EPILOGUE
PORT NAVAS, CORNWALL
Something made Peel wake up. He rolled onto his side, snatched the torch from his bedside table, and shone it at his watch: 3:15 A.M. He switched off the light and lay awake in the darkness, listening to the wind moaning in the eaves and his mother and Derek quietly quarreling in the room next door.
He could hear only snatches of their conversation, so he closed his eyes, remembering something about the blind hearing better than the sighted. “Having trouble with the new play,” Derek was saying. “Can’t seem to find my way into the first act . . . hard with a child in the house . . . back to London to be with his father . . . time alone together . . . lovers again . . .” Peel squeezed his eyes tightly, refusing to permit the tears to escape onto his cheeks.
He was about to cover his ears with his pillow when he heard a sound outside on the quay: a small car, rattling like an oxcart with a broken wheel. He sat, threw off his blankets, placed his feet on the cold wood floor. He carried his torch to the window and looked out: a single red taillight, floating along the quay toward the oyster farm.
The car vanished into the trees, then appeared a moment later, only now Peel was staring directly into the headlights. It was an MG, and it was stopping in front of the old foreman’s cottage. Peel raised his torch, aimed it at the car, and flashed the light twice. The lights of the MG winked back. Then the engine died, and the lights went dark.
Peel climbed back into bed and pulled his blankets beneath his chin. Derek and his mother were still quarreling, but he didn’t really care. The stranger was back in Port Navas. Peel closed his eyes and soon was asleep.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the generous assistance of David Bull. He truly is one of the world’s finest art restorers, and I was privileged to spend many enjoyable hours in his company. He gave freely of his time and expertise, and allowed me to wander through his studio and through his memories as well. For that I am eternally grateful. A special thanks to David’s talented wife, Teresa Longyear; to Lucy Bisognano, formerly of the National Gallery conservation staff, who tried to teach me the basics of X-ray analysis; and to Maxwell Anderson, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, for his friendship and assistance. It goes without saying that they bear no responsibility for errors, omissions, or dramatic license.
Wolf Blitzer, a friend and colleague from my days at CNN, generously helped fill in some blanks in my research on the Israeli intelligence community. Louis Toscano, author of
Triple Cross,
a groundbreaking book on the Vanunu affair, read my manuscript and offered his keen insights. Glenn Whidden answered all my questions on the art of audio surveillance, as did a former head of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services.
Ion Trewin, the managing director of Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London, read my manuscript and, as always, offered wise counsel. Andrew Neil opened his home to us and shared some of his remarkable experiences in the world of London newspaper publishing. Ernie Lyles answered all my questions on semi-automatic hand-guns and made me a decent shot with a Glock and a Browning.
A special thanks to Peter and Paula White for an enchanting week in West Cornwall and a memorable boat trip up Helford Passage. Also, to the staffs of the venerable London art supplies shop L. Cornelissen & Son and the Hotel Queen Elizabeth in Montreal. And to Phyllis and Bernard Jacob, for their love, support, and a day roaming the streets of Brooklyn that I will never forget.
Among the dozens of nonfiction books I consulted while preparing this manuscript, several proved particularly helpful:
Every Spy a Prince
, by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman;
Gideon’s Spies
, by Gordon Thomas;
Israel: A History
and
The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War
, by Martin Gilbert;
The Gun and the Olive Branch
, by David Hirst;
By Way of Deception
, by Victor Ostrovsky and Clair Hoy;
The Hit Team
, by David B. Tinnin with Dag Christensen;
My Home
,
My Land
, by Abu Iyad;
The Quest for the Red Prince
, by Michael Bar-Zohar and Eitan Haber;
The Palestinians
, by Jonathan Dimbleby;
Arafat
, by Alan Hart; and
The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille
, by Donna F. Ryan.
Finally, to the talented group of professionals at Random House and Penguin-Putnam. And of course none of this would have been possible without my wife, Jamie Gangel, and my children, Lily and Nicholas.
Please read on for an excerpt from
Daniel Silva’s exciting novel
THE SECRET SERVANT
Available from Signet
AMSTERDAM
It was Professor Solomon Rosner who sounded the first alarm, though his name would never be linked to the affair except in the secure rooms of a drab office building in downtown Tel Aviv. Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli Intelligence, would later observe that Rosner was the first asset in the annals of Office history to have proven more useful to them dead than alive. Those who overheard the remark found it uncharacteristically callous but in keeping with the bleak mood that by then had settled over them all.
The backdrop for Rosner’s demise was not Israel, where violent death occurs all too frequently, but the normally tranquil quarter of Amsterdam known as the Old Side. The date was the first Friday in December, and the weather was more suited to early spring than to the last days of autumn. It was a day to engage in what the Dutch so fondly refer to as
gezelligheid
, the pursuit of small pleasures: an aimless stroll through the flower stalls of the Bloemenmarkt, a lager or two in a good bar in the Rembrandtplein, or, for those so inclined, a bit of fine cannabis in the brown coffeehouses of the Haarlemmerstraat. Leave the fretting and the fighting to the hated Americans, stately old Amsterdam murmured that golden late-autumn afternoon. Today we give thanks for having been born blameless and Dutch.
Solomon Rosner did not share the sentiments of his countrymen, but then he seldom did. Though he earned a living as a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, it was Rosner’s Center for European Security Studies that occupied the lion’s share of his time. His legion of detractors saw evidence of deception in the name, for Rosner served not only as the center’s director but was its only scholar in residence. Despite those obvious shortcomings, the center had managed to produce a steady stream of authoritative reports and articles detailing the threat posed to the Netherlands by the rise of militant Islam within its borders. Rosner’s last book,
The Islamic Conquest of the West
, had argued that Holland was now under a sustained and systematic assault by jihadist Islam. The goal of this assault, he maintained, was to colonize the Netherlands and turn it into a majority Muslim state, where, in the not too distant future, Islamic law, or
sharia
, would reign supreme. The terrorists and the colonizers were two sides of the same coin, he warned, and unless the government took immediate and drastic action, everything the free-thinking Dutch held dear would soon be swept away.
The Dutch literary press had been predictably appalled. Hysteria, said one reviewer. Racist claptrap, said another. More than one took pains to note that the views expressed in the book were all the more odious given the fact that Rosner’s grandparents had been rounded up with a hundred thousand other Dutch Jews and sent off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. All agreed that what the situation required was not hateful rhetoric like Rosner’s but tolerance and dialogue. Rosner stood steadfast in the face of the withering criticism, adopting what one commentator described as the posture of a man with his finger wedged firmly in the dike. Tolerance and dialogue by all means, Rosner responded, but not capitulation. “We Dutch need to put down our Heinekens and hash pipes and wake up,” he snapped during an interview on Dutch television. “Otherwise we’re going to lose our country.”
The book and surrounding controversy had made Rosner the most vilified and, in some quarters, celebrated man in the country. It had also placed him squarely in the sights of Holland’s homegrown Islamic extremists. Jihadist Web sites, which Rosner monitored more closely than even the Dutch police did, burned with sacred rage over the book, and more than one forecast his imminent execution. An imam in the neighborhood known as the Oud West instructed his flock that “Rosner the Jew must be dealt with harshly” and pleaded for a martyr to step forward and do the job. The feckless Dutch interior minister had responded by proposing that Rosner go into hiding, an idea Rosner vigorously refused. He then supplied the minister with a list of ten radicals he regarded as potential assassins. The minister accepted the list without question, for he knew that Rosner’s sources inside Holland’s extremist fringe were in most cases far better than those of the Dutch security services.
At noon on that Friday in December, Rosner was hunched over his computer in the second-floor office of his canal house at Groenburgwal 2A. The house, like Rosner himself, was stubby and wide, and it tilted forward at a precarious angle, which some of the neighbors saw as fitting, given the political views of its occupant. Its one serious drawback was location, for it stood not fifty yards from the bell tower of the Zuiderkirk church. The bells tolled mercilessly each day, beginning at the stroke of noon and ending forty-five minutes later. Rosner, sensitive to interruptions and unwanted noise, had been waging a personal jihad against them for years. Classical music, white-noise machines, soundproof headphones—all had proven useless in the face of the onslaught. Sometimes he wondered why the bells were rung at all. The old church had long ago been turned into a government housing office—a fact that Rosner, a man of considerable faith, saw as a fitting symbol of the Dutch morass. Confronted by an enemy of infinite religious zeal, the secular Dutch had turned their churches into bureaus of the welfare state.
A church without faithful
, thought Rosner,
in a city without God.
At ten minutes past twelve, he heard a faint knock and looked up to find Sophie Vanderhaus leaning against the doorjamb with a batch of files clutched to her breast. A former student of Rosner’s, she had come to work for him after completing a graduate degree on the impact of the Holocaust on postwar Dutch society. She was part secretary and research assistant, part nursemaid and surrogate daughter. She kept his office in order and typed the final drafts of all his reports and articles. The minder of his impossible schedule, she tended to his appalling personal finances. She even saw to his laundry and made certain he remembered to eat. Earlier that morning, she had informed him that she was planning to spend a week in Saint-Maarten over the New Year. Rosner, upon hearing the news, had fallen into a profound depression.
“You have an interview with
De Telegraaf
in an hour,” she said. “Maybe you should have something to eat and focus your thoughts.”
“Are you suggesting my thoughts lack focus, Sophie?”
“I’m suggesting nothing of the sort. It’s just that you’ve been working on that article since five thirty this morning. You need something more than coffee in your stomach.”
“It’s not that dreadful reporter who called me a Nazi last year?”
“Do you really think I’d let her near you again?” She entered the office and started straightening his desk. “After the interview with
De Telegraaf
, you go to the NOS studios for an appearance on Radio One. It’s a call-in program, so it’s sure to be lively. Do try not to make any more enemies, Professor Rosner. It’s getting harder and harder to keep track of them all.”
“I’ll try to behave myself, but I’m afraid my forbearance is now gone forever.”
She peered into his coffee cup and pulled a sour face. “Why do you insist on putting out your cigarettes in your coffee?”
“My ashtray was full.”
“Try emptying it from time to time.” She poured the contents of the ashtray into his rubbish bin and removed the plastic liner. “And don’t forget you have the forum this evening at the university.”
Rosner frowned. He was not looking forward to the forum. One of the other panelists was the leader of the European Muslim Association, a group that campaigned openly for the imposition of
sharia
in Europe and the destruction of the State of Israel. It promised to be a deeply unpleasant evening.
“I’m afraid I’m coming down with a sudden case of leprosy,” he said.
“They’ll insist that you come anyway. You’re the star of the show.”
He stood and stretched his back. “I think I’ll go to Café de Doelen for a coffee and something to eat. Why don’t you have the reporter from
De Telegraaf
meet me there?”
“Do you really think that’s wise, Professor?”
It was common knowledge in Amsterdam that the famous café on the Staalstraat was his favorite haunt. And Rosner was hardly inconspicuous. Indeed, with his shock of white hair and rumpled tweed wardrobe, he was one of the most recognizable figures in Holland. The geniuses in the Dutch police had once suggested he utilize some crude disguise while in public—an idea Rosner had likened to putting a hat and a false mustache on a hippopotamus and calling it a Dutchman.