“We haven’t kidnapped you.”

“The Bundespolizei might see it differently.”

“They might,” replied Gabriel. “But I have a very good relationship with the chief of the BfV, mainly because I provide him with a great deal of intelligence about threats to German security. Oh, I suppose you could cause me a bit of embarrassment, but you would be missing out on an important opportunity.”

“What kind of opportunity?”

“To change the course of events in the Middle East.”

She regarded him inquiringly. Her eyes were almost black and prominently lidded. It was like being contemplated by Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer. “How?” she asked at last.

“By giving me the story Omar was working on before he was killed.” Receiving no answer, Gabriel said, “Omar wasn’t murdered in that consulate because of the things he was writing on social media. He was killed because he tried to warn Khalid about a plot against him.”

“Says who?”

“Khalid.”

Hanifa’s eyes narrowed. “As usual,” she said bitterly, “Khalid is mistaken.”

“How so?”

“Omar wasn’t the one who tried to warn him about the plot.”

“Who was it?”

Hanifa hesitated, then said, “It was me.”

44

Berlin

The sushi lay scattered over the floor of the entrance hall, so Mikhail went downstairs to the local Persian takeaway and picked up several orders of grilled meat and rice. They ate at the flat’s small rectangular table, which was set against a window overlooking Kronenstrasse. Gabriel sat with his back to the street, with Hanifa Khoury, his new recruit, at his left hand. Throughout the meal, she scarcely looked in Sarah’s direction. It was obvious she had not forgiven her for using a volume of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s literary treasure, as bait to ensnare her. It was obvious, too, that she did not believe Sarah to be a citizen of the state she wished to inundate beneath a sea of returning Palestinian exiles.

All Hanifa Khoury had to do to prove her point was to ask Sarah to speak a few words in Hebrew. Instead, she used the occasion to berate the legendary chief of Israeli intelligence for the crimes he and his people had committed against hers. Gabriel suffered through the tirade largely in silence. He had learned long ago that most debates over the Arab-Israeli conflict quickly took on the quality of a cat chasing its own tail. Besides, he did not want to lose Hanifa as a temporary ally. The Jews had prevailed in the contest for Palestine, the Arabs had lost. They had been outsmarted and outfought at every turn. They had been ill served by their leaders. Hanifa was entitled to her pain and anger, though her lecture might have been more tolerable had it not been delivered in German in the city where Hitler and the Nazis had conceived and executed their plan to rid Europe of the Jews. There was nothing to be done about the setting. The great roulette wheel of providence had placed Gabriel Allon and Hanifa Khoury, both children of Palestine, in Berlin that night.

Over coffee and baklava, Hanifa attempted to draw out Gabriel on some of his exploits. And when he gently fended her off, she trained her rhetorical fire on the Americans and their disastrous intervention in Iraq. She had entered Baghdad behind the advancing Coalition forces and had chronicled Iraq’s rapid descent into insurgency and sectarian civil war. In the autumn of 2003, during the bloody Ramadan Offensive, she met a tall, handsome Saudi journalist in the bar of the Palestine Hotel, where she had taken up residence. The Saudi, while not well known to most Western reporters, was one of the most influential and best-sourced journalists in the Arab world.

“His name,” she said, “was Omar Nawwaf.”

They were both single and, truth be told, both a little frightened. The Palestine Hotel was located outside the American Green Zone and was a frequent target of the insurgents. Indeed, on that very night, it came under sustained mortar fire. Hanifa took shelter in Omar’s room. She returned the next night, which was peaceful, and the night after that as well. They soon fell desperately in love, though they quarreled often about the American presence in Iraq.

“Omar believed Saddam was a menace and a monster who needed to be removed, even if it had to be done with American troops. He also accepted the proposition that the establishment of a democracy in the heart of the Arab world would inevitably spread freedom to the rest of the region. I thought the Iraq adventure would end in disaster. I was right, of course.” She smiled sadly. “Omar didn’t like that. He was a secular, Western-looking Saudi, but he was still a Saudi, if you know what I mean.”

“He didn’t like being proven wrong by a woman?”

“And a Palestinian woman at that.”

For a brief moment, however, it appeared Omar had been right after all. Beginning in early 2011, the popular uprising known as the Arab Spring swept the region. Oppressive regimes crumbled in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya, and a full-fledged civil war erupted in Syria. The old ancestral monarchies fared better, but in Saudi Arabia there were violent clashes. Dozens of demonstrators were shot or executed. Hundreds were jailed, including many women.

“During the Arab Spring,” said Hanifa, “Omar was no longer a mere correspondent. He was the editor in chief of the Arab News. Privately, he hoped His Majesty would meet the same fate as Mubarak or even Gadhafi. But he knew that if he pushed too hard, the Al Saud would shut down the paper and throw him into jail. He had no choice but to editorially support the regime. He even signed his name to a column criticizing the protesters as foreign-inspired hooligans. After that, he fell into a deep depression. Omar never forgave himself for sitting out the Arab Spring.”

Hanifa tried to convince Omar to leave Saudi Arabia and settle with her in Germany, where he would be free to write whatever he wanted without fear of arrest. And in early 2016, as the Saudi economy stagnated under the pressure of falling oil prices, he finally agreed. He changed his mind a few weeks later, however, after meeting a rising young Saudi prince named Khalid bin Mohammed.

“It was not long after Khalid’s father ascended to the throne. Khalid was already the minister of defense, deputy prime minister, and chairman of the economic planning council, but he was not yet the crown prince and the heir apparent. He invited Omar to his palace one afternoon for an off-the-record briefing. Omar arrived, as instructed, at four o’clock. It was well past midnight when he left.”

There was no recording of the session—Khalid wouldn’t permit it—and no contemporaneous notes, only the memo Omar hastily composed after returning to his office. He e-mailed a copy to Hanifa for safekeeping. She was shocked when she read it. Khalid predicted that in twenty years, the price of oil would fall to zero. If Saudi Arabia was to have any future, it had to change, and quickly. He wanted to modernize and diversify the economy. He wanted to loosen the Wahhabi shackles on women and draw them into the workforce. He wanted to break the covenant between the Al Saud and the bearded Ikhwan from the Nejd. He wanted Saudi Arabia to be a normal country, with movie theaters, music, nightclubs, and cafés where people of both sexes could mingle without fear of the Mutaween.

“He even talked about allowing hotels and restaurants to serve alcohol so Saudis wouldn’t have to make the drive across the causeway to Bahrain every time they wanted a drink. It was radical stuff.”