Omar in Istanbul . . .
That morning, a team from the Saudi Embassy had torn the apartment to pieces, looking for what, they did not say. They had neglected to check the large clay flowerpot on the terrace overlooking the internal courtyard. Oh, they had brutalized Hanifa’s geraniums, but they had failed to probe the damp soil beneath.
The object she had hidden there, wrapped in an oily cloth, zipped into a waterproof plastic bag, was now in the palm of her hand. She had acquired it from Tariq, a troubled kid from the Palestinian community, a petty criminal, a failed rapper, a thug. She had told Tariq it was for a story she was working on for ZDF. He hadn’t believed her.
Her building was old and the lift was fickle. Two or three minutes passed before she finally heard heavy male footfalls in the corridor. A male voice, too. The voice of the devil. It sounded as though he was on his phone. She only hoped he was talking to the Israeli. Such perfect poetry, she thought. Darwish himself could not have written it any better.
As she moved into the entrance hall, she saw Omar walking into the consulate at 1:14 p.m. She could only imagine what had happened next. Had they feigned a brief moment of cordiality, or had they set upon him instantly like wild beasts? Did they wait until he was dead before taking him apart, or was he still alive and conscious when the blade carved into his flesh? Such an act could not be forgiven, only avenged. Khalid knew this better than anyone. He was an Arab, after all. A son of the desert. And yet he was walking toward her with only a single bodyguard to protect him. Perhaps he was still the same reckless KBM after all.
At last, the knock. Hanifa reached for the latch. The bodyguard lunged, the devil shielded his face. Omar, thought Hanifa as she raised the gun and fired. The password is Omar . . .
Author’s Note
The New Girl is a work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously.
The International School of Geneva portrayed in The New Girl does not exist and should in no way be confused with Ecole Internationale Genève, the institution founded in 1924 with the help of the League of Nations. Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art in New York will see countless extraordinary works of art, including Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but nothing called the Nadia al-Bakari Collection. The stories of Zizi and Nadia al-Bakari are told in The Messenger, published in 2006, and its 2011 sequel, Portrait of a Spy, both of which feature Sarah Bancroft. Sarah also appears in The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules, and The Defector. I enjoyed her return to the secret world as much as she did.
I have manipulated airline and rail schedules to suit the needs of my story, along with the timing of certain real-world events. The New Girl’s depiction of the Mossad’s astonishing theft of the Iranian nuclear archives is entirely speculative and not based on any information I received from Israeli or American sources. I am certain the Mossad did not plan or oversee the real operation from an anonymous building located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv, as it is the headquarters only of my fictitious “Office.” Chapter 7 of The New Girl contains a not-so-veiled reference to the true location of Mossad headquarters, which, like Gabriel Allon’s address on Narkiss Street, is one of the worst-kept secrets in Israel.
There is no French counterterrorism unit known as the Alpha Group, at least not one that I know of. A fine establishment called Brasserie Saint-Maurice occupies the ground floor of an old house in medieval Annecy, and the popular Café Remor overlooks the Place du Cirque in Geneva. Both are typically free of intelligence operatives and assassins, as is the charming Plein Sud on the avenue du Général Leclerc in Carcassonne. Natural High is the name of the beach pavilion in the lovely Dutch resort town of Renesse. To the best of my knowledge, neither Gabriel Allon nor Rebecca Philby have ever set foot there.
One should not attempt to book a room at the Bedford House Hotel or the East Anglia Inn in Frinton-on-Sea, for they do not exist. There is indeed a marina on the banks of the river Twizzle in Essex, but Nikolai Azarov’s brutal murder of the security guard might well have been witnessed by customers of the Harbour Lights restaurant. Shortly before entering the Dorchester Hotel in London, Christopher Keller borrowed a line from the film version of Dr. No to describe the stopping power of a Walther PPK pistol. Devotees of F. Scott Fitzgerald surely noticed that Gabriel and Sarah Bancroft exchanged two lines from The Great Gatsby while dining in an Italian restaurant near the corner of Second Avenue and East Sixty-Fourth Street in Manhattan. Rumor has it the restaurant was Primola, my favorite on the Upper East Side.
It is true that visitors to 10 Downing Street often spot a brown-and-white tabby cat lurking near the famous black door. His name is Larry, and he has been granted the title Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Apologies to the owner of 7 St. Luke’s Mews in Notting Hill for turning the dwelling into an MI6 safe house, and to the occupants of 70 and 71 Eaton Square for using the exclusive properties as the setting for a Russian assassination. I am confident no British prime minister or MI6 chief, had they known of such a plot, would have allowed it to go forward, even if the end result was a strategic and public-relations disaster for the Russian president and his intelligence services.
I chose not to identify the radioactive poison wielded by my fictitious Russian assassins. Its deadly properties, however, were clearly similar to polonium-210, the highly radioactive chemical element used in the November 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a dissident former Russian intelligence officer living in London. Britain’s feeble response to the use of a weapon of mass destruction on its soil undoubtedly emboldened the Kremlin to target a second Russian living in Britain, Sergei Skripal, in March 2018. A former GRU officer and double agent, Skripal survived after being exposed to the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. But Dawn Sturgess, a forty-four-year-old mother of three who lived near Skripal in the cathedral city of Salisbury, died four months after the initial attack, a collateral casualty in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war on dissent. Not surprisingly, Putin ignored a request by the woman’s son to allow British authorities to question the two suspected Russian assassins.
There is no such thing as the Royal Data Center in Riyadh, but there is something very much like it: the ridiculously named Center for Studies and Media Affairs. Run by Saud al-Qahtani, a courtier and close confidant of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the center obtained its initial arsenal of sophisticated cyberweapons from an Italian firm called Hacking Team. It then acquired software and expertise from the Emirates-based DarkMatter and from NSO Group, an Israeli company that reportedly employs veterans of Intelligence Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence service. According to the New York Times, DarkMatter has also hired graduates of Unit 8200, along with several Americans once employed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Indeed, one of DarkMatter’s top executives reportedly worked on some of the NSA’s most advanced cyberoperations.
Saud al-Qahtani oversaw more than the Center for Studies and Media Affairs. He also led the Saudi Rapid Intervention Group, the clandestine unit responsible for the brutal murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist and columnist for the Washington Post. Eleven Saudis face criminal charges in the killing, which was carried out inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Saudi officials have claimed, among other things, that the operatives acted unilaterally. The CIA, however, concluded that the murder was ordered by none other than Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.