The second movement took place some four hundred miles to the northwest in Casablanca, where two men slipped from a faded old villa, quietly, so as not to awaken the demons within, and loaded their bags into a rented Peugeot sedan. They drove along the empty boulevards of the old colonial section, past the tattered Art Nouveau buildings, and the modern apartment blocks of the newly rich, and the Bidonvilles of the wretchedly poor, until finally they reached the motorway. The younger of the two men handled the driving; the older passed the time by loading and reloading his Beretta pistol. He had no business being there, it was true. He was the chief now, and a chief had to know his place. Still, there was a first for everything.

He slipped the loaded gun into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back, and checked his mobile phone. Then he stared out his window at the endless lights of Casablanca.

“What are you thinking?” asked the younger man.

“I’m thinking that you need to drive faster.”

“I’ve never driven a chief before.”

The older man smiled.

“Is that all you were thinking?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because it looked to me as though you were pulling a trigger.”

“Which hand?”

“Left,” said the younger man. “It was definitely the left.”

The older man looked out the window. “How many times?”

63

The Middle Atlas Mountains, Morocco

The phone moved steadily south, across the lowlands around Fez, toward the slopes of the Middle Atlas. They could not be sure it was actually in the possession of Nazir Bensa?d. Now that the drones were gone, they had no eyes on the target, and neither the NSA nor Unit 8200 had been able to activate the phone’s microphone or camera. For all they knew, the device was on the back of a flatbed truck, and Nazir Bensa?d was somewhere in the labyrinth of Fez’s ancient medina.

It was half past one in the morning when the phone reached the Berber town of Imouzzer. Its pace of travel slowed as it moved along the town’s main street. Gabriel, who was receiving updates from Adrian Carter, wondered whether the brass ring was already within his reach. There was much about a place like Imouzzer, he thought, for a fugitive to find appealing. It was small enough so that Westerners were easily visible, but sufficiently busy to allow a robed man to move about unnoticed. The uninhabited peaks of the Middle Atlas were close, should the fugitive feel the need to flee, and the delights of Fez were but an hour’s car ride away. An image formed in Gabriel’s mind—a tall, powerfully built man in a hooded djellaba, limping through the narrow alleys of the medina.

But at 1:35 a.m. the phone left Imouzzer and, increasing its pace, made for Ifrane, an artificial holiday town that looked as though it had been plucked from the Alps and dropped in North Africa. Once again, Gabriel allowed himself to wonder whether they were close. This time he dressed the prize in different clothing—trousers and a woolen sweater instead of a djellaba—and imagined him passing the winter after the attack on Washington in the comfort of a Swiss-style hotel. But when the phone departed Ifrane, Gabriel covered the image in a layer of obliterating paint and waited for the next update from Adrian Carter at the Black Hole.

“Faster,” he said. “You have to drive faster.”

“I’m driving as fast as I can,” answered Yaakov.

“Not you,” said Gabriel. “Him.”

The next town on the phone’s path was Azrou. There it turned onto the N13, the main highway linking the Middle Atlas Mountains with the Sahara, the same road on which Keller, Mikhail, Natalie, and Dina were now headed north. It passed through a chain of tiny Berber villages—Timahdite, A?t Oufella, Boulaajoul—before finally coming to rest a few hundred yards from the town of Zaida, under what circumstances they could only imagine. A house, a fortress, a camel-hair tent in an open field strewn with boulders. Ten interminable minutes elapsed before a text message appeared on Mohammad Bakkar’s phone. Keller read it aloud to Gabriel.

“Nazir says the brother is very badly injured.”

“What a shame.”

“He says he needs a doctor soon. Otherwise, he might not live.”

“The best possible outcome.”

“You’re not thinking about letting nature take its course?”

“Not for a minute,” said Gabriel. “Tell him that the doctor is on his way. Tell him he’s coming from Fez.”

There was a moment of silence while Natalie composed the message in Arabic and sent it. A few seconds later Gabriel heard the ping of the reply.

“Alhamdulillah,” said Keller.

“I couldn’t agree more.”

Gabriel heard another ping. “What does it say?”

“He wants to know where I am.”

“I didn’t realize you two were friends.”

“He thinks I’m—”

“Yes, I know,” said Gabriel. “Tell him it took you longer than expected to arrange transport. Tell him you’ll be there in two hours, maybe less.”

There was another silence while Natalie sent the message.

“Any reply?”

“No.”

“Is he working on one?”

“Doesn’t seem to be.”