The Black Widow

by Daniel Silva

  “We’re on,” was all he said.

  “Did you speak to Mr. Big?”

  “For a minute or two.”

  “How did he take the news?”

  “As well as you might expect.”

  “Did my name come up?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And?”

  “He says hello.”

  “Is that all?”

  “At least he knows your name. He still calls me Andrew.”

  Gabriel tried to sleep again but it was no good, so he showered and changed and with an Agency security team in tow slipped from the safe house in the last minutes of daylight. The air was heavy with a coming storm; leaves of copper and gold littered the redbrick pavements. He drank a café crème in a patisserie on Wisconsin Avenue and then wandered through the East Village of Georgetown to M Street, with its parade of shops, restaurants, and hotels. Yes, he thought, there would be other teams and other targets. And even if they managed to stop Dr. Leila Hadawi’s attack, it was likely that in a few days’ time Americans would once again die in their own country because of an ideology, and a faith, born of a region that most could not find on a map. The enemy could not be reasoned with or dismissed; it could not be appeased by an American withdrawal from the Islamic world. America could leave the Middle East, thought Gabriel, but the Middle East would follow it home.

  At once, the skies erupted and a downpour sent the pedestrians along M Street scurrying for cover. Gabriel watched them for a moment, but in his thoughts they were running from something else—men with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their hometowns. The appearance of an SUV curbside wrenched him back to the present. He climbed inside, his leather jacket sodden, and rode back to N Street through the rain.

  49

  ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

  THE SAME RAIN THAT DRENCHED Georgetown beat down upon Qassam el-Banna’s modest Korean sedan as he drove along a tree-lined section of Route 7. He had told Amina that he had to make a work call. It was an untruth, but only a small one.

  It had been more than a year since Qassam had left his old IT consulting firm. He had told his colleagues and his wife that he was striking out on his own, a risky move in Northern Virginia’s crowded tech world. The real reasons for his career change, however, lay elsewhere. Qassam had left his previous place of employment because he needed something more precious than money. He needed time. He could not be at the beck and call of Larry Blackburn, his old supervisor—Larry of the sewer breath, the secret addiction to painkillers, and the taste for cheap Salvadoran hookers. Qassam was now beholden to a man of far greater ambitions. He did not know the man’s real name, only his nom de guerre. He was the one from Iraq, the one they called Saladin.

  Not surprisingly, Qassam’s journey had begun in cyberspace, where, his identity carefully shielded, he had indulged in his unquenchable appetite for the blood and bombs of jihadist porn—an appetite he had developed during the American occupation of Iraq, when he was still at university. One evening, after a miserable day at work and a nightmarish commute home, he had knocked on the cyberdoor of an ISIS recruiter and inquired about traveling to Syria to become a fighter. The ISIS recruiter had made inquiries of his own and had convinced Qassam to remain in suburban Washington. Not long after, a month or so, he realized he was being followed. At first, he feared it was the FBI, but it soon became clear he was seeing the same man again and again. The man finally approached Qassam in a Starbucks near Seven Corners and introduced himself. He was a Jordanian who lived in London. His name was Jalal Nasser.

  The rain was coming down in torrents, more like a summer thunderstorm than a slow and steady autumn soaker. Perhaps the doomsday scenarios were true after all, he thought. Perhaps the earth was irrevocably broken. He continued along Route 7 into the center of Alexandria and made his way to an industrial park on Eisenhower Avenue. Wedged between a transmission repair shop and a shooting range were the offices of Dominion Movers. Two of the company’s American-made Freightliner trucks were parked outside. Two more were parked on the floor of the warehouse, where they had been for the past six months. Qassam el-Banna was the moving company’s nominal owner. He had twelve employees. Seven were recent arrivals in America, five were citizens. All were members of ISIS.

  Qassam el-Banna did not enter the premises of his moving enterprise. Instead, he engaged the stopwatch function on his mobile and headed back to Eisenhower Avenue. His Korean sedan was quick and nimble, but now he drove it at the slow, lumbering pace of a fully loaded moving truck. He followed the Eisenhower Avenue Connector to the Capital Beltway and the Beltway in a clockwise direction to Route 123 in Tysons. As he was approaching Anderson Road, the traffic light turned to amber. Normally, Qassam would have put his foot to the floor. But now, imagining he were behind the wheel of a laden truck, he slowed to a stop.

  When the light turned green, Qassam accelerated so slowly that the driver behind him flashed his headlamps and sounded his horn. Undeterred, he proceeded at five miles below the speed limit to Lewinsville Road, where he made a left. It was less than a quarter mile to the intersection of Tysons McLean Drive. To the left, the road rose gently into what appeared to be the campus of a high-tech firm. Qassam turned to the right and stopped next to a bright yellow road sign that read WATCH FOR CHILDREN. Qassam watched his phone instead: 24:23:45 . . . 24:23:46 . . . 24:23:47 . . . 24:23:48 . . .

  When it reached twenty-five minutes exactly, he smiled and whispered, “Boom.”

  50

  GEORGETOWN

  THE RAIN POURED STEADILY DOWN for the remainder of the weekend, returning Washington to the swamp it had once been. Gabriel was largely a prisoner of the N Street safe house. Once each day he journeyed to the Israeli Embassy to check in with his field teams and with King Saul Boulevard, and once each day Adrian Carter rang him with an update. The FBI and the other agencies of American homeland security were closely monitoring more than a thousand known or suspected members of ISIS. “And not one of them,” said Carter, “appears to be in the final preparations for an attack.”

  “There’s just one problem, Adrian.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The FBI is watching the wrong people.”

  By Monday afternoon the rains began to slow, and by that evening a few stars were visible through the thinning clouds. Gabriel wanted to walk to the Four Seasons for his dinner with Paul Rousseau, but his CIA security detail prevailed upon him to take the SUV instead. It dropped him outside the hotel’s covered entrance and, trailed by a single bodyguard, he entered the lobby. Several bleary-eyed French officials, their suits wrinkled by transatlantic travel, waited at reception, behind a tall, broad-shouldered man, Arab in appearance, who looked as though he had borrowed Fareed Barakat’s London tailor. Only the Arab-looking man took note of the thin Israeli who was accompanied by an American security guard. Their eyes met briefly. Then the tall Arab-looking man turned his gaze once more toward the woman behind the desk. Gabriel inspected his back as he passed. He appeared to be unarmed. A leather attaché case stood upright next to his right shoe. And leaning against the front of the reception desk, black and polished, was an elegant walking stick.

  Gabriel continued across the lobby and entered the restaurant. It seemed the bar had been commandeered by a convention of the hard of hearing. He gave the maître d’ a name not his own and was shown to a table overlooking Rock Creek Parkway. Better still, it had an unobstructed view of the lobby, where the tall, impeccably clad Arab was now limping slowly toward the elevators.

  He had requested a suite on the uppermost floor of the hotel. His request had been granted, in no small part because the hotel’s management believed him to be a distant relative of the king of Saudi Arabia. A moment after he entered the room, there was a discreet knock at the door. It was the porter with his luggage. The tall Arab admired the vista from his window while the porter, an African, hung his garment bag in the closet and placed his suitcase on a stand in the bedroom. The usual pre-tip bant
er ensued, with its many offers of additional assistance, but a crisp twenty-dollar bill sent the porter gratefully toward the door. It closed softly and once again the tall Arab was alone.

  His eyes were fixed on the traffic rushing along Rock Creek Parkway. His thoughts, however, were on the man whom he had seen downstairs in the lobby—the man with gray temples and distinctive green eyes. He was almost certain he had seen the man before, not in person but in photographs and news accounts. It was possible he was mistaken. In fact, he thought, it was likely the case. Even so, he had learned long ago to trust his instincts. They had been sharpened to a razor’s edge during the many years he served the Arab world’s cruelest dictator. And they had helped him to survive the long fight against the Americans, when many other men like him had been vaporized by weapons that struck from the sky with the suddenness of lightning.

  He removed a laptop computer from his attaché case and connected it to the hotel’s wireless Internet system. Because the Four Seasons was popular with visiting dignitaries, the NSA had undoubtedly penetrated its network. It was no matter; the hard drive of his computer was a blank page. He opened the Internet browser and typed a name into the search box. Several photos appeared on the screen, including one from London’s Telegraph newspaper that showed a man running along a footpath outside Westminster Abbey, a gun in his hand. Linked to the photo was an article by a reporter named Samantha Cooke concerning the man’s violent death. It seemed the reporter was mistaken, because the subject of her article had just crossed the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington.

  There was another knock at the door, soft, almost apologetic—the obligatory fruit plate, along with a note addressed to Mr. Omar al-Farouk, promising to fulfill his every wish. At the moment he wanted only a few minutes of uninterrupted solitude. He typed an address for the dark net, picked the lock of a password-protected door, and entered a virtual room where all was encrypted. An old friend was waiting there for him.

  The old friend asked, HOW WAS YOUR TRIP?

  He typed, FINE BUT YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHO I JUST SAW.

  WHO?

  He typed the first and last name—the name of an archangel followed by a rather common Israeli surname. The response was a few seconds longer in coming.

  YOU SHOULDN’T JOKE ABOUT THINGS LIKE THAT.

  I’M NOT.

  WHAT DO YOU THINK IT MEANS?

  A very good question indeed. He logged off the Internet, shut down the computer, and limped slowly to the window. He felt as though a dagger were lodged in the thigh of his right leg, his chest throbbed. He watched the traffic moving along the parkway, and for a few seconds the pain seemed to diminish. Then the traffic blurred and in his thoughts he was astride a mighty Arabian horse on a mountaintop near the Sea of Galilee, gazing down at a sunbaked place called Hattin. The vision was not new to him; it came often. Usually, two mighty armies—one Muslim, the other Crusader, the army of Rome—were arrayed for battle. But now only two men were present. One was an Israeli named Gabriel Allon. And the other was Saladin.

  Paul Rousseau was still on Paris time, and so they did not linger long over dinner. Gabriel bade him good night at the elevators and, trailed by his bodyguard, headed across the lobby. The same woman was behind the reception desk.

  “May I help you?” she asked as Gabriel approached.

  “I certainly hope so. Earlier this evening I saw a gentleman checking in. Tall, very well dressed, walked with a cane.”

  “Mr. al-Farouk?”

  “Yes, that’s him. We used to work together a long time ago.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you know how long he’s staying?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not—”

  He held up a hand. “Don’t apologize. I understand your rules.”

  “I’d be happy to give him a message.”

  “That’s not necessary. I’ll ring him in the morning. But don’t mention any of this to him,” Gabriel added conspiratorially. “I want to surprise him.”

  Gabriel went outside into the chill night. He waited until he was in the back of his Suburban before ringing Adrian Carter. Carter was still at his office in Langley.

  “I want you to have a look at someone named al-Farouk. He’s about forty-five years old, maybe fifty. I don’t know his first name or the color of his passport.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “He’s staying at the Four Seasons.”

  “Am I missing something?”

  “I got a funny feeling at the back of my neck, Adrian. Find out who he is.”

  The connection went dead. Gabriel returned the phone to his coat pocket.

  “Back to N Street?” asked the driver.

  “No,” answered Gabriel. “Take me to the embassy.”

  51

  AUBERVILLIERS, FRANCE

  THE ALARM ON NATALIE’S MOBILE phone sounded at seven fifteen, which was odd, because she didn’t remember setting it. In fact, she was quite certain she hadn’t. She silenced the phone with an annoyed tap of her finger and tried to sleep a little longer, but five minutes later it rang a second time. “All right,” she said to the spot in the ceiling where she imagined the camera to be hidden. “You win. I’ll get up.”

  She threw aside the bedding and swung her feet to the floor. In the kitchen she brewed a pot of oily black Carte Noire in the Mocha stovetop maker and poured it into a bowl of steaming milk. Outside, the night was draining slowly from her drab street. In all likelihood, it was the last Paris morning that Dr. Leila Hadawi would ever see, for if Saladin had his way, she would not be returning to France from her sudden, unexpected trip to America. Natalie’s return was uncertain, too. Standing in her sooty little window, her hands wrapped around the café au lait, she realized she would not miss it. Her life in the banlieues had only reinforced her conviction that there was no future in France for the Jews. Israel was her home—Israel and the Office. Gabriel was right. She was one of them now.

  Neither ISIS nor the Office had given her packing instructions, and so instinctively she packed lightly. Her flight was scheduled to depart Charles de Gaulle at 1:45 p.m. She journeyed to the airport on the RER and at half past eleven joined the long line at the economy check-in counter. After a wait of thirty minutes a disagreeable Frenchwoman informed her that she had been upgraded to business class.

  “Why?”

  “Would you rather stay in economy?”

  The woman handed Natalie her boarding pass and returned her passport. She loitered for several minutes in the shops of duty-free, observed by the watchers of the DGSI, before making her way to the departure gate. Because Flight 54 was bound for America, there were special security measures. Her hijab and Arabic name earned her several minutes of additional preflight screening, but eventually she was admitted into the departure lounge. She searched for familiar faces but found none. In a complimentary copy of Le Monde she read about the French president’s upcoming visit to America and, on an inside page, about a new wave of stabbings in Israel. She burned with rage. She rejoiced.

  Presently, the crackle of a boarding call brought her to her feet. She had been given a seat on the right side of the aircraft against the window. The seat next to her remained empty long after the economy passengers had boarded, instilling in her the hope she might not have to spend the next seven and half hours with a complete stranger. That hope died when a business-suited man with coal-black hair and matching eyeglasses lowered himself into the seat next to her. He didn’t appear pleased to be sitting next to an Arab woman in a hijab. He stared at his mobile phone, Natalie stared at hers.

  After a few seconds a message appeared on her screen.

  LONELY?

  She typed, YES.

  WANT SOME COMPANY?

  LOVE SOME.

  LOOK TO YOUR LEFT.

  She did. The man with coal-black hair and matching eyewear was still staring at his phone, but now he was smiling.

  “Is this a good idea?” she asked.

  �
��What’s that?” asked Mikhail.

  “You and me together?”

  “I’ll tell you after we land.”

  “What happens then?”

  Before he could answer, an announcement instructed passengers to switch off their mobile devices. Natalie and her seatmate complied. As the plane thundered down the runway, she placed her hand on his.

  “Not yet,” he whispered.

  “When?” she asked, pulling away her hand.

  “Soon,” he said. “Very soon.”

  52

  HUME, VIRGINIA

  IN WASHINGTON THE RAINS HAD finally ended, and a blast of cold, clear air had scrubbed the last remaining clouds from the sky. The great marble monuments glowed white as bone in the sharp sunlight; a brisk wind chased fallen leaves through the streets of Georgetown. Only the Potomac River bore the scars of the deluge. Swollen by runoff, clogged with tree limbs and debris, it flowed brown and heavy beneath Key Bridge as Saladin drove toward Virginia. He was dressed for a weekend in the English countryside—corduroy trousers, a woolen crewneck sweater, a dark-green Barbour jacket. He turned right onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway and headed west.

  The roadway ran along the bank of the river for about a quarter mile before climbing to the top of the gorge. Trees in autumn leaf blazed in the bright sunlight, and across the muddy river traffic flowed along a parallel parkway. Even Saladin had to admit it was a welcome change from the harsh world of western Iraq and the caliphate. The comfortable leather seat of the luxury German sedan held him with the tenderness of a cupped hand. A member of the network had left it for him in a small parking lot at the corner of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue, a painful walk of several blocks from the Four Seasons Hotel. Saladin was tempted to put the machine through its paces and test his skills on the smooth, winding road. Instead, he kept assiduously to the posted speed limit while other drivers rode his rear bumper and made obscene gestures as they roared past on his left. Americans, he thought—always in a hurry. It was both their greatest strength and their undoing. How foolish they were to think they could snap their fingers and alter the political landscape of the Middle East. Men like Saladin did not measure time in four-year election cycles. As a child he had lived on the banks of one of the four rivers that flowed out of the Garden of Eden. His civilization had flourished for thousands of years in the harsh and unforgiving land of Mesopotamia before anyone had ever heard of a place called America. And it would survive long after the great American experiment receded into history. Of this, Saladin was certain. All great empires eventually collapsed. Only Islam was forever.