The Black Widow

by Daniel Silva

  At that moment, however, Gabriel was focused on only two people: Mikhail Abramov and Natalie Mizrahi. Mikhail was trapped in the men’s room at Café Milano. Natalie was walking north on the west side of Wisconsin Avenue.

  “Why hasn’t the FBI brought her in?” he snapped at Carter.

  “They can’t seem to find her.”

  “How hard can it be to find a woman wearing a suicide vest and a red jacket?”

  “They’re looking.”

  “Tell them to look harder.”

  The door crashed open, the gun entered first. Mikhail recognized the silhouette. It was an AR-15, no scope. He seized the warm barrel with his left hand and pulled, and a man came with it. In the ruined dining room, he had been a jihadist holy warrior, but in the darkened confines of the men’s room, he was now helpless. With the edge of his right hand, Mikhail hit him twice in the side of the neck. The first blow caught a bit of jawbone, but the second was a direct hit that caused something to crack and snap. The man went down without a sound. Mikhail lifted the AR-15 from the limp hands, shot him through the head, and spun into the corridor.

  Directly in front of him, in the back corner of the dining room, one of the terrorists was about to execute a woman whose arm had been shorn off at the shoulder. Hidden in the darkened corridor, Mikhail put the terrorist down with a head shot and then moved cautiously forward. There were no other terrorists in the main dining room, but in a smaller room at the back of the restaurant, a terrorist was executing survivors huddled against a wall, one by one, like an SS man moving along the edge of a burial pit. Mikhail shot the terrorist cleanly through the chest, saving a dozen lives.

  Just then, Mikhail heard another gunshot from an adjoining room—the private dining room he had seen when he entered the restaurant. He moved past the toppled barstool where he had been seated a moment earlier, past the upended table splattered with the viscera of Safia Bourihane, and entered the foyer. The maître d’ and the two hostesses were all dead. It appeared as though they had survived the bombing, only to be shot to death.

  Mikhail crept silently past the corpses and peered into the private dining room, where the fourth terrorist was in the process of executing twenty well-dressed men and women. Too late, the terrorist realized that the man standing in the doorway of the private dining room was not a friend. Mikhail shot him through the chest. Then he fired a second shot, a head shot, to make certain he was dead.

  It had all taken less than a minute, and Mikhail’s mobile phone had been vibrating intermittently the entire time. Now he snatched it from his pocket and peered at the screen. It was a voice call from Gabriel.

  “Please tell me you’re alive.”

  “I’m just fine, but four members of ISIS are now in paradise.”

  “Grab their cell phones and as much hardware as you can carry and get out of there.”

  “What’s going on?”

  The connection went dead. Mikhail searched the pockets of the dead terrorist lying at his feet and found a Samsung Galaxy disposable phone. He found identical Samsungs on the dead terrorists in the main dining room and the room in the back, but the one in the toilet apparently preferred Apple products. Mikhail had all four phones in his possession when he slipped from the restaurant’s rear service door. He also had two AR-15s and four additional magazines of ammunition, for what reason he did not know. He hurried down a darkened alleyway, praying that he did not encounter a SWAT team, and emerged onto Potomac Street. He followed it south to Prospect, where Eli Lavon was sitting behind the wheel of a Buick.

  “What took you so long?” he asked as Mikhail fell into the front passenger seat.

  “Gabriel gave me a shopping list.” Mikhail laid the AR-15s and the magazines on the floor of the backseat. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “The FBI can’t find Natalie.”

  “She’s wearing a red jacket and a suicide vest.”

  Lavon swung a U-turn and headed west across Georgetown.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” said Mikhail. “Wisconsin Avenue is behind us.”

  “We’re not going to Wisconsin Avenue.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s gone, Mikhail. Gone gone.”

  68

  KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV

  THE UNIT THAT TOILED IN Room 414C of King Saul Boulevard had no official name because, officially, it did not exist. Those who had been briefed on its work referred to it only as the Minyan, for the unit was ten in number and exclusively male in gender. With but a few keystrokes, they could darken a city, blind an air traffic control network, or make the centrifuges of an Iranian nuclear-enrichment plant spin wildly out of control. Three Samsungs and an iPhone weren’t going to be much of a challenge.

  Mikhail and Eli Lavon uploaded the contents of the four phones from the Israeli Embassy at 8:42 p.m. local time. By nine o’clock Washington time, the Minyan had determined that the four phones had spent a great deal of time during the past few months at the same address on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia. In fact, they had been there at the same time earlier that evening and had traveled into Washington at the same speed, along the same route. Furthermore, all the phones had placed numerous calls to a local moving company based at the address. The Minyan delivered the intelligence to Uzi Navot, who in turn forwarded it to Gabriel. By then, he and Adrian Carter had left the bombed-out NCTC and were in the CIA’s Global Ops Center at Langley. Of Carter, Gabriel asked a single question.

  “Who owns Dominion Movers in Alexandria?”

  Fifteen precious minutes elapsed before Carter had an answer. He gave Gabriel a name and an address and told him to do whatever it took to find Natalie alive. Carter’s words meant little; as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had no power to let a foreign intelligence service operate with impunity on American soil. Only the president could grant such authority, and at that moment the president had bigger things to worry about than a missing Israeli spy. America was under attack. And like it or not, Gabriel Allon was going to be the first to retaliate.

  At twenty minutes past nine, Carter dropped Gabriel at the Agency’s main security gate and departed quickly, as though fleeing the scene of a crime, or of a crime soon to be committed. Gabriel stood alone in the darkness, watching the ambulances and rescue vehicles hurtling along Route 123 toward Liberty Crossing, waiting. It was a fitting way for his career in the field to end, he thought. The waiting . . . Always the waiting . . . Waiting for a plane or a train. Waiting for a source. Waiting for the sun to rise after a night of killing. Waiting for Mikhail and Eli Lavon at the entrance of the CIA so that he could begin his search for a woman he had asked to penetrate the world’s most dangerous terrorist group. She had done it. Or had she? Perhaps Saladin had been suspicious of her from the beginning. Perhaps he had granted her entrée into his court in order to penetrate and mislead Western intelligence. And perhaps he had dispatched her to America to act as a decoy, a shiny object that would occupy the Americans’ attention while the real terrorists—the men who worked for a moving company in Alexandria, Virginia—engaged in their final preparations unmolested. How else to explain the fact that Safia had withheld Natalie’s target until the final minute? Natalie had no target. Natalie was the target.

  He thought of the man he had seen in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. The large Arab named Omar al-Farouk who walked with a limp. The large Arab who had left Café Milano a few minutes before Safia detonated her suicide vest. Was he truly Saladin? It didn’t matter. Whoever he was, he would soon be dead. So would everyone else associated with Natalie’s disappearance. Gabriel would make it his life’s work to hunt them all down and destroy ISIS before ISIS could destroy the Middle East and what remained of the civilized world. He suspected he would have a willing accomplice in the American president. ISIS was now two hours from Indiana.

  Just then, Gabriel’s mobile phone pulsed. He read the message, returned the phone to his pocket, and walked to the edge of Route 123. A
few seconds later a Buick Regal appeared. It stopped only long enough for Gabriel to slide into the backseat. On the floor were two AR-15s and several magazines of ammunition. The Second Amendment, thought Gabriel, definitely had its advantages. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw Mikhail’s frozen eyes looking back at him.

  “Which way, boss?”

  “Take the GW Parkway back toward Key Bridge,” said Gabriel. “The Beltway is a fucking mess.”

  69

  HUME, VIRGINIA

  NATALIE AWOKE WITH THE SENSATION of having slept an eternity. Her mouth seemed to be stuffed with cotton, her head had lolled sideways against the cool of the window. Here and there, over front porches and in lace-curtained windows, a light faintly burned, but otherwise the atmosphere was one of sudden abandonment. It was as if the inhabitants of this place, having learned of the attacks in Washington, had packed their belongings and taken to the hills.

  Her head throbbed with a hangover’s dull ache. She tried to raise it, but could not. Casting her eyes to the left, she watched the woman drive, the woman she had mistakenly believed to be Megan from the FBI. She was holding the wheel with her right hand; in her left was a gun. The time, according to the dashboard clock, was 9:22. Natalie, through the fog of the drug, tried to reconstruct the evening’s events—the second car in the parking garage, the wild ride into Georgetown, the quaint little French restaurant that was supposed to be her target, the bomb vest with the red stitch in the zipper. The detonator was still in her right hand. Lightly, she ran the tip of her forefinger over the switch.

  Boom, she thought, recalling her bomb training in Palmyra. And now you are on your way to paradise . . .

  A church appeared on Natalie’s right. Soon after, they came to a deserted intersection. The woman came to a complete stop before turning, as instructed by the navigation system, onto a road with a philosopher’s name. It was very narrow, with no yellow centerline. The darkness was absolute; there seemed to be no world at all beyond the patch of asphalt illuminated by the car’s headlights. The navigation system grew suddenly confused. It advised the woman to make a U-turn if possible, and when no turn was forthcoming it fell into a reproachful sulk.

  The woman followed the road for another half mile before turning into a dirt-and-gravel track. It bore them across a pasture, over a ridge of wooded hills, and into a small dell, where a timbered A-frame cottage overlooked a black pond. Lights burned within the cottage, and parked outside were three vehicles—a Lincoln Town Car, a Honda Pilot, and a BMW sedan. The woman pulled up behind the BMW and switched off the engine. Natalie, her head against the glass, feigned a coma.

  “Can you walk?” asked the woman.

  Natalie was silent.

  “I saw your eyes moving. I know you’re awake.”

  “What did you give me?”

  “Propofol.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I’m a nurse.” The woman climbed out of the car and opened Natalie’s door. “Get out.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Propofol is a short-duration anesthetic,” lectured the woman pedantically. “Patients who are given it can typically walk on their own a few minutes after awakening.”

  When Natalie did not move, the woman pointed the gun at her head. Natalie raised her right hand and placed her thumb lightly atop the detonator switch.

  “You haven’t got the guts,” said the woman. Then she seized Natalie’s wrist and dragged her from the car.

  The door of the cottage was a walk of perhaps twenty yards, but the leaden weight of the suicide vest, and the lingering effects of the propofol, made it seem more like a mile. The room Natalie entered was rustic and quaint. Consequently, its male occupants looked obscenely out of place. Four wore black tactical suits and were armed with combat assault rifles. The fifth wore an elegant business suit and was warming his hands before a wood-burning stove. His back was turned to Natalie. He was well over six feet tall and his shoulders were broad. Still, he looked vaguely infirm, as though he were recovering from a recent injury.

  At length, the man in the elegant business suit turned. His hair was neatly groomed and combed, his face was clean-shaven. His dark brown eyes, however, were exactly as Natalie remembered them. So, too, was his confident smile. He took a step toward her, favoring the damaged leg, and stopped.

  “Maimonides,” he said pleasantly. “So good to see you again.”

  Natalie clutched the detonator tightly in her hand. Beneath her feet the earth burned.

  70

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  IT WAS A SMALL DUPLEX, two floors, aluminum siding. The unit on the left was painted granite gray. The one on the right, Qassam el-Banna’s, was the color of a shirt that had been dried too many times on a radiator. Each unit had a single window on the ground floor and a single window on the second. A chain-link fence divided the front yard into separate plots. The one on the left was a showpiece, but Qassam’s looked as though it had been chewed bare by goats.

  “Obviously,” observed Eli Lavon darkly from the backseat of the Buick, “he hasn’t had much time for gardening.”

  They were parked on the opposite side of the street, outside a duplex of identical construction and upkeep. In the space in front of the gray-white duplex was an Acura sedan. It still had dealer plates.

  “Nice car,” said Lavon. “What’s the husband drive?”

  “A Kia,” said Gabriel.

  “I don’t see a Kia.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Wife drives an Acura, husband drives a Kia—what’s wrong with this picture?”

  Gabriel offered no explanation.

  “What’s the wife’s name?” asked Lavon.

  “Amina.”

  “Egyptian?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “Kid?”

  “Boy.”

  “How old?”

  “Two and a half.”

  “So he won’t remember what’s about to happen.”

  “No,” agreed Gabriel. “He won’t remember.”

  A car moved past in the street. The driver had the look of an indigenous South American—a Bolivian, maybe Peruvian. He seemed not to notice the three Israeli intelligence operatives sitting in the parked Buick Regal across the street from the house owned by an Egyptian jihadi who had slipped through the cracks of America’s vast post–9/11 security structure.

  “What did Qassam do before he got into the moving business?”

  “IT.”

  “Why are so many of them in IT?”

  “Because they don’t have to study un-Islamic subjects like English literature or Italian Renaissance painting.”

  “All the things that make life interesting.”

  “They aren’t interested in life, Eli. Only death.”

  “Think he left his computers behind?”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  “What if he smashed his hard drives?”

  Gabriel was silent. Another car moved past in the street, another South American behind the wheel. America, he thought, had its banlieues, too.

  “How are you going to play it?” asked Lavon.

  “I’m not going to knock on the door and invite myself in for a cup of tea.”

  “But no rough stuff, though.”

  “No,” said Gabriel. “No rough stuff.”

  “You always say that.”

  “And?”

  “There’s always rough stuff.”

  Gabriel picked up one of the AR-15s and checked to make sure it was properly loaded.

  “Front door or back?” asked Lavon.

  “I don’t do back doors.”

  “What if they have a dog?”

  “Bad swing thought, Eli.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Stay in the car.”

  Without another word, Gabriel climbed out and started swiftly across the street, gun in one hand, Mikhail at his side. It was funny, thought Lavon, watching him, but even after all these ye
ars he still moved like the boy of twenty-two who had served as Israel’s angel of vengeance after Munich. He scaled the chain-link fence with a straddling sidestep and then hurled himself toward the el-Bannas’ front door. There was a sharp splintering of wood, followed by a female scream, abruptly smothered. Then the door slammed shut and the lights of the house went dark. Lavon slid behind the wheel and surveyed the quiet street. So much for no rough stuff, he thought. There was always rough stuff.

  71

  HUME, VIRGINIA

  NATALIE’S BODY SEEMED TO LIQUEFY with fear. She clutched the detonator tightly in her hand, lest it slip from her grasp and sink like a coin to the bottom of a wishing well. Inwardly, she reviewed the elements of her fabricated curriculum vitae. She was Leila from Sumayriyya, Leila who loved Ziad. At a rally in the Place de la République, she had told a young Jordanian named Nabil that she wanted to punish the West for its support of Israel. Nabil had given her name to Jalal Nasser, and Jalal had given her to Saladin. Inside the global jihadist movement, a story such as hers was commonplace. But it was just that, a story, and somehow Saladin knew it.

  But how long had he known? From the beginning? No, thought Natalie, it wasn’t possible. Saladin’s lieutenants would never have allowed her to be in the same room with him if they suspected her loyalty. Nor would they have placed his fate in her hands. But they had entrusted her with Saladin’s life, and to her shame she had preserved it. And now she stood before him with a bomb strapped to her body and a detonator in her right hand. We don’t do suicide missions, Gabriel had said after her return from the caliphate. We don’t trade our lives for theirs. She placed her thumb atop the trigger switch and, testing the resistance, pressed it lightly. Saladin, watching her, smiled.