The Black Widow

by Daniel Silva

  “‘My roots were entrenched before the birth of time.’”

  “You’ve been reading your Darwish.” He walked deeper into the weeds and the ruins, closer to the highway. When he spoke again, he had to raise his voice to be heard over the whitewater rush of the traffic. “Your home was over there. Your ancestors were called Hadawi. This is your name, too. You are Leila Hadawi. You were born in France, educated in France, and you practice medicine in France. But whenever someone asks where you’re from, you answer Sumayriyya.”

  “What happened here?”

  “Al-Nakba happened here. Operation Ben-Ami happened here.” He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Have your instructors mentioned Ben-Ami to you?”

  “It was an operation undertaken by the Haganah in the spring of 1948 to secure the coast road between Acre and the Lebanese border, and to prepare the Western Galilee for the coming invasion by the regular Arab armies.”

  “Zionist lies!” he snapped. “Ben-Ami had one purpose and one purpose only, to capture the Arab villages of the Western Galilee and cast their inhabitants into exile.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. It’s what Leila believes. It’s what she knows. You see, Leila, your grandfather, Daoud Hadawi, was there that night the Zionist forces of the Haganah came up the road from Acre in a convoy. The residents of Sumayriyya had heard what had happened in some of the other villages conquered by the Jews, so they immediately took flight. A few stayed behind but most fled to Lebanon, where they waited for the Arab armies to recapture Palestine from the Jews. And when the Arab armies were routed, the villagers of Sumayriyya became refugees, exiles. The Hadawi family lived in Ein al-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Open sewers, cinderblock houses . . . hell on earth.”

  Gabriel led her past the rubble of the little houses—houses that were dynamited by the Haganah soon after Sumayriyya fell—and stopped at the edge of an orchard.

  “It belonged to the people of Sumayriyya. Now it is the property of the kibbutz. Many years ago they were having trouble making the water flow through the irrigation tubes. A man appeared, an Arab who spoke a bit of Hebrew, and patiently explained how to do it. The kibbutzniks were amazed, and they asked the Arab how it was he knew how to make the water flow. And do you know what the Arab told them?”

  “It was his orchard.”

  “No, Leila, it was your orchard.”

  He lapsed into silence. There was only the wind in the weeds and the rushing of the traffic along the highway. He was staring at the ruins of a house that lay scattered at his feet, the ruins of a life, the ruins of a people. He seemed angry; whether it was genuine or for Leila’s benefit, Natalie could not tell.

  “Why did you choose this place for me?” she asked.

  “I didn’t,” he answered distantly. “It chose me.”

  “How?”

  “I knew a woman from here, a woman like you.”

  “Was she like Natalie or Leila?”

  “There is no Natalie,” he said to the veiled woman standing next to him. “Not anymore.”

  22

  NAHALAL, ISRAEL

  WHEN NATALIE RETURNED TO NAHALAL, the volume of Darwish poetry had vanished from the bedside table in her room. In its place was a bound briefing book, thick as a manuscript and composed in French. It was the continuation of the story that Gabriel had begun amid the ruins of Sumayriyya, the story of an accomplished young woman, a doctor, who had been born in France of Palestinian lineage. Her father had lived an itinerant life typical of many stateless, educated Palestinians. After graduating from the University of Baghdad with a degree in engineering, he had worked in Iraq, Jordan, Libya, and Kuwait before finally settling in France, where he met a Palestinian woman, originally from Nablus, who worked part-time as a translator for a UN refugee agency and a small French publishing house. They had two children, a son who died in an auto accident in Switzerland at twenty-three, and a daughter whom they named after Leila Khaled, the famous freedom fighter from Black September who was the first woman to hijack an airplane. Leila’s thirty-three-year existence had been rendered in the pages of the briefing book with the excruciating confessional detail of a modern memoir. Natalie had to admit it made for rather good reading. There were the slights she had suffered at school because she was an Arab and a Muslim. There was her brief experimentation with drugs. And there was an anatomically explicit description of her first sexual experience, at sixteen, with a French boy named Henri, who had broken poor Leila’s heart. Next to the passage was a photograph of two teenagers, a French-looking boy and an Arab-looking girl, posed along the balustrade of the Pont Marie in Paris.

  “Who are they?” Natalie asked the cadaverous Abdul.

  “They’re Leila and her boyfriend Henri, of course.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Leila. This is the story of your life. Everything you are reading in that book actually happened to you.”

  As a French Jew, Natalie found she had much in common with the Palestinian woman she would soon become. Both had suffered taunts at school because of their heritage and faith, both had unhappy early sexual experiences with French boys, and both had taken up the study of medicine in the autumn of 2003, Natalie at the Université de Montpellier, one of the oldest medical schools in the world, and Leila at Université Paris-Sud. It was a tense time in France and the Middle East. Earlier that year the Americans had invaded Iraq, inflaming the Arab world and Muslims across Western Europe. What’s more, the Second Intifada was raging in the West Bank and Gaza. Everywhere it seemed Muslims were under siege. Leila was among the thousands who marched in Paris against the war in Iraq and the Israeli crackdown in the Occupied Territories. As her interest in politics grew, so did her devotion to Islam. She decided to take the veil, which shocked her secular mother. Then, a few weeks later, her mother took the veil, too.

  It was during her third year of medical school that Leila met Ziad al-Masri, a Jordanian-Palestinian who was enrolled in the university’s department of electronics. At first, he was a pleasant distraction from her mandatory curriculum of pharmacology, bacteriology, virology, and parasitology. But Leila soon realized she was desperately in love. Ziad was more politically active than Leila, and more religiously devout. He associated with radical Muslims, was a member of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and attended a mosque where a cleric from Saudi Arabia regularly preached a message of jihad. Not surprisingly, Ziad’s activities brought him to the attention of the French security service, which detained him twice for questioning. The interrogations only hardened Ziad’s views, and against Leila’s wishes he decided to travel to Iraq to join the Islamic resistance. He made it only as far as Jordan, where he was arrested and thrown into the notorious prison known as the Fingernail Factory. A month after his arrival he was dead. The dreaded Mukhabarat secret police never bothered to supply his family with an explanation.

  The briefing book was not the work of a single author but the collaborative effort of three experienced intelligence officers from three capable services. Its plot was airtight, its characters well drawn. No reviewer would find fault with it, and not even the most jaded of readers would doubt its verisimilitude. Some might question the amount of extraneous detail concerning the subject’s early life, but there was method in the authors’ verbosity. They wanted to create in their subject a well of memory from which she could draw abundantly when the time came.

  These seemingly inconsequential details—the names, the places, the schools she had attended, the layout of her family’s apartment in Paris, the trips they had taken to the Alps and the sea—formed the core of Natalie’s curriculum during her final days at the farm in Nahalal. And, of course, there was Ziad, Leila’s lover and deceased soldier of Allah. It meant that Natalie had to memorize the details of not one life but two, for Ziad had told Leila much about his upbringing and his life in Jordan. Dina served as her primary tutor and taskmaster. She spoke of Ziad’s c
ommitment to jihad and his hatred of Israel and America as though they were noble pursuits. His path in life was to be emulated, she said, not condemned. More than anything, though, his death required vengeance.

  Natalie’s training as a doctor served her well, for it allowed her to absorb and retain vast amounts of information, especially numbers. She was quizzed constantly, praised for her successes, and upbraided for even the smallest mistake or hesitation. Soon, warned Dina, others would be asking the questions.

  She was visited during this time by a number of observers who sat in on her lessons but did not participate in any way. There was a tough-looking man with cropped dark hair and a pockmarked face. There was a bald, tweedy man who conducted himself with the air of an Oxford don. There was an elfin figure with thinning, flyaway hair whose face, try as she might, Natalie could never seem to recall. And, lastly, there was a tall, lanky man with pale bloodless skin and eyes the color of glacial ice. When Natalie asked Dina his name, she was met by a reproachful glare. “Leila would never be attracted to a non-Muslim,” she admonished her pupil, “let alone a Jew. Leila is in love with the memory of Ziad. No one will ever take his place.”

  He came to Nahalal on two other occasions, both times accompanied by the wispy-haired man with an elusive face. They looked on judgmentally as Dina pressed Natalie on the small details of Leila’s relationship with Ziad—the restaurant where they ate on their first date, the food they ordered, their first kiss, their final e-mail. Ziad had sent it from an Internet café in Amman while waiting for a courier to take him across the border into Iraq. The next morning he was arrested. They never spoke again.

  “Do you remember what he wrote to you?” asked Dina.

  “He was convinced he was being followed.”

  “And what did you say to him?”

  “I told him I was concerned for his safety. I asked him to get on the next plane to Paris.”

  “No, Leila, your exact words. This is your final communication with a man you loved,” Dina added, waving a piece of paper that purported to contain the text of the e-mail exchange. “Surely, you remember the last thing you said to Ziad before he was arrested.”

  “I said I was sick with worry. I begged him to leave.”

  “But that’s not all you said. You told him he could stay with a relative of yours, is that not correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was this relative?”

  “My aunt.”

  “Your mother’s sister?”

  “Correct.”

  “She lives in Amman?”

  “In Zarqa.”

  “The camp or the town?”

  “The town.”

  “Did you tell her that Ziad was coming to Jordan?”

  “No.”

  “Did you tell your mother or father?”

  “No.”

  “What about the French police?”

  “No.”

  “And your contact in Jordanian intelligence? Did you tell him, Leila?”

  “What?”

  “Answer the question,” snapped Dina.

  “I don’t have a contact in Jordanian intelligence.”

  “Did you betray Ziad to the Jordanians?”

  “No.”

  “Are you responsible for his death?”

  “No.”

  “And the night of your first date?” Dina asked, tacking suddenly. “Did you drink wine with dinner?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is haram,” said Natalie.

  That night, when she retired to her room, the volume of Darwish was back on her bedside table. She would be leaving soon, she thought. It was only a question of when.

  That same question—the question of when—was the subject of a meeting between Gabriel and Uzi Navot at King Saul Boulevard later that evening. Between them, arrayed upon Navot’s conference table, were the written conclusions of the various trainers, physicians, and psychiatric specialists assigned to the case. All stated that Natalie Mizrahi was of sound mind and body, and more than capable of carrying out the mission for which she had been recruited. None of the reports, however, were as important as the opinions of the chief of the Office and the man who would succeed him. Both were veteran field operatives who had spent much of their careers working under assumed identities. And they alone would suffer the consequences were anything to go wrong.

  “It’s only France,” said Navot.

  “Yes,” said Gabriel darkly. “Nothing ever happens in France.”

  There was a silence.

  “Well?” Navot asked finally.

  “I’d like to give her one more test.”

  “She’s been tested. And she’s passed every one with flying colors.”

  “Let’s get her out of her comfort zone.”

  “A murder board?”

  “A peer review,” offered Gabriel.

  “How rough?”

  “Rough enough to expose any flaws.”

  “Who do you want to handle it?”

  “Yaakov.”

  “Yaakov would scare me.”

  “That’s the point, Uzi.”

  “How soon do you want to do it?”

  Gabriel looked at his wristwatch. Navot reached for the phone.

  They came for her in the hour before dawn, when she was dreaming of the lemon groves of Sumayriyya. There were three of them—or was it four? Natalie couldn’t be sure; the room was in darkness, and her captors wore black. They pulled a hood over her, bound her hands with packing tape, and frog-marched her down the stairs. Outside, the grass of the garden was wet beneath her bare feet, and the air was cold and heavy with the smells of the land and the animals. They forced her into the back of a car. One sat to her left, another to her right, so that she was wedged tightly at the hips and shoulders. Frightened, she called Gabriel’s name but received no reply. Nor did Dina respond to her cry for help. “Where are you taking me?” she asked, and to her surprise she addressed them in Arabic.

  Like most physicians she had a good internal clock. The drive, a nausea-inducing high-speed derby, lasted between twenty-five and thirty minutes. No one spoke a word to her, even when, in Arabic, she said she was about to be sick. Finally, the car lurched to a stop. Again, she was frog-marched, this time along a dirt pathway. The air was sweet with pine and colder than in the valley, and she could see a bit of light seeping through the fabric of her hood. She was led across a threshold, into a structure of some sort, and forced into a chair. Her hands were placed upon a tabletop. Lights warmed her.

  She sat in silence, trembling slightly. She sensed a presence beyond the lamps. At last, a male voice said in Arabic, “Remove the hood.”

  It came off in a flourish, as though she were a prized object to be unveiled to a waiting audience. She blinked several times while growing accustomed to the harsh light. Then her eyes settled upon the man seated on the opposite side of the table. He was dressed entirely in black, and a black keffiyeh obscured everything of his face except his eyes, which were black, too. The figure to his right was identically attired, as was the one to his left.

  “Tell me your name,” commanded the figure opposite in Arabic.

  “My name is Leila Hadawi.”

  “Not the name the Zionists gave you!” he snapped. “Your real name. Your Jewish name.”

  “It is my real name. I’m Leila Hadawi. I grew up in France, but I am from Sumayriyya.”

  But he would have none of it—not her name, not her professed ethnicity, not her faith, not the story of her childhood in France, at least not all of it. He had in his possession a file, which he said had been prepared by the security department of his organization, though he did not say precisely what organization that was, only that its members emulated the original followers of Muhammad, peace be upon him. The file purported to prove that her real name was Natalie Mizrahi, that she was obviously Jewish, that she was an agent of the Israeli secret intelligence service who had been trained at a farmhouse in the Valley of J
ezreel. She told him that she had never, nor would she ever, set foot in Israel—and the only training she had received was at the Université Paris-Sud, where she had studied medicine.

  “Lies,” said the man in black.

  Which left no option, he added, but to start from the beginning. Under his relentless interrogation, Natalie’s sense of time deserted her. For all she knew a week had passed since her sleep had been interrupted. Her head ached for want of caffeine, the bright lights were intolerable. Even so, her answers flowed from her effortlessly, as water flows downhill. She was not remembering something she had been taught, she was remembering something she already knew. She was Natalie no more. She was Leila. Leila from Sumayriyya. Leila who loved Ziad. Leila who wanted vengeance.

  Finally, the man on the other side of the table closed his file. He looked toward the figure on his right, then the left. Then he unwound the headscarf to reveal his face. He was the one with pockmarked cheeks. The other two men removed their keffiyehs, too. The one on the left was the forgettable wispy-haired man. The one on the right was the one with pale bloodless skin and eyes like ice. All three of the men were smiling, but Natalie was suddenly weeping. Gabriel approached her quietly from behind and placed a hand on her shoulder as it convulsed. “It’s all right, Leila,” he said softly. “It’s all over now.”

  But it wasn’t over, she thought. It was only beginning.

  There exists in Tel Aviv and its suburbs a series of Office safe flats known as jump sites. They are places where, by doctrine and tradition, operatives spend their final night before departing Israel for missions abroad. Three days after Natalie’s mock interrogation, she drove with Dina to a luxury apartment overlooking the sea in Tel Aviv. Her new clothing, all of it purchased in France, lay neatly folded atop the bed. Next to it was a French passport, a French driver’s permit, French credit cards, bank cards, and various medical certificates and accreditations in the name of Leila Hadawi. There were also several photographs of the apartment she would inhabit in the heavily immigrant Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers.