The Black Widow

by Daniel Silva

  With a shrug, Gabriel indicated it was the former.

  “I’m glad someone still knows how to play rough. If I so much as say an unkind word to a terrorist, I’ll be indicted. Droning terrorists and their children is fine, though.”

  “You know, Adrian, sometimes a live terrorist is better than a dead one. A live terrorist can tell you things, such as where and when the next attack will occur.”

  “My president disagrees. He believes detaining terrorists only breeds more of them.”

  “Success breeds terrorists, Adrian. And nothing succeeds quite like an attack on the American homeland.”

  “Which brings us back to our original point,” said Carter, wiping a trickle of sweat from the side of his neck. “I will prevail upon the Pentagon to take care with their air campaign in Syria. In exchange, you will share anything your girl picks up during her vacation in the caliphate.”

  “Agreed,” said Gabriel.

  “I assume the French military is on board?”

  “And the British,” said Gabriel.

  “I’m not sure how I feel being the last to know about this.”

  “Welcome to the post-American world.”

  Carter said nothing.

  “No air strikes on that building,” said Gabriel quietly. “And lay off the training camps until she comes out again.”

  “When do you expect her?”

  “The end of August, unless Saladin has other plans.”

  “We should be so lucky.”

  They had arrived back at the N Street safe house. Carter stopped at the foot of the curved front steps.

  “How are the children?” he asked suddenly.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t blow it with them. You’re too old to have any more.”

  Gabriel smiled.

  “You know,” said Carter, “for about twelve hours, I actually thought you were dead. That was a profoundly lousy thing to do.”

  “I had no other choice.”

  “I’m sure,” said Carter. “But next time, don’t keep me in the dark. I’m not the enemy. I’m here to help.”

  36

  RAQQA, SYRIA

  FROM THE OUTSET SHE MADE it clear to Jalal Nasser that she could remain in Syria for a limited period of time. She had to be back at the clinic no later than the thirtieth of August, the end of her summer holiday. If she were delayed, her colleagues and family would assume the worst. After all, she was politically active, she had left footprints on the Internet, she had lost her one and only love to the jihad. Undoubtedly, someone would go to the police, the police would go to the DGSI, and the DGSI would add her name to the long list of European Muslims who had joined the ranks of ISIS. There would be stories in the press, stories about an educated woman, a healer, who had been seduced by ISIS’s cult of death. If that were to happen, she would have no choice but to remain in Syria, which was not her wish, at least not yet. First, she wanted to avenge Ziad’s death by striking a blow against the West. Then, inshallah, she would make her way back to Syria, marry a fighter, and produce many children for the caliphate.

  Jalal Nasser had said he wanted the same thing. Therefore, it came as a surprise to Natalie when, for three days and nights after her arrival in Raqqa, no one came for her. Miranda Ward, her travel companion, remained with her at the apartment near al-Rasheed Park to serve as her guide and minder. It was not Miranda’s first visit to Raqqa. She was a Sherpa on the secret ratline that funneled British Muslims from East London and the Midlands to Syria and the Islamic caliphate. She was the decoy, the deception, the pretty clean face. She had escorted both men and women, posing as lovers and friends. She was, she joked, “bi-jihadi.”

  It was not really an apartment; it was a small bare room with a sink bolted to the wall and a few blankets on a bare floor. There was a single window, through which dust particles flowed freely, as if by osmosis. The blankets smelled of desert animals, of camels and goats. Sometimes a thread of water leaked from the sink tap, but usually there was none. They received water from an ISIS tanker truck in the street, and when the truck didn’t come they carried water from the Euphrates. In Raqqa, time had receded. It was the seventh century, spiritually and materially.

  There was no electricity—a few minutes a day, if that—and no gas for cooking. Not that there was much to eat. In a land where bread was a staple, bread was in short supply. Each day began with a quest to find a precious loaf or two. The ISIS dinar was the official currency of the caliphate, but in the markets most transactions were conducted in the old Syrian pound or in dollars. Even ISIS traded in the currency of its enemy. At Jalal Nasser’s suggestion, Natalie had brought several hundred dollars with her from France. The money opened many doors, behind which were storerooms filled with rice, beans, olives, and even a bit of meat. For those willing to risk the wrath of the dreaded husbah, the sharia police, there were black-market cigarettes and liquor to be had, too. The punishment for smoking or drinking was severe—the lash, the cross, the chopping block. Natalie once saw a husbah whipping a man because the man had cursed. Cursing was haram.

  To enter the streets of Raqqa was to enter a world gone mad. The traffic signals didn’t work, not without electricity, so ISIS traffic police controlled the intersections. They carried pistols but no whistles because whistles were haram. Photographs of models in shop windows had been retouched to adhere to ISIS’s strict decency codes. The faces were blacked out because it was haram to depict humans or animals, God’s creations, and hang them on a wall. The statue of two peasants atop Raqqa’s famous clock tower had been retouched, too—the heads had been removed. Na’eem Square, once beloved by Raqqa’s children, was now filled with severed heads, not stone, but human. They stared mournfully down from the spikes of an iron fence, Syrian soldiers, Kurdish fighters, traitors, saboteurs, former hostages. The Syrian air force bombed the park frequently in retaliation. Such was life in the Islamic caliphate, bombs falling upon severed heads, in a park where children once played.

  It was a black world, black in spirit, black in color. Black flags flew from every building and lamppost, men in black ninja suits paraded through the streets, women in black abayas moved like black ghosts through the markets. Natalie had been given her abaya shortly after she crossed the Turkish border. It was a heavy, scratchy garment that fit her like a sheet thrown over a piece of furniture. Beneath it she wore only black, for all other colors, even brown, were haram and could provoke a thrashing by the husbah. The facial veil rendered her features all but indistinguishable, and through it Natalie viewed a blurry world of murky charcoal gray. In the midday heat she felt as though she were trapped inside her own private oven, roasting slowly, an ISIS delicacy. There was danger in the abaya, the danger that she might believe herself to be invisible. She did not succumb to it. She knew they were watching her always.

  ISIS was not alone in altering the cityscape of Raqqa. The Syrian air force and their Russian accomplices bombed by day, the Americans and their coalition partners by night. There was damage everywhere: shattered apartment buildings, burned-out cars and trucks, blackened tanks and armored personnel carriers. ISIS had responded to the air campaign by concealing its fighters and weaponry amid the civilian population. The ground floor of Natalie’s building was filled with bullets, artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades, and guns of every sort. Bearded black-clad ISIS fighters used the second and third floors as a barracks. A few were from Syria, but most were Saudis, Egyptians, Tunisians, or wild-eyed Islamic warriors from the Caucasus who were pleased to be fighting Russians again. There were many Europeans, including three Frenchmen. They were aware of Natalie’s presence but made no attempt to communicate with her. She was off-limits. She was Saladin’s girl.

  The Syrians and the Russians did not hesitate to bomb civilian targets, but the Americans were more discriminating. Everyone agreed they were bombing less these days. No one knew why, but everyone had an opinion, especially the foreign fighters, who boasted that decadent, infidel Amer
ica was losing the stomach for the fight. None suspected that the reason for the lull in American air activity was living among them, in a room with a single window looking onto al-Rasheed Park, with blankets that smelled of camel and goat.

  Health care in Syria had been deplorable even before the uprising, and now, in the chaos of civil war, it was almost nonexistent. Raqqa’s National Hospital was a ruin, emptied of medicine and supplies, filled with wounded ISIS fighters. The rest of the city’s unfortunate residents received care, such as it was, from small clinics scattered amid the neighborhoods. Natalie happened upon one while searching for bread on her second day in Raqqa, and found it filled with civilian casualties from a Russian air strike, many dead, several others soon to be. There were no physicians present, only ambulance drivers and ISIS “nurses” who had been given only rudimentary training. Natalie announced that she was a doctor and immediately began treating the wounded with whatever supplies she could find. She did so while still clad in her clumsy, unsterilized abaya because a snarling husbah threatened to beat her if she removed it. That night, when she finally returned to the apartment, she washed the blood from the abaya in water from the Euphrates. In Raqqa, time had receded.

  They did not wear their abayas in the apartment, only their hijabs. Miranda’s flattered her, framing her delicate Celtic features, setting off her sea-green eyes. While preparing supper that evening she told Natalie of her conversion to Islam. Her childhood home had been a distinctly unhappy place—an alcoholic mother, an unemployed, sexually abusive lout of a father. At thirteen she began to drink heavily and use drugs. She became pregnant twice and aborted both. “I was a mess,” she said. “I was going nowhere in flames.”

  Then one day, stoned, drunk, she found herself standing outside an Islamic bookstore in central Bristol. A Muslim man saw her staring through the shop window and invited her inside. She refused but accepted his offer of a free book.

  “I was tempted to drop it in the nearest rubbish bin. I’m glad I didn’t. It changed my life.”

  She stopped drinking and using drugs and having sex with boys she scarcely knew. Then she converted to Islam, took the veil, and began to pray five times a day. Her parents were lapsed Church of England, unbelievers, but they did not want a Muslim for a daughter. Ejected from her home with nothing but a suitcase and a hundred pounds in cash, she made her way to East London, where she was taken in by a group of Muslims in the Tower Hamlets section of London. There she met a Jordanian named Jalal Nasser who taught her about the beauty of jihad and martyrdom. She joined ISIS, traveled secretly to Syria for training, and returned undetected to Britain. She was in awe of Jalal and perhaps a little in love with him. “If he ever takes wives,” she said, “I hope I will be one of them. At the moment, he’s too busy for a bride. He’s married to Saladin.”

  Natalie was familiar with the name, but Dr. Hadawi was not. She replied accordingly.

  “Who?” she asked carefully.

  “Saladin. He’s the leader of the network.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Saladin?” She smiled dreamily and shook her head. “I’m far too low on the food chain. Only the senior leaders know who he really is. But who knows? Maybe you’ll get to meet him.”

  “Why would you say something like that?”

  “Because they have big plans for you.”

  “Did Jalal tell you that?”

  “He didn’t have to.”

  But Natalie was not convinced. In fact, it seemed the opposite was true, that she had been forgotten. That night, and the next, she lay awake on her blanket, gazing at the square patch of sky framed by her single window. The city was entirely dark at night, the stars were incandescent. She imagined an Ofek 10 spy satellite peering down at her, following her as she moved through the streets of the black city.

  Finally, shortly before dawn on the third night, not long after an American air strike in the north, she heard footfalls in the corridor outside her room. Four pile-driver blows shook the door; then it blew open, as if by the force of a car bomb. Natalie instantly covered herself with the abaya before a torch illuminated her face. They took only her, leaving Miranda behind. Outside in the street waited a dented and dusty SUV. They forced her into the backseat, these bearded, black-clad, wild-eyed warriors of Islam, and the SUV shot forward. She peered through the tinted window, through the tinted veil of her abaya, at the madness beyond—at the severed heads on iron skewers, at the bodies writhing on crosses, at the photos of faceless women in shop windows. I am Dr. Leila Hadawi, she told herself. I am Leila who loves Ziad, Leila from Sumayriyya. And I am about to die.

  37

  EASTERN SYRIA

  THEY DROVE EASTWARD INTO THE rising sun, along a ruler-straight road black with oil. The traffic was light—a truck ferrying cargo from Anbar Province in Iraq, a peasant bringing produce to market in Raqqa, a flatbed spilling over with blood-drunk ninjas after a night of fighting in the north. The morning rush in the caliphate, thought Natalie. Occasionally, they came upon a burnt-out tank or troop carrier. In the empty landscape the wreckage looked like the corpses of insects fried by a child’s magnifying glass. One Japanese-made pickup truck still burned as they passed, and in the back a charred fighter still clung to his .50-caliber machine gun, which was aimed skyward. “Allahu Akbar,” murmured the driver of the SUV, and beneath her black abaya Natalie responded, “Allahu Akbar.”

  She had no guide other than the sun and the SUV’s speedometer and dashboard clock. The sun told her they had maintained a steady easterly heading after leaving Raqqa. The speedometer and clock told her they had been barreling along at nearly ninety miles per hour for seventy-five minutes. Raqqa was approximately a hundred miles from the Iraqi border—the old border, she quickly reminded herself. There was no border anymore; the lines drawn on a map by infidel diplomats in London and Paris had been erased. Even the old Syrian road signs had been removed. “Allahu Akbar,” said Natalie’s driver as they passed another flaming wreck. And Natalie, smothering beneath her abaya, intoned, “Allahu Akbar.”

  They plunged eastward for another twenty minutes or so, the terrain growing drier and more desolate with each passing mile. It was still early—seven twenty, according to the clock—but already Natalie’s window blazed to the touch. Finally, they came to a small village of bleached stone houses. The main street was wide enough for traffic, but behind it lay a labyrinth of passages through which a few villagers—veiled women, men in robes and keffiyehs, barefoot children—moved torpidly in the heat. There was a market in the main street and a small café where a few dried-out older men sat listening to a recorded sermon by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph himself. Natalie searched the street for evidence of the village’s name, but found none. She feared she had crossed the invisible border into Iraq.

  All at once the SUV turned through an archway and drew to a stop in the court of a large house. There were date palms in the court; in their shade reclined a half-dozen ISIS fighters. One, a young man of perhaps twenty-five whose reddish beard was a work in progress, opened Natalie’s door and led her inside. It was cool in the house, and from somewhere came the soft reassuring chatter of women. In a room furnished with only carpets and pillows, the young man with the thin reddish beard invited Natalie to sit. He quickly withdrew and a veiled woman appeared with a glass of tea. Then the veiled woman took her leave, too, and Natalie had the room to herself.

  She moved aside her veil and raised the glass tentatively to her lips. The sugary tea entered her bloodstream like drug from a needle. She drank it slowly, careful not to scald her mouth, and watched a shadow creeping toward her across the carpet. When the shadow reached her ankle, the woman reappeared to reclaim the glass. Then, a moment later, the room vibrated with the arrival of another vehicle in the court. Four doors opened and closed in near unison. Four men entered the house.

  It was instantly apparent which of the four was the leader. He was a few years older than the others, more deliberative in movement, calmer in
demeanor. The three younger men all carried large automatic combat rifles of a model Natalie could not identify, but the leader had only a pistol, which he wore holstered on his hip. He was attired in the manner of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—a black jumpsuit, white trainers, a black keffiyeh tied tightly to his large head. His beard was unkempt, streaked with gray, and damp with sweat. His eyes were brown and oddly gentle, like the eyes of Bin Laden. His right hand was intact, but his left had only its thumb and forefinger, evidence of bomb making. For several minutes he stared down at the lump of black seated motionless on the carpet. When finally he addressed her, he did so in Arabic, with an Iraqi accent.

  “Remove your veil.”

  Natalie did not stir. It was haram in the Islamic State for a woman to reveal her face to a male who was not a relative, even if the male was an important Iraqi from the network of Saladin.

  “It’s all right,” he said at last. “It is necessary.”

  Slowly, carefully, Natalie raised her veil. She stared downward toward the carpet.

  “Look at me,” he commanded, and Natalie obediently raised her eyes. He regarded her for a long moment before taking her chin between the thumb and forefinger of his ruined hand and turning her face side to side to examine it in profile. His gaze was critical, as though he were examining the flesh of a horse.

  “They tell me you are a Palestinian.”

  She nodded her assent.

  “You look like a Jew, but I must admit all Palestinians look like Jews to me.” He spoke these words with a desert Arab’s disdain for those who lived in cities, marshes, and seacoasts. He was still holding her chin. “You’ve been to Palestine?”

  “No, never.”

  “But you have a French passport. You could have gone very easily.”

  “It would have been too painful to see the land of my ancestors ruled by Zionists.”

  Her answer appeared to please him. With a nod he instructed her to veil her face. She was grateful for the garment’s shelter, for it gave her a moment to compose herself. Hidden beneath her black tent, her face obscured, she prepared herself for the interrogation she knew lay ahead. The ease with which Leila’s story flowed from her subconscious to her conscious surprised her. The intense training had succeeded. It was as if she were recalling events that had actually occurred. Natalie Mizrahi was lost to her; she was dead and buried. It was Leila Hadawi who had been brought to this village in the middle of the desert, and Leila Hadawi who confidently awaited the sternest test of her life.