The Black Widow

by Daniel Silva

  She stood frozen with indecision for a moment, listening to the screaming of the sirens. They all seemed to be converging at the southern end of Georgetown, near the Potomac. Finally, she headed in the opposite direction, toward her target, and started looking for a telephone. And all the while she was wondering why Safia had insisted she wear the suicide vest with the red stitch in the zipper.

  Five critical minutes would elapse before the FBI managed to find the car. It was parked at the corner of Wisconsin and Prospect, illegally and very badly. The right-front wheel was on the curb, the driver’s-side door was ajar, the headlights were on, the engine was running. More important, the two female occupants, one dark-haired, one blond, subjects one and two, had vanished.

  64

  CAFÉ MILANO, GEORGETOWN

  SAFIA WAS SLIGHTLY OUT OF breath when she entered Café Milano. With a martyr’s serenity, she walked across the foyer to the maître d’ stand.

  “Al-Farouk,” she said.

  “Mr. al-Farouk has already arrived. Right this way, please.”

  Safia followed the maître d’ into the main dining room, and then to the table where Saladin sat alone. He rose slowly on his wounded leg and kissed her lightly on each cheek.

  “Asma, my love,” he said in perfect English. “You look absolutely lovely.”

  She didn’t understand what he was saying, and so she merely smiled and sat down. While reclaiming his own seat, Saladin shot a glance toward the man sitting at the end of the bar. The man with dark hair and eyeglasses who had entered the restaurant a few minutes after Saladin. The man, thought Saladin, who had taken great interest in Safia’s arrival and who was holding a mobile phone tightly to his ear. It could mean only one thing: Saladin’s presence in Washington had not gone unnoticed.

  He raised his eyes toward the television over the bar. It was tuned to CNN. The network was only just beginning to grasp the scope of the calamity that had befallen Washington. There had been attacks at the National Counterterrorism Center, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Kennedy Center. The network was also hearing reports, unconfirmed, of attacks on a number of restaurants in the Washington Harbor complex. The patrons of Café Milano were clearly on edge. Most were staring at their mobiles, and about a dozen were gathered around the bar, watching the television. But not the man with dark hair and glasses. He was trying his best not to stare at Safia. It was time, thought Saladin, to be leaving.

  He placed his hand lightly on Safia’s and stared into her hypnotic eyes. In Arabic, he asked, “You dropped her where I told you?”

  She nodded.

  “The Americans followed you?”

  “They tried. They seemed confused.”

  “With good reason,” he said with a glance toward the television.

  “It went well?”

  “Better than expected.”

  A waiter approached. Saladin waved him away.

  “Do you see the man at the end of the bar?” he asked quietly.

  “The one who’s talking on the phone?”

  Saladin nodded. “Have you ever seen him before?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s going to try to stop you. Don’t let him.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Saladin granted himself the luxury of one last look around the room. This was the reason he had made the risky journey to Washington, to see with his own eyes fear on American faces. For too long, only Muslims had been afraid. Now the Americans would know what it was like to taste fear. They had destroyed Saladin’s country. Tonight, Saladin had begun the process of destroying theirs.

  He looked at Safia. “You’re ready?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “After I leave, wait one minute exactly.” He gave her hand a soft squeeze of encouragement and then smiled. “Don’t be afraid, my love. You won’t feel a thing. And then you’ll see the face of Allah.”

  “Peace be with you,” she said.

  “And with you.”

  With that, Saladin rose and, taking up his cane, limped past the man with dark hair and glasses, into the foyer.

  “Is everything all right, Mr. al-Farouk?” asked the maître d’.

  “I have to make a phone call, and I don’t want to disturb your other guests.”

  “I’m afraid they’re already disturbed.”

  “So it would seem.”

  Saladin went into the night. On the redbrick pavement, he paused for a moment to savor the wail of sirens. A black Lincoln Town Car waited curbside. Saladin lowered himself into the backseat and instructed the driver, a member of his network, to move forward a few yards. Inside the restaurant, surrounded by more than a hundred people, a woman sat alone, staring at her wristwatch. And though she did not realize it, her lips were moving.

  65

  WISCONSIN AVENUE, GEORGETOWN

  AFTER CROSSING Q STREET, NATALIE encountered two Georgetown students, both women, both terrified. Over the scream of a passing ambulance, she explained that she had been robbed and needed to call her boyfriend for help. The women said that the university had sent out an alert ordering all students to return to their dorms and residences and to shelter in place. But when Natalie made a second appeal, one of the women, the taller of the two, handed over an iPhone. Natalie held the device in the palm of her left hand, and with her right, the one that held the detonator switch, entered the number she was supposed to use only in an extreme emergency. It rang on the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. A male voice answered in terse Hebrew.

  “I need to speak to Gabriel right away,” Natalie said in the same language.

  “Who is this?”

  She hesitated and then spoke her given name for the first time in many months.

  “Where are you?”

  “Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown.”

  “Are you safe?”

  “Yes, I think so, but I’m wearing a suicide vest.”

  “It might be booby-trapped. Don’t try to take it off.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Stand by.”

  Twice the man on the Operations Desk in Tel Aviv tried to transfer the call to Gabriel’s mobile. Twice there was no answer.

  “There seems to be a problem.”

  “Where is he?”

  “The National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia.”

  “Try again.”

  A police cruiser flashed past, siren screaming. The two Georgetown students were growing impatient.

  “Just a minute,” Natalie said to them in English.

  “Please hurry,” replied the owner of the phone.

  The man in Tel Aviv tried Gabriel’s phone again. It rang several times before a male voice answered in English.

  “Who is this?” asked Natalie.

  “My name is Adrian Carter. I work for the CIA.”

  “Where’s Gabriel?”

  “He’s here with me.”

  “I need to speak to him.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Is this Natalie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  She answered.

  “Are you still wearing your vest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t touch it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Can you keep this phone?”

  “No.”

  “We’re going to bring you in. Walk north on Wisconsin Avenue. Stay on the west side of the street.”

  “There’s going to be another attack. Safia is somewhere close.”

  “We know exactly where she is. Get moving.”

  The connection went dead. Natalie returned the phone and headed north up Wisconsin Avenue.

  In the ruins of the National Counterterrorism Center, Carter managed to communicate to Gabriel that Natalie was safe and would momentarily be in FBI custody. Deafened, bleeding, Gabriel had no time for celebration. Mikhail was still inside Café Milano, not twenty feet from the table wh
ere Safia Bourihane sat alone, her thumb on her detonator, her eyes on her watch. Carter raised the phone to his ear and again ordered Mikhail to leave the restaurant at once. Gabriel still couldn’t hear what Carter was saying. He only hoped that Mikhail was listening.

  Like Saladin, Mikhail surveyed the interior of Café Milano’s elegant dining room before rising. He, too, saw fear on the faces around him, and like Saladin he knew that in a moment many people would die. Saladin had had the power to stop the attack. Mikhail did not. Even if he was armed, which he was not, the chances of stopping the attack were slim. Safia’s thumb was atop the detonator switch, and when she was not staring at her watch, she was staring at Mikhail. Nor was it possible to issue any sort of warning. A warning would only cause a panicked rush to the door, and more would die. Better to let the vest explode with the patrons as they were. The lucky ones at the outer tables might survive. The ones closest to Safia, the ones who had been granted the coveted tables, would be spared the awful knowledge that they were about to die.

  Slowly, Mikhail slid from the barstool and stood. He didn’t dare try to leave the restaurant through the front entrance; his path would take him far too close to Safia’s table. Instead, he moved calmly down the length of the bar toward the toilets. The door to the men’s room was locked. He twisted the flimsy latch until it snapped and went inside. A thirtysomething man with gelled hair was admiring himself in the mirror.

  “What’s your problem, man?”

  “You’ll know in a minute.”

  The man tried to leave, but Mikhail seized his arm.

  “Don’t go. You’ll thank me later.”

  Mikhail closed the door and pulled the man to the ground.

  From his vantage point on Prospect Street, Eli Lavon had witnessed a series of increasingly unsettling developments. The first was the arrival at Café Milano of Safia Bourihane, followed a few minutes later by the departure of the large Arab known as Omar al-Farouk. The large Arab was now in the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car, which was parked about fifty yards from Café Milano’s entrance, behind a white Honda Pilot. What’s more, Lavon had called Gabriel several times at the NCTC without success. Subsequently, he had learned, from King Saul Boulevard and the car radio, that the NCTC had been attacked by a pair of truck bombs. Lavon now feared that his oldest friend in the world might be dead, this time for real. And he feared that, in a few seconds, Mikhail might be dead, too.

  Just then, Lavon received a message from King Saul Boulevard reporting that Gabriel had been slightly injured in the attack at the NCTC but was still very much alive. Lavon’s relief was short-lived, however, for at that same instant the thunderclap of an explosion shook Prospect Street. The Lincoln Town Car eased sedately from the curb and slid past Lavon’s window. Then four armed men spilled from the Honda Pilot and started running toward the wreckage of Café Milano.

  66

  WISCONSIN AVENUE, GEORGETOWN

  NATALIE HEARD THE EXPLOSION as she was approaching R Street and knew at once it was Safia. She turned and gazed down the length of Wisconsin Avenue, with its graceful rightward bend toward M Street, and saw hundreds of panicked people walking north. It reminded her of the scenes in Washington after 9/11, the tens of thousands of people who had simply left their offices in the world’s most powerful city and started walking. Once again, Washington was under siege. This time, the terrorists weren’t armed with airplanes, only explosives and guns. But the result, it seemed, was far more terrifying.

  Natalie turned and joined the exodus moving north. She was growing weary beneath the dead weight of the suicide vest, and the weight of her own failure. She had saved the life of the very monster who had conceived and plotted this carnage, and after her arrival in America she had been unable to uncover a single piece of intelligence about the targets, the other terrorists, or the timing of the attack. She had been kept in the dark for a reason, she was certain of it.

  All at once there was a burst of gunfire from the same direction as the explosion. Natalie hurried across R Street and continued north, keeping to the west side of the street as the man named Adrian Carter had instructed. We’re going to bring you in, he had said. But he had not told her how. Suddenly, she was pleased to be wearing the red jacket. She might not be able to see them, but they would see her.

  North of R Street, Wisconsin Avenue sank for a block or two before rising into the neighborhoods of Burleith and Glover Park. Ahead, Natalie saw a blue-and-yellow awning that read BISTROT LEPIC & WINE BAR. It was the restaurant Safia had ordered her to bomb. She stopped and peered through the window. It was a charming place—small, warm, inviting, very Parisian. Safia had said it would be crowded, but that wasn’t the case. Nor did the people sitting at the tables look like French diplomats or officials from the Foreign Ministry in Paris. They looked like Americans. And, like everyone else in Washington, they looked frightened.

  Just then, Natalie heard someone calling her name—not her own name but the name of the woman she had become in order to prevent a night like this. She turned sharply and saw that a car had pulled up at the curb behind her. At the wheel was a woman with open-air skin. It was Megan, the woman from the FBI.

  Natalie crawled into the front seat as though she were crawling into the arms of her mother. The weight of the suicide vest pinned her to the seat; the detonator felt like a live animal in her palm. The car swung a U-turn and joined the northward exodus from Georgetown, as all around the sirens wailed. Natalie covered her ears, but it was no use.

  “Please turn on some music,” she begged.

  The woman switched on the car radio, but there was no music to be found, only the terrible news. The National Counterterrorism Center, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, Harbor Place: the death toll, it was feared, could approach one thousand. Natalie was able to bear it for only a minute or two. She reached for the radio’s power button but stopped when she felt a sharp pain in her upper arm, like the bite of a viper. Then she looked at the woman and saw that she, too, was holding something in her right hand. But it was not a detonator switch upon which her thumb rested. It was the plunger of a syringe.

  Instantly, Natalie’s vision blurred. The woman’s weather-beaten face receded; a passing police cruiser left time-lapse streaks of red and blue on the night. Natalie called out a name, the only name she could recall, before a darkness descended upon her. It was like the blackness of her abaya. She saw herself walking through a great Arabian house of many rooms and courts. And in the last room, standing in the molten light of an oculus, was Saladin.

  67

  CAFÉ MILANO, GEORGETOWN

  FOR A FEW SECONDS AFTER the explosion there was only silence. It was like the silence of the crypt, thought Mikhail, the silence of death. Finally, there was a moan, and then a cough, and then the first screams of agony and terror. Soon there were others, many others—the limbless, the blind, the ones who would never be able to gaze into a mirror again. A few more would surely die tonight, but many would survive. They would see their children again, they would dance at weddings and weep at funerals. And perhaps one day they would be able to eat in a restaurant again without the nagging fear that the woman at the next table was wearing a suicide vest. It was the fear that all Israelis had lived with during the dark days of the Second Intifada. And now, thanks to a man called Saladin, that same fear had come to America.

  Mikhail reached for the door latch but stopped when he heard the first gunshot. He realized then that his phone was vibrating in his coat pocket. He checked the screen. It was Eli Lavon.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  In a whisper, Mikhail told him.

  “Four men with guns just entered the restaurant.”

  “I can hear them.”

  “You’ve got to get out of there.”

  “Where’s Natalie?”

  “The FBI is about to pick her up.”

  Mikhail returned the phone to his pocket. From beyond the lavatory’s thin door came another gunshot—large caliber,
military grade. Then there were two more: crack, crack . . . With each shot, another scream went silent. Clearly, the terrorists were determined to see that no one left Café Milano alive. These were no video-game jihadis. They were well trained, disciplined. They were moving methodically through the ruins of the restaurant in search of survivors. And eventually, thought Mikhail, their search would bring them to the lavatory door.

  The American man with gelled hair was shaking with fear. Mikhail looked around for something he might use as a weapon but saw nothing suitable. Then, with a sideways nod of his head, he instructed the American to conceal himself in the stall. Somehow, the restaurant still had power. Mikhail killed the lights, muffling the snap of the switch, and pressed his back against the wall next to the door. In the sudden darkness, he vowed that he would not die this night in a toilet in Georgetown, with a man he did not know. It would be an ignoble way for a soldier to depart this world, he thought, even a soldier of the secret variety.

  From beyond the door there was the sharp crack of another gunshot, closer than the last, and another scream went silent. Then there were footsteps outside in the corridor. Mikhail flexed the fingers of his lethal right hand. Open the door, you bastard, he thought. Open the fucking door.

  It was at that same instant that Gabriel realized his hearing loss was not permanent. The first sound he heard was the same sound that many Washingtonians would associate with that night, the sound of sirens. The first responders were rolling up Tysons McLean Drive toward what had once been the security checkpoint of the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Inside the ruined buildings, the less seriously injured were tending to the gravely wounded in a desperate attempt to stem bleeding and save lives. Fareed Barakat was looking after Paul Rousseau, and Adrian Carter was looking after what remained of Gabriel’s operation. With borrowed mobile phones he had reestablished contact with Langley, FBI Headquarters, and the White House Situation Room. Washington was in chaos, and the federal government was struggling to keep pace with events. Thus far, there had been confirmed attacks at Liberty Crossing, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, Washington Harbor, and Café Milano. In addition, there were reports of more attacks along M Street. It was feared that hundreds of people, perhaps as many as a thousand, had been killed.