The Black Widow

by Daniel Silva

  “You are very brave, Maimonides,” he said to her in Arabic. “But then I always knew that.”

  He reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Natalie, fearing he was reaching for a gun, pressed harder on the switch. But it was not a gun, it was a phone. He tapped the screen a few times, and the device emitted a sharp hissing sound. Natalie realized after a few seconds that the sound was water rushing into a basin. The first voice she heard was her own.

  “Do you know who that woman is?”

  “How did she get into the country?”

  “On a false passport.”

  “Where did she come in?”

  “New York.”

  “Kennedy or Newark?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did she get down to Washington?”

  “The train.”

  “What’s the name of the passport?”

  “Asma Doumaz.”

  “Have you been given a target?”

  “No. But she’s been given hers. It’s a suicide operation.”

  “Do you know her target?”

  “No.”

  “Have you met any other members of the attack cells?”

  “No.”

  “Where’s your phone?”

  “She took it from me. Don’t try to send me any messages.”

  “Get out of here.”

  Saladin, with a tap on the screen, silenced the recording. Then he regarded Natalie for several unbearable seconds. There was no reproach or anger in his expression. It was the gaze of a professional.

  “Who do you work for?” he asked at last, again addressing her in Arabic.

  “I work for you.” She did not know from what reservoir of pointless courage she drew this response, but it seemed to amuse Saladin. “You are very brave, Maimonides,” he said again. “Too brave for your own good.”

  She noticed for the first time that there was a television in the room. It was tuned to CNN. Three hundred invited guests in evening gowns and tuxedos were streaming from the White House East Room under Secret Service escort.

  “A night to remember, don’t you think? All the attacks were successful except for one. The target was a French restaurant where many prominent Washingtonians are known to eat. For some reason, the operative chose not to carry out her assignment. Instead, she climbed into a car driven by a woman she believed to be an agent of the FBI.”

  He paused to allow Natalie a response, but she remained silent.

  “Her treachery posed no threat to the operation,” he continued. “In fact, it proved quite valuable because it allowed us to distract the Americans during the critical final days of the operation. The end game,” he added ominously. “You and Safia were a feint, a deception. I am a soldier of Allah, but a great admirer of Winston Churchill. And it was Churchill who said that in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

  He had addressed these remarks to the television screen. Now he turned once more toward Natalie.

  “But there was one question we were never able to answer satisfactorily,” he continued. “Whom, exactly, were you working for? Abu Ahmed assumed you were an American, but it didn’t feel like an American operation to me. Quite honestly, I assumed you were British, because as we all know, the British are the very best when it comes to running live agents. But that also turned out not to be the case. You weren’t working for the Americans or the British. You were working for someone else. And tonight you finally told me his name.”

  Again, he tapped the screen of his mobile phone, and again Natalie heard a sound like water running into a basin. But it wasn’t water, it was the drone of a car fleeing the chaos of Washington. This time, the only voice she heard was her own. She was speaking Hebrew, and her voice was heavy with sedative.

  “Gabriel . . . Please help me . . . I don’t want to die . . .”

  Saladin silenced the phone and returned it to the breast pocket of his magnificent suit jacket. Case closed, thought Natalie. Still, there was no anger in his expression, only pity.

  “You were a fool to come to the caliphate.”

  “No,” said Natalie, “I was a fool to save your life.”

  “Why did you?”

  “Because you would have died if I hadn’t.”

  “And now,” said Saladin, “it is you who will die. The question is, will you die alone, or will you press your detonator and take me with you? I’m wagering you don’t have the courage or the faith to push the button. Only we, the Muslims, have such faith. We are prepared to die for our religion, but not you Jews. You believe in life, but we believe in death. And in any fight, it is those who are prepared to die who will win.” He paused briefly, then said, “Go ahead, Maimonides, make a liar of me. Prove me wrong. Push your button.”

  Natalie raised the detonator to her face and stared directly into Saladin’s dark eyes. The trigger button yielded to a slight increase in pressure.

  “Don’t you remember your training in Palmyra? We deliberately use a firm trigger to avoid accidents. You have to push it harder.”

  She did. There was a click, then silence. Saladin smiled.

  “Obviously,” he said, “a malfunction.”

  72

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  AMINA EL-BANNA HAD BEEN A legal resident of the United States for more than five years, but her grasp of English was limited. As a result, Gabriel questioned her in his Arabic, which was limited, too. He did so at the tiny kitchen table with Mikhail hovering in the doorway, and in a voice that was not loud enough to wake the child sleeping upstairs. He did not fly a false flag and claim to be an American, for such a pretense was not possible. Amina el-Banna, an Egyptian from the Nile Delta, knew very well that he was an Israeli, and consequently she feared him. He did nothing to put her mind at ease. Fear was his calling card, and at a time like this, with an agent in the hands of the most violent terrorist group the world had ever known, fear was his only asset.

  He explained to Amina el-Banna the facts as he knew them. Her husband was a member of the ISIS terror cell that had just laid waste to Washington. He was no bit player; he was a major operational asset, a planner who had patiently moved the pieces into place and provided cover for the attack cells. In all likelihood, Amina would be charged as an accomplice and spend the rest of her life in jail. Unless, of course, she cooperated.

  “How can I help you? I know nothing.”

  “Did you know Qassam owned a moving company?”

  “Qassam? A moving company?” She shook her head incredulously. “Qassam works in IT.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you tried to call him?”

  “Of course.”

  “And?”

  “His phone goes straight to voice mail.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  She gave no answer. Gabriel didn’t need one. She didn’t call the police, he thought, because she thought her husband was an ISIS terrorist.

  “Did he make arrangements for you and the child to go to Syria?”

  She hesitated, then said, “I told him I wouldn’t go.”

  “Wise decision. Are his computers still here?”

  She nodded.

  “Where?”

  She glanced toward the ceiling.

  “How many?”

  “Two. But they’re locked, and I don’t have the password.”

  “Of course you do. Every wife knows her husband’s password, even if her husband is an ISIS terrorist.”

  She said nothing more.

  “What’s the password?”

  “The Shahada.”

  “English or Arabic transliteration?”

  “English.”

  “Spaces or no spaces?”

  “No spaces.”

  “Let’s go.”

  She led him up the narrow stairs, quietly
, so as not to wake the child, and opened the door to Qassam el-Banna’s office. It was a counterterrorism officer’s nightmare. Gabriel sat down at one of the computers, awakened it with a small movement of the mouse, and placed his fingers lightly on the keyboard. He typed THEREISNOGODBUTGOD and pressed the return button.

  “Shit,” he said softly.

  The hard drive had been wiped clean.

  He was very good, Qassam, but the ten hackers of the Minyan were much better. Within minutes of Gabriel’s upload, they had discovered the digital traces of Qassam’s documents folder. Inside the folder was another folder, locked and encrypted, filled with documents related to Dominion Movers of Alexandria—and among those documents was a one-year lease agreement for a small property near a town called Hume.

  “It’s not far from that old CIA safe house in The Plains,” explained Uzi Navot by telephone. “It’s about an hour from your current location, maybe more. If you drive all that way and she’s not there . . .”

  Gabriel rang off and dialed Adrian Carter at Langley.

  “I need an aircraft with thermal-imaging capability to make a pass over a cottage off Hume Road in Fauquier County. And don’t try to tell me you don’t have one.”

  “I don’t. But the FBI does.”

  “Can they spare a plane?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  They could. In fact, the FBI already had one airborne over Liberty Crossing—a Cessna 182T Skylane, owned by a Bureau front company called LCT Research of Reston, Virginia. It took the single-engine aircraft ten minutes to reach Fauquier County and to locate the small A-frame house in a vale north of Hume Road. Inside were the heat signatures of seven individuals. One of the signatures, the smallest, appeared immobile. There were three vehicles parked outside the cottage. All had been recently driven.

  “Are there any other heat signatures in that valley?” asked Gabriel.

  “Only wildlife,” explained Carter.

  “What kind of wildlife?”

  “Several deer and a couple of bear.”

  “Perfect,” said Gabriel.

  “Where are you now?”

  Gabriel told him. They were heading west on I-66. They had just passed the Beltway.

  “Where’s the closest FBI SWAT or hostage rescue team?” he asked.

  “All the available teams have been sent to Washington to deal with the attacks.”

  “How long can we keep the Cessna up top?”

  “Not long. The Bureau wants it back.”

  “Ask them to make one more pass. But not too low. The men inside that house know the sound of a surveillance aircraft when they hear it.”

  Gabriel killed the connection and watched the images of American suburbia flashing past his window. In his head, however, there were only numbers, and the numbers did not look good. Seven heat signatures, two AR-15 assault rifles, one veteran of the IDF’s most elite special forces unit, one former assassin who would soon be the chief of Israeli intelligence, one surveillance specialist who never cared for rough stuff, two bears. He looked down at his mobile phone. Distance to destination: fifty-one miles. Time to destination: one hour and seven minutes.

  “Faster, Mikhail. You have to drive faster.”

  73

  HUME, VIRGINIA

  SHE WAS TO BE GIVEN no trial, for none was necessary; with a press of her detonator button she had admitted her guilt. There was only the matter of her confession, which would be recorded for dissemination on ISIS’s myriad propaganda platforms, and her execution, which would be by beheading. It might all have been handled quite swiftly were it not for Saladin himself. The brief delay was by no means an act of mercy. Saladin was still a spy at heart. And what a spy craved most was not blood but information.

  The success of the attacks on Washington, and the prospect of Natalie’s imminent death, had the effect of loosening his tongue. He acknowledged that, yes, he had served in the Iraqi Mukhabarat under Saddam Hussein. His primary duty, he claimed, was to provide material and logistical support to Palestinian terrorist groups, especially those that rejected absolutely the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. During the Second Intifada he had overseen the payment of lucrative death benefits to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Abu Nidal, he boasted, was a close friend. Indeed, it was Abu Nidal, the most vicious of the so-called rejectionist terrorists, who had given Saladin his code name.

  His work required him to become something of an expert on the Israeli secret intelligence service. He developed a grudging admiration for the Office and for Ari Shamron, the master spy who guided it, on and off, for the better part of thirty years. He also came to admire the accomplishments of Shamron’s famous protégé, the legendary assassin and operative named Gabriel Allon.

  “And so you can imagine my surprise,” he told Natalie, “to see him walking across the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, and to hear you speak his name.”

  After completing his opening remarks, he commenced questioning Natalie on every aspect of the operation—her life prior to joining Israeli intelligence, her recruitment, her training, her insertion into the field. Having been told she would soon face beheading, Natalie had no reason to cooperate other than to delay by a few minutes her inevitable death. It was motive enough, for she knew that her disappearance had not gone unnoticed. Saladin, with his spy’s curiosity, had given her the opportunity to run a little sand through the hourglass. He began by asking her real name. She resisted for several precious minutes, until in a rage he threatened to carve the flesh from her bones with the same knife he would use to take her head.

  “Amit,” she said at last. “My name is Amit.”

  “Amit what?”

  “Meridor.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Jaffa.”

  “How did you learn to speak Arabic so well?”

  “There are many Arabs in Jaffa.”

  “And your French?”

  “I lived in Paris for several years as a child.”

  “Why?”

  “My parents worked for the Foreign Ministry.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “A very good one.”

  “Who recruited you?”

  “No one. I applied to join the Office.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to serve my country.”

  “Is this your first operation?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Were the French involved in this operation?”

  “We never work with other services. We prefer to work alone.”

  “Blue and white?” asked Saladin, using one of the slogans of the Israeli military and security establishment.

  “Yes,” said Natalie, nodding slowly. “Blue and white.”

  Despite the exigencies of the situation, Saladin insisted that her face be properly veiled during her questioning. There was no abaya to be had in the cottage, so they covered her with a sheet stripped from one of the beds. She could only imagine how she looked to them, a faintly comic figure draped in white, but the cloak did have the advantage of privacy. She lied with the full confidence that Saladin could see no telltale trace of deception in her eyes. And she managed to convey a sense of inward calm, even peace, when in truth she was thinking only of the pain she would feel when the blade of the knife bit into her neck. With her vision obscured, her sense of hearing grew acute. She was able to track Saladin’s labored movements around the sitting room of the cottage and to discern the placement of the four armed ISIS terrorists. And she could hear, high above the cottage, the slow lazy circling of a single-engine aircraft. Saladin, she sensed, could hear it, too. He fell silent for a moment until the plane was gone and then resumed his interrogation.

  “How were you able to transform yourself so convincingly into a Palestinian?”

  “We have a special school.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Negev.”

  “Are there other Office agents who have infiltrated ISIS?”<
br />
  “Yes, many.”

  “What are their names?”

  She gave him six—four men, two other women. She said that she did not know the nature of their assignments. She knew only that, high above the little A-frame cottage, the plane had returned. Saladin, she thought, knew it, too. He had one final question. Why? he asked. Why had she saved his life in the house of many rooms and courts near Mosul?

  “I wanted to gain your trust,” she answered truthfully.

  “You did,” he admitted. “And then you betrayed it. And for that, Maimonides, you will die tonight.”

  There was a silence in the room, but not in the sky above. From beneath her death shroud, Natalie asked one final question of her own. How had Saladin known that she was not real? He gave her no answer, for he was listening once again to the drone of the aircraft. She followed the tap and scrape of his slow journey across the room to the front door of the cottage. It was the last she ever heard of him.

  He stood for several moments outside in the drive, his face tilted toward the sky. There was no moon but the night was bright with stars and very quiet except for the plane. It took some time for him to locate it, for its wingtip navigation lights were dimmed. Only the beat of its single propeller betrayed its location. It was flying a steady orbit around the little valley, at an altitude of about ten thousand feet. Finally, when it reached the northernmost point, it turned due east, toward Washington, and then disappeared. Instinctively, Saladin believed the plane was trouble. They had failed him only once, his instincts. They had told him that a woman named Leila, a gifted doctor who claimed to be a Palestinian, could be trusted, even loved. Soon, the woman would be given the death she deserved.

  His face was still lifted toward the heavens. Yes, the stars were bright this night, but not as bright as the stars of the desert. If he hoped to see them again, he had to leave now. Soon there would be another war—a war that would end with the defeat of the armies of Rome, in a town called Dabiq. There was no way the American president could avoid this war, he thought. Not after tonight.