The Black Widow Read online

  “I was hoping for a cozy little garret on the Left Bank.”

  “I understand. But when one is fishing,” said Dina, “it is best to go where the fish are.”

  Natalie made only one request; she wanted to spend the night with her mother and father. The request was denied. Much time and effort had been expended transforming her into Leila Hadawi. To expose her, even briefly, to her previous life was deemed far too risky. An experienced field officer could move freely between the thin membrane separating his real life from the life he led in service of his country. But newly trained recruits such as Natalie were often fragile flowers that wilted when exposed to direct sunlight.

  And so she passed that evening, her last in Israel, with no company other than the melancholy woman who had wrenched her from the refuge of her old life. To occupy herself, she packed and repacked her suitcase three times. Then, after a carryout dinner of lamb and rice, she switched on the television and watched an episode of an Egyptian soap opera that she had grown fond of in Nahalal. Afterward, she sat on the balcony watching the pedestrians and the cyclists and the skateboarders flowing along the promenade in the cool windy night. It was a remarkable sight, the dream of the early Zionists fully realized, yet Natalie regarded the contented Jews beneath her with Leila’s resentful eye. They were occupiers, children and grandchildren of colonialists who had stolen the land of a weaker people. They had to be defeated, driven out, just as they had driven Leila’s ancestors from Sumayriyya on a May evening in 1948.

  Her anger followed her to bed. If she slept that night, she did not remember it, and in the morning she was bleary-eyed and on edge. She dressed in Leila’s clothing and covered her hair with Leila’s favorite emerald-colored hijab. Downstairs, a taxi was waiting. Not a real taxi, but an Office taxi driven by one of the security agents who used to follow her on her runs in Nahalal. He took her directly to Ben Gurion Airport, where she was thoroughly searched and questioned at length before being allowed to proceed to her gate. Leila did not take offense at her treatment. As a veiled Muslim woman she was used to the special attention of security screeners.

  Inside the terminal she made her way to the gate, oblivious to the hostile stares of the Israeli traveling public, and when her flight was called she filed dutifully onto the plane. Her seatmate was the gray-eyed man with bloodless skin, and across the aisle were her pockmarked interrogator and his wispy-haired accomplice. Not one of them dared to look at the veiled woman traveling alone. She was suddenly exhausted. She told the flight attendant, demurely, that she did not wish to be disturbed. Then, as Israel sank away beneath her, she closed her eyes and dreamed of Sumayriyya.

  23

  AUBERVILLIERS, FRANCE

  TEN DAYS LATER THE Clinique Jacques Chirac opened to muted fanfare in the northern Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers. The minister of health attended the ceremony, as did a popular Ivory Coast–born footballer, who cut a tricolor ribbon to the rain-dampened applause of several community activists assembled for the occasion. French television ran a brief story about the opening on that evening’s main newscast. Le Monde, in a short editorial, called it a promising start.

  The goal of the clinic was to improve the lives of those who resided in a troubled suburb where crime and unemployment were high and government services scarce. Officially, the Ministry of Health oversaw the clinic’s day-to-day operations, but in point of fact it was a classified joint undertaking by the ministry and Paul Rousseau’s Alpha Group. The clinic’s administrator, a man named Roland Girard, was an Alpha Group operative, as was the shapely receptionist. The six nurses and two of the three physicians, however, knew nothing of the clinic’s split personality. All were employed by France’s state-run hospital system, and all had been chosen for the project after a rigorous screening process. None had ever made the acquaintance of Dr. Leila Hadawi. Nor had they attended medical school with her or worked at her previous places of employment.

  The clinic was located on the Avenue Victor Hugo, between an all-night laundry and a tabac frequented by members of a local Moroccan drug gang. Plane trees shaded the pavement outside the clinic’s modest entrance, and above it rose three additional floors of a handsome old building with a tan exterior and shuttered windows. But behind the avenue soared the giant gray slabs of the cités, the public housing estates that warehoused the poor and the foreign born, mainly from Africa and the former French colonies of the Maghreb. This was the part of France where the poets and the travel writers rarely ventured, the France of crime, immigrant resentment, and, increasingly, radical Islam. Half the banlieue’s residents had been born outside France, three-quarters of the young. Alienated, marginalized, they were ISIS recruits in waiting.

  On the first day of the clinic’s operation, it was the subject of mild, if skeptical, curiosity. But by the next morning it was receiving a steady stream of patients. For many, it was their first visit to a doctor in a long time. And for a few, especially the recent arrivals from the interior of Morocco and Algeria, it was their first visit to a physician ever. Not surprisingly, they felt most comfortable with the médecine généraliste who wore modest clothing and a hijab and could speak to them in their native language.

  She tended to their sore throats and their chronic coughs and their assorted aches and pains and the illnesses they had carried from the third world to the first. And she told a mother of forty-four that the source of her severe headaches was a tumor of the brain, and a man of sixty that his lifetime of smoking had resulted in a case of untreatable lung cancer. And when they were too sick to visit the clinic, she cared for them in their cramped flats in the housing estates. In the piss-scented stairwells and vile courts where trash swirled in tiny cyclones of wind, the boys and young men of Aubervilliers eyed her warily. On those rare occasions they spoke to her, they addressed her formally and with respect. The women and the teenage girls, however, were socially free to cross-examine her to their hearts’ content. The housing estates were nothing if not gossipy, sexually segregated Arab villages, and Dr. Leila Hadawi was something new and interesting. They wanted to know where she was from, about her family, and about her medical studies. Mainly, they were curious as to why, at the advanced age of thirty-four, she was unmarried. At this, she would give a wistful smile. The impression she left was of unrequited love—or, perhaps, a love lost to the violence and chaos of the modern Middle East.

  Unlike the other members of the staff, she actually resided in the community she served, not in the crime factories of the housing estates but in a comfortable little apartment in a quartier of the commune where the population was working class and native born. There was a quaint café across the street where, when not at the clinic, she was often seen drinking coffee at a sidewalk table. Never wine or beer, for wine and beer were haram. Her hijab clearly offended some of her fellow citizens; she could hear it in the edge of a waiter’s remark and see it in the hostile stares of the passersby. She was the other, a stranger. It fed her resentment of the land of her birth and fueled her quiet rage. For Dr. Leila Hadawi, a servant of the French national medical bureaucracy, was not the woman she appeared to be. She had been radicalized by the wars in Iraq and Syria and by the occupation of Palestine by the Jews. And she had been radicalized, too, by the death of Ziad al-Masri, her only love, at the hands of the Jordanian Mukhabarat. She was a black widow, a ticking time bomb. She confessed this to no one, only to her computer. It was her secret sharer.

  They had given her a list of Web sites during her final days at the farmhouse in Nahalal, a farmhouse that, try as she might, she could no longer quite conjure in her memory. Some of the sites were on the ordinary Internet; others, in the murky sewers of the dark net. All dealt with issues related to Islam and jihadism. She read blogs, dropped into chat rooms for Muslim women, listened to sermons from extremist preachers, and watched videos that no person, believer or unbeliever, should ever watch. Bombings, beheadings, burnings, crucifixions: a bloody day in the life of ISIS. Leila did not find the images objec
tionable, but several sent Natalie, who was used to the sight of blood, running into her bathroom to be violently sick. She used an onion routing application popular with jihadists that allowed her to wander the virtual caliphate without detection. She referred to herself as Umm Ziad. It was her nom de plume, her nom de guerre.

  It did not take long for Dr. Hadawi to attract attention. She had no shortage of cybersuitors. There was the woman from Hamburg who had a cousin of marrying age. There was the Egyptian cleric who engaged her in a prolonged discussion on the subject of apostasy. And then there was the keeper of a particularly vile blog who knocked on her virtual door while she was watching the beheading of a captured Christian. The blogger was an ISIS recruiter. He asked her to travel to Syria to help build the caliphate.

  I’D LOVE TO, Leila typed, BUT MY WORK IS HERE IN FRANCE. I’M CARING FOR OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN THE LAND OF THE KUFAR. MY PATIENTS NEED ME.

  YOU ARE A DOCTOR?

  YES.

  WE NEED DOCTORS IN THE CALIPHATE. WOMEN, TOO.

  The exchange gave her an electrical charge, a lightness in her fingertips, a blurriness of her vision, that was akin to the first blush of desire. She did not report it; there was no need. They were monitoring her computer and her phone. They were watching her, too. She saw them sometimes on the streets of Aubervilliers—the pockmarked tough who had conducted her final interrogation in the land of the Jews, the man with the forgettable face, the man with eyes like winter. She ignored them, as she had been trained to do, and went about her business. She tended to her patients, she gossiped with the women of the housing estates, she averted her eyes piously in the presence of boys and young men, and at night, alone in her apartment, she wandered the rooms of the house of extremist Islam, hidden behind her protective software and her vague pen name. She was a black widow, a ticking time bomb.

  Approximately twenty miles separate the banlieue of Aubervilliers from the village of Seraincourt, but they are a world apart. There are no halal markets or mosques in Seraincourt, no looming housing blocks filled with immigrants from hostile lands, and French is the only language one hears on its narrow streets or in the brasserie next to the ancient stone church in the village square. It is a foreigner’s idealized vision of France, France as it once was, France no more.

  Just beyond the village, in a river valley of manicured farms and groomed woods, stood Château Treville. Shielded from prying eyes by twelve-foot walls, it had a heated swimming pool, two clay tennis courts, fourteen ornate bedrooms, and thirty-two acres of gardens where, if one were so inclined, one could pace with worry. Housekeeping, the Office division that acquired and maintained safe properties, was on good, if entirely deceptive, terms with the château’s owner. The deal—six months, with an option to extend—was concluded with a swift exchange of faxes and a wire transfer of several thousand well-disguised euros. The team moved in the same day that Dr. Leila Hadawi settled into her modest little flat in Aubervilliers. Most stayed only long enough to drop their bags and then headed straight into the field.

  They had operated in France many times before, even in tranquil Seraincourt, but never with the knowledge and approval of the French security service. They assumed the DGSI was looking over their shoulders at all times and listening to their every word, and so they behaved accordingly. Inside the château they spoke a terse form of colloquial Office Hebrew that was beyond the reach of mere translators. And on the streets of Aubervilliers, where they kept a vigilant watch on Natalie, they did their best not to betray family secrets to their French allies, who were watching her, too. Rousseau acquired an apartment directly opposite Natalie’s where rotating teams of operatives, one Israeli, the other French, maintained a constant presence. At first, the atmosphere in the flat was chilly. But gradually, as the two teams became better acquainted, the mood warmed. For better or worse, they were in this fight together now. All past sins were forgiven. Civility was the new order of the day.

  The one member of the team who never set foot in the observation post or on the streets of Aubervilliers was its founder and guiding light. His movements were unpredictable, Paris one day, Brussels or London the next, Amman when he needed to consult with Fareed Barakat, Jerusalem when he needed the touch of his wife and children. Whenever he slipped into Château Treville, he would sit up late with Eli Lavon, his oldest friend in the world, his brother-in-arms from Operation Wrath of God, and scour the watch reports for signs of trouble. Natalie was his masterpiece. He had recruited her, trained her, and hung her in a gallery of religious madness for the monsters to see. The viewing period was nearing its end. Next would come the sale. The auction would be rigged, for Gabriel had no intention of selling her to anyone but Saladin.

  And so it was that, two months to the day after the Clinique Jacques Chirac opened its doors, Gabriel found himself in Paul Rousseau’s office on the rue de Grenelle. The first phase of the operation, declared Gabriel, batting away another onslaught of pipe smoke, was over. It was time to put their asset into play. Under the rules of the Franco-Israeli operational accord, the decision to proceed was supposed to be a joint one. But the asset was Gabriel’s, and therefore the decision was his, too. He spent that evening at the safe house in Seraincourt in the company of his team, and in the morning, with Mikhail at his side and Eli Lavon watching his back, he boarded a train at the Gare du Nord and headed for Brussels. Rousseau made no attempt to follow them. This was the part of the operation he didn’t want to know about. This was the part where things would get rough.

  24

  RUE DU LOMBARD, BRUSSELS

  DURING ONE OF HIS MANY visits to GID headquarters in Amman, Gabriel had taken possession of several portable hard drives. On them were the contents of Jalal Nasser’s notebook computer, downloaded during his return visits to Jordan or during secret raids on his flat in the Bethnal Green section of East London. The GID had found nothing suspicious—no known jihadists in his contacts, no visits to jihadist Web sites in his browsing history—but Fareed Barakat had agreed to let the Office have a second look. It had taken the cybersleuths of King Saul Boulevard less than an hour to find a clever trapdoor concealed within an innocuous-looking gaming application. It led to a heavily encrypted cellar filled with names, numbers, e-mail addresses, and casing photographs, including several of the Weinberg Center in Paris. There was even a shot of Hannah Weinberg leaving her apartment on the rue Pavée. Gabriel broke the news to Fareed gently, so as not to bruise his valuable partner’s enormous ego.

  “Sometimes,” said Gabriel, “it helps to have a fresh pair of eyes.”

  “Or a smart Jewish boy with a PhD from Caltech,” said Fareed.

  “That, too.”

  Among the names that featured most prominently in this hidden trove was Nabil Awad, originally from the northern Jordanian city of Irbid, lately of the Molenbeek district of Brussels. Separated from the elegant city center by an industrial canal, Molenbeek had once been occupied by Roman Catholic Walloons and Protestant Flemings who worked in the district’s many factories and warehouses. The factories were a memory, as were Molenbeek’s original inhabitants. It was now essentially a Muslim village of one hundred thousand people, where the call to prayer echoed five times each day from twenty-two different mosques. Nabil Awad lived on the rue Ransfort, a narrow street lined with terraces of flaking nineteenth-century brick houses that had been carved into crowded tenements. He worked part-time in a copy center in central Brussels, but like many young men who lived in Molenbeek, his primary occupation was radical Islam. Among security professionals, Molenbeek was known as the jihadi capital of Europe.

  The neighborhood was not the sort of place for a man with the refined tastes of Fareed Barakat. Nor, for that matter, was the sixty-euro-a-night hotel on the rue du Lombard where he met Gabriel. He had toned down his clothing for the occasion—an Italian blazer, dove-gray trousers, a dress shirt with French cuffs, no tie. After being admitted to the cramped little room on the hotel’s third floor, he contemplated the elect
ric teakettle as though he had never laid eyes on such a contraption. Gabriel filled it with water from the bathroom tap and joined Fareed in the window. Directly opposite the hotel, on the ground floor of a modern seven-story office block, was XTC Printing and Copying.

  “What time did he arrive?” asked the Jordanian.

  “Promptly at ten.”

  “A model employee.”

  “So it would seem.”

  The Jordanian’s dark eyes swept the street, a falcon looking for prey.

  “Don’t bother, Fareed. You’ll never find them.”

  “Mind if I try?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “The blue van, the two men in the parked car at the end of the block, the girl sitting alone in the window of the coffeehouse.”

  “Wrong, wrong, and wrong.”

  “Who are the two men in the car?”

  “They’re waiting for their friend to come out of the pharmacy.”

  “Or maybe they’re from the Belgian security service.”

  “The last thing we need to worry about is the Sûreté. Unfortunately,” added Gabriel gloomily, “neither do the terrorists who live in Molenbeek.”

  “Tell me about it,” muttered Fareed. “They produce more terrorists here in Belgium than we do.”

  “Now that’s saying something.”

  “You know,” said Fareed, “we wouldn’t have this problem if it wasn’t for you Israelis. You upended the natural order of things in the Middle East, and now we are all paying the price.”