The Black Widow Read online

  “Of course not.”

  “French?”

  “No.”

  “But you learned to speak French.”

  “Very quickly.”

  “You’re a smart boy, aren’t you, Nabil—too smart to be wasting your time with this jihad shit. You should have finished your education. Things might have turned out differently for you.”

  “In Jordan?” He shook his head. “Unless you are from a prominent family or connected to the king, you don’t stand a chance. What was I going to do? Drive a taxi? Work as a waiter in a Western hotel serving alcohol to infidels?”

  “Better to be a waiter than where you are now, Nabil.”

  The young Jordanian said nothing. Fareed opened a file.

  “It’s an interesting story,” he said, “but I’m afraid Jalal tells it somewhat differently. He says that you approached him. He says that you were the one who built the network in Europe.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “But you see my problem, habibi. He tells me one thing, you tell me the complete opposite.”

  “I’m telling you the truth, Jalal is lying!”

  “Prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me something that I don’t already know about Jalal. Or better yet,” Fareed added almost as an afterthought, “show me something on your phone or your computer.”

  “My computer is my room in Molenbeek.”

  Fareed smiled sadly and patted the back of his prisoner’s hand. “Not anymore, habibi.”

  Since the beginning of the war on terror, al-Qaeda and its murderous offspring had proven remarkably adaptive. Chased from their original Afghan sanctuary, they had found new spaces to operate in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, and a district of Brussels called Molenbeek. They had also devised new methods of communication to avoid detection by the NSA and other Western eavesdropping services. One of the most innovative was an advanced 256-bit encryption program called Mujahideen Secrets. Once Nabil Awad settled in Belgium, he used it to communicate securely with Jalal Nasser. He simply wrote his messages on his laptop, encrypted them using Mujahideen Secrets, and then loaded them onto a flash drive, which would be carried by hand to London. The original messages Nabil shredded and deleted. Even so, Mordecai had little difficulty finding their digital remains on the hard drive of the laptop. Using Nabil’s fourteen-character hard password, he raised the files from the dead, turning seemingly random pages of letters and numbers into clear text. One of the documents concerned a promising potential recruit, a Frenchwoman of Algerian descent named Safia Bourihane.

  “You were the one who brought her into the network?” asked Fareed, when the interrogation resumed.

  “No,” answered the young Jordanian. “I was the one who found her. Jalal handled the actual recruitment.”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “Molenbeek.”

  “What was she doing there?”

  “She has family there—cousins, I think. Her boyfriend had just been killed in Syria.”

  “She was grieving?”

  “She was angry.”

  “At whom?”

  “The Americans, of course, but mainly the French. Her boyfriend died in a French air strike.”

  “She wanted revenge?”

  “Very badly.”

  “You spoke to her directly.”

  “Never.”

  “Where did you see her?”

  “A party at a friend’s apartment.”

  “What kind of party?”

  “The kind that no good Muslim should ever attend.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Working.”

  “You don’t mind if your recruits drink alcohol?”

  “Most do. Remember,” Nabil Awad added, “Zarqawi was a drinker before he discovered the beauty of Islam.”

  “What happened after you sent your message to Jalal?”

  “He instructed me to find out more about her. I went to Aulnay-sous-Bois to watch her for a few days.”

  “You’re familiar with France?”

  “France is part of my territory.”

  “And you liked what you saw?”

  “Very much.”

  “And so you sent a second encrypted message to Jalal,” said Fareed, waving a printout.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “By courier.”

  “What’s the courier’s name?”

  The young Jordanian managed a weak smile. “Ask Jalal,” he said. “He can tell you.”

  Fareed held up a photograph of Nabil Awad’s veiled mother. “What’s the courier’s name?”

  “I don’t know his name. We never met face-to-face.”

  “You use a dead drop system?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you summon him?”

  “I post a message on Twitter.”

  “The courier monitors your feed?”

  “Obviously.”

  “And the dead drop sites?”

  “We have four.”

  “In Brussels?”

  “Or nearby.”

  “How does the courier know which site to clean out?”

  “The location is contained in the message.”

  In the adjoining room, Gabriel watched as Fareed Bakarat placed a yellow legal pad and a felt-tip pen before Nabil Awad. The broken young Jordanian reached for the pen quickly, as a drowning man reaches for a lifeline tossed upon a stormy sea. He wrote in Arabic, swiftly, without pause. He wrote for his parents and his siblings and for all those who would bear the Awad name. But mainly, thought Gabriel, he wrote for Fareed Barakat. Fareed had beaten him. Nabil Awad belonged to them now. They owned him.

  When the task was complete, Fareed demanded one more name from his captive. It was the name of the man who was directing the network, approving the targets, training the operatives, and building the bombs. The name of the man who called himself Saladin. Nabil Awad tearfully claimed not to know it. And Fareed, perhaps because he was growing weary himself, chose to believe him.

  “But you’ve heard of him?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Is he Jordanian?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Syrian?”

  “Could be.”

  “Iraqi?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s very professional. Like you,” Nabil Awad added quickly. “He’s serious about his security. He doesn’t want to be a star like Bin Laden. He just wants to kill infidels. Only the people at the top know his real name or where he comes from.”

  By then, night had fallen. They returned Nabil Awad hooded and bound to the formerly white van and drove him to Le Bourget Airport outside Paris, where a Gulfstream aircraft belonging to the Jordanian monarch waited. Nabil Awad boarded the plane without a struggle, and just six hours later was locked in a cell deep within GID headquarters in Amman. In the parallel universe of the World Wide Web, however, he was still very much a free man. He told friends, followers on social media, and the manager of the print shop where he worked that he had been compelled to return to Jordan suddenly because his father had taken ill. His father was not available to contradict the account, because he, like all the members of the extended Awad clan, was now in GID custody.

  For the next seventy-two hours, Nabil Awad’s mobile phone was besieged with expressions of concern. Two teams of analysts, one at GID headquarters, one at King Saul Boulevard, scrubbed each e-mail, text, and direct message for signs of trouble. They also drafted and posted several dire updates on Nabil Awad’s Twitter feed. It seemed the patient had taken a turn for the worse. God willing, he would make a recovery, but for the moment it didn’t look good.

  To the uninitiated eyes, the words that flowed onto Nabil Awad’s social media pages seemed entirely appropriate for the eldest son of a man who was gravely ill. But one message contained a somewhat peculiar syntax and choice of words that, to one reade
r, meant something quite specific. It meant that an empty can of Belgian beer had been hidden in a gorse bush at the edge of a small pasture not far from the city center of Brussels. Inside the can, wrapped in protective plastic, was a flash drive that contained a single encrypted document. Its subject was a Palestinian doctor named Leila Hadawi.

  27

  SERAINCOURT, FRANCE

  AND THUS COMMENCED THE GREAT WAIT—or so it was referred to by all those who endured the appalling period, roughly seventy-two hours in length, during which the encrypted message sat untouched in its little aluminum sarcophagus, at the base of a power pole on the Kerselaarstraat, in the Brussels suburb of Dilbeek. The actors in this slow-moving drama were far-flung. They were spread from the Bethnal Green section of East London, to an immigrant banlieue north of Paris, to a room in the heart of a building in Amman known as the Fingernail Factory, where a jihadist was being kept on cyber life support. There was precedent for what they were doing; during World War II, British intelligence kept an entire network of captured German spies alive and functioning in the minds of their Abwehr controllers, feeding them false and deceptive intelligence in the process. The Israelis and Jordanians saw themselves as keepers of a sacred flame.

  The one place where no members of the team were present was Dilbeek. Though scarcely a mile from the center of Brussels, it was a decidedly rural suburb ringed by small farms. “In other words,” declared Eli Lavon, who reconnoitered the drop site on the morning after Nabil Awad’s interrogation, “it’s a spy’s nightmare.” A fixed observation point was out of the question. Nor was it possible to surveil the target from a parked car or a café. Parking was not permitted on that stretch of the Kerselaarstraat, and the only cafés were in the center of the village.

  The solution was to conceal a miniature camera in the patch of overgrown weeds on the opposite side of the road. Mordecai monitored its heavily encrypted transmission from a hotel room in central Brussels and routed the signal onto a secure network, which allowed the other members of the team to watch it, too. It was soon appointment viewing, a ratings bonanza. In London, Tel Aviv, Amman, and Paris, highly trained and motivated professional intelligence officers stood motionless before computer screens, staring at a tangle of gorse at the base of a concrete power pole. Occasionally, a vehicle would pass, or a cyclist, or a pensioner from the village out for a morning constitutional, but for the most part the image appeared to be a still photograph rather than a live video feed. Gabriel monitored it from the makeshift op center at Château Treville. He thought it the most unsightly thing he had ever produced. He referred to it as Can by a Pole and cursed himself inwardly for having chosen the Dilbeek drop site over the other three options. Not that they were any better. Clearly, Jalal Nasser had not selected the sites with aesthetics in mind.

  The wait was not without its lighter moments. There was the Belgian shepherd, a colossal wolflike creature, which shat in the gorse bush daily. And the metal-detecting pensioner who unearthed the can and, after a careful inspection, dropped it where he had found it. And the biblical thunderstorm, four hours in duration, that threatened to wash away the can and its contents, not to mention the village itself. Gabriel ordered Mordecai to check on the condition of the flash drive, but Mordecai convinced him it wasn’t necessary. He had placed it inside two watertight ziplock plastic baggies, Nabil Awad’s usual technique. Besides, Mordecai argued, a check was far too risky. There was always the possibility that the courier might arrive at the very moment of the inspection. There was also the possibility, he added, that they were not the only ones watching the drop site.

  The target of this undertaking, Jalal Nasser, Saladin’s director of European operations, provided no clue as to his intentions. By then, it was early summer, and Jalal had been freed from his backbreaking course load at King’s College—a single seminar having something to do with the impact of Western imperialism on the economies of the Arab world—which left him free to pursue jihad and terrorism to his heart’s content. By all outward appearances, however, he was a man of taxpayer-financed leisure. He dawdled over his morning coffee at his favorite café on the Bethnal Green Road, he shopped in Oxford Street, he visited the National Gallery to view forbidden art, he watched an American action film at a theater in Leicester Square. He even took in a musical—Jersey Boys, of all things—which left the London teams wondering whether he planned to bomb the production. They saw no evidence that he was under British surveillance, but in Orwellian London looks could be deceiving. MI5 didn’t have to rely solely on watchers to surveil suspected terrorists. The eyes of CCTV never blinked.

  His bachelor flat in Chilton Street had been entered, searched, and compromised in every conceivable way. They watched him eat, they watched him sleep, they watched him pray, and they peered quietly over his shoulder with the silence of curious children while he toiled late into the night at his computer. He had not one laptop but two, one that was connected to the Internet and an identical model with no links to the cyber universe whatsoever, or so he believed. If he was communicating with elements of Saladin’s network, it was not readily apparent. Jalal Nasser might have been a committed jihadist terrorist, but online he was a model resident of Great Britain and a loyal subject of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

  But was he aware of the flash drive that lay at the base of a power pole in a pastoral suburb of Brussels called Dilbeek? And did he know that the man who had supposedly placed it there was now in Jordan tending to a gravely ill father? And did he find the confluence of events—the dead drop and the sudden travel of a trusted lieutenant—a bit too coincidental for comfort? Gabriel was certain it was so. And the proof, he declared, was the failure of the courier to clean out the drop site. Gabriel’s mood darkened with each passing hour. He stalked the many rooms of Château Treville, he walked the footpaths of the gardens, he scoured the watch reports. Mainly, he stared at a computer screen, at an image of a concrete power pole rising from a tangle of gorse bush, quite possibly the most hideous image in the history of a proud service.

  Late in the afternoon of the third day, the deluge that had flooded Dilbeek laid siege to the banlieues north of Paris. Eli Lavon had been caught on the streets of Aubervilliers, and when he returned to Château Treville he might have been mistaken for a lunatic who had decided to take a swim fully clothed. Gabriel was standing before his computer as though he had been bronzed. His green eyes, however, were burning brightly.

  “Well?” asked Lavon.

  Gabriel reached down, tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and clicked on the play icon on the screen. A few seconds later a motorcyclist flashed across it, right to left, in a black blur.

  “Do you know how many motorcyclists have passed by that spot today?” asked Lavon.

  “Thirty-eight,” answered Gabriel. “But only one did this.”

  He replayed the video in slow motion and then clicked on the pause icon. At the instant the image froze, the visor of the motorcyclist’s helmet was pointed directly at the base of the power pole.

  “Maybe he was distracted by something,” said Lavon.

  “Like what?”

  “A beer can with a flash drive inside it.”

  Gabriel smiled for the first time in three days. He tapped a few keys on the computer, and the live image reappeared on the screen. Can by a Pole, he thought. It was suddenly the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  They saw him for a second time at seven that evening and again at half past eight, as dusk was darkening the image like a painting being slowly devoured by surface grime and yellowed varnish. On both occasions he swept across the screen from left to right. And both times, upon slow-motion reexamination, his head turned almost imperceptibly toward the gorse bush at the base of the concrete power pole. When he returned for a third time it was long past dark, and the image was black as pitch. This time, he stopped and killed the bike’s lights. Mordecai switched the camera from optical to infrared, and a moment later Gabriel and Eli Lavon watched as a yellow-an
d-red man-shaped blob slipped quickly in and out of the gorse at the edge of the Kerselaarstraat.

  The USB flash drive was identical to the model used by Nabil Awad for previous communications, with one critical additional feature: its printed circuit board had been fitted with a tracking device that allowed the team to monitor its movements. From Dilbeek it moved to the city center of Brussels, where it spent a restful evening in a rather good hotel. Then, in the morning, it boarded the 8:52 Eurostar at Brussels Midi, and by ten o’clock it was moving along a platform at St. Pancras International in London. Yaakov Rossman managed to snap a photo of the courier as he crossed the arrivals hall. Later, they would identity him as an Egyptian national who lived off the Edgware Road and worked as a production assistant for Al Jazeera television.

  The flash drive made the journey to East London on foot and at noon changed hands with admirable discretion on the pavements of Brick Lane. A few minutes later, in a bachelor flat in Chilton Street, it was inserted into a computer with no connection to the Internet, or so believed its owner. At which point a new wait commenced, the wait for Jalal Nasser, Saladin’s man in Europe, to come to Paris to meet his new girl.

  28

  PARIS

  NATALIE TOOK CONSCIOUS NOTE OF him for the first time on Saturday, at half past two o’clock, as she was crossing the Luxembourg Gardens. At that instant she realized she had seen him on several prior occasions, including the previous afternoon, at the café across the street from her flat in Aubervilliers. Shaded by a Pernod umbrella, he had nipped at a glass of white wine, feigned absorption in a worn paperback, and stared at her without reservation. She had mistaken his attentions for lust and had left the café earlier than intended. In retrospect, she supposed her actions had made a positive impression.

  But it was not until that perfect sun-dappled Saturday that Natalie was certain the man was following her. She had intended to take the entire day off from work, but a pandemic of strep throat in the cités had compelled her to spend the morning at the clinic. She had left at noon and ridden an RER into the city center. And while pretending to window-shop in the rue Vavin she had seen him on the opposite side of the street, pretending to do the same. A few minutes later, on the footpaths of the Luxembourg Gardens, she had employed another one of the techniques she had learned at the farm in Nahalal—a sudden stop, a turn, a hasty retracing of her steps. And there he was again. She walked past him with her eyes averted. Even so, she could feel the weight of his gaze upon her face. A few paces behind him, dressed like an aging revolutionary poet, was the blurry-faced watcher from the Office, and behind him were two French surveillance men. Natalie returned quickly to the rue Vavin and entered a boutique she had visited a few minutes earlier. Instantly, her phone rang.