The Black Widow Read online

  Presently, the woman reappeared with tea for everyone. The Iraqi sat down opposite Natalie, and the three others sat behind him with their weapons lying across their thighs. An image flashed in Natalie’s memory, a condemned man in an orange jumpsuit, a Westerner, pale as death, seated with his hands bound before a choir-like formation of faceless black-clad executioners. Beneath the shelter of her abaya, she deleted the dreadful picture from her thoughts. She realized then that she was sweating. It was trickling down the length of her spine and dripping between her breasts. She was allowed to sweat, she told herself. She was a pampered Parisian, unused to the heat of the desert, and the room was no longer cool. The house was warming beneath the assault of the late-morning sun.

  “You are a doctor,” the Iraqi said at last, holding his glass of tea between his thumb and forefinger, as a moment earlier he had held Natalie’s face. Yes, she said, laboring with her own glass of tea beneath her veil, she was a doctor, trained at the Université Paris-Sud, employed at the Clinique Jacques Chirac in the Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers. She then elaborated that Aubervilliers was a largely Muslim suburb and that most of her patients were Arabs from North Africa.

  “Yes, I know,” said the Iraqi impatiently, making it abundantly clear he was familiar with her biography. “I’m told you spent a few hours caring for patients in a clinic in Raqqa yesterday.”

  “It was the day before,” she corrected him. And obviously, she thought, gazing at the Iraqi through the black gauze of her veil, you and your friends were watching.

  “You should have come here a long time ago,” he continued. “We have a great need for doctors in the caliphate.”

  “My work is in Paris.”

  “And now you are here,” he pointed out.

  “I’m here,” she said carefully, “because I was asked to come.”

  “By Jalal.”

  She made no response. The Iraqi sipped his tea thoughtfully.

  “Jalal is very good at sending me enthusiastic Europeans, but I am the one who decides whether they are worthy of entering our camps.” He made this sound like a threat, which Natalie supposed was his intention. “Do you wish to fight for the Islamic State?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why not fight for Palestine?”

  “I am.”

  “How?”

  “By fighting for the Islamic State.”

  His eyes warmed. “Zarqawi always said the road to Palestine runs through Amman. First, we will take the rest of Iraq and Syria. Then Jordan. And then, inshallah, Jerusalem.”

  “Like Saladin,” she replied. And not for the first time she wondered whether the man known as Saladin sat before her now.

  “You’ve heard this name?” he asked. “Saladin?”

  She nodded. The Iraqi looked over his shoulder and mumbled something to one of the three men seated behind him. The man handed him a sheaf of papers held together by a paper clip. Natalie reckoned it was her ISIS personnel file, a thought that almost made her smile beneath her abaya. The Iraqi leafed through the pages with an air of bureaucratic distraction. Natalie wondered what sort of work he had done before the American invasion overturned virtually every aspect of Iraqi life. Had he been a clerk in a ministry? Had he been a schoolteacher or a banker? Had he sold vegetables in a market? No, she thought, he was no poor trader. He was a former officer in the Iraqi army. Or perhaps, she thought as sweat dripped down her back, he had worked for Saddam’s dreaded secret police.

  “You are unmarried,” he declared suddenly.

  “Yes,” answered Natalie truthfully.

  “You were engaged once?”

  “Almost.”

  “To Ziad al-Masri? A brother who died in Jordanian custody?”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “At Paris-Sud.”

  “And what was he studying?”

  “Electronics.”

  “Yes, I know.” He laid the pages of her file on the carpet. “We have many supporters in Jordan. Many of our brothers used to be Jordanian citizens. And none of them,” he said, “have ever heard of anyone named Ziad al-Masri.”

  “Ziad was never politically active in Jordan,” she answered with far more calm that she might have thought possible. “He became radicalized only after he moved to Europe.”

  “He was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir?”

  “Not formally.”

  “That would explain why none of our brothers from Hizb ut-Tahrir have heard of him, either.” He regarded Natalie calmly while another waterfall of sweat sluiced down her back. “You’re not drinking your tea,” he pointed out.

  “That’s because you’re making me nervous.”

  “That was my intention.” His remark provoked restrained laughter among the three men seated behind him. He waited for it to subside before continuing. “For a long time the Americans and their friends in Europe did not take us seriously. They belittled us, called us silly names. But now they realize we are a threat to them, and they are trying very hard to penetrate us. The British are the worst. Every time they catch a British Muslim trying to travel to the caliphate, they try to turn him into a spy. We always find them very quickly. Sometimes we play them back against the British. And sometimes,” he said with a shrug, “we just kill them.”

  He allowed a silence to hang heavily over the sweltering room. It was Natalie who broke it.

  “I didn’t ask to join you,” she said. “You asked me.”

  “No, Jalal asked you to come to Syria, not me. But I am the one who will determine whether you will stay.” He gathered up the pages of the file. “I would like to hear your story from the beginning, Leila. I find that most helpful.”

  “I was born—”

  “No,” he said, cutting her off. “I said the beginning.”

  Confused, she said nothing. The Iraqi was looking down at her file again.

  “It says here that your family was from a place called Sumayriyya.”

  “My father’s family,” she said.

  “Where is it?”

  “It was in the Western Galilee. It’s not there anymore.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

  Beneath her veil, Natalie closed her eyes. She saw herself walking through a field of thorn bush and toppled stones, next to a man of medium height whose face and name she could no longer recall. He spoke to her now, as if from the bottom of a well, and his words became hers. They grew bananas and melons in Sumayriyya, the sweetest melons in all of Palestine. They irrigated their fields with water from an ancient aqueduct and buried their dead in a cemetery not far from the mosque. Sumayriyya was paradise on earth, Sumayriyya was an Eden. And then, on a night in May 1948, the Jews came up the coast road in a convoy with their headlamps blazing, and Sumayriyya ceased to exist.

  In the Op Center of King Saul Boulevard there is a chair reserved for the chief. No one else is allowed to sit in it. No one else dares to even touch it. Throughout that long tense day it groaned and buckled beneath the bulk of Uzi Navot. Gabriel had remained constantly at his side, sometimes in a deputy’s chair, sometimes nervously on his feet, a hand pressed to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side.

  Both men, like everyone else in the Op Center, had eyes only for the main video display screen. On it was an overhead satellite image of a large house in a village near the Syrian border. In the courtyard of the house, several men lounged in the shade of date palms. There were two other SUVs in the court. One had ferried a woman from central Raqqa; the other had brought four men from the Sunni Triangle of Iraq. Gabriel had sent along the coordinates of the house to Adrian Carter at CIA Headquarters, and Carter had dispatched a drone from a secret base in Turkey. Occasionally, the aircraft passed through the Ofek 10’s image, circling lazily twelve thousand feet above the target, piloted by a kid in a trailer in another desert on the other side of the world.

  Adrian Carter had brought additional resources to bear on the target as well. Specif
ically, he had instructed the NSA to gather as much cellular data from the house as possible. The NSA had identified no fewer than twelve phones present, one of which had been previously linked to a suspected senior ISIS commander named Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti, a former colonel from Iraq’s military intelligence service. Gabriel suspected it was al-Tikriti who was questioning his agent. He felt sick to his stomach but took small comfort in the fact that he had prepared her well. Even so, he would have gladly taken her place. Perhaps, thought Gabriel, looking at Uzi Navot seated calmly in his designated chair, he was not cut out for the burden of command after all.

  The day limped slowly past. The two SUVs remained in the courtyard, the jihadis sat in the shade of the date palms. Then the shade evaporated with the setting of the sun, and fires flared in the darkness. The Ofek 10 switched over to infrared mode. At nine that evening it detected several human heat signatures emerging from the house. Four of the signatures entered one of the SUVs. A fifth, a woman, entered the other. The drone tracked one of the vehicles to Mosul; the Ofek 10 watched the second as it made the return trip to Raqqa. There it stopped outside an apartment building near al-Rasheed Park, and a single heat signature, a woman, emerged from the back. She entered the apartment house shortly before midnight and disappeared from sight.

  In a room on the second floor of the building, a thin, wizened Saudi cleric was lecturing several dozen spellbound fighters on the role they would play, inshallah, in bringing about the end of days. The time was drawing near, he declared, nearer than they might think. Drained by the arduous interrogation, blinded by exhaustion and her abaya, Natalie could think of no reason to doubt the old preacher’s prophecy.

  The stairwell, as usual, was in pitch darkness. She counted to herself softly in Arabic as she climbed, fourteen steps per flight, two flights per floor. Her room was on the sixth, twelve paces from the stairwell. Entering, she closed the door soundlessly behind her. A shaft of moonlight stretched from the single window to the female form that lay curled on the floor. Silently, Natalie removed her abaya and made a bed for herself. But as she pillowed her head, the female form on the other side of the room stirred and sat up. “Miranda?” asked Natalie, but there was no reply other than the striking of a match. Its flame touched the wick of an olive oil lamp. Warm light filled the room.

  Natalie sat up, too, expecting to see a set of delicate Celtic features. Instead, she found herself staring into a pair of wide hypnotic eyes of hazel and copper. “Who are you?” she asked in Arabic, but her new roommate replied in French. “My name is Safia Bourihane,” she said, extending her hand. “Welcome to the caliphate.”

  38

  PALMYRA, SYRIA

  THE CAMP WAS JUST OUTSIDE the ancient city of Palmyra, not far from the notorious Tadmor desert prison where the ruler’s father had cast those who dared to oppose him. Before the civil war it was an outpost of the Syrian military in the Homs Governorate, but in the spring of 2015, ISIS had captured it largely intact, with scarcely a fight. The group had looted and destroyed many of Palmyra’s astonishing ruins, as well as the prison, but the camp it had preserved. Surrounded by a twelve-foot wall topped with spirals of concertina wire, there were barracks for five hundred, a mess hall, recreation and meeting rooms, a gymnasium, and a diesel generator that provided air conditioning in the heat of the day and light at night. All the old Syrian military signs had been removed, and the black flag of ISIS billowed and snapped above the central courtyard. The installation’s old name was never spoken. Graduates referred to it as Camp Saladin.

  Natalie traveled there by SUV the next day, in the company of Safia Bourihane. Four months had passed since the attack on the Weinberg Center in Paris; in that time Safia had become a jihadist icon. Poems celebrated her, streets and squares bore her name, young girls sought to emulate her feats. In a world where death was celebrated, ISIS expended considerable effort to keep Safia alive. She moved constantly between a chain of safe houses in Syria and Iraq, always under armed escort. During her one and only appearance in an ISIS propaganda video, her face had been veiled. She did not use the telephone, she never touched a computer. Natalie took comfort in the fact she had been allowed into Safia’s presence. It suggested she had come through her interrogation with no taint of suspicion. She was one of them now.

  Safia had clearly grown accustomed to her exalted status. In France she had been a second-class citizen with limited career prospects, but in the upside-down world of the caliphate she was a celebrity. She was quite obviously wary of Natalie, for Natalie represented a potential threat to her standing. For her part, Natalie was content to play the role of terrorist upstart. Safia Bourihane was the charcoal sketch upon which Dr. Leila Hadawi was based. Leila Hadawi admired Safia, but Natalie Mizrahi felt sick being in her presence and, given the chance, would have gladly pumped a hypodermic full of poison into her veins. Inshallah, she thought as the SUV sped across the Syrian desert.

  Safia’s Arabic was rudimentary at best. Therefore, they passed the journey conversing quietly in French, each beneath the private tent of her abaya. They spoke of their upbringings and found they had little in common; as a child of educated Palestinians, Leila Hadawi had lived far differently than the child of Algerian laborers from the banlieues. Islam was their only bridge, but Safia had almost no understanding of the tenets of jihad or even the basics of Islamic practice. She admitted that she missed the taste of French wine. Mainly, she was curious about how she was remembered in the country she had attacked—not the France of the city centers and country villages, but the Arab France of the banlieues. Natalie told her, truthfully, that she was spoken of fondly in the cités of Aubervilliers. This pleased Safia. One day, she said, she hoped to return.

  “To France?” asked Natalie incredulously.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You’re the most wanted woman in the country. It isn’t possible.”

  “That’s because France is still ruled by the French, but Saladin says it will soon be part of the caliphate.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Saladin? Yes, I’ve met him.”

  “Where?” asked Natalie casually.

  “I’m not sure. They blindfolded me during the trip.”

  “How long ago was it?”

  “It was a few weeks after my operation. He wanted to personally congratulate me.”

  “They say he’s Iraqi.”

  “I’m not sure. My Arabic isn’t good enough to tell the difference between a Syrian and an Iraqi.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Very large, powerful, wonderful eyes. He is everything you would expect. Inshallah, you’ll get to meet him someday.”

  Safia’s arrival at the camp was an occasion for celebratory gunfire and cries of “Allahu Akbar!” Natalie, the new recruit, was an afterthought. She was assigned a private room—the former quarters of a junior Syrian officer—and that evening, after prayers, she took her first meal in the communal dining hall. The women ate apart from the men, behind a black curtain. The food was deplorable but plentiful: rice, bread, roasted fowl of some sort, a gray-brown stew of cartilaginous meat. Despite their segregation, the women were required to wear their abayas during mealtime, which made eating a challenge. Natalie ate ravenously of the bread and rice, but her training as a physician informed her decision to avoid the meat. The woman to her left was a silent Saudi called Bushra. To her right was Selma, a loquacious Tunisian. Selma had come to the caliphate for a husband, but her husband had been killed fighting the Kurds and now she wanted vengeance. It was her wish to be a suicide bomber. She was nineteen years old.

  After dinner there was a program. A cleric preached, a fighter read a poem of his own composition. Afterward, Safia was “interviewed” on stage by a clever British Muslim who worked in ISIS’s promotion and marketing department. That night the desert thundered with coalition air strikes. Alone in her room, Natalie prayed for deliverance.

  Her terrorist education commenced after breakfast the next mor
ning when she was driven into the desert for weapons training—assault rifles, pistols, rocket launchers, grenades. She returned to the desert each and every morning, even after her instructors declared her proficient. They were no wild-eyed jihadis, the instructors; they were exclusively Iraqi, all former soldiers and battle-hardened veterans of the Sunni insurgency. They had fought the Americans largely to a draw in Iraq and wanted nothing more than to fight them again, on the plains of northern Syria, in a place called Dabiq. The Americans and their allies—the armies of Rome, in the lexicon of ISIS—had to be poked and prodded and stirred into a rage. The men from Iraq had a plan to do just that, and the students at the camp were their stick.

  During the heat of midday, Natalie repaired to the air-conditioned rooms of the camp for lessons in bomb assembly and secure communication. She also had to endure long lectures on the pleasures of the afterlife, lest she be chosen for a suicide mission. Time and again her Iraqi instructors asked whether she was willing to die for the caliphate, and without hesitation Natalie said she was. Soon, she was made to wear a heavy suicide vest during her weapons training, and she was taught how to arm the device and detonate it using a trigger concealed in her palm. The first time the instructor ordered her to press the detonator, Natalie’s thumb hovered numb and frozen above the switch. “Yalla,” he beseeched her. “It’s not going to really explode.” Natalie closed her eyes and squeezed the detonator. “Boom,” whispered the instructor. “And now you are on your way to paradise.”