The Black Widow Read online

  With the camp director’s permission, Natalie began seeing patients in the base’s old infirmary. At first, the other students were reluctant to call upon her for fear of being regarded as soft by the Iraqi instructors. But soon she was receiving a steady stream of patients during her “office hours,” which fell between the end of her bomb-making class and afternoon prayers. Their ailments ranged from infected battle wounds to whooping cough, diabetes, and sinusitis. Natalie had few supplies and little in the way of medicine, though she ministered patiently to each. In the process she learned a great deal about her fellow students—their names, their countries of origin, the circumstances of their travel to the caliphate, the status of their passports. Among those who came to see her was Safia Bourihane. She was several pounds underweight, mildly depressed, and required eyeglasses. Otherwise, she was in good health. Natalie resisted the impulse to give her an overdose of morphine.

  “I’m leaving in the morning,” Safia announced as she covered herself in her abaya.

  “Where are you going?”

  “They haven’t told me. They never tell me. And you?” she asked.

  Natalie shrugged. “I have to be back in France in a week.”

  “Lucky you.” Safia slid childlike from Natalie’s examination table and moved toward the door.

  “What was it like?” Natalie asked suddenly.

  Safia turned. Even through the mosquito netting of her abaya, her eyes were astonishingly beautiful. “What was what like?”

  “The operation.” Natalie hesitated, then said, “Killing the Jews.”

  “It was beautiful,” said Safia. “It was a dream come true.”

  “And if it had been a suicide operation? Could you have done it?”

  Safia smiled regretfully. “I wish it had been.”

  39

  PALMYRA, SYRIA

  THE CAMP DIRECTOR WAS an Iraqi named Massoud from Anbar Province. He had lost his left eye fighting the Americans during the troop surge of 2006. The right he fixed suspiciously on Natalie when, after a thoroughly unappetizing supper in the dining hall, she requested permission to walk alone outside the camp.

  “There’s no need to deceive us,” he said at length. “If you wish to leave the camp, Dr. Hadawi, you are free to do so.”

  “I have no wish to leave.”

  “Are you not happy here? Have we not treated you well?”

  “Very well.”

  The one-eyed Massoud made a show of deliberation. “There’s no phone service in town, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “And no cellular or Internet service, either.”

  There was a short silence.

  “I’ll send someone with you,” said Massoud.

  “It isn’t necessary.”

  “It is. You’re far too valuable to go walking alone.”

  The escort Massoud selected to accompany Natalie was a handsome university-educated Cairene named Ismail who had joined ISIS in frustration not long after the coup that drove the Muslim Brotherhood from power in Egypt. They left the camp a few minutes after nine o’clock. The moon hung low over the northern Palmyrene mountain belt, a white sun in a black sky, and shone like a spotlight upon the mountains to the south. Natalie pursued her own shadow along a dusty path, Ismail trailing a few paces behind her, his black clothing luminous in the moonlight, a weapon across his chest. On both sides of the path, neat groves of date palms thrived in the rich soil along the Wadi al-Qubur, which was fed by the Efqa spring. It was the spring and the surrounding oasis that had first attracted humans to this place, perhaps as early as the seventh millennium BC. There arose a walled city of two hundred thousand where the inhabitants spoke the Palmyrene dialect of Aramaic and grew wealthy from the caravan traffic along the Silk Road. Empires came and went, and in the first century CE the Romans declared Palmyra a subject of the empire. The ancient city at the edge of an oasis would never be the same.

  The date palms along the track moved in a cool desert wind. At last, the palms fell away and the Temple of Bel, the center of religious life in ancient Palmyra, appeared. Natalie slowed to a stop and stared, openmouthed, at the catastrophe that lay scattered across the desert floor. The temple’s ruins, with their monumental gates and columns, were among the best preserved in Palmyra. Now the ruins were in ruins, with a portion of only a single wall remaining intact. Ismail the Egyptian was obviously unmoved by the damage. “Shirk,” he said with a shrug, using the Arabic word for polytheism. “It had to be destroyed.”

  “You were here when it happened?”

  “I helped to set the charges.”

  “Alhamdulillah,” she heard herself whisper. Praise be to God.

  The fallen stones glowed in the cold light of the moon. Natalie picked her way slowly through the wreckage, careful not to turn an ankle, and set out down the Great Colonnade, the ceremonial avenue that stretched from the Temple of Bel, to the Triumphal Arch, to the Tetrapylon, to the Funerary Temple. Here, too, ISIS had imposed an Islamic death sentence on the non-Islamic past. The colonnades had been toppled, the arches smashed. Whatever ISIS’s ultimate fate, it had left an indelible mark on the Middle East. Palmyra, thought Natalie, would never be the same.

  “You did this, too?”

  “I helped,” admitted Ismail, smiling.

  “And the Great Pyramids of Giza?” she asked leadingly. “We will destroy them, too?”

  “Inshallah,” he whispered.

  Natalie set out toward the Temple of Baalshamin, but soon her limbs grew heavy and tears blurred her vision, so she turned around and with Ismail in tow made her way back through the date palms, to the gates of Camp Saladin. In the main recreation room, a few trainees were watching a new ISIS recruiting video promoting the joys of life in the caliphate—a bearded young jihadi playing with a child in a leafy green park, no severed heads visible, of course. In the canteen, Natalie had tea with Selma, her friend from Tunisia, and told her wide-eyed of the wonders just beyond the camp’s walls. Then she returned to her room and collapsed onto her bed. In her dreams she walked through ruins—a great Roman city, an Arab village in the Galilee. Her guide was a blood-drenched woman with eyes of hazel and copper. He is everything you would expect, she said. Inshallah, you’ll get to meet him someday.

  In her last dream she was sleeping in her own bed. Not her bed in Jerusalem but her childhood bed in France. There was a hammering at the door and soon her room was filled with mighty men with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their villages in the east. Natalie sat up with a start and realized she was no longer dreaming. The room was her room at the camp. And the men were real.

  40

  ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

  THIS TIME, SHE HAD NO sun or dashboard instruments by which to chart her course, for within minutes of leaving Palmyra she had been blindfolded. In her brief interlude of sight, she had managed to gather three small pieces of information. Her captors were four in number, she was in the backseat of another SUV, and the SUV was headed east on the Syrian highway that used to be called the M20. She asked her captors where they were taking her, but received no reply. She protested that she had done nothing wrong in Palmyra, that she had only wanted to see the destroyed temples of shirk with her own eyes, but again her captors were silent. Indeed, not a word passed between them throughout the entire journey. For entertainment they listened to a lengthy sermon by the caliph. And when the sermon ended they listened to a talk show on al-Bayan, ISIS’s slick radio station. Al-Bayan was based in Mosul and transmitted on the FM broadcast band. The panelists were discussing a recent Islamic State fatwa regarding sexual relations between males and their female slaves. At first, the signal from Mosul was faint and filled with waves of static, but it grew stronger the longer they drove.

  They stopped once to add fuel to the tank from a jerry can, and a second time to negotiate an ISIS checkpoint. The guard spoke with an Iraqi accent and was deferential toward the men in the SUV—fearful, almost. Through the
open window, Natalie heard a great commotion in the distance, orders shouted, crying children, wailing women. “Yalla, yalla!” a voice was saying. “Keep moving! It’s not far.” An image formed in Natalie’s mind—a thin line of ragged unbelievers, a trail of tears that led to an execution pit. Soon, she thought, she would be joining them.

  Another half hour or so passed before the SUV stopped a third time. The engine died and the doors swung loudly open, admitting an unwelcome blast of dense wet heat. Instantly, Natalie felt water begin to flow beneath the heavy fabric of her abaya. A hand grasped her wrist and tugged, gently. She shimmied across the seat, swung her legs to the side, and allowed herself to slide until her feet touched the earth. All the while the hand maintained its hold on her wrist. There was no malice in its grip. It guided her only.

  In the haste of her evacuation from the camp, she had been unable to put on her sandals. Beneath her bare feet the earth burned. A memory arose, as unwelcome as the heat. She is on a beach in the South of France. Her mother is telling her to remove the Star of David from her neck, lest others see it. She unclasps the pendant, surrenders it, and hurries toward the blue Mediterranean before the blazing sand can burn her feet.

  “Careful,” said a voice, the first to address her since leaving the camp. “There are steps ahead.”

  They were wide and smooth. When Natalie reached the top step, the hand pulled her forward, gently. She had the sensation of moving through a great house, through cool chambers, across sun-drowned courts. At last, she came to another flight of steps, longer than the first, twelve steps instead of six. At the summit she became aware of the presence of several men and heard the muted clatter of automatic weapons expertly held.

  A few murmured words were exchanged, a door was opened. Natalie moved forward ten paces exactly. Then the hand squeezed her wrist and applied subtle downward pressure. Obediently, she lowered herself to the floor and sat cross-legged upon a carpet with her hands folded neatly in her lap. The blindfold was removed. Through the mosquito netting of her facial veil, she saw a man seated before her, identically posed. His face was instantly familiar; he was the senior Iraqi who had interrogated her before her transfer to Palmyra. He was lacking in his previous composure. His black clothing was covered in dust, his brown eyes were bloodshot and fatigued. The night, thought Natalie, had been unkind to him.

  With a movement of his hand, he instructed her to lift her veil. She hesitated but complied. The brown eyes bored into her for a long moment while she studied the pattern of the carpet. Finally, he took her chin in the lobster claw of his ruined hand and raised her face toward his. “Dr. Hadawi,” he said quietly. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  She passed through one more doorway, entered one more room. Its floor was bare and white, as were its walls. Above was a small round aperture through which poured a shaft of scalding sunlight. Otherwise, the shadows prevailed. In one corner, the farthest, four heavily armed ISIS fighters stood in a ragged circle, eyes lowered, like mourners at a graveside. Dust coated their black costumes. It was not the khaki-colored dust of the desert; it was pale and gray, concrete that had been smashed into powder by a sledgehammer from the sky. At the feet of the four men was a fifth. He lay supine upon a stretcher, one arm across his chest, the other, the left, at his side. There was blood on the left hand, and blood stained the bare floor around him. His face was pale as death. Or was it the gray dust? From across the room, Natalie could not tell.

  The senior Iraqi nudged her forward. She passed through the cylinder of sun; its heat was molten. Before her there was movement, and a place was made for her among the mourners. She stopped and looked down at the man on the stretcher. There was no dust on his face. His ashen pallor was his own, the result of substantial loss of blood. He had suffered two visible wounds, one to the upper chest, the other to the thigh of the right leg—wounds, thought Natalie, that might have proven fatal to an ordinary man, but not him. He was quite large and powerfully built.

  He is everything you would expect . . .

  “Who is he?” she asked after a moment.

  “It’s not important,” answered the Iraqi. “It is only important that he lives. You must not let him die.”

  Natalie gathered up her abaya, crouched beside the stretcher, and reached toward the chest wound. Instantly, one of the fighters seized her wrist. This time, the grip was not gentle; it felt as though her bones were about to crack. She glared at the fighter, silently chastising him for daring to touch her, a woman who was not a blood relative, and then fixed the Iraqi with the same stare. The Iraqi nodded once, the iron grip relaxed. Natalie savored her small victory. For the first time since her arrival in Syria, she felt a sense of power. For the moment, she thought, she owned them.

  She reached toward the wound again, unmolested, and moved aside the shredded black garment. It was a large wound, about two inches at its widest, with ragged edges. Something hot and jagged had entered his body at extremely high speed and had left a trail of appalling damage—broken bone, shredded tissue, severed blood vessels. His respiration was shallow and faint. It was a miracle he was breathing at all.

  “What happened?”

  There was silence.

  “I can’t help him unless I know how he was injured.”

  “He was in a house that was bombed.”

  “Bombed?”

  “It was an air strike.”

  “Drone?”

  “Much larger than a drone.” He spoke as if from personal experience. “We found him beneath the debris. He was unconscious but breathing.”

  “Has he ever stopped?”

  “No.”

  “And has he ever regained consciousness?”

  “Not for a moment.”

  She examined the skull, which was covered with thick dark hair. There were no lacerations or obvious contusions, but that meant nothing; serious brain trauma was still possible. She lifted the lid of the left eye, then the right. The pupils were responsive, a good sign. Or was it? She released the right eyelid.

  “What time did this happen?”

  “The bomb fell shortly after midnight.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Ten fifteen.”

  Natalie examined the gaping wound to the leg. A challenging case, to say the least, she thought dispassionately. The patient had been comatose for ten hours. He had suffered two serious penetration wounds, not to mention the likelihood of numerous additional fractures and crush injuries common to victims of building collapses. Internal bleeding was a given. Sepsis was just around the corner. If he were to have any hope of survival, he needed to be transported to a Level 1 trauma center immediately, a scenario she explained to the clawed Iraqi.

  “Out of the question,” he replied.

  “He needs urgent critical care.”

  “This isn’t Paris, Dr. Hadawi.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “For security reasons,” he explained.

  “Are we in Iraq?”

  “You ask too many questions.”

  “Are we?” she persisted.

  With his silence he confirmed that they were.

  “There’s a hospital in Ramadi, is there not?”

  “It’s not safe for him there.”

  “What about Fallujah?” She couldn’t believe the word had come out of her mouth. Fallujah . . .

  “He’s not going anywhere,” the Iraqi said. “This is the only place that’s safe.”

  “If he stays here, he dies.”

  “No, he won’t,” said the Iraqi. “Because you’re going to save him.”

  “With what?”

  One of the fighters handed her a cardboard box with a red cross on it.

  “It’s a first-aid kit.”

  “It is all we have.”

  “Is there a hospital or a clinic nearby?”

  The Iraqi hesitated, then said, “Mosul is an hour’s drive, but the Americans
are attacking traffic along the roads.”

  “Someone has to try to get through.”

  “Give me a list of the things you need,” he said, extracting a grubby notepad from the pocket of his black uniform. “I’ll send one of the women. It could take a while.”

  Natalie accepted the notepad and a pen and wrote out her wish list of supplies: antibiotics, syringes, surgical instruments, gloves, suture material, a stethoscope, IV bags and solution, a chest tube, clamps, pain medication, sedatives, gauze, and plaster bandages and fiberglass casting tape for immobilizing fractured limbs.

  “You don’t happen to know his blood type, do you?”

  “Blood type?”

  “He needs blood. Otherwise, he’s going to die.”

  The Iraqi shook his head. Natalie handed him the list of supplies. Then she opened the first-aid kit and looked inside. Bandages, ointment, a roll of gauze, aspirin—it was hopeless. She knelt beside the wounded man and raised an eyelid. Still responsive.

  “I need to know his name,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I have to address him by his real name to bring him out of this coma.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Dr. Hadawi.”

  “Then what shall I call him?”

  The Iraqi looked down at the dying, helpless man at his feet. “If you must call him something,” he said after a moment, “you may call him Saladin.”

  41

  ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

  AS A PHYSICIAN IN THE emergency room of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center, Dr. Natalie Mizrahi had routinely confronted ethically fraught scenarios, sometimes on a daily basis. There were the gravely injured and the dying who received heroic treatment despite no chance of survival. And there were the murderers, the attempted suicide bombers, the knife-wielding butchers, upon whose damaged bodies Natalie labored with the tenderest of mercies.

  The situation she faced now, however, was unlike anything she had faced before—or would again, she thought. The man in the bare room somewhere near Mosul was the leader of a terror network that had carried out devastating attacks in Paris and Amsterdam. Natalie had successfully penetrated that network as part of an operation to identify and decapitate its command structure. And now, owing to an American air strike, the life of the network’s mastermind rested in her well-trained hands. As a doctor she was morally obligated to save his life. But as an inhabitant of the civilized world, she was inclined to let him die slowly and thus fulfill the mission for which she had been recruited.