The Black Widow Read online

  He climbed into the BMW, started the engine, and entered his destination into the navigation system. It advised him to proceed to a road it recognized. Saladin did so, like the surveillance aircraft, with his lights doused, following the dirt-and-gravel road over the rim of the little valley and across the pasture to Hume Road. The navigation system instructed him to turn to the left and make his way back to I-66. Saladin, trusting his instincts, turned right instead. After a moment he switched on the radio. He smiled. It wasn’t over, he thought. It was only beginning.

  74

  HUME, VIRGINIA

  THE LAST REPORT FROM THE FBI Cessna was the same as the first—seven individuals inside the cottage, three vehicles outside. One of the individuals was entirely stationary, one appeared to be pacing slowly. There were no other human heat signatures in the little valley, only the bears. They were about fifty yards to the north of the cottage. For that reason, among others, Gabriel and Mikhail approached from the south.

  A single road led into the valley, the private track leading from Hume Road to the cottage itself. They used it only as a point of reference. They kept to the pastureland, Mikhail leading the way, Gabriel a step behind. The earth was sodden and treacherous with the holes of burrowing animals. Occasionally, Mikhail illuminated their path with the light of his mobile phone, but mainly they moved in darkness.

  At the edge of the pasture was a steep hill thick with oak and maple. Fallen tree limbs littered the ground, slowing their pace. Finally, after breasting the ridgeline of the valley, they glimpsed the cottage for the first time. One thing had changed since the departure of the FBI Cessna. There were two vehicles instead of three. Mikhail started down the slope of the hill, Gabriel a step behind.

  After Saladin’s abrupt departure, the preparations for Natalie’s execution began in earnest. The white sheet was removed from her head, her hands were bound behind her back. A brief argument ensued among the four men over who would have the honor of removing her head. The tallest of the four prevailed. By his accent, Natalie could tell that he was a Yemeni. Something about his demeanor was vaguely familiar. All at once she realized that she and the Yemeni had been at the camp in Palmyra at the same time. He had worn his hair and beard long then. Now he was clean-shaven and neatly groomed. Were it not for his black tactical suit, he might have been mistaken for a sales associate at the Apple store.

  The four men covered their faces, leaving only their pitiless eyes exposed. They made no attempt to alter the striking Americana of the setting—indeed, they seemed to revel in it. Natalie was made to kneel before the camera, which was held by the woman she knew as Megan. It was a real camera, not a cell phone; ISIS was second to none when it came to production value. They ordered Natalie to stare directly into the lens, but she refused, even after the Yemeni struck her viciously across the face. She stared straight ahead, toward the window over the woman’s right shoulder, and tried to think of something, anything, other than the steel blade of the hunting knife in the Yemeni’s right hand.

  He stood directly behind her, with the other three men arrayed to his right, and read from a prepared statement, first in Arabic, then in a language that Natalie, after a moment, realized was broken English. It was no matter; the team at ISIS media productions would surely add subtitles. Natalie tried not to listen, focusing her attention instead on the window. Because it was dark outside, the glass was acting as a mirror. She could see the tableau of her execution roughly as it was being framed by the camera—one helpless woman kneeling, three masked men cradling automatic rifles, a Yemeni with a knife speaking no known language. But there was something else in the window, something less distinct than the reflection of Natalie and her four murderers. It was a face. Instantly, she realized it was Mikhail’s. It was odd, she thought. Of all the faces she might conjure from her memory in the moments before her death, his was not the one she had expected.

  The Yemeni’s voice rose with an oratorical flourish as he concluded his statement. Natalie took one last look at her reflection in the window, and at the face of the man she might have loved. Are you watching? she thought. What are you waiting for?

  She became aware of a silence. It lasted a second or two, it lasted an hour or more—she could not tell. Then the Yemeni set upon her like a wild animal and she toppled sideways. When his hand seized her throat, she prepared herself for the pain of the knife’s first bite. Relax, she told herself. It would hurt less if her muscles and tendons were not constricted. But then there was a sharp crack, which she mistook for the severing of her own neck, and the Yemeni fell beside her. The other three jihadists fell next, one by one, like targets in a shooting gallery. The woman was the last to die. Shot through the head, she collapsed as if a trapdoor had opened beneath her. The camera slipped from her grasp and clattered to the floor. Benevolently, the lens averted its gaze from Natalie’s face. She was beautiful, thought Gabriel, as he cut the binds from her wrists. Even when she was screaming.

  PART FOUR

  THE ONE IN CHARGE

  75

  WASHINGTON—JERUSALEM

  THE RECRIMINATIONS BEGAN EVEN BEFORE the sun had risen. One party blamed the president for the calamity that had befallen America, the other blamed his predecessor. That was the only thing Washington was good at these days—recriminations and apportionment of blame. There was once a time, during the darkest days of the Cold War, when American foreign policy was characterized by consensus and steadfastness. Now the two parties could not agree on what to call the enemy, let alone how to combat him. It was little wonder, then, that an attack on the nation’s capital was yet another occasion for partisan bickering.

  In the meantime—at the National Counterterrorism Center, the Lincoln Memorial, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Harbor Place, a string of restaurants along M Street, and at Café Milano—they counted the dead. One hundred and sixteen at the NCTC and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 28 at the Lincoln Memorial, 312 at the Kennedy Center, 147 at Harbor Place, 62 along M Street, and 49 at Café Milano. Among those killed at the renowned Georgetown eatery were the four ISIS gunmen. All had been shot to death. But in the immediate aftermath, there was confusion over precisely who had done the shooting. The Metropolitan Police said it had been the FBI. The FBI said it had been the Metropolitan Police.

  The suicide bomber was identified as a woman, late twenties, blond. In short order, it would be established that she had flown from Paris to New York on a French passport and had spent a single night at the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington, in a room registered to a Dr. Leila Hadawi, also a French citizen. The French government was then forced to acknowledge that the suicide bomber, identified by her passport as Asma Doumaz, was in fact Safia Bourihane, the woman who had attacked the Weinberg Center in Paris. But how had the most wanted woman in the world, a jihadist icon, managed to slip back into France, board an international flight, and enter the United States? On Capitol Hill, members of both political parties called for the secretary of homeland security to resign, along with the commissioner of customs and border protection. Recriminations and apportionment of blame: Washington’s favorite pastime.

  But who was Dr. Leila Hadawi? The French government claimed she had been born in France of Palestinian parentage and was an employee of the state-run health care system. According to passport records, she had spent the month of August in Greece, though French security and intelligence officials now suspected she had traveled clandestinely to Syria for training. Curiously, ISIS seemed not to know her. Indeed, her name appeared in none of the celebratory videos or social media postings that flooded the Internet in the hours after the attack. As for her current whereabouts, they were unknown.

  Media on both sides of the Atlantic began calling it the “French Connection”—the uncomfortable links between the attack on Washington and citizens of America’s oldest ally. Le Monde revealed an additional “connection” when it reported that a senior DGSI officer named Paul Rousseau, the hero of the
secret campaign against Direct Action, had been wounded in the bombing of the National Counterterrorism Center. But why was Rousseau there? The DGSI claimed that he was involved in the routine security measures surrounding the French president’s visit to Washington. Le Monde, however, politely disagreed. Rousseau, said the newspaper, was the chief of something called Alpha Group, an ultra-secret counterterrorism unit known for deception and dirty tricks. The interior minister denied Alpha Group’s existence, as did the chief of the DGSI. No one in France believed them.

  Nor did anyone really care at that point, at least not in America, where blood vengeance was the first order of business. The president immediately ordered massive air strikes against all known ISIS targets in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, though he went out of his way to assure the Islamic world that America was not at war with them. He also rejected calls for a full-scale U.S. invasion of the caliphate. The American response, said the president, would be limited to air strikes and special operations to kill or capture senior ISIS leaders, like the man, still unidentified, who had planned and executed the attack. The president’s critics were livid. So, too, was ISIS, which wanted nothing more than a final apocalyptic battle with the armies of Rome, in a place called Dabiq. The president refused to grant ISIS its wish. He had been elected to end the endless wars in the Middle East, not start another one. This time, America would not overreact. It would survive the attack on Washington, he said, and be stronger as a result.

  Among the first targets of the U.S. military response was an apartment building near al-Rasheed Park in Raqqa and a large house of many rooms and courts west of Mosul. At home, however, the American media was focused on a house of a far different sort, a timbered A-frame cottage near the town of Hume, Virginia. The cottage had been rented to a Northern Virginia–based shell entity owned by an Egyptian national named Qassam el-Banna. The very same Qassam el-Banna had been discovered in a small pond on the property, in the front seat of his Kia sedan, having been shot four times at close range. Five additional bodies were discovered inside the cottage, four ISIS fighters in black tactical suits and a woman who would later be identified as Megan Taylor, a convert to Islam originally from Valparaiso, Indiana. The FBI concluded that all five had been shot with 5.56x45mm rounds fired by two AR-15 assault rifles. Later, through ballistics analysis, it would be determined that those same AR-15s had been involved in the attack on Café Milano in Georgetown. But exactly who had done the shooting? The FBI director said he did not know the answer. No one believed him.

  Not long after the discovery in rural Virginia, the FBI detained Amina el-Banna, the wife of the man found in the pond, for questioning. And it was at this point that the story took an intriguing turn. For immediately after her release, Mrs. el-Banna retained the services of a lawyer from a civil rights organization with well-established ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. A press conference soon followed, conducted on the front lawn of the el-Bannas’ small duplex on Eighth Place in Arlington. Speaking in Arabic, with the lawyer acting as her translator, Mrs. el-Banna denied that her husband was a member of ISIS or had played any role in the attack on Washington. Furthermore, she claimed that, on the night of the attack, two men had broken into her house and brutally interrogated her. She described one of the men as tall and lanky. The other was of medium height and build, with gray temples and the greenest eyes she had ever seen. Both were quite obviously Israeli. She claimed that they had threatened to kill her and her son—she never mentioned that he was named for Mohamed Atta—unless she gave them the passwords for her husband’s computers. After uploading the contents of the devices, they left quickly. No, she admitted, she did not report the incident to the police. She was frightened, she claimed, because she was a Muslim.

  Mrs. el-Banna’s claims might well have been dismissed were it not for her description of one of the men who had entered her house—the man of medium height and build, with gray temples and vivid green eyes. Former inhabitants of the secret world recognized him as the noted Israeli operative named Gabriel Allon, and a few said so on television. They were quick to point out, however, that Allon could not possibly have been present in Mrs. el-Banna’s house because he had been killed in a bombing in London’s Brompton Road almost a year earlier. Or had he? Israel’s ambassador to Washington inadvertently muddied the waters when he refused to state categorically and without equivocation that Gabriel Allon was indeed no longer among the living. “What do you want me to say?” he snapped during an interview. “That he’s still dead?” Then, hiding behind Israel’s long-standing policy of refusing to comment on intelligence matters, the ambassador asked the interviewer to change the subject. And thus commenced the slow resurrection of a legend.

  There quickly appeared in the press accounts of many Washington sightings, all of dubious provenance and reliability. He had been seen entering and leaving a large Federal-style house on N Street, or so claimed a neighbor. He had been seen having coffee at a patisserie on Wisconsin Avenue, or so claimed the woman who had been seated at the next table. He had even been seen having dinner at the Four Seasons on M Street, as if the great Gabriel Allon, with his endless list of deadly enemies, would ever dream of eating in public. There was also a report that, like Paul Rousseau, he had been inside the National Counterterrorism Center at the time of the attack. The Israeli ambassador, who was almost never at a loss for words, failed to return phone calls and text messages, as did his spokeswoman. No one bothered to ask the NCTC for comment. Its press officer had died in the bombing, as had its director. For all intents and purposes, there was no NCTC anymore.

  And there the matter might have faded into the void were it not for an enterprising reporter from the Washington Post. Many years earlier, not long after 9/11, she had revealed the existence of a chain of secret CIA detention centers—the so-called black sites—where al-Qaeda terrorists were subjected to harsh interrogations. Now she sought to answer the many unanswered questions surrounding the attack on Washington. Who was Dr. Leila Hadawi? Who had killed the four terrorists in Café Milano and the five terrorists at the cottage in Hume? And why had a dead man, a legend, been inside the NCTC when a thousand-pound truck bomb leveled it?

  The reporter’s story appeared one week to the day after the attack. It stated that the woman known as Dr. Leila Hadawi was in fact an agent of Israeli intelligence who had penetrated the network of a mysterious ISIS terror mastermind called Saladin. He had been in Washington at the time of the attack but had managed to escape. He was now assumed to be back in the caliphate, hiding from the American and coalition air bombardment. Gabriel Allon, she wrote, was in hiding, too—and very much alive. Israel’s prime minister, when asked for a comment, managed only a crooked smile. Then, cryptically, he suggested he would have more to say about the matter soon. Very soon.

  In the old central Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot, there had been doubts about the circumstances surrounding Allon’s death for some time, especially on leafy Narkiss Street, where he was known to reside in a limestone apartment house with a drooping eucalyptus tree in the front garden. On the evening the story appeared on the Post’s Web site, he and his family were seen dining at Focaccia on Rabbi Akiva Street—or so claimed the couple who had been seated at the next table. Allon, they said, had ordered the chicken livers and mashed potatoes, while his wife, an Italian by birth, had opted for pasta. The children, a few weeks shy of their first birthday, had displayed exemplary behavior. Mother and father appeared relaxed and happy, though their bodyguards were clearly on edge. The entire city was. Earlier that afternoon, near Damascus Gate, three Jews had been stabbed to death. Their killer, a young Palestinian from East Jerusalem, had been shot several times by police. He had died in the trauma center at Hadassah Medical Center, despite heroic efforts to preserve his life.

  The following afternoon Allon was seen lunching with an old friend, the noted biblical archaeologist Eli Lavon, in a café along the Mamilla Mall, and at four o’clock he was spotted on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport, whe
re he met the daily Air France flight from Paris. Documents were signed, and a large wooden crate, flat and rectangular, was placed carefully in the back of his personal armored SUV. Inside the crate was payment in full for an unfinished job: Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table, oil on canvas, by Vincent van Gogh. One hour later, after a high-speed journey up the Bab al-Wad, the canvas was propped upon an easel in the conservation lab of the Israel Museum. Gabriel stood before it, one hand to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side. Ephraim Cohen stood next to him. For a long time, neither spoke.

  “You know,” said Cohen at last, “it’s not too late to change your mind.”

  “Why would I want to do something like that?”

  “Because she wanted you to have it.” After a pause, Cohen added, “And it’s worth more than a hundred million dollars.”

  “Give me the papers, Ephraim.”

  They were contained in a formal leather folio case, embossed with the museum’s logo. The agreement was brief and straightforward. Henceforth, Gabriel Allon renounced any and all claim to the van Gogh; it was now the property of the Israel Museum. There was, however, one inviolable proviso. The painting could never, under any circumstances, be sold or lent to another institution. As long as there was an Israel Museum—indeed, as long as there was an Israel—Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table would hang there.

  Gabriel signed the document with an indecipherable flourish and resumed his contemplation of the painting. At length, he reached out and trailed a forefinger lightly across the face of Marguerite. She required no additional restoration; she was ready for her coming-out party. He only wished he could say the same for Natalie. Natalie required a bit of retouching. Natalie was a work in progress.