The Black Widow Read online

  By Bouchard’s wristwatch, the Israeli remained at the barricade for three minutes. Then he headed eastward along the street, trailed by his bodyguard. After a few paces he paused in a shop window, a crude but effective touch of tradecraft that compelled Bouchard, who was discreetly following, to seek shelter in the boutique opposite. Instantly, a cloying saleswoman accosted him, and by the time he’d managed to extricate himself, the Israeli and his bodyguard had vanished. Bouchard stood frozen for a moment, staring up the length of the street. Then he wheeled round and saw the Israeli standing behind him, one hand pressed to his chin, head tilted to one side.

  “Where’s your sign?” he asked finally in French.

  “My what?”

  “Your sign. The one you were holding at the airport.” The green eyes probed. “You must be Christian Bouchard.”

  “And you must be—”

  “I must be,” he interrupted with the terseness of a nail gun. “And I was assured there would be no surveillance.”

  “I wasn’t watching you.”

  “Then what were you doing?”

  “Rousseau asked me to make sure you arrived safely.”

  “You’re here to protect me—is that what you’re saying?”

  Bouchard was silent.

  “Allow me to make one thing clear from the outset,” said the legend. “I don’t need protection.”

  They walked side by side along the pavement, Bouchard in his smart suit and raincoat, Gabriel in his leather jacket and his grief, until they arrived at the entrance of the apartment house at Number 24. When Bouchard opened the outer door, he inadvertently opened a door in Gabriel’s memory, too. It was ten years ago, early evening, a light rain falling like tears from the sky. Gabriel had come to Paris because he needed a van Gogh as bait in order to insert an agent into the entourage of Zizi al-Bakari, and he had heard from an old friend in London, a wildly eccentric art dealer named Julian Isherwood, that Hannah Weinberg was in possession of one. He had approached her without introduction on the very spot where he and Christian Bouchard stood now. She was holding an umbrella in one hand and with the other was stretching a key toward the lock. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she had lied with admirable composure, “but I don’t have a van Gogh. If you’d like to see some paintings by Vincent, I suggest you visit the Musée d’Orsay.”

  The memory dissipated. Gabriel followed Bouchard across an internal courtyard, into a foyer, and up a flight of carpeted stairs. On the fourth floor, nickeled light leaked weakly through a soiled window, illuminating two stately mahogany doors facing each other like duelists across the chessboard floor of the landing. The door on the right was absent a nameplate. Bouchard unlocked it and, stepping to one side, motioned for Gabriel to enter.

  He paused in the formal entrance hall and surveyed his surroundings, as if for the first time. The room was decorated precisely as it had been on the morning of Jeudi Noir: stately brocaded furniture, heavy velvet curtains, an ormolu clock, still ticking away five minutes slow on the mantel. Again, the door to Gabriel’s memory opened, and he glimpsed Hannah seated on the couch in a rather dowdy woolen skirt and thick sweater. She had just handed him a bottle of Sancerre and was watching intently as he removed the cork—watching his hands, he remembered, the hands of the avenger. “I’m very good at keeping secrets,” she was saying. “Tell me why you want my van Gogh, Monsieur Allon. Perhaps we can reach some accommodation.”

  From the adjoining library there came the faint rustle of paper, like the turning of a page. Gabriel peered inside and saw a rumpled figure standing before a bookcase, a large leather-bound volume in his hand. “Dumas,” the figure said without looking up. “And quite valuable.”

  He closed the book, returned it to the shelf, and studied Gabriel as if contemplating a rare coin or a cage bird. Gabriel returned the gaze without expression. He had expected another version of Bouchard, a slick, cocky bastard who took wine with his midday meal and left the office promptly at five so he could spend an hour with his mistress before rushing home to his wife. Therefore, Paul Rousseau was a pleasant surprise.

  “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said. “I only wish the circumstances were different. Madame Weinberg was a friend, was she not?”

  Gabriel was silent.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Rousseau.

  “I’ll let you know when I see the van Gogh.”

  “Ah, yes, the van Gogh. It’s in the room at the end of the hall,” said Rousseau. “But I suppose you already knew that.”

  She had kept a key, Gabriel recalled, in the top drawer of the desk. Obviously, Rousseau and his men had not discovered it, because the lock had been dismantled. Otherwise, the room was as Gabriel remembered it: the same bed with a lace canopy, the same toys and stuffed animals, the same provincial dresser, above which hung the same painting, Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table, oil on canvas, by Vincent van Gogh. Gabriel had carried out the painting’s only restoration, in a rambling Victorian safe house outside London, shortly before its sale—private, of course—to Zizi al-Bakari. His work, he thought now, had held up well. The painting was perfect except for a thin horizontal line near the top of the image that Gabriel had made no attempt to repair. The line was Vincent’s fault; he had leaned another canvas against poor Marguerite before she was sufficiently dry. Zizi al-Bakari, a connoisseur of art as well as jihadist terror, had regarded the line as proof of the painting’s authenticity—and of the authenticity of the beautiful young American woman, a Harvard-educated art historian, who had sold it to him.

  Of this, Paul Rousseau knew nothing. He was staring not at the painting but at Gabriel, his cage bird, his curio. “One wonders why she chose to hang it here rather than in her parlor,” he said after a moment. “And why, in death, she chose to leave it to you, of all people.”

  Gabriel lifted his eyes from the painting and fixed them squarely on the face of Paul Rousseau. “Perhaps we should make one thing clear at the outset,” he said. “We’re not going to be closing out old accounts. Nor are we going to take any strolls down memory lane.”

  “Oh, no,” Rousseau agreed hastily, “we haven’t time for that. Still, it would be an interesting exercise, if only for its entertainment value.”

  “Be careful, Monsieur Rousseau. Memory lane is just around the next corner.”

  “So it is.” Rousseau gave a capitulatory smile.

  “We had a deal,” said Gabriel. “I come to Paris, you give me the picture.”

  “No, Monsieur Allon. First you help me find the man who bombed the Weinberg Center, and then I give you the painting. I was very clear with your friend Uzi Navot.” Rousseau looked quizzically at Gabriel. “He is a friend of yours, is he not?”

  “He used to be,” said Gabriel coolly.

  They fell into a comfortable silence, each staring at the van Gogh, like strangers in a gallery.

  “Vincent must have loved her very much to paint something so beautiful,” Rousseau said at last. “And soon it will belong to you. I’m tempted to say you’re a very lucky man, but I won’t. You see, Monsieur Allon,” he said, smiling sadly, “I’ve read your file.”

  10

  RUE PAVÉE, PARIS

  INTELLIGENCE SERVICES FROM DIFFERENT NATIONS do not cooperate because they enjoy it. They do so because, like divorced parents of small children, they sometimes find it necessary to work together for the greater good. Old rivalries do not vanish overnight. They slumber just beneath the surface, like the wounds of infidelities, forgotten anniversaries, and unmet emotional needs. The challenge for the two intelligence services is to create a zone of trust, a room where there are no secrets. Outside that room they are free to pursue their own interests. But once inside, each is compelled to lay bare its most cherished sources and methods for the other to see. Gabriel had much experience in this realm. A natural restorer, he had repaired the Office’s relations with both the CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. France, however, was a more difficult proposit
ion. It had long been an important operational theater for the Office, especially for Gabriel, whose litany of secret sins on French soil was long. What’s more, France was an unabashed supporter of many of Israel’s most implacable foes. In short, the intelligence services of Israel and France did not like each other much.

  It was not always so. France armed Israel in its infancy, and without French help Israel would have never developed the nuclear deterrent that allowed it to survive in the hostile Middle East. But in the 1960s, after the disastrous war in Algeria, Charles de Gaulle set out to repair France’s strained relations with the Arab world—and when Israel, largely with French aircraft, launched the Six-Day War with a surprise attack on Egypt’s airfields, de Gaulle condemned it. He referred to Jews as “an elite people, sure of itself, domineering,” and the rupture was complete.

  Now, over coffee in the salon of the Weinberg family apartment on the rue Pavée, Gabriel and Rousseau set out to repair, at least temporarily, the legacy of mistrust. Their first order of business was to hammer out a basic operational accord, a blueprint for how the two services would work together, a division of labor and authority, the rules of the road. It was to be a true partnership, though for obvious reasons Rousseau would retain preeminence over any aspects of the operation that touched French soil. In return, Gabriel would be granted complete and total access to France’s voluminous files on the thousands of Islamic extremists living within its borders: the watch reports, the e-mail and phone intercepts, the immigration records. That alone, he would say much later, had been worth the price of admission.

  There were bumps in the road, but for the most part the negotiations went more smoothly than either Gabriel or Rousseau could have imagined. Perhaps it was because the two men were not so different. They were men of the arts, men of culture and learning who had devoted their lives to protecting their fellow citizens from those who would shed the blood of innocents over ideology or religion. Each had lost a spouse—one to illness, the other to terror—and each was well respected by their counterparts in Washington and London. Rousseau was no Gabriel Allon, but he had been fighting terrorists almost as long, and had the notches in his belt to prove it.

  “There are some in the French political establishment,” said Gabriel, “who would like to see me behind bars because of my previous activities.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “If I am to function here without cover, I require a document giving me blanket immunity, now and forever, amen.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “And I’ll see if I can find Saladin before he attacks again.”

  Rousseau frowned. “Too bad you weren’t the one to negotiate the Iran nuclear deal.”

  “Too bad,” agreed Gabriel.

  By then, it was approaching four o’clock. Rousseau stood, yawned elaborately, stretched his arms wide, and suggested a walk. “Doctor’s orders,” he said. “It seems I’m too fat for my own good.” They slipped from the entrance of Hannah Weinberg’s apartment house and, with Bouchard and Gabriel’s bodyguard in tow, walked along the Seine embankments toward Notre-Dame. They were a mismatched pair, the lumpy, tweedy former professor from the Sorbonne, the smallish figure in leather who seemed to float slightly above the surface of the paving stones. The sun was low in the western sky, blazing through a slit in the clouds. Rousseau shaded his eyes.

  “Where do you intend to start?”

  “The files, of course.”

  “You’ll need help.”

  “Obviously.”

  “How many officers do you intend to bring into the country?”

  “The exact number I need.”

  “I can give you a room in our headquarters on the rue de Grenelle.”

  “I prefer something a bit more private.”

  “I can arrange a safe house.”

  “So can I.”

  Gabriel paused at a news kiosk. On the front page of Le Monde were two photographs of Safia Bourihane, the Frenchwoman of Muslim heritage, the veiled killer from the caliphate. The headline was one word in length: CATASTROPHE!

  “Whose catastrophe was it?” asked Gabriel.

  “The inevitable inquiry will undoubtedly find that elements of my service made terrible mistakes. But are we truly to blame? We, the humble secret servants who stand with our fingers in the dike? Or does the blame lie elsewhere?”

  “Where?”

  “In Washington, for example.” Rousseau set off along the embankment. “The invasion of Iraq turned the region into a cauldron. And when the new American president decided the time had come to withdraw, the cauldron boiled over. And then there was this folly we called the Arab Spring. Mubarak must go! Gaddafi must go! Assad must go!” He shook his head slowly. “It was madness, absolute madness. And now we are left with this. ISIS controls a swath of territory the size of the United Kingdom, right on the doorstep of Europe. Even Bin Laden would have never dared to dream of such a thing. And what does the American president tell us? ISIS is not Islamic. ISIS is the jayvee team.” He frowned. “What does this mean? Jayvee?”

  “I think it has something to do with basketball.”

  “And what does basketball have to do with a subject as serious as the rise of the caliphate?”

  Gabriel only smiled.

  “Does he truly believe this drivel, or is it an ignorantia affectata?”

  “A willful ignorance?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “We’ve met.”

  Rousseau was obviously tempted to ask Gabriel about the circumstances of his one and only meeting with the American president, but he carried on with his lecture on ISIS instead. “The truth is,” he said, “ISIS is indeed Islamic. And it has more in common with Muhammad and his earliest followers—al salaf al salih—than some of the so-called experts care to admit. We are horrified when we read accounts of ISIS using crucifixion. We tell ourselves that these are the actions of barbarians, not men of faith. But ISIS doesn’t crucify only because it is cruel. It crucifies because, according to the Koran, crucifixion is one of the proscribed punishments for the enemies of Islam. It crucifies because it must. We civilized Westerners find this almost impossible to comprehend.”

  “We don’t,” said Gabriel.

  “That’s because you live in the region. You are a people of the region,” Rousseau added. “And you know full well what will happen if the likes of ISIS are ever let loose within the walls of your fortress. It will be . . .”

  “A holocaust,” said Gabriel.

  Rousseau nodded thoughtfully. Then he led Gabriel across the Pont Notre-Dame, to the Île de la Cité. “So in the words of Lenin,” he asked, “what is to be done?”

  “I am merely a spy, Monsieur Rousseau, not a general or a prime minister.”

  “And if you were?”

  “I would tear them out root and branch. I would turn them into losers instead of winners. Take away the land,” Gabriel added, “and there can be no Islamic State. And if there is no state, the caliphate will recede once more into history.”

  “Invasion didn’t work in Iraq or Afghanistan,” replied Rousseau, “and it won’t work in Syria. Better to chip away at them from the air and with the help of regional allies. In the meantime, contain the infection so it doesn’t spread to the rest of the Middle East and Europe.”

  “It’s too late for that. The contagion is already here.”

  They crossed another bridge, the Petit Pont, and entered the Latin Quarter. Rousseau knew it well. He walked now with a purpose other than his health, down the boulevard Saint-Germain, into a narrow side street, until finally he stopped outside the doorway of an apartment building. It was as familiar to Gabriel as the entrance of Hannah Weinberg’s building on the rue Pavée, though it had been many years since his last visit. He glanced at the intercom. Some of the names were still the same.

  Presently, the door swung open and two people, a man and a woman in thei
r mid-twenties, emerged. Rousseau caught the door before it could close and led Gabriel into the half-light of the foyer. A passageway gave onto the shadowed internal courtyard, where Rousseau paused for a second time and pointed toward a window on the uppermost floor.

  “My wife and I lived right there. When she died I gave up the apartment and headed south. There were too many memories, too many ghosts.” He pointed toward a window overlooking the opposite side of the courtyard. “A former student of mine lived over there. She was quite brilliant. Quite radical, too, as were most of my students in those days. Her name,” he added, with a sidelong glance at Gabriel, “was Denise Jaubert.”

  Gabriel stared without expression at Rousseau, as though the name meant nothing to him. In truth, he suspected he knew more about Denise Jaubert than did her former professor. She was indeed a radical. More important, she was the occasional lover of one Sabri al-Khalifa, leader of the Palestinian terror group Black September, mastermind of the Munich Olympics massacre.

  “Late one afternoon,” Rousseau resumed, “I was working at my desk when I heard laughter in the courtyard. It was Denise. She was with a man. Black hair, pale skin, strikingly handsome. Walking a few steps behind them was a smaller fellow with short hair. I couldn’t see much of his face. You see, in spite of the overcast weather he was wearing dark glasses.”

  Rousseau looked at Gabriel, but Gabriel, in his thoughts, was walking across a Parisian courtyard, a few paces behind the man for whom the Office had spent seven long years searching.

  “I wasn’t the only one who noticed the man in the sunglasses,” Rousseau said after a moment. “Denise’s handsome companion noticed him, too. He tried to draw a pistol, but the smaller man drew first. I’ll never forget how he moved forward while he was firing. It was . . . beautiful. There were ten shots. Then he inserted a second magazine into his weapon, placed the barrel of the gun against the man’s ear, and fired one last shot. It’s odd, but I don’t recall him leaving. He just seemed to vanish.” Rousseau looked at Gabriel. “And now he stands beside me.”