Gabriel Allon: The Black Widow Part 15

"But that's not all you said. You told him he could stay with a relative of yours, is that not correct?"

"Yes."

"Who was this relative?"

"My aunt."

"Your mother's sister?"

"Correct."

"She lives in Amman?"

"In Zarqa."

"The camp or the town?"

"The town."

"Did you tell her that Ziad was coming to Jordan?"

"No."

"Did you tell your mother or father?"

"No."

"What about the French police?"

"No."

"And your contact in Jordanian intelligence? Did you tell him, Leila?"

"What?"

"Answer the question," snapped Dina.

"I don't have a contact in Jordanian intelligence."

"Did you betray Ziad to the Jordanians?"

"No."

"Are you responsible for his death?"

"No."

"And the night of your first date?" Dina asked, tacking suddenly. "Did you drink wine with dinner?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"It is haram," said Natalie.

That night, when she retired to her room, the volume of Darwish was back on her bedside table. She would be leaving soon, she thought. It was only a question of when.

That same question-the question of when-was the subject of a meeting between Gabriel and Uzi Navot at King Saul Boulevard later that evening. Between them, arrayed upon Navot's conference table, were the written conclusions of the various trainers, physicians, and psychiatric specialists a.s.signed to the case. All stated that Natalie Mizrahi was of sound mind and body, and more than capable of carrying out the mission for which she had been recruited. None of the reports, however, were as important as the opinions of the chief of the Office and the man who would succeed him. Both were veteran field operatives who had spent much of their careers working under a.s.sumed ident.i.ties. And they alone would suffer the consequences were anything to go wrong.

"It's only France," said Navot.

"Yes," said Gabriel darkly. "Nothing ever happens in France."

There was a silence.

"Well?" Navot asked finally.

"I'd like to give her one more test."

"She's been tested. And she's pa.s.sed every one with flying colors."

"Let's get her out of her comfort zone."

"A murder board?"

"A peer review," offered Gabriel.

"How rough?"

"Rough enough to expose any flaws."

"Who do you want to handle it?"

"Yaakov."

"Yaakov would scare me."

"That's the point, Uzi."

"How soon do you want to do it?"

Gabriel looked at his wrist.w.a.tch. Navot reached for the phone.

They came for her in the hour before dawn, when she was dreaming of the lemon groves of Sumayriyya. There were three of them-or was it four? Natalie couldn't be sure; the room was in darkness, and her captors wore black. They pulled a hood over her, bound her hands with packing tape, and frog-marched her down the stairs. Outside, the gra.s.s of the garden was wet beneath her bare feet, and the air was cold and heavy with the smells of the land and the animals. They forced her into the back of a car. One sat to her left, another to her right, so that she was wedged tightly at the hips and shoulders. Frightened, she called Gabriel's name but received no reply. Nor did Dina respond to her cry for help. "Where are you taking me?" she asked, and to her surprise she addressed them in Arabic.

Like most physicians she had a good internal clock. The drive, a nausea-inducing high-speed derby, lasted between twenty-five and thirty minutes. No one spoke a word to her, even when, in Arabic, she said she was about to be sick. Finally, the car lurched to a stop. Again, she was frog-marched, this time along a dirt pathway. The air was sweet with pine and colder than in the valley, and she could see a bit of light seeping through the fabric of her hood. She was led across a threshold, into a structure of some sort, and forced into a chair. Her hands were placed upon a tabletop. Lights warmed her.

She sat in silence, trembling slightly. She sensed a presence beyond the lamps. At last, a male voice said in Arabic, "Remove the hood."

It came off in a flourish, as though she were a prized object to be unveiled to a waiting audience. She blinked several times while growing accustomed to the harsh light. Then her eyes settled upon the man seated on the opposite side of the table. He was dressed entirely in black, and a black keffiyeh obscured everything of his face except his eyes, which were black, too. The figure to his right was identically attired, as was the one to his left.

"Tell me your name," commanded the figure opposite in Arabic.

"My name is Leila Hadawi."

"Not the name the Zionists gave you!" he snapped. "Your real name. Your Jewish name."

"It is my real name. I'm Leila Hadawi. I grew up in France, but I am from Sumayriyya."

But he would have none of it-not her name, not her professed ethnicity, not her faith, not the story of her childhood in France, at least not all of it. He had in his possession a file, which he said had been prepared by the security department of his organization, though he did not say precisely what organization that was, only that its members emulated the original followers of Muhammad, peace be upon him. The file purported to prove that her real name was Natalie Mizrahi, that she was obviously Jewish, that she was an agent of the Israeli secret intelligence service who had been trained at a farmhouse in the Valley of Jezreel. She told him that she had never, nor would she ever, set foot in Israel-and the only training she had received was at the Universite Paris-Sud, where she had studied medicine.

"Lies," said the man in black.

Which left no option, he added, but to start from the beginning. Under his relentless interrogation, Natalie's sense of time deserted her. For all she knew a week had pa.s.sed since her sleep had been interrupted. Her head ached for want of caffeine, the bright lights were intolerable. Even so, her answers flowed from her effortlessly, as water flows downhill. She was not remembering something she had been taught, she was remembering something she already knew. She was Natalie no more. She was Leila. Leila from Sumayriyya. Leila who loved Ziad. Leila who wanted vengeance.

Finally, the man on the other side of the table closed his file. He looked toward the figure on his right, then the left. Then he unwound the headscarf to reveal his face. He was the one with pockmarked cheeks. The other two men removed their keffiyehs, too. The one on the left was the forgettable wispy-haired man. The one on the right was the one with pale bloodless skin and eyes like ice. All three of the men were smiling, but Natalie was suddenly weeping. Gabriel approached her quietly from behind and placed a hand on her shoulder as it convulsed. "It's all right, Leila," he said softly. "It's all over now."

But it wasn't over, she thought. It was only beginning.

There exists in Tel Aviv and its suburbs a series of Office safe flats known as jump sites. They are places where, by doctrine and tradition, operatives spend their final night before departing Israel for missions abroad. Three days after Natalie's mock interrogation, she drove with Dina to a luxury apartment overlooking the sea in Tel Aviv. Her new clothing, all of it purchased in France, lay neatly folded atop the bed. Next to it was a French pa.s.sport, a French driver's permit, French credit cards, bank cards, and various medical certificates and accreditations in the name of Leila Hadawi. There were also several photographs of the apartment she would inhabit in the heavily immigrant Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers.

"I was hoping for a cozy little garret on the Left Bank."

"I understand. But when one is fis.h.i.+ng," said Dina, "it is best to go where the fish are."

Natalie made only one request; she wanted to spend the night with her mother and father. The request was denied. Much time and effort had been expended transforming her into Leila Hadawi. To expose her, even briefly, to her previous life was deemed far too risky. An experienced field officer could move freely between the thin membrane separating his real life from the life he led in service of his country. But newly trained recruits such as Natalie were often fragile flowers that wilted when exposed to direct sunlight.

And so she pa.s.sed that evening, her last in Israel, with no company other than the melancholy woman who had wrenched her from the refuge of her old life. To occupy herself, she packed and repacked her suitcase three times. Then, after a carryout dinner of lamb and rice, she switched on the television and watched an episode of an Egyptian soap opera that she had grown fond of in Nahalal. Afterward, she sat on the balcony watching the pedestrians and the cyclists and the skateboarders flowing along the promenade in the cool windy night. It was a remarkable sight, the dream of the early Zionists fully realized, yet Natalie regarded the contented Jews beneath her with Leila's resentful eye. They were occupiers, children and grandchildren of colonialists who had stolen the land of a weaker people. They had to be defeated, driven out, just as they had driven Leila's ancestors from Sumayriyya on a May evening in 1948.

Her anger followed her to bed. If she slept that night, she did not remember it, and in the morning she was bleary-eyed and on edge. She dressed in Leila's clothing and covered her hair with Leila's favorite emerald-colored hijab. Downstairs, a taxi was waiting. Not a real taxi, but an Office taxi driven by one of the security agents who used to follow her on her runs in Nahalal. He took her directly to Ben Gurion Airport, where she was thoroughly searched and questioned at length before being allowed to proceed to her gate. Leila did not take offense at her treatment. As a veiled Muslim woman she was used to the special attention of security screeners.

Inside the terminal she made her way to the gate, oblivious to the hostile stares of the Israeli traveling public, and when her flight was called she filed dutifully onto the plane. Her seatmate was the gray-eyed man with bloodless skin, and across the aisle were her pockmarked interrogator and his wispy-haired accomplice. Not one of them dared to look at the veiled woman traveling alone. She was suddenly exhausted. She told the flight attendant, demurely, that she did not wish to be disturbed. Then, as Israel sank away beneath her, she closed her eyes and dreamed of Sumayriyya.

23.

AUBERVILLIERS, FRANCE.

TEN DAYS LATER THE Clinique Jacques Chirac opened to muted fanfare in the northern Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers. The minister of health attended the ceremony, as did a popular Ivory Coastborn footballer, who cut a tricolor ribbon to the rain-dampened applause of several community activists a.s.sembled for the occasion. French television ran a brief story about the opening on that evening's main newscast. Le Monde, in a short editorial, called it a promising start.

The goal of the clinic was to improve the lives of those who resided in a troubled suburb where crime and unemployment were high and government services scarce. Officially, the Ministry of Health oversaw the clinic's day-to-day operations, but in point of fact it was a cla.s.sified joint undertaking by the ministry and Paul Rousseau's Alpha Group. The clinic's administrator, a man named Roland Girard, was an Alpha Group operative, as was the shapely receptionist. The six nurses and two of the three physicians, however, knew nothing of the clinic's split personality. All were employed by France's state-run hospital system, and all had been chosen for the project after a rigorous screening process. None had ever made the acquaintance of Dr. Leila Hadawi. Nor had they attended medical school with her or worked at her previous places of employment.

The clinic was located on the Avenue Victor Hugo, between an all-night laundry and a tabac frequented by members of a local Moroccan drug gang. Plane trees shaded the pavement outside the clinic's modest entrance, and above it rose three additional floors of a handsome old building with a tan exterior and shuttered windows. But behind the avenue soared the giant gray slabs of the cites, the public housing estates that warehoused the poor and the foreign born, mainly from Africa and the former French colonies of the Maghreb. This was the part of France where the poets and the travel writers rarely ventured, the France of crime, immigrant resentment, and, increasingly, radical Islam. Half the banlieue's residents had been born outside France, three-quarters of the young. Alienated, marginalized, they were ISIS recruits in waiting.

On the first day of the clinic's operation, it was the subject of mild, if skeptical, curiosity. But by the next morning it was receiving a steady stream of patients. For many, it was their first visit to a doctor in a long time. And for a few, especially the recent arrivals from the interior of Morocco and Algeria, it was their first visit to a physician ever. Not surprisingly, they felt most comfortable with the medecine generaliste who wore modest clothing and a hijab and could speak to them in their native language.

She tended to their sore throats and their chronic coughs and their a.s.sorted aches and pains and the illnesses they had carried from the third world to the first. And she told a mother of forty-four that the source of her severe headaches was a tumor of the brain, and a man of sixty that his lifetime of smoking had resulted in a case of untreatable lung cancer. And when they were too sick to visit the clinic, she cared for them in their cramped flats in the housing estates. In the p.i.s.s-scented stairwells and vile courts where trash swirled in tiny cyclones of wind, the boys and young men of Aubervilliers eyed her warily. On those rare occasions they spoke to her, they addressed her formally and with respect. The women and the teenage girls, however, were socially free to cross-examine her to their hearts' content. The housing estates were nothing if not gossipy, s.e.xually segregated Arab villages, and Dr. Leila Hadawi was something new and interesting. They wanted to know where she was from, about her family, and about her medical studies. Mainly, they were curious as to why, at the advanced age of thirty-four, she was unmarried. At this, she would give a wistful smile. The impression she left was of unrequited love-or, perhaps, a love lost to the violence and chaos of the modern Middle East.

Unlike the other members of the staff, she actually resided in the community she served, not in the crime factories of the housing estates but in a comfortable little apartment in a quartier of the commune where the population was working cla.s.s and native born. There was a quaint cafe across the street where, when not at the clinic, she was often seen drinking coffee at a sidewalk table. Never wine or beer, for wine and beer were haram. Her hijab clearly offended some of her fellow citizens; she could hear it in the edge of a waiter's remark and see it in the hostile stares of the pa.s.sersby. She was the other, a stranger. It fed her resentment of the land of her birth and fueled her quiet rage. For Dr. Leila Hadawi, a servant of the French national medical bureaucracy, was not the woman she appeared to be. She had been radicalized by the wars in Iraq and Syria and by the occupation of Palestine by the Jews. And she had been radicalized, too, by the death of Ziad al-Masri, her only love, at the hands of the Jordanian Mukhabarat. She was a black widow, a ticking time bomb. She confessed this to no one, only to her computer. It was her secret sharer.

They had given her a list of Web sites during her final days at the farmhouse in Nahalal, a farmhouse that, try as she might, she could no longer quite conjure in her memory. Some of the sites were on the ordinary Internet; others, in the murky sewers of the dark net. All dealt with issues related to Islam and jihadism. She read blogs, dropped into chat rooms for Muslim women, listened to sermons from extremist preachers, and watched videos that no person, believer or unbeliever, should ever watch. Bombings, beheadings, burnings, crucifixions: a b.l.o.o.d.y day in the life of ISIS. Leila did not find the images objectionable, but several sent Natalie, who was used to the sight of blood, running into her bathroom to be violently sick. She used an onion routing application popular with jihadists that allowed her to wander the virtual caliphate without detection. She referred to herself as Umm Ziad. It was her nom de plume, her nom de guerre.

It did not take long for Dr. Hadawi to attract attention. She had no shortage of cybersuitors. There was the woman from Hamburg who had a cousin of marrying age. There was the Egyptian cleric who engaged her in a prolonged discussion on the subject of apostasy. And then there was the keeper of a particularly vile blog who knocked on her virtual door while she was watching the beheading of a captured Christian. The blogger was an ISIS recruiter. He asked her to travel to Syria to help build the caliphate.

I'D LOVE TO, Leila typed, BUT MY WORK IS HERE IN FRANCE. I'M CARING FOR OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN THE LAND OF THE KUFAR. MY PATIENTS NEED ME.

YOU ARE A DOCTOR?.

YES.

WE NEED DOCTORS IN THE CALIPHATE. WOMEN, TOO.

The exchange gave her an electrical charge, a lightness in her fingertips, a blurriness of her vision, that was akin to the first blush of desire. She did not report it; there was no need. They were monitoring her computer and her phone. They were watching her, too. She saw them sometimes on the streets of Aubervilliers-the pockmarked tough who had conducted her final interrogation in the land of the Jews, the man with the forgettable face, the man with eyes like winter. She ignored them, as she had been trained to do, and went about her business. She tended to her patients, she gossiped with the women of the housing estates, she averted her eyes piously in the presence of boys and young men, and at night, alone in her apartment, she wandered the rooms of the house of extremist Islam, hidden behind her protective software and her vague pen name. She was a black widow, a ticking time bomb.

Approximately twenty miles separate the banlieue of Aubervilliers from the village of Seraincourt, but they are a world apart. There are no halal markets or mosques in Seraincourt, no looming housing blocks filled with immigrants from hostile lands, and French is the only language one hears on its narrow streets or in the bra.s.serie next to the ancient stone church in the village square. It is a foreigner's idealized vision of France, France as it once was, France no more.

Just beyond the village, in a river valley of manicured farms and groomed woods, stood Chteau Treville. s.h.i.+elded from prying eyes by twelve-foot walls, it had a heated swimming pool, two clay tennis courts, fourteen ornate bedrooms, and thirty-two acres of gardens where, if one were so inclined, one could pace with worry. Housekeeping, the Office division that acquired and maintained safe properties, was on good, if entirely deceptive, terms with the chteau's owner. The deal-six months, with an option to extend-was concluded with a swift exchange of faxes and a wire transfer of several thousand well-disguised euros. The team moved in the same day that Dr. Leila Hadawi settled into her modest little flat in Aubervilliers. Most stayed only long enough to drop their bags and then headed straight into the field.

They had operated in France many times before, even in tranquil Seraincourt, but never with the knowledge and approval of the French security service. They a.s.sumed the DGSI was looking over their shoulders at all times and listening to their every word, and so they behaved accordingly. Inside the chteau they spoke a terse form of colloquial Office Hebrew that was beyond the reach of mere translators. And on the streets of Aubervilliers, where they kept a vigilant watch on Natalie, they did their best not to betray family secrets to their French allies, who were watching her, too. Rousseau acquired an apartment directly opposite Natalie's where rotating teams of operatives, one Israeli, the other French, maintained a constant presence. At first, the atmosphere in the flat was chilly. But gradually, as the two teams became better acquainted, the mood warmed. For better or worse, they were in this fight together now. All past sins were forgiven. Civility was the new order of the day.

The one member of the team who never set foot in the observation post or on the streets of Aubervilliers was its founder and guiding light. His movements were unpredictable, Paris one day, Brussels or London the next, Amman when he needed to consult with Fareed Barakat, Jerusalem when he needed the touch of his wife and children. Whenever he slipped into Chteau Treville, he would sit up late with Eli Lavon, his oldest friend in the world, his brother-in-arms from Operation Wrath of G.o.d, and scour the watch reports for signs of trouble. Natalie was his masterpiece. He had recruited her, trained her, and hung her in a gallery of religious madness for the monsters to see. The viewing period was nearing its end. Next would come the sale. The auction would be rigged, for Gabriel had no intention of selling her to anyone but Saladin.

And so it was that, two months to the day after the Clinique Jacques Chirac opened its doors, Gabriel found himself in Paul Rousseau's office on the rue de Grenelle. The first phase of the operation, declared Gabriel, batting away another onslaught of pipe smoke, was over. It was time to put their a.s.set into play. Under the rules of the Franco-Israeli operational accord, the decision to proceed was supposed to be a joint one. But the a.s.set was Gabriel's, and therefore the decision was his, too. He spent that evening at the safe house in Seraincourt in the company of his team, and in the morning, with Mikhail at his side and Eli Lavon watching his back, he boarded a train at the Gare du Nord and headed for Brussels. Rousseau made no attempt to follow them. This was the part of the operation he didn't want to know about. This was the part where things would get rough.

24.

RUE DU LOMBARD, BRUSSELS.