Gabriel Allon: The Black Widow Part 14

PART TWO.

ONE OF US.

21.

NAHALAL, ISRAEL.

NEXT MORNING THE STAFF OF Hada.s.sah Medical Center was informed via e-mail that Dr. Natalie Mizrahi would be taking an extended leave of absence. The announcement was thirty words in length and a masterpiece of bureaucratic murk. No reason was given for the sabbatical, no date of return was mentioned. This left the staff with no option but to speculate about the reasons for Natalie's sudden departure, a pursuit they engaged in freely, for it gave them something to talk about other than the stabbings. There were rumors of a serious illness, rumors of an emotional breakdown, rumors of a homesick return to France. After all, said one sage from cardiology, why in the world would anyone with a French pa.s.sport actually choose to live in Israel at a time like this? Ayelet Malkin, who considered herself Natalie's closest friend at the hospital, found all these theories inadequate. She knew Natalie to be of sound mind and body and had heard her speak many times of her relief to be in Israel, where she could live as a Jew without fear of a.s.sault or rebuke. Moreover, she had worked a twenty-four-hour shift with Natalie that week, and the two women had shared a gossipy dinner during which Natalie made no mention of any pending leave of absence. She thought the entire thing reeked of official mischief. Like many Israelis, Ayelet had a relative, an uncle, who was involved in secret government work. He came and went without warning and never spoke of his job or his travels. Ayelet decided that Natalie, fluent in three languages, had been recruited as a spy. Or perhaps, she thought, she had always been one.

While Ayelet had stumbled upon something resembling the truth, she was not technically correct, as Natalie was to learn on her first full day in Nahalal. She was not going to be a spy. Spies, she was told, are human sources who are recruited to spy against their own intelligence service, government, terrorist organization, international body, or commercial enterprise. Sometimes they spied for money, sometimes for s.e.x or respect, and sometimes they spied because they were coerced, owing to some blemish in their personal life. In Natalie's case, there was no coercion, only persuasion. She was from that point forward a special employee of the Office. As such, she would be governed by the same rules and strictures that applied to all those who worked directly for the service. She could not divulge secrets to foreign governments. She could not write a memoir about her work without approval. She could not discuss that work with anyone outside the Office, including members of her family. Her employment was to commence immediately and would terminate upon the completion of her mission. However, if Natalie wished to remain with the Office, suitable work would be found for her. A sum of five hundred thousand shekels was placed in a bank account bearing her real name. In addition, she would be paid the equivalent of her monthly salary from Hada.s.sah. An Office courier would look after her apartment during her absence. In the event of her death, two million shekels would be paid to her parents.

The paperwork, briefings, and stern warnings consumed the entire first day. On the second her formal education commenced. She felt rather like a graduate student in a private university of one. In the mornings, immediately following breakfast, she learned techniques for replacing her own ident.i.ty with an a.s.sumed one-tradecraft, they called it. After a light lunch she embarked on Palestinian studies, followed by Islamic and jihadist studies. No one ever referred to her as Natalie. She was Leila, no family name, only Leila. The instructors spoke to her only in Arabic and referred to themselves as Abdul, Muhammad, or Ahmed. One two-person team of briefers called themselves Abdul and Abdul. Natalie called them Double-A for short.

The last hour of daylight was Natalie's exclusively. With her head spinning with Islam and jihad, she would set out for training runs along the dusty farm roads. She was never permitted to go alone; two armed security guards followed her always in a dark-green ATV. Often she returned to the house to find Gabriel waiting, and they would walk a mile or two through the perfumed twilight of the valley. His Arabic was not sufficiently fluent for prolonged conversation, so he addressed her in French. He spoke to her about her training and her studies but never about his childhood in the valley or its remarkable history. As far as Leila was concerned, the valley represented an act of colonial theft and dispossession. "Look at it," he would say, pointing toward the Arab village on the hillock. "Imagine how they must feel when they see the accomplishments of the Jews. Imagine their anger. Imagine their shame. It is your anger, Leila. It is your shame."

As her training progressed, she learned techniques for determining whether she was being followed. Or whether her flat or office was bugged. Or whether the person she a.s.sumed to be her best friend, or her lover, was in fact her worst enemy. The teaching team of Abdul and Abdul instructed her to a.s.sume she was being followed, observed, and listened to at all times. This was not a problem, they said, so long as she remained faithful to her cover. A proper cover was like a shield. The typical undercover Office field agent spent far more time maintaining his cover than actually gathering intelligence. Cover, they told her, was everything.

During the second week at the farm, her Palestinian studies took a decidedly harder turn. The entire Zionist enterprise, she was told, was based upon a myth-the myth that Palestine was a land without a people waiting for a people without a land. In fact, in 1881, the year before the first Zionist settlers arrived, the population of Palestine was 475,000. The vast majority were Muslim and were concentrated in the Judean Hills, the Galilee, and the other portions of the land that were then habitable. Roughly that same number of people were driven into exile during al-Nakba, the catastrophe of Israel's founding in 1948. And still another wave fled their villages in the West Bank after the Zionist conquest of 1967. They languished in the refugee camps-Khan Yunis, Shatila, Ein al-Hilweh, Yarmouk, Balata, Jenin, Tulkarm, and dozens more-and dreamed of their olive groves and lemon trees. Many kept the deeds to property and homes. Some even carried keys to front doors. This unhealed wound was the seedbed of the Arab world's grief. The wars, the suffering, the lack of economic progress, the despotism-all this was the fault of Israel.

"Spare me," groaned Natalie.

"Who said this?" demanded one of the Abduls, a cadaverous-looking creature, pale as milk, who was never without a cigarette or a cup of tea. "Was it Natalie or was it Leila? Because Leila does not question these a.s.sertions. Leila knows in her bones they are true. Leila drank it with her mother's milk. Leila heard it from the lips of her kin. Leila believes the Jews to be descendants of apes and pigs. She knows they use the blood of Palestinian children to make their matzo. She thinks they are an intrinsically evil people, children of the devil."

Her Islamic studies grew more rigid, too. After completing a crash course in the basics of ritual and belief, Natalie's instructors immersed her in the concepts of Islamism and jihad. She read Sayyid Qutb, the dissident Egyptian writer regarded as the founder of modern Islamism, and slogged her way through Ibn Taymiyyah, the thirteenth-century Islamic theologian who, according to many experts in the field, was the wellspring for it all. She read Bin Laden and Zawahiri and listened to hours of sermons by a Yemeni-American cleric who had been killed in a drone strike. She watched videos of roadside bombings of American forces in Iraq and surfed some of the more salacious Islamic Web sites, which her instructors referred to as jihadi p.o.r.n. Before switching off her bedside lamp at night, she always read a few lines of Mahmoud Darwish. My roots were entrenched before the birth of time . . . In dreams she walked through an Eden of olive groves and lemon trees.

The technique was something akin to brainwashing, and slowly it began to work. Natalie packed away her old ident.i.ty and life and became Leila. She did not know her family name; her legend, as they called it, would be given to her last, after a proper foundation had been poured and a frame constructed. In word and deed, she became more pious, more outwardly Islamic. In the evenings, when she ran along the dusty farm roads, she covered her arms and legs. And whenever her instructors were talking about Palestine or Islam, she wore her hijab. She experimented with several different ways of securing it but settled on a simple two-pin method that showed no hair. She thought she looked pretty in the hijab, but didn't like the way it focused attention on her nose and mouth. A partial facial veil would solve the problem, but it wasn't consistent with Leila's profile. Leila was an educated woman, a doctor, caught between East and West, present and past. She walked a tightrope that stretched between the House of Islam and the House of War, that part of the world where the faith was not yet dominant. Leila was conflicted. She was an impressionable girl.

They taught her the basics of martial arts but nothing of guns, for knowledge of weaponry didn't fit Leila's profile, either. Then, three weeks into her stay at the farm, they dressed her from head to toe as a Muslim woman and took her for a heavily guarded test drive in Tayibe, the largest Arab city in the so-called Triangle. Next she visited Ramallah, the seat of Palestinian authority in the West Bank, and a few days later, and on a warm Friday in mid-May, she attended Friday prayer services at the al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. It was a tense day-the Israelis forbade young men from entering the n.o.ble Sanctuary-and afterward there was a violent protest. Natalie briefly became separated from her undercover security guards. Eventually, they dragged her, choking on tear gas, into the back of a car and spirited her back to the farm.

"How did it make you feel?" asked Gabriel that evening, as they walked through the cool evening air of the valley. By then, Natalie was no longer running, for running didn't fit Leila's profile, either.

"It made me angry," she said without hesitation.

"At whom?"

"The Israelis, of course."

"Good," he replied. "That's why I did it."

"Did what?"

"Provoked a demonstration in the Old City for your benefit."

"You did that?"

"Trust me, Natalie. It really wasn't that difficult."

He didn't come to Nahalal the next day or for five days after that. Only later would Natalie learn that he had been in Paris and Amman preparing for her introduction into the field-operational spadework, he called it. When finally he returned to the farm it was at noon on a warm and breezy Thursday, as Natalie was becoming acquainted with some of the unique features of her new mobile phone. He informed her that they were going to take another field trip, just the two of them, and instructed her to dress as Leila. She chose a green hijab with embroidered edges, a white blouse that concealed the shape of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and hips, and long pants that left only the insteps of her feet visible. Her pumps were Bruno Magli. Leila, it seemed, had a soft spot for Italian footwear.

"Where are we going?"

"North," was all he said.

"No bodyguards."

"Not today," he answered. "Today I am free."

The car was a rather ordinary Korean sedan, which he drove very fast and with an uncharacteristic abandon.

"You seem to be enjoying yourself," observed Natalie.

"It's been a long time since I've been behind the wheel of a car. The world looks different from the backseat of an armored SUV."

"How so?"

"I'm afraid that's cla.s.sified."

"But I'm one of you now."

"Not quite," he answered, "but we're getting close."

They were the last words he spoke for several minutes. Natalie slipped on a pair of stylish sungla.s.ses and watched a sepia-toned version of Acre slide past her window. A few miles to the north was Lohamei HaGeta'ot, a kibbutz founded by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. It was a tidy little farming community of neat houses, green lawns, and regular streets lined with cypress. The sight of an obviously Israeli man driving a car in which a veiled woman was the sole pa.s.senger elicited glances of only mild curiosity.

"What's that?" asked Natalie, pointing toward a white conical structure rising above the rooftops of the kibbutz.

"It's called Yad Layeled. It's a memorial for the children killed in the Holocaust." There was a curious note of detachment in his voice. "But that's not why we're here. We're here to see something much more important."

"What's that?"

"Your home."

He drove to a shopping center just north of the kibbutz and parked in a distant corner of the lot.

"How charming," said Natalie.

"This isn't it." He pointed toward a patch of uncultivated land between the car park and Highway 4. "Your home is out there, Leila. The home that was stolen from you by the Jews."

He climbed out of the car without another word and led Natalie across a service road, into a field of weeds and p.r.i.c.kly pear and broken blocks of limestone. "Welcome to Sumayriyya, Leila." He turned to face her. "Say it for me, please. Say it as though it is the most beautiful word you've ever heard. Say it as though it is the name of your mother."

"Sumayriyya," she repeated.

"Very good." He turned and watched the traffic rushing along the highway. "In May 1948 there were eight hundred people living here, all Muslims." He pointed toward the arches of an ancient aqueduct, largely intact, running along the edge of a field of soy. "That was theirs. It carried water from the springs and irrigated the fields that produced the sweetest melons and bananas in the Galilee. They buried their dead over there," he added, swinging his arm to the left. "And they prayed to Allah here"-he placed his hand on the ruins of an arched doorway-"in the mosque. They were your ancestors, Leila. This is who you are."

"'My roots were entrenched before the birth of time.'"

"You've been reading your Darwish." He walked deeper into the weeds and the ruins, closer to the highway. When he spoke again, he had to raise his voice to be heard over the whitewater rush of the traffic. "Your home was over there. Your ancestors were called Hadawi. This is your name, too. You are Leila Hadawi. You were born in France, educated in France, and you practice medicine in France. But whenever someone asks where you're from, you answer Sumayriyya."

"What happened here?"

"Al-Nakba happened here. Operation Ben-Ami happened here." He glanced at her over his shoulder. "Have your instructors mentioned Ben-Ami to you?"

"It was an operation undertaken by the Haganah in the spring of 1948 to secure the coast road between Acre and the Lebanese border, and to prepare the Western Galilee for the coming invasion by the regular Arab armies."

"Zionist lies!" he snapped. "Ben-Ami had one purpose and one purpose only, to capture the Arab villages of the Western Galilee and cast their inhabitants into exile."

"Is that the truth?"

"It doesn't matter whether it's true. It's what Leila believes. It's what she knows. You see, Leila, your grandfather, Daoud Hadawi, was there that night the Zionist forces of the Haganah came up the road from Acre in a convoy. The residents of Sumayriyya had heard what had happened in some of the other villages conquered by the Jews, so they immediately took flight. A few stayed behind but most fled to Lebanon, where they waited for the Arab armies to recapture Palestine from the Jews. And when the Arab armies were routed, the villagers of Sumayriyya became refugees, exiles. The Hadawi family lived in Ein al-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Open sewers, cinderblock houses . . . h.e.l.l on earth."

Gabriel led her past the rubble of the little houses-houses that were dynamited by the Haganah soon after Sumayriyya fell-and stopped at the edge of an orchard.

"It belonged to the people of Sumayriyya. Now it is the property of the kibbutz. Many years ago they were having trouble making the water flow through the irrigation tubes. A man appeared, an Arab who spoke a bit of Hebrew, and patiently explained how to do it. The kibbutzniks were amazed, and they asked the Arab how it was he knew how to make the water flow. And do you know what the Arab told them?"

"It was his orchard."

"No, Leila, it was your orchard."

He lapsed into silence. There was only the wind in the weeds and the rushing of the traffic along the highway. He was staring at the ruins of a house that lay scattered at his feet, the ruins of a life, the ruins of a people. He seemed angry; whether it was genuine or for Leila's benefit, Natalie could not tell.

"Why did you choose this place for me?" she asked.

"I didn't," he answered distantly. "It chose me."

"How?"

"I knew a woman from here, a woman like you."

"Was she like Natalie or Leila?"

"There is no Natalie," he said to the veiled woman standing next to him. "Not anymore."

22.

NAHALAL, ISRAEL.

WHEN NATALIE RETURNED TO NAHALAL, the volume of Darwish poetry had vanished from the bedside table in her room. In its place was a bound briefing book, thick as a ma.n.u.script and composed in French. It was the continuation of the story that Gabriel had begun amid the ruins of Sumayriyya, the story of an accomplished young woman, a doctor, who had been born in France of Palestinian lineage. Her father had lived an itinerant life typical of many stateless, educated Palestinians. After graduating from the University of Baghdad with a degree in engineering, he had worked in Iraq, Jordan, Libya, and Kuwait before finally settling in France, where he met a Palestinian woman, originally from Nablus, who worked part-time as a translator for a UN refugee agency and a small French publishing house. They had two children, a son who died in an auto accident in Switzerland at twenty-three, and a daughter whom they named after Leila Khaled, the famous freedom fighter from Black September who was the first woman to hijack an airplane. Leila's thirty-three-year existence had been rendered in the pages of the briefing book with the excruciating confessional detail of a modern memoir. Natalie had to admit it made for rather good reading. There were the slights she had suffered at school because she was an Arab and a Muslim. There was her brief experimentation with drugs. And there was an anatomically explicit description of her first s.e.xual experience, at sixteen, with a French boy named Henri, who had broken poor Leila's heart. Next to the pa.s.sage was a photograph of two teenagers, a French-looking boy and an Arab-looking girl, posed along the bal.u.s.trade of the Pont Marie in Paris.

"Who are they?" Natalie asked the cadaverous Abdul.

"They're Leila and her boyfriend Henri, of course."

"But-"

"No buts, Leila. This is the story of your life. Everything you are reading in that book actually happened to you."

As a French Jew, Natalie found she had much in common with the Palestinian woman she would soon become. Both had suffered taunts at school because of their heritage and faith, both had unhappy early s.e.xual experiences with French boys, and both had taken up the study of medicine in the autumn of 2003, Natalie at the Universite de Montpellier, one of the oldest medical schools in the world, and Leila at Universite Paris-Sud. It was a tense time in France and the Middle East. Earlier that year the Americans had invaded Iraq, inflaming the Arab world and Muslims across Western Europe. What's more, the Second Intifada was raging in the West Bank and Gaza. Everywhere it seemed Muslims were under siege. Leila was among the thousands who marched in Paris against the war in Iraq and the Israeli crackdown in the Occupied Territories. As her interest in politics grew, so did her devotion to Islam. She decided to take the veil, which shocked her secular mother. Then, a few weeks later, her mother took the veil, too.

It was during her third year of medical school that Leila met Ziad al-Masri, a Jordanian-Palestinian who was enrolled in the university's department of electronics. At first, he was a pleasant distraction from her mandatory curriculum of pharmacology, bacteriology, virology, and parasitology. But Leila soon realized she was desperately in love. Ziad was more politically active than Leila, and more religiously devout. He a.s.sociated with radical Muslims, was a member of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and attended a mosque where a cleric from Saudi Arabia regularly preached a message of jihad. Not surprisingly, Ziad's activities brought him to the attention of the French security service, which detained him twice for questioning. The interrogations only hardened Ziad's views, and against Leila's wishes he decided to travel to Iraq to join the Islamic resistance. He made it only as far as Jordan, where he was arrested and thrown into the notorious prison known as the Fingernail Factory. A month after his arrival he was dead. The dreaded Mukhabarat secret police never bothered to supply his family with an explanation.

The briefing book was not the work of a single author but the collaborative effort of three experienced intelligence officers from three capable services. Its plot was airtight, its characters well drawn. No reviewer would find fault with it, and not even the most jaded of readers would doubt its verisimilitude. Some might question the amount of extraneous detail concerning the subject's early life, but there was method in the authors' verbosity. They wanted to create in their subject a well of memory from which she could draw abundantly when the time came.

These seemingly inconsequential details-the names, the places, the schools she had attended, the layout of her family's apartment in Paris, the trips they had taken to the Alps and the sea-formed the core of Natalie's curriculum during her final days at the farm in Nahalal. And, of course, there was Ziad, Leila's lover and deceased soldier of Allah. It meant that Natalie had to memorize the details of not one life but two, for Ziad had told Leila much about his upbringing and his life in Jordan. Dina served as her primary tutor and taskmaster. She spoke of Ziad's commitment to jihad and his hatred of Israel and America as though they were n.o.ble pursuits. His path in life was to be emulated, she said, not condemned. More than anything, though, his death required vengeance.

Natalie's training as a doctor served her well, for it allowed her to absorb and retain vast amounts of information, especially numbers. She was quizzed constantly, praised for her successes, and upbraided for even the smallest mistake or hesitation. Soon, warned Dina, others would be asking the questions.

She was visited during this time by a number of observers who sat in on her lessons but did not partic.i.p.ate in any way. There was a tough-looking man with cropped dark hair and a pockmarked face. There was a bald, tweedy man who conducted himself with the air of an Oxford don. There was an elfin figure with thinning, flyaway hair whose face, try as she might, Natalie could never seem to recall. And, lastly, there was a tall, lanky man with pale bloodless skin and eyes the color of glacial ice. When Natalie asked Dina his name, she was met by a reproachful glare. "Leila would never be attracted to a non-Muslim," she admonished her pupil, "let alone a Jew. Leila is in love with the memory of Ziad. No one will ever take his place."

He came to Nahalal on two other occasions, both times accompanied by the wispy-haired man with an elusive face. They looked on judgmentally as Dina pressed Natalie on the small details of Leila's relationship with Ziad-the restaurant where they ate on their first date, the food they ordered, their first kiss, their final e-mail. Ziad had sent it from an Internet cafe in Amman while waiting for a courier to take him across the border into Iraq. The next morning he was arrested. They never spoke again.

"Do you remember what he wrote to you?" asked Dina.

"He was convinced he was being followed."

"And what did you say to him?"

"I told him I was concerned for his safety. I asked him to get on the next plane to Paris."

"No, Leila, your exact words. This is your final communication with a man you loved," Dina added, waving a piece of paper that purported to contain the text of the e-mail exchange. "Surely, you remember the last thing you said to Ziad before he was arrested."

"I said I was sick with worry. I begged him to leave."