Gabriel Allon: The Black Widow Part 25

"You are unmarried," he declared suddenly.

"Yes," answered Natalie truthfully.

"You were engaged once?"

"Almost."

"To Ziad al-Masri? A brother who died in Jordanian custody?"

She nodded slowly.

"Where did you meet him?"

"At Paris-Sud."

"And what was he studying?"

"Electronics."

"Yes, I know." He laid the pages of her file on the carpet. "We have many supporters in Jordan. Many of our brothers used to be Jordanian citizens. And none of them," he said, "have ever heard of anyone named Ziad al-Masri."

"Ziad was never politically active in Jordan," she answered with far more calm that she might have thought possible. "He became radicalized only after he moved to Europe."

"He was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir?"

"Not formally."

"That would explain why none of our brothers from Hizb ut-Tahrir have heard of him, either." He regarded Natalie calmly while another waterfall of sweat sluiced down her back. "You're not drinking your tea," he pointed out.

"That's because you're making me nervous."

"That was my intention." His remark provoked restrained laughter among the three men seated behind him. He waited for it to subside before continuing. "For a long time the Americans and their friends in Europe did not take us seriously. They belittled us, called us silly names. But now they realize we are a threat to them, and they are trying very hard to penetrate us. The British are the worst. Every time they catch a British Muslim trying to travel to the caliphate, they try to turn him into a spy. We always find them very quickly. Sometimes we play them back against the British. And sometimes," he said with a shrug, "we just kill them."

He allowed a silence to hang heavily over the sweltering room. It was Natalie who broke it.

"I didn't ask to join you," she said. "You asked me."

"No, Jalal asked you to come to Syria, not me. But I am the one who will determine whether you will stay." He gathered up the pages of the file. "I would like to hear your story from the beginning, Leila. I find that most helpful."

"I was born-"

"No," he said, cutting her off. "I said the beginning."

Confused, she said nothing. The Iraqi was looking down at her file again.

"It says here that your family was from a place called Sumayriyya."

"My father's family," she said.

"Where is it?"

"It was in the Western Galilee. It's not there anymore."

"Tell me about it," he said. "Tell me everything."

Beneath her veil, Natalie closed her eyes. She saw herself walking through a field of thorn bush and toppled stones, next to a man of medium height whose face and name she could no longer recall. He spoke to her now, as if from the bottom of a well, and his words became hers. They grew bananas and melons in Sumayriyya, the sweetest melons in all of Palestine. They irrigated their fields with water from an ancient aqueduct and buried their dead in a cemetery not far from the mosque. Sumayriyya was paradise on earth, Sumayriyya was an Eden. And then, on a night in May 1948, the Jews came up the coast road in a convoy with their headlamps blazing, and Sumayriyya ceased to exist.

In the Op Center of King Saul Boulevard there is a chair reserved for the chief. No one else is allowed to sit in it. No one else dares to even touch it. Throughout that long tense day it groaned and buckled beneath the bulk of Uzi Navot. Gabriel had remained constantly at his side, sometimes in a deputy's chair, sometimes nervously on his feet, a hand pressed to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side.

Both men, like everyone else in the Op Center, had eyes only for the main video display screen. On it was an overhead satellite image of a large house in a village near the Syrian border. In the courtyard of the house, several men lounged in the shade of date palms. There were two other SUVs in the court. One had ferried a woman from central Raqqa; the other had brought four men from the Sunni Triangle of Iraq. Gabriel had sent along the coordinates of the house to Adrian Carter at CIA Headquarters, and Carter had dispatched a drone from a secret base in Turkey. Occasionally, the aircraft pa.s.sed through the Ofek 10's image, circling lazily twelve thousand feet above the target, piloted by a kid in a trailer in another desert on the other side of the world.

Adrian Carter had brought additional resources to bear on the target as well. Specifically, he had instructed the NSA to gather as much cellular data from the house as possible. The NSA had identified no fewer than twelve phones present, one of which had been previously linked to a suspected senior ISIS commander named Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti, a former colonel from Iraq's military intelligence service. Gabriel suspected it was al-Tikriti who was questioning his agent. He felt sick to his stomach but took small comfort in the fact that he had prepared her well. Even so, he would have gladly taken her place. Perhaps, thought Gabriel, looking at Uzi Navot seated calmly in his designated chair, he was not cut out for the burden of command after all.

The day limped slowly past. The two SUVs remained in the courtyard, the jihadis sat in the shade of the date palms. Then the shade evaporated with the setting of the sun, and fires flared in the darkness. The Ofek 10 switched over to infrared mode. At nine that evening it detected several human heat signatures emerging from the house. Four of the signatures entered one of the SUVs. A fifth, a woman, entered the other. The drone tracked one of the vehicles to Mosul; the Ofek 10 watched the second as it made the return trip to Raqqa. There it stopped outside an apartment building near al-Rasheed Park, and a single heat signature, a woman, emerged from the back. She entered the apartment house shortly before midnight and disappeared from sight.

In a room on the second floor of the building, a thin, wizened Saudi cleric was lecturing several dozen spellbound fighters on the role they would play, inshallah, in bringing about the end of days. The time was drawing near, he declared, nearer than they might think. Drained by the arduous interrogation, blinded by exhaustion and her abaya, Natalie could think of no reason to doubt the old preacher's prophecy.

The stairwell, as usual, was in pitch darkness. She counted to herself softly in Arabic as she climbed, fourteen steps per flight, two flights per floor. Her room was on the sixth, twelve paces from the stairwell. Entering, she closed the door soundlessly behind her. A shaft of moonlight stretched from the single window to the female form that lay curled on the floor. Silently, Natalie removed her abaya and made a bed for herself. But as she pillowed her head, the female form on the other side of the room stirred and sat up. "Miranda?" asked Natalie, but there was no reply other than the striking of a match. Its flame touched the wick of an olive oil lamp. Warm light filled the room.

Natalie sat up, too, expecting to see a set of delicate Celtic features. Instead, she found herself staring into a pair of wide hypnotic eyes of hazel and copper. "Who are you?" she asked in Arabic, but her new roommate replied in French. "My name is Safia Bourihane," she said, extending her hand. "Welcome to the caliphate."

38.

PALMYRA, SYRIA.

THE CAMP WAS JUST OUTSIDE the ancient city of Palmyra, not far from the notorious Tadmor desert prison where the ruler's father had cast those who dared to oppose him. Before the civil war it was an outpost of the Syrian military in the Homs Governorate, but in the spring of 2015, ISIS had captured it largely intact, with scarcely a fight. The group had looted and destroyed many of Palmyra's astonishing ruins, as well as the prison, but the camp it had preserved. Surrounded by a twelve-foot wall topped with spirals of concertina wire, there were barracks for five hundred, a mess hall, recreation and meeting rooms, a gymnasium, and a diesel generator that provided air conditioning in the heat of the day and light at night. All the old Syrian military signs had been removed, and the black flag of ISIS billowed and snapped above the central courtyard. The installation's old name was never spoken. Graduates referred to it as Camp Saladin.

Natalie traveled there by SUV the next day, in the company of Safia Bourihane. Four months had pa.s.sed since the attack on the Weinberg Center in Paris; in that time Safia had become a jihadist icon. Poems celebrated her, streets and squares bore her name, young girls sought to emulate her feats. In a world where death was celebrated, ISIS expended considerable effort to keep Safia alive. She moved constantly between a chain of safe houses in Syria and Iraq, always under armed escort. During her one and only appearance in an ISIS propaganda video, her face had been veiled. She did not use the telephone, she never touched a computer. Natalie took comfort in the fact she had been allowed into Safia's presence. It suggested she had come through her interrogation with no taint of suspicion. She was one of them now.

Safia had clearly grown accustomed to her exalted status. In France she had been a second-cla.s.s citizen with limited career prospects, but in the upside-down world of the caliphate she was a celebrity. She was quite obviously wary of Natalie, for Natalie represented a potential threat to her standing. For her part, Natalie was content to play the role of terrorist upstart. Safia Bourihane was the charcoal sketch upon which Dr. Leila Hadawi was based. Leila Hadawi admired Safia, but Natalie Mizrahi felt sick being in her presence and, given the chance, would have gladly pumped a hypodermic full of poison into her veins. Inshallah, she thought as the SUV sped across the Syrian desert.

Safia's Arabic was rudimentary at best. Therefore, they pa.s.sed the journey conversing quietly in French, each beneath the private tent of her abaya. They spoke of their upbringings and found they had little in common; as a child of educated Palestinians, Leila Hadawi had lived far differently than the child of Algerian laborers from the banlieues. Islam was their only bridge, but Safia had almost no understanding of the tenets of jihad or even the basics of Islamic practice. She admitted that she missed the taste of French wine. Mainly, she was curious about how she was remembered in the country she had attacked-not the France of the city centers and country villages, but the Arab France of the banlieues. Natalie told her, truthfully, that she was spoken of fondly in the cites of Aubervilliers. This pleased Safia. One day, she said, she hoped to return.

"To France?" asked Natalie incredulously.

"Yes, of course."

"You're the most wanted woman in the country. It isn't possible."

"That's because France is still ruled by the French, but Saladin says it will soon be part of the caliphate."

"You've met him?"

"Saladin? Yes, I've met him."

"Where?" asked Natalie casually.

"I'm not sure. They blindfolded me during the trip."

"How long ago was it?"

"It was a few weeks after my operation. He wanted to personally congratulate me."

"They say he's Iraqi."

"I'm not sure. My Arabic isn't good enough to tell the difference between a Syrian and an Iraqi."

"What's he like?"

"Very large, powerful, wonderful eyes. He is everything you would expect. Inshallah, you'll get to meet him someday."

Safia's arrival at the camp was an occasion for celebratory gunfire and cries of "Allahu Akbar!" Natalie, the new recruit, was an afterthought. She was a.s.signed a private room-the former quarters of a junior Syrian officer-and that evening, after prayers, she took her first meal in the communal dining hall. The women ate apart from the men, behind a black curtain. The food was deplorable but plentiful: rice, bread, roasted fowl of some sort, a gray-brown stew of cartilaginous meat. Despite their segregation, the women were required to wear their abayas during mealtime, which made eating a challenge. Natalie ate ravenously of the bread and rice, but her training as a physician informed her decision to avoid the meat. The woman to her left was a silent Saudi called Bushra. To her right was Selma, a loquacious Tunisian. Selma had come to the caliphate for a husband, but her husband had been killed fighting the Kurds and now she wanted vengeance. It was her wish to be a suicide bomber. She was nineteen years old.

After dinner there was a program. A cleric preached, a fighter read a poem of his own composition. Afterward, Safia was "interviewed" on stage by a clever British Muslim who worked in ISIS's promotion and marketing department. That night the desert thundered with coalition air strikes. Alone in her room, Natalie prayed for deliverance.

Her terrorist education commenced after breakfast the next morning when she was driven into the desert for weapons training-a.s.sault rifles, pistols, rocket launchers, grenades. She returned to the desert each and every morning, even after her instructors declared her proficient. They were no wild-eyed jihadis, the instructors; they were exclusively Iraqi, all former soldiers and battle-hardened veterans of the Sunni insurgency. They had fought the Americans largely to a draw in Iraq and wanted nothing more than to fight them again, on the plains of northern Syria, in a place called Dabiq. The Americans and their allies-the armies of Rome, in the lexicon of ISIS-had to be poked and prodded and stirred into a rage. The men from Iraq had a plan to do just that, and the students at the camp were their stick.

During the heat of midday, Natalie repaired to the air-conditioned rooms of the camp for lessons in bomb a.s.sembly and secure communication. She also had to endure long lectures on the pleasures of the afterlife, lest she be chosen for a suicide mission. Time and again her Iraqi instructors asked whether she was willing to die for the caliphate, and without hesitation Natalie said she was. Soon, she was made to wear a heavy suicide vest during her weapons training, and she was taught how to arm the device and detonate it using a trigger concealed in her palm. The first time the instructor ordered her to press the detonator, Natalie's thumb hovered numb and frozen above the switch. "Yalla," he beseeched her. "It's not going to really explode." Natalie closed her eyes and squeezed the detonator. "Boom," whispered the instructor. "And now you are on your way to paradise."

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 cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances of their travel to the caliphate, the status of their pa.s.sports. Among those who came to see her was Safia Bourihane. She was several pounds underweight, mildly depressed, and required eyegla.s.ses. 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 Ma.s.soud 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 Ma.s.soud 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 Ma.s.soud.

"It isn't necessary."

"It is. You're far too valuable to go walking alone."

The escort Ma.s.soud 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."