Gabriel Allon: The Black Widow Part 29

"There she is," murmured the Israeli, as though addressing his footwear, but Bouchard didn't see her. A flight from Cairo had arrived at the same time as the flight from Athens; there were hijabs aplenty. "What color?" asked Bouchard, and the Israeli replied, "Burgundy." It was one of the few French words he knew.

Bouchard's gaze swept over the arriving pa.s.sengers, and then at once he saw her, a turning leaf afloat a rushing stream. She walked within a few feet of where they were standing, her eyes straight ahead, her chin raised slightly, pulling her little rolling suitcase. Then she slipped through the outer doors and was gone again.

Bouchard looked at the Israeli, who was suddenly smiling. His sense of relief was palpable, but Bouchard detected something else. As a Frenchman, he knew a thing or two about matters of the heart. The Israeli was in love with the woman who had just returned from Syria. Of that, Bouchard was certain.

She settled quietly into her apartment in the banlieue of Aubervilliers and resumed her old life. She was Leila before Jalal Na.s.ser had approached her at the cafe across the street, Leila before a pretty girl from Bristol had spirited her secretly to Syria. She had never witnessed the horrors of Raqqa or the tragedy of Palmyra, she had never dug shrapnel from the body of a man called Saladin. She had been to Greece, to the enchanted isle of Santorini. Yes, it had been as lovely as she imagined. No, she would probably not return. Once was quite enough.

She was surprisingly thin for a woman who had been on holiday, and her face was stained with evidence of strain and fatigue. The fatigue would not abate, for even after her return, sleep eluded her. Nor did she regain her appet.i.te. She forced herself to eat croissants and baguettes and Camembert and pasta, and quickly she regained a lost kilo or two. It did little for her appearance. She looked like a cyclist who had just completed the Tour de France-or a jihadist who had just spent a month training in Syria and Iraq.

Roland Girard, the clinic's ersatz administrator, tried to lighten her patient load, but she wouldn't hear of it. After a month in the upside-down world of the caliphate, she longed for some semblance of normality, even if it was Leila's and not her own. She discovered that she missed her patients, the inhabitants of the cites, the citizens of the other France. And for the first time, she saw the Arab world as they undoubtedly saw it, as a cruel and unforgiving place, a place with no future, a place to be fled. The vast majority of them wanted nothing more than to live in peace and care for their families. But a small minority-small in percentage, but large in number-had fallen victim to the siren song of radical Islam. Some were prepared to slaughter their fellow Frenchmen in the name of the caliphate. And some would surely have slit Dr. Hadawi's throat if they knew the secret she was hiding beneath her hijab.

Still, she was pleased to be back in their presence, and back in France. Mainly, she was curious as to why she had not been summoned for the debriefing she was secretly dreading. They were watching her; she could see them in the streets of the banlieue and in the window of the apartment opposite. She supposed they were just being cautious, for surely they were not the only ones watching. Surely, she thought, Saladin was watching her, too.

Finally, on the first Friday evening after her return, Roland Girard again invited her for an after-work coffee. Instead of heading to the center of Paris, as he had before her departure for Syria, he drove her northward into the countryside.

"Aren't you going to blindfold me?" she asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

Silent, she watched the clock and the speedometer and thought of a ruler-straight road stained with oil, stretching eastward into the desert. At the end of the road was a great house of many rooms and courts. And in one of the rooms, bandaged and infirm, was Saladin.

"Can you do me a favor, Roland?"

"Of course."

"Turn on some music."

"What kind?"

"It doesn't matter. Any kind will do."

The gate was imposing, the drive was long and gravel. At the end of it, ivied and stately, stood a large manor house. Roland Girard stopped a few meters from the front entrance. He left the engine running.

"This is as far as I'm allowed to go. I'm disappointed. I want to know what it was like."

She gave no answer.

"You're a very brave woman to go to that place."

"You would have done the same thing."

"Not in a million years."

An exterior light bloomed in the dusk, the front door opened.

"Go," said Roland Girard. "They've waited a long time to see you."

Mikhail was now standing in the entrance of the house. Natalie climbed out of the car and approached him slowly.

"I was beginning to think you'd forgotten about me." She looked past him, into the interior of the grand house. "How lovely. Much better than my little place in Aubervilliers."

"Or that dump near al-Rasheed Park."

"You were watching me?"

"As much as we could. We know that you were taken to a village near the Iraqi border, where you were undoubtedly interrogated by a man named Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti. And we know that you spent several days at a training camp in Palmyra, where you managed to find time to tour the ruins by moonlight." He hesitated before continuing. "And we know," he said, "that you were taken to a village near Mosul, where you spent several days in a large house. We saw you pacing in a courtyard."

"You should have bombed that house."

Mikhail gave her a quizzical look. Then he stepped aside and with a movement of his hand invited her to enter. She remained frozen in place.

"What's wrong?"

"I'm afraid he's going to be disappointed with me."

"Not possible."

"We'll see about that," she said, and went inside.

They embraced her, they kissed her cheeks, they clung to her limbs as though they feared she might drift away from them and never return. Dina removed the hijab from Natalie's head; Gabriel pressed a gla.s.s of chilled white wine into her hand. It was a sauvignon blanc from the Western Galilee that Natalie adored.

"I couldn't possibly," she laughed. "It is haram."

"Not tonight," he said. "Tonight you are one of us again."

There was food and there was music, and there were a thousand questions no one dared ask; there would be time for that later. They had sent an agent into the belly of the beast, and the agent had come back to them. They were going to savor their achievement. They were going to celebrate life.

Only Gabriel seemed to withhold himself from the revelry. He did not partake of the food or wine, only coffee. Mainly, he watched Natalie with an unnerving intensity. She remembered the things he had told her about his mother on that first day at the farm in the Jezreel Valley, how she rarely laughed or smiled, how she could not show pleasure on festive occasions. Perhaps he had inherited her affliction. Or perhaps, thought Natalie, he knew that tonight was not an occasion for celebration.

At last, as if by some imperceptible signal, the party came to an end. The dishes were cleared away, the wine was removed. In one of the sitting rooms a wing chair had been reserved for Natalie. There were no cameras or microphones visible, but surely, she thought, the proceedings were being recorded. Gabriel chose to remain standing.

"Usually," he said, "I prefer to start debriefings from the beginning. But perhaps tonight we should start at the end."

"Yes," she agreed. "Perhaps we should."

"Who was staying in the large house near Mosul?"

"Saladin," she answered without hesitation.

"Why were you brought there?"

"He required medical attention."

"And you gave it to him?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because," replied Natalie, "he was going to die."

45.

SERAINCOURT, FRANCE.

ONE DAY," SAID GABRIEL, "they're going to write a book about you."

"It's funny," replied Natalie, "but Saladin told me the same thing."

They were walking along a footpath in the garden of the chteau. A bit of light leaked from the French doors of the sitting room, but otherwise it was dark. A storm had come and gone during the many hours of her debriefing, and the gravel was wet beneath their feet. Natalie shivered. The air was chill with the promise of autumn.

"You're cold," said Gabriel. "We should go back inside."

"Not yet. There's something I wanted to tell you in private."

Gabriel stopped and turned to face her.

"He knows who you are."

"Saladin?" He smiled. "I'm flattered but not surprised. I have quite a following in the Arab world."

"There's more, I'm afraid. He knows about your connection to Hannah Weinberg. And he suspects that you are very much alive."

This time, he did not dismiss her words with a smile.

"What does it mean?" asked Natalie.

"It means that our suspicions about Saladin being a former Iraqi intelligence officer are almost certainly correct. It also means he's probably connected to certain elements in Saudi Arabia. Who knows? Perhaps he's receiving support from them."

"But ISIS wants to destroy the House of Saud and incorporate the Arabian Peninsula into the caliphate."

"In theory."

"So why would the Saudis support ISIS?"

"You are now our foremost expert on ISIS. You tell me."

"Saudi Arabia is a cla.s.sic straddling state. It combats Sunni extremism while at the same time nurturing it. They're like a man holding a tiger by the ears. If the man lets go of the tiger, it will devour him."

"You were obviously paying attention during those long lectures at the farm. But you left out one other important factor, and that's Iran. The Saudis are more afraid of Iran than they are of ISIS. Iran is Shiite. And ISIS, for all its evil, is Sunni."

"And from the Saudi perspective," continued Natalie, "a Sunni caliphate is far preferable to a Shiite Crescent that stretches from Iran to Lebanon."

"Exactly." Again, he smiled. "You're going to make a fine intelligence officer. Actually," he corrected himself, "you already are."

"A fine intelligence officer wouldn't have saved the life of a monster like Saladin."

"You did the right thing."

"Did I?"

"We're not like them, Natalie. If they want to die for Allah, we will help them in any way we can. But we will not sacrifice ourselves in the process. Besides," he added after a moment, "if you had killed Saladin, Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti would have taken his place."

"So why bother to kill any of them if another will rise?"

"It is a question with which we wrestle all the time."

"And the answer?"

"What choice do we have?"

"Maybe we should bomb that house."

"Bad idea."

"Why?"

"You tell me."

She considered the question carefully before answering. "Because they would suspect that the woman who saved Saladin-the woman he called Maimonides-was a spy who had revealed the location of the house to her handlers."

"Very good. And you can be certain they moved him the minute you crossed into Turkey."

"Were you watching?"

"Our satellite had been retasked to follow you."

"I saw al-Tikriti use a phone several times."

"That phone is now off the air. I'll ask the Americans to review their satellite and cellular data. It's possible they'll be able to retrace Saladin's movements, but unlikely. They've been looking for al-Baghdadi for a long time without success. In a case like this we need to know where Saladin is going to be, not where he's been." With a sidelong glance he asked, "Is there any chance he might have already died of his wounds?"

"There's always a chance. But I'm afraid he had a very good doctor."

"That's because she was Jewish. Everyone knows that all the best doctors are Jewish."

She smiled.