Gabriel Allon: The Black Widow Part 41

"Please turn on some music," she begged.

The woman switched on the car radio, but there was no music to be found, only the terrible news. The National Counterterrorism Center, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, Harbor Place: the death toll, it was feared, could approach one thousand. Natalie was able to bear it for only a minute or two. She reached for the radio's power b.u.t.ton but stopped when she felt a sharp pain in her upper arm, like the bite of a viper. Then she looked at the woman and saw that she, too, was holding something in her right hand. But it was not a detonator switch upon which her thumb rested. It was the plunger of a syringe.

Instantly, Natalie's vision blurred. The woman's weather-beaten face receded; a pa.s.sing police cruiser left time-lapse streaks of red and blue on the night. Natalie called out a name, the only name she could recall, before a darkness descended upon her. It was like the blackness of her abaya. She saw herself walking through a great Arabian house of many rooms and courts. And in the last room, standing in the molten light of an oculus, was Saladin.

67.

CAFe MILANO, GEORGETOWN.

FOR A FEW SECONDS AFTER the explosion there was only silence. It was like the silence of the crypt, thought Mikhail, the silence of death. Finally, there was a moan, and then a cough, and then the first screams of agony and terror. Soon there were others, many others-the limbless, the blind, the ones who would never be able to gaze into a mirror again. A few more would surely die tonight, but many would survive. They would see their children again, they would dance at weddings and weep at funerals. And perhaps one day they would be able to eat in a restaurant again without the nagging fear that the woman at the next table was wearing a suicide vest. It was the fear that all Israelis had lived with during the dark days of the Second Intifada. And now, thanks to a man called Saladin, that same fear had come to America.

Mikhail reached for the door latch but stopped when he heard the first gunshot. He realized then that his phone was vibrating in his coat pocket. He checked the screen. It was Eli Lavon.

"Where the h.e.l.l are you?"

In a whisper, Mikhail told him.

"Four men with guns just entered the restaurant."

"I can hear them."

"You've got to get out of there."

"Where's Natalie?"

"The FBI is about to pick her up."

Mikhail returned the phone to his pocket. From beyond the lavatory's thin door came another gunshot-large caliber, military grade. Then there were two more: crack, crack . . . With each shot, another scream went silent. Clearly, the terrorists were determined to see that no one left Cafe Milano alive. These were no video-game jihadis. They were well trained, disciplined. They were moving methodically through the ruins of the restaurant in search of survivors. And eventually, thought Mikhail, their search would bring them to the lavatory door.

The American man with gelled hair was shaking with fear. Mikhail looked around for something he might use as a weapon but saw nothing suitable. Then, with a sideways nod of his head, he instructed the American to conceal himself in the stall. Somehow, the restaurant still had power. Mikhail killed the lights, m.u.f.fling the snap of the switch, and pressed his back against the wall next to the door. In the sudden darkness, he vowed that he would not die this night in a toilet in Georgetown, with a man he did not know. It would be an ign.o.ble way for a soldier to depart this world, he thought, even a soldier of the secret variety.

From beyond the door there was the sharp crack of another gunshot, closer than the last, and another scream went silent. Then there were footsteps outside in the corridor. Mikhail flexed the fingers of his lethal right hand. Open the door, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, he thought. Open the f.u.c.king door.

It was at that same instant that Gabriel realized his hearing loss was not permanent. The first sound he heard was the same sound that many Washingtonians would a.s.sociate with that night, the sound of sirens. The first responders were rolling up Tysons McLean Drive toward what had once been the security checkpoint of the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Inside the ruined buildings, the less seriously injured were tending to the gravely wounded in a desperate attempt to stem bleeding and save lives. Fareed Barakat was looking after Paul Rousseau, and Adrian Carter was looking after what remained of Gabriel's operation. With borrowed mobile phones he had reestablished contact with Langley, FBI Headquarters, and the White House Situation Room. Washington was in chaos, and the federal government was struggling to keep pace with events. Thus far, there had been confirmed attacks at Liberty Crossing, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, Washington Harbor, and Cafe Milano. In addition, there were reports of more attacks along M Street. It was feared that hundreds of people, perhaps as many as a thousand, had been killed.

At that moment, however, Gabriel was focused on only two people: Mikhail Abramov and Natalie Mizrahi. Mikhail was trapped in the men's room at Cafe Milano. Natalie was walking north on the west side of Wisconsin Avenue.

"Why hasn't the FBI brought her in?" he snapped at Carter.

"They can't seem to find her."

"How hard can it be to find a woman wearing a suicide vest and a red jacket?"

"They're looking."

"Tell them to look harder."

The door crashed open, the gun entered first. Mikhail recognized the silhouette. It was an AR-15, no scope. He seized the warm barrel with his left hand and pulled, and a man came with it. In the ruined dining room, he had been a jihadist holy warrior, but in the darkened confines of the men's room, he was now helpless. With the edge of his right hand, Mikhail hit him twice in the side of the neck. The first blow caught a bit of jawbone, but the second was a direct hit that caused something to crack and snap. The man went down without a sound. Mikhail lifted the AR-15 from the limp hands, shot him through the head, and spun into the corridor.

Directly in front of him, in the back corner of the dining room, one of the terrorists was about to execute a woman whose arm had been shorn off at the shoulder. Hidden in the darkened corridor, Mikhail put the terrorist down with a head shot and then moved cautiously forward. There were no other terrorists in the main dining room, but in a smaller room at the back of the restaurant, a terrorist was executing survivors huddled against a wall, one by one, like an SS man moving along the edge of a burial pit. Mikhail shot the terrorist cleanly through the chest, saving a dozen lives.

Just then, Mikhail heard another gunshot from an adjoining room-the private dining room he had seen when he entered the restaurant. He moved past the toppled barstool where he had been seated a moment earlier, past the upended table splattered with the viscera of Safia Bourihane, and entered the foyer. The matre d' and the two hostesses were all dead. It appeared as though they had survived the bombing, only to be shot to death.

Mikhail crept silently past the corpses and peered into the private dining room, where the fourth terrorist was in the process of executing twenty well-dressed men and women. Too late, the terrorist realized that the man standing in the doorway of the private dining room was not a friend. Mikhail shot him through the chest. Then he fired a second shot, a head shot, to make certain he was dead.

It had all taken less than a minute, and Mikhail's mobile phone had been vibrating intermittently the entire time. Now he s.n.a.t.c.hed it from his pocket and peered at the screen. It was a voice call from Gabriel.

"Please tell me you're alive."

"I'm just fine, but four members of ISIS are now in paradise."

"Grab their cell phones and as much hardware as you can carry and get out of there."

"What's going on?"

The connection went dead. Mikhail searched the pockets of the dead terrorist lying at his feet and found a Samsung Galaxy disposable phone. He found identical Samsungs on the dead terrorists in the main dining room and the room in the back, but the one in the toilet apparently preferred Apple products. Mikhail had all four phones in his possession when he slipped from the restaurant's rear service door. He also had two AR-15s and four additional magazines of ammunition, for what reason he did not know. He hurried down a darkened alleyway, praying that he did not encounter a SWAT team, and emerged onto Potomac Street. He followed it south to Prospect, where Eli Lavon was sitting behind the wheel of a Buick.

"What took you so long?" he asked as Mikhail fell into the front pa.s.senger seat.

"Gabriel gave me a shopping list." Mikhail laid the AR-15s and the magazines on the floor of the backseat. "What the f.u.c.k is going on?"

"The FBI can't find Natalie."

"She's wearing a red jacket and a suicide vest."

Lavon swung a U-turn and headed west across Georgetown.

"You're going the wrong way," said Mikhail. "Wisconsin Avenue is behind us."

"We're not going to Wisconsin Avenue."

"Why not?"

"She's gone, Mikhail. Gone gone."

68.

KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV.

THE UNIT THAT TOILED IN Room 414C of King Saul Boulevard had no official name because, officially, it did not exist. Those who had been briefed on its work referred to it only as the Minyan, for the unit was ten in number and exclusively male in gender. With but a few keystrokes, they could darken a city, blind an air traffic control network, or make the centrifuges of an Iranian nuclear-enrichment plant spin wildly out of control. Three Samsungs and an iPhone weren't going to be much of a challenge.

Mikhail and Eli Lavon uploaded the contents of the four phones from the Israeli Emba.s.sy at 8:42 p.m. local time. By nine o'clock Washington time, the Minyan had determined that the four phones had spent a great deal of time during the past few months at the same address on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia. In fact, they had been there at the same time earlier that evening and had traveled into Washington at the same speed, along the same route. Furthermore, all the phones had placed numerous calls to a local moving company based at the address. The Minyan delivered the intelligence to Uzi Navot, who in turn forwarded it to Gabriel. By then, he and Adrian Carter had left the bombed-out NCTC and were in the CIA's Global Ops Center at Langley. Of Carter, Gabriel asked a single question.

"Who owns Dominion Movers in Alexandria?"

Fifteen precious minutes elapsed before Carter had an answer. He gave Gabriel a name and an address and told him to do whatever it took to find Natalie alive. Carter's words meant little; as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had no power to let a foreign intelligence service operate with impunity on American soil. Only the president could grant such authority, and at that moment the president had bigger things to worry about than a missing Israeli spy. America was under attack. And like it or not, Gabriel Allon was going to be the first to retaliate.

At twenty minutes past nine, Carter dropped Gabriel at the Agency's main security gate and departed quickly, as though fleeing the scene of a crime, or of a crime soon to be committed. Gabriel stood alone in the darkness, watching the ambulances and rescue vehicles hurtling along Route 123 toward Liberty Crossing, waiting. It was a fitting way for his career in the field to end, he thought. The waiting . . . Always the waiting . . . Waiting for a plane or a train. Waiting for a source. Waiting for the sun to rise after a night of killing. Waiting for Mikhail and Eli Lavon at the entrance of the CIA so that he could begin his search for a woman he had asked to penetrate the world's most dangerous terrorist group. She had done it. Or had she? Perhaps Saladin had been suspicious of her from the beginning. Perhaps he had granted her entree into his court in order to penetrate and mislead Western intelligence. And perhaps he had dispatched her to America to act as a decoy, a shiny object that would occupy the Americans' attention while the real terrorists-the men who worked for a moving company in Alexandria, Virginia-engaged in their final preparations unmolested. How else to explain the fact that Safia had withheld Natalie's target until the final minute? Natalie had no target. Natalie was the target.

He thought of the man he had seen in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. The large Arab named Omar al-Farouk who walked with a limp. The large Arab who had left Cafe Milano a few minutes before Safia detonated her suicide vest. Was he truly Saladin? It didn't matter. Whoever he was, he would soon be dead. So would everyone else a.s.sociated with Natalie's disappearance. Gabriel would make it his life's work to hunt them all down and destroy ISIS before ISIS could destroy the Middle East and what remained of the civilized world. He suspected he would have a willing accomplice in the American president. ISIS was now two hours from Indiana.

Just then, Gabriel's mobile phone pulsed. He read the message, returned the phone to his pocket, and walked to the edge of Route 123. A few seconds later a Buick Regal appeared. It stopped only long enough for Gabriel to slide into the backseat. On the floor were two AR-15s and several magazines of ammunition. The Second Amendment, thought Gabriel, definitely had its advantages. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw Mikhail's frozen eyes looking back at him.

"Which way, boss?"

"Take the GW Parkway back toward Key Bridge," said Gabriel. "The Beltway is a f.u.c.king mess."

69.

HUME, VIRGINIA.

NATALIE AWOKE WITH THE SENSATION of having slept an eternity. Her mouth seemed to be stuffed with cotton, her head had lolled sideways against the cool of the window. Here and there, over front porches and in lace-curtained windows, a light faintly burned, but otherwise the atmosphere was one of sudden abandonment. It was as if the inhabitants of this place, having learned of the attacks in Washington, had packed their belongings and taken to the hills.

Her head throbbed with a hangover's dull ache. She tried to raise it, but could not. Casting her eyes to the left, she watched the woman drive, the woman she had mistakenly believed to be Megan from the FBI. She was holding the wheel with her right hand; in her left was a gun. The time, according to the dashboard clock, was 9:22. Natalie, through the fog of the drug, tried to reconstruct the evening's events-the second car in the parking garage, the wild ride into Georgetown, the quaint little French restaurant that was supposed to be her target, the bomb vest with the red st.i.tch in the zipper. The detonator was still in her right hand. Lightly, she ran the tip of her forefinger over the switch.

Boom, she thought, recalling her bomb training in Palmyra. And now you are on your way to paradise . . .

A church appeared on Natalie's right. Soon after, they came to a deserted intersection. The woman came to a complete stop before turning, as instructed by the navigation system, onto a road with a philosopher's name. It was very narrow, with no yellow centerline. The darkness was absolute; there seemed to be no world at all beyond the patch of asphalt illuminated by the car's headlights. The navigation system grew suddenly confused. It advised the woman to make a U-turn if possible, and when no turn was forthcoming it fell into a reproachful sulk.

The woman followed the road for another half mile before turning into a dirt-and-gravel track. It bore them across a pasture, over a ridge of wooded hills, and into a small dell, where a timbered A-frame cottage overlooked a black pond. Lights burned within the cottage, and parked outside were three vehicles-a Lincoln Town Car, a Honda Pilot, and a BMW sedan. The woman pulled up behind the BMW and switched off the engine. Natalie, her head against the gla.s.s, feigned a coma.

"Can you walk?" asked the woman.

Natalie was silent.

"I saw your eyes moving. I know you're awake."

"What did you give me?"

"Propofol."

"Where did you get it?"

"I'm a nurse." The woman climbed out of the car and opened Natalie's door. "Get out."

"I can't."

"Propofol is a short-duration anesthetic," lectured the woman pedantically. "Patients who are given it can typically walk on their own a few minutes after awakening."

When Natalie did not move, the woman pointed the gun at her head. Natalie raised her right hand and placed her thumb lightly atop the detonator switch.

"You haven't got the guts," said the woman. Then she seized Natalie's wrist and dragged her from the car.

The door of the cottage was a walk of perhaps twenty yards, but the leaden weight of the suicide vest, and the lingering effects of the propofol, made it seem more like a mile. The room Natalie entered was rustic and quaint. Consequently, its male occupants looked obscenely out of place. Four wore black tactical suits and were armed with combat a.s.sault rifles. The fifth wore an elegant business suit and was warming his hands before a wood-burning stove. His back was turned to Natalie. He was well over six feet tall and his shoulders were broad. Still, he looked vaguely infirm, as though he were recovering from a recent injury.

At length, the man in the elegant business suit turned. His hair was neatly groomed and combed, his face was clean-shaven. His dark brown eyes, however, were exactly as Natalie remembered them. So, too, was his confident smile. He took a step toward her, favoring the damaged leg, and stopped.

"Maimonides," he said pleasantly. "So good to see you again."

Natalie clutched the detonator tightly in her hand. Beneath her feet the earth burned.

70.

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA.