The Black Widow

“They’re your friends, not mine.”

“You have a history with the Dutch services?”

“I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting the Netherlands.”

“Somehow, I find that difficult to believe.” Rousseau glanced at the small bald man sitting on the other side of the brasserie. “A friend of yours?”

“He runs a shop across the street.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw him leave and lock the door.”

“How observant of you.” Rousseau peered into the darkening street. “Antiquités Scientifiques?”

“Old microscopes and the like,” explained Gabriel.

“Interesting.” Rousseau contemplated his coffee cup. “It seems I wasn’t the only foreign visitor to AIVD headquarters yesterday. An American came, too.”

“Agency?”

Rousseau nodded.

“Local or Langley?”

“The latter.”

“Did he have a name?”

“Not one that my Dutch hosts wished to share with me. They did suggest, however, that American interest was high.”

“How refreshing.”

“Apparently, the White House is concerned that an attack on the American homeland this late in the president’s second term might prove injurious to his legacy. The Agency is under enormous pressure to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

“I guess ISIS isn’t the jayvee team after all.”

“To that end,” Rousseau continued, “the Agency is expecting full and complete cooperation from America’s friends and partners here in Europe. The man from Langley is due in Paris tomorrow morning.”

“It might be wise for you to spend some time with him.”

“My name is already on the guest list.”

Gabriel handed Rousseau a slip of paper, folded in quarters.

“What’s this?”

“A list of additional files we need.”

“How much longer?”

“Soon,” said Gabriel.

“That’s what you said yesterday, and the day before.” Rousseau slipped the list into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. “Are you ever going to tell me where you and your helpers are working?”

“You mean you haven’t figured it out yet?”

“We haven’t tried.”

“Somehow,” said Gabriel, “I find that difficult to believe.”

He rose without another word and went into the street. Rousseau watched him walk away along the darkened pavement, followed discreetly by two of Alpha Group’s best surveillance men. The little bald man with the lavender necktie laid a few bills on his table and departed, leaving Rousseau alone in the brasserie with no company other than his mobile phone. Five minutes elapsed before it finally illuminated. It was a text message from Christian Bouchard. “Merde,” said Rousseau softly. Allon had lost them again.

12 (#ulink_85e1463d-0d45-5608-beb6-674787191220)

PARIS (#ulink_85e1463d-0d45-5608-beb6-674787191220)

IT WAS WITH A PAIR of routine countersurveillance moves—a reversal of course along a one-way street, a brief stop in a bistro that had a rear service exit off the kitchen—that Gabriel slipped away from the finest watchers of Paul Rousseau’s Alpha Group. Afterward, he made his way, on foot, by Métro, and in a taxi, to a small apartment building along the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. According to the intercom panel, the occupant of 4B was someone named Guzman. Gabriel thumbed the button, waited for the snap of the automatic locks, and entered.

Upstairs, Mikhail Abramov unchained the door to him. The air was bitter with smoke. Gabriel peered into the kitchen and saw Eli Lavon attempting to extinguish a fire he had started in the microwave. Lavon was a diminutive figure, with a head of wispy unkempt hair and a face that was entirely forgettable. His looks, like most things about him, were deceiving. A natural predator and chameleon, Lavon was regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the Office ever produced. Ari Shamron had famously said of Lavon that he could disappear while shaking your hand. It wasn’t far from the truth.

“How long did it take you to lose them this time?” Lavon asked as he tossed a misshapen lump of charred plastic into the sink.

“Less time than it took you to burn down the safe flat.”

“A small mix-up with the time setting. You know me, I’ve never really been good with numbers.”

Which wasn’t true. Lavon also happened to be a skilled financial investigator who singlehandedly had managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Holocaust assets. An archaeologist by training, he was a natural digger.

Gabriel entered the sitting room. Yaakov Rossman, a veteran agent runner and a fluent speaker of Arabic, appeared to be contemplating an act of violence against his notebook computer. Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern were sprawled on the couch like a couple of undergraduates. Yossi was a top officer in Research, which is how the Office referred to its analytical division. Tall, tweedy, and balding, he had read classics at All Souls and spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent. He had also done a bit of acting—Shakespearean, mainly—and was a gifted cellist. Rimona served in the Office unit that spied on Iran’s nuclear program. She had sandstone-colored hair, childbearing hips, and a temper she had inherited from Ari Shamron, who was her uncle. Gabriel had known her since she was a small child. Indeed, his fondest memories of Rimona were of a fearless young girl on a kick scooter careening down the steep drive of her famous uncle’s house.

The five field agents and analysts were members of an elite team of operatives known as Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, for their ability to gather and strike quickly. They had fought and sometimes bled together on a string of secret battlefields stretching from Moscow to the Caribbean, and in the process had carried out some of the most fabled operations in the history of Israeli intelligence. Gabriel was the team’s founder and leader, but a sixth member, Dina Sarid, was its conscience and institutional memory. Dina was the Office’s top terrorism specialist, a human database who could recite the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of Palestinian or Islamic terrorism committed against Israel and the West. Her talent was to see connections where others saw only a blizzard of names, numbers, and words.

She was small in stature, with coal-black hair that fell about a soft, childlike face. At present, she was standing before a seemingly haphazard collage of surveillance photos, e-mails, text messages, and phone conversations. It was the same place she had been standing, three hours earlier, when Gabriel had left the safe flat for his meeting with Paul Rousseau. Dina was in the grip of the fever, the frightful creative rage that came over her each time a bomb exploded. Gabriel had induced the fever many times before. Judging by her expression, it was about to break. He crossed the room and stood beside her.

“What are you looking at?” he asked after a moment.

Dina took two steps forward, limping slightly, and pointed toward a surveillance photo of Safia Bourihane. It had been taken before her first trip to Syria, in an Arab-style café in the heavily immigrant Paris banlieue of Saint-Denis. Safia had recently taken the veil. Her companion, a young woman, was veiled, too. There were several other women in the café, along with four men, Algerians, Moroccans, sharing a table near the counter. Another man, angular face, clean-shaven, slightly out of focus, sat alone. He wore a dark business suit, no tie, and was working on a notebook computer. He might have been an Arab—or he might have been a Frenchman or an Italian. For the moment he was of no concern to Dina Sarid. She was gazing, spellbound, at the face of Safia Bourihane.

“She looks normal, doesn’t she? Happy, even. You’d never suspect she’d spent the entire morning talking to an ISIS recruiter on the Internet. The recruiter asked her to leave her family and travel to Syria to help build the caliphate. And what do you suppose Safia told him?”

“She said she wanted to stay in France. She said she wanted to marry a nice boy from a good family and have children who would grow up to be fully assimilated French citizens. She said she wanted no part of a caliphate run by men who behead and crucify and burn their enemies alive.”

“Isn’t it pretty to think so.” Dina shook her head slowly. “What went wrong, Gabriel? Why have more than five hundred young Western women joined the ranks of ISIS? Why are the bearded ones the new rock stars of Islam? Why are killers cool?” Dina had devoted her life to the study of terrorism and Islamic extremism, and yet she had no answers. “We thought they would be repulsed by the violence of ISIS. We were wrong. We assumed assimilation was the answer. But the more they assimilated, the less they liked what they saw. And so when a recruiter from ISIS comes knocking on their digital door, they’re vulnerable.”

“You’re too charitable, Dina.”

“They’re children.” She paused, then added, “Impressionable girls.”