The Black Widow

“Not all of them.”

“That’s true. Many are educated, much more educated than the men who’ve joined ISIS. They’re forbidden to fight, the women, so they take on important support roles. In many respects, it’s the women who are actually building the caliphate. Most of them will also take a husband—a husband who’s likely to soon be a martyr. One in four women will become widows. Black widows,” she added. “Indoctrinated, embittered, vengeful. And all it takes is a good recruiter or talent spotter to turn them into ticking time bombs.” She pointed toward the slightly-out-of-focus figure seated alone in the Arab-style café. “Like him. Unfortunately, the French never noticed him. They were too busy looking at Safia’s friend.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s a girl who watched a few beheading videos on the Internet. She’s a waste of time, money, and manpower. But not Safia. Safia was trouble waiting to happen.” Dina took a step to the right and indicated a second photograph. “Three days after Safia had coffee with her friend in Saint-Denis, she came to the center of Paris to do a bit of shopping. This picture was taken as she was walking along the arcades of the rue de Rivoli. And look who’s walking a few steps behind her.”

It was the same man from the café, the clean-shaven man with an angular face who might have been an Arab or a Frenchman or an Italian.

“How did they miss him?”

“Good question. And they missed him here, too.”

Dina pointed toward a third photograph, the same day, an hour later. Safia Bourihane was leaving a women’s clothing store on the Champs-Élysées. The same man was waiting outside on the pavement, pretending to consult a tourist guidebook.

“Send the photos to King Saul Boulevard,” said Gabriel. “See if anything turns up.”

“I already have.”

“And?”

“King Saul Boulevard has never made his acquaintance.”

“Maybe this will help.” Gabriel held up the flash drive.

“What is it?”

“The life and times of Margreet Janssen.”

“I wonder how long it will take to find Safia’s secret admirer.”

“I’d hurry if I were you. The Americans have her file, too.”

“I’ll beat them,” she said. “I always do.”

It took Dina fewer than thirty minutes to find the first surveillance photograph of Margreet Janssen and the man who had shadowed Safia Bourihane in Paris. An AIVD team had snapped the picture at a quaint Italian restaurant in central Amsterdam where Margreet, having left her dreary home in Noordwijk, was waiting tables for starvation wages. It wasn’t difficult to spot him; he was dining alone with a volume of Sartre for protection. This time, the camera managed to capture him in focus, though he was somewhat different in appearance. A pair of round eyeglasses had softened the sharp edges of his face; a cardigan sweater lent him a librarian’s unthreatening air. Margreet was his server, and judging from her wide smile she found him attractive—so attractive, in fact, that she agreed to meet him for drinks later at a bar on the edge of the red-light district. The evening ended with a well-executed slap, delivered with Margreet’s right hand to the man’s left cheek and witnessed by the same surveillance team. It was, thought Gabriel, a nice touch of tradecraft. The Dutch wrote the man off as a cad and never tried to establish his identity.

But what was the connection between the two women, other than the man who might have been an Arab or a Frenchman or an Italian? Dina found that, too. It was a Web site based in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar that sold clothing for Muslim women of piety and taste. Safia Bourihane had surfed it three weeks before the man’s visit to Paris. Margreet Janssen had stopped there just ten days before the slap in Amsterdam. Dina suspected that the site contained a password-protected room where ISIS recruiters could invite promising young women for a private chat. These encrypted rooms had so far proved almost impenetrable to the intelligence services of Israel and the West. Even the mighty National Security Agency, America’s omniscient signals intelligence service, was struggling to keep pace with ISIS’s digital hydra.

There is no worse feeling for a professional spy than to be told something by an officer from another service that he should have already known himself. Paul Rousseau endured this indignity in a small café on the rue Cler, a fashionable pedestrian shopping street not far from the Eiffel Tower. The French police had erected barricades at the intersections of the cross streets and were checking the handbags and backpacks of everyone who dared to enter. Even Gabriel, who had nothing in his possession other than a manila envelope filled with photographs, was thoroughly searched before being allowed to pass.

“If this were ever to become public,” said Rousseau, “it would be deeply embarrassing for my service. Heads would roll. Remember, this is France.”

“Don’t worry, Paul, your secret is safe with me.”

Rousseau leafed again through the photos of Safia Bourihane and the man who for two days had followed her around Paris undetected by the DGSI.

“What do you suppose he was doing?”

“Watching her, of course.”

“Why?”

“To make sure she was the right kind of girl. The question is,” said Gabriel, “can you find him?”

“These photographs were taken more than a year ago.”

“Yes?” asked Gabriel leadingly.

“It will be difficult. After all,” said Rousseau, “we still haven’t been able to find out where your team is working.”

“That’s because we’re better than he is.”

“Actually, his track record is rather good, too.”

“He didn’t travel to the café in Saint-Denis on a magic carpet,” said Gabriel. “He took a train, or a bus, or he walked along a street with security cameras.”

“Our network of CCTV cameras is nowhere near as extensive as yours or the British.”

“But it exists, especially in a place like Saint-Denis.”

“Yes,” said Rousseau. “It exists.”

“So find out how he got there. And then find out who he is. But whatever you do,” Gabriel added, “do it quietly. And don’t mention any of this to our friend from Langley.”

Rousseau consulted his wristwatch.

“What time are you seeing him?”

“Eleven. His name is Taylor, by the way. Kyle Taylor. He’s the chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Apparently, Monsieur Taylor is very ambitious. He’s droned many terrorists. One more scalp, and he might be the next director of operations. At least, that’s the rumor.”

“That would come as news to the current director.”

“Adrian Carter?”

Gabriel nodded.

“I’ve always liked Adrian,” said Rousseau. “He’s a decent soul, and rather too honest for a spy. One wonders how a man like that could survive so long in a place like Langley.”

As it turned out, it took Rousseau’s Alpha Group just forty-eight hours to determine that the man from the café in Saint-Denis had traveled to Paris from London aboard a Eurostar high-speed train. Surveillance photographs showed him disembarking at the Gare du Nord in late morning and boarding a Métro a few minutes later, bound for the northern suburbs of Paris. He departed Paris the morning after he was photographed on the rue de Rivoli and the Champs-Élysées, also aboard a Eurostar train, this one bound for London.

Unlike most international trains in Western Europe, the Eurostar requires passengers to clear passport control before boarding. Alpha Group quickly found their man in the manifests. He was Jalal Nasser, born in Amman, Jordan, in 1984, currently residing in the United Kingdom, address unknown. Rousseau dispatched a cable to MI5 in London and, in the dullest language possible, asked whether the British security service had a place of residence for one Jalal Nasser and whether it had reason to suspect his involvement in any form of Islamic extremism. His address arrived two hours later: 33 Chilton Street, Bethnal Green, East London. And, no, said MI5, it had no evidence to suggest that Nasser was anything more than what he claimed to be, which was a graduate student in economics at King’s College. He had been enrolled there, on and off, for seven years.

Gabriel dispatched Mikhail to London, along with a pair of all-purpose field hands named Mordecai and Oded, and within a few hours of their arrival they managed to acquire a small flat in Chilton Street. They also managed to snap a photograph of Jalal Nasser, the eternal student, walking along Bethnal Green Road with a book bag over one shoulder. It appeared on Gabriel’s mobile phone that evening as he was standing in the nursery of his apartment in Jerusalem, staring down at the two children sleeping peacefully in their cribs.

“They missed you terribly,” said Chiara. “But if you wake them …”

“What?”