The Black Widow. Daniel Silva
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“We don’t,” said Gabriel.
“That’s because you live in the region. You are a people of the region,” Rousseau added. “And you know full well what will happen if the likes of ISIS are ever let loose within the walls of your fortress. It will be …”
“A holocaust,” said Gabriel.
Rousseau nodded thoughtfully. Then he led Gabriel across the Pont Notre-Dame, to the Île de la Cité. “So in the words of Lenin,” he asked, “what is to be done?”
“I am merely a spy, Monsieur Rousseau, not a general or a prime minister.”
“And if you were?”
“I would tear them out root and branch. I would turn them into losers instead of winners. Take away the land,” Gabriel added, “and there can be no Islamic State. And if there is no state, the caliphate will recede once more into history.”
“Invasion didn’t work in Iraq or Afghanistan,” replied Rousseau, “and it won’t work in Syria. Better to chip away at them from the air and with the help of regional allies. In the meantime, contain the infection so it doesn’t spread to the rest of the Middle East and Europe.”
“It’s too late for that. The contagion is already here.”
They crossed another bridge, the Petit Pont, and entered the Latin Quarter. Rousseau knew it well. He walked now with a purpose other than his health, down the boulevard Saint-Germain, into a narrow side street, until finally he stopped outside the doorway of an apartment building. It was as familiar to Gabriel as the entrance of Hannah Weinberg’s building on the rue Pavée, though it had been many years since his last visit. He glanced at the intercom. Some of the names were still the same.
Presently, the door swung open and two people, a man and a woman in their mid-twenties, emerged. Rousseau caught the door before it could close and led Gabriel into the half-light of the foyer. A passageway gave onto the shadowed internal courtyard, where Rousseau paused for a second time and pointed toward a window on the uppermost floor.
“My wife and I lived right there. When she died I gave up the apartment and headed south. There were too many memories, too many ghosts.” He pointed toward a window overlooking the opposite side of the courtyard. “A former student of mine lived over there. She was quite brilliant. Quite radical, too, as were most of my students in those days. Her name,” he added, with a sidelong glance at Gabriel, “was Denise Jaubert.”
Gabriel stared without expression at Rousseau, as though the name meant nothing to him. In truth, he suspected he knew more about Denise Jaubert than did her former professor. She was indeed a radical. More important, she was the occasional lover of one Sabri al-Khalifa, leader of the Palestinian terror group Black September, mastermind of the Munich Olympics massacre.
“Late one afternoon,” Rousseau resumed, “I was working at my desk when I heard laughter in the courtyard. It was Denise. She was with a man. Black hair, pale skin, strikingly handsome. Walking a few steps behind them was a smaller fellow with short hair. I couldn’t see much of his face. You see, in spite of the overcast weather he was wearing dark glasses.”
Rousseau looked at Gabriel, but Gabriel, in his thoughts, was walking across a Parisian courtyard, a few paces behind the man for whom the Office had spent seven long years searching.
“I wasn’t the only one who noticed the man in the sunglasses,” Rousseau said after a moment. “Denise’s handsome companion noticed him, too. He tried to draw a pistol, but the smaller man drew first. I’ll never forget how he moved forward while he was firing. It was … beautiful. There were ten shots. Then he inserted a second magazine into his weapon, placed the barrel of the gun against the man’s ear, and fired one last shot. It’s odd, but I don’t recall him leaving. He just seemed to vanish.” Rousseau looked at Gabriel. “And now he stands beside me.”
Gabriel said nothing. He was staring down at the cobbles of the courtyard, the cobbles that had once run red with the blood of Sabri al-Khalifa.
“I must admit,” said Rousseau, “that for a long time I thought you a murderer. The civilized world condemned your actions. But now the civilized world finds itself in the very same fight, and we are using the very same tactics. Drones, missiles, men in black in the middle of the night.” He paused, then added, “It seems history has absolved you of your sins.”
“I committed no sins,” said Gabriel. “And I seek no absolution.”
Just then, Rousseau’s mobile chimed in his coat pocket, followed a few seconds later by Gabriel’s. Once again, it was Gabriel who drew first. It was a priority message from King Saul Boulevard. The DGSI had sent a similar message to Rousseau.
“It appears the attack on the Weinberg Center was only the beginning.” Rousseau returned the phone to his coat pocket and stared at the cobbles where Sabri al-Khalifa had fallen. “Will it end the same way for the one they call Saladin?”
“If we’re lucky.”
“How soon can you start?”
“Tonight.”
LATER, IT WOULD BE DETERMINED with near certainty that the Paris and Amsterdam bombs were the lethal handiwork of the same man. Once again the mode of delivery was an ordinary white panel van, though in Amsterdam it was a Ford Transit rather than a Renault. It detonated at half past four precisely, in the center of Amsterdam’s bustling Albert Cuyp Market. The vehicle had entered the market early that morning and had remained there undetected throughout the day as thousands of shoppers strolled obliviously past through the pale spring sunshine. The driver of the van was a woman, approximately thirty years of age, blond hair, long legs, narrow hips, blue jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, a fleece vest. This was established not with the help of witnesses but with closed-circuit video surveillance cameras. Police found no one among the living who could recall seeing her.
The market, regarded as Europe’s largest, is located in the Old Side of the city. Opposing rows of stalls line the street, and behind the stalls are terraces of saddle-brown brick houses with shops and restaurants on the ground floor. Many of the vendors are from the Middle East and North Africa, a fact that several reporters and terrorism analysts were quick to point out during the first hours of the coverage. They saw it as evidence that the perpetrators were inspired by a creed other than radical Islam, though when pressed to name one, they could not. Finally, a scholar of Islam from Cambridge explained the seeming paradox. The Muslims of Amsterdam, she said, were living in a city of legalized drugs and prostitution where the laws of men held sway rather than the laws of Allah. In the eyes of the Muslim extremists, they were apostates. And the only punishment for apostasy was death.
Witnesses would recall not the thunderous bellow of the explosion but the deep, wintry silence that followed. In time, there was a moan, and a childlike sob, and the electronic pulse of a mobile phone pleading to be answered. For several minutes thick black smoke obscured the horror. Then, gradually, the smoke lifted and the devastation was revealed: the limbless and the lifeless, the sooty-faced survivors wandering dazed and partially disrobed through the debris, the shoes of a vendor scattered among the shoes of the dead. Everywhere there was split fruit and spilled blood and the aroma, suddenly nauseating, of roasted lamb seasoned with cumin and turmeric.
The claims of responsibility were not long in coming. The first was from an obscure cell in lawless Libya, followed soon after by al-Shabaab, the Somalia-based group that had terrorized East Africa. Finally, there appeared a video on a popular social media site. In it, a black-hooded man who spoke English with an East London accent declared that the attack was the work of ISIS, and that more attacks were to come. He then embarked, in a mixture of English and Arabic, on a rambling homily about the armies of Rome and a Syrian