The Black Widow. Daniel Silva
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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.”
“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