The Black Widow

  “Abu Ahmed is right,” he said, watching her. “You do look like a Jew.”

  “And you,” said Natalie, “need to rest.”

  The eyelids dropped like window blinds and Saladin slipped helplessly into unconsciousness.

  43

  ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

  HER DAYS MOVED TO THE rhythm of Saladin. She slept when he slept and woke whenever he stirred on his sickbed. She monitored his vital signs, she changed his dressings, she gave him morphine against his wishes for the pain. For a few seconds after the drug entered his blood, he would hover in a hallucinatory state where words escaped his mouth, like the air that had rushed from his damaged lung. Natalie could have prolonged his talkative mood by giving him a smaller measure of the drug; conversely, she could have ushered him to death’s door with a larger dose. But she was never alone with her patient. Two fighters stood over him always, and Abu Ahmed—he of the lobster claw and overcast disposition—was never far. He consulted with Saladin frequently, about what Natalie was not privy. When matters of state or terror were discussed, she was banished from the room.

  She was not permitted to go far—the next room, the toilet, a sun-blasted court where Abu Ahmed encouraged her to take exercise in order to stay fit for her operation. She was never allowed to see the rest of the great house or told where she was, though when she listened to al-Bayan on the ancient transistor radio they gave her, the signal was without interference. All other radio was forbidden, lest she be exposed to un-Islamic ideas or, heaven forbid, music. The absence of music was harder to bear than she imagined. She longed to hear a few notes of a melody, a child sawing away at a major scale, even the thud of hip-hop from a passing car. Her rooms became a prison. The camp at Palmyra seemed a paradise in comparison. Even Raqqa was better, for at least in Raqqa she had been allowed to roam the streets. Never mind the severed heads and the men on crosses, at least there was some semblance of life. The caliphate, she thought grimly, had a way of reducing one’s expectations.

  And all the while she watched an imaginary clock in her head and turned the pages of an imaginary calendar. She was scheduled to fly from Athens to Paris on Sunday evening, and to return to work at the clinic in Aubervilliers Monday morning. But first, she had to get from the caliphate to Turkey and from Turkey to Santorini. For all their talk of an important role in an upcoming operation, she wondered whether Saladin and Abu Ahmed had other plans for her. Saladin would require constant medical care for months. And who better to care for him than the woman who had saved his life?

  He referred to her as Maimonides and she, having no other name for him, called him Saladin. They did not become friends or confidants, far from it, but a bond was forged between them. She played the same game she had played with Abu Ahmed, the game of guessing what he had been before the American invasion upended Iraq. He was obviously of high intelligence and a student of history. During one of their conversations, he told her that he had been to Paris many times—for what reason he did not say—and he spoke French badly but with great enthusiasm. He spoke English, too, much better than he spoke French. Perhaps, thought Natalie, he had attended an English preparatory school or military academy. She tried to imagine him without his wild hair and beard. She dressed him in a Western suit and tie, but he didn’t wear it well. Then she clothed him in olive drab, and the fit was better. When she added a thick mustache of the sort worn by Saddam loyalists, the picture was complete. Saladin, she decided, was a secret policeman or a spy. For that reason she was always fearful in his presence.

  He was no fire-breathing jihadist, Saladin. His Islam was political rather than spiritual, a tool by which he intended to redraw the map of the Middle East. It would be dominated by a massive Sunni state that would stretch from Baghdad to the Arabian Peninsula and across the Levant and North Africa. He did not rant or spew venom or recite Koranic verses or the sayings of the Prophet. He was entirely reasonable, which made him all the more terrifying. The liberation of Jerusalem, he said, was high on his agenda. It was his wish to pray in the Noble Sanctuary at least once before his death.

  “You’ve been, Maimonides?”

  “To Jerusalem? No, never.”

  “Yes, I know. Abu Ahmed told me that.”

  “Who?”

  Eventually, he told her he had been raised in a small, poor village in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, though he pointedly did not say the village’s name. He had joined the Iraqi army, hardly surprising in a land of mass conscription, and had fought in the long war against Iranians, though he referred to them always as Persians and rafida. The years between the war with Iran and the first Gulf War were a blank; he mentioned something about government work but did not elaborate. But when he spoke of the second war with the Americans, the war that destroyed Iraq as he knew it, his eyes flashed with anger. When the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army and removed all Baath Party members from their government posts, he was put on the streets along with thousands of other mainly Sunni Iraqi men. He joined the secular resistance and, later, al-Qaeda in Iraq, where he met and befriended Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Unlike Zarqawi, who relished his Bin Laden–like role as a terror superstar, Saladin preferred to keep a lower profile. It was Saladin, not Zarqawi, who masterminded many of al-Qaeda in Iraq’s most spectacular and deadly attacks. And yet even now, he said, the Americans and the Jordanians did not know his real name.

  “You, Maimonides, will not be so fortunate. Soon you will be the most wanted woman on the planet. Everyone will know your name, especially the Americans.”

  She asked again about the target of her attack. Annoyed, he refused to say. For reasons of operational security, he explained, recruits were not given their targets until the last possible minute.

  “Your friend Safia Bourihane wasn’t told her target until the night before the operation. But your target will be much bigger than hers. One day they will write books about you.”

  “Is it a suicide operation?”

  “Maimonides, please.”

  “I must know.”

  “Did I not tell you that you were going to be my personal physician? Did I not say that we would live together in Damascus?”

  Suddenly fatigued, he closed his eyes. His words, thought Natalie, were without conviction. She knew at that moment that Dr. Leila Hadawi would not be returning to the caliphate. She had saved Saladin’s life, and yet Saladin, with no trace of misgivings or guilt, would soon send her to her death.

  “How is your pain?” she asked.

  “I feel nothing.”

  She placed her forefinger in the center of his chest and pressed. His eyes shot open.

  “It seems you have pain, after all.”

  “A little,” he confessed.

  She prepared his dose of morphine.

  “Wait, Maimonides. There’s something I must tell you.”

  She stopped.

  “You’ll be leaving here in a few hours to begin your journey back to France. In time, someone will contact you and tell you how to proceed.”

  Natalie finished preparing his dose of morphine.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “we shall meet again in paradise.”

  “Inshallah, Maimonides.”

  She fed the morphine through his IV tube into his veins. His eyes blurred and grew vacant; he was in a vulnerable state. Natalie wanted to double his dose and shove him through death’s door, but she hadn’t the courage. If he died, the knife or the stone would be her fate.

  Finally, he slipped into unconsciousness and his eyes closed. Natalie checked his vital signs one last time and while he was sleeping removed the chest tube and sutured the incision. That night, after supper, she was blindfolded and placed in the backseat of another SUV. She was too tired to be afraid. She plunged into a dreamless sleep, and when she woke they were near the Turkish border. A pair of smugglers took her across and drove her to the ferry terminal in Bodrun, where Miranda Ward was waiting. They traveled together on the ferry to Santorini and shared a room that night at the Panorama H
otel. It was not until late the following morning, when they arrived in Athens, that Miranda returned Natalie’s phone. She sent a text message to her “father” saying that her trip had gone well and that she was safe. Then, alone, she boarded an Air France flight bound for Paris.

  PART THREE

  THE END OF DAYS

  44

  CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT, PARIS

  THE NAME ON THE RECTANGULAR paper sign read MORESBY. Christian Bouchard had chosen it himself. It came from a book he had read once about wealthy, naive Americans wandering among the Arabs of North Africa. The story ended badly for the Americans; someone had died. Bouchard hadn’t cared for the novel, but then Bouchard was the first to admit he wasn’t much of a reader. This shortcoming had not endeared him initially to Paul Rousseau, who famously read while brushing his teeth. Rousseau was forever foisting dense volumes of prose and poetry upon his ill-read deputy. Bouchard displayed the books on the coffee table in his apartment to impress his wife’s friends.

  He clutched the paper sign in his damp right hand. In his left he held a mobile phone, which for the past several hours had pinged with a steady stream of messages regarding a certain Dr. Leila Hadawi, a French citizen of Palestinian Arab extraction. Dr. Hadawi had boarded Air France Flight 1533 in Athens earlier that afternoon, following a month’s holiday in Greece. She had been granted reentry into France with no questions about her travel itinerary and was now making her way to the arrivals hall of Terminal 2F, or so said the last message Bouchard had received. He would believe it when he saw her with his own eyes. The Israeli standing next to him seemed to feel the same way. He was the lanky one with gray eyes, the one the French members of the team knew as Michel. There was something about him that made Bouchard uneasy. It was not difficult to picture him with a gun in his hand, pointed at a man who was about to die.

  “There she is,” murmured the Israeli, as though addressing his footwear, but Bouchard didn’t see her. A flight from Cairo had arrived at the same time as the flight from Athens; there were hijabs aplenty. “What color?” asked Bouchard, and the Israeli replied, “Burgundy.” It was one of the few French words he knew.

  Bouchard’s gaze swept over the arriving passengers, and then at once he saw her, a turning leaf afloat a rushing stream. She walked within a few feet of where they were standing, her eyes straight ahead, her chin raised slightly, pulling her little rolling suitcase. Then she slipped through the outer doors and was gone again.

  Bouchard looked at the Israeli, who was suddenly smiling. His sense of relief was palpable, but Bouchard detected something else. As a Frenchman, he knew a thing or two about matters of the heart. The Israeli was in love with the woman who had just returned from Syria. Of that, Bouchard was certain.

  She settled quietly into her apartment in the banlieue of Aubervilliers and resumed her old life. She was Leila before Jalal Nasser had approached her at the café across the street, Leila before a pretty girl from Bristol had spirited her secretly to Syria. She had never witnessed the horrors of Raqqa or the tragedy of Palmyra, she had never dug shrapnel from the body of a man called Saladin. She had been to Greece, to the enchanted isle of Santorini. Yes, it had been as lovely as she imagined. No, she would probably not return. Once was quite enough.

  She was surprisingly thin for a woman who had been on holiday, and her face was stained with evidence of strain and fatigue. The fatigue would not abate, for even after her return, sleep eluded her. Nor did she regain her appetite. She forced herself to eat croissants and baguettes and Camembert and pasta, and quickly she regained a lost kilo or two. It did little for her appearance. She looked like a cyclist who had just completed the Tour de France—or a jihadist who had just spent a month training in Syria and Iraq.

  Roland Girard, the clinic’s ersatz administrator, tried to lighten her patient load, but she wouldn’t hear of it. After a month in the upside-down world of the caliphate, she longed for some semblance of normality, even if it was Leila’s and not her own. She discovered that she missed her patients, the inhabitants of the cités, the citizens of the other France. And for the first time, she saw the Arab world as they undoubtedly saw it, as a cruel and unforgiving place, a place with no future, a place to be fled. The vast majority of them wanted nothing more than to live in peace and care for their families. But a small minority—small in percentage, but large in number—had fallen victim to the siren song of radical Islam. Some were prepared to slaughter their fellow Frenchmen in the name of the caliphate. And some would surely have slit Dr. Hadawi’s throat if they knew the secret she was hiding beneath her hijab.

  Still, she was pleased to be back in their presence, and back in France. Mainly, she was curious as to why she had not been summoned for the debriefing she was secretly dreading. They were watching her; she could see them in the streets of the banlieue and in the window of the apartment opposite. She supposed they were just being cautious, for surely they were not the only ones watching. Surely, she thought, Saladin was watching her, too.

  Finally, on the first Friday evening after her return, Roland Girard again invited her for an after-work coffee. Instead of heading to the center of Paris, as he had before her departure for Syria, he drove her northward into the countryside.

  “Aren’t you going to blindfold me?” she asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Silent, she watched the clock and the speedometer and thought of a ruler-straight road stained with oil, stretching eastward into the desert. At the end of the road was a great house of many rooms and courts. And in one of the rooms, bandaged and infirm, was Saladin.

  “Can you do me a favor, Roland?”

  “Of course.”

  “Turn on some music.”

  “What kind?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Any kind will do.”

  The gate was imposing, the drive was long and gravel. At the end of it, ivied and stately, stood a large manor house. Roland Girard stopped a few meters from the front entrance. He left the engine running.

  “This is as far as I’m allowed to go. I’m disappointed. I want to know what it was like.”

  She gave no answer.

  “You’re a very brave woman to go to that place.”

  “You would have done the same thing.”

  “Not in a million years.”

  An exterior light bloomed in the dusk, the front door opened.

  “Go,” said Roland Girard. “They’ve waited a long time to see you.”

  Mikhail was now standing in the entrance of the house. Natalie climbed out of the car and approached him slowly.

  “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.” She looked past him, into the interior of the grand house. “How lovely. Much better than my little place in Aubervilliers.”

  “Or that dump near al-Rasheed Park.”

  “You were watching me?”

  “As much as we could. We know that you were taken to a village near the Iraqi border, where you were undoubtedly interrogated by a man named Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti. And we know that you spent several days at a training camp in Palmyra, where you managed to find time to tour the ruins by moonlight.” He hesitated before continuing. “And we know,” he said, “that you were taken to a village near Mosul, where you spent several days in a large house. We saw you pacing in a courtyard.”

  “You should have bombed that house.”

  Mikhail gave her a quizzical look. Then he stepped aside and with a movement of his hand invited her to enter. She remained frozen in place.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m afraid he’s going to be disappointed with me.”

  “Not possible.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she said, and went inside.

  They embraced her, they kissed her cheeks, they clung to her limbs as though they feared she might drift away from them and never return. Dina removed the hijab from Natalie’s head; Gabriel pressed a glass of chilled white wine into her hand. It was a sauvignon blanc from the Western Ga
lilee that Natalie adored.

  “I couldn’t possibly,” she laughed. “It is haram.”

  “Not tonight,” he said. “Tonight you are one of us again.”

  There was food and there was music, and there were a thousand questions no one dared ask; there would be time for that later. They had sent an agent into the belly of the beast, and the agent had come back to them. They were going to savor their achievement. They were going to celebrate life.

  Only Gabriel seemed to withhold himself from the revelry. He did not partake of the food or wine, only coffee. Mainly, he watched Natalie with an unnerving intensity. She remembered the things he had told her about his mother on that first day at the farm in the Jezreel Valley, how she rarely laughed or smiled, how she could not show pleasure on festive occasions. Perhaps he had inherited her affliction. Or perhaps, thought Natalie, he knew that tonight was not an occasion for celebration.

  At last, as if by some imperceptible signal, the party came to an end. The dishes were cleared away, the wine was removed. In one of the sitting rooms a wing chair had been reserved for Natalie. There were no cameras or microphones visible, but surely, she thought, the proceedings were being recorded. Gabriel chose to remain standing.

  “Usually,” he said, “I prefer to start debriefings from the beginning. But perhaps tonight we should start at the end.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Perhaps we should.”

  “Who was staying in the large house near Mosul?”

  “Saladin,” she answered without hesitation.

  “Why were you brought there?”

  “He required medical attention.”

  “And you gave it to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” replied Natalie, “he was going to die.”

  45