At seven that evening the Jordanian spread a mat upon the floor of his tiny sitting room and prayed for the last time. Then, at seven twenty, he walked to the Noodle King on Bethnal Green Road, where, alone, he ate a final meal of fried rice and spicy chicken wings, watched over by Eli Lavon. Leaving the restaurant, he popped into the Saver Plus for a bottle of milk and then set off toward his flat, unaware that Mikhail was walking a few paces behind him.
Later, Scotland Yard would determine that Jalal arrived on his doorstep at twelve minutes past eight o’clock. It would also determine that, while fishing his keys from his coat pocket, he dropped them to the pavement. Stooping, he noticed Mikhail standing in the street. He left the keys where they lay and, slowly, stood upright. He was clutching the shopping bag defensively to his chest.
“Hello, Jalal,” said Mikhail calmly. “So good to finally meet you.”
“Who are you?” asked the Jordanian.
“I’m the last person you’re ever going to see.”
Swiftly, Mikhail drew a gun from the small of his back. It was a .22-caliber Beretta, with no suppressor. It was a naturally soft-spoken weapon.
“I’m here for Hannah Weinberg,” he said quietly. “And for Rachel Lévy and Arthur Goldman and all the other people you killed in Paris. I’m here for the victims in Amsterdam and America. I speak for the dead.”
“Please,” whispered the Jordanian. “I can help you. I know things. I know the plans for the next attack.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, I swear.”
“Where will it be?”
“Here in London.”
“What’s the target?”
Before Jalal could answer, Mikhail fired his first shot. It shattered the bottle of milk and lodged in the Jordanian’s heart. Slowly, Mikhail moved forward, firing nine more shots in rapid succession, until his target lay motionless in the entrance, in a pool of blood and milk. The gun was empty. Mikhail rammed a new magazine into the grip, placed the barrel to the dead man’s head, and fired one last shot. The eleventh. Behind him, a motorcycle pulled to the curb. He climbed onto the back, and in a moment he was gone.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE BLACK WIDOW IS A work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Visitors to the rue des Rosiers in the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris will search in vain for the Isaac Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France. Isaac’s granddaughter, the fictitious Hannah Weinberg, created the center at the end of The Messenger, the first novel in which she appeared. Hannah’s van Gogh painting, Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table, is also fictitious, though its tragic provenance is quite obviously drawn from the terrible events of Jeudi Noir and the Paris Roundup in July 1942.
I wish I could say that the anti-Jewish attacks described in the first chapter of The Black Widow were cut from whole cloth. But sadly they, too, were inspired by truth. Anti-Semitism in France, much of it emanating from Muslim communities, has compelled thousands of French Jews to leave their homes and emigrate to Israel. Indeed, eight thousand departed in the twelve months following the brutal murder of four Jews at the Hypercacher kosher market in January 2015. Many French Jews pass their afternoons in Independence Square in Netanya, at Chez Claude or one of the other cafés that cater to a growing francophone clientele. I can think of no other religious minority or ethnic group that is fleeing a Western European country. What’s more, the Jews of France are swimming against the tide, moving from the West to the most dangerous and volatile region on the planet. They are doing so for one reason only: they feel safer in Israel than they do in Paris, Toulouse, Marseilles, or Nice. Such is the condition of modern France.
Alpha Group, the secret counterterrorism unit of the DGSI portrayed in The Black Widow, does not exist, though I hope for all our sakes that something like it does. For the record, I am aware of the fact that the headquarters of Israel’s secret intelligence service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. I have chosen to keep the headquarters of my fictitious service there in part because I like the name of the street much more than the current address, which I shall not mention in print. There is indeed a limestone apartment building at 16 Narkiss Street in Jerusalem, but Gabriel Allon and his new family do not live there. During a recent visit to Israel, I learned that the building is now a stop on at least one guided tour of the city. My deepest apologies to the residents and their neighbors.
There was once an Arab village in the Western Galilee called al-Sumayriyya, and its current condition is accurately rendered in the pages of The Black Widow. Longtime readers of the Gabriel Allon series know that it first appeared in Prince of Fire in 2005, as the family home of a female terrorist named Fellah al-Tamari. Deir Yassin was in fact the site of a notorious massacre that occurred during the darkest days of the sectarian conflict in 1948 that gave birth to both the modern State of Israel and the Palestinian refugee crisis. The old village is now the home of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center, a psychiatric hospital that utilizes some of the old buildings and homes vacated by Deir Yassin’s original Arab residents. Kfar Shaul is affiliated with the Hadassah Medical Center and specializes in the treatment of Jerusalem syndrome, a disorder of religious obsession and delusion that begins with a visit to God’s fractured city upon a hill. Leah Allon’s condition is far more serious, as are her physical wounds. I have always been slightly vague about the exact address of the hospital where she is a permanent patient. Now we know its approximate location.
There is no Gallerie Mansour in downtown Beirut, but the Islamic State’s links to the trade in looted antiquities have been well documented. I first explored the concept of terrorists raising money by selling stolen or illicitly excavated antiquities in The Fallen Angel in 2012. At that time there was no proof, at least not in the public realm, that terrorists were actually lining their pockets by selling treasures from the past; it was merely something that I suspected was occurring. I take no satisfaction in being proven correct, especially by the likes of ISIS.
But ISIS has not been content merely to sell antiquities; it destroys them, too, especially if they conflict with the group’s interpretation of Islam. After sweeping into Palmyra in May 2015, ISIS holy warriors promptly destroyed many of the city’s glorious Roman temples. Forces loyal to the Assad regime recaptured Palmyra as I was finishing the first draft of The Black Widow. Having sworn at the outset that I would not chase the shifting sands of the conflict, I chose to leave chapter 39 as originally written. Such are the hazards of attempting to catch history in the act. I regret to say I am confident the civil war in Syria will continue for years, if not decades, much like the war that almost destroyed its neighbor, Lebanon. Territory will be won and lost, captured and abandoned. Thousands more will become refugees. Many more will die.
I did my utmost to explain the roots and explosive growth of ISIS accurately and dispassionately, though I am confident that, given America’s divided and increasingly dysfunctional politics, some will quibble with my portrayal. There is no doubt that the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 created the seedbed from which ISIS sprang. And there is also no doubt that the failure to leave a residual American force in Iraq in 2011, combined with the outbreak of civil war in Syria, allowed the group to flourish and spread on two sides of an increasingly meaningless border. To dismiss the group as “un-Islamic” or “not a state” is wishful thinking and, ultimately, counterproductive and dangerous. As the journalist and scholar Graeme Wood pointed out in a groundbreaking study of ISIS published in the Atlantic: “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” And it is rapidly taking on many functions of a modern state, issuing its citizenry everything from driver’s permits to fishing licenses.
At lea
st four thousand Westerners have heeded the clarion call to come to the caliphate, including more than five hundred women. A database maintained by London’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue finds that most of the women are teenagers or in their early twenties, and are likely to be widowed at a young age. Others face the very real prospect of losing their own lives in the violent world of the caliphate. In February 2015, three radicalized teenage girls from the Bethnal Green section of East London slipped out of the United Kingdom on an Istanbul-bound flight and made their way to the Syrian city of Raqqa, the caliphate’s unofficial capital. In December 2015, as the city came under both Russian and American air assault, all contact with the girls was lost. Their families now fear the three teenagers are dead.
Many Western ISIS recruits, men and women, have returned home. Some are disillusioned; others remain committed to the cause of the caliphate. And still others are prepared to carry out acts of mass murder and terror in the name of Islam. In the near term, Western Europe faces the greatest threat, in no small measure because of the large and restive Muslim populations living within its open borders. ISIS has no need to insert terrorists into Western Europe because the potential terrorists are already there. They reside in the banlieues of France and the Muslim quarters of Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Malmo, East London, and Luton. At the time of this writing, ISIS had carried out devastating attacks in Paris and Brussels. The perpetrators, for the most part, were born in the West and carried European passports in their pockets. More attacks will surely follow, for the security services of Western Europe have proven themselves woefully unprepared—especially the Belgian Sûreté, which has countenanced the creation of a virtual ISIS safe haven in the heart of Brussels.
The American homeland, however, is ISIS’s ultimate target. While researching this novel, I was struck by the number of times I heard someone say that an attack on a U.S. city is imminent, sooner rather than later. I was struck, too, by the number of times a high-level government official told me that this state of affairs is “the new normal”—that we must live with the fact that bombs will occasionally explode in our airports and subways, that we can no longer expect to be fully safe in a restaurant or a concert hall because of an ideology, and a faith, born of the Middle East. President Barack Obama seemed to express this point of view after the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the siege at the Hypercacher market. Cautioning against overreaction, he dismissed the perpetrators as “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” It was not a deli, of course; it was a kosher market. And the four victims were not “a bunch of folks.” They were Jews. And for that reason alone they were targeted and mercilessly slaughtered.
But how did the West arrive at this place? In the afterword of Portrait of a Spy, I warned what would happen if America and its allies mishandled the so-called Arab Spring. “If the forces of moderation and modernity prevail,” I wrote in April 2011, “it is possible the threat of terrorism will gradually recede. But if radical Muslim clerics and their adherents manage to seize power in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, we might very well look back fondly on the turbulent early years of the twenty-first century as a golden age of relations between Islam and the West.” Unfortunately, the promise of the Arab Spring has been broken, and the Arab world is in turmoil. With the age of oil in retreat, its future is bleak. If history is a guide, a leader of destiny might arise from the chaos. Perhaps he will hail from the biblical cradle of civilization, near the banks of one of the four rivers that flowed from the Garden of Eden. And perhaps, if he is so inclined, he might refer to himself as Saladin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM INDEBTED TO MY WIFE, Jamie Gangel, who listened patiently while I worked out the plot of The Black Widow and then skillfully edited the enormous pile of paper that spilled from my printer after seven months of intense writing. She has been at my side from the very beginning of the Gabriel Allon series, a warm sun-dappled morning in Georgetown when I first had the idea of turning an Israeli assassin into an art restorer. Now the morose, grieving man we first met in The Kill Artist is the chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. It is an outcome I never could have imagined, and I would not have arrived at it without Jamie’s constant support. Nor would it have been possible without the love of my two children, Lily and Nicholas. Each day, in ways large and small, they remind me that there is more to life than words and paragraphs and clever plot twists.
To write sixteen books about a man from Israel has required me to spend a great deal of time there. I have traveled the country from end to end, and parts of it I know as well as my own. Along the way I have made many friends. Some are diplomats or academics, others are soldiers and spies. Without fail, they have treated my family with enormous kindness and generosity, a debt I have repaid by slipping bits and pieces of them into my plots and characters. I turned a friend’s historic farm in the moshav of Nahalal into a safe house where I prepared a woman for a mission no one of sound mind would undertake. And when I think of Uzi Navot’s beautiful home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva, I am actually seeing the home of a friend who lives a short distance away. I also think of my friend’s brilliance, his pitch-perfect sense of humor, his humanity, and his amazing wife, who bears absolutely no resemblance to the domineering Bella.
I, too, have been summoned with scant notice to the old hotel in Ma’ale Hahamisha—not by Ari Shamron but by Meir Dagan, the tenth director general of the Mossad, who died as I was finishing this novel. Meir painted in his spare time and, like Ari, he loved the northern Galilee, where he lived in the historic town of Rosh Pinah. The Holocaust was never far from his thoughts. In his office at Mossad headquarters hung a haunting photograph of his grandfather taken in the seconds before he was shot to death by the SS officers. Mossad agents were made to look at it one last time before departing on missions abroad. On that afternoon in Ma’ale Hahamisha, Meir gave me a tour of the world I will never forget and gently chided me for some of the plot choices I had made. Every few minutes an Israeli in a swimsuit would pause at our table to shake Meir’s hand. A spy by nature, he did not seem to relish the attention. His sense of humor was self-deprecating. “When they make the movie about Gabriel,” he said with his inscrutable smile, “please ask them to make me taller.”
General Doron Almog and his beautiful wife, Didi, always open their home to us when we come to Israel and, like Chiara and Gilah Shamron, they prepare far more food than we can possibly eat. I did not know Doron when I created Gabriel’s physical appearance, but surely he was the mold upon which my character was based. One never quite knows who might show up at Doron’s dinner table. Late one evening a very senior IDF general stopped by for a nightcap. Earlier that day, in a European port, a threat to Israel’s security had been quietly and cleverly eliminated. When I asked the general whether he’d had anything to do with it, he smiled and said, “Shit happens.”
The remarkable staff of Hadassah Medical Center allowed me to roam the hospital from its rooftop helipad to its new state-of-the-art operating suites far beneath ground. Dr. Andrew Pate, the eminent anesthesiologist, helped me save the life of a terrorist under less than ideal circumstances. Thanks to his expert instruction, I now feel that, in a pinch, I could treat pneumohemothorax.
I am forever indebted to David Bull, who, unlike the fictitious Gabriel, truly is one of the world’s finest art restorers. A heartfelt thanks to my legal team, Michael Gendler and Linda Rappaport, for their support and wise counsel. Louis Toscano, my dear friend and longtime editor, made countless improvements to my manuscript, and my eagle-eyed personal copy editor, Kathy Crosby, made certain the text was free of typographical and grammatical errors.
We are blessed with many friends who fill our lives with love and laughter at critical junctures during the writing year, especially Betsy and Andrew Lack, Caryn and Jeff Zucker, Nancy Dubuc and Michael Kizilbash, Pete Williams and David Gardner, Elsa Walsh and
Bob Woodward. Also, a special thanks to Deborah Tyman of the New York Yankees for taking a chance on an untested right-hander with a bad shoulder. For the record, I didn’t bounce it.
I consulted hundreds of books, newspaper and magazine articles, and Web sites while preparing this manuscript, far too many to name here. I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention the extraordinary scholarship and reporting of Joby Warrick, Paul Cruickshank, Scott Shane, and Michael Weiss. I salute all the courageous reporters who have dared to enter Syria and tell the world of the horrors they have seen there. Journalism—real journalism—still matters.
It goes without saying that this book could not have been published without the support of my team at HarperCollins, but I shall say it anyway, for they are the best in the business. A special thanks to Jonathan Burnham, Brian Murray, Michael Morrison, Jennifer Barth, Josh Marwell, Tina Andreadis, Leslie Cohen, Leah Wasielewski, Robin Bilardello, Mark Ferguson, Kathy Schneider, Carolyn Bodkin, Doug Jones, Katie Ostrowka, Erin Wicks, Shawn Nicholls, Amy Baker, Mary Sasso, David Koral, and Leah Carlson-Stanisic.
Finally, a special thanks to the staff of Café Milano in Georgetown, who always take good care of our family and friends when we are fortunate enough to get a table. Please forgive the fictitious unpleasantness in the climax of The Black Widow. Let us hope a night such as that never comes to pass.