The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,108

month of October, which in Paris was drenched with sun and warmer than usual, much to the delight of the surveillance artists, the operation’s unsung heroes. By the first week of November, the team was beset by something approaching abject panic. Even the normally placid Paul Rousseau was beside himself, but then Rousseau was to be forgiven. He had a chief and a minister breathing down his neck, and a president who was too politically weak to survive another attack on French soil. The president would soon be leaving for Washington for a meeting with his American counterpart, and for that Rousseau was eternally grateful.

Natalie soldiered on, but clearly she was growing weary of her double life in the dreary banlieue. There were no more team gatherings; they communicated with her only by text. Status checks invariably elicited a terse response. She was fine. She was well. She was bored. She was lonely. On her days off from the clinic, she escaped the banlieue by RER train and ran the watchers ragged on the streets of central Paris. During one such visit she was accosted by a Frenchwoman of National Front persuasion who took exception to her hijab. Natalie returned fire and instantly the two women were nose to nose on a busy street corner. Were it not for the gendarme who pulled them apart, they might very well have come to blows.

“An admirable performance,” Paul Rousseau told Gabriel that evening at Alpha Group’s headquarters on the rue de Grenelle. “Let us hope Saladin was watching.”

“Yes,” said Gabriel. “Let us hope.”

But was he even alive? And if he was, had he lost faith in the woman who had saved him? This was their greatest fear, that Saladin’s operational train had left the station and Dr. Leila Hadawi had not been issued a ticket. In the meantime, the system was blinking red. European capitals, including Paris, were on high alert, and in Washington the Department of Homeland Security reluctantly raised its threat level, though publicly the president continued to play down the danger. The fact that warnings came and went with no attack seemed to bolster his case that the group did not possess the capability to carry out a major terror spectacular on the American homeland. A climate change accord was signed, a famous pop star released a long-awaited album, China’s stock market collapsed, and soon the world forgot. But the world did not know what Gabriel and Natalie and the rest of the team knew. Somewhere in Iraq or Syria was a man called Saladin. He was not a raving lunatic; he was a man of reason, a Sunni nationalist, quite possibly a former spy. He had suffered two serious shrapnel wounds to the right side of his body, one in the chest, the other to the thigh. If he was ambulatory, he would almost certainly require a cane or crutches to walk. The scars would make him easily identifiable. So, too, would his ambition. He planned to carry out an attack of such severity that the West would have no choice but to invade the Islamic caliphate. The armies of Rome and the men with black flags and long hair and beards would clash in a place called Dabiq, on the plains of northern Syria. The men who flew black flags would prevail, thus unleashing a chain of apocalyptic events that would bring about the appearance of the Mahdi and the end of days.

But even in the sacred city of Jerusalem, Saladin’s ultimate target, attention wandered. Several months had passed since Gabriel was to have assumed control of the Office, and even the prime minister, who had been complicit in the delay, was losing patience. He had an ally in Ari Shamron, who never supported the delay in the first place. Frustrated, Shamron rang a compliant journalist and told him—anonymously, of course—that a change in leadership at the Office was imminent, days rather than weeks. He also suggested that the prime minister’s choice for a new chief would be surprising, to say the least. There followed a round of intense media speculation. Many names were floated, though the name Gabriel Allon was mentioned only in passing and with sadness. Gabriel was the chief who never was. Gabriel was dead.

But he was not dead, of course. He was jetlagged, he was anxious, he was worried that his meticulously planned and executed operation had been in vain, but he was very much alive. On a Friday afternoon in mid-November he