The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,122

smiled in spite of himself and looked at the video screen. The mouthwash-green airplane had just entered American airspace.

54

DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

IT TOOK AN HOUR FOR Dr. Leila Hadawi to navigate the frozen welcome mat at Dulles Airport’s passport control—forty minutes in the long, mazelike line, and another twenty minutes standing before the dais of a Customs and Border Protection officer. The officer was clearly not part of the operation. He questioned Dr. Hadawi at length about her recent travels—Greece was of particular interest—and about the purpose of her visit to the United States. Her response, that she had come to visit friends, was one he had heard many times before.

“Where do the friends live?”

“Falls Church.”

“What are their names?”

She gave him two Arabic names.

“Are you staying with them?”

“No.”

“Where are you staying?”

And on it went until finally she was invited to smile for a camera and place her fingers on the cool glass of a digital scanner. Returning her passport, the customs officer hollowly wished her a pleasant stay in the United States. She made her way to baggage claim, where her suitcase was circling slowly on an otherwise empty carousel. In the arrivals hall she searched for a man with coal-black hair and matching eyewear, but he was nowhere in sight. She was not surprised. While crossing the Atlantic, he had told her that the Office would be relegated to a secondary role, that the Americans were now in charge and would be taking the operational lead.

“And when I’m given my target?” she had asked.

“Send us a text through the usual channel.”

“And if they take my phone away from me?”

“Take a walk. Handbag over the left shoulder.”

“What if they don’t let me take a walk?”

She wheeled her bag outside and, assisted by a well-built American with a military-style haircut, boarded a Hertz shuttle bus. Her car, a bright red Chevrolet Impala, was in its assigned space. She placed her bag in the trunk, climbed behind the wheel, and hesitantly started the engine. The nobs and dials of the instrument panel seemed entirely alien to her. Then she realized she had not driven an automobile since the morning she had returned to her apartment in Jerusalem to find Dina Sarid sitting at her kitchen table. What a disaster it would be, she thought, if she were to kill or seriously injure herself in an accident. She punched a destination into her mobile phone and was informed that her drive of twenty-four miles would take well over an hour because of unusually heavy traffic. She smiled; she was glad for the delay. She removed her hijab and tucked it carefully into her handbag. Then she slipped the car into gear and headed slowly toward the exit.

It was no accident the Impala was bright red; the FBI had quietly intervened in the booking. In addition, the Bureau’s technicians had fitted the car with a beacon and bugged its interior. As a result, the analysts on duty on the Operations Floor at the National Counterterrorism Center heard Natalie singing softly to herself in French as she drove along the Dulles Access Road toward Washington. On one of the giant video screens, the traffic cameras tracked her every move. On another blinked the blue light of the beacon. Her mobile phone was emitting a signal of its own. Her French phone number appeared in a shaded rectangular box, next to the blinking blue light. The Office had real-time access to her voice calls, texts, and e-mails. And now that the phone was on American soil, connected to an American cellular network, the NCTC had access to them, too.

The bright red car passed within a few hundred feet of the Liberty Crossing campus and continued along Interstate 66 to the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia, where it turned into the surface parking lot of the Key Bridge Marriott. There the blinking blue light of the beacon came to a stop. But after an interval of thirty seconds—long enough for a woman to adjust her hair and retrieve a suitcase from the trunk of a car—the shaded rectangular box of the mobile phone moved toward the hotel’s entrance. It paused briefly at the reception desk, where the device’s owner, an Arab woman in her early thirties, veiled, French passport, stated her name for the clerk. There was no need to present a credit card; ISIS had already paid for her room charges and incidentals. Weary from a long day of travel, she gratefully accepted an electronic key card