The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,148
of Reston, Virginia. It took the single-engine aircraft ten minutes to reach Fauquier County and to locate the small A-frame house in a vale north of Hume Road. Inside were the heat signatures of seven individuals. One of the signatures, the smallest, appeared immobile. There were three vehicles parked outside the cottage. All had been recently driven.
“Are there any other heat signatures in that valley?” asked Gabriel.
“Only wildlife,” explained Carter.
“What kind of wildlife?”
“Several deer and a couple of bear.”
“Perfect,” said Gabriel.
“Where are you now?”
Gabriel told him. They were heading west on I-66. They had just passed the Beltway.
“Where’s the closest FBI SWAT or hostage rescue team?” he asked.
“All the available teams have been sent to Washington to deal with the attacks.”
“How long can we keep the Cessna up top?”
“Not long. The Bureau wants it back.”
“Ask them to make one more pass. But not too low. The men inside that house know the sound of a surveillance aircraft when they hear it.”
Gabriel killed the connection and watched the images of American suburbia flashing past his window. In his head, however, there were only numbers, and the numbers did not look good. Seven heat signatures, two AR-15 assault rifles, one veteran of the IDF’s most elite special forces unit, one former assassin who would soon be the chief of Israeli intelligence, one surveillance specialist who never cared for rough stuff, two bears. He looked down at his mobile phone. Distance to destination: fifty-one miles. Time to destination: one hour and seven minutes.
“Faster, Mikhail. You have to drive faster.”
73
HUME, VIRGINIA
SHE WAS TO BE GIVEN no trial, for none was necessary; with a press of her detonator button she had admitted her guilt. There was only the matter of her confession, which would be recorded for dissemination on ISIS’s myriad propaganda platforms, and her execution, which would be by beheading. It might all have been handled quite swiftly were it not for Saladin himself. The brief delay was by no means an act of mercy. Saladin was still a spy at heart. And what a spy craved most was not blood but information.
The success of the attacks on Washington, and the prospect of Natalie’s imminent death, had the effect of loosening his tongue. He acknowledged that, yes, he had served in the Iraqi Mukhabarat under Saddam Hussein. His primary duty, he claimed, was to provide material and logistical support to Palestinian terrorist groups, especially those that rejected absolutely the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. During the Second Intifada he had overseen the payment of lucrative death benefits to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Abu Nidal, he boasted, was a close friend. Indeed, it was Abu Nidal, the most vicious of the so-called rejectionist terrorists, who had given Saladin his code name.
His work required him to become something of an expert on the Israeli secret intelligence service. He developed a grudging admiration for the Office and for Ari Shamron, the master spy who guided it, on and off, for the better part of thirty years. He also came to admire the accomplishments of Shamron’s famous protégé, the legendary assassin and operative named Gabriel Allon.
“And so you can imagine my surprise,” he told Natalie, “to see him walking across the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, and to hear you speak his name.”
After completing his opening remarks, he commenced questioning Natalie on every aspect of the operation—her life prior to joining Israeli intelligence, her recruitment, her training, her insertion into the field. Having been told she would soon face beheading, Natalie had no reason to cooperate other than to delay by a few minutes her inevitable death. It was motive enough, for she knew that her disappearance had not gone unnoticed. Saladin, with his spy’s curiosity, had given her the opportunity to run a little sand through the hourglass. He began by asking her real name. She resisted for several precious minutes, until in a rage he threatened to carve the flesh from her bones with the same knife he would use to take her head.