The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,151

one, like targets in a shooting gallery. The woman was the last to die. Shot through the head, she collapsed as if a trapdoor had opened beneath her. The camera slipped from her grasp and clattered to the floor. Benevolently, the lens averted its gaze from Natalie’s face. She was beautiful, thought Gabriel, as he cut the binds from her wrists. Even when she was screaming.

PART FOUR

THE ONE IN CHARGE

75

WASHINGTON—JERUSALEM

THE RECRIMINATIONS BEGAN EVEN BEFORE the sun had risen. One party blamed the president for the calamity that had befallen America, the other blamed his predecessor. That was the only thing Washington was good at these days—recriminations and apportionment of blame. There was once a time, during the darkest days of the Cold War, when American foreign policy was characterized by consensus and steadfastness. Now the two parties could not agree on what to call the enemy, let alone how to combat him. It was little wonder, then, that an attack on the nation’s capital was yet another occasion for partisan bickering.

In the meantime—at the National Counterterrorism Center, the Lincoln Memorial, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Harbor Place, a string of restaurants along M Street, and at Café Milano—they counted the dead. One hundred and sixteen at the NCTC and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 28 at the Lincoln Memorial, 312 at the Kennedy Center, 147 at Harbor Place, 62 along M Street, and 49 at Café Milano. Among those killed at the renowned Georgetown eatery were the four ISIS gunmen. All had been shot to death. But in the immediate aftermath, there was confusion over precisely who had done the shooting. The Metropolitan Police said it had been the FBI. The FBI said it had been the Metropolitan Police.

The suicide bomber was identified as a woman, late twenties, blond. In short order, it would be established that she had flown from Paris to New York on a French passport and had spent a single night at the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington, in a room registered to a Dr. Leila Hadawi, also a French citizen. The French government was then forced to acknowledge that the suicide bomber, identified by her passport as Asma Doumaz, was in fact Safia Bourihane, the woman who had attacked the Weinberg Center in Paris. But how had the most wanted woman in the world, a jihadist icon, managed to slip back into France, board an international flight, and enter the United States? On Capitol Hill, members of both political parties called for the secretary of homeland security to resign, along with the commissioner of customs and border protection. Recriminations and apportionment of blame: Washington’s favorite pastime.

But who was Dr. Leila Hadawi? The French government claimed she had been born in France of Palestinian parentage and was an employee of the state-run health care system. According to passport records, she had spent the month of August in Greece, though French security and intelligence officials now suspected she had traveled clandestinely to Syria for training. Curiously, ISIS seemed not to know her. Indeed, her name appeared in none of the celebratory videos or social media postings that flooded the Internet in the hours after the attack. As for her current whereabouts, they were unknown.

Media on both sides of the Atlantic began calling it the “French Connection”—the uncomfortable links between the attack on Washington and citizens of America’s oldest ally. Le Monde revealed an additional “connection” when it reported that a senior DGSI officer named Paul Rousseau, the hero of the secret campaign against Direct Action, had been wounded in the bombing of the National Counterterrorism Center. But why was Rousseau there? The DGSI claimed that he was involved in the routine security measures surrounding the French president’s visit to Washington. Le Monde, however, politely disagreed. Rousseau, said the newspaper, was the chief of something called Alpha Group, an ultra-secret counterterrorism unit known for deception and dirty tricks. The interior minister denied Alpha Group’s existence, as did the chief of the DGSI. No one in France believed them.

Nor did anyone really care at that point, at least not in America, where blood vengeance was the first order of business. The president immediately ordered massive air strikes against all known ISIS targets in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, though he went out of his way to assure the Islamic world that America was not at war with them. He also rejected calls for a full-scale U.S. invasion of the caliphate. The American response,