The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,152

said the president, would be limited to air strikes and special operations to kill or capture senior ISIS leaders, like the man, still unidentified, who had planned and executed the attack. The president’s critics were livid. So, too, was ISIS, which wanted nothing more than a final apocalyptic battle with the armies of Rome, in a place called Dabiq. The president refused to grant ISIS its wish. He had been elected to end the endless wars in the Middle East, not start another one. This time, America would not overreact. It would survive the attack on Washington, he said, and be stronger as a result.

Among the first targets of the U.S. military response was an apartment building near al-Rasheed Park in Raqqa and a large house of many rooms and courts west of Mosul. At home, however, the American media was focused on a house of a far different sort, a timbered A-frame cottage near the town of Hume, Virginia. The cottage had been rented to a Northern Virginia–based shell entity owned by an Egyptian national named Qassam el-Banna. The very same Qassam el-Banna had been discovered in a small pond on the property, in the front seat of his Kia sedan, having been shot four times at close range. Five additional bodies were discovered inside the cottage, four ISIS fighters in black tactical suits and a woman who would later be identified as Megan Taylor, a convert to Islam originally from Valparaiso, Indiana. The FBI concluded that all five had been shot with 5.56x45mm rounds fired by two AR-15 assault rifles. Later, through ballistics analysis, it would be determined that those same AR-15s had been involved in the attack on Café Milano in Georgetown. But exactly who had done the shooting? The FBI director said he did not know the answer. No one believed him.

Not long after the discovery in rural Virginia, the FBI detained Amina el-Banna, the wife of the man found in the pond, for questioning. And it was at this point that the story took an intriguing turn. For immediately after her release, Mrs. el-Banna retained the services of a lawyer from a civil rights organization with well-established ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. A press conference soon followed, conducted on the front lawn of the el-Bannas’ small duplex on Eighth Place in Arlington. Speaking in Arabic, with the lawyer acting as her translator, Mrs. el-Banna denied that her husband was a member of ISIS or had played any role in the attack on Washington. Furthermore, she claimed that, on the night of the attack, two men had broken into her house and brutally interrogated her. She described one of the men as tall and lanky. The other was of medium height and build, with gray temples and the greenest eyes she had ever seen. Both were quite obviously Israeli. She claimed that they had threatened to kill her and her son—she never mentioned that he was named for Mohamed Atta—unless she gave them the passwords for her husband’s computers. After uploading the contents of the devices, they left quickly. No, she admitted, she did not report the incident to the police. She was frightened, she claimed, because she was a Muslim.

Mrs. el-Banna’s claims might well have been dismissed were it not for her description of one of the men who had entered her house—the man of medium height and build, with gray temples and vivid green eyes. Former inhabitants of the secret world recognized him as the noted Israeli operative named Gabriel Allon, and a few said so on television. They were quick to point out, however, that Allon could not possibly have been present in Mrs. el-Banna’s house because he had been killed in a bombing in London’s Brompton Road almost a year earlier. Or had he? Israel’s ambassador to Washington inadvertently muddied the waters when he refused to state categorically and without equivocation that Gabriel Allon was indeed no longer among the living. “What do you want me to say?” he snapped during an interview. “That he’s still dead?” Then, hiding behind Israel’s long-standing policy of refusing to comment on intelligence matters, the ambassador asked the interviewer to change the subject. And thus commenced the slow resurrection of a legend.

There quickly appeared in the press accounts of many Washington sightings, all of dubious provenance and reliability. He had been seen entering and leaving a large Federal-style house on N Street, or so claimed a neighbor. He had been seen having coffee at a patisserie