The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,154
to the van Gogh; it was now the property of the Israel Museum. There was, however, one inviolable proviso. The painting could never, under any circumstances, be sold or lent to another institution. As long as there was an Israel Museum—indeed, as long as there was an Israel—Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table would hang there.
Gabriel signed the document with an indecipherable flourish and resumed his contemplation of the painting. At length, he reached out and trailed a forefinger lightly across the face of Marguerite. She required no additional restoration; she was ready for her coming-out party. He only wished he could say the same for Natalie. Natalie required a bit of retouching. Natalie was a work in progress.
76
NAHALAL, ISRAEL
THEY RETURNED HER TO THE place where it all began, to the farmhouse in the old moshav of Nahalal. Her room was as she had left it, save for the volume of Darwish poetry, which had vanished. So, too, had the outsize photographs of Palestinian suffering. The walls of the sitting room were now hung with paintings.
“Yours?” she asked on the evening of her arrival.
“Some,” answered Gabriel.
“Which ones?”
“The ones with no signatures.”
“And the others?”
“My mother.”
Her eyes moved across the canvases. “She was obviously a great influence on you.”
“Actually, we influenced each other.”
“You were competitive?”
“Very.”
She went to the French doors and gazed across the darkened valley, toward the lights of the Arab village atop the hillock.
“How long can I stay here?”
“As long as you like.”
“And then?”
“That,” said Gabriel, “is entirely up to you.”
She was the farmhouse’s only occupant, but she was never truly alone. A security detail monitored her every move, as did the cameras and the microphones, which recorded the awful sounds of her night terrors. Saladin appeared often in her dreams. Sometimes he was the wounded, helpless man whom she had encountered in the house near Mosul. And sometimes he was the strong, elegantly dressed figure who had so gleefully sentenced her to die in a cottage at the edge of the Shenandoah. Safia came to Natalie in her dreams, too. She never wore a hijab or abaya, only the gray five-button jacket she had worn the night of her death, and her hair was always blond. She was Safia as she might have been if radical Islam hadn’t sunk its hooks into her. She was Safia the impressionable girl.
Natalie explained all this to the team of physicians and therapists who checked in on her every few days. They prescribed sleeping pills, which she refused to take, and anti-anxiety medication, which left her feeling dull and listless. To aid in her recovery, she led herself on punishing training runs on the farm roads of the valley. As before, she covered her arms and legs, not out of piety, but because it was late autumn and quite cold. The security guards kept watch over her always, as did the other residents of Nahalal. It was a tight-knit community, with many veterans of the IDF and the security services. They came to regard Natalie as their responsibility. They also came to believe she was the one they had read about in the newspapers. The one who had infiltrated the most vicious terrorist group the world had ever known. The one who had gone to the caliphate and lived to tell about it.
The doctors were not her only visitors. Her parents came often, sometimes spending the night, and early each afternoon she had a session with her old trainers. This time, their task was to undo what they had done before, to flush Natalie’s system of Palestinian enmity and Islamic zeal, to turn her into an Israeli again. “But not too Israeli,” Gabriel cautioned the trainers. He had invested a great deal of time and effort transforming Natalie into one of his enemies. He did not want to lose her because of a few terrifying minutes in a Virginia cottage.
She was visited, too, by Dina Sarid. During six interminable sessions, all recorded, she debriefed Natalie in far greater detail than before—her time in Raqqa and the camp at Palmyra, her initial interrogation at the hands of Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti, the many hours she had spent alone with the former Iraqi intelligence officer who called himself Saladin. All the material would eventually find its way into Dina’s voluminous files, for she was already preparing for the next round. Saladin, she had warned the Office, was not finished. One day soon he would come for Jerusalem.