The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,42

smaller than Natalie, and wore an expression that fell somewhere between boredom and grief. She had helped herself to a cup of tea. Next to it was a mobile phone, and next to the phone was Natalie’s passport, which had been hidden in a manila envelope in the bottom drawer of her bedside table. The envelope had also contained three letters of an intensely personal nature, written by a man Natalie had known at university in France. She had always regretted not burning them, never more so than at that moment.

“Open it,” said the woman with a glance toward Natalie’s stylish carry-on suitcase. It bore the bar-coded, stickered traces of her last trip to Paris, Air France instead of El Al, the preferred airline of French-Jewish exiles. Natalie tugged at the zipper and peered inside. It had been hastily and carelessly packed—a pair of trousers, two blouses, a cotton pullover sweater, a single pair of underwear. What kind of woman, she thought, packed one pair of panties?

“How long am I going to be away?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

The woman only sipped her tea.

“No makeup? No deodorant? No shampoo? Where am I going? Syria?”

There was a silence. Then the woman said, “Pack whatever you need. But don’t take too long. He’s very anxious to meet you. We mustn’t keep him waiting.”

“Who? Uzi Navot?”

“No,” she answered, smiling for the first time. “The man you’re going to meet is much more important than Uzi Navot.”

“I have to be back at work in three days.”

“Yes, we know. Nine o’clock.” She held out her hand. “Your phone.”

“But—”

“Please,” the woman said, “you’re wasting valuable time.”

Natalie surrendered the phone and went into her bedroom. It looked as if it had been ransacked. The contents of the manila envelope lay scattered across the bed, everything but the letters, which seemed to have vanished. Natalie had a sudden vision of a roomful of people reading passages aloud and then bursting into uproarious laughter. She gathered up a few more items of clothing and packed a small toiletry kit, including her birth control pills and the prescription pain reliever she took for the headaches that sometimes swept over her like a storm. Then she returned to the kitchen.

“Where are my letters?”

“What letters?”

“The letters you took from my bedroom.”

“I didn’t take anything from you.”

“Who did?”

“Let’s go,” was all the woman said.

Descending the stairs, suitcase in one hand, purse in the other, Natalie noticed that the woman walked with a slight limp. Her car was parked in Ibn Ezra Street, directly in front of Natalie’s. She drove calmly but very fast, down the Judean Hills toward Tel Aviv, then northward up the Coastal Plain along Highway 6. For a time they listened to the news on the radio, but it was all stabbings and death and predictions of a coming apocalyptic war between Jews and Muslims over the Temple Mount. The woman rebuffed all questions and attempts at conversation, leaving Natalie to stare out her window at the minarets rising above the West Bank towns just beyond the Separation Barrier. They were so close she imagined she could touch them. The proximity of the villages to such a vital road had left her dubious about the prospects of a two-state solution. French and Swiss villages existed side by side along a largely invisible border, but Switzerland did not wish to wipe France from the map. Nor did the Swiss beseech their sons to shed the blood of French infidels.

Gradually, the Coastal Plain fell away and the highway tilted toward the bluffs of Mount Carmel and the green-and-tan patchwork of the Galilee. They were headed vaguely toward Nazareth, but a few miles before reaching the city the woman turned onto a smaller road and followed it past the sporting fields of a school until a security barrier, metal and spiked, blocked their path. Automatically, the gate slid away, and they proceeded along a gently curving street lined with trees. Natalie had been expecting a secret installation of some sort. Instead, she found herself in a quiet little town. Its layout was circular. Bungalows fronted the road, and behind the bungalows, like the folds of a hand fan, lay pastures and cultivated cropland.

“Where are we?”

“Nahalal,” replied the woman. “It’s a moshav. Do you know this term? Moshav?”

“I’m an immigrant,” answered Natalie coolly, “not an idiot. A moshav is a cooperative community of individual farms, which is different from a kibbutz.”

“Very good.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“What’s that?”

“You really do think we’re idiots. You ask us to make aliyah