The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,5

shot twice despite the fact that she had almost no chance of survival. The attackers’ cruelty was matched only by their competence. The woman was seen calmly clearing a jammed round from her Kalashnikov before killing a badly wounded man who, a moment earlier, had been seated on the fourth floor of the building.

For several hours after the attack, the Marais remained cordoned off, inaccessible to all but emergency workers and investigators. Finally, in late afternoon, when the last of the fires had been extinguished and the site was determined to be free of secondary explosives, the French president arrived. After touring the devastation, he declared it “a Holocaust in the heart of Paris.” The remark did not meet with a favorable reception in some of the more restive banlieues. In one, there erupted a spontaneous celebration that was quickly snuffed out by riot police. Most of the newspapers ignored the incident. A senior French police official called it “an unpleasant distraction” from the immediate task at hand, which was finding the perpetrators.

Their escape from the Marais, like everything else about the operation, had been meticulously planned and executed. A Peugeot Satelis motorbike had been left for them on a nearby street, along with a pair of black helmets. They traveled north, the male driving, the woman clinging to his waist, passing unnoticed through the stream of approaching police cars and ambulances. A traffic camera photographed them for the last time near the hamlet of Villeron, in the Val-d’Oise department. By midday they were the targets of the largest manhunt in French history.

The National Police and the gendarmerie saw to the roadblocks, the identity checks, the smashed windows of abandoned warehouses, and the severed padlocks of suspected hideouts. But inside a graceful old building located on the rue de Grenelle, eighty-four men and women were engaged in a search of a far different kind. Known only as the Alpha Group, they were members of a secret unit of the DGSI, France’s internal security service. The Group, as it was known informally, had been formed six years earlier, in the aftermath of a jihadist suicide bombing outside a landmark restaurant on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It specialized in human penetration of France’s sprawling jihadist underground and had been granted the authority to take “active measures” to remove potential Islamic terrorists from circulation before the Islamic terrorists could take active measures against the Republic or its citizenry. It was said of Paul Rousseau, Alpha Group’s chief, that he had plotted more bombings than Osama bin Laden, a charge he did not dispute, though he was quick to point out that none of his bombs actually exploded. The officers of Alpha Group were skilled practitioners in the art of deception. And Paul Rousseau was their undisputed leader and lodestar.

With his tweed jackets, tousled gray hair, and ever-present pipe, Rousseau seemed more suited to the role of absentminded professor than ruthless secret policeman, and not without good reason. Academia was where he began his career and where, in darker moments, he sometimes longed to return. A respected scholar of nineteenth-century French literature, Rousseau had been serving on the faculty of Paris-Sorbonne University when a friend in French intelligence asked him to take a job with the DST, France’s internal security service. The year was 1983, and the country was beset by a wave of bombings and assassinations carried out by the left-wing terrorist group known as Direct Action. Rousseau joined a unit dedicated to Direct Action’s destruction and, with a series of brilliant operations, brought the group to its knees.

He remained with the DST, battling successive waves of leftist and Middle East–based terrorism, until 2004, when his beloved wife Collette died after a long struggle with leukemia. Inconsolable, he retired to his modest villa in the Luberon and commenced work on a planned multivolume biography of Proust. Then came the bombing on the Champs-Élysées. Rousseau agreed to lay down his pen and return to the fight, but only on one condition. He had no interest in tailing suspected terrorists, listening to their telephone conversations, or reading their maniacal musings on the Internet. He wanted to go on offense. The chief agreed, as did the interior minister, and Alpha Group was born. In the six years of its existence, it had foiled more than a dozen major attacks on French soil. Rousseau viewed the bombing of the Weinberg Center not merely as a failure of intelligence but as a personal affront. Late that afternoon, with