The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,53
best friend, or her lover, was in fact her worst enemy. The teaching team of Abdul and Abdul instructed her to assume she was being followed, observed, and listened to at all times. This was not a problem, they said, so long as she remained faithful to her cover. A proper cover was like a shield. The typical undercover Office field agent spent far more time maintaining his cover than actually gathering intelligence. Cover, they told her, was everything.
During the second week at the farm, her Palestinian studies took a decidedly harder turn. The entire Zionist enterprise, she was told, was based upon a myth—the myth that Palestine was a land without a people waiting for a people without a land. In fact, in 1881, the year before the first Zionist settlers arrived, the population of Palestine was 475,000. The vast majority were Muslim and were concentrated in the Judean Hills, the Galilee, and the other portions of the land that were then habitable. Roughly that same number of people were driven into exile during al-Nakba, the catastrophe of Israel’s founding in 1948. And still another wave fled their villages in the West Bank after the Zionist conquest of 1967. They languished in the refugee camps—Khan Yunis, Shatila, Ein al-Hilweh, Yarmouk, Balata, Jenin, Tulkarm, and dozens more—and dreamed of their olive groves and lemon trees. Many kept the deeds to property and homes. Some even carried keys to front doors. This unhealed wound was the seedbed of the Arab world’s grief. The wars, the suffering, the lack of economic progress, the despotism—all this was the fault of Israel.
“Spare me,” groaned Natalie.
“Who said this?” demanded one of the Abduls, a cadaverous-looking creature, pale as milk, who was never without a cigarette or a cup of tea. “Was it Natalie or was it Leila? Because Leila does not question these assertions. Leila knows in her bones they are true. Leila drank it with her mother’s milk. Leila heard it from the lips of her kin. Leila believes the Jews to be descendants of apes and pigs. She knows they use the blood of Palestinian children to make their matzo. She thinks they are an intrinsically evil people, children of the devil.”
Her Islamic studies grew more rigid, too. After completing a crash course in the basics of ritual and belief, Natalie’s instructors immersed her in the concepts of Islamism and jihad. She read Sayyid Qutb, the dissident Egyptian writer regarded as the founder of modern Islamism, and slogged her way through Ibn Taymiyyah, the thirteenth-century Islamic theologian who, according to many experts in the field, was the wellspring for it all. She read Bin Laden and Zawahiri and listened to hours of sermons by a Yemeni-American cleric who had been killed in a drone strike. She watched videos of roadside bombings of American forces in Iraq and surfed some of the more salacious Islamic Web sites, which her instructors referred to as jihadi porn. Before switching off her bedside lamp at night, she always read a few lines of Mahmoud Darwish. My roots were entrenched before the birth of time . . . In dreams she walked through an Eden of olive groves and lemon trees.
The technique was something akin to brainwashing, and slowly it began to work. Natalie packed away her old identity and life and became Leila. She did not know her family name; her legend, as they called it, would be given to her last, after a proper foundation had been poured and a frame constructed. In word and deed, she became more pious, more outwardly Islamic. In the evenings, when she ran along the dusty farm roads, she covered her arms and legs. And whenever her instructors were talking about Palestine or Islam, she wore her hijab. She experimented with several different ways of securing it but settled on a simple two-pin method that showed no hair. She thought she looked pretty in the hijab, but didn’t like the way it focused attention on her nose and mouth. A partial facial veil would solve the problem, but it wasn’t consistent with Leila’s profile. Leila was an educated woman, a doctor, caught between East and West, present and past. She walked a tightrope that stretched between the House of Islam and the House of War, that part of the world where the faith was not yet dominant. Leila was conflicted. She was an impressionable girl.
They taught her the basics of martial arts but nothing of guns, for knowledge of weaponry