The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,56

of the briefing book with the excruciating confessional detail of a modern memoir. Natalie had to admit it made for rather good reading. There were the slights she had suffered at school because she was an Arab and a Muslim. There was her brief experimentation with drugs. And there was an anatomically explicit description of her first sexual experience, at sixteen, with a French boy named Henri, who had broken poor Leila’s heart. Next to the passage was a photograph of two teenagers, a French-looking boy and an Arab-looking girl, posed along the balustrade of the Pont Marie in Paris.

“Who are they?” Natalie asked the cadaverous Abdul.

“They’re Leila and her boyfriend Henri, of course.”

“But—”

“No buts, Leila. This is the story of your life. Everything you are reading in that book actually happened to you.”

As a French Jew, Natalie found she had much in common with the Palestinian woman she would soon become. Both had suffered taunts at school because of their heritage and faith, both had unhappy early sexual experiences with French boys, and both had taken up the study of medicine in the autumn of 2003, Natalie at the Université de Montpellier, one of the oldest medical schools in the world, and Leila at Université Paris-Sud. It was a tense time in France and the Middle East. Earlier that year the Americans had invaded Iraq, inflaming the Arab world and Muslims across Western Europe. What’s more, the Second Intifada was raging in the West Bank and Gaza. Everywhere it seemed Muslims were under siege. Leila was among the thousands who marched in Paris against the war in Iraq and the Israeli crackdown in the Occupied Territories. As her interest in politics grew, so did her devotion to Islam. She decided to take the veil, which shocked her secular mother. Then, a few weeks later, her mother took the veil, too.

It was during her third year of medical school that Leila met Ziad al-Masri, a Jordanian-Palestinian who was enrolled in the university’s department of electronics. At first, he was a pleasant distraction from her mandatory curriculum of pharmacology, bacteriology, virology, and parasitology. But Leila soon realized she was desperately in love. Ziad was more politically active than Leila, and more religiously devout. He associated with radical Muslims, was a member of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and attended a mosque where a cleric from Saudi Arabia regularly preached a message of jihad. Not surprisingly, Ziad’s activities brought him to the attention of the French security service, which detained him twice for questioning. The interrogations only hardened Ziad’s views, and against Leila’s wishes he decided to travel to Iraq to join the Islamic resistance. He made it only as far as Jordan, where he was arrested and thrown into the notorious prison known as the Fingernail Factory. A month after his arrival he was dead. The dreaded Mukhabarat secret police never bothered to supply his family with an explanation.

The briefing book was not the work of a single author but the collaborative effort of three experienced intelligence officers from three capable services. Its plot was airtight, its characters well drawn. No reviewer would find fault with it, and not even the most jaded of readers would doubt its verisimilitude. Some might question the amount of extraneous detail concerning the subject’s early life, but there was method in the authors’ verbosity. They wanted to create in their subject a well of memory from which she could draw abundantly when the time came.

These seemingly inconsequential details—the names, the places, the schools she had attended, the layout of her family’s apartment in Paris, the trips they had taken to the Alps and the sea—formed the core of Natalie’s curriculum during her final days at the farm in Nahalal. And, of course, there was Ziad, Leila’s lover and deceased soldier of Allah. It meant that Natalie had to memorize the details of not one life but two, for Ziad had told Leila much about his upbringing and his life in Jordan. Dina served as her primary tutor and taskmaster. She spoke of Ziad’s commitment to jihad and his hatred of Israel and America as though they were noble pursuits. His path in life was to be emulated, she said, not condemned. More than anything, though, his death required vengeance.

Natalie’s training as a doctor served her well, for it allowed her to absorb and retain vast amounts of information, especially numbers. She was quizzed constantly, praised for her successes, and upbraided for even the smallest mistake