The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,60

they attended medical school with her or worked at her previous places of employment.

The clinic was located on the Avenue Victor Hugo, between an all-night laundry and a tabac frequented by members of a local Moroccan drug gang. Plane trees shaded the pavement outside the clinic’s modest entrance, and above it rose three additional floors of a handsome old building with a tan exterior and shuttered windows. But behind the avenue soared the giant gray slabs of the cités, the public housing estates that warehoused the poor and the foreign born, mainly from Africa and the former French colonies of the Maghreb. This was the part of France where the poets and the travel writers rarely ventured, the France of crime, immigrant resentment, and, increasingly, radical Islam. Half the banlieue’s residents had been born outside France, three-quarters of the young. Alienated, marginalized, they were ISIS recruits in waiting.

On the first day of the clinic’s operation, it was the subject of mild, if skeptical, curiosity. But by the next morning it was receiving a steady stream of patients. For many, it was their first visit to a doctor in a long time. And for a few, especially the recent arrivals from the interior of Morocco and Algeria, it was their first visit to a physician ever. Not surprisingly, they felt most comfortable with the médecine généraliste who wore modest clothing and a hijab and could speak to them in their native language.

She tended to their sore throats and their chronic coughs and their assorted aches and pains and the illnesses they had carried from the third world to the first. And she told a mother of forty-four that the source of her severe headaches was a tumor of the brain, and a man of sixty that his lifetime of smoking had resulted in a case of untreatable lung cancer. And when they were too sick to visit the clinic, she cared for them in their cramped flats in the housing estates. In the piss-scented stairwells and vile courts where trash swirled in tiny cyclones of wind, the boys and young men of Aubervilliers eyed her warily. On those rare occasions they spoke to her, they addressed her formally and with respect. The women and the teenage girls, however, were socially free to cross-examine her to their hearts’ content. The housing estates were nothing if not gossipy, sexually segregated Arab villages, and Dr. Leila Hadawi was something new and interesting. They wanted to know where she was from, about her family, and about her medical studies. Mainly, they were curious as to why, at the advanced age of thirty-four, she was unmarried. At this, she would give a wistful smile. The impression she left was of unrequited love—or, perhaps, a love lost to the violence and chaos of the modern Middle East.

Unlike the other members of the staff, she actually resided in the community she served, not in the crime factories of the housing estates but in a comfortable little apartment in a quartier of the commune where the population was working class and native born. There was a quaint café across the street where, when not at the clinic, she was often seen drinking coffee at a sidewalk table. Never wine or beer, for wine and beer were haram. Her hijab clearly offended some of her fellow citizens; she could hear it in the edge of a waiter’s remark and see it in the hostile stares of the passersby. She was the other, a stranger. It fed her resentment of the land of her birth and fueled her quiet rage. For Dr. Leila Hadawi, a servant of the French national medical bureaucracy, was not the woman she appeared to be. She had been radicalized by the wars in Iraq and Syria and by the occupation of Palestine by the Jews. And she had been radicalized, too, by the death of Ziad al-Masri, her only love, at the hands of the Jordanian Mukhabarat. She was a black widow, a ticking time bomb. She confessed this to no one, only to her computer. It was her secret sharer.

They had given her a list of Web sites during her final days at the farmhouse in Nahalal, a farmhouse that, try as she might, she could no longer quite conjure in her memory. Some of the sites were on the ordinary Internet; others, in the murky sewers of the dark net. All dealt with issues related to Islam and jihadism. She read blogs, dropped into