The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,61

chat rooms for Muslim women, listened to sermons from extremist preachers, and watched videos that no person, believer or unbeliever, should ever watch. Bombings, beheadings, burnings, crucifixions: a bloody day in the life of ISIS. Leila did not find the images objectionable, but several sent Natalie, who was used to the sight of blood, running into her bathroom to be violently sick. She used an onion routing application popular with jihadists that allowed her to wander the virtual caliphate without detection. She referred to herself as Umm Ziad. It was her nom de plume, her nom de guerre.

It did not take long for Dr. Hadawi to attract attention. She had no shortage of cybersuitors. There was the woman from Hamburg who had a cousin of marrying age. There was the Egyptian cleric who engaged her in a prolonged discussion on the subject of apostasy. And then there was the keeper of a particularly vile blog who knocked on her virtual door while she was watching the beheading of a captured Christian. The blogger was an ISIS recruiter. He asked her to travel to Syria to help build the caliphate.

I’D LOVE TO, Leila typed, BUT MY WORK IS HERE IN FRANCE. I’M CARING FOR OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN THE LAND OF THE KUFAR. MY PATIENTS NEED ME.

YOU ARE A DOCTOR?

YES.

WE NEED DOCTORS IN THE CALIPHATE. WOMEN, TOO.

The exchange gave her an electrical charge, a lightness in her fingertips, a blurriness of her vision, that was akin to the first blush of desire. She did not report it; there was no need. They were monitoring her computer and her phone. They were watching her, too. She saw them sometimes on the streets of Aubervilliers—the pockmarked tough who had conducted her final interrogation in the land of the Jews, the man with the forgettable face, the man with eyes like winter. She ignored them, as she had been trained to do, and went about her business. She tended to her patients, she gossiped with the women of the housing estates, she averted her eyes piously in the presence of boys and young men, and at night, alone in her apartment, she wandered the rooms of the house of extremist Islam, hidden behind her protective software and her vague pen name. She was a black widow, a ticking time bomb.

Approximately twenty miles separate the banlieue of Aubervilliers from the village of Seraincourt, but they are a world apart. There are no halal markets or mosques in Seraincourt, no looming housing blocks filled with immigrants from hostile lands, and French is the only language one hears on its narrow streets or in the brasserie next to the ancient stone church in the village square. It is a foreigner’s idealized vision of France, France as it once was, France no more.

Just beyond the village, in a river valley of manicured farms and groomed woods, stood Château Treville. Shielded from prying eyes by twelve-foot walls, it had a heated swimming pool, two clay tennis courts, fourteen ornate bedrooms, and thirty-two acres of gardens where, if one were so inclined, one could pace with worry. Housekeeping, the Office division that acquired and maintained safe properties, was on good, if entirely deceptive, terms with the château’s owner. The deal—six months, with an option to extend—was concluded with a swift exchange of faxes and a wire transfer of several thousand well-disguised euros. The team moved in the same day that Dr. Leila Hadawi settled into her modest little flat in Aubervilliers. Most stayed only long enough to drop their bags and then headed straight into the field.

They had operated in France many times before, even in tranquil Seraincourt, but never with the knowledge and approval of the French security service. They assumed the DGSI was looking over their shoulders at all times and listening to their every word, and so they behaved accordingly. Inside the château they spoke a terse form of colloquial Office Hebrew that was beyond the reach of mere translators. And on the streets of Aubervilliers, where they kept a vigilant watch on Natalie, they did their best not to betray family secrets to their French allies, who were watching her, too. Rousseau acquired an apartment directly opposite Natalie’s where rotating teams of operatives, one Israeli, the other French, maintained a constant presence. At first, the atmosphere in the flat was chilly. But gradually, as the two teams became better acquainted, the mood warmed. For better or worse, they were in this fight together now. All