The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,68

strike.”

“She wanted revenge?”

“Very badly.”

“You spoke to her directly.”

“Never.”

“Where did you see her?”

“A party at a friend’s apartment.”

“What kind of party?”

“The kind that no good Muslim should ever attend.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Working.”

“You don’t mind if your recruits drink alcohol?”

“Most do. Remember,” Nabil Awad added, “Zarqawi was a drinker before he discovered the beauty of Islam.”

“What happened after you sent your message to Jalal?”

“He instructed me to find out more about her. I went to Aulnay-sous-Bois to watch her for a few days.”

“You’re familiar with France?”

“France is part of my territory.”

“And you liked what you saw?”

“Very much.”

“And so you sent a second encrypted message to Jalal,” said Fareed, waving a printout.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“By courier.”

“What’s the courier’s name?”

The young Jordanian managed a weak smile. “Ask Jalal,” he said. “He can tell you.”

Fareed held up a photograph of Nabil Awad’s veiled mother. “What’s the courier’s name?”

“I don’t know his name. We never met face-to-face.”

“You use a dead drop system?”

“Yes.”

“How do you summon him?”

“I post a message on Twitter.”

“The courier monitors your feed?”

“Obviously.”

“And the dead drop sites?”

“We have four.”

“In Brussels?”

“Or nearby.”

“How does the courier know which site to clean out?”

“The location is contained in the message.”

In the adjoining room, Gabriel watched as Fareed Bakarat placed a yellow legal pad and a felt-tip pen before Nabil Awad. The broken young Jordanian reached for the pen quickly, as a drowning man reaches for a lifeline tossed upon a stormy sea. He wrote in Arabic, swiftly, without pause. He wrote for his parents and his siblings and for all those who would bear the Awad name. But mainly, thought Gabriel, he wrote for Fareed Barakat. Fareed had beaten him. Nabil Awad belonged to them now. They owned him.

When the task was complete, Fareed demanded one more name from his captive. It was the name of the man who was directing the network, approving the targets, training the operatives, and building the bombs. The name of the man who called himself Saladin. Nabil Awad tearfully claimed not to know it. And Fareed, perhaps because he was growing weary himself, chose to believe him.

“But you’ve heard of him?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Is he Jordanian?”

“I doubt it.”

“Syrian?”

“Could be.”

“Iraqi?”

“I’d say so.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s very professional. Like you,” Nabil Awad added quickly. “He’s serious about his security. He doesn’t want to be a star like Bin Laden. He just wants to kill infidels. Only the people at the top know his real name or where he comes from.”

By then, night had fallen. They returned Nabil Awad hooded and bound to the formerly white van and drove him to Le Bourget Airport outside Paris, where a Gulfstream aircraft belonging to the Jordanian monarch waited. Nabil Awad boarded the plane without a struggle, and just six hours later was locked in a cell deep within GID headquarters in Amman. In the parallel universe of the World Wide Web, however, he was still very much a free man. He told friends, followers on social media, and the manager of the print shop where he worked that he had been compelled to return to Jordan suddenly because his father had taken ill. His father was not available to contradict the account, because he, like all the members of the extended Awad clan, was now in GID custody.

For the next seventy-two hours, Nabil Awad’s mobile phone was besieged with expressions of concern. Two teams of analysts, one at GID headquarters, one at King Saul Boulevard, scrubbed each e-mail, text, and direct message for signs of trouble. They also drafted and posted several dire updates on Nabil Awad’s Twitter feed. It seemed the patient had taken a turn for the worse. God willing, he would make a recovery, but for the moment it didn’t look good.

To the uninitiated eyes, the words that flowed onto Nabil Awad’s social media pages seemed entirely appropriate for the eldest son of a man who was gravely ill. But one message contained a somewhat peculiar syntax and choice of words that, to one reader, meant something quite specific. It meant that an empty can of Belgian beer had been hidden in a gorse bush at the edge of a small pasture not far from the city center of Brussels. Inside the can, wrapped in protective plastic, was a flash drive that contained a single encrypted document. Its subject was a Palestinian doctor named Leila Hadawi.

27

SERAINCOURT, FRANCE

AND THUS COMMENCED THE GREAT WAIT—or so it was referred to by all those who endured the appalling period, roughly seventy-two hours in length, during which the encrypted message sat untouched in its