“Who was the woman you had coffee with yesterday afternoon?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The woman at Café de Flore, the one with the veil. Who is she?”
“How long have you been watching me?”
“Answer my question, please.”
“Her name is Mona.”
“Mona what?”
“Mona el-Baz. We studied medicine together. She lives in Frankfurt now.”
“She’s a Palestinian, too?”
“Egyptian, actually.”
“She didn’t look Egyptian to me.”
“She comes from an old family, very aristocratic.”
“I’d like to meet her.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps she could be helpful to our cause.”
“Don’t bother. Mona doesn’t think the way we do.”
He seemed shocked by this. “Why would you associate with such a person?”
“Why do you attend King’s College and reside in the land of the kufar?”
The street brought them to the edge of a square. The tables of a small restaurant spilled onto the paving stones, and on the opposite side rose the Gothic towers and flying buttresses of Senlis Cathedral.
“And the clothing store on the rue Vavin?” he asked over the tolling of the bells. “Why did you return there?”
“I forgot my credit card.”
“You were preoccupied?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Nervous?”
“Why should I have been?”
“Did you know I was following you?”
“Were you?”
He was distracted by the sound of laughter rising from the tables of the restaurant. He took her hand and as the bells fell silent led her across the square.
“How well do you know the Koran and the Hadith?” he asked suddenly.
She was grateful for the change of subject, for it suggested he had no concerns as to her authenticity. Consequently, she did not confess that she had not cracked the Koran before settling into a farmhouse in the Valley of Jezreel. Instead, she explained that her parents were secular and that she did not discover the beauty of the Koran until she was at university.
“Do you know about the Mahdi?” he asked. “The one they call the Redeemer?”
“Yes, of course. The Hadith says he will appear as an ordinary man. ‘His name will be my name,’” she said, quoting the relevant passage, “‘and his father’s name my father’s name.’ He will be one of us.”
“Very good. Go on, please.”
“The Mahdi will rule over the earth until the Day of Judgment and rid the world of evil. There will be no Christians after the Mahdi comes.” She paused, then added, “And no Jews.”
“And no Israel, either.”
“Inshallah,” Natalie heard herself say softly.
“Yes, God willing.” He stopped in the center of the square and gazed disapprovingly at the darkened southern facade of the ancient cathedral. “Soon it will look like the Colosseum in Rome and the Parthenon in Athens. Our Muslim tour guides will explain what went on here. This is where the kufar worshiped, they will say. This is where they baptized their young. This is where their priests whispered the magic spells that turned bread and wine into the body and blood of Isa, our prophet. The end is near, Leila. The clock is ticking.”
“You intend to destroy them?”
“We won’t have to. They will destroy themselves by invading the lands of the caliphate. There will be a final battle between the armies of Rome and the armies of Islam in the Syrian village of Dabiq. The Hadith tells us the black flags will come from the east, led by mighty men with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their hometowns. Men like Zarqawi and Baghdadi.” He turned and looked at her for a moment in silence. Then he said, “And you, of course.”
“I’m not a soldier. I can’t fight.”
“We don’t allow our women to fight, Leila, not on the battlefield, at least. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be a soldier.”
A squadron of rooks took noisy flight from the abutments of the cathedral. Natalie watched their black silhouettes flutter across the sky like the black flags of the mighty men from the east. Then she followed Jalal through a doorway, into the south transept. An attendant, a gray emaciated woman of perhaps seventy, informed them that the cathedral would be closing in ten minutes. Natalie accepted a brochure and then joined Jalal in the central crossing. He was staring westward down the nave. Natalie looked in the opposite direction, over the choir, toward the main altar. The stained-glass windows were invisible in the gloom. There was no one else in the cathedral, no one but the elderly attendant.
“The organization for which I work,” Jalal explained, his Arabic echoing softly among the pillars of the arcades, “handles external affairs for the Islamic State. Our goal is to draw America and its European allies into a ground war in Syria through