The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,95

hours,” which fell between the end of her bomb-making class and afternoon prayers. Their ailments ranged from infected battle wounds to whooping cough, diabetes, and sinusitis. Natalie had few supplies and little in the way of medicine, though she ministered patiently to each. In the process she learned a great deal about her fellow students—their names, their countries of origin, the circumstances of their travel to the caliphate, the status of their passports. Among those who came to see her was Safia Bourihane. She was several pounds underweight, mildly depressed, and required eyeglasses. Otherwise, she was in good health. Natalie resisted the impulse to give her an overdose of morphine.

“I’m leaving in the morning,” Safia announced as she covered herself in her abaya.

“Where are you going?”

“They haven’t told me. They never tell me. And you?” she asked.

Natalie shrugged. “I have to be back in France in a week.”

“Lucky you.” Safia slid childlike from Natalie’s examination table and moved toward the door.

“What was it like?” Natalie asked suddenly.

Safia turned. Even through the mosquito netting of her abaya, her eyes were astonishingly beautiful. “What was what like?”

“The operation.” Natalie hesitated, then said, “Killing the Jews.”

“It was beautiful,” said Safia. “It was a dream come true.”

“And if it had been a suicide operation? Could you have done it?”

Safia smiled regretfully. “I wish it had been.”

39

PALMYRA, SYRIA

THE CAMP DIRECTOR WAS an Iraqi named Massoud from Anbar Province. He had lost his left eye fighting the Americans during the troop surge of 2006. The right he fixed suspiciously on Natalie when, after a thoroughly unappetizing supper in the dining hall, she requested permission to walk alone outside the camp.

“There’s no need to deceive us,” he said at length. “If you wish to leave the camp, Dr. Hadawi, you are free to do so.”

“I have no wish to leave.”

“Are you not happy here? Have we not treated you well?”

“Very well.”

The one-eyed Massoud made a show of deliberation. “There’s no phone service in town, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It isn’t.”

“And no cellular or Internet service, either.”

There was a short silence.

“I’ll send someone with you,” said Massoud.

“It isn’t necessary.”

“It is. You’re far too valuable to go walking alone.”

The escort Massoud selected to accompany Natalie was a handsome university-educated Cairene named Ismail who had joined ISIS in frustration not long after the coup that drove the Muslim Brotherhood from power in Egypt. They left the camp a few minutes after nine o’clock. The moon hung low over the northern Palmyrene mountain belt, a white sun in a black sky, and shone like a spotlight upon the mountains to the south. Natalie pursued her own shadow along a dusty path, Ismail trailing a few paces behind her, his black clothing luminous in the moonlight, a weapon across his chest. On both sides of the path, neat groves of date palms thrived in the rich soil along the Wadi al-Qubur, which was fed by the Efqa spring. It was the spring and the surrounding oasis that had first attracted humans to this place, perhaps as early as the seventh millennium BC. There arose a walled city of two hundred thousand where the inhabitants spoke the Palmyrene dialect of Aramaic and grew wealthy from the caravan traffic along the Silk Road. Empires came and went, and in the first century CE the Romans declared Palmyra a subject of the empire. The ancient city at the edge of an oasis would never be the same.

The date palms along the track moved in a cool desert wind. At last, the palms fell away and the Temple of Bel, the center of religious life in ancient Palmyra, appeared. Natalie slowed to a stop and stared, openmouthed, at the catastrophe that lay scattered across the desert floor. The temple’s ruins, with their monumental gates and columns, were among the best preserved in Palmyra. Now the ruins were in ruins, with a portion of only a single wall remaining intact. Ismail the Egyptian was obviously unmoved by the damage. “Shirk,” he said with a shrug, using the Arabic word for polytheism. “It had to be destroyed.”

“You were here when it happened?”

“I helped to set the charges.”

“Alhamdulillah,” she heard herself whisper. Praise be to God.

The fallen stones glowed in the cold light of the moon. Natalie picked her way slowly through the wreckage, careful not to turn an ankle, and set out down the Great Colonnade, the ceremonial avenue that stretched from the Temple of Bel, to the Triumphal Arch, to the Tetrapylon, to the Funerary Temple. Here,