The Black Widow

21 NAHALAL, ISRAEL

NEXT MORNING THE STAFF OF Hadassah Medical Center was informed via e-mail that Dr. Natalie Mizrahi would be taking an extended leave of absence. The announcement was thirty words in length and a masterpiece of bureaucratic murk. No reason was given for the sabbatical, no date of return was mentioned. This left the staff with no option but to speculate about the reasons for Natalie’s sudden departure, a pursuit they engaged in freely, for it gave them something to talk about other than the stabbings. There were rumors of a serious illness, rumors of an emotional breakdown, rumors of a homesick return to France. After all, said one sage from cardiology, why in the world would anyone with a French passport actually choose to live in Israel at a time like this? Ayelet Malkin, who considered herself Natalie’s closest friend at the hospital, found all these theories inadequate. She knew Natalie to be of sound mind and body and had heard her speak many times of her relief to be in Israel, where she could live as a Jew without fear of assault or rebuke. Moreover, she had worked a twenty-four-hour shift with Natalie that week, and the two women had shared a gossipy dinner during which Natalie made no mention of any pending leave of absence. She thought the entire thing reeked of official mischief. Like many Israelis, Ayelet had a relative, an uncle, who was involved in secret government work. He came and went without warning and never spoke of his job or his travels. Ayelet decided that Natalie, fluent in three languages, had been recruited as a spy. Or perhaps, she thought, she had always been one.

While Ayelet had stumbled upon something resembling the truth, she was not technically correct, as Natalie was to learn on her first full day in Nahalal. She was not going to be a spy. Spies, she was told, are human sources who are recruited to spy against their own intelligence service, government, terrorist organization, international body, or commercial enterprise. Sometimes they spied for money, sometimes for sex or respect, and sometimes they spied because they were coerced, owing to some blemish in their personal life. In Natalie’s case, there was no coercion, only persuasion. She was from that point forward a special employee of the Office. As such, she would be governed by the same rules and strictures that applied to all those who worked directly for the service. She could not divulge secrets to foreign governments. She could not write a memoir about her work without approval. She could not discuss that work with anyone outside the Office, including members of her family. Her employment was to commence immediately and would terminate upon the completion of her mission. However, if Natalie wished to remain with the Office, suitable work would be found for her. A sum of five hundred thousand shekels was placed in a bank account bearing her real name. In addition, she would be paid the equivalent of her monthly salary from Hadassah. An Office courier would look after her apartment during her absence. In the event of her death, two million shekels would be paid to her parents.

The paperwork, briefings, and stern warnings consumed the entire first day. On the second her formal education commenced. She felt rather like a graduate student in a private university of one. In the mornings, immediately following breakfast, she learned techniques for replacing her own identity with an assumed one — tradecraft, they called it. After a light lunch she embarked on Palestinian studies, followed by Islamic and jihadist studies. No one ever referred to her as Natalie. She was Leila, no family name, only Leila. The instructors spoke to her only in Arabic and referred to themselves as Abdul, Muhammad, or Ahmed. One two-person team of briefers called themselves Abdul and Abdul. Natalie called them Double-A for short.

The last hour of daylight was Natalie’s exclusively. With her head spinning with Islam and jihad, she would set out for training runs along the dusty farm roads. She was never permitted to go alone; two armed security guards followed her always in a dark-green ATV. Often she returned to the house to find Gabriel waiting, and they would walk a mile or two through the perfumed twilight of the valley. His Arabic was not sufficiently fluent for prolonged conversation, so he addressed her in French. He spoke to her about her training and her studies but never about his childhood in the valley or its remarkable history. As far as Leila was concerned, the valley represented an act of colonial theft and dispossession. “Look at it,” he would say, pointing toward the Arab village on the hillock. “Imagine how they must feel when they see the accomplishments of the Jews. Imagine their anger. Imagine their shame. It is your anger, Leila. It is your shame.”

As her training progressed, she learned techniques for determining whether she was being followed. Or whether her flat or office was bugged. Or whether the person she assumed to be her best friend, or her lover, was in fact her worst enemy. The teaching team of Abdul and Abdul instructed her to assume she was being followed, observed, and listened to at all times. This was not a problem, they said, so long as she remained faithful to her cover. A proper cover was like a shield. The typical undercover Office field agent spent far more time maintaining his cover than actually gathering intelligence. Cover, they told her, was everything.

During the second week at the farm, her Palestinian studies took a decidedly harder turn. The entire Zionist enterprise, she was told, was based upon a myth — the myth that Palestine was a land without a people waiting for a people without a land. In fact, in 1881, the year before the first Zionist settlers arrived, the population of Palestine was 475,000. The vast majority were Muslim and were concentrated in the Judean Hills, the Galilee, and the other portions of the land that were then habitable. Roughly that same number of people were driven into exile during al-Nakba, the catastrophe of Israel’s founding in 1948. And still another wave fled their villages in the West Bank after the Zionist conquest of 1967. They languished in the refugee camps — Khan Yunis, Shatila, Ein al-Hilweh, Yarmouk, Balata, Jenin, Tulkarm, and dozens more — and dreamed of their olive groves and lemon trees. Many kept the deeds to property and homes. Some even carried keys to front doors. This unhealed wound was the seedbed of the Arab world’s grief. The wars, the suffering, the lack of economic progress, the despotism — all this was the fault of Israel.

“Spare me,” groaned Natalie.

“Who said this?” demanded one of the Abduls, a cadaverous-looking creature, pale as milk, who was never without a cigarette or a cup of tea. “Was it Natalie or was it Leila? Because Leila does not question these assertions. Leila knows in her bones they are true. Leila drank it with her mother’s milk. Leila heard it from the lips of her kin. Leila believes the Jews to be descendants of apes and pigs. She knows they use the blood of Palestinian children to make their matzo. She thinks they are an intrinsically evil people, children of the devil.”

Her Islamic studies grew more rigid, too. After completing a crash course in the basics of ritual and belief, Natalie’s instructors immersed her in the concepts of Islamism and jihad. She read Sayyid Qutb, the dissident Egyptian writer regarded as the founder of modern Islamism, and slogged her way through Ibn Taymiyyah, the thirteenth-century Islamic theologian who, according to many experts in the field, was the wellspring for it all. She read Bin Laden and Zawahiri and listened to hours of sermons by a Yemeni-American cleric who had been killed in a drone strike. She watched videos of roadside bombings of American forces in Iraq and surfed some of the more salacious Islamic Web sites, which her instructors referred to as jihadi porn. Before switching off her bedside lamp at night, she always read a few lines of Mahmoud Darwish. My roots were entrenched before the birth of time. . In dreams she walked through an Eden of olive groves and lemon trees.

The technique was something akin to brainwashing, and slowly it began to work. Natalie packed away her old identity and life and became Leila. She did not know her family name; her legend, as they called it, would be given to her last, after a proper foundation had been poured and a frame constructed. In word and deed, she became more pious, more outwardly Islamic. In the evenings, when she ran along the dusty farm roads, she covered her arms and legs. And whenever her instructors were talking about Palestine or Islam, she wore her hijab. She experimented with several different ways of securing it but settled on a simple two-pin method that showed no hair. She thought she looked pretty in the hijab, but didn’t like the way it focused attention on her nose and mouth. A partial facial veil would solve the problem, but it wasn’t consistent with Leila’s profile. Leila was an educated woman, a doctor, caught between East and West, present and past. She walked a tightrope that stretched between the House of Islam and the House of War, that part of the world where the faith was not yet dominant. Leila was conflicted. She was an impressionable girl.

They taught her the basics of martial arts but nothing of guns, for knowledge of weaponry didn’t fit Leila’s profile, either. Then, three weeks into her stay at the farm, they dressed her from head to toe as a Muslim woman and took her for a heavily guarded test drive in Tayibe, the largest Arab city in the so-called Triangle. Next she visited Ramallah, the seat of Palestinian authority in the West Bank, and a few days later, and on a warm Friday in mid-May, she attended Friday prayer services at the al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. It was a tense day — the Israelis forbade young men from entering the Noble Sanctuary — and afterward there was a violent protest. Natalie briefly became separated from her undercover security guards. Eventually, they dragged her, choking on tear gas, into the back of a car and spirited her back to the farm.

“How did it make you feel?” asked Gabriel that evening, as they walked through the cool evening air of the valley. By then, Natalie was no longer running, for running didn’t fit Leila’s profile, either.

“It made me angry,” she said without hesitation.

“At whom?”

“The Israelis, of course.”

“Good,” he replied. “That’s why I did it.”

“Did what?”

“Provoked a demonstration in the Old City for your benefit.”

“You did that?”

“Trust me, Natalie. It really wasn’t that difficult.”

He didn’t come to Nahalal the next day or for five days after that. Only later would Natalie learn that he had been in Paris and Amman preparing for her introduction into the field — operational spadework, he called it. When finally he returned to the farm it was at noon on a warm and breezy Thursday, as Natalie was becoming acquainted with some of the unique features of her new mobile phone. He informed her that they were going to take another field trip, just the two of them, and instructed her to dress as Leila. She chose a green hijab with embroidered edges, a white blouse that concealed the shape of her breasts and hips, and long pants that left only the insteps of her feet visible. Her pumps were Bruno Magli. Leila, it seemed, had a soft spot for Italian footwear.

“Where are we going?”

“North,” was all he said.

“No bodyguards.”

“Not today,” he answered. “Today I am free.”

The car was a rather ordinary Korean sedan, which he drove very fast and with an uncharacteristic abandon.

“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” observed Natalie.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been behind the wheel of a car. The world looks different from the backseat of an armored SUV.”

“How so?”

“I’m afraid that’s classified.”

“But I’m one of you now.”

“Not quite,” he answered, “but we’re getting close.”

They were the last words he spoke for several minutes. Natalie slipped on a pair of stylish sunglasses and watched a sepia-toned version of Acre slide past her window. A few miles to the north was Lohamei HaGeta’ot, a kibbutz founded by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. It was a tidy little farming community of neat houses, green lawns, and regular streets lined with cypress. The sight of an obviously Israeli man driving a car in which a veiled woman was the sole passenger elicited glances of only mild curiosity.

“What’s that?” asked Natalie, pointing toward a white conical structure rising above the rooftops of the kibbutz.

“It’s called Yad Layeled. It’s a memorial for the children killed in the Holocaust.” There was a curious note of detachment in his voice. “But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to see something much more important.”

“What’s that?”

“Your home.”

He drove to a shopping center just north of the kibbutz and parked in a distant corner of the lot.

“How charming,” said Natalie.

“This isn’t it.” He pointed toward a patch of uncultivated land between the car park and Highway 4. “Your home is out there, Leila. The home that was stolen from you by the Jews.”

He climbed out of the car without another word and led Natalie across a service road, into a field of weeds and prickly pear and broken blocks of limestone. “Welcome to Sumayriyya, Leila.” He turned to face her. “Say it for me, please. Say it as though it is the most beautiful word you’ve ever heard. Say it as though it is the name of your mother.”

“Sumayriyya,” she repeated.

“Very good.” He turned and watched the traffic rushing along the highway. “In May 1948 there were eight hundred people living here, all Muslims.” He pointed toward the arches of an ancient aqueduct, largely intact, running along the edge of a field of soy. “That was theirs. It carried water from the springs and irrigated the fields that produced the sweetest melons and bananas in the Galilee. They buried their dead over there,” he added, swinging his arm to the left. “And they prayed to Allah here”—he placed his hand on the ruins of an arched doorway—“in the mosque. They were your ancestors, Leila. This is who you are.”

“‘My roots were entrenched before the birth of time.’”

“You’ve been reading your Darwish.” He walked deeper into the weeds and the ruins, closer to the highway. When he spoke again, he had to raise his voice to be heard over the whitewater rush of the traffic. “Your home was over there. Your ancestors were called Hadawi. This is your name, too. You are Leila Hadawi. You were born in France, educated in France, and you practice medicine in France. But whenever someone asks where you’re from, you answer Sumayriyya.”

“What happened here?”

“Al-Nakba happened here. Operation Ben-Ami happened here.” He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Have your instructors mentioned Ben-Ami to you?”

“It was an operation undertaken by the Haganah in the spring of 1948 to secure the coast road between Acre and the Lebanese border, and to prepare the Western Galilee for the coming invasion by the regular Arab armies.”

“Zionist lies!” he snapped. “Ben-Ami had one purpose and one purpose only, to capture the Arab villages of the Western Galilee and cast their inhabitants into exile.”

“Is that the truth?”

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. It’s what Leila believes. It’s what she knows. You see, Leila, your grandfather, Daoud Hadawi, was there that night the Zionist forces of the Haganah came up the road from Acre in a convoy. The residents of Sumayriyya had heard what had happened in some of the other villages conquered by the Jews, so they immediately took flight. A few stayed behind but most fled to Lebanon, where they waited for the Arab armies to recapture Palestine from the Jews. And when the Arab armies were routed, the villagers of Sumayriyya became refugees, exiles. The Hadawi family lived in Ein al-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Open sewers, cinderblock houses. . hell on earth.”

Gabriel led her past the rubble of the little houses — houses that were dynamited by the Haganah soon after Sumayriyya fell — and stopped at the edge of an orchard.

“It belonged to the people of Sumayriyya. Now it is the property of the kibbutz. Many years ago they were having trouble making the water flow through the irrigation tubes. A man appeared, an Arab who spoke a bit of Hebrew, and patiently explained how to do it. The kibbutzniks were amazed, and they asked the Arab how it was he knew how to make the water flow. And do you know what the Arab told them?”

“It was his orchard.”

“No, Leila, it was your orchard.”

He lapsed into silence. There was only the wind in the weeds and the rushing of the traffic along the highway. He was staring at the ruins of a house that lay scattered at his feet, the ruins of a life, the ruins of a people. He seemed angry; whether it was genuine or for Leila’s benefit, Natalie could not tell.

“Why did you choose this place for me?” she asked.

“I didn’t,” he answered distantly. “It chose me.”

“How?”

“I knew a woman from here, a woman like you.”

“Was she like Natalie or Leila?”

“There is no Natalie,” he said to the veiled woman standing next to him. “Not anymore.”

22 NAHALAL, ISRAEL

WHEN NATALIE RETURNED TO NAHALAL, the volume of Darwish poetry had vanished from the bedside table in her room. In its place was a bound briefing book, thick as a manuscript and composed in French. It was the continuation of the story that Gabriel had begun amid the ruins of Sumayriyya, the story of an accomplished young woman, a doctor, who had been born in France of Palestinian lineage. Her father had lived an itinerant life typical of many stateless, educated Palestinians. After graduating from the University of Baghdad with a degree in engineering, he had worked in Iraq, Jordan, Libya, and Kuwait before finally settling in France, where he met a Palestinian woman, originally from Nablus, who worked part-time as a translator for a UN refugee agency and a small French publishing house. They had two children, a son who died in an auto accident in Switzerland at twenty-three, and a daughter whom they named after Leila Khaled, the famous freedom fighter from Black September who was the first woman to hijack an airplane. Leila’s thirty-three-year existence had been rendered in the pages of the briefing book with the excruciating confessional detail of a modern memoir. Natalie had to admit it made for rather good reading. There were the slights she had suffered at school because she was an Arab and a Muslim. There was her brief experimentation with drugs. And there was an anatomically explicit description of her first sexual experience, at sixteen, with a French boy named Henri, who had broken poor Leila’s heart. Next to the passage was a photograph of two teenagers, a French-looking boy and an Arab-looking girl, posed along the balustrade of the Pont Marie in Paris.

“Who are they?” Natalie asked the cadaverous Abdul.

“They’re Leila and her boyfriend Henri, of course.”

“But—”

“No buts, Leila. This is the story of your life. Everything you are reading in that book actually happened to you.”

As a French Jew, Natalie found she had much in common with the Palestinian woman she would soon become. Both had suffered taunts at school because of their heritage and faith, both had unhappy early sexual experiences with French boys, and both had taken up the study of medicine in the autumn of 2003, Natalie at the Université de Montpellier, one of the oldest medical schools in the world, and Leila at Université Paris-Sud. It was a tense time in France and the Middle East. Earlier that year the Americans had invaded Iraq, inflaming the Arab world and Muslims across Western Europe. What’s more, the Second Intifada was raging in the West Bank and Gaza. Everywhere it seemed Muslims were under siege. Leila was among the thousands who marched in Paris against the war in Iraq and the Israeli crackdown in the Occupied Territories. As her interest in politics grew, so did her devotion to Islam. She decided to take the veil, which shocked her secular mother. Then, a few weeks later, her mother took the veil, too.

It was during her third year of medical school that Leila met Ziad al-Masri, a Jordanian-Palestinian who was enrolled in the university’s department of electronics. At first, he was a pleasant distraction from her mandatory curriculum of pharmacology, bacteriology, virology, and parasitology. But Leila soon realized she was desperately in love. Ziad was more politically active than Leila, and more religiously devout. He associated with radical Muslims, was a member of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and attended a mosque where a cleric from Saudi Arabia regularly preached a message of jihad. Not surprisingly, Ziad’s activities brought him to the attention of the French security service, which detained him twice for questioning. The interrogations only hardened Ziad’s views, and against Leila’s wishes he decided to travel to Iraq to join the Islamic resistance. He made it only as far as Jordan, where he was arrested and thrown into the notorious prison known as the Fingernail Factory. A month after his arrival he was dead. The dreaded Mukhabarat secret police never bothered to supply his family with an explanation.

The briefing book was not the work of a single author but the collaborative effort of three experienced intelligence officers from three capable services. Its plot was airtight, its characters well drawn. No reviewer would find fault with it, and not even the most jaded of readers would doubt its verisimilitude. Some might question the amount of extraneous detail concerning the subject’s early life, but there was method in the authors’ verbosity. They wanted to create in their subject a well of memory from which she could draw abundantly when the time came.

These seemingly inconsequential details — the names, the places, the schools she had attended, the layout of her family’s apartment in Paris, the trips they had taken to the Alps and the sea — formed the core of Natalie’s curriculum during her final days at the farm in Nahalal. And, of course, there was Ziad, Leila’s lover and deceased soldier of Allah. It meant that Natalie had to memorize the details of not one life but two, for Ziad had told Leila much about his upbringing and his life in Jordan. Dina served as her primary tutor and taskmaster. She spoke of Ziad’s commitment to jihad and his hatred of Israel and America as though they were noble pursuits. His path in life was to be emulated, she said, not condemned. More than anything, though, his death required vengeance.

Natalie’s training as a doctor served her well, for it allowed her to absorb and retain vast amounts of information, especially numbers. She was quizzed constantly, praised for her successes, and upbraided for even the smallest mistake or hesitation. Soon, warned Dina, others would be asking the questions.

She was visited during this time by a number of observers who sat in on her lessons but did not participate in any way. There was a tough-looking man with cropped dark hair and a pockmarked face. There was a bald, tweedy man who conducted himself with the air of an Oxford don. There was an elfin figure with thinning, flyaway hair whose face, try as she might, Natalie could never seem to recall. And, lastly, there was a tall, lanky man with pale bloodless skin and eyes the color of glacial ice. When Natalie asked Dina his name, she was met by a reproachful glare. “Leila would never be attracted to a non-Muslim,” she admonished her pupil, “let alone a Jew. Leila is in love with the memory of Ziad. No one will ever take his place.”

He came to Nahalal on two other occasions, both times accompanied by the wispy-haired man with an elusive face. They looked on judgmentally as Dina pressed Natalie on the small details of Leila’s relationship with Ziad — the restaurant where they ate on their first date, the food they ordered, their first kiss, their final e-mail. Ziad had sent it from an Internet café in Amman while waiting for a courier to take him across the border into Iraq. The next morning he was arrested. They never spoke again.

“Do you remember what he wrote to you?” asked Dina.

“He was convinced he was being followed.”

“And what did you say to him?”

“I told him I was concerned for his safety. I asked him to get on the next plane to Paris.”

“No, Leila, your exact words. This is your final communication with a man you loved,” Dina added, waving a piece of paper that purported to contain the text of the e-mail exchange. “Surely, you remember the last thing you said to Ziad before he was arrested.”

“I said I was sick with worry. I begged him to leave.”

“But that’s not all you said. You told him he could stay with a relative of yours, is that not correct?”

“Yes.”

“Who was this relative?”

“My aunt.”

“Your mother’s sister?”

“Correct.”

“She lives in Amman?”

“In Zarqa.”

“The camp or the town?”

“The town.”

“Did you tell her that Ziad was coming to Jordan?”

“No.”

“Did you tell your mother or father?”

“No.”

“What about the French police?”

“No.”

“And your contact in Jordanian intelligence? Did you tell him, Leila?”

“What?”

“Answer the question,” snapped Dina.

“I don’t have a contact in Jordanian intelligence.”

“Did you betray Ziad to the Jordanians?”

“No.”

“Are you responsible for his death?”

“No.”

“And the night of your first date?” Dina asked, tacking suddenly. “Did you drink wine with dinner?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It is haram,” said Natalie.

That night, when she retired to her room, the volume of Darwish was back on her bedside table. She would be leaving soon, she thought. It was only a question of when.

That same question — the question of when — was the subject of a meeting between Gabriel and Uzi Navot at King Saul Boulevard later that evening. Between them, arrayed upon Navot’s conference table, were the written conclusions of the various trainers, physicians, and psychiatric specialists assigned to the case. All stated that Natalie Mizrahi was of sound mind and body, and more than capable of carrying out the mission for which she had been recruited. None of the reports, however, were as important as the opinions of the chief of the Office and the man who would succeed him. Both were veteran field operatives who had spent much of their careers working under assumed identities. And they alone would suffer the consequences were anything to go wrong.

“It’s only France,” said Navot.

“Yes,” said Gabriel darkly. “Nothing ever happens in France.”

There was a silence.

“Well?” Navot asked finally.

“I’d like to give her one more test.”

“She’s been tested. And she’s passed every one with flying colors.”

“Let’s get her out of her comfort zone.”

“A murder board?”

“A peer review,” offered Gabriel.

“How rough?”

“Rough enough to expose any flaws.”

“Who do you want to handle it?”

“Yaakov.”

“Yaakov would scare me.”

“That’s the point, Uzi.”

“How soon do you want to do it?”

Gabriel looked at his wristwatch. Navot reached for the phone.

They came for her in the hour before dawn, when she was dreaming of the lemon groves of Sumayriyya. There were three of them — or was it four? Natalie couldn’t be sure; the room was in darkness, and her captors wore black. They pulled a hood over her, bound her hands with packing tape, and frog-marched her down the stairs. Outside, the grass of the garden was wet beneath her bare feet, and the air was cold and heavy with the smells of the land and the animals. They forced her into the back of a car. One sat to her left, another to her right, so that she was wedged tightly at the hips and shoulders. Frightened, she called Gabriel’s name but received no reply. Nor did Dina respond to her cry for help. “Where are you taking me?” she asked, and to her surprise she addressed them in Arabic.

Like most physicians she had a good internal clock. The drive, a nausea-inducing high-speed derby, lasted between twenty-five and thirty minutes. No one spoke a word to her, even when, in Arabic, she said she was about to be sick. Finally, the car lurched to a stop. Again, she was frog-marched, this time along a dirt pathway. The air was sweet with pine and colder than in the valley, and she could see a bit of light seeping through the fabric of her hood. She was led across a threshold, into a structure of some sort, and forced into a chair. Her hands were placed upon a tabletop. Lights warmed her.

She sat in silence, trembling slightly. She sensed a presence beyond the lamps. At last, a male voice said in Arabic, “Remove the hood.”

It came off in a flourish, as though she were a prized object to be unveiled to a waiting audience. She blinked several times while growing accustomed to the harsh light. Then her eyes settled upon the man seated on the opposite side of the table. He was dressed entirely in black, and a black keffiyeh obscured everything of his face except his eyes, which were black, too. The figure to his right was identically attired, as was the one to his left.

“Tell me your name,” commanded the figure opposite in Arabic.

“My name is Leila Hadawi.”

“Not the name the Zionists gave you!” he snapped. “Your real name. Your Jewish name.”

“It is my real name. I’m Leila Hadawi. I grew up in France, but I am from Sumayriyya.”

But he would have none of it — not her name, not her professed ethnicity, not her faith, not the story of her childhood in France, at least not all of it. He had in his possession a file, which he said had been prepared by the security department of his organization, though he did not say precisely what organization that was, only that its members emulated the original followers of Muhammad, peace be upon him. The file purported to prove that her real name was Natalie Mizrahi, that she was obviously Jewish, that she was an agent of the Israeli secret intelligence service who had been trained at a farmhouse in the Valley of Jezreel. She told him that she had never, nor would she ever, set foot in Israel — and the only training she had received was at the Université Paris-Sud, where she had studied medicine.

“Lies,” said the man in black.

Which left no option, he added, but to start from the beginning. Under his relentless interrogation, Natalie’s sense of time deserted her. For all she knew a week had passed since her sleep had been interrupted. Her head ached for want of caffeine, the bright lights were intolerable. Even so, her answers flowed from her effortlessly, as water flows downhill. She was not remembering something she had been taught, she was remembering something she already knew. She was Natalie no more. She was Leila. Leila from Sumayriyya. Leila who loved Ziad. Leila who wanted vengeance.

Finally, the man on the other side of the table closed his file. He looked toward the figure on his right, then the left. Then he unwound the headscarf to reveal his face. He was the one with pockmarked cheeks. The other two men removed their keffiyehs, too. The one on the left was the forgettable wispy-haired man. The one on the right was the one with pale bloodless skin and eyes like ice. All three of the men were smiling, but Natalie was suddenly weeping. Gabriel approached her quietly from behind and placed a hand on her shoulder as it convulsed. “It’s all right, Leila,” he said softly. “It’s all over now.”

But it wasn’t over, she thought. It was only beginning.

There exists in Tel Aviv and its suburbs a series of Office safe flats known as jump sites. They are places where, by doctrine and tradition, operatives spend their final night before departing Israel for missions abroad. Three days after Natalie’s mock interrogation, she drove with Dina to a luxury apartment overlooking the sea in Tel Aviv. Her new clothing, all of it purchased in France, lay neatly folded atop the bed. Next to it was a French passport, a French driver’s permit, French credit cards, bank cards, and various medical certificates and accreditations in the name of Leila Hadawi. There were also several photographs of the apartment she would inhabit in the heavily immigrant Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers.

“I was hoping for a cozy little garret on the Left Bank.”

“I understand. But when one is fishing,” said Dina, “it is best to go where the fish are.”

Natalie made only one request; she wanted to spend the night with her mother and father. The request was denied. Much time and effort had been expended transforming her into Leila Hadawi. To expose her, even briefly, to her previous life was deemed far too risky. An experienced field officer could move freely between the thin membrane separating his real life from the life he led in service of his country. But newly trained recruits such as Natalie were often fragile flowers that wilted when exposed to direct sunlight.

And so she passed that evening, her last in Israel, with no company other than the melancholy woman who had wrenched her from the refuge of her old life. To occupy herself, she packed and repacked her suitcase three times. Then, after a carryout dinner of lamb and rice, she switched on the television and watched an episode of an Egyptian soap opera that she had grown fond of in Nahalal. Afterward, she sat on the balcony watching the pedestrians and the cyclists and the skateboarders flowing along the promenade in the cool windy night. It was a remarkable sight, the dream of the early Zionists fully realized, yet Natalie regarded the contented Jews beneath her with Leila’s resentful eye. They were occupiers, children and grandchildren of colonialists who had stolen the land of a weaker people. They had to be defeated, driven out, just as they had driven Leila’s ancestors from Sumayriyya on a May evening in 1948.

Her anger followed her to bed. If she slept that night, she did not remember it, and in the morning she was bleary-eyed and on edge. She dressed in Leila’s clothing and covered her hair with Leila’s favorite emerald-colored hijab. Downstairs, a taxi was waiting. Not a real taxi, but an Office taxi driven by one of the security agents who used to follow her on her runs in Nahalal. He took her directly to Ben Gurion Airport, where she was thoroughly searched and questioned at length before being allowed to proceed to her gate. Leila did not take offense at her treatment. As a veiled Muslim woman she was used to the special attention of security screeners.

Inside the terminal she made her way to the gate, oblivious to the hostile stares of the Israeli traveling public, and when her flight was called she filed dutifully onto the plane. Her seatmate was the gray-eyed man with bloodless skin, and across the aisle were her pockmarked interrogator and his wispy-haired accomplice. Not one of them dared to look at the veiled woman traveling alone. She was suddenly exhausted. She told the flight attendant, demurely, that she did not wish to be disturbed. Then, as Israel sank away beneath her, she closed her eyes and dreamed of Sumayriyya.

23 AUBERVILLIERS, FRANCE

TEN DAYS LATER THE Clinique Jacques Chirac opened to muted fanfare in the northern Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers. The minister of health attended the ceremony, as did a popular Ivory Coast — born footballer, who cut a tricolor ribbon to the rain-dampened applause of several community activists assembled for the occasion. French television ran a brief story about the opening on that evening’s main newscast. Le Monde, in a short editorial, called it a promising start.

The goal of the clinic was to improve the lives of those who resided in a troubled suburb where crime and unemployment were high and government services scarce. Officially, the Ministry of Health oversaw the clinic’s day-to-day operations, but in point of fact it was a classified joint undertaking by the ministry and Paul Rousseau’s Alpha Group. The clinic’s administrator, a man named Roland Girard, was an Alpha Group operative, as was the shapely receptionist. The six nurses and two of the three physicians, however, knew nothing of the clinic’s split personality. All were employed by France’s state-run hospital system, and all had been chosen for the project after a rigorous screening process. None had ever made the acquaintance of Dr. Leila Hadawi. Nor had 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 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 past sins were forgiven. Civility was the new order of the day.

The one member of the team who never set foot in the observation post or on the streets of Aubervilliers was its founder and guiding light. His movements were unpredictable, Paris one day, Brussels or London the next, Amman when he needed to consult with Fareed Barakat, Jerusalem when he needed the touch of his wife and children. Whenever he slipped into Château Treville, he would sit up late with Eli Lavon, his oldest friend in the world, his brother-in-arms from Operation Wrath of God, and scour the watch reports for signs of trouble. Natalie was his masterpiece. He had recruited her, trained her, and hung her in a gallery of religious madness for the monsters to see. The viewing period was nearing its end. Next would come the sale. The auction would be rigged, for Gabriel had no intention of selling her to anyone but Saladin.

And so it was that, two months to the day after the Clinique Jacques Chirac opened its doors, Gabriel found himself in Paul Rousseau’s office on the rue de Grenelle. The first phase of the operation, declared Gabriel, batting away another onslaught of pipe smoke, was over. It was time to put their asset into play. Under the rules of the Franco-Israeli operational accord, the decision to proceed was supposed to be a joint one. But the asset was Gabriel’s, and therefore the decision was his, too. He spent that evening at the safe house in Seraincourt in the company of his team, and in the morning, with Mikhail at his side and Eli Lavon watching his back, he boarded a train at the Gare du Nord and headed for Brussels. Rousseau made no attempt to follow them. This was the part of the operation he didn’t want to know about. This was the part where things would get rough.

24 RUE DU LOMBARD, BRUSSELS

DURING ONE OF HIS MANY visits to GID headquarters in Amman, Gabriel had taken possession of several portable hard drives. On them were the contents of Jalal Nasser’s notebook computer, downloaded during his return visits to Jordan or during secret raids on his flat in the Bethnal Green section of East London. The GID had found nothing suspicious — no known jihadists in his contacts, no visits to jihadist Web sites in his browsing history — but Fareed Barakat had agreed to let the Office have a second look. It had taken the cybersleuths of King Saul Boulevard less than an hour to find a clever trapdoor concealed within an innocuous-looking gaming application. It led to a heavily encrypted cellar filled with names, numbers, e-mail addresses, and casing photographs, including several of the Weinberg Center in Paris. There was even a shot of Hannah Weinberg leaving her apartment on the rue Pavée. Gabriel broke the news to Fareed gently, so as not to bruise his valuable partner’s enormous ego.

“Sometimes,” said Gabriel, “it helps to have a fresh pair of eyes.”

“Or a smart Jewish boy with a PhD from Caltech,” said Fareed.

“That, too.”

Among the names that featured most prominently in this hidden trove was Nabil Awad, originally from the northern Jordanian city of Irbid, lately of the Molenbeek district of Brussels. Separated from the elegant city center by an industrial canal, Molenbeek had once been occupied by Roman Catholic Walloons and Protestant Flemings who worked in the district’s many factories and warehouses. The factories were a memory, as were Molenbeek’s original inhabitants. It was now essentially a Muslim village of one hundred thousand people, where the call to prayer echoed five times each day from twenty-two different mosques. Nabil Awad lived on the rue Ransfort, a narrow street lined with terraces of flaking nineteenth-century brick houses that had been carved into crowded tenements. He worked part-time in a copy center in central Brussels, but like many young men who lived in Molenbeek, his primary occupation was radical Islam. Among security professionals, Molenbeek was known as the jihadi capital of Europe.

The neighborhood was not the sort of place for a man with the refined tastes of Fareed Barakat. Nor, for that matter, was the sixty-euro-a-night hotel on the rue du Lombard where he met Gabriel. He had toned down his clothing for the occasion — an Italian blazer, dove-gray trousers, a dress shirt with French cuffs, no tie. After being admitted to the cramped little room on the hotel’s third floor, he contemplated the electric teakettle as though he had never laid eyes on such a contraption. Gabriel filled it with water from the bathroom tap and joined Fareed in the window. Directly opposite the hotel, on the ground floor of a modern seven-story office block, was XTC Printing and Copying.

“What time did he arrive?” asked the Jordanian.

“Promptly at ten.”

“A model employee.”

“So it would seem.”

The Jordanian’s dark eyes swept the street, a falcon looking for prey.

“Don’t bother, Fareed. You’ll never find them.”

“Mind if I try?”

“Be my guest.”

“The blue van, the two men in the parked car at the end of the block, the girl sitting alone in the window of the coffeehouse.”

“Wrong, wrong, and wrong.”

“Who are the two men in the car?”

“They’re waiting for their friend to come out of the pharmacy.”

“Or maybe they’re from the Belgian security service.”

“The last thing we need to worry about is the Sûreté. Unfortunately,” added Gabriel gloomily, “neither do the terrorists who live in Molenbeek.”

“Tell me about it,” muttered Fareed. “They produce more terrorists here in Belgium than we do.”

“Now that’s saying something.”

“You know,” said Fareed, “we wouldn’t have this problem if it wasn’t for you Israelis. You upended the natural order of things in the Middle East, and now we are all paying the price.”

Gabriel stared into the street. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” he said quietly.

“You and I working together?”

Gabriel nodded.

“You need friends wherever you can find them, habibi. You should consider yourself lucky.”

The water boiled, the kettle shut down with a click.

“Would you mind terribly?” asked the Jordanian. “I’m afraid I’m helpless in the kitchen.”

“Sure, Fareed. It’s not as if I have anything better to do.”

“Sugar, please. Lots of sugar.”

Gabriel poured water into a mug, dropped a stale teabag into it, and added three packets of sugar. The Jordanian blew on the tea furtively before raising the mug to his lips.

“How is it?” asked Gabriel.

“Ambrosia.” Fareed started to light a cigarette but stopped when Gabriel pointed toward the NO SMOKING sign. “Couldn’t you have booked a smoking room?”

“They were sold out.”

Fareed returned the cigarette to his gold case and the case to the pocket of his blazer. “Maybe you’re right,” he said with a frown. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.”

They saw him at eleven that morning when he left the shop to collect four takeaway coffees for his colleagues, and again at one that afternoon when he took his lunch break at a café around the corner. Finally, at six, they watched as he left the shop for the last time, trailed by the meekest-looking soul in all of Brussels and by a couple — a tall tweedy man and a woman with childbearing hips — who could scarcely keep their hands off one another. Though he did not know it, his life as he knew it was almost at its end. Soon, thought Gabriel, he would exist only in cyberspace. He would be a virtual person, ones and zeros, digital dust. But only if they could get him cleanly, without the knowledge of his comrades or the Belgian police, without a trace. It would be no easy feat in a city like Brussels, a city of irregular streets and dense population. But as the great Ari Shamron once said, nothing worth doing is ever easy.

Six bridges span the wide industrial canal that separates the center of Brussels from Molenbeek. To cross any of them is to leave the West and enter the Islamic world. As usual, Nabil Awad made the passage over a graffiti-sprayed pedestrian footbridge upon which few native Belgians ever dared to set foot. On the Molenbeek side, parked along an unsightly quay, was a battered van, formerly white, with a sliding side door. Nabil Awad seemed not to notice it; he had eyes only for the lanky man, a non-Arab, walking along the pea-soup-green waters of the canal. It was rare to see a Western face in Molenbeek at night, and rarer still that the owner of the face did not have a friend or two for protection.

Nabil Awad, ever vigilant, paused next to the van to allow the man to pass, which was his mistake. For at that instant the side door slid open on well-greased runners, and two pairs of trained hands wrenched him inside. The man with the non-Arab face climbed into the front passenger seat, the van eased away from the curb. As it passed through the Muslim village known as Molenbeek, past sandaled men and veiled women, past halal markets and Turkish pizza stands, the man in back, now blindfolded and bound, struggled for his life. It was no use; his life as he knew it was over.

At half past six that evening, two men of late middle age, one an elegantly dressed Arab with a bird-of-prey face, the other vaguely Jewish in appearance, departed the hotel on the rue du Lombard and climbed into a car that seemed to materialize from thin air. The hotel’s housekeeping staff entered the room a few minutes later, expecting the usual disaster after a brief stay by two men of suspect appearance. Instead, they found it in pristine condition, save for two dirty cups resting on the windowsill, one stained with tea, the other filled with cigarette butts, a clear violation of hotel policy. Management was furious, but not surprised. This was Brussels, after all, the crime capital of Western Europe. Management added one hundred euros to the bill for additional cleaning and spitefully tacked on a hefty room-service charge for food and drink that had never been ordered. Management was confident there would be no complaints.

25 NORTHERN FRANCE

PAUL ROUSSEAU’S PARTICIPATION IN WHAT came next was limited to the acquisition of a safe property near the Belgian border, the cost of which he buried deep within his operating budget. He warned Gabriel and Fareed Barakat to avoid using any tactic on their prisoner that might remotely be construed as torture. Even so, Rousseau was flying dangerously close to the sun. There was no provision in French law to allow for the extrajudicial capture of a Belgian resident from Belgian soil, even if the Belgian resident was suspected of involvement in an act of terror committed in France. Were the operation ever to become public, Rousseau would surely perish in the resulting scandal. It was a risk he was willing to take. He regarded his counterparts in the Belgian Sûreté as incompetent fools who had countenanced the establishment of an ISIS safe haven in the heart of Europe. On numerous occasions, the Sûreté had failed to pass along vital intelligence regarding threats against French targets. As far as Rousseau was concerned, he was merely returning the favor.

The safe property was a small isolated farmhouse near Lille. Nabil Awad did not know this, for he had passed the journey blinded by a hood and deafened by earplugs. The cramped dining room had been prepared for his arrival — a metal table, two chairs, a lamp with a bulb like the sun, nothing more. Mikhail and Yaakov secured Nabil Awad to one of the chairs with duct tape, and on Fareed Bakarat’s signal, a barely perceptible nod of his regal head, they removed the hood. Instantly, the young Jordanian recoiled in fear of the dreaded Mukhabarat man seated calmly on the opposite side of the table. For someone like Nabil Awad, a Jordanian from a modest family, it was the worst place in the world to be. It was the end of the line.

The ensuing silence was several minutes in length and unnerved even Gabriel, who was watching from the darkened corner of the room with Eli Lavon at his side. Nabil Awad was already trembling with fear. That was the thing about the Jordanians, thought Gabriel. They didn’t have to torture; their reputation preceded them. It allowed them to think themselves superior to their kindred service in Egypt. The Egyptian version of the Mukhabarat hung its prisoners on hooks before bothering to say hello.

With another small nod, Fareed instructed Mikhail to return the hood to the prisoner’s head. The Jordanians, Gabriel knew, were great believers in sensory deprivation. A man deprived of the ability to see and hear becomes disoriented very quickly, sometimes in mere minutes. He grows anxious and depressed, he hears voices and experiences hallucinations. Soon, he suffers from a kind of madness. With a whisper, he can be convinced of almost anything. His flesh is melting from his bones. His arm is missing. His father, long dead, is sitting beside him, watching his humiliation. And all of this can be accomplished without beatings, without electricity, without water. All that is required is a bit of time.

But time, thought Gabriel, was not necessarily on their side. Nabil Awad was at that moment on another bridge, a bridge separating his old life from the life he would soon be living on behalf of Fareed Barakat. He had to cross that bridge quickly, without the knowledge of the other members of the network. Otherwise, this phase of the operation — the phase that had the potential to derail all that had come before — would be a colossal waste of time, effort, and valuable resources. For now, Gabriel was reduced to the role of spectator. His operation was in the hands of his former enemy.

At last, Fareed spoke, a brief question, delivered in a rich baritone that seemed to shake the very walls of the little French dining room. There was no menace in the voice, for none was necessary. It said that he was powerful, privileged, and moneyed. It said that he was a relative of His Majesty and, as such, was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. It said that you, Nabil Awad, are nothing. And if I should choose to take your life, I will do so without batting an eye. And then I will enjoy a nice cup of tea.

“Who is he?” was the question Fareed posed.

“Who?” came the weak and defeated voice from beneath the hood.

“Saladin,” answered Fareed.

“He recaptured Jerusalem from the—”

“No, no,” said Fareed, interrupting, “not that Saladin. I’m talking about the Saladin who ordered you to bomb the Jewish target in Paris and the market in Amsterdam.”

“I had nothing to do with those attacks! Nothing! I swear it.”

“That’s not what Jalal told me.”

“Who’s Jalal?”

“Jalal Nasser, your friend from London.”

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“Of course you do, habibi. Jalal has told me everything already. He said you were the operational planner for both Paris and Amsterdam. He said you are Saladin’s trusted lieutenant in Western Europe.”

“That’s not true!”

“Which part?”

“I don’t know anyone named Jalal Nasser, and I’m not an operational planner. I work in a print shop. I’m no one. Please, you have to believe me.”

“Are you sure, habibi?” asked Fareed softly, as though disappointed. “Are you sure that’s your answer?”

From beneath the hood there was only silence. With a glance, Fareed instructed Mikhail and Yaakov to remove the prisoner. Gabriel, from his post in the corner of the room, watched as his two trusted officers obeyed Fareed’s command. For now, it was the Jordanian’s operation. Gabriel was only a bystander.

A room had been prepared in the cellar. It was small and cold and damp and stank of mildew. Mikhail and Yaakov chained Nabil Awad to the cot and locked the reinforced soundproof door. An overhead light, protected by a metal cage, burned brightly. It was no matter; the sun had set on Nabil Awad. With the opaque hood shielding his eyes, he lived in a world of permanent night.

It did not take long for the darkness and the silence and the fear to bore a hole in Nabil Awad’s brain. Fareed monitored the feed from the camera inside the makeshift cell. He was looking for the telltale signs — the fidgeting, the squirming, the sudden starts — that signaled the onset of emotional distress and confusion. He had personally conducted countless interrogations in the bleak cellars of GID headquarters, and he knew when to ask questions and when to let the darkness and the silence do their work for him. Some of the terrorists Fareed had interrogated had refused to break, even under brutal questioning, but he judged Nabil Awad to be fashioned of weaker stuff. There was a reason he was in Europe instead of bombing and killing and cutting off heads in the caliphate. Awad was no action-figure jihadist. He was a cog, which is precisely what they needed.

After two hours Fareed requested that the prisoner be brought up from the cellar. He posed three questions. What was your precise role in the Paris and Amsterdam attacks? How do you communicate with Jalal Nasser? Who is Saladin? Again, the young Jordanian claimed to know nothing about terrorism or Jalal Nasser or the mysterious man who called himself Saladin. He was a loyal Jordanian subject. He did not believe in terrorism or jihad. He did not go to the mosque with any regularity. He liked girls, smoked cigarettes, and drank alcohol. He worked in a copy shop. He was a nothing man.

“Are you sure, habibi?” asked Fareed before returning Nabil Awad to his cell. “Are you sure that’s your answer?”

And on it went, all through the long night, every two hours, sometimes a quarter-hour less, sometimes more, so that Nabil Awad could not set an internal clock and thus prepare himself for Fareed’s quiet onslaught. With each appearance the young Jordanian was more skittish, more disoriented. Each time, he was asked the same three questions. What was your precise role in the Paris and Amsterdam attacks? How do you communicate with Jalal Nasser? Who is Saladin? His answers never varied. He was nothing. He was no one.

And all the while the jihadist’s mobile phone pinged and flared with incoming traffic from a half-dozen different messaging and social media feeds. The phone was in the capable hands of Mordecai, a specialist in all things electronic, who was systematically mining its memory for valuable content. Two teams, one at GID headquarters, the other at King Saul Boulevard, were rapidly analyzing the intelligence haul. Together, they were drafting the responses that Mordecai sent from the phone itself, responses that would keep Nabil Awad alive in the minds of his friends, family, and fellow travelers in the global jihadist movement. One misstep, one stray word, could doom the entire operation.

It was high-wire work and a remarkable display of interservice cooperation. But then, the global war against Islamic extremism made for strange bedfellows, none stranger than Gabriel Allon and Fareed Barakat. In their youth they had been on opposite sides of the great Arab — Israeli divide, and their countries had fought a terrible conflict in which the goal of Fareed’s side was to slaughter as many Jews as possible and drive the rest into the sea. Now they were allies in a new kind of war, a war against those who killed in the name of Fareed’s ancient ancestor. It was a long war, perhaps a war without end.

On that night the war was being waged not in Yemen or Pakistan or Afghanistan but in a small isolated farmhouse near Lille, not far from the Belgian border. It was fought at two-hour intervals — sometimes two and a quarter, sometimes less — and three questions at a time. What was your precise role in the Paris and Amsterdam attacks? How do you communicate with Jalal Nasser? Who is Saladin?

“Are you sure, habibi? Are you sure that’s your answer?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

But he was not sure, not at all, and with each hooded appearance before Fareed Barakat his confidence weakened. So, too, did his will to resist. By morning he was talking to a cellmate who did not exist, and by early afternoon he could no longer walk the flight of steep stairs leading from the cellar. It was then Fareed removed the hood from his captive’s head and laid before him a photograph of a round-faced, veiled woman. Other photos followed — a weathered man wearing a black-and-white keffiyeh, a boy of sixteen or so, a beautiful young girl. They were the ones who would pay the price for Nabil Awad’s actions. The old ones would die in shame, the young ones had no future. That was the other thing about the Jordanians, thought Gabriel. They had the power to ruin lives. Not just the life of a terrorist but generations of lives. No one knew this better than Nabil Awad, who was soon sobbing in Fareed’s powerful embrace. Fareed promised to make everything all right. But first, he said gently, they were going to have a little talk.

26 NORTHERN FRANCE

IT WAS AN ALL-TOO-FAMILIAR story — a story of disillusion and dissatisfaction, of needs unmet, of economic and marital hopes dashed, of rage against the Americans and Jews over their perceived mistreatment of Muslims. Half the jihadists in the world could have told the same sad tale; it was, thought Gabriel, well-trod territory. Yes, there were a few bright minds and young men from good families in the upper ranks of the global jihadist movement, but the foot soldiers and the cannon fodder were, for the most part, radical losers. Political Islam was their salvation, and ISIS was their paradise. ISIS gave purpose to lost souls and promised an afterlife of eternal copulation to those who perished for the cause. It was a powerful message for which the West had no antidote.

Nabil Awad’s version of the story began in Irbid, where his father tended a stall in the central market. Nabil was a diligent student and upon graduation from secondary school was admitted to London’s University College. The year was 2011; Syria was burning, British Muslims were seething. No longer under the thumb of the Jordanian Mukhabarat, Nabil quickly began associating with Islamists and radicals. He prayed at the East London Mosque and joined the London chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Sunni Islamic organization that supported the resurrection of the caliphate long before anyone had heard of a group called ISIS. The Hizb, as it was known colloquially, was active in more than fifty countries and counted more than a million followers. One was a Jordanian from Amman named Jalal Nasser, whom Nabil Awad met during a Hizb gathering in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets. Jalal Nasser had already crossed the line — the line between Islamism and jihadism, between politics and terror. In time, he took Nabil Awad with him.

“When exactly did you meet him?” asked Fareed.

“I don’t remember.”

“Of course you do, habibi.”

“It was the spring of 2013.”

“I knew you could do it,” said Fareed with a paternal smile. He had removed the bindings from Nabil Awad’s wrists, and had given him a cup of sugary tea to keep his energy up. Fareed was drinking tea, too — and smoking, which Nabil Awad, a Salafist, did not approve of. Gabriel was no longer present; he was watching a video feed of the interrogation on a laptop in the next room, along with the other members of his team. Two other teams were monitoring the interrogation as well, one at GID headquarters, the other at King Saul Boulevard.

With a nudge, Fareed encouraged Nabil Awad to expound on his relationship with Jalal Nasser, which he did. At first, he said, Jalal was guarded around his fellow Jordanian, wary. He was afraid he was an agent of the GID or MI5, the British security service. But gradually, after several conversations that bordered on interrogations, he took Nabil into his confidence. He said that he had been dispatched to Europe by ISIS to help build a network capable of striking targets in the West. He said he wanted Nabil to help him.

“How?”

“By looking for recruits.”

“Recruits for ISIS?”

“For the network,” said Nabil Awad.

“In London?”

“No. He wanted me to move to Belgium.”

“Why Belgium?”

“Because Jalal could handle England on his own, and he thought Belgium was promising territory.”

“Because there were many brothers there?”

“Many,” answered Nabil Awad. “Especially in Brussels.”

“Did you speak Flemish?”

“Of course not.”

“French?”

“No.”

“But you learned to speak French.”

“Very quickly.”

“You’re a smart boy, aren’t you, Nabil — too smart to be wasting your time with this jihad shit. You should have finished your education. Things might have turned out differently for you.”

“In Jordan?” He shook his head. “Unless you are from a prominent family or connected to the king, you don’t stand a chance. What was I going to do? Drive a taxi? Work as a waiter in a Western hotel serving alcohol to infidels?”

“Better to be a waiter than where you are now, Nabil.”

The young Jordanian said nothing. Fareed opened a file.

“It’s an interesting story,” he said, “but I’m afraid Jalal tells it somewhat differently. He says that you approached him. He says that you were the one who built the network in Europe.”

“That’s not true!”

“But you see my problem, habibi. He tells me one thing, you tell me the complete opposite.”

“I’m telling you the truth, Jalal is lying!”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“Tell me something that I don’t already know about Jalal. Or better yet,” Fareed added almost as an afterthought, “show me something on your phone or your computer.”

“My computer is my room in Molenbeek.”

Fareed smiled sadly and patted the back of his prisoner’s hand. “Not anymore, habibi.”

Since the beginning of the war on terror, al-Qaeda and its murderous offspring had proven remarkably adaptive. Chased from their original Afghan sanctuary, they had found new spaces to operate in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, and a district of Brussels called Molenbeek. They had also devised new methods of communication to avoid detection by the NSA and other Western eavesdropping services. One of the most innovative was an advanced 256-bit encryption program called Mujahideen Secrets. Once Nabil Awad settled in Belgium, he used it to communicate securely with Jalal Nasser. He simply wrote his messages on his laptop, encrypted them using Mujahideen Secrets, and then loaded them onto a flash drive, which would be carried by hand to London. The original messages Nabil shredded and deleted. Even so, Mordecai had little difficulty finding their digital remains on the hard drive of the laptop. Using Nabil’s fourteen-character hard password, he raised the files from the dead, turning seemingly random pages of letters and numbers into clear text. One of the documents concerned a promising potential recruit, a Frenchwoman of Algerian descent named Safia Bourihane.

“You were the one who brought her into the network?” asked Fareed, when the interrogation resumed.

“No,” answered the young Jordanian. “I was the one who found her. Jalal handled the actual recruitment.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“Molenbeek.”

“What was she doing there?”

“She has family there — cousins, I think. Her boyfriend had just been killed in Syria.”

“She was grieving?”

“She was angry.”

“At whom?”

“The Americans, of course, but mainly the French. Her boyfriend died in a French air 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 little aluminum sarcophagus, at the base of a power pole on the Kerselaarstraat, in the Brussels suburb of Dilbeek. The actors in this slow-moving drama were far-flung. They were spread from the Bethnal Green section of East London, to an immigrant banlieue north of Paris, to a room in the heart of a building in Amman known as the Fingernail Factory, where a jihadist was being kept on cyber life support. There was precedent for what they were doing; during World War II, British intelligence kept an entire network of captured German spies alive and functioning in the minds of their Abwehr controllers, feeding them false and deceptive intelligence in the process. The Israelis and Jordanians saw themselves as keepers of a sacred flame.

The one place where no members of the team were present was Dilbeek. Though scarcely a mile from the center of Brussels, it was a decidedly rural suburb ringed by small farms. “In other words,” declared Eli Lavon, who reconnoitered the drop site on the morning after Nabil Awad’s interrogation, “it’s a spy’s nightmare.” A fixed observation point was out of the question. Nor was it possible to surveil the target from a parked car or a café. Parking was not permitted on that stretch of the Kerselaarstraat, and the only cafés were in the center of the village.

The solution was to conceal a miniature camera in the patch of overgrown weeds on the opposite side of the road. Mordecai monitored its heavily encrypted transmission from a hotel room in central Brussels and routed the signal onto a secure network, which allowed the other members of the team to watch it, too. It was soon appointment viewing, a ratings bonanza. In London, Tel Aviv, Amman, and Paris, highly trained and motivated professional intelligence officers stood motionless before computer screens, staring at a tangle of gorse at the base of a concrete power pole. Occasionally, a vehicle would pass, or a cyclist, or a pensioner from the village out for a morning constitutional, but for the most part the image appeared to be a still photograph rather than a live video feed. Gabriel monitored it from the makeshift op center at Château Treville. He thought it the most unsightly thing he had ever produced. He referred to it as Can by a Pole and cursed himself inwardly for having chosen the Dilbeek drop site over the other three options. Not that they were any better. Clearly, Jalal Nasser had not selected the sites with aesthetics in mind.

The wait was not without its lighter moments. There was the Belgian shepherd, a colossal wolflike creature, which shat in the gorse bush daily. And the metal-detecting pensioner who unearthed the can and, after a careful inspection, dropped it where he had found it. And the biblical thunderstorm, four hours in duration, that threatened to wash away the can and its contents, not to mention the village itself. Gabriel ordered Mordecai to check on the condition of the flash drive, but Mordecai convinced him it wasn’t necessary. He had placed it inside two watertight ziplock plastic baggies, Nabil Awad’s usual technique. Besides, Mordecai argued, a check was far too risky. There was always the possibility that the courier might arrive at the very moment of the inspection. There was also the possibility, he added, that they were not the only ones watching the drop site.

The target of this undertaking, Jalal Nasser, Saladin’s director of European operations, provided no clue as to his intentions. By then, it was early summer, and Jalal had been freed from his backbreaking course load at King’s College — a single seminar having something to do with the impact of Western imperialism on the economies of the Arab world — which left him free to pursue jihad and terrorism to his heart’s content. By all outward appearances, however, he was a man of taxpayer-financed leisure. He dawdled over his morning coffee at his favorite café on the Bethnal Green Road, he shopped in Oxford Street, he visited the National Gallery to view forbidden art, he watched an American action film at a theater in Leicester Square. He even took in a musical—Jersey Boys, of all things — which left the London teams wondering whether he planned to bomb the production. They saw no evidence that he was under British surveillance, but in Orwellian London looks could be deceiving. MI5 didn’t have to rely solely on watchers to surveil suspected terrorists. The eyes of CCTV never blinked.

His bachelor flat in Chilton Street had been entered, searched, and compromised in every conceivable way. They watched him eat, they watched him sleep, they watched him pray, and they peered quietly over his shoulder with the silence of curious children while he toiled late into the night at his computer. He had not one laptop but two, one that was connected to the Internet and an identical model with no links to the cyber universe whatsoever, or so he believed. If he was communicating with elements of Saladin’s network, it was not readily apparent. Jalal Nasser might have been a committed jihadist terrorist, but online he was a model resident of Great Britain and a loyal subject of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

But was he aware of the flash drive that lay at the base of a power pole in a pastoral suburb of Brussels called Dilbeek? And did he know that the man who had supposedly placed it there was now in Jordan tending to a gravely ill father? And did he find the confluence of events — the dead drop and the sudden travel of a trusted lieutenant — a bit too coincidental for comfort? Gabriel was certain it was so. And the proof, he declared, was the failure of the courier to clean out the drop site. Gabriel’s mood darkened with each passing hour. He stalked the many rooms of Château Treville, he walked the footpaths of the gardens, he scoured the watch reports. Mainly, he stared at a computer screen, at an image of a concrete power pole rising from a tangle of gorse bush, quite possibly the most hideous image in the history of a proud service.

Late in the afternoon of the third day, the deluge that had flooded Dilbeek laid siege to the banlieues north of Paris. Eli Lavon had been caught on the streets of Aubervilliers, and when he returned to Château Treville he might have been mistaken for a lunatic who had decided to take a swim fully clothed. Gabriel was standing before his computer as though he had been bronzed. His green eyes, however, were burning brightly.

“Well?” asked Lavon.

Gabriel reached down, tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and clicked on the play icon on the screen. A few seconds later a motorcyclist flashed across it, right to left, in a black blur.

“Do you know how many motorcyclists have passed by that spot today?” asked Lavon.

“Thirty-eight,” answered Gabriel. “But only one did this.”

He replayed the video in slow motion and then clicked on the pause icon. At the instant the image froze, the visor of the motorcyclist’s helmet was pointed directly at the base of the power pole.

“Maybe he was distracted by something,” said Lavon.

“Like what?”

“A beer can with a flash drive inside it.”

Gabriel smiled for the first time in three days. He tapped a few keys on the computer, and the live image reappeared on the screen. Can by a Pole, he thought. It was suddenly the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

They saw him for a second time at seven that evening and again at half past eight, as dusk was darkening the image like a painting being slowly devoured by surface grime and yellowed varnish. On both occasions he swept across the screen from left to right. And both times, upon slow-motion reexamination, his head turned almost imperceptibly toward the gorse bush at the base of the concrete power pole. When he returned for a third time it was long past dark, and the image was black as pitch. This time, he stopped and killed the bike’s lights. Mordecai switched the camera from optical to infrared, and a moment later Gabriel and Eli Lavon watched as a yellow-and-red man-shaped blob slipped quickly in and out of the gorse at the edge of the Kerselaarstraat.

The USB flash drive was identical to the model used by Nabil Awad for previous communications, with one critical additional feature: its printed circuit board had been fitted with a tracking device that allowed the team to monitor its movements. From Dilbeek it moved to the city center of Brussels, where it spent a restful evening in a rather good hotel. Then, in the morning, it boarded the 8:52 Eurostar at Brussels Midi, and by ten o’clock it was moving along a platform at St. Pancras International in London. Yaakov Rossman managed to snap a photo of the courier as he crossed the arrivals hall. Later, they would identity him as an Egyptian national who lived off the Edgware Road and worked as a production assistant for Al Jazeera television.

The flash drive made the journey to East London on foot and at noon changed hands with admirable discretion on the pavements of Brick Lane. A few minutes later, in a bachelor flat in Chilton Street, it was inserted into a computer with no connection to the Internet, or so believed its owner. At which point a new wait commenced, the wait for Jalal Nasser, Saladin’s man in Europe, to come to Paris to meet his new girl.

28 PARIS

NATALIE TOOK CONSCIOUS NOTE OF him for the first time on Saturday, at half past two o’clock, as she was crossing the Luxembourg Gardens. At that instant she realized she had seen him on several prior occasions, including the previous afternoon, at the café across the street from her flat in Aubervilliers. Shaded by a Pernod umbrella, he had nipped at a glass of white wine, feigned absorption in a worn paperback, and stared at her without reservation. She had mistaken his attentions for lust and had left the café earlier than intended. In retrospect, she supposed her actions had made a positive impression.

But it was not until that perfect sun-dappled Saturday that Natalie was certain the man was following her. She had intended to take the entire day off from work, but a pandemic of strep throat in the cités had compelled her to spend the morning at the clinic. She had left at noon and ridden an RER into the city center. And while pretending to window-shop in the rue Vavin she had seen him on the opposite side of the street, pretending to do the same. A few minutes later, on the footpaths of the Luxembourg Gardens, she had employed another one of the techniques she had learned at the farm in Nahalal — a sudden stop, a turn, a hasty retracing of her steps. And there he was again. She walked past him with her eyes averted. Even so, she could feel the weight of his gaze upon her face. A few paces behind him, dressed like an aging revolutionary poet, was the blurry-faced watcher from the Office, and behind him were two French surveillance men. Natalie returned quickly to the rue Vavin and entered a boutique she had visited a few minutes earlier. Instantly, her phone rang.

“Have you forgotten that we’re having coffee today?”

Natalie recognized the voice. “Of course not,” she answered quickly. “I’m just running a few minutes late. Where are you?”

“Café de Flore. It’s on—”

“I know where it is,” she interrupted with a flash of French superiority. “I’m on my way.”

The connection went dead. Natalie dropped the phone into her bag and went into the street. Her pursuer was not there, but on the opposite pavement was one of the French surveillance men. He followed her through the Luxembourg Quarter to the boulevard Saint-Germain, where Dina Sarid was waving to her from a sidewalk table of one of Paris’s most famous coffeehouses. She was brightly veiled and wearing a pair of large movie starlet sunglasses.

“Even with that getup,” said Natalie softly as she kissed Dina’s cheek, “you still look like an Ashkenazi Jew in a hijab.”

“The maître d’ doesn’t agree. I was lucky to get a table.”

Natalie laid a napkin across her lap. “I think I’m being followed.”

“You are.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

Dina only smiled.

“Is he the one we want?”

“Absolutely.”

“How do you want me to play it?”

“Hard to get. And remember,” added Dina, “no kissing on the first date.”

Natalie opened her menu and sighed. “I need a drink.”

29 AUBERVILLIERS, FRANCE

LEILA? IS THAT REALLY YOU? It’s Jalal. Jalal Nasser from London. Remember me? We met a few weeks ago. May I join you? I was just going to have a coffee myself.”

He blurted all this in classical Jordanian Arabic while hovering over Natalie’s usual table at the café opposite her apartment. It was late the following morning, a Sunday, the air cool and soft, the sun adrift in a cloudless sky. The traffic in the street was light; consequently, Natalie had seen him walking along the pavement from a long way off. Passing her table, he had stopped abruptly — as Natalie had stopped on the footpaths of the Luxembourg Gardens — and spun around as though his shoulder had been tapped. He approached her slowly and established himself so that the sun was at his back and his long shadow fell upon Natalie’s open newspaper. Looking up, she shaded her eyes and regarded him coolly, as if for the first time. His hair was tightly curled and neatly styled, his jawline was square and strong, his smile was restrained but warm. Women found him attractive, and he knew it.

“You’re blocking the light,” she said.

He grasped the back of an empty chair. “May I?”

Before Natalie could object, he pulled the chair away from the table and settled himself proprietarily into it. And there it was, she thought. All the preparation, all the training — and now he sat before her, the one they wanted, the one who would place her in the hands of Saladin. All at once she realized her heart was tolling like an iron bell. Her discomfort must have been apparent, because he placed a hand on the sleeve of her modest silk blouse. Met by her reproachful glare, he hastily removed it.

“Forgive me. I don’t want you to be nervous.”

But she wasn’t nervous, she told herself. And why should she be? She was in her usual café across the street from her apartment. She was a respected member of the community, a healer who cared for the residents of the cités and spoke to them in their native language, though with a distinct Palestinian accent. She was Dr. Leila Hadawi, graduate of the Université Paris-Sud, fully accredited and licensed to practice medicine by the government of France. She was Leila from Sumayriyya, Leila who loved Ziad. And the handsome creature who had just intruded on her Sunday-morning coffee, who had dared to touch the hem of her sleeve, was of no consequence.

“I’m sorry,” she said, folding her newspaper absently, “but I didn’t catch your name.”

“Jalal,” he repeated. “Jalal Nasser.”

“Jalal from London?”

“Yes.”

“And you say we’ve met before?”

“Briefly.”

“That would explain why I don’t remember you.”

“It might.”

“And where exactly did we meet?”

“It was in the Place de la République, two months ago. Or maybe it was three. There was a demonstration against—”

“I remember it.” She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. “But I don’t remember you.”

“We spoke afterward. I told you that I admired your passion and commitment to the issue of Palestine. I said I wanted to discuss it with you further. I wrote down my contact information on the back of a leaflet and gave it to you.”

“If you say so.” Feigning boredom, she gazed into the street. “Do you use this tired approach on all the women you see sitting alone in cafés?”

“Are you accusing me of making this entire thing up?”

“I might be.”

“How did I know you were at the demonstration in the Place de la République if I wasn’t there?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“I know you were there,” he said, “because I was there, too.”

“So you say.”

He flagged down the waiter and ordered a café crème. Natalie turned her head and smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“Your French is atrocious.”

“I live in London.”

“We’ve established that.”

“I’m a student at King’s College,” he explained.

“Aren’t you a bit old to still be a student?”

“My father tells me the same thing.”

“Your father sounds like a wise man. Does he live in London, too?”

“Amman.” He fell silent as the waiter placed a coffee before him. Then, casually, he asked, “Your mother is from Jordan, is she not?”

This time, the silence was Leila’s. It was the silence of suspicion, the silence of an exile. “How do you know my mother is from Jordan?” she asked at last.

“You told me.”

“When?”

“After the demonstration, of course. You told me your mother’s family lived in Nablus. You said they fled to Jordan and were forced to live in the refugee camp at Zarqa. I know this camp, by the way. I have many friends from this camp. I used to pray in the mosque there. Do you know the mosque in Zarqa camp?”

“Are you referring to the al-Falah Mosque?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

“I know it well,” she said. “But I’m quite certain I never mentioned any of this to you.”

“How could I know about your mother if you didn’t tell me?”

Again, she was silent.

“You also told me about your father.”

“Not possible.”

He ignored her objection. “He wasn’t from Nablus like your mother. He was from the Western Galilee.” He paused, then added, “From Sumayriyya.”

Her expression darkened and she engaged in a series of tiny gestures that interrogators refer to as displacement activity. She adjusted her hijab, she tapped a nail against the rim of her coffee cup, she glanced nervously around the quiet Sunday street — anywhere but into the face of the man seated on the other side of the table, the man who would place her in the hands of Saladin.

“I don’t know who you are,” she said finally, “but I’ve never told you anything about my parents. In fact, I’m quite certain I’ve never seen you until this moment.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Then how do I know these things about you?”

“Maybe you’re from the DGSI?”

“Me? French intelligence? My French is dreadful. You said so yourself.”

“Then maybe you’re American. Or Israeli,” she added.

“You’re paranoid.”

“That’s because I’m a Palestinian. And if you don’t tell me who you really are and what you want, I’m leaving. And there’s a very good chance I might find the nearest gendarme and tell him about the strange man who knows things about me he shouldn’t.”

“It’s never a good idea for Muslims to get involved with the French police, Leila. There’s a good chance they’ll open an S file on you. And if they do, they’ll learn things that could prove detrimental to someone in your position.”

She placed a five-euro note next to her coffee and started to rise, but once again he placed his hand on her arm — not lightly but with a grip that was shockingly firm. And all the while he was smiling for the benefit of the waiter and the passersby, immigrants and native French, filing past through the soft sunlight.

“Who are you?” she murmured through clenched teeth.

“My name is Jalal Nasser.”

“Jalal from London?”

“Correct.”

“Have we ever met before?”

“No.”

“You lied to me.”

“I had to.”

“Why are you here?”

“I was asked to come.”

“By whom?”

“You, of course.” He relaxed his grip. “Don’t be nervous, Leila,” he said calmly. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m only here to help. I’m going to give you the chance you’ve been waiting for. I’m going to make your dreams come true.”

Paul Rousseau’s observation post was located directly above the café, and the sharp downward angle of the surveillance camera was such that Natalie and Jalal seemed like characters in an avant-garde French film. Audio coverage was supplied by Natalie’s mobile phone, which meant that, when viewed live, there was a maddening two-second audio delay. But afterward, in the safe house at Seraincourt, Mordecai produced an edited version of the encounter in which sound and video were synchronized. With Eli Lavon at his side, Gabriel watched it three times from beginning to end. Then he adjusted the time code to 11:17:38 and clicked on the play icon.

“Why are you here?”

“I was asked to come.”

“By whom?”

“You, of course.”

Gabriel clicked PAUSE.

“Impressive performance,” said Eli Lavon.

“His or hers?”

“Both, actually.”

Gabriel clicked PLAY.

“I’m going to give you the chance you’ve been waiting for. I’m going to make your dreams come true.”

“Who told you about these dreams of mine?”

“My friend Nabil. Perhaps you remember him.”

“Very well.”

“Nabil told me about the conversation you had after the demonstration in the Place de la République.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because Nabil and I work for the same organization.”

“Which organization?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. Not here. Not now.”

Gabriel clicked PAUSE and looked at Lavon. “Why not here?” he asked. “Why not now?”

“You didn’t really think he would make his move in the café, did you?”

Gabriel frowned and pressed PLAY.

“Perhaps we can meet somewhere more private to talk at length.”

“Perhaps.”

“Are you free this evening?”

“I might be.”

“Do you know La Courneuve?”

“Of course.”

“Can you make your way there?”

“It’s not far. I can walk.”

“There’s a large housing estate on the Avenue Leclerc.”

“I know it.”

“Be outside the pharmacy at nine. Don’t bring your mobile phone or anything electronic. And dress warmly.”

Gabriel paused the recording. “Sounds to me like they’re going to be traveling by motorbike.”

“Brilliant,” said Lavon.

“Jalal or me?”

A silence fell between them. It was Lavon who finally broke it.

“What are you worried about?”

“I’m worried that he’s going to drive her to a secluded location, brutally interrogate her, and then cut her head off. Other than that, I have no concerns at all.”

Another silence, longer than the first.

“What are you going to do?” Lavon asked finally.

Gabriel stared at the computer screen, one hand to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side. Then he reached down, reset the time code, and pressed PLAY.

“Leila? Is that really you? It’s Jalal. Jalal Nasser from London. .”

30 LA COURNEUVE, FRANCE

THE CLEAR SKIES WERE BY that evening a pleasant memory. A cold, damp wind plucked at Natalie’s hijab as she made her way along the Avenue Leclerc, and above her head a blanket of thick clouds obscured the moon and stars. The raw weather was more typical of the northern banlieues; a trick of the prevailing southwesterly winds gave them a distinctly gloomier climate than the center of Paris. It only added to the air of dystopian misery that hung like a gray shroud over the looming concrete towers of the cités.

One of the largest housing estates in the entire department rose before Natalie now, two enormous slabs in the brutalist style, one tall and rectangular, like a giant deck of playing cards, the other lower and longer, as if to provide architectural balance. Between the two structures was a broad esplanade planted with many youthful trees in green leaf. A flock of veiled women, some wearing full facial veils, conversed quietly in Arabic while a few feet away a quartet of teenage boys openly passed a joint, knowing that a patrol by the French police was exceedingly unlikely. Natalie slipped past the women, returning their greeting of peace, and headed toward the parade of shops at the base of the tower. A supermarket, a hair salon, a small carryout restaurant, an optician, a pharmacy — all of life’s needs met in one convenient location. That was the goal of the central planners, to create self-contained utopias for the working classes. Few residents of the banlieues ventured into the center of Paris unless they were lucky enough to have jobs there. Even then, they joked that the short journey, ten minutes on the RER, required a passport and proof of vaccination.

Natalie made her way to the entrance of the pharmacy. Outside was a pair of modular concrete benches, upon which sat several Africans in traditional flowing dress. She reckoned it was a few minutes before nine o’clock, but couldn’t be sure; as instructed she had come without electronic devices, including her battery-powered wristwatch. One of the Africans, a tall thin man with skin like ebony, offered Natalie his seat, but with only a polite smile she indicated she preferred to stand. She watched the evening traffic moving in the avenue, and the hidden women chattering softly in Arabic, and the now-stoned teenage boys, who in turn were eyeing her malevolently, as though they could see the truth beneath her veil. She drew a deep breath to slow the beat of her heart. I’m in France, she told herself. Nothing can happen to me here.

Several minutes elapsed, long enough for Natalie to wonder whether Jalal Nasser had decided to abort the meeting. Behind her, the pharmacy door opened and from inside emerged a Frenchman who might have been mistaken for a North African. Natalie recognized him; he was one of her watchers from the French security service. He slipped past without a word and climbed into the backseat of a battered Renault. Approaching the car from behind was a motor scooter, black in color, large enough to accommodate two passengers. It stopped outside the pharmacy, a few feet from where Natalie stood. The driver lifted the visor of his helmet and smiled.

“You’re late,” said Natalie, annoyed.

“Actually,” said Jalal Nasser, “you were early.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I followed you.”

He removed a second helmet from the rear storage compartment. Warily, Natalie accepted it. This was something they hadn’t covered during her training at the farm in Nahalal, how to wear a helmet over a hijab. She slipped it on carefully, buckled the strap beneath her chin, and climbed onto the back of the bike. Instantly, it lurched forward into the traffic. As they shot through the canyons of the cités in a blur, Natalie wrapped her arms around Jalal Nasser’s waist and held on for her life. I’m in France, she reassured herself. Nothing can happen to me here. Then she realized her mistake. She wasn’t in France, not anymore.

Earlier that afternoon, in the elegant salon of Château Treville, there had been an intense debate regarding the level of surveillance required for that evening’s meeting. Gabriel, perhaps owing to the burden of pending command, had wanted as many eyes as possible on his agent, both human and electronic. Only Eli Lavon dared to offer a countervailing opinion. Lavon knew the possibilities of surveillance, and its pitfalls. Clearly, he argued, Jalal Nasser intended to take his potential recruit on a surveillance-detection run before baring his jihadist soul to her. And if he discovered they were being followed, the operation would be doomed before it left port. Nor was it possible, said Lavon, to conceal a tracking beacon on Natalie, because the technologically minded operatives of ISIS and al-Qaeda knew how to find them.

It was a brotherly row, but heated. There were voices raised, mild insults exchanged, and a piece of fruit, a banana of all things, hurled in frustration — though afterward Lavon insisted that Gabriel’s lightning-fast duck, while impressive, had been wholly unnecessary, for it was only a warning shot across the bow. Lavon prevailed in the end, if only because Gabriel, in his operational heart, knew that his old friend was correct. He was magnanimous in defeat, but no less worried about sending his agent into the meeting entirely alone. Despite his unthreatening appearance, Jalal Nasser was a ruthless and committed jihadi killer who had served as a project manager for two devastating terror attacks. And Natalie, for all her training and intelligence, was a Jew who happened to speak Arabic very well.

And so, at two minutes past nine that evening, as Natalie swung her leg over the back of Jalal Nasser’s Piaggio motorbike, only French eyes were watching, and only from a distance. The battered Renault followed for a time and was soon replaced by a Citroën. Then the Citroën dropped away too, and only the cameras watched over them. They tracked them northward, past Le Bourget Airport and Charles de Gaulle, and eastward through the villages of Thieux and Juilly. Then, at nine twenty, Paul Rousseau rang Gabriel to say that Natalie had vanished from their radar screens.

At which point Gabriel and his team settled in for another long wait. Mordecai and Oded engaged in a furious game of table tennis; Mikhail and Eli Lavon waged war over a chessboard, Yossi and Rimona watched an American film on television. Only Gabriel and Dina refused to distract themselves with trivial pursuits. Gabriel paced alone in the darkened garden, worrying himself to death, while Dina sat alone in the makeshift operations room, staring at a black computer screen. Dina was grieving. Dina would have given anything to be in Natalie’s place.

After putting the last of the Paris suburbs behind them, they rode for an hour through sleeping cropland and postcard villages, seemingly without aim or purpose or destination. Or was it two hours they journeyed? Natalie couldn’t be sure. Her view of the world was limited. There were only Jalal’s square shoulders, and the back of Jalal’s helmet, and Jalal’s narrow waist, to which she clung with guilt, for she was thinking of Ziad, whom she loved. For a time she tried to maintain a grasp of their whereabouts, noting the names of the villages they entered and exited, and the numbers of the roads along which they sped. Eventually, she surrendered and tilted her head heavenward. Stars shone in the black sky; a low luminous moon chased them across the landscape. She supposed she was back in France again.

At last, they arrived at the outskirts of a midsize town. Natalie knew it; it was Senlis, the ancient city of French kings located at the edge of the Forest of Chantilly. Jalal sped through the cobbled alleyways of the medieval center and parked in a small courtyard. On two sides were high walls of gray flint, and on the third, darkened and shuttered, was a two-story building that showed no sign of habitation. Somewhere a church bell tolled heavily, but otherwise the town was eerily quiet. Jalal dismounted and removed his helmet. Natalie did the same.

“Your hijab, too,” he murmured in Arabic.

“Why?”

“Because this isn’t the sort of place for people like us.”

Natalie unpinned her hijab and tucked it into the helmet. In the darkness Jalal scrutinized her carefully.

“Is something wrong?”

“You’re just. .”

“Just what?”

“More beautiful than I imagined.” He locked the two helmets in the bike’s rear storage compartment. Then, from his coat pocket, he removed an object about the size of an old-fashioned pager. “Did you follow my instructions about phones and electronic devices?”

“Of course.”

“And no credit cards?”

“None.”

“Mind if I check?”

He moved the object methodically over her body, down her arms and legs, across her shoulders, her breasts, her hips, down the length of her spine.

“Did I pass?”

Wordlessly, he returned the device to his coat pocket.

“Is your name really Jalal Nasser?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

“Yes, my name is Jalal.”

“And your organization?”

“We seek to re-create the caliphate in the Muslim lands of the Middle East and establish Islamic dominance over the rest of the world.”

“You’re from ISIS.”

Without responding he turned and led her along an empty street, toward the sound of the church bells.

“Take my arm,” he said sotto voce. “Speak to me in French.”

“About what?”

“Anything. It doesn’t matter.”

She threaded her arm through his and told him about her day at the clinic. He nodded occasionally, always at the wrong times, but made no attempt to address her in his dreadful French. Finally, in Arabic, he asked, “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 calculated acts of violence. The attacks in Paris and Amsterdam were carried out by our network. We have many more attacks planned, some in the coming days.”

He said all this while gazing down the length of the cathedral. Natalie delivered her response to the apse.

“What does this have to do with me?”

“I would like you to work for us.”

“I couldn’t be involved with something like Paris or Amsterdam.”

“That’s not what you told my friend Nabil. You told Nabil that you wanted the kufar to know what it felt like to be afraid. You said you wanted to punish them for their support of Israel.” He turned and looked directly into her eyes. “You said you wanted to pay them back for what happened to Ziad.”

“I suppose Nabil told you about Ziad, too.”

He took the brochure from her hand, consulted it briefly, and then led her down the center of the nave, toward the western facade. “You know,” he was saying, “I think I actually met him once.”

“Really? Where?”

“At a meeting of some brothers in Amman. For reasons of security we weren’t using our real names.” He stopped and craned his neck toward the ceiling. “You’re afraid. I can see it.”

“Yes,” she replied. “I am afraid.”

“Why?”

“Because I wasn’t serious. It was only talk.”

“You are a salon jihadist, Leila? You prefer to carry signs and shout slogans?”

“No. I just never imagined something like this might happen.”

“This isn’t the Internet, Leila. This is the real thing.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

From across the cathedral the old woman signaled that it was time to leave. Jalal lowered his gaze from the ceiling to Natalie’s face.

“And if I say yes?” she asked.

“You’ll need to travel to the caliphate for training. We’ll handle all the arrangements.”

“I can’t be away for long.”

“A few weeks are all we need.”

“What happens if the authorities find out?”

“Trust me, Leila, they’ll know nothing. We have routes we use. False passports, too. Your time in Syria will be our little secret.”

“And then?”

“You return to France and your job at the clinic. And you wait.”

“For what?”

He placed his hands on her shoulders. “You know, Leila, you’re lucky. You’re going to do something incredibly important. I envy you.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “My friend Mona told me the same thing.”

“What was she talking about?”

“It was nothing,” said Natalie. “Nothing at all.”

31 AUBERVILLIERS, FRANCE

THAT NIGHT NATALIE COULD NOT sleep. For a time she lay awake in her bed, committing to memory every word Jalal Nasser had spoken. Afterward, she wrestled with her sheets while her mind raced with thoughts of what lay ahead. To distract herself she watched a tedious documentary on French television, and when that didn’t work, she opened her laptop and surfed the Internet. Not the jihadist sites, though; Jalal had warned her to avoid those. Natalie was now a servant of two masters, a woman with two lovers. When sleep finally claimed her, it was Jalal who visited her in her dreams. He strapped a suicide vest to her nude body and kissed her softly. You’re lucky, he said. You’re going to do something incredibly important.

She awoke groggy and agitated and afflicted with a migraine that no amount of medication or caffeine would alleviate. A benevolent God might have seen fit to give her a quiet day at the clinic, but a parade of human malady kept her running from examination room to examination room until six that evening. As she was leaving work, Roland Girard, the clinic’s ersatz administrative director, invited her for coffee. Outside, he helped her into the front seat of his Peugeot sedan, and for the next forty-five minutes he spoke not a word as he followed a meandering path toward the center of Paris. As they were passing the Musée d’Orsay, his mobile phone pinged with an incoming message. After reading it he drove across the Seine and made his way to the rue de Grenelle in the Seventh Arrondissement, where he nosed the car through the security gate of a handsome cream-colored building. Natalie glimpsed the brass plaque as it flashed past her window. It read SOCIÉTÉ INTERNATIONALE POUR LA LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE.

“An evening of Balzac?”

He switched off the engine and led her inside. In the foyer she glimpsed the Arab-looking Frenchman whom she had seen leaving the pharmacy in La Courneuve, and in the stairwell she passed a habitué of the café across the street from her apartment. The uppermost floor of the building felt like a bank after hours. A stern-looking woman sat behind an orderly desk, while in an adjacent office a sharp-suited man glared at his computer as though it were an uncooperative witness. Two men waited in a glass-enclosed conference room. One smoked a pipe and wore a crumpled blazer. The other was Gabriel.

“Leila,” he said formally. “So nice to see you again. You’re looking well. A bit tired, but well.”

“It was a long night.”

“For all of us. We were relieved when we saw that motorbike pull up outside your apartment building.” Gabriel moved slowly from behind the table. “I trust your meeting with Jalal went well.”

“It did.”

“He has plans for you?”

“I think he does.”

“Because of his security precautions, we weren’t able to record the conversation. It is important you tell us everything he said last night, exactly the way he said it. Can you do that, Leila?”

She nodded.

“Good,” said Gabriel, smiling for the first time. “Please have a seat and start from the beginning. What were the first words out of his mouth when he met you outside the pharmacy? Did he speak during the drive? Where did he take you? What was his route? Tell us everything you can. No detail is too small.”

She lowered herself into her assigned seat, adjusted her hijab, and began to speak. After a moment or two, Gabriel reached across the table and placed a restraining hand upon hers.

“Did I do something wrong?” she asked.

“You’re doing beautifully, Leila. But please start again from the beginning. And this time,” he added, “it would be helpful if you spoke French instead of Arabic.”

It was at this point that they were confronted with their first serious operational dilemma — for within the walls of the ancient cathedral of Senlis, Jalal Nasser, Saladin’s man in Western Europe, had told his potential recruit that more attacks were coming, sooner rather than later. Paul Rousseau declared that they were compelled to inform his minister of the developments, and perhaps even the British. The goal of the operation, he said, had been to roll up the network. Working with MI5, they could arrest Jalal Nasser, interrogate him, learn his future plans, and scoop up his operatives.

“Call it a day?” asked Gabriel. “Job well done?”

“It happens to be true.”

“And what if Nasser doesn’t crack under the friendly interrogation he’ll receive in London? What if he doesn’t reveal his plans or the names of his operatives? What if there are parallel networks and cells, so that if one goes down the others survive?” He paused, then added, “And what about Saladin?”

Rousseau conceded the point. But on the question of bringing the threat to the attention of higher authority — namely, his chief and his minister — he was unyielding. And so it was that Gabriel Allon, the man who had operated on French soil with impunity and had left a trail of dead bodies stretching from Paris to Marseilles, entered the Interior Ministry at half past ten that evening, with Alpha Group’s chief at his side. The minister was waiting in his ornate office, along with the chief of the DGSI and Alain Lambert, the minister’s aide-de-camp, note taker, food taster, and general factotum. Lambert had come from a dinner party; the minister, from his bed. He shook Gabriel’s hand as if he feared catching something. Lambert avoided Gabriel’s eye.

“How serious is the threat of another attack?” the minister asked when Rousseau had completed his briefing.

“As serious as it gets,” answered the Alpha Group chief.

“Will the next attack come in France?”

“We cannot say.”

“What can you say?”

“Our agent has been recruited and invited to travel to Syria for training.”

“Our agent?” The minister shook his head. “No, Paul, she is not our agent.” He pointed to Gabriel and said, “She is his.”

A silence fell over the room.

“Is she still willing to go through with it?” the minister asked after a moment.

“She is.”

“And you, Monsieur Allon? Are you still willing to send her?”

“The best way to learn the time and place of the next attack is to insert an agent directly into the operation itself.”

“I take it your answer is yes, then?”

Gabriel nodded gravely. The minister made a show of thought.

“How comprehensive is your surveillance of this man Nasser?” he asked.

“Physical and electronic.”

“But he uses encrypted communications?”

“Correct.”

“So he could issue an attack order and we would be completely in the dark.”

“Conceivably,” said Gabriel carefully.

“And the British? They are unaware of his activities?”

“It appears so.”

“Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, Monsieur Allon, but if I had an agent who was about to go into Syria, I wouldn’t want the man who sent her there to be arrested by the British.”

Gabriel did not disagree with the minister, largely because he had been thinking the same thing for some time. And so late the following morning he journeyed across the channel to inform Graham Seymour, the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, that the Office had been covertly watching a high-ranking ISIS operative living in the Bethnal Green section of East London. Seymour was predictably appalled, as was Amanda Wallace, the chief of MI5, who heard the same confession an hour later across the river at Thames House. For his penance, Gabriel was forced to make the British services nonvoting partners in his operations. All he needed now was the Americans, he thought, and the disaster would be complete.

The woman now known as Dr. Leila Hadawi was unaware of the interservice warfare raging around her. She tended to her patients at the clinic, she idled away her spare time at the café across the street from her apartment, she ventured occasionally into the center of Paris to shop or stroll. She no longer viewed extremist material on the Internet because she had been instructed not to. Nor did she ever discuss her political beliefs with friends or colleagues. Mainly, she spoke of her summer holiday, which she planned to spend in Greece with a friend from her university days. A packet containing her airline tickets and hotel accommodations arrived three days before she was due to depart. A travel agent in London named Farouk Ghazi handled the booking. Dr. Hadawi paid for nothing.

With the arrival of the packet, Gabriel and the rest of the team went on a war footing. They made travel accommodations of their own — in point of fact, King Saul Boulevard handled the arrangements for them — and by early the next morning the first operatives were moving quietly toward their failsafe points. Only Eli Lavon remained behind at Seraincourt with Gabriel, a decision he later came to regret because his old friend was distraught with worry. He watched over Natalie as a parent watches over an ailing child, looking for signs of distress, changes in mood and demeanor. If she was frightened, she gave no sign of it, even on the last night, when Gabriel spirited her into Paul Rousseau’s lair on the rue de Grenelle for a final briefing. When he gave her a last chance to change her mind, she only smiled. Then she composed a letter to her parents, to be delivered in the event of her death. Tellingly, Gabriel did not refuse to accept it. He placed it in a sealed envelope and placed the envelope in the breast pocket of his jacket. And there it would remain until the day she came out of Syria again.

ISIS supplied most of its European recruits with a detailed list of items to pack for their trip. Dr. Leila Hadawi was no ordinary recruit, however, and so she packed with deception in mind — summer dresses of the kind worn by promiscuous Europeans, revealing swimwear, erotic undergarments. In the morning she dressed piously, pinned her hijab carefully into place, and wheeled her suitcase through the quiet streets of the banlieue to the Aubervilliers RER station. The ride to Charles de Gaulle Airport was ten minutes in length. She glided through unusually heavy security and onto an Air France jet bound for Athens. On the other side of the aisle, dressed for the boardroom of a Fortune 500 company, was the small man with an elusive face. Smiling, Natalie peered out her window as France disappeared beneath her. She was not alone. Not yet.

As it happened, the day of Natalie’s departure was a particularly violent one in the Middle East, even by the region’s bloody standards. There were beheadings and burnings in Syria, a string of simultaneous suicide bombings in Baghdad, a Taliban raid in Kabul, a new round of fighting in Yemen, several stabbings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and a gun-and-grenade attack on Western tourists at a beach hotel in Tunisia. So it was understandable that a relatively minor skirmish between Islamic militants and Jordanian police went largely unnoticed. The incident occurred at ten fifteen in the morning outside the village of Ramtha, located just a few yards from the Syrian border. The militants were four in number; all perished during the brief firefight. One of the militants was later identified as Nabil Awad, a twenty-four-year-old Jordanian citizen who resided in the Molenbeek district of Brussels. In a statement released on social media, ISIS confirmed that Awad was a member of its organization who had played a major support role in the attacks in Paris and Amsterdam. It declared him a holy martyr and swore to avenge his death by unleashing “rivers of blood.” The final battle, it said, would come in a place called Dabiq.

32 SANTORINI, GREECE

DR. LEILA HADAWI SHED HER VEIL in a public toilet at Athens International Airport ten minutes after clearing passport control. She shed her pious clothing, too, changing into a pair of white Capri-length pants, a sleeveless blouse, and a pair of gold flat-soled sandals that displayed her newly polished nails. While waiting for her next flight to be called, she repaired to an airport bar and consumed her first alcohol, two glasses of tart Greek white wine, since her recruitment. Boarding her next flight, the three-fifteen to Santorini, she was oblivious to fear. Syria was a troubled place on a map. Isis was the wife of Osiris, friend of slaves and sinners, protector of the dead.

Leila Hadawi had never visited Santorini, and neither for that matter had the woman who wore the good doctor’s identity. Her first airborne glimpse of the island, with its sharp demonic peaks rising from the rim of a flooded caldera, was a revelation. And at the airport, as she stepped onto the bleached tarmac, the heat of the sun on her bare arms was like a lover’s first kiss. She rode in a taxi to Thera and then made her way on foot along a pedestrian walkway to the Panorama Boutique Hotel. Entering the lobby, she saw a tall, sunburned Englishman shouting hysterically at the concierge while a woman with sandstone-colored hair and childbearing hips looked on in embarrassment. Natalie smiled. She was not alone. Not yet.

A young Greek woman stood watch behind the reception desk. Natalie walked over and stated her name. “We have you in a double for ten nights,” said the woman after tapping a few keys on her computer keyboard. “According to our records, one other person will be joining you, a Miss Shirazi.”

“I’m afraid she’s been delayed.”

“Problems with her flight?”

“A family emergency.”

“Not serious, I hope.”

“Not too.”

“Passport, please.”

Natalie slid her worn French passport across the counter while Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern, using different names, flying false flags, stormed from the lobby in a rage. Even Natalie welcomed the sudden quiet.

“Their room isn’t to their liking,” explained the clerk.

“I gathered that.”

“Yours is lovely, I assure you.”

Natalie accepted the key and, after declining an offer of help with her bag, made her way alone to her room. It had two single beds and a small balcony overlooking the rim of the caldera, where a pair of gleaming white cruise ships floated like toys upon a flat perfect sea. One last fling, she thought, courtesy of the richest terrorist organization in history.

She unzipped her bag and unpacked her belongings as though she were settling in for a long stay. By the time she had finished, the sun was a few degrees above the horizon, flooding her room with fiery orange light. After locking her passport in the room safe, she headed downstairs to the terrace bar, which was crowded with other guests, mainly from the British Isles. Seated among them, in decidedly better spirits, were Yossi and Rimona.

Natalie seized an empty table and from a harried waitress ordered a glass of white wine. Slowly, the bar filled with other guests, including a lanky man with bloodless skin and eyes like glacial ice. She hoped he might join her but instead he sat at the bar, where he could keep watch over the terrace and pretend to flirt with a pretty girl from Bristol. Natalie was able to hear his voice for the first time and was surprised by the distinct Russian accent. Given the demographics of modern Israel, she suspected the accent was authentic.

Presently, the sun slipped behind the peaks of Therasia. The skies darkened, the sea turned to black. Natalie glanced at the man who spoke with a Russian accent but at that moment he was otherwise occupied, so she turned away again and stared into the emptiness. Someone will come for you, they had said. But at that instant, in this place, the only person Natalie wanted was the man at the bar.

For the next three days Dr. Leila Hadawi behaved as an ordinary, if solitary, tourist. She breakfasted alone in the Panorama’s dining room, she roasted her skin on the black-pebble beach at Perissa, she hiked the rim of the caldera, she toured the island’s archaeological and geological sites, she took her wine at sunset on the terrace. It was a small island, so it was understandable she might encounter other guests of the hotel far from its premises. She passed an unpleasant morning on the beach within earshot of the balding Englishman and his Rubenesque wife, and while touring the buried city of Akrotiri she bumped into the pale Russian, who pointedly ignored her. The next day, her fourth on the island, she saw the pretty girl from Bristol while shopping in Thera. Dr. Hadawi was coming out of a swimwear boutique. The pretty girl was standing outside in the narrow street.

“You’re staying at my hotel,” she said.

“Yes, I think I am.”

“I’m Miranda Ward.”

Dr. Leila Hadawi extended her hand and introduced herself.

“What a lovely name. Won’t you join me for a drink?”

“I was just going back to the hotel.”

“I can’t bear the scene at our bar anymore. Too many bloody English! Especially that bald bloke and his curvy wife. God, what bores! If they complain about the service again, I’ll open a vein.”

“Let’s go somewhere else then.”

“Yes, let’s.”

“Where?”

“Have you been to the Tango?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s this way.”

She seized Natalie’s arm as though she feared losing her and led her through the shadows of the street. She was thin and blond and freckled and smelled of cherry candy and coconut. Her sandals slapped the paving stones like the palm of a hand connecting to an unfaithful cheek.

“You’re French,” she said at once, her tone accusatory.

“Yes.”

“French French?”

“My family is from Palestine.”

“I see. A shame, that.”

“How so?”

“The whole refugee thing. And those Israelis! Horrible creatures.”

Dr. Hadawi smiled but said nothing.

“You’re here alone?” asked Miranda Ward.

“That wasn’t the plan, but it seems to have worked out that way.”

“What happened?”

“My friend had to cancel at the last minute.”

“Mine, too. He dumped me for another woman.”

“Your friend is an idiot.”

“He was gorgeous, though. Here we are.”

The Tango generally didn’t come alive until late. They passed through the deserted cavelike interior and went onto the terrace. Natalie ordered a glass of Santorini white; Miranda Ward, a vodka martini. She took a decorous sip, made a face, and returned the glass to the table.

“You don’t like it?” asked Natalie.

“Actually, I never touch alcohol.”

“Really? Then why did you invite me for a drink?”

“I needed to have a word with you in private.” She gazed at the darkening sea. “It’s lovely here, but dreadfully boring. What do you say we take a little trip, just the two of us? It will be an adventure, I promise.”

“Where?”

Smiling, Miranda Ward raised the martini to her lips. “I used to love this stuff. Now it tastes like bloody nail polish to me.”

Together they returned to the Panorama and informed the clerk that they planned to travel to Turkey. No, they did not require assistance with ferry bookings; others had done that for them. Yes, they would like to keep their rooms; their stay in Turkey would be brief. Dr. Hadawi then returned to her room alone and packed her bags. Afterward, she dispatched a text message to her “father,” telling him of her plans. Her father pleaded with her to be careful. A moment later he sent a second message.

ARE YOU WELL?

Natalie hesitated and then typed her answer.

LONELY BUT FINE.

DO YOU NEED COMPANY?

Another hesitation, then three taps on the screen.

YES.

No reply was forthcoming. Natalie went down to the terrace, expecting to see Miranda Ward, but there was no sign of her. The tall pale Russian was in his usual place at the bar, where he had found fresh prey. Natalie sat with her back to him and consumed the last wine she would taste for many weeks. When she had finished it, the waitress brought a second glass.

“I didn’t order that.”

“It’s from him.” The waitress glanced toward the bar. Then she handed Natalie a slip of paper, folded in half. “This is from him, too. Looks like this is your unlucky night.”

When the waitress was gone, Natalie read the note. Smiling, she drank the second glass of wine, slipped the note into her handbag, and left without acknowledging the loathsome creature at the bar. In her room she showered quickly, hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the latch, and switched out the lights. Then she sat alone in the darkness and waited for the knock at her door. It came at twenty minutes past ten. When she unchained the door, he entered with the silence of a night thief. “Please,” she said, collapsing into his arms. “Tell him I want to go home. Tell him I can’t do it. Tell him I’m frightened to death.”

33 SANTORINI, GREECE

WHAT’S YOUR REAL NAME?” asked Natalie.

“The management of the Panorama Hotel is under the impression it’s Michael Danilov.”

“Is it?”

“Close enough.” He was standing before the door that gave onto the balcony. A pale moon illuminated his pale face. “And you, Dr. Hadawi, have no business inviting a man like me to your room.”

“I did nothing of the sort, Mr. Danilov. I said I needed company. They could have sent the woman instead.”

“Consider yourself lucky. Empathy isn’t her strong suit.” His head swiveled a few degrees, his eyes found hers in the darkness. “We all get nervous before a big operation, especially those of us who operate in places where there’s no embassy if things go sideways. But we trust in our mission and our planning and we go. It’s what we do.”

“I’m not like you.”

“Actually, you’re more like me than you realize.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“The kind we never talk about.”

“You kill people?”

“I eliminate threats to our security. And on the night before a big operation, I’m always afraid that I’m the one who’s going to get eliminated.”

“But you go.”

He averted his gaze and changed the subject. “So the comely Miss Ward is going to take you to the other side.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“I’m not. Did she give you the route?”

“Santorini to Kos, Kos to Bodrum.”

“Two young women on holiday, very professional.” He turned away and addressed his next words to the night. “He must think very highly of you.”

“Who?”

“Saladin.”

From beyond the door came the sound of voices in the corridor, Englishmen, drunk. When the silence returned, he looked at the luminous dial of his wristwatch.

“The Kos ferry leaves early. You should get some sleep.”

“Sleep? You can’t be serious.”

“It’s important. You have a long day tomorrow.”

He drew the blinds, casting the room into pitch darkness, and started toward the door.

“Please don’t go,” whispered Natalie. “I don’t want to be alone.”

After a moment he eased onto the bed, propped his back against the headboard, and stretched his long legs before him. Natalie placed a pillow next to his hip and laid her head upon it. He covered her with a thin blanket and brushed her hair from her face.

“Close your eyes.”

“They are closed.”

“No, they’re not.”

“You can see in the dark?”

“Very well, actually.”

“At least take off your shoes.”

“I prefer to sleep with them on.”

“You’re joking.”

With his silence he said that he wasn’t. She laughed quietly and once again asked his name. This time, he answered truthfully. His name, he said, was Mikhail Abramov.

“When did you come to Israel?”

“When I was a teenager.”

“Why did your family leave Russia?”

“The same reason yours left France.”

“Maybe we’re not so different after all.”

“I told you.”

“You’re not married, are you? I would hate to think—”

“I’m not married.”

“Serious girlfriend?”

“Not anymore.”

“What happened?”

“It’s not so easy to have a relationship in this business. You’ll find out soon enough.”

“I have no intention of staying with the Office when this is over.”

“Whatever you say.”

He placed his hand at the center of her back and worked his fingers gently along her spine.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re very good at that?”

“Close your eyes.”

She did. But not because she was suddenly drowsy; his touch had sent an electrical charge straight to her abdomen. She draped an arm across his thighs. The fingers went still and then resumed their exploration of her spine.

“Do you think we could have a drink when this is over,” she asked, “or is that not allowed?”

“Close your eyes,” was all he said.

The fingers moved a few inches lower down her back. She laid her palm flat against his thigh and squeezed gently.

“Don’t.” Then he said, “Not now.”

She removed her hand and placed it beneath her chin while his fingers strolled the length of her spine. Sleep stalked her. She kept it at bay.

“Tell him I can’t go through with it,” she said drowsily. “Tell him I want to go home.”

“Sleep, Leila,” was all he said, and she slept. And in the morning, when she awoke, he was gone.

The sugar-cube dwellings of Thera were still pink with the sunrise when Natalie and Miranda Ward stepped into the quiet street at seven fifteen. They walked to the nearest taxi stand, each towing a rolling suitcase, and hired a car to take them down the coast to the ferry terminal in Athinios. The eastward crossing to Kos was four and a half hours; they passed it on the sun-drenched observation deck or in the ship’s café. Forsaking her training, Natalie actively searched for watchers among the faces of her fellow passengers, hoping Mikhail might be among them. She recognized no one. It seemed she was alone now.

At Kos they had to wait an hour for the next ferry to the Turkish port of Bodrum. It was a shorter journey, less than an hour, with strict passport control at both ends. Miranda Ward gave Natalie a Belgian passport and instructed her to hide her French passport deep within her luggage. The photograph in the Belgian passport was of a thirtysomething woman of Moroccan ethnicity. Dark hair, dark eyes, not ideal but close enough.

“Who is she?” asked Natalie.

“She’s you,” answered Miranda Ward.

The Greek border policeman in Kos seemed to think so, too, as did his Turkish counterpart in Bodrum. He stamped the passport after a brief inspection and with a frown invited Natalie to enter Turkey. Miranda followed a few seconds later, and together they made their way to the bedlam of the car park, where a line of taxis smoked in the scalding midafternoon sun. Somewhere a horn sounded, and an arm gestured from the front window of a dusty cream-colored Mercedes. Natalie and Miranda Ward hoisted their bags into the boot and climbed in, Miranda in front, Natalie in the backseat. She opened her handbag, withdrew her favorite green hijab, and pinned it piously into place. She was Leila from Sumayriyya. Leila who loved Ziad. Leila who wanted vengeance.

Contrary to her assumptions, Natalie had not made the crossing from Santorini to Bodrum alone. Yaakov Rossman had accompanied her on the first leg of the journey; Oded, the second. In fact, he had snapped a photo of her climbing into the back of the Mercedes, which he transmitted to King Saul Boulevard and the safe house in Seraincourt.

Within minutes of leaving the terminal, the car was headed east on the D330 motorway, watched over by an Ofek 10 Israeli spy satellite. Shortly after two the next morning, the car arrived at the border town of Kilis, where the satellite’s infrared camera observed two figures, both women, entering a small house. They did not remain there long — two hours and twelve minutes, to be precise. Afterward, they crossed the porous border on foot, accompanied by four men, and slipped into another vehicle in the Syrian town of A’zaz. It bore them southward to Raqqa, the unofficial capital of the caliphate. There, cloaked in black, they entered an apartment building near al-Rasheed Park.

By then, it was approaching four a.m. in Paris. Sleepless, Gabriel slipped behind the wheel of a rented car and drove to Charles de Gaulle Airport, where he boarded a flight to Washington. It was time to have a word with Langley, and thus make the disaster complete.

34 N STREET, GEORGETOWN

RAQQA? ARE YOU OUT OF your fucking mind?”

It was uncharacteristic of Adrian Carter to use profanity, especially of the Anglo-Saxon copulatory variety. He was the son of an Episcopal minister from New England. He regarded foul language as the refuge of lesser minds, and those who used it in his presence, even powerful politicians, were rarely invited back to his office on the seventh floor of the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Carter was the chief of the Agency’s Directorate of Operations, the longest serving in the Agency’s history. For a brief period after 9/11, Carter’s kingdom had been known as the National Clandestine Service. But his new director, his sixth in just ten years, had decided to call it by its old name. That’s what the Agency did when it made mistakes; it swapped nameplates and moved desks. Carter’s fingerprints were on many of the Agency’s greatest failures, from the failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union to the botched National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and yet somehow he endured. He was the man who knew too much. He was untouchable.

Like Paul Rousseau, he did not look the role of spymaster. With his tousled hair, outdated mustache, and underpowered voice, he might have been mistaken for a therapist who passed his days listening to confessions of affairs and inadequacies. His unthreatening appearance, like his flair for languages, had been a valuable asset, both in the field, where he had served with distinction in several postings, and at headquarters. Adversaries and allies alike tended to underestimate Carter, a blunder Gabriel had never made. He had worked closely with Carter on several high-profile operations — including the one in which Hannah Weinberg had played a small role — but America’s nuclear deal with Iran had altered the dynamics of their relationship. Where once Langley and the Office had worked hand-in-glove to sabotage Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the United States, under the deal’s provisions, was now sworn to protect what remained of Tehran’s atomic infrastructure. Gabriel planned to spy the daylights out of Iran to make sure it was not violating the agreement’s provisions. And if he saw any evidence that the mullahs were still enriching uranium or building delivery systems, he would advise his prime minister to strike militarily. And under no circumstances would he consult first with his good friend and ally Adrian Carter.

“Is he one of theirs,” asked Carter now, “or one of yours?”

“She,” said Gabriel. “And she’s one of ours.”

Carter swore softly. “Maybe you really have lost your mind.”

From a pump-action thermos flask atop a credenza, he drew himself a cup of coffee. They were in the sitting room of a redbrick Federal house on N Street in Georgetown, the crown jewel of the CIA’s vast network of safe houses in metropolitan Washington. Gabriel had been a frequent guest at the house during the salad days of the Office’s post–9/11 relationship with Langley. He had planned operations there, recruited agents there, and once, early in the American president’s first term, he had agreed to hunt down and kill a terrorist who happened to carry an American passport in his pocket. Such had been the nature of the relationship. Gabriel had willingly served as a black branch office of the CIA, carrying out operations that, for political reasons, Carter could not undertake himself. But soon Gabriel would be the chief of his service, which meant that, for protocol’s sake, he would outrank Carter. Secretly, Gabriel suspected that Carter wanted nothing more than to be a chief himself. His past, however, would not allow it. In the months after 9/11, he had locked terrorists in secret black sites, rendered them to countries that tortured, and subjected them to interrogation methods of the sort that Gabriel had just countenanced in a farmhouse in the north of France. In short, Carter had done the dirty work necessary to prevent another al-Qaeda spectacular on the American homeland. And for his punishment he would be forever forced to knock politely on the doors of lesser men.

“I didn’t realize the Office had any interest in going after ISIS,” he was saying.

“Someone has to do it, Adrian. It might as well be us.”

Carter frowned at Gabriel over his shoulder. Pointedly, he neglected to offer Gabriel any of the coffee.

“The last time I talked to Uzi about Syria, he was more than content to let the crazies fight it out. The enemy of my enemy is my friend — isn’t that the golden rule in your charming little neighborhood? As long as the regime, the Iranians, Hezbollah, and the Sunni jihadists were all killing each other, the Office was content to sit in the orchestra section and enjoy the show. So don’t stand there and lecture me about sitting on my hands and doing nothing about ISIS.”

“Uzi isn’t going to be the chief for long.”

“That’s the rumor,” agreed Carter. “In fact, we were expecting the transition to occur several months ago and were quite surprised when Uzi let us know he would be staying on for an indefinite period of time. For a while we wondered whether the reports regarding the unfortunate death of Uzi’s chosen successor were true. Now we know the real reason why Uzi is still the chief. His successor has decided to try to penetrate ISIS’s global terror network with a live agent, a noble goal but incredibly dangerous.”

Gabriel made no reply.

“For the record,” said Carter, “I was very relieved to learn that the reports of your demise were premature. Maybe someday you’ll tell me why you did it.”

“Maybe someday. And, yes,” Gabriel added, “I’d love a coffee.”

Carter squeezed out a second cup. “I would have thought you’d had your fill of Syria after your last operation. How much did that one cost you? Eight billion dollars rings a bell.”

“Eight point two,” answered Gabriel. “But who’s counting?”

“Rather steep for a single human life.”

“It was the best deal I ever made. And you would have made the same one in my position.”

“But I wasn’t in your position,” said Carter, “because you didn’t tell us about that operation, either.”

“And you didn’t tell us that the administration was secretly negotiating with the Iranians, did you, Adrian? After all the work we did together to delay the program, you blindsided us.”

“I didn’t blindside you, my president did. I don’t make policy, I steal secrets and produce analysis. Actually,” Carter added after a thoughtful pause, “I don’t do much of that anymore. Mainly, I kill terrorists.”

“Not enough of them.”

“I take it you’re referring to our policy regarding ISIS.”

“If that’s what you want to call it. First, you failed to see the gathering storm. And then you refused to pack a raincoat and an umbrella.”

“We weren’t the only ones to miss the rise of ISIS. The Office missed it, too.”

“We were preoccupied with Iran at the time. You remember Iran, don’t you, Adrian?”

There was a silence. “Let’s not do this,” said Carter after a moment. “We accomplished too much together to allow a politician to come between us.”

It was an olive branch. With a nod, Gabriel accepted it.

“It’s true,” said Carter. “We were late to the ISIS party. It is also true that even after arriving at the party we avoided the buffet and the punch bowl. You see, after many years of attending such parties, we’ve grown weary of them. Our president has made it clear that the last one, the one in Iraq, was a crashing bore. Expensive, too, in American blood and treasure. And he has no interest in throwing another one in Syria, especially when it conflicts with the narrative.”

“What narrative is that?”

“The one about how we overreacted to nine-eleven. The one about how terrorism is a nuisance, not a threat. The one about how we can absorb another strike like the one that brought our economy and transportation system to its knees, and be stronger as a result. And let us not forget,” Carter added, “the president’s unfortunate remarks about ISIS being the jayvee team. Presidents don’t like being proved wrong.”

“Neither do spies, for that matter.”

“I don’t make policy,” Carter repeated. “I produce intelligence. And at the moment, that intelligence is painting a dire picture of what we’re up against. The attacks in Paris and Amsterdam were but a preview of coming attractions. The movie is coming to theaters everywhere, including here in America.”

“If I had to guess,” said Gabriel, “it’s going to be a blockbuster.”

“The president’s closest advisers agree. They’re concerned an attack on the homeland so late in his second term will leave an indelible stain on his legacy. They’ve told the Agency in no uncertain terms to keep the beast at bay, at least until the president gets on Marine One for the last time.”

“Then I suggest you get busy, Adrian, because the beast is already at the gates.”

“We’re aware of that. But unfortunately the beast is largely immune to our dominance in cyberspace, and we have no human assets in ISIS to speak of.” Carter paused, then added, “Until now.”

Gabriel was silent.

“Why didn’t you tell us you were trying to get inside?”

“Because it’s our operation.”

“You’re working alone?”

“We have partners.”

“Where?”

“Western Europe and the region.”

“The French and the Jordanians?”

“The British crashed the party, too.”

“They’re a lot of fun, the British.” Carter paused, then asked, “So why are you coming to us now?”

“Because I’d like you to avoid dropping a bomb or firing a missile into an apartment building near al-Rasheed Park in downtown Raqqa.”

“It’ll cost you.”

“How much?”

Carter smiled. “It’s good to have you back in town, Gabriel. It’s been too long since your last visit.”

35 N STREET, GEORGETOWN

IT WAS DEEP SUMMER in Washington, that inhospitable time of year when most well-heeled residents of Georgetown flee their little village for second homes in Maine or Martha’s Vineyard or the mountains of Sun Valley and Aspen. With good reason, thought Gabriel; the heat was equatorial. As always, he wondered why America’s founders had willingly placed their capital in the middle of a malarial swamp. Jerusalem had chosen the Jews. The Americans had only themselves to blame.

“Why are we walking, Adrian? Why can’t we sit in the air conditioning and drink mint juleps like everyone else?”

“I needed to stretch my legs. Besides, I would have thought you’d be accustomed to the heat. This is nothing compared to the Jezreel Valley.”

“There’s a reason why I love Cornwall. It isn’t hot there.”

“It will be soon. Langley estimates that because of global warming, the south of England will one day be among the world’s largest producers of premium wine.”

“If Langley believes that,” said Gabriel, “then I’m sure it won’t happen.”

They had reached the edge of Georgetown University, educator of future American diplomats, retirement home of many grounded spies. After leaving the safe house, Gabriel had told Carter about his unlikely partnership with Paul Rousseau and Fareed Barakat, and about an ISIS project manager in London named Jalal Nasser, and about an ISIS talent spotter in Brussels named Nabil Awad. Now, as they walked along Thirty-seventh Street, clinging to the thin shadows for cool, Gabriel told Carter the rest of it — that he and his team had made Nabil Awad disappear from the streets of Molenbeek without a trace, that they had kept him alive in the minds of ISIS in the tradition of the great wartime deceivers, that they had used him to feed Jalal Nasser the name of a promising recruit, a woman from a banlieue north of Paris. ISIS had sent her on an all-expenses-paid trip to Santorini and then spirited her to Turkey and across the border into Syria. Gabriel did not mention the woman’s name — not her cover name and certainly not her real name — and Carter had the professional good manners not to ask.

“She’s Jewish, this girl of yours?”

“Not so you’d know.”

“God help you, Gabriel.”

“He usually does.”

Carter smiled. “I don’t suppose this girl of yours referred to herself as Umm Ziad online, did she?”

Gabriel was silent.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Turbulence,” said Carter.

Gabriel knew the code name. Turbulence was an ultra-secret NSA computer surveillance program that constantly swept the Internet for militant Web sites and jihadist chat rooms.

“NSA identified her as a potential extremist not long after she popped up on the Web,” Carter explained. “They tried to plant surveillance software inside her computer, but it proved resistant to all forms of assault. They couldn’t even figure out where she was operating. Now we know why.” With a sidelong glance at Gabriel, he asked, “Who’s Ziad, by the way?”

“The dead boyfriend.”

“She’s a black widow, your girl?”

Gabriel nodded.

“Nice touch.”

They rounded the corner into P Street and walked beside a high stone wall bordering a cloistered convent. The redbrick pavements were empty except for Carter’s security detail. Two bodyguards walked before them, two behind.

“You’ll be happy to know,” said Carter, “that your new friend Fareed Barakat didn’t breathe a word of this to me when we spoke last. He never mentioned anything about Saladin, either.” He paused, then added, “I guess ten million dollars in a Swiss bank account only buys so much loyalty these days.”

“Does he exist?”

“Saladin? Without question, or someone like him. And there’s no way he’s Syrian.”

“Is he one of us?”

“A professional intelligence officer?”

“Yes.”

“We think he might be ex-Iraqi Mukhabarat.”

“So did Nabil Awad.”

“May he rest in peace.” Carter frowned. “Is he really dead, or was that shootout a ruse, too?”

With a shrug, Gabriel indicated it was the former.

“I’m glad someone still knows how to play rough. If I so much as say an unkind word to a terrorist, I’ll be indicted. Droning terrorists and their children is fine, though.”

“You know, Adrian, sometimes a live terrorist is better than a dead one. A live terrorist can tell you things, such as where and when the next attack will occur.”

“My president disagrees. He believes detaining terrorists only breeds more of them.”

“Success breeds terrorists, Adrian. And nothing succeeds quite like an attack on the American homeland.”

“Which brings us back to our original point,” said Carter, wiping a trickle of sweat from the side of his neck. “I will prevail upon the Pentagon to take care with their air campaign in Syria. In exchange, you will share anything your girl picks up during her vacation in the caliphate.”

“Agreed,” said Gabriel.

“I assume the French military is on board?”

“And the British,” said Gabriel.

“I’m not sure how I feel being the last to know about this.”

“Welcome to the post-American world.”

Carter said nothing.

“No air strikes on that building,” said Gabriel quietly. “And lay off the training camps until she comes out again.”

“When do you expect her?”

“The end of August, unless Saladin has other plans.”

“We should be so lucky.”

They had arrived back at the N Street safe house. Carter stopped at the foot of the curved front steps.

“How are the children?” he asked suddenly.

“I’m not sure.”

“Don’t blow it with them. You’re too old to have any more.”

Gabriel smiled.

“You know,” said Carter, “for about twelve hours, I actually thought you were dead. That was a profoundly lousy thing to do.”

“I had no other choice.”

“I’m sure,” said Carter. “But next time, don’t keep me in the dark. I’m not the enemy. I’m here to help.”

36 RAQQA, SYRIA

FROM THE OUTSET SHE MADE it clear to Jalal Nasser that she could remain in Syria for a limited period of time. She had to be back at the clinic no later than the thirtieth of August, the end of her summer holiday. If she were delayed, her colleagues and family would assume the worst. After all, she was politically active, she had left footprints on the Internet, she had lost her one and only love to the jihad. Undoubtedly, someone would go to the police, the police would go to the DGSI, and the DGSI would add her name to the long list of European Muslims who had joined the ranks of ISIS. There would be stories in the press, stories about an educated woman, a healer, who had been seduced by ISIS’s cult of death. If that were to happen, she would have no choice but to remain in Syria, which was not her wish, at least not yet. First, she wanted to avenge Ziad’s death by striking a blow against the West. Then, inshallah, she would make her way back to Syria, marry a fighter, and produce many children for the caliphate.

Jalal Nasser had said he wanted the same thing. Therefore, it came as a surprise to Natalie when, for three days and nights after her arrival in Raqqa, no one came for her. Miranda Ward, her travel companion, remained with her at the apartment near al-Rasheed Park to serve as her guide and minder. It was not Miranda’s first visit to Raqqa. She was a Sherpa on the secret ratline that funneled British Muslims from East London and the Midlands to Syria and the Islamic caliphate. She was the decoy, the deception, the pretty clean face. She had escorted both men and women, posing as lovers and friends. She was, she joked, “bi-jihadi.”

It was not really an apartment; it was a small bare room with a sink bolted to the wall and a few blankets on a bare floor. There was a single window, through which dust particles flowed freely, as if by osmosis. The blankets smelled of desert animals, of camels and goats. Sometimes a thread of water leaked from the sink tap, but usually there was none. They received water from an ISIS tanker truck in the street, and when the truck didn’t come they carried water from the Euphrates. In Raqqa, time had receded. It was the seventh century, spiritually and materially.

There was no electricity — a few minutes a day, if that — and no gas for cooking. Not that there was much to eat. In a land where bread was a staple, bread was in short supply. Each day began with a quest to find a precious loaf or two. The ISIS dinar was the official currency of the caliphate, but in the markets most transactions were conducted in the old Syrian pound or in dollars. Even ISIS traded in the currency of its enemy. At Jalal Nasser’s suggestion, Natalie had brought several hundred dollars with her from France. The money opened many doors, behind which were storerooms filled with rice, beans, olives, and even a bit of meat. For those willing to risk the wrath of the dreaded husbah, the sharia police, there were black-market cigarettes and liquor to be had, too. The punishment for smoking or drinking was severe — the lash, the cross, the chopping block. Natalie once saw a husbah whipping a man because the man had cursed. Cursing was haram.

To enter the streets of Raqqa was to enter a world gone mad. The traffic signals didn’t work, not without electricity, so ISIS traffic police controlled the intersections. They carried pistols but no whistles because whistles were haram. Photographs of models in shop windows had been retouched to adhere to ISIS’s strict decency codes. The faces were blacked out because it was haram to depict humans or animals, God’s creations, and hang them on a wall. The statue of two peasants atop Raqqa’s famous clock tower had been retouched, too — the heads had been removed. Na’eem Square, once beloved by Raqqa’s children, was now filled with severed heads, not stone, but human. They stared mournfully down from the spikes of an iron fence, Syrian soldiers, Kurdish fighters, traitors, saboteurs, former hostages. The Syrian air force bombed the park frequently in retaliation. Such was life in the Islamic caliphate, bombs falling upon severed heads, in a park where children once played.

It was a black world, black in spirit, black in color. Black flags flew from every building and lamppost, men in black ninja suits paraded through the streets, women in black abayas moved like black ghosts through the markets. Natalie had been given her abaya shortly after she crossed the Turkish border. It was a heavy, scratchy garment that fit her like a sheet thrown over a piece of furniture. Beneath it she wore only black, for all other colors, even brown, were haram and could provoke a thrashing by the husbah. The facial veil rendered her features all but indistinguishable, and through it Natalie viewed a blurry world of murky charcoal gray. In the midday heat she felt as though she were trapped inside her own private oven, roasting slowly, an ISIS delicacy. There was danger in the abaya, the danger that she might believe herself to be invisible. She did not succumb to it. She knew they were watching her always.

ISIS was not alone in altering the cityscape of Raqqa. The Syrian air force and their Russian accomplices bombed by day, the Americans and their coalition partners by night. There was damage everywhere: shattered apartment buildings, burned-out cars and trucks, blackened tanks and armored personnel carriers. ISIS had responded to the air campaign by concealing its fighters and weaponry amid the civilian population. The ground floor of Natalie’s building was filled with bullets, artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades, and guns of every sort. Bearded black-clad ISIS fighters used the second and third floors as a barracks. A few were from Syria, but most were Saudis, Egyptians, Tunisians, or wild-eyed Islamic warriors from the Caucasus who were pleased to be fighting Russians again. There were many Europeans, including three Frenchmen. They were aware of Natalie’s presence but made no attempt to communicate with her. She was off-limits. She was Saladin’s girl.

The Syrians and the Russians did not hesitate to bomb civilian targets, but the Americans were more discriminating. Everyone agreed they were bombing less these days. No one knew why, but everyone had an opinion, especially the foreign fighters, who boasted that decadent, infidel America was losing the stomach for the fight. None suspected that the reason for the lull in American air activity was living among them, in a room with a single window looking onto al-Rasheed Park, with blankets that smelled of camel and goat.

Health care in Syria had been deplorable even before the uprising, and now, in the chaos of civil war, it was almost nonexistent. Raqqa’s National Hospital was a ruin, emptied of medicine and supplies, filled with wounded ISIS fighters. The rest of the city’s unfortunate residents received care, such as it was, from small clinics scattered amid the neighborhoods. Natalie happened upon one while searching for bread on her second day in Raqqa, and found it filled with civilian casualties from a Russian air strike, many dead, several others soon to be. There were no physicians present, only ambulance drivers and ISIS “nurses” who had been given only rudimentary training. Natalie announced that she was a doctor and immediately began treating the wounded with whatever supplies she could find. She did so while still clad in her clumsy, unsterilized abaya because a snarling husbah threatened to beat her if she removed it. That night, when she finally returned to the apartment, she washed the blood from the abaya in water from the Euphrates. In Raqqa, time had receded.

They did not wear their abayas in the apartment, only their hijabs. Miranda’s flattered her, framing her delicate Celtic features, setting off her sea-green eyes. While preparing supper that evening she told Natalie of her conversion to Islam. Her childhood home had been a distinctly unhappy place — an alcoholic mother, an unemployed, sexually abusive lout of a father. At thirteen she began to drink heavily and use drugs. She became pregnant twice and aborted both. “I was a mess,” she said. “I was going nowhere in flames.”

Then one day, stoned, drunk, she found herself standing outside an Islamic bookstore in central Bristol. A Muslim man saw her staring through the shop window and invited her inside. She refused but accepted his offer of a free book.

“I was tempted to drop it in the nearest rubbish bin. I’m glad I didn’t. It changed my life.”

She stopped drinking and using drugs and having sex with boys she scarcely knew. Then she converted to Islam, took the veil, and began to pray five times a day. Her parents were lapsed Church of England, unbelievers, but they did not want a Muslim for a daughter. Ejected from her home with nothing but a suitcase and a hundred pounds in cash, she made her way to East London, where she was taken in by a group of Muslims in the Tower Hamlets section of London. There she met a Jordanian named Jalal Nasser who taught her about the beauty of jihad and martyrdom. She joined ISIS, traveled secretly to Syria for training, and returned undetected to Britain. She was in awe of Jalal and perhaps a little in love with him. “If he ever takes wives,” she said, “I hope I will be one of them. At the moment, he’s too busy for a bride. He’s married to Saladin.”

Natalie was familiar with the name, but Dr. Hadawi was not. She replied accordingly.

“Who?” she asked carefully.

“Saladin. He’s the leader of the network.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Saladin?” She smiled dreamily and shook her head. “I’m far too low on the food chain. Only the senior leaders know who he really is. But who knows? Maybe you’ll get to meet him.”

“Why would you say something like that?”

“Because they have big plans for you.”

“Did Jalal tell you that?”

“He didn’t have to.”

But Natalie was not convinced. In fact, it seemed the opposite was true, that she had been forgotten. That night, and the next, she lay awake on her blanket, gazing at the square patch of sky framed by her single window. The city was entirely dark at night, the stars were incandescent. She imagined an Ofek 10 spy satellite peering down at her, following her as she moved through the streets of the black city.

Finally, shortly before dawn on the third night, not long after an American air strike in the north, she heard footfalls in the corridor outside her room. Four pile-driver blows shook the door; then it blew open, as if by the force of a car bomb. Natalie instantly covered herself with the abaya before a torch illuminated her face. They took only her, leaving Miranda behind. Outside in the street waited a dented and dusty SUV. They forced her into the backseat, these bearded, black-clad, wild-eyed warriors of Islam, and the SUV shot forward. She peered through the tinted window, through the tinted veil of her abaya, at the madness beyond — at the severed heads on iron skewers, at the bodies writhing on crosses, at the photos of faceless women in shop windows. I am Dr. Leila Hadawi, she told herself. I am Leila who loves Ziad, Leila from Sumayriyya. And I am about to die.

37 EASTERN SYRIA

THEY DROVE EASTWARD INTO THE rising sun, along a ruler-straight road black with oil. The traffic was light — a truck ferrying cargo from Anbar Province in Iraq, a peasant bringing produce to market in Raqqa, a flatbed spilling over with blood-drunk ninjas after a night of fighting in the north. The morning rush in the caliphate, thought Natalie. Occasionally, they came upon a burnt-out tank or troop carrier. In the empty landscape the wreckage looked like the corpses of insects fried by a child’s magnifying glass. One Japanese-made pickup truck still burned as they passed, and in the back a charred fighter still clung to his.50-caliber machine gun, which was aimed skyward. “Allahu Akbar,” murmured the driver of the SUV, and beneath her black abaya Natalie responded, “Allahu Akbar.”

She had no guide other than the sun and the SUV’s speedometer and dashboard clock. The sun told her they had maintained a steady easterly heading after leaving Raqqa. The speedometer and clock told her they had been barreling along at nearly ninety miles per hour for seventy-five minutes. Raqqa was approximately a hundred miles from the Iraqi border — the old border, she quickly reminded herself. There was no border anymore; the lines drawn on a map by infidel diplomats in London and Paris had been erased. Even the old Syrian road signs had been removed. “Allahu Akbar,” said Natalie’s driver as they passed another flaming wreck. And Natalie, smothering beneath her abaya, intoned, “Allahu Akbar.”

They plunged eastward for another twenty minutes or so, the terrain growing drier and more desolate with each passing mile. It was still early — seven twenty, according to the clock — but already Natalie’s window blazed to the touch. Finally, they came to a small village of bleached stone houses. The main street was wide enough for traffic, but behind it lay a labyrinth of passages through which a few villagers — veiled women, men in robes and keffiyehs, barefoot children — moved torpidly in the heat. There was a market in the main street and a small café where a few dried-out older men sat listening to a recorded sermon by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph himself. Natalie searched the street for evidence of the village’s name, but found none. She feared she had crossed the invisible border into Iraq.

All at once the SUV turned through an archway and drew to a stop in the court of a large house. There were date palms in the court; in their shade reclined a half-dozen ISIS fighters. One, a young man of perhaps twenty-five whose reddish beard was a work in progress, opened Natalie’s door and led her inside. It was cool in the house, and from somewhere came the soft reassuring chatter of women. In a room furnished with only carpets and pillows, the young man with the thin reddish beard invited Natalie to sit. He quickly withdrew and a veiled woman appeared with a glass of tea. Then the veiled woman took her leave, too, and Natalie had the room to herself.

She moved aside her veil and raised the glass tentatively to her lips. The sugary tea entered her bloodstream like drug from a needle. She drank it slowly, careful not to scald her mouth, and watched a shadow creeping toward her across the carpet. When the shadow reached her ankle, the woman reappeared to reclaim the glass. Then, a moment later, the room vibrated with the arrival of another vehicle in the court. Four doors opened and closed in near unison. Four men entered the house.

It was instantly apparent which of the four was the leader. He was a few years older than the others, more deliberative in movement, calmer in demeanor. The three younger men all carried large automatic combat rifles of a model Natalie could not identify, but the leader had only a pistol, which he wore holstered on his hip. He was attired in the manner of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — a black jumpsuit, white trainers, a black keffiyeh tied tightly to his large head. His beard was unkempt, streaked with gray, and damp with sweat. His eyes were brown and oddly gentle, like the eyes of Bin Laden. His right hand was intact, but his left had only its thumb and forefinger, evidence of bomb making. For several minutes he stared down at the lump of black seated motionless on the carpet. When finally he addressed her, he did so in Arabic, with an Iraqi accent.

“Remove your veil.”

Natalie did not stir. It was haram in the Islamic State for a woman to reveal her face to a male who was not a relative, even if the male was an important Iraqi from the network of Saladin.

“It’s all right,” he said at last. “It is necessary.”

Slowly, carefully, Natalie raised her veil. She stared downward toward the carpet.

“Look at me,” he commanded, and Natalie obediently raised her eyes. He regarded her for a long moment before taking her chin between the thumb and forefinger of his ruined hand and turning her face side to side to examine it in profile. His gaze was critical, as though he were examining the flesh of a horse.

“They tell me you are a Palestinian.”

She nodded her assent.

“You look like a Jew, but I must admit all Palestinians look like Jews to me.” He spoke these words with a desert Arab’s disdain for those who lived in cities, marshes, and seacoasts. He was still holding her chin. “You’ve been to Palestine?”

“No, never.”

“But you have a French passport. You could have gone very easily.”

“It would have been too painful to see the land of my ancestors ruled by Zionists.”

Her answer appeared to please him. With a nod he instructed her to veil her face. She was grateful for the garment’s shelter, for it gave her a moment to compose herself. Hidden beneath her black tent, her face obscured, she prepared herself for the interrogation she knew lay ahead. The ease with which Leila’s story flowed from her subconscious to her conscious surprised her. The intense training had succeeded. It was as if she were recalling events that had actually occurred. Natalie Mizrahi was lost to her; she was dead and buried. It was Leila Hadawi who had been brought to this village in the middle of the desert, and Leila Hadawi who confidently awaited the sternest test of her life.

Presently, the woman reappeared with tea for everyone. The Iraqi sat down opposite Natalie, and the three others sat behind him with their weapons lying across their thighs. An image flashed in Natalie’s memory, a condemned man in an orange jumpsuit, a Westerner, pale as death, seated with his hands bound before a choir-like formation of faceless black-clad executioners. Beneath the shelter of her abaya, she deleted the dreadful picture from her thoughts. She realized then that she was sweating. It was trickling down the length of her spine and dripping between her breasts. She was allowed to sweat, she told herself. She was a pampered Parisian, unused to the heat of the desert, and the room was no longer cool. The house was warming beneath the assault of the late-morning sun.

“You are a doctor,” the Iraqi said at last, holding his glass of tea between his thumb and forefinger, as a moment earlier he had held Natalie’s face. Yes, she said, laboring with her own glass of tea beneath her veil, she was a doctor, trained at the Université Paris-Sud, employed at the Clinique Jacques Chirac in the Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers. She then elaborated that Aubervilliers was a largely Muslim suburb and that most of her patients were Arabs from North Africa.

“Yes, I know,” said the Iraqi impatiently, making it abundantly clear he was familiar with her biography. “I’m told you spent a few hours caring for patients in a clinic in Raqqa yesterday.”

“It was the day before,” she corrected him. And obviously, she thought, gazing at the Iraqi through the black gauze of her veil, you and your friends were watching.

“You should have come here a long time ago,” he continued. “We have a great need for doctors in the caliphate.”

“My work is in Paris.”

“And now you are here,” he pointed out.

“I’m here,” she said carefully, “because I was asked to come.”

“By Jalal.”

She made no response. The Iraqi sipped his tea thoughtfully.

“Jalal is very good at sending me enthusiastic Europeans, but I am the one who decides whether they are worthy of entering our camps.” He made this sound like a threat, which Natalie supposed was his intention. “Do you wish to fight for the Islamic State?”

“Yes.”

“Why not fight for Palestine?”

“I am.”

“How?”

“By fighting for the Islamic State.”

His eyes warmed. “Zarqawi always said the road to Palestine runs through Amman. First, we will take the rest of Iraq and Syria. Then Jordan. And then, inshallah, Jerusalem.”

“Like Saladin,” she replied. And not for the first time she wondered whether the man known as Saladin sat before her now.

“You’ve heard this name?” he asked. “Saladin?”

She nodded. The Iraqi looked over his shoulder and mumbled something to one of the three men seated behind him. The man handed him a sheaf of papers held together by a paper clip. Natalie reckoned it was her ISIS personnel file, a thought that almost made her smile beneath her abaya. The Iraqi leafed through the pages with an air of bureaucratic distraction. Natalie wondered what sort of work he had done before the American invasion overturned virtually every aspect of Iraqi life. Had he been a clerk in a ministry? Had he been a schoolteacher or a banker? Had he sold vegetables in a market? No, she thought, he was no poor trader. He was a former officer in the Iraqi army. Or perhaps, she thought as sweat dripped down her back, he had worked for Saddam’s dreaded secret police.

“You are unmarried,” he declared suddenly.

“Yes,” answered Natalie truthfully.

“You were engaged once?”

“Almost.”

“To Ziad al-Masri? A brother who died in Jordanian custody?”

She nodded slowly.

“Where did you meet him?”

“At Paris-Sud.”

“And what was he studying?”

“Electronics.”

“Yes, I know.” He laid the pages of her file on the carpet. “We have many supporters in Jordan. Many of our brothers used to be Jordanian citizens. And none of them,” he said, “have ever heard of anyone named Ziad al-Masri.”

“Ziad was never politically active in Jordan,” she answered with far more calm that she might have thought possible. “He became radicalized only after he moved to Europe.”

“He was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir?”

“Not formally.”

“That would explain why none of our brothers from Hizb ut-Tahrir have heard of him, either.” He regarded Natalie calmly while another waterfall of sweat sluiced down her back. “You’re not drinking your tea,” he pointed out.

“That’s because you’re making me nervous.”

“That was my intention.” His remark provoked restrained laughter among the three men seated behind him. He waited for it to subside before continuing. “For a long time the Americans and their friends in Europe did not take us seriously. They belittled us, called us silly names. But now they realize we are a threat to them, and they are trying very hard to penetrate us. The British are the worst. Every time they catch a British Muslim trying to travel to the caliphate, they try to turn him into a spy. We always find them very quickly. Sometimes we play them back against the British. And sometimes,” he said with a shrug, “we just kill them.”

He allowed a silence to hang heavily over the sweltering room. It was Natalie who broke it.

“I didn’t ask to join you,” she said. “You asked me.”

“No, Jalal asked you to come to Syria, not me. But I am the one who will determine whether you will stay.” He gathered up the pages of the file. “I would like to hear your story from the beginning, Leila. I find that most helpful.”

“I was born—”

“No,” he said, cutting her off. “I said the beginning.”

Confused, she said nothing. The Iraqi was looking down at her file again.

“It says here that your family was from a place called Sumayriyya.”

“My father’s family,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“It was in the Western Galilee. It’s not there anymore.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

Beneath her veil, Natalie closed her eyes. She saw herself walking through a field of thorn bush and toppled stones, next to a man of medium height whose face and name she could no longer recall. He spoke to her now, as if from the bottom of a well, and his words became hers. They grew bananas and melons in Sumayriyya, the sweetest melons in all of Palestine. They irrigated their fields with water from an ancient aqueduct and buried their dead in a cemetery not far from the mosque. Sumayriyya was paradise on earth, Sumayriyya was an Eden. And then, on a night in May 1948, the Jews came up the coast road in a convoy with their headlamps blazing, and Sumayriyya ceased to exist.

In the Op Center of King Saul Boulevard there is a chair reserved for the chief. No one else is allowed to sit in it. No one else dares to even touch it. Throughout that long tense day it groaned and buckled beneath the bulk of Uzi Navot. Gabriel had remained constantly at his side, sometimes in a deputy’s chair, sometimes nervously on his feet, a hand pressed to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side.

Both men, like everyone else in the Op Center, had eyes only for the main video display screen. On it was an overhead satellite image of a large house in a village near the Syrian border. In the courtyard of the house, several men lounged in the shade of date palms. There were two other SUVs in the court. One had ferried a woman from central Raqqa; the other had brought four men from the Sunni Triangle of Iraq. Gabriel had sent along the coordinates of the house to Adrian Carter at CIA Headquarters, and Carter had dispatched a drone from a secret base in Turkey. Occasionally, the aircraft passed through the Ofek 10’s image, circling lazily twelve thousand feet above the target, piloted by a kid in a trailer in another desert on the other side of the world.

Adrian Carter had brought additional resources to bear on the target as well. Specifically, he had instructed the NSA to gather as much cellular data from the house as possible. The NSA had identified no fewer than twelve phones present, one of which had been previously linked to a suspected senior ISIS commander named Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti, a former colonel from Iraq’s military intelligence service. Gabriel suspected it was al-Tikriti who was questioning his agent. He felt sick to his stomach but took small comfort in the fact that he had prepared her well. Even so, he would have gladly taken her place. Perhaps, thought Gabriel, looking at Uzi Navot seated calmly in his designated chair, he was not cut out for the burden of command after all.

The day limped slowly past. The two SUVs remained in the courtyard, the jihadis sat in the shade of the date palms. Then the shade evaporated with the setting of the sun, and fires flared in the darkness. The Ofek 10 switched over to infrared mode. At nine that evening it detected several human heat signatures emerging from the house. Four of the signatures entered one of the SUVs. A fifth, a woman, entered the other. The drone tracked one of the vehicles to Mosul; the Ofek 10 watched the second as it made the return trip to Raqqa. There it stopped outside an apartment building near al-Rasheed Park, and a single heat signature, a woman, emerged from the back. She entered the apartment house shortly before midnight and disappeared from sight.

In a room on the second floor of the building, a thin, wizened Saudi cleric was lecturing several dozen spellbound fighters on the role they would play, inshallah, in bringing about the end of days. The time was drawing near, he declared, nearer than they might think. Drained by the arduous interrogation, blinded by exhaustion and her abaya, Natalie could think of no reason to doubt the old preacher’s prophecy.

The stairwell, as usual, was in pitch darkness. She counted to herself softly in Arabic as she climbed, fourteen steps per flight, two flights per floor. Her room was on the sixth, twelve paces from the stairwell. Entering, she closed the door soundlessly behind her. A shaft of moonlight stretched from the single window to the female form that lay curled on the floor. Silently, Natalie removed her abaya and made a bed for herself. But as she pillowed her head, the female form on the other side of the room stirred and sat up. “Miranda?” asked Natalie, but there was no reply other than the striking of a match. Its flame touched the wick of an olive oil lamp. Warm light filled the room.

Natalie sat up, too, expecting to see a set of delicate Celtic features. Instead, she found herself staring into a pair of wide hypnotic eyes of hazel and copper. “Who are you?” she asked in Arabic, but her new roommate replied in French. “My name is Safia Bourihane,” she said, extending her hand. “Welcome to the caliphate.”

38 PALMYRA, SYRIA

THE CAMP WAS JUST OUTSIDE the ancient city of Palmyra, not far from the notorious Tadmor desert prison where the ruler’s father had cast those who dared to oppose him. Before the civil war it was an outpost of the Syrian military in the Homs Governorate, but in the spring of 2015, ISIS had captured it largely intact, with scarcely a fight. The group had looted and destroyed many of Palmyra’s astonishing ruins, as well as the prison, but the camp it had preserved. Surrounded by a twelve-foot wall topped with spirals of concertina wire, there were barracks for five hundred, a mess hall, recreation and meeting rooms, a gymnasium, and a diesel generator that provided air conditioning in the heat of the day and light at night. All the old Syrian military signs had been removed, and the black flag of ISIS billowed and snapped above the central courtyard. The installation’s old name was never spoken. Graduates referred to it as Camp Saladin.

Natalie traveled there by SUV the next day, in the company of Safia Bourihane. Four months had passed since the attack on the Weinberg Center in Paris; in that time Safia had become a jihadist icon. Poems celebrated her, streets and squares bore her name, young girls sought to emulate her feats. In a world where death was celebrated, ISIS expended considerable effort to keep Safia alive. She moved constantly between a chain of safe houses in Syria and Iraq, always under armed escort. During her one and only appearance in an ISIS propaganda video, her face had been veiled. She did not use the telephone, she never touched a computer. Natalie took comfort in the fact she had been allowed into Safia’s presence. It suggested she had come through her interrogation with no taint of suspicion. She was one of them now.

Safia had clearly grown accustomed to her exalted status. In France she had been a second-class citizen with limited career prospects, but in the upside-down world of the caliphate she was a celebrity. She was quite obviously wary of Natalie, for Natalie represented a potential threat to her standing. For her part, Natalie was content to play the role of terrorist upstart. Safia Bourihane was the charcoal sketch upon which Dr. Leila Hadawi was based. Leila Hadawi admired Safia, but Natalie Mizrahi felt sick being in her presence and, given the chance, would have gladly pumped a hypodermic full of poison into her veins. Inshallah, she thought as the SUV sped across the Syrian desert.

Safia’s Arabic was rudimentary at best. Therefore, they passed the journey conversing quietly in French, each beneath the private tent of her abaya. They spoke of their upbringings and found they had little in common; as a child of educated Palestinians, Leila Hadawi had lived far differently than the child of Algerian laborers from the banlieues. Islam was their only bridge, but Safia had almost no understanding of the tenets of jihad or even the basics of Islamic practice. She admitted that she missed the taste of French wine. Mainly, she was curious about how she was remembered in the country she had attacked — not the France of the city centers and country villages, but the Arab France of the banlieues. Natalie told her, truthfully, that she was spoken of fondly in the cités of Aubervilliers. This pleased Safia. One day, she said, she hoped to return.

“To France?” asked Natalie incredulously.

“Yes, of course.”

“You’re the most wanted woman in the country. It isn’t possible.”

“That’s because France is still ruled by the French, but Saladin says it will soon be part of the caliphate.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Saladin? Yes, I’ve met him.”

“Where?” asked Natalie casually.

“I’m not sure. They blindfolded me during the trip.”

“How long ago was it?”

“It was a few weeks after my operation. He wanted to personally congratulate me.”

“They say he’s Iraqi.”

“I’m not sure. My Arabic isn’t good enough to tell the difference between a Syrian and an Iraqi.”

“What’s he like?”

“Very large, powerful, wonderful eyes. He is everything you would expect. Inshallah, you’ll get to meet him someday.”

Safia’s arrival at the camp was an occasion for celebratory gunfire and cries of “Allahu Akbar!” Natalie, the new recruit, was an afterthought. She was assigned a private room — the former quarters of a junior Syrian officer — and that evening, after prayers, she took her first meal in the communal dining hall. The women ate apart from the men, behind a black curtain. The food was deplorable but plentiful: rice, bread, roasted fowl of some sort, a gray-brown stew of cartilaginous meat. Despite their segregation, the women were required to wear their abayas during mealtime, which made eating a challenge. Natalie ate ravenously of the bread and rice, but her training as a physician informed her decision to avoid the meat. The woman to her left was a silent Saudi called Bushra. To her right was Selma, a loquacious Tunisian. Selma had come to the caliphate for a husband, but her husband had been killed fighting the Kurds and now she wanted vengeance. It was her wish to be a suicide bomber. She was nineteen years old.

After dinner there was a program. A cleric preached, a fighter read a poem of his own composition. Afterward, Safia was “interviewed” on stage by a clever British Muslim who worked in ISIS’s promotion and marketing department. That night the desert thundered with coalition air strikes. Alone in her room, Natalie prayed for deliverance.

Her terrorist education commenced after breakfast the next morning when she was driven into the desert for weapons training — assault rifles, pistols, rocket launchers, grenades. She returned to the desert each and every morning, even after her instructors declared her proficient. They were no wild-eyed jihadis, the instructors; they were exclusively Iraqi, all former soldiers and battle-hardened veterans of the Sunni insurgency. They had fought the Americans largely to a draw in Iraq and wanted nothing more than to fight them again, on the plains of northern Syria, in a place called Dabiq. The Americans and their allies — the armies of Rome, in the lexicon of ISIS — had to be poked and prodded and stirred into a rage. The men from Iraq had a plan to do just that, and the students at the camp were their stick.

During the heat of midday, Natalie repaired to the air-conditioned rooms of the camp for lessons in bomb assembly and secure communication. She also had to endure long lectures on the pleasures of the afterlife, lest she be chosen for a suicide mission. Time and again her Iraqi instructors asked whether she was willing to die for the caliphate, and without hesitation Natalie said she was. Soon, she was made to wear a heavy suicide vest during her weapons training, and she was taught how to arm the device and detonate it using a trigger concealed in her palm. The first time the instructor ordered her to press the detonator, Natalie’s thumb hovered numb and frozen above the switch. “Yalla,” he beseeched her. “It’s not going to really explode.” Natalie closed her eyes and squeezed the detonator. “Boom,” whispered the instructor. “And now you are on your way to paradise.”

With the camp director’s permission, Natalie began seeing patients in the base’s old infirmary. At first, the other students were reluctant to call upon her for fear of being regarded as soft by the Iraqi instructors. But soon she was receiving a steady stream of patients during her “office 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, too, ISIS had imposed an Islamic death sentence on the non-Islamic past. The colonnades had been toppled, the arches smashed. Whatever ISIS’s ultimate fate, it had left an indelible mark on the Middle East. Palmyra, thought Natalie, would never be the same.

“You did this, too?”

“I helped,” admitted Ismail, smiling.

“And the Great Pyramids of Giza?” she asked leadingly. “We will destroy them, too?”

“Inshallah,” he whispered.

Natalie set out toward the Temple of Baalshamin, but soon her limbs grew heavy and tears blurred her vision, so she turned around and with Ismail in tow made her way back through the date palms, to the gates of Camp Saladin. In the main recreation room, a few trainees were watching a new ISIS recruiting video promoting the joys of life in the caliphate — a bearded young jihadi playing with a child in a leafy green park, no severed heads visible, of course. In the canteen, Natalie had tea with Selma, her friend from Tunisia, and told her wide-eyed of the wonders just beyond the camp’s walls. Then she returned to her room and collapsed onto her bed. In her dreams she walked through ruins — a great Roman city, an Arab village in the Galilee. Her guide was a blood-drenched woman with eyes of hazel and copper. He is everything you would expect, she said. Inshallah, you’ll get to meet him someday.

In her last dream she was sleeping in her own bed. Not her bed in Jerusalem but her childhood bed in France. There was a hammering at the door and soon her room was filled with mighty men with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their villages in the east. Natalie sat up with a start and realized she was no longer dreaming. The room was her room at the camp. And the men were real.

40 ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

THIS TIME, SHE HAD NO sun or dashboard instruments by which to chart her course, for within minutes of leaving Palmyra she had been blindfolded. In her brief interlude of sight, she had managed to gather three small pieces of information. Her captors were four in number, she was in the backseat of another SUV, and the SUV was headed east on the Syrian highway that used to be called the M20. She asked her captors where they were taking her, but received no reply. She protested that she had done nothing wrong in Palmyra, that she had only wanted to see the destroyed temples of shirk with her own eyes, but again her captors were silent. Indeed, not a word passed between them throughout the entire journey. For entertainment they listened to a lengthy sermon by the caliph. And when the sermon ended they listened to a talk show on al-Bayan, ISIS’s slick radio station. Al-Bayan was based in Mosul and transmitted on the FM broadcast band. The panelists were discussing a recent Islamic State fatwa regarding sexual relations between males and their female slaves. At first, the signal from Mosul was faint and filled with waves of static, but it grew stronger the longer they drove.

They stopped once to add fuel to the tank from a jerry can, and a second time to negotiate an ISIS checkpoint. The guard spoke with an Iraqi accent and was deferential toward the men in the SUV — fearful, almost. Through the open window, Natalie heard a great commotion in the distance, orders shouted, crying children, wailing women. “Yalla, yalla!” a voice was saying. “Keep moving! It’s not far.” An image formed in Natalie’s mind — a thin line of ragged unbelievers, a trail of tears that led to an execution pit. Soon, she thought, she would be joining them.

Another half hour or so passed before the SUV stopped a third time. The engine died and the doors swung loudly open, admitting an unwelcome blast of dense wet heat. Instantly, Natalie felt water begin to flow beneath the heavy fabric of her abaya. A hand grasped her wrist and tugged, gently. She shimmied across the seat, swung her legs to the side, and allowed herself to slide until her feet touched the earth. All the while the hand maintained its hold on her wrist. There was no malice in its grip. It guided her only.

In the haste of her evacuation from the camp, she had been unable to put on her sandals. Beneath her bare feet the earth burned. A memory arose, as unwelcome as the heat. She is on a beach in the South of France. Her mother is telling her to remove the Star of David from her neck, lest others see it. She unclasps the pendant, surrenders it, and hurries toward the blue Mediterranean before the blazing sand can burn her feet.

“Careful,” said a voice, the first to address her since leaving the camp. “There are steps ahead.”

They were wide and smooth. When Natalie reached the top step, the hand pulled her forward, gently. She had the sensation of moving through a great house, through cool chambers, across sun-drowned courts. At last, she came to another flight of steps, longer than the first, twelve steps instead of six. At the summit she became aware of the presence of several men and heard the muted clatter of automatic weapons expertly held.

A few murmured words were exchanged, a door was opened. Natalie moved forward ten paces exactly. Then the hand squeezed her wrist and applied subtle downward pressure. Obediently, she lowered herself to the floor and sat cross-legged upon a carpet with her hands folded neatly in her lap. The blindfold was removed. Through the mosquito netting of her facial veil, she saw a man seated before her, identically posed. His face was instantly familiar; he was the senior Iraqi who had interrogated her before her transfer to Palmyra. He was lacking in his previous composure. His black clothing was covered in dust, his brown eyes were bloodshot and fatigued. The night, thought Natalie, had been unkind to him.

With a movement of his hand, he instructed her to lift her veil. She hesitated but complied. The brown eyes bored into her for a long moment while she studied the pattern of the carpet. Finally, he took her chin in the lobster claw of his ruined hand and raised her face toward his. “Dr. Hadawi,” he said quietly. “Thank you so much for coming.”

She passed through one more doorway, entered one more room. Its floor was bare and white, as were its walls. Above was a small round aperture through which poured a shaft of scalding sunlight. Otherwise, the shadows prevailed. In one corner, the farthest, four heavily armed ISIS fighters stood in a ragged circle, eyes lowered, like mourners at a graveside. Dust coated their black costumes. It was not the khaki-colored dust of the desert; it was pale and gray, concrete that had been smashed into powder by a sledgehammer from the sky. At the feet of the four men was a fifth. He lay supine upon a stretcher, one arm across his chest, the other, the left, at his side. There was blood on the left hand, and blood stained the bare floor around him. His face was pale as death. Or was it the gray dust? From across the room, Natalie could not tell.

The senior Iraqi nudged her forward. She passed through the cylinder of sun; its heat was molten. Before her there was movement, and a place was made for her among the mourners. She stopped and looked down at the man on the stretcher. There was no dust on his face. His ashen pallor was his own, the result of substantial loss of blood. He had suffered two visible wounds, one to the upper chest, the other to the thigh of the right leg — wounds, thought Natalie, that might have proven fatal to an ordinary man, but not him. He was quite large and powerfully built.

He is everything you would expect. .

“Who is he?” she asked after a moment.

“It’s not important,” answered the Iraqi. “It is only important that he lives. You must not let him die.”

Natalie gathered up her abaya, crouched beside the stretcher, and reached toward the chest wound. Instantly, one of the fighters seized her wrist. This time, the grip was not gentle; it felt as though her bones were about to crack. She glared at the fighter, silently chastising him for daring to touch her, a woman who was not a blood relative, and then fixed the Iraqi with the same stare. The Iraqi nodded once, the iron grip relaxed. Natalie savored her small victory. For the first time since her arrival in Syria, she felt a sense of power. For the moment, she thought, she owned them.

She reached toward the wound again, unmolested, and moved aside the shredded black garment. It was a large wound, about two inches at its widest, with ragged edges. Something hot and jagged had entered his body at extremely high speed and had left a trail of appalling damage — broken bone, shredded tissue, severed blood vessels. His respiration was shallow and faint. It was a miracle he was breathing at all.

“What happened?”

There was silence.

“I can’t help him unless I know how he was injured.”

“He was in a house that was bombed.”

“Bombed?”

“It was an air strike.”

“Drone?”

“Much larger than a drone.” He spoke as if from personal experience. “We found him beneath the debris. He was unconscious but breathing.”

“Has he ever stopped?”

“No.”

“And has he ever regained consciousness?”

“Not for a moment.”

She examined the skull, which was covered with thick dark hair. There were no lacerations or obvious contusions, but that meant nothing; serious brain trauma was still possible. She lifted the lid of the left eye, then the right. The pupils were responsive, a good sign. Or was it? She released the right eyelid.

“What time did this happen?”

“The bomb fell shortly after midnight.”

“What time is it now?”

“Ten fifteen.”

Natalie examined the gaping wound to the leg. A challenging case, to say the least, she thought dispassionately. The patient had been comatose for ten hours. He had suffered two serious penetration wounds, not to mention the likelihood of numerous additional fractures and crush injuries common to victims of building collapses. Internal bleeding was a given. Sepsis was just around the corner. If he were to have any hope of survival, he needed to be transported to a Level 1 trauma center immediately, a scenario she explained to the clawed Iraqi.

“Out of the question,” he replied.

“He needs urgent critical care.”

“This isn’t Paris, Dr. Hadawi.”

“Where are we?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“For security reasons,” he explained.

“Are we in Iraq?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“Are we?” she persisted.

With his silence he confirmed that they were.

“There’s a hospital in Ramadi, is there not?”

“It’s not safe for him there.”

“What about Fallujah?” She couldn’t believe the word had come out of her mouth. Fallujah. .

“He’s not going anywhere,” the Iraqi said. “This is the only place that’s safe.”

“If he stays here, he dies.”

“No, he won’t,” said the Iraqi. “Because you’re going to save him.”

“With what?”

One of the fighters handed her a cardboard box with a red cross on it.

“It’s a first-aid kit.”

“It is all we have.”

“Is there a hospital or a clinic nearby?”

The Iraqi hesitated, then said, “Mosul is an hour’s drive, but the Americans are attacking traffic along the roads.”

“Someone has to try to get through.”

“Give me a list of the things you need,” he said, extracting a grubby notepad from the pocket of his black uniform. “I’ll send one of the women. It could take a while.”

Natalie accepted the notepad and a pen and wrote out her wish list of supplies: antibiotics, syringes, surgical instruments, gloves, suture material, a stethoscope, IV bags and solution, a chest tube, clamps, pain medication, sedatives, gauze, and plaster bandages and fiberglass casting tape for immobilizing fractured limbs.

“You don’t happen to know his blood type, do you?”

“Blood type?”

“He needs blood. Otherwise, he’s going to die.”

The Iraqi shook his head. Natalie handed him the list of supplies. Then she opened the first-aid kit and looked inside. Bandages, ointment, a roll of gauze, aspirin — it was hopeless. She knelt beside the wounded man and raised an eyelid. Still responsive.

“I need to know his name,” she said.

“Why?”

“I have to address him by his real name to bring him out of this coma.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, Dr. Hadawi.”

“Then what shall I call him?”

The Iraqi looked down at the dying, helpless man at his feet. “If you must call him something,” he said after a moment, “you may call him Saladin.”

41 ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

AS A PHYSICIAN IN THE emergency room of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center, Dr. Natalie Mizrahi had routinely confronted ethically fraught scenarios, sometimes on a daily basis. There were the gravely injured and the dying who received heroic treatment despite no chance of survival. And there were the murderers, the attempted suicide bombers, the knife-wielding butchers, upon whose damaged bodies Natalie labored with the tenderest of mercies.

The situation she faced now, however, was unlike anything she had faced before — or would again, she thought. The man in the bare room somewhere near Mosul was the leader of a terror network that had carried out devastating attacks in Paris and Amsterdam. Natalie had successfully penetrated that network as part of an operation to identify and decapitate its command structure. And now, owing to an American air strike, the life of the network’s mastermind rested in her well-trained hands. As a doctor she was morally obligated to save his life. But as an inhabitant of the civilized world, she was inclined to let him die slowly and thus fulfill the mission for which she had been recruited.

But what would the men of ISIS do to the female physician who allowed the great Saladin to perish before his mission of uniting the Muslim world under the black banner of the caliphate was complete? Surely, she thought, they would not thank her for her efforts and send her peacefully on her way. The stone or the knife would likely be her fate. She had not come to Syria on a suicide mission and had no intention of dying in this wretched place, at the hands of these black-clad prophets of the apocalypse. What’s more, Saladin’s predicament provided her with an unprecedented opportunity — the opportunity to nurse him back to health, to befriend him, to earn his trust, and to steal the deadly secrets that resided in his head. You must not let him die, the Iraqi had said. But why? The answer, thought Natalie, was simple. The Iraqi did not know what Saladin knew. Saladin could not die because the network’s ambitions would die with him.

As it turned out, the supplies were only ninety minutes in arriving. The woman, whoever she was, had managed to secure most of what Natalie needed. After pulling on gloves and a surgical mask, she quickly inserted an IV needle into Saladin’s left arm and handed the bag of solution to the Iraqi, who was looking anxiously over her shoulder. Then, using a pair of surgical scissors, she cut away Saladin’s soiled, blood-soaked clothing. The stethoscope was practically a museum piece, but it worked well. The left lung sounded normal but from the right there was only silence.

“He has a pneumohemothorax.”

“What does that mean?”

“His left lung has stopped functioning because it’s filled with air and blood. I need to move him.”

The Iraqi motioned toward one of the fighters, who assisted Natalie in easing Saladin onto his left side. Next she made a small incision between the sixth and seventh rib, inserted a hemostat clamp, and pushed a tube into the chest cavity. There was an audible rush of escaping air. Then the blood of Saladin flowed through the tube, onto the bare floor.

“He’s bleeding to death!” cried the Iraqi.

“Be quiet,” snapped Natalie, “or I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

A half-liter or more of blood spilled before the flow slowed to a trickle. Natalie clamped the tube to prevent outside air from entering. Then she eased Saladin carefully onto his back and went to work on the chest wound.

The piece of shrapnel had broken two ribs and caused significant damage to the pectoralis major muscle. Natalie flooded the wound with alcohol; then, using a pair of angled surgical tweezers, she removed the shrapnel. There was additional bleeding but it was not significant. She removed several bone fragments and threads of Saladin’s black garment. After that, there was nothing more she could do. The ribs, if he survived, would heal, but the damaged pectoral muscle would likely never regain its original shape or strength. Natalie closed the deep tissue with sutures but left the skin open. Twelve hours had passed since the original wound. If she closed the skin now, she would be sealing infectious agents into the body, ensuring a case of sepsis and an agonizingly slow death. It was tempting, she thought, but medically reckless. She covered the wound with a gauze bandage and turned her attention to the leg.

Here again, Saladin had been fortunate. The lump of shrapnel had been discriminating in the havoc it had wreaked, damaging bone and tissue but sparing major blood vessels. Natalie’s procedure was identical to the first wound — irrigation with alcohol, retrieval of bone fragments and clothing fibers, closure of deep tissue, a gauze bandage over the open skin. In all, the crude surgery had taken less than an hour. She added a heavy dose of antibiotic to the IV and covered the patient with a clean white sheet. The chest tube she left in place.

“It looks like a burial shroud,” the Iraqi said darkly.

“Not yet,” answered Natalie.

“What about something for the pain?”

“At this point,” she said, “pain is our ally. It acts as a stimulus. It will help him regain consciousness.”

“Will he?”

“Which answer do you want to hear?”

“The truth.”

“The truth,” said Natalie, “is that he’s probably going to die.”

“If he dies,” said the Iraqi coldly, “then you will die soon after.”

Natalie was silent. The Iraqi looked at the once-powerful man shrouded in white. “Do everything you can to revive him,” he said. “Even for a moment or two. It is essential that I speak to him.”

But why? thought Natalie as the Iraqi slipped from the room. Because the Iraqi did not know what Saladin knew. Because if Saladin died, the network would die with him.

With the surgery complete, Natalie dutifully covered herself with her abaya, lest the great Saladin awaken to find an unveiled woman in his court. She requested a timepiece to properly chart the patient’s recovery and was given the Iraqi’s personal Seiko digital. She checked Saladin’s pulse and blood pressure every thirty minutes and recorded his intake of IV solution. His pulse was still rapid and weak, but his blood pressure was rising steadily, a positive development. It suggested there were no other sources of internal bleeding and that the IV was helping to increase his blood volume. Even so, he remained unconscious and unresponsive to mild stimulus. The likely culprit was the immense loss of blood and the shock he had suffered after being wounded, but Natalie could not rule out brain trauma. A CT scan would reveal evidence of brain bleeding and swelling, but the Iraqi had made it clear that Saladin could not be moved. Not that it mattered, thought Natalie. In a land where bread was scarce and women carried water from the Euphrates, the chances of finding a working scanner were almost zero.

A pair of fighters remained in the room always, and the Iraqi appeared every hour or so to stare at the prostrate man on the floor, as if willing him to regain consciousness. During his third visit, Natalie pulled at Saladin’s earlobe and tugged the thick hair of his beard, but there was no response.

“Must you?” asked the Iraqi.

“Yes,” said Natalie, “I must.”

She pinched the back of his hand. Nothing.

“Try talking to him,” she suggested. “A familiar voice is helpful.”

The Iraqi crouched next to the stretcher and murmured something into Saladin’s ear that Natalie could not discern.

“It might help if you say it so he can actually hear it. Shout at him, in fact.”

“Shout at Saladin?” The Iraqi shook his head. “One does not even raise one’s voice to Saladin.”

By then, it was late afternoon. The shaft of light from the oculus had traveled slowly across the room, and now it heated the patch of bare floor where Natalie sat. She imagined that God was watching her through the oculus, judging her. She imagined that Gabriel was watching her, too. In his wildest operational dreams, surely he had not contemplated a scenario such as this. She pictured her homecoming, a meeting in a safe house, a tense debriefing, during which she would be forced to defend her attempt to save the life of the most dangerous terrorist in the world. She pushed the thought from her mind, for such thoughts were perilous. She had never met a man named Gabriel Allon, she reminded herself, and she had no interest in the opinion of her God. Only Allah’s judgment mattered to Leila Hadawi, and surely Allah would have approved.

There was no electricity in the house, and with nightfall it plunged into darkness. The fighters lit old-fashioned hurricane lamps and placed them around the room. The Iraqi joined Natalie for supper. The fare was far better than at the camp in Palmyra, a couscous worthy of a Left Bank café. She did not share this insight with her dinner companion. He was in a dark mood, and not particularly good company.

“I don’t suppose you can tell me your name,” said Natalie.

“No,” he answered through a mouthful of food. “I don’t suppose I can.”

“You don’t trust me? Even now?”

“Trust has nothing to do with it. If you are arrested when you return to Paris next week, French intelligence will ask you who you met during your vacation in the caliphate. And you will give them my name.”

“I would never talk to French intelligence.”

“Everyone talks.” Again, it seemed the Iraqi spoke from personal experience. “Besides,” he added after a moment, “we have plans for you.”

“What sort of plans?”

“Your operation.”

“When will I be told?”

He said nothing.

“And if he dies?” she asked with a glance at Saladin. “Will the operation go forward?”

“That is none of your affair.” He scooped up a portion of the couscous.

“Were you there when it happened?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m making conversation.”

“In the caliphate, conversation can be dangerous.”

“Forget I asked.”

He didn’t. “I arrived soon after,” he said. “I was the one who pulled him out of the rubble. I thought he was dead.”

“Were there other casualties?”

“Many.”

“Is there anything I can—”

“You have one patient and one patient only.” The Iraqi fixed his dark eyes on Saladin. “How long can he go on like this?”

“He’s a large man, strong, otherwise healthy. It could go on a very long time.”

“Is there anything more you can do to revive him? A shot of something?”

“The best thing you can do is talk to him. Say his name loudly. Not his nom de guerre,” she said. “His real name. The name his mother called him.”

“He didn’t have a mother.”

With those words the Iraqi departed. A woman cleared away the couscous and brought tea and baklava, an unheard of delicacy in the Syrian portion of the caliphate. Natalie checked Saladin’s pulse, blood pressure, and lung function every thirty minutes. All showed signs of improvement. His heartbeat was slowing and growing stronger, his blood pressure was rising, the right lung was clearing. She checked his eyes, too, by the light of a butane cigarette lighter — the right eye first, then the left. The pupils were still responsive. His brain, regardless of its state, was alive.

At midnight, some twenty-four hours after the American air strike, Natalie was in desperate need of a few hours’ sleep. Moonlight shone through the oculus, cold and white, the same moon that had illuminated the ruins of Palmyra. She checked the pulse, blood pressure, and lungs. All were progressing nicely. Then she checked the eyes by the blue glow of the butane lighter. The right eye, then the left.

Both remained open after the examination.

“Who are you?” asked a voice of shocking strength and resonance.

Startled, Natalie had to compose herself before answering. “My name is Dr. Leila Hadawi. I’m taking care of you.”

“What happened?”

“You were injured in an air strike.”

“Where am I now?”

“I’m not sure.”

He was momentarily confused. Then he understood. Fatigued, he asked, “Where is Abu Ahmed?”

“Who?”

Wearily, he raised his left hand and made a lobster claw of his thumb and forefinger. Natalie smiled in spite of herself.

“He’s right outside. He’s very anxious to talk to you.”

Saladin closed his eyes. “I can imagine.”

42 ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

YOU ARE MY MAIMONIDES.”

“Who?”

“Maimonides. The Jew who looked after Saladin whenever he was in Cairo.”

Natalie was silent.

“I meant it as a compliment. I owe you my life.”

Saladin closed his eyes. It was late morning. The circle of light from the oculus had only just begun its slow journey across the bare floor, and the room was still pleasantly cool. After regaining consciousness, he had passed a restful night, thanks in part to the dose of morphine that Natalie had added to his IV drip. At first, he had objected to the drug, but Natalie had convinced him it was necessary. “You cannot heal properly if you are in pain,” she had scolded him. “For the sake of the caliphate, you must.” Once again, she could not fathom that such words had passed her lips.

She placed the stethoscope to his chest. He recoiled slightly from the cold.

“Am I still alive?” he asked.

“Be quiet, please. I can’t hear properly if you speak.”

He said nothing more. His right lung sounded as though it had regained normal function; his heartbeat was steady and strong. She wrapped the blood pressure cuff around the upper portion of his left arm and inflated it with several quick squeezes of the bulb. He winced.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Do you have more pain?”

“Not at all.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“The arm,” he said after a moment.

Natalie released the air pressure, removed the cuff, and tenderly probed the arm with her fingertips. She had noticed the swelling last night and had suspected a fracture. Now, with the assistance of a conscious patient, she all but confirmed it.

“The only thing I can do is immobilize it.”

“Perhaps we should.”

Natalie applied the cuff to the right arm.

“Pain?”

“No.”

His blood pressure was at the low end of normal. Natalie removed the cuff and changed the dressings on his chest and leg. There was no visible sign of infection in either wound. Miraculously, it appeared as though he had come through surgery in an unsterile environment with no sepsis. Unless he took a sudden turn for the worse, Saladin would survive.

She opened a package of fiberglass casting tape and commenced work on the arm. Saladin watched her intently.

“It’s not necessary for you to conceal your face in my presence. After all,” he said, fingering the white sheet that covered his otherwise nude body, “we are well acquainted, you and I. A hijab is sufficient.”

Natalie hesitated, then removed the heavy black garment. Saladin stared hard at her face.

“You’re very beautiful. But Abu Ahmed is right. You look like a Jew.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment, too?”

“I’ve known many beautiful Jewesses. And everyone knows that the best doctors are always Jewish.”

“As an Arab doctor,” said Natalie, “I take exception to that.”

“You’re not an Arab, you’re a Palestinian. There’s a difference.”

“I take exception to that, too.”

Silently, she bound his arm with the fiberglass tape. Orthopedics was hardly her specialty, but then she was not a surgeon, either.

“It was a mistake,” he said, watching her work, “for me to mention Abu Ahmed’s name in front of you. Names have a way of getting people killed. You will do your best to forget you ever heard it.”

“I already have.”

“He tells me you’re French.”

“Who?” she asked playfully, but Saladin did not rise to the bait. “Yes,” she said, “I am French.”

“You approved of our attack on the Weinberg Center?”

“I wept with joy.”

“The Western press said it was a soft target. I can assure you it was not. Hannah Weinberg was an associate of an Israeli intelligence officer named Gabriel Allon, and her so-called center for the study of anti-Semitism was a front for the Israeli service. Which is why I targeted it.” He fell silent. Natalie could feel the weight of his gaze on her while she worked on the arm. “Perhaps you’ve heard of this man Gabriel Allon,” he said at last. “He is an enemy of the Palestinian people.”

“I think I read about him in the papers a few months ago,” she answered. “He’s the one who died in London, is he not?”

“Gabriel Allon? Dead?” He shook his head slowly. “I don’t believe it.”

“Be quiet for a moment,” Natalie instructed him. “It’s important that I immobilize your arm properly. If I don’t, you’ll have problems with it later.”

“And my leg?”

“You need surgery — proper surgery in a proper hospital. Otherwise, I’m afraid your leg will be badly damaged.”

“I’ll be a cripple, is that what you’re saying?”

“You’ll have restricted movement, you’ll require a cane to walk, you’ll have chronic pain.”

“I already have restricted movement.” He smiled at his own joke. “They say Saladin walked with a limp, the real Saladin. It didn’t stop him, and it won’t stop me, either.”

“I believe you,” she said. “A normal man would never have survived wounds as serious as yours. Surely, Allah is watching over you. He has plans for you.”

“And I,” said Saladin, “have plans for you.”

She finished the cast in silence. She was pleased with her work. So, too, was Saladin.

“Perhaps when your operation is complete, you can return to the caliphate to serve as my personal physician.”

“Your Maimonides?”

“Exactly.”

“It would be an honor,” she heard herself say.

“But we won’t be in Cairo. Like Saladin, I’ve always preferred Damascus.”

“What about Baghdad?”

“Baghdad is a city of rafida.”

It was a bigoted Sunni slur for Shia Muslims. Natalie wordlessly prepared a new IV bag.

“What’s that you’re putting in the solution?” he asked.

“Something for your pain. It will help you sleep through the heat of the afternoon.”

“I’m not in pain. And I don’t want to sleep.”

Natalie attached the bag to the IV tube and squeezed it to start the flow of fluid. Within a few seconds, Saladin’s eyes dulled. He fought to keep them open.

“Abu Ahmed is right,” he said, watching her. “You do look like a Jew.”

“And you,” said Natalie, “need to rest.”

The eyelids dropped like window blinds and Saladin slipped helplessly into unconsciousness.

43 ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

HER DAYS MOVED TO THE rhythm of Saladin. She slept when he slept and woke whenever he stirred on his sickbed. She monitored his vital signs, she changed his dressings, she gave him morphine against his wishes for the pain. For a few seconds after the drug entered his blood, he would hover in a hallucinatory state where words escaped his mouth, like the air that had rushed from his damaged lung. Natalie could have prolonged his talkative mood by giving him a smaller measure of the drug; conversely, she could have ushered him to death’s door with a larger dose. But she was never alone with her patient. Two fighters stood over him always, and Abu Ahmed — he of the lobster claw and overcast disposition — was never far. He consulted with Saladin frequently, about what Natalie was not privy. When matters of state or terror were discussed, she was banished from the room.

She was not permitted to go far — the next room, the toilet, a sun-blasted court where Abu Ahmed encouraged her to take exercise in order to stay fit for her operation. She was never allowed to see the rest of the great house or told where she was, though when she listened to al-Bayan on the ancient transistor radio they gave her, the signal was without interference. All other radio was forbidden, lest she be exposed to un-Islamic ideas or, heaven forbid, music. The absence of music was harder to bear than she imagined. She longed to hear a few notes of a melody, a child sawing away at a major scale, even the thud of hip-hop from a passing car. Her rooms became a prison. The camp at Palmyra seemed a paradise in comparison. Even Raqqa was better, for at least in Raqqa she had been allowed to roam the streets. Never mind the severed heads and the men on crosses, at least there was some semblance of life. The caliphate, she thought grimly, had a way of reducing one’s expectations.

And all the while she watched an imaginary clock in her head and turned the pages of an imaginary calendar. She was scheduled to fly from Athens to Paris on Sunday evening, and to return to work at the clinic in Aubervilliers Monday morning. But first, she had to get from the caliphate to Turkey and from Turkey to Santorini. For all their talk of an important role in an upcoming operation, she wondered whether Saladin and Abu Ahmed had other plans for her. Saladin would require constant medical care for months. And who better to care for him than the woman who had saved his life?

He referred to her as Maimonides and she, having no other name for him, called him Saladin. They did not become friends or confidants, far from it, but a bond was forged between them. She played the same game she had played with Abu Ahmed, the game of guessing what he had been before the American invasion upended Iraq. He was obviously of high intelligence and a student of history. During one of their conversations, he told her that he had been to Paris many times — for what reason he did not say — and he spoke French badly but with great enthusiasm. He spoke English, too, much better than he spoke French. Perhaps, thought Natalie, he had attended an English preparatory school or military academy. She tried to imagine him without his wild hair and beard. She dressed him in a Western suit and tie, but he didn’t wear it well. Then she clothed him in olive drab, and the fit was better. When she added a thick mustache of the sort worn by Saddam loyalists, the picture was complete. Saladin, she decided, was a secret policeman or a spy. For that reason she was always fearful in his presence.

He was no fire-breathing jihadist, Saladin. His Islam was political rather than spiritual, a tool by which he intended to redraw the map of the Middle East. It would be dominated by a massive Sunni state that would stretch from Baghdad to the Arabian Peninsula and across the Levant and North Africa. He did not rant or spew venom or recite Koranic verses or the sayings of the Prophet. He was entirely reasonable, which made him all the more terrifying. The liberation of Jerusalem, he said, was high on his agenda. It was his wish to pray in the Noble Sanctuary at least once before his death.

“You’ve been, Maimonides?”

“To Jerusalem? No, never.”

“Yes, I know. Abu Ahmed told me that.”

“Who?”

Eventually, he told her he had been raised in a small, poor village in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, though he pointedly did not say the village’s name. He had joined the Iraqi army, hardly surprising in a land of mass conscription, and had fought in the long war against Iranians, though he referred to them always as Persians and rafida. The years between the war with Iran and the first Gulf War were a blank; he mentioned something about government work but did not elaborate. But when he spoke of the second war with the Americans, the war that destroyed Iraq as he knew it, his eyes flashed with anger. When the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army and removed all Baath Party members from their government posts, he was put on the streets along with thousands of other mainly Sunni Iraqi men. He joined the secular resistance and, later, al-Qaeda in Iraq, where he met and befriended Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Unlike Zarqawi, who relished his Bin Laden — like role as a terror superstar, Saladin preferred to keep a lower profile. It was Saladin, not Zarqawi, who masterminded many of al-Qaeda in Iraq’s most spectacular and deadly attacks. And yet even now, he said, the Americans and the Jordanians did not know his real name.

“You, Maimonides, will not be so fortunate. Soon you will be the most wanted woman on the planet. Everyone will know your name, especially the Americans.”

She asked again about the target of her attack. Annoyed, he refused to say. For reasons of operational security, he explained, recruits were not given their targets until the last possible minute.

“Your friend Safia Bourihane wasn’t told her target until the night before the operation. But your target will be much bigger than hers. One day they will write books about you.”

“Is it a suicide operation?”

“Maimonides, please.”

“I must know.”

“Did I not tell you that you were going to be my personal physician? Did I not say that we would live together in Damascus?”

Suddenly fatigued, he closed his eyes. His words, thought Natalie, were without conviction. She knew at that moment that Dr. Leila Hadawi would not be returning to the caliphate. She had saved Saladin’s life, and yet Saladin, with no trace of misgivings or guilt, would soon send her to her death.

“How is your pain?” she asked.

“I feel nothing.”

She placed her forefinger in the center of his chest and pressed. His eyes shot open.

“It seems you have pain, after all.”

“A little,” he confessed.

She prepared his dose of morphine.

“Wait, Maimonides. There’s something I must tell you.”

She stopped.

“You’ll be leaving here in a few hours to begin your journey back to France. In time, someone will contact you and tell you how to proceed.”

Natalie finished preparing his dose of morphine.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we shall meet again in paradise.”

“Inshallah, Maimonides.”

She fed the morphine through his IV tube into his veins. His eyes blurred and grew vacant; he was in a vulnerable state. Natalie wanted to double his dose and shove him through death’s door, but she hadn’t the courage. If he died, the knife or the stone would be her fate.

Finally, he slipped into unconsciousness and his eyes closed. Natalie checked his vital signs one last time and while he was sleeping removed the chest tube and sutured the incision. That night, after supper, she was blindfolded and placed in the backseat of another SUV. She was too tired to be afraid. She plunged into a dreamless sleep, and when she woke they were near the Turkish border. A pair of smugglers took her across and drove her to the ferry terminal in Bodrun, where Miranda Ward was waiting. They traveled together on the ferry to Santorini and shared a room that night at the Panorama Hotel. It was not until late the following morning, when they arrived in Athens, that Miranda returned Natalie’s phone. She sent a text message to her “father” saying that her trip had gone well and that she was safe. Then, alone, she boarded an Air France flight bound for Paris.