The Black Widow

44 CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT, PARIS

THE NAME ON THE RECTANGULAR paper sign read MORESBY. Christian Bouchard had chosen it himself. It came from a book he had read once about wealthy, naive Americans wandering among the Arabs of North Africa. The story ended badly for the Americans; someone had died. Bouchard hadn’t cared for the novel, but then Bouchard was the first to admit he wasn’t much of a reader. This shortcoming had not endeared him initially to Paul Rousseau, who famously read while brushing his teeth. Rousseau was forever foisting dense volumes of prose and poetry upon his ill-read deputy. Bouchard displayed the books on the coffee table in his apartment to impress his wife’s friends.

He clutched the paper sign in his damp right hand. In his left he held a mobile phone, which for the past several hours had pinged with a steady stream of messages regarding a certain Dr. Leila Hadawi, a French citizen of Palestinian Arab extraction. Dr. Hadawi had boarded Air France Flight 1533 in Athens earlier that afternoon, following a month’s holiday in Greece. She had been granted reentry into France with no questions about her travel itinerary and was now making her way to the arrivals hall of Terminal 2F, or so said the last message Bouchard had received. He would believe it when he saw her with his own eyes. The Israeli standing next to him seemed to feel the same way. He was the lanky one with gray eyes, the one the French members of the team knew as Michel. There was something about him that made Bouchard uneasy. It was not difficult to picture him with a gun in his hand, pointed at a man who was about to die.

“There she is,” murmured the Israeli, as though addressing his footwear, but Bouchard didn’t see her. A flight from Cairo had arrived at the same time as the flight from Athens; there were hijabs aplenty. “What color?” asked Bouchard, and the Israeli replied, “Burgundy.” It was one of the few French words he knew.

Bouchard’s gaze swept over the arriving passengers, and then at once he saw her, a turning leaf afloat a rushing stream. She walked within a few feet of where they were standing, her eyes straight ahead, her chin raised slightly, pulling her little rolling suitcase. Then she slipped through the outer doors and was gone again.

Bouchard looked at the Israeli, who was suddenly smiling. His sense of relief was palpable, but Bouchard detected something else. As a Frenchman, he knew a thing or two about matters of the heart. The Israeli was in love with the woman who had just returned from Syria. Of that, Bouchard was certain.

She settled quietly into her apartment in the banlieue of Aubervilliers and resumed her old life. She was Leila before Jalal Nasser had approached her at the café across the street, Leila before a pretty girl from Bristol had spirited her secretly to Syria. She had never witnessed the horrors of Raqqa or the tragedy of Palmyra, she had never dug shrapnel from the body of a man called Saladin. She had been to Greece, to the enchanted isle of Santorini. Yes, it had been as lovely as she imagined. No, she would probably not return. Once was quite enough.

She was surprisingly thin for a woman who had been on holiday, and her face was stained with evidence of strain and fatigue. The fatigue would not abate, for even after her return, sleep eluded her. Nor did she regain her appetite. She forced herself to eat croissants and baguettes and Camembert and pasta, and quickly she regained a lost kilo or two. It did little for her appearance. She looked like a cyclist who had just completed the Tour de France — or a jihadist who had just spent a month training in Syria and Iraq.

Roland Girard, the clinic’s ersatz administrator, tried to lighten her patient load, but she wouldn’t hear of it. After a month in the upside-down world of the caliphate, she longed for some semblance of normality, even if it was Leila’s and not her own. She discovered that she missed her patients, the inhabitants of the cités, the citizens of the other France. And for the first time, she saw the Arab world as they undoubtedly saw it, as a cruel and unforgiving place, a place with no future, a place to be fled. The vast majority of them wanted nothing more than to live in peace and care for their families. But a small minority — small in percentage, but large in number — had fallen victim to the siren song of radical Islam. Some were prepared to slaughter their fellow Frenchmen in the name of the caliphate. And some would surely have slit Dr. Hadawi’s throat if they knew the secret she was hiding beneath her hijab.

Still, she was pleased to be back in their presence, and back in France. Mainly, she was curious as to why she had not been summoned for the debriefing she was secretly dreading. They were watching her; she could see them in the streets of the banlieue and in the window of the apartment opposite. She supposed they were just being cautious, for surely they were not the only ones watching. Surely, she thought, Saladin was watching her, too.

Finally, on the first Friday evening after her return, Roland Girard again invited her for an after-work coffee. Instead of heading to the center of Paris, as he had before her departure for Syria, he drove her northward into the countryside.

“Aren’t you going to blindfold me?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

Silent, she watched the clock and the speedometer and thought of a ruler-straight road stained with oil, stretching eastward into the desert. At the end of the road was a great house of many rooms and courts. And in one of the rooms, bandaged and infirm, was Saladin.

“Can you do me a favor, Roland?”

“Of course.”

“Turn on some music.”

“What kind?”

“It doesn’t matter. Any kind will do.”

The gate was imposing, the drive was long and gravel. At the end of it, ivied and stately, stood a large manor house. Roland Girard stopped a few meters from the front entrance. He left the engine running.

“This is as far as I’m allowed to go. I’m disappointed. I want to know what it was like.”

She gave no answer.

“You’re a very brave woman to go to that place.”

“You would have done the same thing.”

“Not in a million years.”

An exterior light bloomed in the dusk, the front door opened.

“Go,” said Roland Girard. “They’ve waited a long time to see you.”

Mikhail was now standing in the entrance of the house. Natalie climbed out of the car and approached him slowly.

“I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.” She looked past him, into the interior of the grand house. “How lovely. Much better than my little place in Aubervilliers.”

“Or that dump near al-Rasheed Park.”

“You were watching me?”

“As much as we could. We know that you were taken to a village near the Iraqi border, where you were undoubtedly interrogated by a man named Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti. And we know that you spent several days at a training camp in Palmyra, where you managed to find time to tour the ruins by moonlight.” He hesitated before continuing. “And we know,” he said, “that you were taken to a village near Mosul, where you spent several days in a large house. We saw you pacing in a courtyard.”

“You should have bombed that house.”

Mikhail gave her a quizzical look. Then he stepped aside and with a movement of his hand invited her to enter. She remained frozen in place.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m afraid he’s going to be disappointed with me.”

“Not possible.”

“We’ll see about that,” she said, and went inside.

They embraced her, they kissed her cheeks, they clung to her limbs as though they feared she might drift away from them and never return. Dina removed the hijab from Natalie’s head; Gabriel pressed a glass of chilled white wine into her hand. It was a sauvignon blanc from the Western Galilee that Natalie adored.

“I couldn’t possibly,” she laughed. “It is haram.”

“Not tonight,” he said. “Tonight you are one of us again.”

There was food and there was music, and there were a thousand questions no one dared ask; there would be time for that later. They had sent an agent into the belly of the beast, and the agent had come back to them. They were going to savor their achievement. They were going to celebrate life.

Only Gabriel seemed to withhold himself from the revelry. He did not partake of the food or wine, only coffee. Mainly, he watched Natalie with an unnerving intensity. She remembered the things he had told her about his mother on that first day at the farm in the Jezreel Valley, how she rarely laughed or smiled, how she could not show pleasure on festive occasions. Perhaps he had inherited her affliction. Or perhaps, thought Natalie, he knew that tonight was not an occasion for celebration.

At last, as if by some imperceptible signal, the party came to an end. The dishes were cleared away, the wine was removed. In one of the sitting rooms a wing chair had been reserved for Natalie. There were no cameras or microphones visible, but surely, she thought, the proceedings were being recorded. Gabriel chose to remain standing.

“Usually,” he said, “I prefer to start debriefings from the beginning. But perhaps tonight we should start at the end.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Perhaps we should.”

“Who was staying in the large house near Mosul?”

“Saladin,” she answered without hesitation.

“Why were you brought there?”

“He required medical attention.”

“And you gave it to him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because,” replied Natalie, “he was going to die.”

45 SERAINCOURT, FRANCE

ONE DAY,” SAID GABRIEL, “they’re going to write a book about you.”

“It’s funny,” replied Natalie, “but Saladin told me the same thing.”

They were walking along a footpath in the garden of the château. A bit of light leaked from the French doors of the sitting room, but otherwise it was dark. A storm had come and gone during the many hours of her debriefing, and the gravel was wet beneath their feet. Natalie shivered. The air was chill with the promise of autumn.

“You’re cold,” said Gabriel. “We should go back inside.”

“Not yet. There’s something I wanted to tell you in private.”

Gabriel stopped and turned to face her.

“He knows who you are.”

“Saladin?” He smiled. “I’m flattered but not surprised. I have quite a following in the Arab world.”

“There’s more, I’m afraid. He knows about your connection to Hannah Weinberg. And he suspects that you are very much alive.”

This time, he did not dismiss her words with a smile.

“What does it mean?” asked Natalie.

“It means that our suspicions about Saladin being a former Iraqi intelligence officer are almost certainly correct. It also means he’s probably connected to certain elements in Saudi Arabia. Who knows? Perhaps he’s receiving support from them.”

“But ISIS wants to destroy the House of Saud and incorporate the Arabian Peninsula into the caliphate.”

“In theory.”

“So why would the Saudis support ISIS?”

“You are now our foremost expert on ISIS. You tell me.”

“Saudi Arabia is a classic straddling state. It combats Sunni extremism while at the same time nurturing it. They’re like a man holding a tiger by the ears. If the man lets go of the tiger, it will devour him.”

“You were obviously paying attention during those long lectures at the farm. But you left out one other important factor, and that’s Iran. The Saudis are more afraid of Iran than they are of ISIS. Iran is Shiite. And ISIS, for all its evil, is Sunni.”

“And from the Saudi perspective,” continued Natalie, “a Sunni caliphate is far preferable to a Shiite Crescent that stretches from Iran to Lebanon.”

“Exactly.” Again, he smiled. “You’re going to make a fine intelligence officer. Actually,” he corrected himself, “you already are.”

“A fine intelligence officer wouldn’t have saved the life of a monster like Saladin.”

“You did the right thing.”

“Did I?”

“We’re not like them, Natalie. If they want to die for Allah, we will help them in any way we can. But we will not sacrifice ourselves in the process. Besides,” he added after a moment, “if you had killed Saladin, Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti would have taken his place.”

“So why bother to kill any of them if another will rise?”

“It is a question with which we wrestle all the time.”

“And the answer?”

“What choice do we have?”

“Maybe we should bomb that house.”

“Bad idea.”

“Why?”

“You tell me.”

She considered the question carefully before answering. “Because they would suspect that the woman who saved Saladin — the woman he called Maimonides — was a spy who had revealed the location of the house to her handlers.”

“Very good. And you can be certain they moved him the minute you crossed into Turkey.”

“Were you watching?”

“Our satellite had been retasked to follow you.”

“I saw al-Tikriti use a phone several times.”

“That phone is now off the air. I’ll ask the Americans to review their satellite and cellular data. It’s possible they’ll be able to retrace Saladin’s movements, but unlikely. They’ve been looking for al-Baghdadi for a long time without success. In a case like this we need to know where Saladin is going to be, not where he’s been.” With a sidelong glance he asked, “Is there any chance he might have already died of his wounds?”

“There’s always a chance. But I’m afraid he had a very good doctor.”

“That’s because she was Jewish. Everyone knows that all the best doctors are Jewish.”

She smiled.

“You dispute this?”

“No. It’s just that Saladin said the same thing.”

“Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

They walked in silence for a moment, the gravel of the pathway crunching beneath their feet, watched over by Greek and Roman statuary. Apollo emerged spectrally from the darkness. For an instant Natalie was once more in Palmyra.

“What now?” she asked at last.

“We wait for Saladin to summon you. And we stop the next attack.”

“What if they don’t choose me for the team?”

“They’ve invested a great deal of time and effort in you. Almost as much as we have,” he added.

“How long will we have to wait?”

“A week, a month. .” He shrugged. “Saladin has been at this for a long time, a thousand years in fact. He’s obviously a patient man.”

“I can’t keep living as Leila Hadawi.”

He said nothing.

“How are my parents?”

“Worried, but fine.”

“Do they know I went to Syria?”

“No. But they know you’re safe.”

“I wish to make one demand.”

“Anything,” he said. “Within reason, of course.”

“I wish to see my parents.”

“Impossible,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“Please,” she pleaded. “Just for a few minutes.”

“A few minutes?”

“Yes, that’s all. I just want to hear the sound of my mother’s voice. I want my father to hold me.”

He made a show of thought. “I think that can be arranged.”

“Really? How soon?”

“Now,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

He pointed toward the facade of the house, toward the light spilling from the French doors. Natalie turned and scampered childlike down the darkened garden path. She was beautiful, thought Gabriel, even when she was crying.

46 PARIS — TIBERIAS, ISRAEL

THE REMAINDER OF SEPTEMBER PASSED without a nibble, and so did the entire month of October, which in Paris was drenched with sun and warmer than usual, much to the delight of the surveillance artists, the operation’s unsung heroes. By the first week of November, the team was beset by something approaching abject panic. Even the normally placid Paul Rousseau was beside himself, but then Rousseau was to be forgiven. He had a chief and a minister breathing down his neck, and a president who was too politically weak to survive another attack on French soil. The president would soon be leaving for Washington for a meeting with his American counterpart, and for that Rousseau was eternally grateful.

Natalie soldiered on, but clearly she was growing weary of her double life in the dreary banlieue. There were no more team gatherings; they communicated with her only by text. Status checks invariably elicited a terse response. She was fine. She was well. She was bored. She was lonely. On her days off from the clinic, she escaped the banlieue by RER train and ran the watchers ragged on the streets of central Paris. During one such visit she was accosted by a Frenchwoman of National Front persuasion who took exception to her hijab. Natalie returned fire and instantly the two women were nose to nose on a busy street corner. Were it not for the gendarme who pulled them apart, they might very well have come to blows.

“An admirable performance,” Paul Rousseau told Gabriel that evening at Alpha Group’s headquarters on the rue de Grenelle. “Let us hope Saladin was watching.”

“Yes,” said Gabriel. “Let us hope.”

But was he even alive? And if he was, had he lost faith in the woman who had saved him? This was their greatest fear, that Saladin’s operational train had left the station and Dr. Leila Hadawi had not been issued a ticket. In the meantime, the system was blinking red. European capitals, including Paris, were on high alert, and in Washington the Department of Homeland Security reluctantly raised its threat level, though publicly the president continued to play down the danger. The fact that warnings came and went with no attack seemed to bolster his case that the group did not possess the capability to carry out a major terror spectacular on the American homeland. A climate change accord was signed, a famous pop star released a long-awaited album, China’s stock market collapsed, and soon the world forgot. But the world did not know what Gabriel and Natalie and the rest of the team knew. Somewhere in Iraq or Syria was a man called Saladin. He was not a raving lunatic; he was a man of reason, a Sunni nationalist, quite possibly a former spy. He had suffered two serious shrapnel wounds to the right side of his body, one in the chest, the other to the thigh. If he was ambulatory, he would almost certainly require a cane or crutches to walk. The scars would make him easily identifiable. So, too, would his ambition. He planned to carry out an attack of such severity that the West would have no choice but to invade the Islamic caliphate. The armies of Rome and the men with black flags and long hair and beards would clash in a place called Dabiq, on the plains of northern Syria. The men who flew black flags would prevail, thus unleashing a chain of apocalyptic events that would bring about the appearance of the Mahdi and the end of days.

But even in the sacred city of Jerusalem, Saladin’s ultimate target, attention wandered. Several months had passed since Gabriel was to have assumed control of the Office, and even the prime minister, who had been complicit in the delay, was losing patience. He had an ally in Ari Shamron, who never supported the delay in the first place. Frustrated, Shamron rang a compliant journalist and told him — anonymously, of course — that a change in leadership at the Office was imminent, days rather than weeks. He also suggested that the prime minister’s choice for a new chief would be surprising, to say the least. There followed a round of intense media speculation. Many names were floated, though the name Gabriel Allon was mentioned only in passing and with sadness. Gabriel was the chief who never was. Gabriel was dead.

But he was not dead, of course. He was jetlagged, he was anxious, he was worried that his meticulously planned and executed operation had been in vain, but he was very much alive. On a Friday afternoon in mid-November he returned to Jerusalem after several days in Paris, hoping to spend a quiet weekend with his wife and children. But within minutes of his arrival, Chiara informed him that they were all expected for dinner that evening at Shamron’s villa in Tiberias.

“Not a chance,” said Gabriel.

“It’s Shabbat,” replied Chiara. She said nothing more. She was the daughter of the chief rabbi of Venice. In Chiara’s world, Shabbat was the ultimate trump card. No further argument was necessary. The case was closed.

“I’m too tired. Call Gilah and tell her we’ll do it another night.”

“You call her.”

Which he did. The conversation was brief, less than a minute.

“What did she say?”

“She said it’s Shabbat.”

“Is that all?”

“No. She said Ari isn’t doing well.”

“He’s been sick all autumn. You’ve been too busy to notice, and Gilah didn’t want to worry you.”

“What is it this time?”

She shrugged. “Your abba is getting old, Gabriel.”

To move the Allon family was no easy feat. The children’s car seats had to be buckled into the back of Gabriel’s SUV, and an additional vehicle added to the motorcade. It barreled down the Bab al-Wad at rush hour, sped northward up the Coastal Plain, and then raced westward across the Galilee. Shamron’s honey-colored villa stood atop a rocky bluff overlooking the lake. At the base of the drive was a small guardhouse where a security detail kept watch behind a metal gate. It was like entering a forward military base in a hostile land.

It was precisely three minutes before sunset when the motorcade rumbled to a stop outside the entrance of the villa. Gilah Shamron was standing on the steps, tapping her wristwatch to indicate that time was running short if they were going to light the candles in time. Gabriel carried the children inside while Chiara saw to the food she had spent the afternoon preparing. Gilah, too, had spent the day cooking. There was enough to feed a multitude.

Chiara’s description of Shamron’s failing health had left Gabriel expecting the worst, and he was deeply relieved to find Shamron looking rather well. Indeed, if anything, his appearance had improved since Gabriel saw him last. He was dressed, as usual, in a white oxford cloth shirt and pressed khaki trousers, though tonight he had added a navy cardigan against the November chill. Little remained of his hair and his skin was pale and translucent, but his blue eyes shone brightly behind his ugly steel spectacles when Gabriel entered with a child in each arm. Shamron raised his liver-spotted hands — hands that were far too large for so small a man — and without apprehension Gabriel entrusted them with Raphael. Shamron held the child as though he were a live grenade and whispered nonsense into his ear in his murderous Polish accent. When Raphael emitted a peal of laughter, Gabriel was instantly glad he had come.

He had been raised in a home without religion, but as always, when Gilah drew the light of the Sabbath candles to her eyes while reciting the blessing, he thought it the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Shamron then recited the blessings of the bread and the wine in the Yiddish intonations of his youth, and the meal commenced. Gabriel had yet to take his first bite when Shamron attempted to quiz him on the operation, but Gilah adroitly changed the subject to the children. Chiara briefed them on the latest developments — the dietary changes, the growth and weight gain, the attempts at speech and movement. Gabriel had caught only passing glimpses of the changes during the many months of the operation. In a few weeks’ time they would gather again in Tiberias to celebrate the children’s first birthday. He wondered whether Saladin would allow him to attend the party.

For the most part, though, he tried to forget the operation long enough to enjoy a quiet evening in the company of his family. He didn’t dare turn off his phone, but he didn’t check for updates from Paris, either. It wasn’t necessary. He knew that in a few minutes Natalie would be leaving the clinic on the Avenue Victor Hugo, in the banlieue of Aubervilliers. Perhaps she would go to her café for something to eat or drink, or perhaps she would repair directly to her flat for another evening alone. Gabriel felt a stab of guilt — Natalie, he thought, should be passing the Sabbath in the company of her family, too. He wondered how much longer she could go on. Long enough, he hoped, for Saladin to come calling.

Shamron was quiet at dinner, for small talk had never been his strong suit. After finishing his coffee, he pulled on his old leather bomber jacket and led Gabriel outside to the terrace. It looked east toward the silvery surface of the lake and the looming black mass of the Golan Heights. Behind them was Mount Arbel, with its ancient synagogue and cave fortresses, and on the southeastern slope was a small town by the same name. The town had once been an Arab village called Hittin, and long before that, a thousand years ago, it had been known as Hattin. It was there, a stone’s throw from the spot where Gabriel and Shamron now stood, that Saladin, the real Saladin, had laid waste to the armies of Rome.

Shamron ignited a pair of gas heaters to take the sharp chill off the air. Then, after fending off a halfhearted attack by Gabriel, he ignited one of his Turkish cigarettes, too. They sat in a pair of chairs at the edge of the terrace, Gabriel at Shamron’s right hand, his phone resting on the small table between them. A minaret moon floated above the Golan Heights, shining its benevolent light on the lands of the caliphate. From behind them, through an open door, came the voices of Gilah and Chiara and the chirp and laughter of the children.

“Have you noticed,” asked Shamron, “how much your son looks like Daniel?”

“It’s difficult not to.”

“It’s shocking.”

“Yes,” said Gabriel, his eyes on the moon.

“You’re a lucky man.”

“Am I really?”

“It’s not often we are given a second chance at happiness.”

“But with happiness,” said Gabriel, “comes guilt.”

“You have nothing to feel guilty about. I was the one who recruited you. And I was the one who allowed you to take your wife and child with you to Vienna. If there’s anyone who should feel guilty,” said Shamron gravely, “it’s me. And I’m reminded of my guilt each time I gaze into your son’s face.”

“And every time you put on that old jacket.”

Shamron had torn the left shoulder of the jacket while hastily climbing into the back of his car on the night of the bombing in Vienna. He had never repaired it — it was Daniel’s tear. From behind them came the soft voices of women and the laughter of a child, which one Gabriel could not tell. Yes, he thought, he was happy. But not an hour of a day went by when he did not hold the lifeless body of his son, or pull his wife from behind the wheel of a burning car. Happiness was his punishment for having survived.

“I enjoyed the article about the coming change in leadership at the Office.”

“Did you?” Even Shamron seemed pleased by the change in subject. “I’m glad.”

“That was low, Ari, even by your standards.”

“I’ve never believed in fighting cleanly. That’s why I’m a spy instead of a soldier.”

“It was disruptive,” said Gabriel.

“That’s why I did it.”

“Does the prime minister know you were behind it?”

“Who do you think asked me to do it in the first place?” Shamron raised his cigarette to his lips with a tremulous hand. “This situation,” he said disdainfully, “has gone on long enough.”

“I’m running an operation.”

“You can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

“Your point?”

“I was an operational chief,” answered Shamron, “and I expect you to be an operational chief, too.”

“The minute Saladin’s network makes contact with Natalie, we’ll have to go on a war footing. I can’t be worrying about personnel matters and parking privileges while trying to stop the next attack.”

“If he makes contact with her.” Shamron slowly crushed out his cigarette. “Two and a half months is a long time.”

“Two and a half months is nothing, and you know it. Besides, it fits the network’s profile. Safia Bourihane was dormant for many months after her return from Syria. So dormant, in fact, that the French lost interest in her, which is exactly what Saladin wanted to happen.”

“I’m afraid the prime minister isn’t prepared to wait much longer. And neither am I.”

“Really? It’s good to know you still have the prime minister’s ear.”

“What makes you think I ever lost it?” Shamron’s old Zippo lighter flared. He touched the end of another cigarette to the flame.

“How long?” asked Gabriel.

“If Saladin’s network hasn’t made contact with Natalie by next Friday, the prime minister will announce your appointment live on television. And next Sunday you will attend your first cabinet meeting as chief of the Office.”

“When was the prime minister planning to tell me this?”

“He’s telling you now,” said Shamron.

“Why now? Why the sudden rush to get me into the job?”

“Politics,” said Shamron. “The prime minister’s coalition is in danger of fracturing. He needs a boost, and he’s confident you’ll give him one.”

“I have no interest in coming to the prime minister’s political rescue, now or ever.”

“May I give you a piece of advice, my son?”

“If you must.”

“One day soon you’re going to make a mistake. There will be a scandal or an operational disaster. And you’ll need the prime minister to save you. Don’t alienate him.”

“I hope to keep the disasters and scandals to a minimum.”

“Please don’t. Remember, a career without scandal—”

“Is not a proper career at all.”

“You were listening after all.”

“To every word.”

Shamron lifted his rheumy gaze toward the Golan Heights. “Where do you suppose he is?”

“Saladin?”

Shamron nodded.

“The Americans think he’s somewhere near Mosul.”

“I wasn’t asking the Americans, I was asking you.”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“I’d avoid using phrases like that when you’re briefing the prime minister.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

There was a brief silence.

“Is it true she saved his life?” asked Shamron.

“I’m afraid so.”

“And for her reward, Saladin will send her to her death.”

“We should be so lucky.”

Just then, Gabriel’s phone flared. The screen lit his face as he read the message. Shamron could see he was smiling.

“Good news?” he asked.

“Very.”

“What is it?”

“It looks as though I’ve been granted another reprieve.”

“By the prime minister?”

“No,” said Gabriel, switching off the phone. “By Saladin.”

47 AMMAN, JORDAN

GABRIEL RETURNED TO NARKISS STREET long enough to throw a few items of clothing into a suitcase. Then he crawled into the backseat of his SUV for a high-speed drive across the West Bank to Amman’s Queen Alia Airport, where one of His Majesty’s Gulfstreams was fueled and ready for takeoff. Fareed Barakat was stretched out on one of the leather seats, his necktie loosened, looking like a busy executive at the end of a long but lucrative day. The plane was taxiing before Gabriel had settled into his own seat, and a moment later it was airborne. It was still climbing as it passed over Jerusalem.

“Look at the settlements,” said Fareed, pointing toward the orderly yellow streetlamps spilling down the ancient hills into the West Bank. “Every year, more and more. At the rate you’re building, Amman will soon be a suburb of Jerusalem.”

Gabriel’s gaze was elsewhere, on the old limestone apartment house near the end of Narkiss Street where his wife and children slept peacefully because of people like him.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” he said quietly.

“Would you rather fly El Al?”

“I can get a kosher meal, and I don’t have to listen to a lecture about the evils of Israel.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have any kosher food on board.”

“Don’t worry, Fareed, I already ate.”

“Something to drink? How about a film? His Majesty gets all the new American movies from his friends in Hollywood.”

“I think I’ll just sleep.”

“Wise decision.”

Fareed switched off his light as the Gulfstream departed Israeli airspace, and soon he was sleeping soundly. Gabriel had never been able to sleep on airplanes, an affliction that not even the fully reclining seat of the Gulfstream could cure. He ordered coffee from the cabin crew and stared distractedly at the inane film that flickered on his private screen. His phone provided him no company. The plane had Wi-Fi, but Gabriel had powered off and dismantled his phone before crossing the Jordanian border. As a rule, it was better not to allow one’s mobile phone to attach itself to the wireless network of a monarch — or an Israeli network, for that matter.

An hour from the eastern seaboard of the United States, Fareed woke gently, as though an invisible butler had tapped him lightly on the shoulder. Rising, he repaired to His Majesty’s private quarters, where he shaved and showered and changed into a fresh suit and tie. The cabin crew brought him a lavish English breakfast. He lifted the lid of the teapot and sniffed. The Earl Grey had been brewed to his requested strength.

“Nothing for you?” asked the Jordanian as he poured.

“I had a snack while you were sleeping,” lied Gabriel.

“Feel free to use His Majesty’s facilities.”

“I’ll just steal a towel as a souvenir.”

The plane touched down at Dulles Airport in a steel morning rain and taxied to a distant hangar. Three black SUVs waited there, along with a large all-American detail of security men. Gabriel and Fareed climbed into one of the vehicles and were whisked eastward along the Dulles Access Road toward the Capital Beltway. The Liberty Crossing Intelligence Campus, ground zero of Washington’s post–9/11 national security sprawl, occupied several acres of land adjacent to the giant highway interchange. Their destination, however, was located a few miles farther to the east along Route 123. It was the George Bush Center for Intelligence, otherwise known as CIA Headquarters.

After clearing the massive security checkpoint, they proceeded to an underground parking garage and boarded a restricted elevator that bore them to the seventh floor of the Original Headquarters Building. A security detail waited in the wood-paneled foyer to relieve them of their mobile phones. Fareed dutifully surrendered his device, but Gabriel refused. A brief standoff ensued before he was allowed to proceed.

“Why didn’t I ever think of that?” murmured Fareed as they padded silently down a densely carpeted hall.

“What do they think I’m going to do? Bug myself?”

They were led to a conference room with windows overlooking the woods along the Potomac. Adrian Carter waited there alone. He was wearing a blue blazer and a pair of wrinkled chinos, a spymaster’s Saturday-morning attire. He looked decidedly displeased to see his two closest Middle East allies.

“I don’t suppose this is a social call.”

“I’m afraid not,” answered Gabriel.

“What have you got?”

“An airline ticket, a hotel reservation, and a rental car.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means the jayvee team is about to launch a major terrorist attack on the American homeland.”

Carter’s face turned ashen. He said nothing.

“Am I forgiven, Adrian?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you can help me stop it.”

“Which flight is she coming in on?”

“Air France Fifty-four.”

“When?”

“Tuesday.”

“A few hours before the French president arrives,” Carter pointed out.

“I doubt it’s a coincidence.”

“Which hotel?”

“Key Bridge Marriott.”

“Rental car?”

“Hertz.”

“I don’t suppose they gave her a target, too.”

“Sorry, Adrian, but that’s not Saladin’s style.”

“It was worth asking. After all, she did save his life.”

Gabriel frowned but said nothing.

“I assume,” said Carter, “that you intend to let her get on that plane.”

“With your approval,” said Gabriel. “And you would be wise to let her into the country.”

“Put her under watch — is that what you’re suggesting? Wait for the other members of the attack cell to make contact? Roll them up before they can strike?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“What if she’s not the only operational asset? What if there are other teams? Other targets?”

“You should assume there are other teams and targets, Adrian. A lot of them, in fact. Saladin told Natalie that she was going to be involved in something big — big enough to leave the United States with no choice but to put boots on the ground in Syria.”

“What if they don’t make contact with her? Or what if she’s part of a second wave of attacks?”

“Forgive me for not bringing you the entire plot gift wrapped, Adrian, but that’s not the way it works in the real world.”

Fareed Barakat smiled. It wasn’t often he was given a front-row seat to a spat between the Americans and the Israelis.

“How much does Jalal Nasser know?” asked Carter.

“Should I call and ask him? I’m sure he’d love to help us.”

“Maybe it’s time to pull him in for a little chat.”

Fareed shook his head gravely. “Bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because in all likelihood he doesn’t know the entire picture. Furthermore,” added Fareed, “if we arrest Jalal, it will send a signal to Saladin that his network has been compromised.”

“Maybe that’s exactly the signal we should send him.”

“He’ll lash out, Adrian. He’ll hit you any way he can.”

Carter exhaled slowly. “Who’s handling the surveillance in London?”

“We’re working jointly with the British.”

“I need in on that, too.”

“Three’s a crowd, Adrian.”

“I don’t give a shit.” Carter frowned at his wristwatch. It was half past eight on a Saturday morning. “Why do these things always seem to break on the weekend?” Greeted by silence, he looked at Gabriel. “In a few minutes, several hundred employees of my government are going to learn that the Office has an agent deep inside ISIS. Are you prepared for that?”

“I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“Once she gets off that plane, she’s no longer your agent. She’ll be our agent, and it will be our operation. Are we clear?”

“Perfectly,” said Gabriel. “But whatever you do, make damn sure nothing happens to her.”

Carter reached for the phone and dialed. “I need to speak to the director. Now.”

48 ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

QASSAM EL-BANNA WOKE TO THE call to prayer. He had been dreaming, about what he could not recall — his dreams, like contentment, eluded him. From an early age, while still a boy in the Nile Delta of Egypt, he believed he was destined for greatness. He had studied hard in school, won admission to a mildly prestigious university in the eastern United States, and after a lengthy struggle had convinced the Americans to let him remain in the country to work. And for all his efforts he had been rewarded with a life of uninterrupted tedium. It was a distinctly American tedium of traffic jams, credit card debt, fast food, and weekend trips to the Tysons Corner mall to push his son past shop windows hung with photographs of unveiled, half-naked women. For a long time he blamed Allah for his plight. Why had he given him visions of greatness, only to make him ordinary? What’s more, Qassam was now forced by the folly of his ambition to reside in the House of War, in the land of the unbelievers. After much reflection he had come to the conclusion that Allah had placed him in America for a reason. Allah had provided Qassam el-Banna with a path to greatness. And with greatness would come immortality.

Qassam lifted his Samsung from the bedside table and silenced the muezzin’s tinny nasally wail. Amina had slept through it. Amina, he had discovered, could sleep through anything — the cry of a child, thunder, fire alarms, the tap of his fingers on the keyboard of his laptop. Amina, too, was disappointed, not with Allah but with Qassam. She had come to America with reality-TV visions of a life in Bel Air, only to find herself living around the corner from a 7-Eleven off Carlin Springs Road. She berated Qassam daily for failing to earn more money and consoled herself by driving them deeper into debt. Her latest acquisition was a new luxury car. The dealership had approved the sale despite their abysmal credit rating. Only in America, thought Qassam.

He slipped soundlessly from bed, unfurled a small mat, and prayed for the first time that day. He pressed his forehead only lightly to the floor to avoid giving himself a dark callused prayer mark — it was known as a zabiba, the Arabic word for raisin — like the marks on the religious men from his village. Islam had left no visible marks on Qassam. He did not pray in any of the Northern Virginia mosques and avoided other Muslims as much as possible. He even tried to play down his Arabic name. At his last place of employment, a small IT consulting firm, he had been known as Q or Q-Ban, which he liked because of its vaguely Hispanic and hip-hop sensibilities. He was not one of those Muslims with his face on the ground and his ass in the air, he would say to his colleagues over beers in his faintly accented English. He came to America because he wanted to escape all that. Yes, his wife wore a hijab, but that had more to do with tradition and fashion than faith. And, yes, he had named his son Mohamed, but it had nothing to do with the Prophet. That much, at least, was true. Qassam el-Banna had named his son after Mohamed Atta, the operational leader of the 9/11 plot. Atta, like Qassam, was a son of the Nile Delta. It was not the only trait they had in common.

His prayers complete, Qassam rose and went quietly downstairs to the kitchen, where he popped a capsule of French roast into the Keurig. Then, in the living room, he performed two hundred push-ups and five hundred abdominal crunches. His twice-daily workouts had reshaped his body. He was no longer the skinny kid from the Delta; he had the body of a cage fighter. In addition to his exercises, he had become a master of both karate and Brazilian jujitsu. Qassam el-Banna, Q-Ban, was a killing machine.

He finished the workout with a few lethal movements of each discipline and then headed back upstairs. Amina was still sleeping, as was Mohamed. Qassam used the third bedroom of the little duplex as his office. It was a hacker’s paradise. Entering, he sat down at one of the three computers and quickly surfed a dozen e-mail accounts and social media pages. A few more keystrokes took him to a doorway of the dark net, the murky Internet world hidden beneath the surface Web that can be accessed only if the user has the proper protocol, ports, passwords, and software applications. Qassam, an IT professional, had everything he needed — and more.

Qassam passed easily through the door and soon found himself standing before another. The proper password admitted him, a line of text wished him peace and inquired as to his business. He typed his answer into the designated box and after a brief delay was presented with a waiting message.

“Alhamdulillah,” he said softly.

His heart beat faster — faster than during his rigorous workout. Twice, he had to reenter the password because in his haste he had typed it incorrectly. At first, the message appeared as gibberish — lines, letters, and numbers, with no apparent purpose — but the proper password instantly turned the gibberish into clear text. Qassam read it slowly, for the message could not be printed, saved, copied, or retrieved. The words themselves were coded, too, though he knew precisely what they meant. Allah had finally put him on the path to greatness. And with greatness, he thought, would come immortality.

Gabriel declined Carter’s invitation to accompany him to the White House. His only previous meeting with the president had been a tense affair, and his presence in the West Wing now would only be an unhelpful distraction. It was far better to let Adrian tell the administration that the American homeland was about to be attacked by a group that the president had once written off as weak and ineffectual. To hear such news from the mouth of an Israeli would only invite skepticism, something they could not afford.

Gabriel did, however, accept Carter’s offer of the N Street safe house and an Agency SUV and security detail. After leaving Langley, he headed to the Israeli Embassy in far Northwest Washington. There, in the Office’s secure communications crypt, he checked in with his teams in Paris and London before ringing Paul Rousseau at his office on the rue de Grenelle. Rousseau had just returned from the Élysée Palace, where he had delivered the same message that Adrian Carter was conveying to the White House. ISIS was planning an attack on American soil, in all likelihood while the French president was in town.

“What else has he got on his schedule other than the White House meeting with the president and the state dinner?”

“A cocktail reception at the French Embassy.”

“Cancel it.”

“He refuses to make any changes in his schedule.”

“How courageous of him.”

“He seems to think so.”

“How soon can you get here?”

“I arrive Monday night with the advance team. We’re staying at the Four Seasons.”

“Dinner?”

“Done.”

From the embassy Gabriel headed to the safe house for a few hours of badly needed sleep. Carter woke him in late afternoon.

“We’re on,” was all he said.

“Did you speak to Mr. Big?”

“For a minute or two.”

“How did he take the news?”

“As well as you might expect.”

“Did my name come up?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And?”

“He says hello.”

“Is that all?”

“At least he knows your name. He still calls me Andrew.”

Gabriel tried to sleep again but it was no good, so he showered and changed and with an Agency security team in tow slipped from the safe house in the last minutes of daylight. The air was heavy with a coming storm; leaves of copper and gold littered the redbrick pavements. He drank a café crème in a patisserie on Wisconsin Avenue and then wandered through the East Village of Georgetown to M Street, with its parade of shops, restaurants, and hotels. Yes, he thought, there would be other teams and other targets. And even if they managed to stop Dr. Leila Hadawi’s attack, it was likely that in a few days’ time Americans would once again die in their own country because of an ideology, and a faith, born of a region that most could not find on a map. The enemy could not be reasoned with or dismissed; it could not be appeased by an American withdrawal from the Islamic world. America could leave the Middle East, thought Gabriel, but the Middle East would follow it home.

At once, the skies erupted and a downpour sent the pedestrians along M Street scurrying for cover. Gabriel watched them for a moment, but in his thoughts they were running from something else — men with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their hometowns. The appearance of an SUV curbside wrenched him back to the present. He climbed inside, his leather jacket sodden, and rode back to N Street through the rain.

49 ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

THE SAME RAIN THAT DRENCHED Georgetown beat down upon Qassam el-Banna’s modest Korean sedan as he drove along a tree-lined section of Route 7. He had told Amina that he had to make a work call. It was an untruth, but only a small one.

It had been more than a year since Qassam had left his old IT consulting firm. He had told his colleagues and his wife that he was striking out on his own, a risky move in Northern Virginia’s crowded tech world. The real reasons for his career change, however, lay elsewhere. Qassam had left his previous place of employment because he needed something more precious than money. He needed time. He could not be at the beck and call of Larry Blackburn, his old supervisor — Larry of the sewer breath, the secret addiction to painkillers, and the taste for cheap Salvadoran hookers. Qassam was now beholden to a man of far greater ambitions. He did not know the man’s real name, only his nom de guerre. He was the one from Iraq, the one they called Saladin.

Not surprisingly, Qassam’s journey had begun in cyberspace, where, his identity carefully shielded, he had indulged in his unquenchable appetite for the blood and bombs of jihadist porn — an appetite he had developed during the American occupation of Iraq, when he was still at university. One evening, after a miserable day at work and a nightmarish commute home, he had knocked on the cyberdoor of an ISIS recruiter and inquired about traveling to Syria to become a fighter. The ISIS recruiter had made inquiries of his own and had convinced Qassam to remain in suburban Washington. Not long after, a month or so, he realized he was being followed. At first, he feared it was the FBI, but it soon became clear he was seeing the same man again and again. The man finally approached Qassam in a Starbucks near Seven Corners and introduced himself. He was a Jordanian who lived in London. His name was Jalal Nasser.

The rain was coming down in torrents, more like a summer thunderstorm than a slow and steady autumn soaker. Perhaps the doomsday scenarios were true after all, he thought. Perhaps the earth was irrevocably broken. He continued along Route 7 into the center of Alexandria and made his way to an industrial park on Eisenhower Avenue. Wedged between a transmission repair shop and a shooting range were the offices of Dominion Movers. Two of the company’s American-made Freightliner trucks were parked outside. Two more were parked on the floor of the warehouse, where they had been for the past six months. Qassam el-Banna was the moving company’s nominal owner. He had twelve employees. Seven were recent arrivals in America, five were citizens. All were members of ISIS.

Qassam el-Banna did not enter the premises of his moving enterprise. Instead, he engaged the stopwatch function on his mobile and headed back to Eisenhower Avenue. His Korean sedan was quick and nimble, but now he drove it at the slow, lumbering pace of a fully loaded moving truck. He followed the Eisenhower Avenue Connector to the Capital Beltway and the Beltway in a clockwise direction to Route 123 in Tysons. As he was approaching Anderson Road, the traffic light turned to amber. Normally, Qassam would have put his foot to the floor. But now, imagining he were behind the wheel of a laden truck, he slowed to a stop.

When the light turned green, Qassam accelerated so slowly that the driver behind him flashed his headlamps and sounded his horn. Undeterred, he proceeded at five miles below the speed limit to Lewinsville Road, where he made a left. It was less than a quarter mile to the intersection of Tysons McLean Drive. To the left, the road rose gently into what appeared to be the campus of a high-tech firm. Qassam turned to the right and stopped next to a bright yellow road sign that read WATCH FOR CHILDREN. Qassam watched his phone instead: 24:23:45. . 24:23:46. . 24:23:47. . 24:23:48. .

When it reached twenty-five minutes exactly, he smiled and whispered, “Boom.”

50 GEORGETOWN

THE RAIN POURED STEADILY DOWN for the remainder of the weekend, returning Washington to the swamp it had once been. Gabriel was largely a prisoner of the N Street safe house. Once each day he journeyed to the Israeli Embassy to check in with his field teams and with King Saul Boulevard, and once each day Adrian Carter rang him with an update. The FBI and the other agencies of American homeland security were closely monitoring more than a thousand known or suspected members of ISIS. “And not one of them,” said Carter, “appears to be in the final preparations for an attack.”

“There’s just one problem, Adrian.”

“What’s that?”

“The FBI is watching the wrong people.”

By Monday afternoon the rains began to slow, and by that evening a few stars were visible through the thinning clouds. Gabriel wanted to walk to the Four Seasons for his dinner with Paul Rousseau, but his CIA security detail prevailed upon him to take the SUV instead. It dropped him outside the hotel’s covered entrance and, trailed by a single bodyguard, he entered the lobby. Several bleary-eyed French officials, their suits wrinkled by transatlantic travel, waited at reception, behind a tall, broad-shouldered man, Arab in appearance, who looked as though he had borrowed Fareed Barakat’s London tailor. Only the Arab-looking man took note of the thin Israeli who was accompanied by an American security guard. Their eyes met briefly. Then the tall Arab-looking man turned his gaze once more toward the woman behind the desk. Gabriel inspected his back as he passed. He appeared to be unarmed. A leather attaché case stood upright next to his right shoe. And leaning against the front of the reception desk, black and polished, was an elegant walking stick.

Gabriel continued across the lobby and entered the restaurant. It seemed the bar had been commandeered by a convention of the hard of hearing. He gave the maître d’ a name not his own and was shown to a table overlooking Rock Creek Parkway. Better still, it had an unobstructed view of the lobby, where the tall, impeccably clad Arab was now limping slowly toward the elevators.

He had requested a suite on the uppermost floor of the hotel. His request had been granted, in no small part because the hotel’s management believed him to be a distant relative of the king of Saudi Arabia. A moment after he entered the room, there was a discreet knock at the door. It was the porter with his luggage. The tall Arab admired the vista from his window while the porter, an African, hung his garment bag in the closet and placed his suitcase on a stand in the bedroom. The usual pre-tip banter ensued, with its many offers of additional assistance, but a crisp twenty-dollar bill sent the porter gratefully toward the door. It closed softly and once again the tall Arab was alone.

His eyes were fixed on the traffic rushing along Rock Creek Parkway. His thoughts, however, were on the man whom he had seen downstairs in the lobby — the man with gray temples and distinctive green eyes. He was almost certain he had seen the man before, not in person but in photographs and news accounts. It was possible he was mistaken. In fact, he thought, it was likely the case. Even so, he had learned long ago to trust his instincts. They had been sharpened to a razor’s edge during the many years he served the Arab world’s cruelest dictator. And they had helped him to survive the long fight against the Americans, when many other men like him had been vaporized by weapons that struck from the sky with the suddenness of lightning.

He removed a laptop computer from his attaché case and connected it to the hotel’s wireless Internet system. Because the Four Seasons was popular with visiting dignitaries, the NSA had undoubtedly penetrated its network. It was no matter; the hard drive of his computer was a blank page. He opened the Internet browser and typed a name into the search box. Several photos appeared on the screen, including one from London’s Telegraph newspaper that showed a man running along a footpath outside Westminster Abbey, a gun in his hand. Linked to the photo was an article by a reporter named Samantha Cooke concerning the man’s violent death. It seemed the reporter was mistaken, because the subject of her article had just crossed the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington.

There was another knock at the door, soft, almost apologetic — the obligatory fruit plate, along with a note addressed to Mr. Omar al-Farouk, promising to fulfill his every wish. At the moment he wanted only a few minutes of uninterrupted solitude. He typed an address for the dark net, picked the lock of a password-protected door, and entered a virtual room where all was encrypted. An old friend was waiting there for him.

The old friend asked, HOW WAS YOUR TRIP?

He typed, FINE BUT YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHO I JUST SAW.

WHO?

He typed the first and last name — the name of an archangel followed by a rather common Israeli surname. The response was a few seconds longer in coming.

YOU SHOULDN’T JOKE ABOUT THINGS LIKE THAT.

I’M NOT.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IT MEANS?

A very good question indeed. He logged off the Internet, shut down the computer, and limped slowly to the window. He felt as though a dagger were lodged in the thigh of his right leg, his chest throbbed. He watched the traffic moving along the parkway, and for a few seconds the pain seemed to diminish. Then the traffic blurred and in his thoughts he was astride a mighty Arabian horse on a mountaintop near the Sea of Galilee, gazing down at a sunbaked place called Hattin. The vision was not new to him; it came often. Usually, two mighty armies — one Muslim, the other Crusader, the army of Rome — were arrayed for battle. But now only two men were present. One was an Israeli named Gabriel Allon. And the other was Saladin.

Paul Rousseau was still on Paris time, and so they did not linger long over dinner. Gabriel bade him good night at the elevators and, trailed by his bodyguard, headed across the lobby. The same woman was behind the reception desk.

“May I help you?” she asked as Gabriel approached.

“I certainly hope so. Earlier this evening I saw a gentleman checking in. Tall, very well dressed, walked with a cane.”

“Mr. al-Farouk?”

“Yes, that’s him. We used to work together a long time ago.”

“I see.”

“Do you know how long he’s staying?”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not—”

He held up a hand. “Don’t apologize. I understand your rules.”

“I’d be happy to give him a message.”

“That’s not necessary. I’ll ring him in the morning. But don’t mention any of this to him,” Gabriel added conspiratorially. “I want to surprise him.”

Gabriel went outside into the chill night. He waited until he was in the back of his Suburban before ringing Adrian Carter. Carter was still at his office in Langley.

“I want you to have a look at someone named al-Farouk. He’s about forty-five years old, maybe fifty. I don’t know his first name or the color of his passport.”

“What do you know about him?”

“He’s staying at the Four Seasons.”

“Am I missing something?”

“I got a funny feeling at the back of my neck, Adrian. Find out who he is.”

The connection went dead. Gabriel returned the phone to his coat pocket.

“Back to N Street?” asked the driver.

“No,” answered Gabriel. “Take me to the embassy.”

51 AUBERVILLIERS, FRANCE

THE ALARM ON NATALIE’S MOBILE phone sounded at seven fifteen, which was odd, because she didn’t remember setting it. In fact, she was quite certain she hadn’t. She silenced the phone with an annoyed tap of her finger and tried to sleep a little longer, but five minutes later it rang a second time. “All right,” she said to the spot in the ceiling where she imagined the camera to be hidden. “You win. I’ll get up.”

She threw aside the bedding and swung her feet to the floor. In the kitchen she brewed a pot of oily black Carte Noire in the Mocha stovetop maker and poured it into a bowl of steaming milk. Outside, the night was draining slowly from her drab street. In all likelihood, it was the last Paris morning that Dr. Leila Hadawi would ever see, for if Saladin had his way, she would not be returning to France from her sudden, unexpected trip to America. Natalie’s return was uncertain, too. Standing in her sooty little window, her hands wrapped around the café au lait, she realized she would not miss it. Her life in the banlieues had only reinforced her conviction that there was no future in France for the Jews. Israel was her home — Israel and the Office. Gabriel was right. She was one of them now.

Neither ISIS nor the Office had given her packing instructions, and so instinctively she packed lightly. Her flight was scheduled to depart Charles de Gaulle at 1:45 p.m. She journeyed to the airport on the RER and at half past eleven joined the long line at the economy check-in counter. After a wait of thirty minutes a disagreeable Frenchwoman informed her that she had been upgraded to business class.

“Why?”

“Would you rather stay in economy?”

The woman handed Natalie her boarding pass and returned her passport. She loitered for several minutes in the shops of duty-free, observed by the watchers of the DGSI, before making her way to the departure gate. Because Flight 54 was bound for America, there were special security measures. Her hijab and Arabic name earned her several minutes of additional preflight screening, but eventually she was admitted into the departure lounge. She searched for familiar faces but found none. In a complimentary copy of Le Monde she read about the French president’s upcoming visit to America and, on an inside page, about a new wave of stabbings in Israel. She burned with rage. She rejoiced.

Presently, the crackle of a boarding call brought her to her feet. She had been given a seat on the right side of the aircraft against the window. The seat next to her remained empty long after the economy passengers had boarded, instilling in her the hope she might not have to spend the next seven and half hours with a complete stranger. That hope died when a business-suited man with coal-black hair and matching eyeglasses lowered himself into the seat next to her. He didn’t appear pleased to be sitting next to an Arab woman in a hijab. He stared at his mobile phone, Natalie stared at hers.

After a few seconds a message appeared on her screen.

LONELY?

She typed, YES.

WANT SOME COMPANY?

LOVE SOME.

LOOK TO YOUR LEFT.

She did. The man with coal-black hair and matching eyewear was still staring at his phone, but now he was smiling.

“Is this a good idea?” she asked.

“What’s that?” asked Mikhail.

“You and me together?”

“I’ll tell you after we land.”

“What happens then?”

Before he could answer, an announcement instructed passengers to switch off their mobile devices. Natalie and her seatmate complied. As the plane thundered down the runway, she placed her hand on his.

“Not yet,” he whispered.

“When?” she asked, pulling away her hand.

“Soon,” he said. “Very soon.”

52 HUME, VIRGINIA

IN WASHINGTON THE RAINS HAD finally ended, and a blast of cold, clear air had scrubbed the last remaining clouds from the sky. The great marble monuments glowed white as bone in the sharp sunlight; a brisk wind chased fallen leaves through the streets of Georgetown. Only the Potomac River bore the scars of the deluge. Swollen by runoff, clogged with tree limbs and debris, it flowed brown and heavy beneath Key Bridge as Saladin drove toward Virginia. He was dressed for a weekend in the English countryside — corduroy trousers, a woolen crewneck sweater, a dark-green Barbour jacket. He turned right onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway and headed west.

The roadway ran along the bank of the river for about a quarter mile before climbing to the top of the gorge. Trees in autumn leaf blazed in the bright sunlight, and across the muddy river traffic flowed along a parallel parkway. Even Saladin had to admit it was a welcome change from the harsh world of western Iraq and the caliphate. The comfortable leather seat of the luxury German sedan held him with the tenderness of a cupped hand. A member of the network had left it for him in a small parking lot at the corner of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue, a painful walk of several blocks from the Four Seasons Hotel. Saladin was tempted to put the machine through its paces and test his skills on the smooth, winding road. Instead, he kept assiduously to the posted speed limit while other drivers rode his rear bumper and made obscene gestures as they roared past on his left. Americans, he thought — always in a hurry. It was both their greatest strength and their undoing. How foolish they were to think they could snap their fingers and alter the political landscape of the Middle East. Men like Saladin did not measure time in four-year election cycles. As a child he had lived on the banks of one of the four rivers that flowed out of the Garden of Eden. His civilization had flourished for thousands of years in the harsh and unforgiving land of Mesopotamia before anyone had ever heard of a place called America. And it would survive long after the great American experiment receded into history. Of this, Saladin was certain. All great empires eventually collapsed. Only Islam was forever.

The car’s navigation system guided Saladin onto the Capital Beltway. He drove south, across the Dulles Access Road, past the shopping malls of Tysons Corner, to Interstate 66, where he once again headed west, toward the foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains. The eastbound lanes were still clogged with morning commuter traffic, but before Saladin stretched several car-lengths of empty asphalt, a rarity for the metropolitan Washington motorist. Again, he kept diligently to the speed limit while other traffic overtook him. The last thing he needed now was a traffic stop; it would put at risk an elaborate plot that taken months of meticulous planning. Paris and Amsterdam had been dress rehearsals. Washington was Saladin’s ultimate target, for only the Americans had the power to unleash the chain of events he was attempting to bring about. A final review of the plan with his primary Washington operative was all that remained. It was dangerous — there was always the possibility the operative had been compromised — but Saladin wanted to hear from the man’s lips that everything was in place.

He passed the exit for a town with the quintessentially American-sounding name of Gainesville. The traffic thinned, the terrain turned hilly, the blue peaks of the Shenandoah seemed within reach. He had been driving for three-quarters of an hour, and his right leg was beginning to throb from the effort of controlling his speed. To distract himself from the pain, he allowed his mind to drift. It settled quickly on the man he had seen in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel the previous evening.

Gabriel Allon. .

It was possible Allon’s presence in Washington was entirely coincidental — after all, the Israeli had worked closely with the Americans for many years — but Saladin doubted that was the case. Several Israeli citizens had died in the Paris attack, along with Hannah Weinberg, a woman who was a personal friend of Allon’s and an asset of Israeli intelligence. It was entirely possible that Allon had taken part in the post-attack investigation. Perhaps he had learned of the existence of Saladin’s network. And perhaps he had learned, too, that the network was about to carry out an attack in America. But how? The answer to that question was quite simple. Saladin had to assume that Allon had managed to penetrate his network — it was, thought the Iraqi, Allon’s special talent. And if Allon knew about the network, the Americans knew about it, too. Most of Saladin’s operatives had infiltrated the country from abroad through the porous American visa and immigration system. But several operatives, including the man Saladin was about to meet, were American based, and therefore more vulnerable to U.S. counterterrorism efforts. They were critical to the operation’s success, but they were the weak link in the network’s long chain.

The navigation system advised Saladin to leave Interstate 66 at Exit 18. He followed the instructions and found himself in a town called Markham. No, he thought, it was not a town, it was a tiny collection of houses with covered porches looking out upon overgrown lawns. He headed south along Leeds Manor Road, past fenced pastures and barns, until he came to a town called Hume. It was slightly larger than the first. Still, there were no shops or markets, only an auto repair shop, a country inn, and a couple of churches where the infidels worshiped their blasphemous version of God.

The navigation system was now essentially useless; the address of Saladin’s destination was far too remote. He turned right onto Hume Road and followed it six-tenths of a mile, until he came to an unpaved track. It bore him across a pasture, over a ridge of wooded hills, and into a small dell. There was a black pond, its surface smooth as glass, and a timbered A-frame cottage. Saladin switched off the engine; the silence was like the silence of the desert. He opened the trunk. Concealed inside were a 9mm Glock 19 and a high-performance sound and flash suppressor, both of which had been purchased legally in Virginia by a member of Saladin’s network.

The gun in his left hand, his cane in the right, Saladin cautiously entered the cottage. Its furnishings were rustic and sparse. In the kitchen he boiled a pot of water — it smelled as though it came unfiltered from the pond — and coaxed a cup of weak tea from an elderly bag of Twinings. Returning to the sitting room, he lowered himself onto the couch and gazed through the triangular picture window, toward the ridge of hills he had just crossed. After a few minutes a little Korean sedan appeared, trailing a cloud of dust. Saladin concealed the gun beneath an embroidered pillow that read GOD BLESS THIS HOUSE. Then he blew on his tea and waited.

Saladin had never met the operative in person, though he knew him to be a green-carded Egyptian citizen named Qassam el-Banna, five foot nine inches in height, 165 pounds, tightly curled hair, light brown eyes. The man who entered the cottage matched that description. He appeared nervous. With a nod, Saladin instructed him to sit. Then in Arabic he said, “Peace be upon you, Brother Qassam.”

The young Egyptian was clearly flattered. Softly, he repeated the traditional Islamic greeting of peace, though without the name of the man he was addressing.

“Do you know who I am?” asked Saladin.

“No,” answered the Egyptian quickly. “We’ve never met.”

“But surely you’ve heard of me.”

It was obvious the young Egyptian did not know how to answer the question, so he proceeded with caution. “I received a message instructing me to come to this location for a meeting. I was not told who would be here or why he wanted to see me.”

“Were you followed?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

The young Egyptian vigorously nodded his head.

“And the moving company?” asked Saladin. “I trust there are no problems?”

There was a brief pause. “Moving company?”

Saladin gave him a reassuring smile. It was surprisingly charming, the smile of a professional.

“Your caution is admirable, Qassam. But I can assure you it’s not necessary.”

The Egyptian was silent.

“Do you know who I am?” Saladin asked again.

“Yes, I believe I do.”

“Then answer my question.”

“There are no problems at the moving company. Everything is in place.”

Again, Saladin smiled. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

He debriefed the young Egyptian with the patience of a skilled professional. Saladin’s professionalism, however, was twofold. He was an intelligence officer turned master terrorist. He had honed his skills in the badlands of Anbar Province, where he had plotted countless car bombings and suicide attacks, all while sleeping in a different bed every night and evading the drones and the F-16s. Now he was about to lay siege to the American capital from the comfort of the Four Seasons Hotel. The irony, he thought, was exquisite. Saladin was prepared for this moment like no other terrorist in history. He was America’s creation. He was America’s nightmare.

No detail of the operation was too small to evade Saladin’s scrutiny — the primary targets, the backup targets, the weapons, the vehicle-borne bombs, the suicide vests. The young Egyptian answered each question fully and without hesitation. Jalal Nasser and Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti had been wise to choose him; he had a brain like a computer hard drive. The individual operatives knew portions of the plot, but Qassam el-Banna knew almost everything. If he happened to fall into the hands of the FBI while driving back to Arlington, it would be a disaster. For that reason alone, he would not be leaving the isolated cottage outside Hume alive.

“Have all the operatives been told their targets?” asked Saladin.

“Everyone but the Palestinian doctor.”

“When does she arrive?”

“Her flight is scheduled to land at four thirty, but it’s running a few minutes ahead of schedule.”

“You checked?”

He nodded. He was good, thought Saladin, as good as Mohamed Atta. Too bad he would never achieve the same fame. Mohamed Atta was spoken of with reverence in jihadi circles, but only a handful of people in the movement would ever know the name Qassam el-Banna.

“I’m afraid,” said Saladin, “there’s been a slight change in the plan.”

“Regarding?”

“You.”

“What about me?”

“I want you to leave the country tonight and make your way to the caliphate.”

“But if I make a reservation at the last minute, the Americans—”

“Will suspect nothing,” Saladin said firmly. “It’s too dangerous for you to stay here, Brother Qassam. You know too much.”

The Egyptian made no reply.

“You’ve cleaned out your computers?” asked Saladin.

“Yes, of course.”

“And your wife knows nothing of your work?”

“Nothing.”

“Will she join you?”

“I doubt it.”

“A shame,” said Saladin. “But I can assure you there’s no shortage of beautiful young women in the caliphate.”

“So I’ve heard.”

The young Egyptian was smiling for the first time. When Saladin lifted the embroidered pillow, exposing the silenced Glock, the smile evaporated.

“Don’t worry, my brother,” said Saladin. “It was just a precaution in case the FBI came through the door instead of you.” He held out his hand. “Help me up. I’ll see you out.”

Gun in one hand, walking stick in the other, Saladin followed Qassam el-Banna outside to his car.

“If for some reason you are arrested on the way to the airport. .”

“I won’t tell them a thing,” said the young Egyptian bravely, “even if they waterboard me.”

“Haven’t you heard, Brother Qassam? The Americans don’t do that sort of thing anymore.”

Qassam el-Banna climbed behind the wheel of his car, closed the door, and started the engine. Saladin rapped lightly on the window with the grip of his cane. The window slid down. The young Egyptian looked up inquisitively.

“There’s just one more thing,” said Saladin.

“Yes?”

Saladin pointed the silenced Glock through the open window and fired four shots in rapid succession. Then he reached into the interior, careful not to stain his jacket in blood, and eased the car into drive. A moment later it disappeared into the black pond. Saladin waited until the bubbling had stopped and the surface of the pond was once again as smooth as glass. Then he climbed into his own car and headed back to Washington.

53 LIBERTY CROSSING, VIRGINIA

UNLIKE SALADIN, GABRIEL PASSED a quiet if restless morning at the N Street safe house, watching a tiny mouthwash-green airplane creeping slowly across the screen of his Samsung mobile. Finally, at half past two in the afternoon, he climbed into the back of a black Suburban and was driven across Chain Bridge to the wealthy Virginia enclave of McLean. On Route 123 he saw a sign for the George Bush Center for Intelligence. The driver blew past the entrance without slowing.

“You missed your turn,” said Gabriel.

The driver smiled but said nothing. He continued along Route 123, past the low-slung shopping centers and business parks of downtown McLean, before finally turning onto Lewinsville Road. He turned again after a quarter mile onto Tysons McLean Drive and followed it up the slope of a gentle rise. The road bent to the left, then to the right, before delivering them to a large checkpoint manned by a dozen uniformed guards, all heavily armed. A clipboard was consulted, a dog sniffed for bombs. Then the Suburban proceeded slowly to the forecourt of a large office building, the headquarters of the National Counterterrorism Center. On the opposite side of the court, connected by a convenient sky bridge, was the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The complex, thought Gabriel, was a monument to failure. The American intelligence community, the largest and most advanced the world had ever known, had failed to prevent the attacks of 9/11. And for its sins it had been reorganized and rewarded with money, real estate, and pretty buildings.

An employee of the center — a pantsuited, ponytailed woman of perhaps thirty — awaited Gabriel in the lobby. She gave him a guest pass, which he clipped to the pocket of his suit jacket, and led him to the Operations Floor, the NCTC’s nerve center. The giant video screens and kidney-shaped desks gave it the appearance of a television newsroom. The desks were an optimistic shade of pale pine, like something from an IKEA catalog. At one sat Adrian Carter, Fareed Barakat, and Paul Rousseau. As Gabriel took his assigned seat, Carter handed him a photograph of a dark-haired man in his mid-forties.

“Is this the fellow you saw at the Four Seasons?”

“A reasonable facsimile. Who is he?”

“Omar al-Farouk, Saudi national, not quite a member of the royal family, but close enough.”

“Says who?”

“Says our man in Riyadh. He checked him out. He’s clean.”

“Checked him out how? Checked him with whom?”

“The Saudis.”

“Well,” said Gabriel cynically, “that settles it then.”

Carter said nothing.

“Put him under watch, Adrian.”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me the first time. Not quite a member of the royal family, but close enough. Besides, Saudi Arabia is our ally in the fight against ISIS. Every month,” Carter added with a glance toward Fareed Barakat, “the Saudis write a big fat check to the king of Jordan to finance his efforts against ISIS. And if the check is one day late, the king calls Riyadh to complain. Isn’t that right, Fareed?”

“And every month,” Fareed replied, “certain wealthy Saudis funnel money and other support to ISIS. The Saudis aren’t alone. Qataris and Emiratis are doing it, too.”

Carter was unconvinced. He looked at Gabriel and said, “The FBI doesn’t have the resources to watch everyone who gives you a funny feeling at the back of your neck.”

“Then let us watch him for you.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.” Carter’s mobile chirped. He looked at the screen and frowned. “It’s the White House. I need to take this in private.”

He entered one of the fishbowl conference rooms at the edge of the Operations Floor and closed the door. Gabriel looked up at one of the video screens and saw a mouthwash-green airplane approaching the American coastline.

“How good are your sources inside Saudi Arabia?” he asked Fareed Barakat quietly.

“Better than yours, my friend.”

“Do me a favor then.” Gabriel handed Fareed the photograph. “Find out who this asshole really is.”

Fareed snapped a photo of the photo with his mobile phone and forwarded it to the GID headquarters in Amman. At the same time, Gabriel sent a message to King Saul Boulevard ordering surveillance of a guest at the Four Seasons Hotel named Omar al-Farouk.

“You realize,” murmured Fareed, “that we are totally busted.”

“I’ll send Adrian a nice fruit basket when this is all over.”

“He’s not allowed to accept gifts. Believe me, my friend, I’ve tried.”

Gabriel smiled in spite of himself and looked at the video screen. The mouthwash-green airplane had just entered American airspace.

54 DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

IT TOOK AN HOUR FOR Dr. Leila Hadawi to navigate the frozen welcome mat at Dulles Airport’s passport control — forty minutes in the long, mazelike line, and another twenty minutes standing before the dais of a Customs and Border Protection officer. The officer was clearly not part of the operation. He questioned Dr. Hadawi at length about her recent travels — Greece was of particular interest — and about the purpose of her visit to the United States. Her response, that she had come to visit friends, was one he had heard many times before.

“Where do the friends live?”

“Falls Church.”

“What are their names?”

She gave him two Arabic names.

“Are you staying with them?”

“No.”

“Where are you staying?”

And on it went until finally she was invited to smile for a camera and place her fingers on the cool glass of a digital scanner. Returning her passport, the customs officer hollowly wished her a pleasant stay in the United States. She made her way to baggage claim, where her suitcase was circling slowly on an otherwise empty carousel. In the arrivals hall she searched for a man with coal-black hair and matching eyewear, but he was nowhere in sight. She was not surprised. While crossing the Atlantic, he had told her that the Office would be relegated to a secondary role, that the Americans were now in charge and would be taking the operational lead.

“And when I’m given my target?” she had asked.

“Send us a text through the usual channel.”

“And if they take my phone away from me?”

“Take a walk. Handbag over the left shoulder.”

“What if they don’t let me take a walk?”

She wheeled her bag outside and, assisted by a well-built American with a military-style haircut, boarded a Hertz shuttle bus. Her car, a bright red Chevrolet Impala, was in its assigned space. She placed her bag in the trunk, climbed behind the wheel, and hesitantly started the engine. The nobs and dials of the instrument panel seemed entirely alien to her. Then she realized she had not driven an automobile since the morning she had returned to her apartment in Jerusalem to find Dina Sarid sitting at her kitchen table. What a disaster it would be, she thought, if she were to kill or seriously injure herself in an accident. She punched a destination into her mobile phone and was informed that her drive of twenty-four miles would take well over an hour because of unusually heavy traffic. She smiled; she was glad for the delay. She removed her hijab and tucked it carefully into her handbag. Then she slipped the car into gear and headed slowly toward the exit.

It was no accident the Impala was bright red; the FBI had quietly intervened in the booking. In addition, the Bureau’s technicians had fitted the car with a beacon and bugged its interior. As a result, the analysts on duty on the Operations Floor at the National Counterterrorism Center heard Natalie singing softly to herself in French as she drove along the Dulles Access Road toward Washington. On one of the giant video screens, the traffic cameras tracked her every move. On another blinked the blue light of the beacon. Her mobile phone was emitting a signal of its own. Her French phone number appeared in a shaded rectangular box, next to the blinking blue light. The Office had real-time access to her voice calls, texts, and e-mails. And now that the phone was on American soil, connected to an American cellular network, the NCTC had access to them, too.

The bright red car passed within a few hundred feet of the Liberty Crossing campus and continued along Interstate 66 to the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia, where it turned into the surface parking lot of the Key Bridge Marriott. There the blinking blue light of the beacon came to a stop. But after an interval of thirty seconds — long enough for a woman to adjust her hair and retrieve a suitcase from the trunk of a car — the shaded rectangular box of the mobile phone moved toward the hotel’s entrance. It paused briefly at the reception desk, where the device’s owner, an Arab woman in her early thirties, veiled, French passport, stated her name for the clerk. There was no need to present a credit card; ISIS had already paid for her room charges and incidentals. Weary from a long day of travel, she gratefully accepted an electronic key card and wheeled her suitcase slowly across the lobby toward the elevators.

After pressing the call button, Natalie became aware of the attractive woman, late twenties, shoulder-length blond hair, knock-off Vuitton luggage, watching her from a barstool in the chrome-and-laminate lounge. Natalie assumed the woman to be an American intelligence officer and boarded the first available elevator without making eye contact. She pressed the button for the eighth floor and moved to the corner of the carriage, but as the doors were closing a hand appeared in the breach. The hand belonged to the attractive blonde from the lounge. She stood on the opposite side of the carriage and stared straight ahead. Her heavy lilac fragrance was intoxicating.

“What floor?” asked Natalie in English.

“Eight is fine.” The accent was French, the voice vaguely familiar.

They said nothing more to one another as the elevator climbed slowly upward. When the doors opened on the eighth floor, Natalie exited first. She paused briefly to take her bearings and then set off along the corridor. The attractive blond woman walked in the same direction. And when Natalie stopped outside Room 822, the woman stopped, too. It was then Natalie looked into her eyes for the first time. Somehow, she managed to smile.

They were the eyes of Safia Bourihane.

In preparation for Natalie’s arrival, the FBI had stationed a pair of agents, a man and a woman, in the same lounge of the Key Bridge Marriott. It had also hacked into the hotel’s security system, giving the NCTC unfettered access to some three hundred cameras. Both the agents and the cameras had noticed the attractive blond woman who joined Natalie in the elevator. The agents had made no attempt to follow the two women, but the cameras had shown no such restraint. They tracked their movement down the half-lit corridor, to the door of Room 822. It, too, had been penetrated by the FBI. There were four microphones and four cameras. All watched and listened as the women entered. In French, the blond woman murmured something the microphones couldn’t quite catch. Then, ten seconds later, the shaded rectangular box vanished from the giant display at the NCTC.

“Looks like the network just made contact with her,” said Carter, watching as the two women settled into the room. “Too bad about the phone going dark.”

“But not unexpected.”

“No,” agreed Carter. “It would have been too much to hope for.”

Gabriel asked to see a replay of the elevator video. Carter gave the order, and a few seconds later it appeared on the screen.

“Pretty girl,” said Carter.

“Natalie or the blond?”

“Both, actually, but I was referring to the blond. Think she’s a natural?”

“Not a chance,” replied Gabriel. He asked to see a close-up of the blond woman’s face. Again, Carter gave the order.

“Recognize her?”

“Yes,” said Gabriel with a glance toward Paul Rousseau, “I’m afraid I do.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s someone who has no business being in this country,” said Gabriel ominously. “And if she’s here, it means there are many more just like her.”

55 ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

THE FRENCH PRESIDENT AND HIS glamorous ex — fashion model of a wife arrived at Joint Base Andrews at seven that evening. The motorcade that bore the couple from suburban Maryland to Blair House — the Federal-style guest mansion located across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House — was the largest anyone could recall. The many street closures snarled the Potomac River crossings and turned downtown Washington into a parking lot for thousands of commuters. Unfortunately, the disruption to life in the capital was only going to get worse. Earlier that morning, the Washington Post had reported that the security operation surrounding the Franco-American summit was the most extensive since the last inauguration. The primary threat, the newspaper said, was an attack by ISIS. But even the venerable Post, with its many sources inside the U.S. intelligence community, was unaware of the true nature of the peril hanging over the city.

By that evening, the intense efforts to prevent an attack were centered on a hotel at the foot of Key Bridge in Arlington, Virginia. In a room on the eighth floor were two women, one an agent of Israeli intelligence, the other an agent of a man called Saladin. The presence of the second woman on American soil had set off alarm bells inside the NCTC and throughout the rest of the U.S. homeland security apparatus. A dozen different government agencies were trying desperately to discover how she had managed to get into the country and how long she had been there. The White House had been advised of the situation. The president was said to be livid.

At half past eight that evening, the two women decided to leave the hotel for dinner. The concierge advised them to avoid Georgetown—“It’s a zoo because of the traffic”—and directed them instead to a chain bar-and-grill in the Clarendon section of Arlington. Natalie drove there in the bright red Impala and parked in a public lot off Wilson Boulevard. The bar-and-grill was a no-reservations establishment, infamous for the size of its portions and the length of its lines. The wait for a table was thirty minutes, but there was a small round high-top available in the bar. The menu was ten pages of spiral-bound plastic laminate. Safia Bourihane leafed desultorily through it, mystified.

“Who can eat so much food?” she asked in French, turning another page.

“Americans,” said Natalie, glancing at the well-fed clientele around her. The room was high-ceilinged and impossibly loud. As a result, it was the perfect place to talk.

“I think I’ve lost my appetite,” Safia was saying.

“You should eat something.”

“I ate on the train.”

“What train?”

“The train from New York.”

“How long were you in New York?”

“Just a day. I flew there from Paris.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I told you I would go back to France one day.”

Safia smiled. With her blond hair and snug-fitting dress, she looked very French. Natalie imagined the woman Safia might have become were it not for radical Islam and ISIS.

A waitress came and took their drink orders. They both asked for tea. Natalie was annoyed by the interruption. Safia, it seemed, was in a talkative mood.

“How did you manage to get back to France?”

“How do you think?”

“On a borrowed passport?”

Safia nodded.

“Who did it belong to?”

“A new girl. She was the right height and weight, and her face was close enough.”

“How did you travel?”

“By bus and train mostly. Once I was back in the EU, no one even looked at my passport.”

“How long were you in France?”

“About ten days.”

“Paris?”

“Only at the end.”

“And before Paris?”

“I was hidden by a cell in Vaulx-en-Velin.”

“Did you use the same passport to come here?”

She nodded.

“No problems?”

“None at all. The American customs agents were quite nice to me, actually.”

“Were you wearing that dress?”

The tea arrived before Safia could answer. Natalie opened her menu for the first time.

“What’s the name on the passport?”

“Why do you ask?”

“What happens if we’re detained? What if they ask me your name and I can’t tell them?”

Safia appeared to give the questions serious thought. “It’s Asma,” she said finally. “Asma Doumaz.”

“Where’s Asma from?”

Safia pulled her lips down and said, “Clichy-sous-Bois.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“What are you going to have to eat?”

“An omelet.”

“Do you think they can make a proper omelet?”

“We’ll find out.”

“Are you going to have anything to start?”

“I was thinking about the soup.”

“It sounds terrible. Have a salad instead.”

“They look enormous.”

“I’ll share it with you. But don’t get any of those horrible dressings. Just ask for oil and vinegar.”

The waitress reappeared, Natalie did the ordering.

“You speak English very well,” said Safia resentfully.

“My parents both speak English, and I studied it at school.”

“I didn’t learn anything at my school.” Safia glanced at the television over the bar. It was tuned to CNN. “What are they talking about?”

“The threat of an ISIS attack during the French president’s visit.”

Safia was silent.

“Have you been given your target?” asked Natalie quietly.

“Yes.”

“Is it a suicide operation?”

Safia, her eyes on the television screen, nodded slowly.

“What about me?”

“You’ll be given yours soon.”

“By whom?”

Safia gave a noncommittal shrug.

“Do you know what it is?”

“No.”

Natalie looked at the television.

“What are they saying now?” asked Safia.

“The same thing.”

“They always say the same thing.”

Natalie slid off her barstool.

“Where are you going?”

Natalie nodded toward the passageway leading to the restrooms.

“You went before we left the hotel.”

“It’s the tea.”

“Don’t be long.”

Natalie placed her handbag over her shoulder, her left, and wove her way slowly across the bar, through the maze of high-top tables. The women’s lounge was unoccupied. She entered one of the stalls, locked the door, and began counting slowly to herself. When she reached forty-five, she heard the restroom door open and close, followed by the hiss of water rushing into a basin and the blast of a hand dryer. To this symphony of bathroom sounds Natalie added the thunderous flush of an industrial toilet. Stepping from the stall, she saw a woman standing before the mirror applying makeup to her face. The woman was in her early thirties. She wore tight stretch jeans and a sleeveless pullover that did not flatter her powerful physique. She had the broad shoulders and muscular arms of an Olympic skier. Her skin was dry and porous. It was the skin of a woman who had lived in the desert or at altitude.

Natalie went to the second sink and opened the tap. When she looked up into the mirror, the woman was staring at her in the glass.

“How are you, Leila?”

“Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter who I am.”

“Unless you’re one of them. Then it matters a great deal to me.”

The woman applied powder to the rough skin of her face. “I’m Megan,” she said to her reflection. “Megan from the FBI. And you’re wasting valuable time.”

“Do you know who that woman is?”

Nodding, the woman put away the powder and went to work on her lips. “How did she get into the country?”

“On a false passport.”

“Where did she come in?”

Natalie answered.

“Kennedy or Newark?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did she get down to Washington?”

“The train.”

“What’s the name on the passport?”

“Asma Doumaz.”

“Have you been given a target?”

“No. But she’s been given hers. It’s a suicide operation.”

“Do you know her target?”

“No.”

“Have you met any other members of the attack cells?”

“No.”

“Where’s your phone?”

“She took it from me. Don’t try to send me any messages.”

“Get out of here.”

Natalie switched off the tap and went out. Warily, Safia watched her approach the table. Then her eyes moved to the athletic-looking woman with open-air skin who reclaimed her seat at the bar.

“Did that woman try to talk to you?”

“What woman?”

Safia nodded toward the bar.

“Her?” Natalie shook her head. “She was on the phone the whole time.”

“Really?” Safia expertly dressed the salad with the oil and the vinegar. “Bon appétit.”

56 KEY BRIDGE MARRIOTT, ARLINGTON

THE ROOM WAS A SINGLE, the bed scarcely large enough for two. Safia slept rather well for a woman who knew she would soon be dead, though once during the night she sat bolt upright and engaged in a somniloquous explanation about how to properly wear a suicide vest. Natalie listened carefully to Safia’s mumbled words, searching for clues about her target, but soon Safia was asleep again. Eventually, sometime after three in the morning, Natalie slept, too. She woke to find Safia clinging marsupial-like to her back. Outside, the weather was gray and wet, and the overnight change of pressure had left Natalie with a throbbing headache. She swallowed two tablets of pain reliever and drifted into a pleasant half-sleep until the scream of a jetliner woke her a second time. It seemed to pass within a few feet of their window. Then it banked low over the Potomac and disappeared into the clouds before reaching the end of the runway at Reagan National Airport.

Natalie rolled over and saw Safia sitting up in bed, staring at her mobile phone.

“How did you sleep?” Safia asked, her eyes still on the screen.

“Well. You?”

“Not bad.” Safia switched off the phone. “Get dressed. We have work to do.”

After showering and dressing, they headed downstairs to the lobby to partake of the complimentary breakfast. Safia had no appetite. Neither for that matter did Natalie. She drank three cups of coffee for the sake of her headache and forced down a container of Greek yogurt. The restaurant was full of tourists and two clean-cut men who looked as though they were in town for business. One of the men couldn’t keep his eyes off Safia. The other was watching the news on the overhead television. A network icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen read LIVE. The American and French presidents were seated before the fireplace in the Oval Office. The American president was speaking. The French president didn’t look happy.

“What’s he saying?” asked Safia.

“Something about working with our friends and allies in the Middle East to defeat ISIS.”

“Is he serious?”

“Our president doesn’t seem to think so.”

Safia’s eyes met the eyes of her not-so-secret admirer on the other side of the restaurant. She looked quickly away.

“Why does that man keep looking at me?”

“He finds you attractive.”

“Are you sure that’s all it is?”

Natalie nodded.

“It’s annoying.”

“I know.”

“I wish I could put on my hijab.”

“It wouldn’t help.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’d still be beautiful.” Natalie scraped the last of the yogurt from the bottom of the plastic container. “You really should eat something.”

“Why?”

Natalie had no answer. “Where are we going this morning?” she asked.

“Shopping.”

“What do we need?”

“Clothes.”

“I have clothes.”

“Nice clothes.”

Safia glanced at the television screen, where the White House press secretary was herding the reporters from the Oval Office. Then she stood without another word and walked out of the restaurant. Natalie followed a few paces behind, her handbag over her right shoulder. Outside, the rain had subsided to a cold drizzle. They hurried across the parking lot and climbed into the Impala. Natalie shoved the key into the ignition and started the engine while Safia pulled her mobile from her purse and thumbed TYSONS CORNER into Google Maps. When the blue route line appeared on the screen, she pointed toward Lee Highway. “Make a right.”

On the Operations Floor at the NCTC, Gabriel and Adrian Carter watched as the bright red Impala eased into a westbound lane of I-66, followed by a Ford Explorer containing two officers from the FBI’s Special Surveillance Group. On the neighboring video screen, the blue light of the beacon flashed on a giant digital map of metropolitan Washington.

“What are you going to do?” asked Gabriel.

“It’s not my call. Not even close.”

“Whose call is it?”

“His,” said Carter, nodding toward a CNN live shot from the Oval Office. “He’s on his way down to the Situation Room. All the national security principals are there.”

Just then, the phone in front of Carter rang. It was a decidedly one-sided conversation. “Understood,” was all Carter said. Then he hung up and stared at the winking blue light moving west along I-66.

“What’s the decision?” asked Gabriel.

“We’re going to let them run.”

“Good call.”

“Maybe,” said Carter. “Or maybe not.”

Natalie followed I-66 to the Beltway and the Beltway to the Tysons Corner Center shopping mall. There were several spaces available on the coveted first level of Lot B, but Safia directed Natalie to the second level instead. “There,” she said, pointing to a deserted distant corner of the lot. “Park over there.”

“Why so far from the mall?”

“Just do what I tell you,” Safia hissed.

Natalie pulled into the space and killed the engine. Safia scrutinized the instrument panel as a Ford Explorer passed behind them. It parked at the end of the same row, and two all-American males in their early thirties climbed out and headed toward the mall. Safia didn’t seem to notice them. She was looking at the instrument panel again.

“Does this car have an internal trunk release?”

“There,” said Natalie, pointing toward the button near the center of the dash.

“Leave the doors unlocked.”

“Why?”

“Because I told you to.”

Safia climbed out without another word. Together, they made their way to the stairwell and descended to the Bloomingdale’s entrance of the mall. The all-Americans were pretending to shop for winter coats. Safia followed the signs to the women’s department and spent the next thirty minutes moving from boutique to boutique, rack to rack. Natalie explained to the saleswoman that her friend was looking for something appropriate for a business dinner — a skirt and jacket, but the jacket couldn’t be too tight. Safia tried on several of the saleswoman’s suggestions but rejected all of them.

“Too tight,” she said in labored English, running her hands over her shapely hips and flat stomach. “Looser.”

“If I had a body like yours,” the saleswoman said, “I’d want it as tight as possible.”

“She wants to make a good impression,” explained Natalie.

“Tell her to try Macy’s. She might have more luck there.”

She did. Within a few minutes she found a five-button car-length jacket by Tahari that she declared suitable. She selected two — one red, the other gray, both size six.

“They’re much too big for her,” said the saleswoman. “She’s a four at most.”

Natalie wordlessly swiped her credit card through the scanner and scribbled her signature on the touch screen. The saleswoman covered the two jackets in a white plastic bag emblazoned with the Macy’s logo and handed them over. Natalie accepted the garment bag and followed Safia from the store.

“Why did you buy two jackets?”

“One is for you.”

Natalie felt suddenly ill. “Which one?”

“The red one, of course.”

“I’ve never looked good in red.”

“Don’t be silly.”

Outside in the mall, Safia checked her phone.

“Do you need anything?” she asked.

“Like what?”

“Makeup? Some jewelry?”

“You tell me.”

“How about some coffee?”

Natalie didn’t feel much like drinking coffee, but she didn’t want to earn another reproach from Safia, either. They went next door to Starbucks, ordered two lattes, and sat in the seating area outside in the mall. Several Muslim women, all veiled, were conversing softly in Arabic, and many other women in hijabs, some middle-aged, some mere girls, were strolling the arcades. Natalie felt as though she were back in her banlieue. She looked at Safia, who was staring vacantly into the middle distance. She held her mobile phone tightly in her hand. Her coffee stood on the table next to her, untouched.

“I need to use the restroom,” said Natalie.

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not allowed.”

Safia’s phone pulsed. She read the message and stood abruptly.

“We can go now.”

They returned to Lot B and climbed the stairs to the second level. The distant corner was now filled with other cars. As they approached the red Impala, Natalie popped the trunk with her fob, but Safia quickly closed it again.

“Hang the clothes in the back.”

Natalie did as instructed. Then she slid behind the wheel and started the engine while Safia thumbed KEY BRIDGE MARRIOTT into Google Maps. “Follow the signs to the exit,” she said. “And then make a left.”

The bullet-point reports from the FBI surveillance teams flashed onto the video screens at the NCTC like updates on an airport departure board. SUBJECTS PURCHASING GARMENTS AT MACY’S. . SUBJECTS HAVING COFFEE AT STARBUCKS. . SUBJECTS DEPARTING MALL. . ADVISE. . Huddled in the White House Situation Room, the president and his national security team had delivered their verdict. Listen, watch, wait. Let them run.

“Good call,” said Gabriel.

“Maybe,” said Adrian Carter. “Or maybe not.”

At twelve fifteen the red Impala turned into the parking lot of the Key Bridge Marriott and slid into the same space it had abandoned two hours earlier. The hotel security cameras told part of the story. The terse dispatches from the FBI watchers told the rest. The subjects were exiting the vehicle. Subject one, the Israeli agent, collected the Macy’s bag from the backseat. Subject two, the Frenchwoman, lifted two large paper bags from the trunk.

“What two bags in the trunk?” asked Gabriel.

Carter was silent.

“Where are the bags from?”

Carter shouted the question to the Operations Floor. The answer appeared on the screen a few seconds later.

The bags were from L.L.Bean.

“Shit,” said Gabriel and Carter in unison.

Natalie and Safia had never gone to L.L.Bean.

57 THE WHITE HOUSE

MUCH LATER, THE MEETING BETWEEN the American and French leaders would be recalled as the most interrupted ever. Three times, the American president was summoned to the Situation Room. Twice, he went alone, leaving the French president and his closest aides behind in the Oval Office. The third time, the French president went, too. After all, the two women in Room 822 of the Key Bridge Marriott both held French passports, though both documents were fraudulent. Eventually, the two leaders managed to spend an hour together without disruption before repairing to the East Room for a joint news conference. The American president was grim-faced throughout, and his answers were uncharacteristically rambling and unfocused. One reporter said the president appeared annoyed with his French colleague. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The French president departed the White House at three p.m. and returned to Blair House. At that same moment, the Department of Homeland Security issued a vaguely worded warning of a possible terrorist attack on U.S. soil, perhaps in metropolitan Washington. When the bulletin failed to attract sufficient attention — only one cable news outlet bothered to report it — the DHS secretary hastily called a press conference to repeat the warning for the cameras. His tense demeanor made it clear that this was no cover-your-backside statement. The threat was real.

“Will there be any changes to the president’s schedule?” asked a reporter.

“Not at this time,” replied the secretary cryptically.

The secretary then listed several steps the federal government had taken to prevent or disrupt a potential attack, though he made no mention of the situation unfolding across the Potomac River, where, at 12:18 p.m., two women — subjects one and two, as they were known — had returned to their hotel room after a brief shopping excursion to Tysons Corner Center. Subject one had hung a Macy’s bag in the closet while subject two had placed two suspect parcels — L.L.Bean shopping bags — on the floor near the window. Three times, the microphones heard subject one asking about the contents of the bags. Three times, subject two refused to answer.

The entire national security apparatus of the United States was desperately asking the same question. How the bags had found their way into the trunk of the Impala, however, had been established rather quickly with the help of Tysons Corner’s massive array of security cameras. The delivery had occurred at 11:37 a.m., on the second level of Lot B. A hatted, coated man of indeterminate age and ethnicity had entered the parking garage on foot, an L.L.Bean bag in each hand, and had placed them in the Impala’s trunk, which he opened after gaining access to the car’s interior through an unlocked door. He then left the garage, once again on foot, and made his way to Route 7, where traffic cameras saw him climbing into a Nissan Altima with Delaware plates. It had been rented Friday afternoon at the Hertz outlet at Union Station. Hertz records identified the customer as a Frenchwoman named Asma Doumaz. The name was unfamiliar to the FBI.

All of which said nothing about the actual contents of the bags, though the highly professional method of delivery suggested the worst. At least one senior FBI official, not to mention a top political aide to the president, recommended an immediate raid on the room. But calmer heads, including the president’s, had prevailed. The cameras and the microphones would alert the FBI the instant the two subjects were preparing to go operational. In the meantime, the surveillance devices had the potential to supply invaluable intelligence, such as the targets and identities of other members of the attack cells. As a precaution, FBI SWAT and hostage rescue teams had quietly moved into position around the hotel. For now, the Marriott’s management knew nothing.

The signal from the cameras and microphones inside Room 822 flowed through the NCTC to the White House and beyond. The primary camera was concealed inside the entertainment console; it peered out at its subjects like a telescreen keeping watch over Winston Smith in his flat at the Victory Mansions. Subject two was lying seminude on the bed, smoking in violation of hotel rules and the laws of ISIS. Subject one, a devout nonsmoker, had requested permission to leave the room to get some fresh air, but subject two had denied it. It was, she said, haram to leave.

“Says who?” asked subject one.

“Says Saladin.”

The mention of the mastermind’s name raised hopes at the NCTC and the White House that critical intelligence would soon flow from the mouth of subject two. Instead, she lit a fresh cigarette and with the remote switched on the television. The secretary of homeland security was at the podium.

“What’s he saying?”

“He says there’s going to be an attack.”

“How does he know?”

“He won’t say.”

Subject two, still smoking, checked her phone — a phone that the FBI and NSA had been unable to penetrate. Then she squinted at the television. The secretary of homeland security had concluded his news conference. A panel of terrorism experts was analyzing what had just transpired.

“What are they saying?”

“The same thing,” said subject one. “There’s going to be an attack.”

“Do they know about us?”

“They would have arrested us if they knew.”

Subject two didn’t appear convinced. She checked her phone, checked it again fifteen seconds later, and checked it again ten seconds after that. Clearly, she was expecting an imminent communication from the network. It came at 4:47 p.m.

“Alhamdulillah,” whispered subject two.

“What is it?”

Subject two crushed out her cigarette and switched off the television. On the Operations Floor of the National Counterterrorism Center, several dozen analysts and officers watched and waited. Also present was the leader of an elite French counterterrorism organization, the chief of the Jordanian GID, and the future chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. Only the Israeli could not watch what unfolded next. He sat in his assigned seat at the kidney-shaped desk, elbows resting on the pale blond wood, hands over his eyes, and listened.

“In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. .”

Natalie was making her suicide video.

58 ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

IT WAS AN UNUSUALLY QUIET day for Dominion Movers of Alexandria, Virginia — just one small job, a single woman who was trading her rented wreck on Capitol Hill for a cramped cottage in North Arlington, a steal at $700,000. The job had required only one truck and two employees. One of the men was a Jordanian national, the other was from Tunisia. Both were members of ISIS and had fought and trained in Syria. The woman, who worked as an aide to a prominent Republican senator, knew none of this, of course. She served the men coffee and cookies and on completion of the job tipped them well.

The two men left North Arlington at five thirty and started back to the company’s headquarters on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria. Owing to the heavy rush-hour traffic, they did not arrive until six fifteen, a few minutes later than they hoped. They parked the truck, a 2011 Freightliner model, outside the warehouse and entered the business office through a glass doorway. Fatimah, the young woman who answered the company’s phones, was absent and her desk was bare. She had flown to Frankfurt the previous evening and was now in Istanbul. By morning, she would be in the caliphate.

Another doorway led to the warehouse floor. There were two additional Freightliners, both painted with the Dominion logo, and three white Honda Pilots. Inside the Hondas was an arsenal of AR-15 assault rifles and.45-caliber Glock pistols, along with a backpack bomb and a suicide vest. Each Freightliner had been fitted with a thousand-pound ammonium nitrate/fuel oil bomb. The devices were exact replicas of the massive bomb that had devastated London’s Canary Wharf in February 1996. It was no coincidence. The man who built the Canary Wharf bomb, a former Irish Republican Army terrorist named Eamon Quinn, had sold his design to ISIS for $2 million.

The other members of the attack cell were already present. Two wore ordinary Western clothing, but the others, eleven in all, wore black tactical suits and white athletic shoes, a sartorial homage to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. For operational reasons, the Tunisian and the Jordanian remained in their blue Dominion coveralls. They had one last delivery to make.

At seven o’clock all fifteen men prayed together one last time. The other members of the attack cell departed shortly thereafter, leaving only the Tunisian and the Jordanian behind. At half past the hour, they climbed into the cabs of the Freightliners. The Tunisian had been selected to drive the lead truck. In many respects, it was the more important assignment, for if he failed, the second truck could not reach its target. He had named the truck Buraq, the heavenly steed that had carried the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem during the Night Journey. The Tunisian would take a similar journey tonight, a journey that would end, inshallah, in paradise.

It began, however, on an unsightly industrial section of Eisenhower Avenue. He followed it to the connector and followed the connector to the Beltway. The traffic was heavy but moving just below the speed limit. The Tunisian eased into the right travel lane and then glanced into his side-view mirror. The second Freightliner was about a quarter mile behind, exactly where it was supposed to be. The Tunisian stared straight ahead and began to pray.

“In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful. .”

Saladin observed the obligatory evening prayer as well, though with far less fervor than the men in the warehouse, for he had no intention of achieving martyrdom this night. Afterward, he dressed in a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a solid navy-blue tie. His suitcase was packed. He wheeled it into the corridor and, using his cane for support, limped to the elevator. Downstairs, he collected a printed receipt at the front desk before going outside to the motor court. The car was waiting. He instructed the valet to place his suitcase in the trunk and then climbed behind the wheel.

Directly across the street from the Four Seasons, outside the entrance of a CVS drugstore, was a rented Buick Regal. Eli Lavon sat in the front passenger seat, Mikhail Abramov behind the wheel. They had passed that long day watching the front of the hotel, sometimes from the comfort of the car, sometimes from the pavement or a café, and, briefly, from inside the hotel itself. Of their target, the alleged Saudi national Omar al-Farouk, they had caught not a glimpse. A call to the hotel operator had confirmed, however, that Mr. al-Farouk, whoever he was, was indeed a guest of the establishment. He had instructed the switchboard to hold his calls. A walk past his door had revealed a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from his latch.

Mikhail, a man of action rather than observation, was drumming his fingers anxiously on the center console, but Lavon, a battle-scarred veteran of many such vigils, sat with the stillness of a stone Buddha. His brown eyes were fixed on the exit of the hotel, where a black BMW sedan was waiting to turn into M Street.

“There’s our boy,” he said.

“You sure that’s him?”

“Positive.”

The BMW rounded a traffic island of small trees and shrubs and sped off down M Street.

“That’s definitely him,” agreed Mikhail.

“I’ve been doing this a long time.”

“Where do you think he’s going?”

“Maybe you should follow him and find out.”

Saladin turned right onto Wisconsin Avenue and then made a quick left into Prospect Street. On the north side was Café Milano, one of Georgetown’s most popular restaurants. Directly opposite was one of Washington’s costliest parking lots. Saladin left the car with an attendant and entered the restaurant. The maître d’ and two hostesses stood behind a pulpit-like counter in the foyer.

“Al-Farouk,” said Saladin. “I have a reservation for two.”

One of the hostesses checked the computer. “Eight o’clock?”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes averted.

“You’re early.”

“I hope that’s not a problem.”

“Not at all. Is the rest of your party here?”

“Not yet.”

“I can seat you now, or if you prefer you can wait at the bar.”

“I prefer to sit.”

The hostess led Saladin to a coveted table near the front of the restaurant, a few paces from the bar.

“I’m dining with a young lady. She should be arriving in a few minutes.”

The hostess smiled and withdrew. Saladin sat down and surveyed the interior of the restaurant. Its patrons were moneyed, comfortable, and powerful. He was surprised to find he recognized a few, including the man seated at the next table. He was a columnist for the New York Times who had supported — no, thought Saladin, that was too weak a word—campaigned for the American invasion of Iraq. Saladin smiled. Qassam el-Banna had chosen well. It was a shame he would not see the results of his hard work.

A waiter appeared and offered Saladin a cocktail. With practiced confidence, he ordered a vodka martini, specifying the brand of alcohol he preferred. It arrived a few minutes later and with great ceremony was poured from its silver shaker. It stood untouched before him, beads of condensation clouding the glass. At the bar a trio of half-naked women were screaming with laughter, and at the next table the columnist was holding forth on the subject of Syria. Apparently, he did not think the band of murderous thugs known as ISIS posed much of a threat to the United States. Saladin smiled and checked his watch.

There were no parking spaces to be had on Prospect Street, so Mikhail made a U-turn at the end of the block and parked illegally opposite a sandwich shop that catered to students from Georgetown University. Café Milano was more than a hundred yards away, a smudge in the distance.

“This won’t do,” said Eli Lavon, pointing out the obvious. “One of us has to go in there and keep an eye on him.”

“You go. I’ll stay with the car.”

“It’s not really my kind of place,” replied Lavon.

Mikhail climbed out and started back toward Café Milano on foot. It was not the only restaurant on the street. Besides the sandwich shop, there was a Thai restaurant and an upscale bistro. Mikhail walked past them and descended the two steps to Café Milano’s entrance. The maître d’ smiled at Mikhail as though he were expected.

“I’m meeting a friend at the bar.”

The maître d’ pointed the way. Only one stool was available, a few paces from where a well-dressed man, Arab in appearance, sat alone. There was a second place setting opposite, which meant that in all likelihood the well-dressed man would not be dining alone. Mikhail settled onto the empty stool. It was far too close to the target, though it had the advantage of an unobstructed view of the entrance. He ordered a glass of wine and dug his phone from his pocket.

Mikhail’s message landed on Gabriel’s phone thirty seconds later. He now had a choice to make: keep the information to himself or confess to Adrian Carter that he had deceived him. Given the circumstances, he chose the latter. Carter took the news surprisingly well.

“You’re wasting your time,” he said. “And mine.”

“Then you won’t mind if we stick around a little longer and see who he’s having dinner with.”

“Don’t bother. We have more important things to worry about than a rich Saudi having dinner with the beautiful people at Café Milano.”

“Like what?”

“Like that.”

Carter nodded toward the video screen, where subject number two, otherwise known as Safia Bourihane, was placing the L.L.Bean bags upon the bed. From one, she carefully removed a black nylon vest fitted with wires and explosives and held it to her torso. Then, smiling, she examined her appearance in the mirror while the entire counterterrorism apparatus of the United States looked on in horror.

“Game over,” said Gabriel. “Get my girl out of there.”

59 KEY BRIDGE MARRIOTT

THERE WAS A MOMENT’S CONFUSION regarding who would wear which suicide vest. It seemed peculiar to Natalie — the vests appeared identical in every way — but Safia was insistent. She wanted Natalie to wear the vest with the small stitch of red thread along the inside of the zipper. Natalie accepted it without argument and carried it into the bathroom, warily, as though it were a cup brimming over with scalding liquid. She had treated the victims of weapons like these, the poor souls like Dina Sarid whose limbs and vital organs had been shredded by nails and ball bearings or ravaged by the unseen destructive power of the blast wave. And she had heard the macabre stories about the damage done to those who had been seduced into strapping bombs to their bodies. Ayelet Malkin, her friend from Hadassah Medical Center, had been sitting in her apartment one afternoon in Jerusalem when the head of a suicide bomber landed like a fallen coconut on her balcony. The thing had lain there for more than an hour, glaring at Ayelet reproachfully, until finally a policewoman zipped it into a plastic evidence bag and carted it off.

Natalie sniffed the explosive; it smelled of marzipan. She held the detonator lightly in her right hand and then threaded her arm carefully through the sleeve of the red Tahari jacket. The left arm was even more of a challenge. She didn’t dare use her right hand for fear of accidentally hitting the detonator button and blowing herself and a portion of the eighth floor to bits. Next she fastened the jacket’s five decorative buttons using only her left hand, smoothed the front, and straightened the shoulders. Examining her appearance in the mirror, she thought Safia had chosen well. The cut of the jacket concealed the bomb perfectly. Even Natalie, whose back was aching beneath the weight of the ball bearings, could see no visible evidence of it. There was only the smell, the faint smell of almonds and sugar.

She looked around the interior of the bathroom, around the edges of the mirror, at the overhead light fixture. Surely, the Americans were watching and listening. And surely, she thought, Gabriel was watching, too. She wondered what they were waiting for. She had come to Washington in an attempt to identify targets and other members of the attack cells. Thus far, she had learned almost nothing because Safia had very deliberately withheld even the most basic information about the operation. But why? And why had Safia insisted that Natalie wear the suicide vest with the red stitch in the zipper? Again, she glanced around the bathroom. Are you watching? Do you see what’s going on in here? Obviously, they intended to let it play out a little longer. But not too long, she thought. The Americans wouldn’t allow a proven terrorist like Safia, a black widow with blood on her hands, to walk around the streets of Washington wearing a suicide vest. As an Israeli, Natalie knew that such operations were inherently dangerous and unpredictable. Safia would have to be shot cleanly through the brain stem with a large-caliber weapon to ensure that she did not retain the capacity to squeeze her detonator with a dying spasm. If she did, anyone close to her would be cut to pieces.

Natalie scrutinized her face one last time in the mirror, as if committing her own features to memory — the nose she detested, the mouth she thought too large for her face, the dark alluring eyes. Then, quite unexpectedly, she saw someone standing beside her, a man with pale skin and eyes the color of glacial ice. He was dressed for a special occasion, a wedding, perhaps a funeral, and was holding a gun in one hand.

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

She switched out the light and went into the next room. Safia was sitting at the end of the bed, dressed in her suicide vest and her gray jacket. She was staring blankly at the television. Her skin was pale as milk, her hair lay heavy and limp against the side of her neck. The young woman who had carried out a massacre of innocents in the name of Islam was obviously frightened.

“Are you ready?” asked Natalie.

“I can’t.” Safia spoke as though a hand were squeezing her throat.

“Of course you can. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Safia held a cigarette between the trembling fingers of her left hand. With her right she was clutching her detonator — too tightly, thought Natalie.

“Maybe I should drink a little vodka or whisky,” Safia was saying. “They say it helps.”

“Do you really want to meet Allah smelling of alcohol?”

“I suppose not.” Her eyes moved from the television to Natalie’s face. “Aren’t you afraid?”

“A little.”

“You don’t look afraid. In fact, you look happy.”

“I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

“For death?”

“For vengeance,” said Natalie.

“I thought I wanted vengeance, too. I thought I wanted to die. .”

The invisible hand had closed around her throat again. She appeared incapable of speech. Natalie removed the cigarette from Safia’s fingertips, crushed it out, and laid the butt next to the twelve others she had smoked that afternoon.

“Shouldn’t we be leaving?”

“In a minute.”

“Where are we going?”

She didn’t answer.

“You have to tell me the target, Safia.”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

Her voice was as brittle as dead leaves. She had the pallor of a corpse.

“Do you think it’s true?” she asked. “Do you think we’ll go to paradise after our bombs explode?”

I don’t know where you’ll go, thought Natalie, but it won’t be into the loving arms of God.

“Why wouldn’t it be true?” she asked.

“I sometimes wonder whether it’s just. .” Again, her voice faltered.

“Just what?”

“Something men like Jalal and Saladin say to women like us to turn us into martyrs.”

“Saladin would put on the vest if he were here.”

“Would he really?”

“I met him after you left the camp in Palmyra.”

“I know. He’s very fond of you.” An edge of jealousy crept into her voice. It seemed she was still capable of at least one emotion other than fear. “He told me you saved his life.”

“I did.”

“And now he’s sending you out to die.”

Natalie said nothing.

“And what about the people we kill tonight?” Safia asked. “Or the people I killed in Paris?”

“They were unbelievers.”

The detonator suddenly felt hot in Natalie’s hand, as though she were clutching a live ember. She wanted nothing more than to rip the suicide vest from her body. She glanced around the interior of the room.

Are you watching? What are you waiting for?

“I killed the woman in France,” Safia was saying. “The Weinberg woman, the Jew. She was going to die of her injuries, but I shot her anyway. I’m afraid—” She cut herself off.

“Afraid of what?”

“That I’m going to meet her again in paradise.”

Natalie could summon no response from the well of lies within her. She placed a hand on Safia’s shoulder, lightly, so as not to startle her. “Shouldn’t we be going?”

Safia stared dully at her mobile phone, drugged by the opiate of fear, and then rose unsteadily to her feet — so unsteadily, in fact, that Natalie was afraid she might inadvertently press her detonator trying to maintain her balance.

“How do I look?” she asked.

Like a woman who knows she has only minutes to live, thought Natalie.

“You look beautiful, Safia. You always look beautiful.”

With that, Safia moved to the doorway and opened it without hesitation, but Natalie was searching for something amid the twisted sheets and blankets of the bed. She had hoped to hear the sound of a large-caliber weapon dispatching Safia on her journey to paradise. Instead, she heard Safia’s voice. The fear had evaporated. She sounded faintly annoyed.

“What are you waiting for?” she demanded. “It’s time.”

60 THE WHITE HOUSE

THE STATE DINNER WAS SCHEDULED to begin at eight o’clock that evening. The French president and his wife arrived punctually at the North Portico, having made the crossing from Blair House in record time, under the tightest security anyone had ever seen. They hurried inside, as if trying to escape a sudden deluge, and found the president and the first lady, both formally attired, waiting in the Entrance Hall. The president’s smile was dazzling, but his handshake was damp and full of tension.

“We have a problem,” he said sotto voce as the cameras flashed.

“Problem?”

“I’ll explain in a minute.”

The photo opportunity was much shorter than usual, fifteen seconds exactly. Then the president led the party to the Cross Hall. The first lady and her French counterpart turned to the left, toward the East Room. The two leaders headed to the right, toward the West Wing. Downstairs in the Situation Room it was standing room only — principals in their assigned seats, deputies and aides lining the walls. On one of the display screens, two women, one blond, the other dark-haired, were walking along a hotel corridor. The president quickly brought the French leader up to date. A few minutes earlier, Safia Bourihane had produced a pair of suicide vests. A hasty evacuation of the hotel had been rejected as too time-consuming and too risky. A direct assault on the room had been ruled out as well.

“So what are we left with?” asked the French president.

“Undercover SWAT and hostage rescue teams are standing by outside the front of the hotel and in the lobby. If they’re afforded an opportunity to kill Safia Bourihane with no collateral loss of innocent life, they will request permission to take the shot.”

“Who gives the approval?”

“Me and me alone.” The president looked at his French counterpart soberly. “I don’t need your permission to do this, but I’d like your approval.”

“You have it, Mr. President.” The French leader watched as the two women entered the elevators. “But may I offer one small piece of advice?”

“Of course.”

“Tell your snipers not to miss.”

By the time the Tunisian reached the exit for Route 123, the second Freightliner was directly behind him, exactly where it was supposed to be. He checked the clock. It was five minutes past eight. They were a minute ahead of schedule, better than the alternative but not ideal. The clock was Saladin’s trademark. He believed that in terror, as in life, timing was everything.

Six times the Tunisian had performed dry runs, and six times the traffic signal at Lewinsville Road had temporarily halted his advance, as it did now. When the light changed to green he meandered up the suburban lane at a leisurely pace, followed by the second Freightliner. Directly ahead was the intersection of Tysons McLean Drive. Again, the Tunisian checked the clock. They were back on schedule. He turned to the left and the overloaded truck labored up the slope of the gentle hill.

This was the portion of the approach the Tunisian had never driven, though he and the Jordanian had practiced it on a sophisticated computer simulator. The road bent gradually to the left, then, at the top of a hill, sharply to the right, where it led to an elaborate security checkpoint. By now, the highly trained and heavily armed guards were already aware of his presence. The Americans had been attacked by vehicle-borne bombs before — at the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996—and they were no doubt prepared for just such an attack on this critical facility, the nerve center of their counterterrorism apparatus. But unfortunately for the Americans, Saladin had prepared, too. The engine blocks of the trucks were encased in pig iron, the windshields and tires were bulletproof. Short of a direct hit by an antitank missile, the trucks were unstoppable.

The Tunisian waited until he had made the first slight left turn before slamming the accelerator to the floor. On the right a line of neon-orange pylons funneled inbound traffic into one lane. The Tunisian made no effort to avoid them, thus signaling to the Americans that his intentions were far from innocent.

He rounded the sharp right turn without slowing, and for an instant he feared the top-heavy truck would overturn. Before him several American security guards were gesturing wildly for him to stop. Several others already had their weapons trained on him. All at once he was blinded by a searing white light — arc lights, perhaps a laser. Then came the first gunshots. They bounced off the windshield like hail. The Tunisian gripped the wheel with his left hand and the detonator switch with his right.

“In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful. .”

The men and women on the Operations Floor of the National Counterterrorism Center were unaware of the situation at the facility’s front gate. They had eyes only for the giant video screen at the front of the room, where two women — one blond, the other dark-haired: subjects one and two, as they were known — had just boarded a hotel elevator in nearby Arlington. The shot was from above and at a slight angle. The blond woman, subject two, appeared catatonic with fear, but the dark-haired woman seemed curiously serene. She was staring directly into the lens of the camera, as though posing for a final portrait. Gabriel stared back at her. He was on his feet, a hand pressed to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side. Adrian Carter stood next to him, a phone to each ear. Fareed Barakat was twirling an unlit cigarette nervously between his manicured fingers, his onyx-black eyes fastened to the video screen. Only Paul Rousseau, who had no taste for blood, could not watch. He was staring at the carpet as if searching for lost valuables.

Outside the hotel, the bright red Impala was parked in the surface lot, watched over clandestinely by the agents of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group. The blue light of the beacon winked on the NCTC’s screens like a channel marker. The car’s hidden microphones captured the faint drone of traffic moving along North Fort Myer Drive.

Two undercover SWAT agents were chatting amiably just outside the hotel’s entrance. Two more waited near the taxi stand. In addition, there were SWAT agents inside the hotel, two in the chrome-and-laminate lobby lounge, and two at the concierge stand. Each SWAT agent carried a concealed Springfield.45-caliber semiautomatic pistol with an eight-round magazine and an additional round in the chamber. One of the agents at the concierge stand, a veteran of the Iraq surge, was the designated shooter. He planned to approach the target, subject number two, from behind. If ordered by the president — and if no innocent lives would be lost — he would employ lethal force.

All eight members of the SWAT team tensed as the elevator doors opened and the two women, subjects one and two, stepped out. A new camera followed them across the foyer to the edge of the lobby. There the blond woman stopped abruptly and placed a restraining hand on the arm of the dark-haired woman. Words were exchanged, inaudible inside the NCTC, and the blond woman pondered her mobile phone. Then something happened that no one was expecting — not the FBI teams inside and outside the hotel, not the president and his closest aides in the Situation Room, and surely not the four spymasters watching from the Operations Floor at the NCTC. Without warning, the two women turned away from the lobby and set out along a ground-floor corridor, toward the back of the hotel.

“They’re going the wrong way,” said Carter.

“No, they’re not,” replied Gabriel. “They’re going the way Saladin told them to go.”

Carter was silent.

“Tell the SWAT teams to follow them. Tell them to take the shot.”

“They can’t,” snapped Carter. “Not inside the hotel.”

“Take it now, Adrian, because we’re not going to get another chance.”

Just then, the Operations Floor flashed with an intense burst of white light. An instant later there came a sound like a sonic boom that shook the building violently. Carter and Paul Rousseau were momentarily confused; Gabriel and Fareed Barakat, men of the Middle East, were not. Gabriel rushed to the window as a mushroom cloud of fire rose over the facility’s main security checkpoint. A few seconds later he saw a large cargo truck careening at high speed into the forecourt separating the NCTC from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Gabriel whirled around and shouted like a madman at those closest to the windows to move to safety. He glanced briefly at the giant video screen and saw the two women, subjects one and two, entering the parking garage of the Key Bridge Marriott. Then there was a second explosion, and the video screen, like everything else, turned to black.

In the Situation Room of the White House, the screens went black, too. So did the videoconference link with the director of the NCTC.

“What just happened?” asked the president.

It was the secretary of homeland security who answered.

“Obviously, there’s some sort of problem with the feed.”

“I can’t order the SWAT teams to move unless I can see what’s going on.”

“We’re checking, Mr. President.”

So was every other principal, deputy, and aide in the room. It was the director of the CIA, thirty seconds later, who informed the president that two loud sounds, possibly explosions, had been heard in the McLean — Tysons Corner area, near the intersection of Route 123 and the Beltway.

“Heard by whom?” asked the president.

“They could hear the explosions at CIA Headquarters, sir.”

“A mile away?”

“More like two, sir.”

The president stared at the blank video screen. “What just happened?” he asked again, but this time there was no answer in the room, only the concussive thump of another explosion, close enough to rattle the White House. “What the hell was that?”

“Checking, sir.”

“Check faster.”

Fifteen seconds later the president had his answer. It came not from the senior officials gathered inside the Situation Room but from the Secret Service agents stationed atop the Executive Mansion. Smoke was pouring from the Lincoln Memorial.

America was under attack.

61 THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL

HE HAD ARRIVED ON FOOT, a single man, dark hair, about five eight, wearing a bulky woolen coat against the evening chill and carrying a backpack over one shoulder. Later, the FBI would determine that a Honda Pilot SUV, Virginia plates, had dropped him at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Constitution Avenue. The Honda Pilot had continued north on Twenty-third Street to Virginia Avenue, where it made a left turn. The man with the heavy woolen coat and backpack had headed south, across the far western end of the Washington Mall, to the Lincoln Memorial. Several U.S. Park Police officers stood watch at the base of the steps. They did not challenge or even seem to notice the man with the backpack and the oversize coat.

The monument, built in the form of a Greek Doric temple, was aglow with a warm golden light that seemed to radiate from within. The man with the backpack paused for several seconds on the spot where Dr. Martin Luther King had delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, then proceeded up the final steps, into the memorial’s central chamber. About twenty tourists were gathered before the nineteen-foot statue of a seated Lincoln. Equal numbers were in the two side chambers, before the towering engravings of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. The man with the oversize coat placed his backpack near the base of one of the ionic columns and, drawing a mobile phone from his pocket, began taking photographs of the statue. Curiously, his lips were moving.

In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful. .

A young couple, in broken English, asked the man whether he would take their photograph in front of the statue. He declined and, turning abruptly, hurried down the steps toward the Reflecting Pool. Too late, a female Park Police officer, twenty-eight years old, a mother of two, noticed the unattended bag and ordered the tourists to evacuate the memorial. An instant later the policewoman was decapitated by the circular saw of ball bearings that flew from the bag at detonation, as were the man and woman who had asked to have their photo taken. The bomber was blown from his feet by the force of the explosion. A tourist from Oklahoma, sixty-nine years old, a Vietnam veteran, unwittingly helped the murderer to his feet, and for this benevolent act was shot through the heart with the Glock 19 pistol that the man pulled from beneath his coat. The man managed to kill six more people before being shot by the Park Police officers at the base of the steps. In all, twenty-eight would die.

By the time the bomb exploded, the Honda Pilot was braking to a stop outside the main entrance of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. One man climbed out and entered the Hall of States. His coat was identical to the one worn by the man who attacked the Lincoln Memorial, though he carried no backpack; his bomb was strapped to his body. He made his way past the visitor center to the main box office, where he detonated his device. Three more men then emerged from the Honda, including the driver. All were armed with AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifles. They slaughtered the wounded and the dying in the Hall of States and then moved methodically from the Eisenhower Theater to the Opera House to the Concert Hall, killing indiscriminately. In all, more than three hundred would die.

By the time the first units of the Metropolitan Police had arrived, the three surviving terrorists had crossed the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway on foot and were entering Washington Harbor. There they moved from restaurant to restaurant, killing without mercy. Fiola Mare, Nick’s Riverside Grill, Sequoia: all were raked with gunfire. Once again, they encountered no resistance from the Metropolitan Police; the Americans, it seemed, had been caught flat-footed. Or perhaps, thought the leader of the attack cell, Saladin had deceived them. The three men reloaded their weapons and headed into the heart of Georgetown in search of other prey.

It was into this chaos that the two women — one dark-haired, the other blond: subjects one and two, as they were known — entered the rear parking garage of the Key Bridge Marriott. A second car, a rented Toyota Corolla, was waiting. Much later, it would be established that the car had been left in the garage earlier that day by the same man who had delivered the suicide vests at Tysons Corner Center.

Usually, it was subject one, the Israeli agent, who handled the driving, but this time subject two, the Frenchwoman, slid behind the wheel. Leaving the garage, she careened past the little blockhouse of the parking attendant, smashing the barrier gate in the process, and headed for the hotel’s Lee Highway exit. The undercover SWAT teams stationed in the surface parking lot did not deploy lethal force against subject one, the Frenchwoman, because they had received no authorization from the president or the director of the FBI. Even the FBI surveillance teams were momentarily paralyzed because they were receiving no guidance from the NCTC. A moment earlier the watchers had heard something over their radios that sounded like an explosion. Now, from the NCTC, there was only silence.

The Lee Highway exit of the hotel was a right turn only. The Frenchwoman turned left instead. She evaded the oncoming cars, turned left onto North Lynn Street, and a few seconds later was racing across Key Bridge toward Georgetown. The FBI undercover SWAT and surveillance teams had no choice but to repeat the Frenchwoman’s reckless moves. Two vehicles spilled from the Lee Highway exit, two more into North Fort Myer Drive. By the time they reached Key Bridge, the Corolla was already turning onto M Street. It had no tracking beacon and no interior microphones. From the heights of the bridge, the FBI teams could see flashing red-and-blue lights streaking toward Georgetown.

62 LIBERTY CROSSING, VIRGINIA

GABRIEL OPENED ONE EYE, then, slowly, painfully, the other. He had lost consciousness, for how long he did not know — a few seconds, a few minutes, an hour or more. Nor could he fathom the attitude of his own body. He was submerged in a sea of debris, that much he knew, but he could not discern whether he was prone or supine, upright or topsy-turvy. He felt no undue pressure in his head, which he took as a good sign, though he was afraid he had lost the ability to hear. The last sound he could recall was the roar of the detonation and the whoosh-thump of the vacuum effect. The supersonic blast wave seemed to have scrambled his internal organs. He hurt everywhere — his lungs, his heart, his liver, everywhere.

He pushed with his hands, and the debris yielded. Through a fog of dust he glimpsed the exposed steel skeleton of the building and the severed arteries of network cables and electric wiring. Sparks rained down, as if from a Roman candle, and through a rip in the ceiling he could make out the handle of the Big Dipper. A cold November wind chilled him. A finch landed within his grasp, studied him dispassionately, and was gone again.

Gabriel swept aside more of the debris and, wincing, sat up. One of the kidney-shaped tables had come to rest across his legs. Lying next to him, motionless, dredged in dust, was a woman. Her face was pristine, save for a few small cuts from the flying glass. Her eyes were open and fixed in the thousand-yard stare of death. Gabriel recognized her; she was an analyst who worked at a pod near his. Jill was her name — or was it Jen? Her job was to scour the manifests of incoming flights for potential bad actors. She was a bright young woman, barely out of college, probably from a wholesome town somewhere in Iowa or Utah. She had come to Washington to help keep her country safe, thought Gabriel, and now she was dead.

He placed his hand lightly on her face and closed her eyes. Then he pushed away the table and rose unsteadily to his feet. Instantly, the shattered world of the Operations Floor began to spin. Gabriel placed his hands on his knees until the merry-go-round stopped. The right side of his head was warm and wet. Blood flowed into his eyes.

He wiped it away and returned to the window where he had seen the approaching truck. There were no bodies and very little debris on this side of the building; everything had been blown inward. Nor were there any windows or outer walls. The entire southern facade of the National Counterterrorism Center had been shorn away. Gabriel moved cautiously toward the edge of the precipice and looked down. In the forecourt was a deep crater, far deeper than the one that had been left outside the Weinberg Center in Paris, a meteor strike. The skyway connecting the NCTC to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was gone. So was the entire northern face of the building. Inside its shattered conference rooms and offices not a single light burned. A survivor waved to Gabriel from the cliff’s edge of an upper floor. Gabriel, not knowing what else to do, waved back.

The traffic on the Beltway had ground to a halt, white headlights on the inner loop, red taillights on the outer. Gabriel patted the front of his jacket and discovered he was still in possession of his mobile phone. He removed it and thumbed it into life. He still had service. He dialed Mikhail’s number and raised the phone to his ear, but there was only silence. Or maybe Mikhail was speaking and Gabriel couldn’t hear. He realized he had heard nothing since regaining consciousness — not a siren, not a groan of pain or cry for help, not his footfalls through the rubble. He was in a silent world. He wondered if the condition were permanent and thought about all the sounds he would never hear again. He would never hear the nonsensical chatter of his children or thrill to the arias of La Bohème. Nor would he hear the soft bristly tap of a Winsor & Newton Series 7 paintbrush against a Caravaggio. But it was the sound of Chiara singing he would miss the most. Gabriel always joked that he had fallen in love with Chiara the first time she made him fettuccini and mushrooms, but it wasn’t true. He lost his heart to her the first time he heard her singing a silly Italian love song when she thought no one was listening.

Gabriel killed the connection to Mikhail and picked his way through the debris of what a moment ago had been the Operations Floor. He had to give Saladin credit; it was a masterstroke. Honor was due. The dead were everywhere. The astonished survivors, the lucky ones, were hauling themselves laboriously from the rubble. Gabriel located the spot where he had been standing when he heard the first explosion. Paul Rousseau was bleeding heavily from numerous lacerations and cradling an obviously broken arm. Fareed Barakat, the ultimate survivor, seemed to have come through it unscathed. Looking only mildly annoyed, he was brushing the dust from his handmade English suit. Adrian Carter was still holding a phone to his ear. He didn’t seem to realize the receiver was no longer connected to its base.

Gabriel gently removed the phone from Carter’s grasp and asked whether Safia Bourihane was dead. He could not hear the sound of his own voice, nor could he hear Carter’s response. It was as if someone had pressed the mute button. He looked toward the giant video screen, but the screen was gone. And then he realized that Natalie was gone, too.

63 GEORGETOWN

SAFIA CLEARLY KNEW WHERE SHE was going. After making the right turn onto M Street, she blew through the red light at the base of Thirty-fourth and then swerved hard into Bank Street, a cobbled alley that climbed the gentle hill up to Prospect. Ignoring the stop sign, she made a right, and then another left onto Thirty-third. It was a one-way street running south-to-north up the length of Georgetown’s West Village, with four-way stops at every block. Safia flashed across N Street without slowing. She was holding the steering wheel tightly with her left hand. Her right, the one with the detonator, was clutching the grip of the shift.

“Are they still behind us?”

“Who?”

“The Americans!” Safia shouted.

“What Americans?”

“The ones who’ve been watching us at the hotel. The ones who followed us to the shopping mall.”

“No one followed us.”

“Of course they did! And they were waiting for us just now in the parking lot of the hotel. But he tricked them.”

“Who tricked them?”

“Saladin, of course. Can’t you hear the sirens? The attack has begun.”

Natalie could hear them. There were sirens everywhere.

“Alhamdulillah,” she said softly.

Ahead, an elderly man entered the crosswalk at O Street, trailed by a basset hound on a leash. Safia slammed on the horn with her detonator hand, and both man and canine moved out of the car’s path. Natalie glanced over her shoulder. The man and the dog appeared uninjured. Far behind them, a car rounded the corner at Prospect Street at high speed.

“Where did we attack them?” asked Natalie.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s my target?”

“In a minute.”

“What’s yours?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Alarm flashed on Safia’s face. “They’re coming!”

“Who?”

“The Americans.”

Safia put her foot to the floor and raced across P Street. Then, at Volta Place, she made another right turn.

“There’s a French restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue called Bistrot Lepic. It’s about a kilometer up the street, on the left side. Some diplomats from the French Embassy are having a private dinner there tonight with people from the Foreign Ministry from Paris. It will be very crowded. Walk as far into the restaurant as you can and hit your detonator. If they try to stop you at the door, do it there.”

“Is it just me, or are there others?”

“Just you. We’re part of the second wave of attacks.”

“What’s your target?”

“I told you once already, it doesn’t matter.”

Safia braked hard at Wisconsin Avenue.

“Get out.”

“But—”

“Get out!” Safia waved her clenched right fist in Natalie’s face, the fist that held the detonator. “Get out or I’ll kill us both right now!”

Natalie climbed out and watched the Toyota speed south on Wisconsin Avenue. Then she looked up the length of Volta Place. No traffic moved in the street. It seemed Safia had managed to elude their pursuers. Once again, Natalie was alone.

She stood frozen with indecision for a moment, listening to the screaming of the sirens. They all seemed to be converging at the southern end of Georgetown, near the Potomac. Finally, she headed in the opposite direction, toward her target, and started looking for a telephone. And all the while she was wondering why Safia had insisted she wear the suicide vest with the red stitch in the zipper.

Five critical minutes would elapse before the FBI managed to find the car. It was parked at the corner of Wisconsin and Prospect, illegally and very badly. The right-front wheel was on the curb, the driver’s-side door was ajar, the headlights were on, the engine was running. More important, the two female occupants, one dark-haired, one blond, subjects one and two, had vanished.

64 CAFÉ MILANO, GEORGETOWN

SAFIA WAS SLIGHTLY OUT OF breath when she entered Café Milano. With a martyr’s serenity, she walked across the foyer to the maître d’ stand.

“Al-Farouk,” she said.

“Mr. al-Farouk has already arrived. Right this way, please.”

Safia followed the maître d’ into the main dining room, and then to the table where Saladin sat alone. He rose slowly on his wounded leg and kissed her lightly on each cheek.

“Asma, my love,” he said in perfect English. “You look absolutely lovely.”

She didn’t understand what he was saying, and so she merely smiled and sat down. While reclaiming his own seat, Saladin shot a glance toward the man sitting at the end of the bar. The man with dark hair and eyeglasses who had entered the restaurant a few minutes after Saladin. The man, thought Saladin, who had taken great interest in Safia’s arrival and who was holding a mobile phone tightly to his ear. It could mean only one thing: Saladin’s presence in Washington had not gone unnoticed.

He raised his eyes toward the television over the bar. It was tuned to CNN. The network was only just beginning to grasp the scope of the calamity that had befallen Washington. There had been attacks at the National Counterterrorism Center, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Kennedy Center. The network was also hearing reports, unconfirmed, of attacks on a number of restaurants in the Washington Harbor complex. The patrons of Café Milano were clearly on edge. Most were staring at their mobiles, and about a dozen were gathered around the bar, watching the television. But not the man with dark hair and glasses. He was trying his best not to stare at Safia. It was time, thought Saladin, to be leaving.

He placed his hand lightly on Safia’s and stared into her hypnotic eyes. In Arabic, he asked, “You dropped her where I told you?”

She nodded.

“The Americans followed you?”

“They tried. They seemed confused.”

“With good reason,” he said with a glance toward the television.

“It went well?”

“Better than expected.”

A waiter approached. Saladin waved him away.

“Do you see the man at the end of the bar?” he asked quietly.

“The one who’s talking on the phone?”

Saladin nodded. “Have you ever seen him before?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He’s going to try to stop you. Don’t let him.”

There was a moment’s silence. Saladin granted himself the luxury of one last look around the room. This was the reason he had made the risky journey to Washington, to see with his own eyes fear on American faces. For too long, only Muslims had been afraid. Now the Americans would know what it was like to taste fear. They had destroyed Saladin’s country. Tonight, Saladin had begun the process of destroying theirs.

He looked at Safia. “You’re ready?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“After I leave, wait one minute exactly.” He gave her hand a soft squeeze of encouragement and then smiled. “Don’t be afraid, my love. You won’t feel a thing. And then you’ll see the face of Allah.”

“Peace be with you,” she said.

“And with you.”

With that, Saladin rose and, taking up his cane, limped past the man with dark hair and glasses, into the foyer.

“Is everything all right, Mr. al-Farouk?” asked the maître d’.

“I have to make a phone call, and I don’t want to disturb your other guests.”

“I’m afraid they’re already disturbed.”

“So it would seem.”

Saladin went into the night. On the redbrick pavement, he paused for a moment to savor the wail of sirens. A black Lincoln Town Car waited curbside. Saladin lowered himself into the backseat and instructed the driver, a member of his network, to move forward a few yards. Inside the restaurant, surrounded by more than a hundred people, a woman sat alone, staring at her wristwatch. And though she did not realize it, her lips were moving.

65 WISCONSIN AVENUE, GEORGETOWN

AFTER CROSSING Q STREET, NATALIE encountered two Georgetown students, both women, both terrified. Over the scream of a passing ambulance, she explained that she had been robbed and needed to call her boyfriend for help. The women said that the university had sent out an alert ordering all students to return to their dorms and residences and to shelter in place. But when Natalie made a second appeal, one of the women, the taller of the two, handed over an iPhone. Natalie held the device in the palm of her left hand, and with her right, the one that held the detonator switch, entered the number she was supposed to use only in an extreme emergency. It rang on the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. A male voice answered in terse Hebrew.

“I need to speak to Gabriel right away,” Natalie said in the same language.

“Who is this?”

She hesitated and then spoke her given name for the first time in many months.

“Where are you?”

“Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown.”

“Are you safe?”

“Yes, I think so, but I’m wearing a suicide vest.”

“It might be booby-trapped. Don’t try to take it off.”

“I won’t.”

“Stand by.”

Twice the man on the Operations Desk in Tel Aviv tried to transfer the call to Gabriel’s mobile. Twice there was no answer.

“There seems to be a problem.”

“Where is he?”

“The National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia.”

“Try again.”

A police cruiser flashed past, siren screaming. The two Georgetown students were growing impatient.

“Just a minute,” Natalie said to them in English.

“Please hurry,” replied the owner of the phone.

The man in Tel Aviv tried Gabriel’s phone again. It rang several times before a male voice answered in English.

“Who is this?” asked Natalie.

“My name is Adrian Carter. I work for the CIA.”

“Where’s Gabriel?”

“He’s here with me.”

“I need to speak to him.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“Is this Natalie?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

She answered.

“Are you still wearing your vest?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t touch it.”

“I won’t.”

“Can you keep this phone?”

“No.”

“We’re going to bring you in. Walk north on Wisconsin Avenue. Stay on the west side of the street.”

“There’s going to be another attack. Safia is somewhere close.”

“We know exactly where she is. Get moving.”

The connection went dead. Natalie returned the phone and headed north up Wisconsin Avenue.

In the ruins of the National Counterterrorism Center, Carter managed to communicate to Gabriel that Natalie was safe and would momentarily be in FBI custody. Deafened, bleeding, Gabriel had no time for celebration. Mikhail was still inside Café Milano, not twenty feet from the table where Safia Bourihane sat alone, her thumb on her detonator, her eyes on her watch. Carter raised the phone to his ear and again ordered Mikhail to leave the restaurant at once. Gabriel still couldn’t hear what Carter was saying. He only hoped that Mikhail was listening.

Like Saladin, Mikhail surveyed the interior of Café Milano’s elegant dining room before rising. He, too, saw fear on the faces around him, and like Saladin he knew that in a moment many people would die. Saladin had had the power to stop the attack. Mikhail did not. Even if he was armed, which he was not, the chances of stopping the attack were slim. Safia’s thumb was atop the detonator switch, and when she was not staring at her watch, she was staring at Mikhail. Nor was it possible to issue any sort of warning. A warning would only cause a panicked rush to the door, and more would die. Better to let the vest explode with the patrons as they were. The lucky ones at the outer tables might survive. The ones closest to Safia, the ones who had been granted the coveted tables, would be spared the awful knowledge that they were about to die.

Slowly, Mikhail slid from the barstool and stood. He didn’t dare try to leave the restaurant through the front entrance; his path would take him far too close to Safia’s table. Instead, he moved calmly down the length of the bar toward the toilets. The door to the men’s room was locked. He twisted the flimsy latch until it snapped and went inside. A thirtysomething man with gelled hair was admiring himself in the mirror.

“What’s your problem, man?”

“You’ll know in a minute.”

The man tried to leave, but Mikhail seized his arm.

“Don’t go. You’ll thank me later.”

Mikhail closed the door and pulled the man to the ground.

From his vantage point on Prospect Street, Eli Lavon had witnessed a series of increasingly unsettling developments. The first was the arrival at Café Milano of Safia Bourihane, followed a few minutes later by the departure of the large Arab known as Omar al-Farouk. The large Arab was now in the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car, which was parked about fifty yards from Café Milano’s entrance, behind a white Honda Pilot. What’s more, Lavon had called Gabriel several times at the NCTC without success. Subsequently, he had learned, from King Saul Boulevard and the car radio, that the NCTC had been attacked by a pair of truck bombs. Lavon now feared that his oldest friend in the world might be dead, this time for real. And he feared that, in a few seconds, Mikhail might be dead, too.

Just then, Lavon received a message from King Saul Boulevard reporting that Gabriel had been slightly injured in the attack at the NCTC but was still very much alive. Lavon’s relief was short-lived, however, for at that same instant the thunderclap of an explosion shook Prospect Street. The Lincoln Town Car eased sedately from the curb and slid past Lavon’s window. Then four armed men spilled from the Honda Pilot and started running toward the wreckage of Café Milano.

66 WISCONSIN AVENUE, GEORGETOWN

NATALIE HEARD THE EXPLOSION as she was approaching R Street and knew at once it was Safia. She turned and gazed down the length of Wisconsin Avenue, with its graceful rightward bend toward M Street, and saw hundreds of panicked people walking north. It reminded her of the scenes in Washington after 9/11, the tens of thousands of people who had simply left their offices in the world’s most powerful city and started walking. Once again, Washington was under siege. This time, the terrorists weren’t armed with airplanes, only explosives and guns. But the result, it seemed, was far more terrifying.

Natalie turned and joined the exodus moving north. She was growing weary beneath the dead weight of the suicide vest, and the weight of her own failure. She had saved the life of the very monster who had conceived and plotted this carnage, and after her arrival in America she had been unable to uncover a single piece of intelligence about the targets, the other terrorists, or the timing of the attack. She had been kept in the dark for a reason, she was certain of it.

All at once there was a burst of gunfire from the same direction as the explosion. Natalie hurried across R Street and continued north, keeping to the west side of the street as the man named Adrian Carter had instructed. We’re going to bring you in, he had said. But he had not told her how. Suddenly, she was pleased to be wearing the red jacket. She might not be able to see them, but they would see her.

North of R Street, Wisconsin Avenue sank for a block or two before rising into the neighborhoods of Burleith and Glover Park. Ahead, Natalie saw a blue-and-yellow awning that read BISTROT LEPIC & WINE BAR. It was the restaurant Safia had ordered her to bomb. She stopped and peered through the window. It was a charming place — small, warm, inviting, very Parisian. Safia had said it would be crowded, but that wasn’t the case. Nor did the people sitting at the tables look like French diplomats or officials from the Foreign Ministry in Paris. They looked like Americans. And, like everyone else in Washington, they looked frightened.

Just then, Natalie heard someone calling her name — not her own name but the name of the woman she had become in order to prevent a night like this. She turned sharply and saw that a car had pulled up at the curb behind her. At the wheel was a woman with open-air skin. It was Megan, the woman from the FBI.

Natalie crawled into the front seat as though she were crawling into the arms of her mother. The weight of the suicide vest pinned her to the seat; the detonator felt like a live animal in her palm. The car swung a U-turn and joined the northward exodus from Georgetown, as all around the sirens wailed. Natalie covered her ears, but it was no use.

“Please turn on some music,” she begged.

The woman switched on the car radio, but there was no music to be found, only the terrible news. The National Counterterrorism Center, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, Harbor Place: the death toll, it was feared, could approach one thousand. Natalie was able to bear it for only a minute or two. She reached for the radio’s power button but stopped when she felt a sharp pain in her upper arm, like the bite of a viper. Then she looked at the woman and saw that she, too, was holding something in her right hand. But it was not a detonator switch upon which her thumb rested. It was the plunger of a syringe.

Instantly, Natalie’s vision blurred. The woman’s weather-beaten face receded; a passing police cruiser left time-lapse streaks of red and blue on the night. Natalie called out a name, the only name she could recall, before a darkness descended upon her. It was like the blackness of her abaya. She saw herself walking through a great Arabian house of many rooms and courts. And in the last room, standing in the molten light of an oculus, was Saladin.

67 CAFÉ MILANO, GEORGETOWN

FOR A FEW SECONDS AFTER the explosion there was only silence. It was like the silence of the crypt, thought Mikhail, the silence of death. Finally, there was a moan, and then a cough, and then the first screams of agony and terror. Soon there were others, many others — the limbless, the blind, the ones who would never be able to gaze into a mirror again. A few more would surely die tonight, but many would survive. They would see their children again, they would dance at weddings and weep at funerals. And perhaps one day they would be able to eat in a restaurant again without the nagging fear that the woman at the next table was wearing a suicide vest. It was the fear that all Israelis had lived with during the dark days of the Second Intifada. And now, thanks to a man called Saladin, that same fear had come to America.

Mikhail reached for the door latch but stopped when he heard the first gunshot. He realized then that his phone was vibrating in his coat pocket. He checked the screen. It was Eli Lavon.

“Where the hell are you?”

In a whisper, Mikhail told him.

“Four men with guns just entered the restaurant.”

“I can hear them.”

“You’ve got to get out of there.”

“Where’s Natalie?”

“The FBI is about to pick her up.”

Mikhail returned the phone to his pocket. From beyond the lavatory’s thin door came another gunshot — large caliber, military grade. Then there were two more: crack, crack. . With each shot, another scream went silent. Clearly, the terrorists were determined to see that no one left Café Milano alive. These were no video-game jihadis. They were well trained, disciplined. They were moving methodically through the ruins of the restaurant in search of survivors. And eventually, thought Mikhail, their search would bring them to the lavatory door.

The American man with gelled hair was shaking with fear. Mikhail looked around for something he might use as a weapon but saw nothing suitable. Then, with a sideways nod of his head, he instructed the American to conceal himself in the stall. Somehow, the restaurant still had power. Mikhail killed the lights, muffling the snap of the switch, and pressed his back against the wall next to the door. In the sudden darkness, he vowed that he would not die this night in a toilet in Georgetown, with a man he did not know. It would be an ignoble way for a soldier to depart this world, he thought, even a soldier of the secret variety.

From beyond the door there was the sharp crack of another gunshot, closer than the last, and another scream went silent. Then there were footsteps outside in the corridor. Mikhail flexed the fingers of his lethal right hand. Open the door, you bastard, he thought. Open the fucking door.

It was at that same instant that Gabriel realized his hearing loss was not permanent. The first sound he heard was the same sound that many Washingtonians would associate with that night, the sound of sirens. The first responders were rolling up Tysons McLean Drive toward what had once been the security checkpoint of the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Inside the ruined buildings, the less seriously injured were tending to the gravely wounded in a desperate attempt to stem bleeding and save lives. Fareed Barakat was looking after Paul Rousseau, and Adrian Carter was looking after what remained of Gabriel’s operation. With borrowed mobile phones he had reestablished contact with Langley, FBI Headquarters, and the White House Situation Room. Washington was in chaos, and the federal government was struggling to keep pace with events. Thus far, there had been confirmed attacks at Liberty Crossing, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, Washington Harbor, and Café Milano. In addition, there were reports of more attacks along M Street. It was feared that hundreds of people, perhaps as many as a thousand, had been killed.

At that moment, however, Gabriel was focused on only two people: Mikhail Abramov and Natalie Mizrahi. Mikhail was trapped in the men’s room at Café Milano. Natalie was walking north on the west side of Wisconsin Avenue.

“Why hasn’t the FBI brought her in?” he snapped at Carter.

“They can’t seem to find her.”

“How hard can it be to find a woman wearing a suicide vest and a red jacket?”

“They’re looking.”

“Tell them to look harder.”

The door crashed open, the gun entered first. Mikhail recognized the silhouette. It was an AR-15, no scope. He seized the warm barrel with his left hand and pulled, and a man came with it. In the ruined dining room, he had been a jihadist holy warrior, but in the darkened confines of the men’s room, he was now helpless. With the edge of his right hand, Mikhail hit him twice in the side of the neck. The first blow caught a bit of jawbone, but the second was a direct hit that caused something to crack and snap. The man went down without a sound. Mikhail lifted the AR-15 from the limp hands, shot him through the head, and spun into the corridor.

Directly in front of him, in the back corner of the dining room, one of the terrorists was about to execute a woman whose arm had been shorn off at the shoulder. Hidden in the darkened corridor, Mikhail put the terrorist down with a head shot and then moved cautiously forward. There were no other terrorists in the main dining room, but in a smaller room at the back of the restaurant, a terrorist was executing survivors huddled against a wall, one by one, like an SS man moving along the edge of a burial pit. Mikhail shot the terrorist cleanly through the chest, saving a dozen lives.

Just then, Mikhail heard another gunshot from an adjoining room — the private dining room he had seen when he entered the restaurant. He moved past the toppled barstool where he had been seated a moment earlier, past the upended table splattered with the viscera of Safia Bourihane, and entered the foyer. The maître d’ and the two hostesses were all dead. It appeared as though they had survived the bombing, only to be shot to death.

Mikhail crept silently past the corpses and peered into the private dining room, where the fourth terrorist was in the process of executing twenty well-dressed men and women. Too late, the terrorist realized that the man standing in the doorway of the private dining room was not a friend. Mikhail shot him through the chest. Then he fired a second shot, a head shot, to make certain he was dead.

It had all taken less than a minute, and Mikhail’s mobile phone had been vibrating intermittently the entire time. Now he snatched it from his pocket and peered at the screen. It was a voice call from Gabriel.

“Please tell me you’re alive.”

“I’m just fine, but four members of ISIS are now in paradise.”

“Grab their cell phones and as much hardware as you can carry and get out of there.”

“What’s going on?”

The connection went dead. Mikhail searched the pockets of the dead terrorist lying at his feet and found a Samsung Galaxy disposable phone. He found identical Samsungs on the dead terrorists in the main dining room and the room in the back, but the one in the toilet apparently preferred Apple products. Mikhail had all four phones in his possession when he slipped from the restaurant’s rear service door. He also had two AR-15s and four additional magazines of ammunition, for what reason he did not know. He hurried down a darkened alleyway, praying that he did not encounter a SWAT team, and emerged onto Potomac Street. He followed it south to Prospect, where Eli Lavon was sitting behind the wheel of a Buick.

“What took you so long?” he asked as Mikhail fell into the front passenger seat.

“Gabriel gave me a shopping list.” Mikhail laid the AR-15s and the magazines on the floor of the backseat. “What the fuck is going on?”

“The FBI can’t find Natalie.”

“She’s wearing a red jacket and a suicide vest.”

Lavon swung a U-turn and headed west across Georgetown.

“You’re going the wrong way,” said Mikhail. “Wisconsin Avenue is behind us.”

“We’re not going to Wisconsin Avenue.”

“Why not?”

“She’s gone, Mikhail. Gone gone.”

68 KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV

THE UNIT THAT TOILED IN Room 414C of King Saul Boulevard had no official name because, officially, it did not exist. Those who had been briefed on its work referred to it only as the Minyan, for the unit was ten in number and exclusively male in gender. With but a few keystrokes, they could darken a city, blind an air traffic control network, or make the centrifuges of an Iranian nuclear-enrichment plant spin wildly out of control. Three Samsungs and an iPhone weren’t going to be much of a challenge.

Mikhail and Eli Lavon uploaded the contents of the four phones from the Israeli Embassy at 8:42 p.m. local time. By nine o’clock Washington time, the Minyan had determined that the four phones had spent a great deal of time during the past few months at the same address on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia. In fact, they had been there at the same time earlier that evening and had traveled into Washington at the same speed, along the same route. Furthermore, all the phones had placed numerous calls to a local moving company based at the address. The Minyan delivered the intelligence to Uzi Navot, who in turn forwarded it to Gabriel. By then, he and Adrian Carter had left the bombed-out NCTC and were in the CIA’s Global Ops Center at Langley. Of Carter, Gabriel asked a single question.

“Who owns Dominion Movers in Alexandria?”

Fifteen precious minutes elapsed before Carter had an answer. He gave Gabriel a name and an address and told him to do whatever it took to find Natalie alive. Carter’s words meant little; as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had no power to let a foreign intelligence service operate with impunity on American soil. Only the president could grant such authority, and at that moment the president had bigger things to worry about than a missing Israeli spy. America was under attack. And like it or not, Gabriel Allon was going to be the first to retaliate.

At twenty minutes past nine, Carter dropped Gabriel at the Agency’s main security gate and departed quickly, as though fleeing the scene of a crime, or of a crime soon to be committed. Gabriel stood alone in the darkness, watching the ambulances and rescue vehicles hurtling along Route 123 toward Liberty Crossing, waiting. It was a fitting way for his career in the field to end, he thought. The waiting. . Always the waiting. . Waiting for a plane or a train. Waiting for a source. Waiting for the sun to rise after a night of killing. Waiting for Mikhail and Eli Lavon at the entrance of the CIA so that he could begin his search for a woman he had asked to penetrate the world’s most dangerous terrorist group. She had done it. Or had she? Perhaps Saladin had been suspicious of her from the beginning. Perhaps he had granted her entrée into his court in order to penetrate and mislead Western intelligence. And perhaps he had dispatched her to America to act as a decoy, a shiny object that would occupy the Americans’ attention while the real terrorists — the men who worked for a moving company in Alexandria, Virginia — engaged in their final preparations unmolested. How else to explain the fact that Safia had withheld Natalie’s target until the final minute? Natalie had no target. Natalie was the target.

He thought of the man he had seen in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. The large Arab named Omar al-Farouk who walked with a limp. The large Arab who had left Café Milano a few minutes before Safia detonated her suicide vest. Was he truly Saladin? It didn’t matter. Whoever he was, he would soon be dead. So would everyone else associated with Natalie’s disappearance. Gabriel would make it his life’s work to hunt them all down and destroy ISIS before ISIS could destroy the Middle East and what remained of the civilized world. He suspected he would have a willing accomplice in the American president. ISIS was now two hours from Indiana.

Just then, Gabriel’s mobile phone pulsed. He read the message, returned the phone to his pocket, and walked to the edge of Route 123. A few seconds later a Buick Regal appeared. It stopped only long enough for Gabriel to slide into the backseat. On the floor were two AR-15s and several magazines of ammunition. The Second Amendment, thought Gabriel, definitely had its advantages. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw Mikhail’s frozen eyes looking back at him.

“Which way, boss?”

“Take the GW Parkway back toward Key Bridge,” said Gabriel. “The Beltway is a fucking mess.”

69 HUME, VIRGINIA

NATALIE AWOKE WITH THE SENSATION of having slept an eternity. Her mouth seemed to be stuffed with cotton, her head had lolled sideways against the cool of the window. Here and there, over front porches and in lace-curtained windows, a light faintly burned, but otherwise the atmosphere was one of sudden abandonment. It was as if the inhabitants of this place, having learned of the attacks in Washington, had packed their belongings and taken to the hills.

Her head throbbed with a hangover’s dull ache. She tried to raise it, but could not. Casting her eyes to the left, she watched the woman drive, the woman she had mistakenly believed to be Megan from the FBI. She was holding the wheel with her right hand; in her left was a gun. The time, according to the dashboard clock, was 9:22. Natalie, through the fog of the drug, tried to reconstruct the evening’s events — the second car in the parking garage, the wild ride into Georgetown, the quaint little French restaurant that was supposed to be her target, the bomb vest with the red stitch in the zipper. The detonator was still in her right hand. Lightly, she ran the tip of her forefinger over the switch.

Boom, she thought, recalling her bomb training in Palmyra. And now you are on your way to paradise. .

A church appeared on Natalie’s right. Soon after, they came to a deserted intersection. The woman came to a complete stop before turning, as instructed by the navigation system, onto a road with a philosopher’s name. It was very narrow, with no yellow centerline. The darkness was absolute; there seemed to be no world at all beyond the patch of asphalt illuminated by the car’s headlights. The navigation system grew suddenly confused. It advised the woman to make a U-turn if possible, and when no turn was forthcoming it fell into a reproachful sulk.

The woman followed the road for another half mile before turning into a dirt-and-gravel track. It bore them across a pasture, over a ridge of wooded hills, and into a small dell, where a timbered A-frame cottage overlooked a black pond. Lights burned within the cottage, and parked outside were three vehicles — a Lincoln Town Car, a Honda Pilot, and a BMW sedan. The woman pulled up behind the BMW and switched off the engine. Natalie, her head against the glass, feigned a coma.

“Can you walk?” asked the woman.

Natalie was silent.

“I saw your eyes moving. I know you’re awake.”

“What did you give me?”

“Propofol.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I’m a nurse.” The woman climbed out of the car and opened Natalie’s door. “Get out.”

“I can’t.”

“Propofol is a short-duration anesthetic,” lectured the woman pedantically. “Patients who are given it can typically walk on their own a few minutes after awakening.”

When Natalie did not move, the woman pointed the gun at her head. Natalie raised her right hand and placed her thumb lightly atop the detonator switch.

“You haven’t got the guts,” said the woman. Then she seized Natalie’s wrist and dragged her from the car.

The door of the cottage was a walk of perhaps twenty yards, but the leaden weight of the suicide vest, and the lingering effects of the propofol, made it seem more like a mile. The room Natalie entered was rustic and quaint. Consequently, its male occupants looked obscenely out of place. Four wore black tactical suits and were armed with combat assault rifles. The fifth wore an elegant business suit and was warming his hands before a wood-burning stove. His back was turned to Natalie. He was well over six feet tall and his shoulders were broad. Still, he looked vaguely infirm, as though he were recovering from a recent injury.

At length, the man in the elegant business suit turned. His hair was neatly groomed and combed, his face was clean-shaven. His dark brown eyes, however, were exactly as Natalie remembered them. So, too, was his confident smile. He took a step toward her, favoring the damaged leg, and stopped.

“Maimonides,” he said pleasantly. “So good to see you again.”

Natalie clutched the detonator tightly in her hand. Beneath her feet the earth burned.

70 ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

IT WAS A SMALL DUPLEX, two floors, aluminum siding. The unit on the left was painted granite gray. The one on the right, Qassam el-Banna’s, was the color of a shirt that had been dried too many times on a radiator. Each unit had a single window on the ground floor and a single window on the second. A chain-link fence divided the front yard into separate plots. The one on the left was a showpiece, but Qassam’s looked as though it had been chewed bare by goats.

“Obviously,” observed Eli Lavon darkly from the backseat of the Buick, “he hasn’t had much time for gardening.”

They were parked on the opposite side of the street, outside a duplex of identical construction and upkeep. In the space in front of the gray-white duplex was an Acura sedan. It still had dealer plates.

“Nice car,” said Lavon. “What’s the husband drive?”

“A Kia,” said Gabriel.

“I don’t see a Kia.”

“Neither do I.”

“Wife drives an Acura, husband drives a Kia — what’s wrong with this picture?”

Gabriel offered no explanation.

“What’s the wife’s name?” asked Lavon.

“Amina.”

“Egyptian?”

“Apparently so.”

“Kid?”

“Boy.”

“How old?”

“Two and a half.”

“So he won’t remember what’s about to happen.”

“No,” agreed Gabriel. “He won’t remember.”

A car moved past in the street. The driver had the look of an indigenous South American — a Bolivian, maybe Peruvian. He seemed not to notice the three Israeli intelligence operatives sitting in the parked Buick Regal across the street from the house owned by an Egyptian jihadi who had slipped through the cracks of America’s vast post–9/11 security structure.

“What did Qassam do before he got into the moving business?”

“IT.”

“Why are so many of them in IT?”

“Because they don’t have to study un-Islamic subjects like English literature or Italian Renaissance painting.”

“All the things that make life interesting.”

“They aren’t interested in life, Eli. Only death.”

“Think he left his computers behind?”

“I certainly hope so.”

“What if he smashed his hard drives?”

Gabriel was silent. Another car moved past in the street, another South American behind the wheel. America, he thought, had its banlieues, too.

“How are you going to play it?” asked Lavon.

“I’m not going to knock on the door and invite myself in for a cup of tea.”

“But no rough stuff, though.”

“No,” said Gabriel. “No rough stuff.”

“You always say that.”

“And?”

“There’s always rough stuff.”

Gabriel picked up one of the AR-15s and checked to make sure it was properly loaded.

“Front door or back?” asked Lavon.

“I don’t do back doors.”

“What if they have a dog?”

“Bad swing thought, Eli.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Stay in the car.”

Without another word, Gabriel climbed out and started swiftly across the street, gun in one hand, Mikhail at his side. It was funny, thought Lavon, watching him, but even after all these years he still moved like the boy of twenty-two who had served as Israel’s angel of vengeance after Munich. He scaled the chain-link fence with a straddling sidestep and then hurled himself toward the el-Bannas’ front door. There was a sharp splintering of wood, followed by a female scream, abruptly smothered. Then the door slammed shut and the lights of the house went dark. Lavon slid behind the wheel and surveyed the quiet street. So much for no rough stuff, he thought. There was always rough stuff.

71 HUME, VIRGINIA

NATALIE’S BODY SEEMED TO LIQUEFY with fear. She clutched the detonator tightly in her hand, lest it slip from her grasp and sink like a coin to the bottom of a wishing well. Inwardly, she reviewed the elements of her fabricated curriculum vitae. She was Leila from Sumayriyya, Leila who loved Ziad. At a rally in the Place de la République, she had told a young Jordanian named Nabil that she wanted to punish the West for its support of Israel. Nabil had given her name to Jalal Nasser, and Jalal had given her to Saladin. Inside the global jihadist movement, a story such as hers was commonplace. But it was just that, a story, and somehow Saladin knew it.

But how long had he known? From the beginning? No, thought Natalie, it wasn’t possible. Saladin’s lieutenants would never have allowed her to be in the same room with him if they suspected her loyalty. Nor would they have placed his fate in her hands. But they had entrusted her with Saladin’s life, and to her shame she had preserved it. And now she stood before him with a bomb strapped to her body and a detonator in her right hand. We don’t do suicide missions, Gabriel had said after her return from the caliphate. We don’t trade our lives for theirs. She placed her thumb atop the trigger switch and, testing the resistance, pressed it lightly. Saladin, watching her, smiled.

“You are very brave, Maimonides,” he said to her in Arabic. “But then I always knew that.”

He reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Natalie, fearing he was reaching for a gun, pressed harder on the switch. But it was not a gun, it was a phone. He tapped the screen a few times, and the device emitted a sharp hissing sound. Natalie realized after a few seconds that the sound was water rushing into a basin. The first voice she heard was her own.

“Do you know who that woman is?”

“How did she get into the country?”

“On a false passport.”

“Where did she come in?”

“New York.”

“Kennedy or Newark?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did she get down to Washington?”

“The train.”

“What’s the name of the passport?”

“Asma Doumaz.”

“Have you been given a target?”

“No. But she’s been given hers. It’s a suicide operation.”

“Do you know her target?”

“No.”

“Have you met any other members of the attack cells?”

“No.”

“Where’s your phone?”

“She took it from me. Don’t try to send me any messages.”

“Get out of here.”

Saladin, with a tap on the screen, silenced the recording. Then he regarded Natalie for several unbearable seconds. There was no reproach or anger in his expression. It was the gaze of a professional.

“Who do you work for?” he asked at last, again addressing her in Arabic.

“I work for you.” She did not know from what reservoir of pointless courage she drew this response, but it seemed to amuse Saladin. “You are very brave, Maimonides,” he said again. “Too brave for your own good.”

She noticed for the first time that there was a television in the room. It was tuned to CNN. Three hundred invited guests in evening gowns and tuxedos were streaming from the White House East Room under Secret Service escort.

“A night to remember, don’t you think? All the attacks were successful except for one. The target was a French restaurant where many prominent Washingtonians are known to eat. For some reason, the operative chose not to carry out her assignment. Instead, she climbed into a car driven by a woman she believed to be an agent of the FBI.”

He paused to allow Natalie a response, but she remained silent.

“Her treachery posed no threat to the operation,” he continued. “In fact, it proved quite valuable because it allowed us to distract the Americans during the critical final days of the operation. The end game,” he added ominously. “You and Safia were a feint, a deception. I am a soldier of Allah, but a great admirer of Winston Churchill. And it was Churchill who said that in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

He had addressed these remarks to the television screen. Now he turned once more toward Natalie.

“But there was one question we were never able to answer satisfactorily,” he continued. “Whom, exactly, were you working for? Abu Ahmed assumed you were an American, but it didn’t feel like an American operation to me. Quite honestly, I assumed you were British, because as we all know, the British are the very best when it comes to running live agents. But that also turned out not to be the case. You weren’t working for the Americans or the British. You were working for someone else. And tonight you finally told me his name.”

Again, he tapped the screen of his mobile phone, and again Natalie heard a sound like water running into a basin. But it wasn’t water, it was the drone of a car fleeing the chaos of Washington. This time, the only voice she heard was her own. She was speaking Hebrew, and her voice was heavy with sedative.

“Gabriel. . Please help me. . I don’t want to die. .”

Saladin silenced the phone and returned it to the breast pocket of his magnificent suit jacket. Case closed, thought Natalie. Still, there was no anger in his expression, only pity.

“You were a fool to come to the caliphate.”

“No,” said Natalie, “I was a fool to save your life.”

“Why did you?”

“Because you would have died if I hadn’t.”

“And now,” said Saladin, “it is you who will die. The question is, will you die alone, or will you press your detonator and take me with you? I’m wagering you don’t have the courage or the faith to push the button. Only we, the Muslims, have such faith. We are prepared to die for our religion, but not you Jews. You believe in life, but we believe in death. And in any fight, it is those who are prepared to die who will win.” He paused briefly, then said, “Go ahead, Maimonides, make a liar of me. Prove me wrong. Push your button.”

Natalie raised the detonator to her face and stared directly into Saladin’s dark eyes. The trigger button yielded to a slight increase in pressure.

“Don’t you remember your training in Palmyra? We deliberately use a firm trigger to avoid accidents. You have to push it harder.”

She did. There was a click, then silence. Saladin smiled.

“Obviously,” he said, “a malfunction.”

72 ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

AMINA EL-BANNA HAD BEEN A legal resident of the United States for more than five years, but her grasp of English was limited. As a result, Gabriel questioned her in his Arabic, which was limited, too. He did so at the tiny kitchen table with Mikhail hovering in the doorway, and in a voice that was not loud enough to wake the child sleeping upstairs. He did not fly a false flag and claim to be an American, for such a pretense was not possible. Amina el-Banna, an Egyptian from the Nile Delta, knew very well that he was an Israeli, and consequently she feared him. He did nothing to put her mind at ease. Fear was his calling card, and at a time like this, with an agent in the hands of the most violent terrorist group the world had ever known, fear was his only asset.

He explained to Amina el-Banna the facts as he knew them. Her husband was a member of the ISIS terror cell that had just laid waste to Washington. He was no bit player; he was a major operational asset, a planner who had patiently moved the pieces into place and provided cover for the attack cells. In all likelihood, Amina would be charged as an accomplice and spend the rest of her life in jail. Unless, of course, she cooperated.

“How can I help you? I know nothing.”

“Did you know Qassam owned a moving company?”

“Qassam? A moving company?” She shook her head incredulously. “Qassam works in IT.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you tried to call him?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“His phone goes straight to voice mail.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

She gave no answer. Gabriel didn’t need one. She didn’t call the police, he thought, because she thought her husband was an ISIS terrorist.

“Did he make arrangements for you and the child to go to Syria?”

She hesitated, then said, “I told him I wouldn’t go.”

“Wise decision. Are his computers still here?”

She nodded.

“Where?”

She glanced toward the ceiling.

“How many?”

“Two. But they’re locked, and I don’t have the password.”

“Of course you do. Every wife knows her husband’s password, even if her husband is an ISIS terrorist.”

She said nothing more.

“What’s the password?”

“The Shahada.”

“English or Arabic transliteration?”

“English.”

“Spaces or no spaces?”

“No spaces.”

“Let’s go.”

She led him up the narrow stairs, quietly, so as not to wake the child, and opened the door to Qassam el-Banna’s office. It was a counterterrorism officer’s nightmare. Gabriel sat down at one of the computers, awakened it with a small movement of the mouse, and placed his fingers lightly on the keyboard. He typed THEREISNOGODBUTGOD and pressed the return button.

“Shit,” he said softly.

The hard drive had been wiped clean.

He was very good, Qassam, but the ten hackers of the Minyan were much better. Within minutes of Gabriel’s upload, they had discovered the digital traces of Qassam’s documents folder. Inside the folder was another folder, locked and encrypted, filled with documents related to Dominion Movers of Alexandria — and among those documents was a one-year lease agreement for a small property near a town called Hume.

“It’s not far from that old CIA safe house in The Plains,” explained Uzi Navot by telephone. “It’s about an hour from your current location, maybe more. If you drive all that way and she’s not there. .”

Gabriel rang off and dialed Adrian Carter at Langley.

“I need an aircraft with thermal-imaging capability to make a pass over a cottage off Hume Road in Fauquier County. And don’t try to tell me you don’t have one.”

“I don’t. But the FBI does.”

“Can they spare a plane?”

“I’ll find out.”

They could. In fact, the FBI already had one airborne over Liberty Crossing — a Cessna 182T Skylane, owned by a Bureau front company called LCT Research of Reston, Virginia. It took the single-engine aircraft ten minutes to reach Fauquier County and to locate the small A-frame house in a vale north of Hume Road. Inside were the heat signatures of seven individuals. One of the signatures, the smallest, appeared immobile. There were three vehicles parked outside the cottage. All had been recently driven.

“Are there any other heat signatures in that valley?” asked Gabriel.

“Only wildlife,” explained Carter.

“What kind of wildlife?”

“Several deer and a couple of bear.”

“Perfect,” said Gabriel.

“Where are you now?”

Gabriel told him. They were heading west on I-66. They had just passed the Beltway.

“Where’s the closest FBI SWAT or hostage rescue team?” he asked.

“All the available teams have been sent to Washington to deal with the attacks.”

“How long can we keep the Cessna up top?”

“Not long. The Bureau wants it back.”

“Ask them to make one more pass. But not too low. The men inside that house know the sound of a surveillance aircraft when they hear it.”

Gabriel killed the connection and watched the images of American suburbia flashing past his window. In his head, however, there were only numbers, and the numbers did not look good. Seven heat signatures, two AR-15 assault rifles, one veteran of the IDF’s most elite special forces unit, one former assassin who would soon be the chief of Israeli intelligence, one surveillance specialist who never cared for rough stuff, two bears. He looked down at his mobile phone. Distance to destination: fifty-one miles. Time to destination: one hour and seven minutes.

“Faster, Mikhail. You have to drive faster.”

73 HUME, VIRGINIA

SHE WAS TO BE GIVEN no trial, for none was necessary; with a press of her detonator button she had admitted her guilt. There was only the matter of her confession, which would be recorded for dissemination on ISIS’s myriad propaganda platforms, and her execution, which would be by beheading. It might all have been handled quite swiftly were it not for Saladin himself. The brief delay was by no means an act of mercy. Saladin was still a spy at heart. And what a spy craved most was not blood but information.

The success of the attacks on Washington, and the prospect of Natalie’s imminent death, had the effect of loosening his tongue. He acknowledged that, yes, he had served in the Iraqi Mukhabarat under Saddam Hussein. His primary duty, he claimed, was to provide material and logistical support to Palestinian terrorist groups, especially those that rejected absolutely the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. During the Second Intifada he had overseen the payment of lucrative death benefits to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Abu Nidal, he boasted, was a close friend. Indeed, it was Abu Nidal, the most vicious of the so-called rejectionist terrorists, who had given Saladin his code name.

His work required him to become something of an expert on the Israeli secret intelligence service. He developed a grudging admiration for the Office and for Ari Shamron, the master spy who guided it, on and off, for the better part of thirty years. He also came to admire the accomplishments of Shamron’s famous protégé, the legendary assassin and operative named Gabriel Allon.

“And so you can imagine my surprise,” he told Natalie, “to see him walking across the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, and to hear you speak his name.”

After completing his opening remarks, he commenced questioning Natalie on every aspect of the operation — her life prior to joining Israeli intelligence, her recruitment, her training, her insertion into the field. Having been told she would soon face beheading, Natalie had no reason to cooperate other than to delay by a few minutes her inevitable death. It was motive enough, for she knew that her disappearance had not gone unnoticed. Saladin, with his spy’s curiosity, had given her the opportunity to run a little sand through the hourglass. He began by asking her real name. She resisted for several precious minutes, until in a rage he threatened to carve the flesh from her bones with the same knife he would use to take her head.

“Amit,” she said at last. “My name is Amit.”

“Amit what?”

“Meridor.”

“Where are you from?”

“Jaffa.”

“How did you learn to speak Arabic so well?”

“There are many Arabs in Jaffa.”

“And your French?”

“I lived in Paris for several years as a child.”

“Why?”

“My parents worked for the Foreign Ministry.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“A very good one.”

“Who recruited you?”

“No one. I applied to join the Office.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to serve my country.”

“Is this your first operation?”

“No, of course not.”

“Were the French involved in this operation?”

“We never work with other services. We prefer to work alone.”

“Blue and white?” asked Saladin, using one of the slogans of the Israeli military and security establishment.

“Yes,” said Natalie, nodding slowly. “Blue and white.”

Despite the exigencies of the situation, Saladin insisted that her face be properly veiled during her questioning. There was no abaya to be had in the cottage, so they covered her with a sheet stripped from one of the beds. She could only imagine how she looked to them, a faintly comic figure draped in white, but the cloak did have the advantage of privacy. She lied with the full confidence that Saladin could see no telltale trace of deception in her eyes. And she managed to convey a sense of inward calm, even peace, when in truth she was thinking only of the pain she would feel when the blade of the knife bit into her neck. With her vision obscured, her sense of hearing grew acute. She was able to track Saladin’s labored movements around the sitting room of the cottage and to discern the placement of the four armed ISIS terrorists. And she could hear, high above the cottage, the slow lazy circling of a single-engine aircraft. Saladin, she sensed, could hear it, too. He fell silent for a moment until the plane was gone and then resumed his interrogation.

“How were you able to transform yourself so convincingly into a Palestinian?”

“We have a special school.”

“Where?”

“In the Negev.”

“Are there other Office agents who have infiltrated ISIS?”

“Yes, many.”

“What are their names?”

She gave him six — four men, two other women. She said that she did not know the nature of their assignments. She knew only that, high above the little A-frame cottage, the plane had returned. Saladin, she thought, knew it, too. He had one final question. Why? he asked. Why had she saved his life in the house of many rooms and courts near Mosul?

“I wanted to gain your trust,” she answered truthfully.

“You did,” he admitted. “And then you betrayed it. And for that, Maimonides, you will die tonight.”

There was a silence in the room, but not in the sky above. From beneath her death shroud, Natalie asked one final question of her own. How had Saladin known that she was not real? He gave her no answer, for he was listening once again to the drone of the aircraft. She followed the tap and scrape of his slow journey across the room to the front door of the cottage. It was the last she ever heard of him.

He stood for several moments outside in the drive, his face tilted toward the sky. There was no moon but the night was bright with stars and very quiet except for the plane. It took some time for him to locate it, for its wingtip navigation lights were dimmed. Only the beat of its single propeller betrayed its location. It was flying a steady orbit around the little valley, at an altitude of about ten thousand feet. Finally, when it reached the northernmost point, it turned due east, toward Washington, and then disappeared. Instinctively, Saladin believed the plane was trouble. They had failed him only once, his instincts. They had told him that a woman named Leila, a gifted doctor who claimed to be a Palestinian, could be trusted, even loved. Soon, the woman would be given the death she deserved.

His face was still lifted toward the heavens. Yes, the stars were bright this night, but not as bright as the stars of the desert. If he hoped to see them again, he had to leave now. Soon there would be another war — a war that would end with the defeat of the armies of Rome, in a town called Dabiq. There was no way the American president could avoid this war, he thought. Not after tonight.

He climbed into the BMW, started the engine, and entered his destination into the navigation system. It advised him to proceed to a road it recognized. Saladin did so, like the surveillance aircraft, with his lights doused, following the dirt-and-gravel road over the rim of the little valley and across the pasture to Hume Road. The navigation system instructed him to turn to the left and make his way back to I-66. Saladin, trusting his instincts, turned right instead. After a moment he switched on the radio. He smiled. It wasn’t over, he thought. It was only beginning.

74 HUME, VIRGINIA

THE LAST REPORT FROM THE FBI Cessna was the same as the first — seven individuals inside the cottage, three vehicles outside. One of the individuals was entirely stationary, one appeared to be pacing slowly. There were no other human heat signatures in the little valley, only the bears. They were about fifty yards to the north of the cottage. For that reason, among others, Gabriel and Mikhail approached from the south.

A single road led into the valley, the private track leading from Hume Road to the cottage itself. They used it only as a point of reference. They kept to the pastureland, Mikhail leading the way, Gabriel a step behind. The earth was sodden and treacherous with the holes of burrowing animals. Occasionally, Mikhail illuminated their path with the light of his mobile phone, but mainly they moved in darkness.

At the edge of the pasture was a steep hill thick with oak and maple. Fallen tree limbs littered the ground, slowing their pace. Finally, after breasting the ridgeline of the valley, they glimpsed the cottage for the first time. One thing had changed since the departure of the FBI Cessna. There were two vehicles instead of three. Mikhail started down the slope of the hill, Gabriel a step behind.

After Saladin’s abrupt departure, the preparations for Natalie’s execution began in earnest. The white sheet was removed from her head, her hands were bound behind her back. A brief argument ensued among the four men over who would have the honor of removing her head. The tallest of the four prevailed. By his accent, Natalie could tell that he was a Yemeni. Something about his demeanor was vaguely familiar. All at once she realized that she and the Yemeni had been at the camp in Palmyra at the same time. He had worn his hair and beard long then. Now he was clean-shaven and neatly groomed. Were it not for his black tactical suit, he might have been mistaken for a sales associate at the Apple store.

The four men covered their faces, leaving only their pitiless eyes exposed. They made no attempt to alter the striking Americana of the setting — indeed, they seemed to revel in it. Natalie was made to kneel before the camera, which was held by the woman she knew as Megan. It was a real camera, not a cell phone; ISIS was second to none when it came to production value. They ordered Natalie to stare directly into the lens, but she refused, even after the Yemeni struck her viciously across the face. She stared straight ahead, toward the window over the woman’s right shoulder, and tried to think of something, anything, other than the steel blade of the hunting knife in the Yemeni’s right hand.

He stood directly behind her, with the other three men arrayed to his right, and read from a prepared statement, first in Arabic, then in a language that Natalie, after a moment, realized was broken English. It was no matter; the team at ISIS media productions would surely add subtitles. Natalie tried not to listen, focusing her attention instead on the window. Because it was dark outside, the glass was acting as a mirror. She could see the tableau of her execution roughly as it was being framed by the camera — one helpless woman kneeling, three masked men cradling automatic rifles, a Yemeni with a knife speaking no known language. But there was something else in the window, something less distinct than the reflection of Natalie and her four murderers. It was a face. Instantly, she realized it was Mikhail’s. It was odd, she thought. Of all the faces she might conjure from her memory in the moments before her death, his was not the one she had expected.

The Yemeni’s voice rose with an oratorical flourish as he concluded his statement. Natalie took one last look at her reflection in the window, and at the face of the man she might have loved. Are you watching? she thought. What are you waiting for?

She became aware of a silence. It lasted a second or two, it lasted an hour or more — she could not tell. Then the Yemeni set upon her like a wild animal and she toppled sideways. When his hand seized her throat, she prepared herself for the pain of the knife’s first bite. Relax, she told herself. It would hurt less if her muscles and tendons were not constricted. But then there was a sharp crack, which she mistook for the severing of her own neck, and the Yemeni fell beside her. The other three jihadists fell next, one by one, like targets in a shooting gallery. The woman was the last to die. Shot through the head, she collapsed as if a trapdoor had opened beneath her. The camera slipped from her grasp and clattered to the floor. Benevolently, the lens averted its gaze from Natalie’s face. She was beautiful, thought Gabriel, as he cut the binds from her wrists. Even when she was screaming.