The Black Widow

“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.