The Black Widow

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.