The Black Widow

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.