The Black Widow

Many Western ISIS recruits, men and women, have returned home. Some are disillusioned; others remain committed to the cause of the caliphate. And still others are prepared to carry out acts of mass murder and terror in the name of Islam. In the near term, Western Europe faces the greatest threat, in no small measure because of the large and restive Muslim populations living within its open borders. ISIS has no need to insert terrorists into Western Europe because the potential terrorists are already there. They reside in the banlieues of France and the Muslim quarters of Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Malmo, East London, and Luton. At the time of this writing, ISIS had carried out devastating attacks in Paris and Brussels. The perpetrators, for the most part, were born in the West and carried European passports in their pockets. More attacks will surely follow, for the security services of Western Europe have proven themselves woefully unprepared — especially the Belgian Sûreté, which has countenanced the creation of a virtual ISIS safe haven in the heart of Brussels.

The American homeland, however, is ISIS’s ultimate target. While researching this novel, I was struck by the number of times I heard someone say that an attack on a U.S. city is imminent, sooner rather than later. I was struck, too, by the number of times a high-level government official told me that this state of affairs is “the new normal”—that we must live with the fact that bombs will occasionally explode in our airports and subways, that we can no longer expect to be fully safe in a restaurant or a concert hall because of an ideology, and a faith, born of the Middle East. President Barack Obama seemed to express this point of view after the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the siege at the Hypercacher market. Cautioning against overreaction, he dismissed the perpetrators as “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” It was not a deli, of course; it was a kosher market. And the four victims were not “a bunch of folks.” They were Jews. And for that reason alone they were targeted and mercilessly slaughtered.

But how did the West arrive at this place? In the afterword of Portrait of a Spy, I warned what would happen if America and its allies mishandled the so-called Arab Spring. “If the forces of moderation and modernity prevail,” I wrote in April 2011, “it is possible the threat of terrorism will gradually recede. But if radical Muslim clerics and their adherents manage to seize power in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, we might very well look back fondly on the turbulent early years of the twenty-first century as a golden age of relations between Islam and the West.” Unfortunately, the promise of the Arab Spring has been broken, and the Arab world is in turmoil. With the age of oil in retreat, its future is bleak. If history is a guide, a leader of destiny might arise from the chaos. Perhaps he will hail from the biblical cradle of civilization, near the banks of one of the four rivers that flowed from the Garden of Eden. And perhaps, if he is so inclined, he might refer to himself as Saladin.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM INDEBTED TO MY WIFE, Jamie Gangel, who listened patiently while I worked out the plot of The Black Widow and then skillfully edited the enormous pile of paper that spilled from my printer after seven months of intense writing. She has been at my side from the very beginning of the Gabriel Allon series, a warm sun-dappled morning in Georgetown when I first had the idea of turning an Israeli assassin into an art restorer. Now the morose, grieving man we first met in The Kill Artist is the chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. It is an outcome I never could have imagined, and I would not have arrived at it without Jamie’s constant support. Nor would it have been possible without the love of my two children, Lily and Nicholas. Each day, in ways large and small, they remind me that there is more to life than words and paragraphs and clever plot twists.