The Black Widow

DURING ONE OF HIS MANY visits to GID headquarters in Amman, Gabriel had taken possession of several portable hard drives. On them were the contents of Jalal Nasser’s notebook computer, downloaded during his return visits to Jordan or during secret raids on his flat in the Bethnal Green section of East London. The GID had found nothing suspicious — no known jihadists in his contacts, no visits to jihadist Web sites in his browsing history — but Fareed Barakat had agreed to let the Office have a second look. It had taken the cybersleuths of King Saul Boulevard less than an hour to find a clever trapdoor concealed within an innocuous-looking gaming application. It led to a heavily encrypted cellar filled with names, numbers, e-mail addresses, and casing photographs, including several of the Weinberg Center in Paris. There was even a shot of Hannah Weinberg leaving her apartment on the rue Pavée. Gabriel broke the news to Fareed gently, so as not to bruise his valuable partner’s enormous ego.

“Sometimes,” said Gabriel, “it helps to have a fresh pair of eyes.”

“Or a smart Jewish boy with a PhD from Caltech,” said Fareed.

“That, too.”

Among the names that featured most prominently in this hidden trove was Nabil Awad, originally from the northern Jordanian city of Irbid, lately of the Molenbeek district of Brussels. Separated from the elegant city center by an industrial canal, Molenbeek had once been occupied by Roman Catholic Walloons and Protestant Flemings who worked in the district’s many factories and warehouses. The factories were a memory, as were Molenbeek’s original inhabitants. It was now essentially a Muslim village of one hundred thousand people, where the call to prayer echoed five times each day from twenty-two different mosques. Nabil Awad lived on the rue Ransfort, a narrow street lined with terraces of flaking nineteenth-century brick houses that had been carved into crowded tenements. He worked part-time in a copy center in central Brussels, but like many young men who lived in Molenbeek, his primary occupation was radical Islam. Among security professionals, Molenbeek was known as the jihadi capital of Europe.

The neighborhood was not the sort of place for a man with the refined tastes of Fareed Barakat. Nor, for that matter, was the sixty-euro-a-night hotel on the rue du Lombard where he met Gabriel. He had toned down his clothing for the occasion — an Italian blazer, dove-gray trousers, a dress shirt with French cuffs, no tie. After being admitted to the cramped little room on the hotel’s third floor, he contemplated the electric teakettle as though he had never laid eyes on such a contraption. Gabriel filled it with water from the bathroom tap and joined Fareed in the window. Directly opposite the hotel, on the ground floor of a modern seven-story office block, was XTC Printing and Copying.

“What time did he arrive?” asked the Jordanian.

“Promptly at ten.”

“A model employee.”

“So it would seem.”

The Jordanian’s dark eyes swept the street, a falcon looking for prey.

“Don’t bother, Fareed. You’ll never find them.”

“Mind if I try?”

“Be my guest.”

“The blue van, the two men in the parked car at the end of the block, the girl sitting alone in the window of the coffeehouse.”

“Wrong, wrong, and wrong.”

“Who are the two men in the car?”

“They’re waiting for their friend to come out of the pharmacy.”

“Or maybe they’re from the Belgian security service.”

“The last thing we need to worry about is the Sûreté. Unfortunately,” added Gabriel gloomily, “neither do the terrorists who live in Molenbeek.”

“Tell me about it,” muttered Fareed. “They produce more terrorists here in Belgium than we do.”

“Now that’s saying something.”

“You know,” said Fareed, “we wouldn’t have this problem if it wasn’t for you Israelis. You upended the natural order of things in the Middle East, and now we are all paying the price.”

Gabriel stared into the street. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” he said quietly.

“You and I working together?”

Gabriel nodded.

“You need friends wherever you can find them, habibi. You should consider yourself lucky.”

The water boiled, the kettle shut down with a click.

“Would you mind terribly?” asked the Jordanian. “I’m afraid I’m helpless in the kitchen.”

“Sure, Fareed. It’s not as if I have anything better to do.”

“Sugar, please. Lots of sugar.”

Gabriel poured water into a mug, dropped a stale teabag into it, and added three packets of sugar. The Jordanian blew on the tea furtively before raising the mug to his lips.

“How is it?” asked Gabriel.

“Ambrosia.” Fareed started to light a cigarette but stopped when Gabriel pointed toward the NO SMOKING sign. “Couldn’t you have booked a smoking room?”

“They were sold out.”

Fareed returned the cigarette to his gold case and the case to the pocket of his blazer. “Maybe you’re right,” he said with a frown. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.”