The Black Widow

By then, night had fallen. They returned Nabil Awad hooded and bound to the formerly white van and drove him to Le Bourget Airport outside Paris, where a Gulfstream aircraft belonging to the Jordanian monarch waited. Nabil Awad boarded the plane without a struggle, and just six hours later was locked in a cell deep within GID headquarters in Amman. In the parallel universe of the World Wide Web, however, he was still very much a free man. He told friends, followers on social media, and the manager of the print shop where he worked that he had been compelled to return to Jordan suddenly because his father had taken ill. His father was not available to contradict the account, because he, like all the members of the extended Awad clan, was now in GID custody.

For the next seventy-two hours, Nabil Awad’s mobile phone was besieged with expressions of concern. Two teams of analysts, one at GID headquarters, one at King Saul Boulevard, scrubbed each e-mail, text, and direct message for signs of trouble. They also drafted and posted several dire updates on Nabil Awad’s Twitter feed. It seemed the patient had taken a turn for the worse. God willing, he would make a recovery, but for the moment it didn’t look good.

To the uninitiated eyes, the words that flowed onto Nabil Awad’s social media pages seemed entirely appropriate for the eldest son of a man who was gravely ill. But one message contained a somewhat peculiar syntax and choice of words that, to one reader, meant something quite specific. It meant that an empty can of Belgian beer had been hidden in a gorse bush at the edge of a small pasture not far from the city center of Brussels. Inside the can, wrapped in protective plastic, was a flash drive that contained a single encrypted document. Its subject was a Palestinian doctor named Leila Hadawi.

27 SERAINCOURT, FRANCE

AND THUS COMMENCED THE GREAT WAIT — or so it was referred to by all those who endured the appalling period, roughly seventy-two hours in length, during which the encrypted message sat untouched in its little aluminum sarcophagus, at the base of a power pole on the Kerselaarstraat, in the Brussels suburb of Dilbeek. The actors in this slow-moving drama were far-flung. They were spread from the Bethnal Green section of East London, to an immigrant banlieue north of Paris, to a room in the heart of a building in Amman known as the Fingernail Factory, where a jihadist was being kept on cyber life support. There was precedent for what they were doing; during World War II, British intelligence kept an entire network of captured German spies alive and functioning in the minds of their Abwehr controllers, feeding them false and deceptive intelligence in the process. The Israelis and Jordanians saw themselves as keepers of a sacred flame.

The one place where no members of the team were present was Dilbeek. Though scarcely a mile from the center of Brussels, it was a decidedly rural suburb ringed by small farms. “In other words,” declared Eli Lavon, who reconnoitered the drop site on the morning after Nabil Awad’s interrogation, “it’s a spy’s nightmare.” A fixed observation point was out of the question. Nor was it possible to surveil the target from a parked car or a café. Parking was not permitted on that stretch of the Kerselaarstraat, and the only cafés were in the center of the village.

The solution was to conceal a miniature camera in the patch of overgrown weeds on the opposite side of the road. Mordecai monitored its heavily encrypted transmission from a hotel room in central Brussels and routed the signal onto a secure network, which allowed the other members of the team to watch it, too. It was soon appointment viewing, a ratings bonanza. In London, Tel Aviv, Amman, and Paris, highly trained and motivated professional intelligence officers stood motionless before computer screens, staring at a tangle of gorse at the base of a concrete power pole. Occasionally, a vehicle would pass, or a cyclist, or a pensioner from the village out for a morning constitutional, but for the most part the image appeared to be a still photograph rather than a live video feed. Gabriel monitored it from the makeshift op center at Château Treville. He thought it the most unsightly thing he had ever produced. He referred to it as Can by a Pole and cursed himself inwardly for having chosen the Dilbeek drop site over the other three options. Not that they were any better. Clearly, Jalal Nasser had not selected the sites with aesthetics in mind.