The Black Widow

“Yes, I know.” He laid the pages of her file on the carpet. “We have many supporters in Jordan. Many of our brothers used to be Jordanian citizens. And none of them,” he said, “have ever heard of anyone named Ziad al-Masri.”

“Ziad was never politically active in Jordan,” she answered with far more calm that she might have thought possible. “He became radicalized only after he moved to Europe.”

“He was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir?”

“Not formally.”

“That would explain why none of our brothers from Hizb ut-Tahrir have heard of him, either.” He regarded Natalie calmly while another waterfall of sweat sluiced down her back. “You’re not drinking your tea,” he pointed out.

“That’s because you’re making me nervous.”

“That was my intention.” His remark provoked restrained laughter among the three men seated behind him. He waited for it to subside before continuing. “For a long time the Americans and their friends in Europe did not take us seriously. They belittled us, called us silly names. But now they realize we are a threat to them, and they are trying very hard to penetrate us. The British are the worst. Every time they catch a British Muslim trying to travel to the caliphate, they try to turn him into a spy. We always find them very quickly. Sometimes we play them back against the British. And sometimes,” he said with a shrug, “we just kill them.”

He allowed a silence to hang heavily over the sweltering room. It was Natalie who broke it.

“I didn’t ask to join you,” she said. “You asked me.”

“No, Jalal asked you to come to Syria, not me. But I am the one who will determine whether you will stay.” He gathered up the pages of the file. “I would like to hear your story from the beginning, Leila. I find that most helpful.”

“I was born—”

“No,” he said, cutting her off. “I said the beginning.”

Confused, she said nothing. The Iraqi was looking down at her file again.

“It says here that your family was from a place called Sumayriyya.”

“My father’s family,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“It was in the Western Galilee. It’s not there anymore.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

Beneath her veil, Natalie closed her eyes. She saw herself walking through a field of thorn bush and toppled stones, next to a man of medium height whose face and name she could no longer recall. He spoke to her now, as if from the bottom of a well, and his words became hers. They grew bananas and melons in Sumayriyya, the sweetest melons in all of Palestine. They irrigated their fields with water from an ancient aqueduct and buried their dead in a cemetery not far from the mosque. Sumayriyya was paradise on earth, Sumayriyya was an Eden. And then, on a night in May 1948, the Jews came up the coast road in a convoy with their headlamps blazing, and Sumayriyya ceased to exist.

In the Op Center of King Saul Boulevard there is a chair reserved for the chief. No one else is allowed to sit in it. No one else dares to even touch it. Throughout that long tense day it groaned and buckled beneath the bulk of Uzi Navot. Gabriel had remained constantly at his side, sometimes in a deputy’s chair, sometimes nervously on his feet, a hand pressed to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side.

Both men, like everyone else in the Op Center, had eyes only for the main video display screen. On it was an overhead satellite image of a large house in a village near the Syrian border. In the courtyard of the house, several men lounged in the shade of date palms. There were two other SUVs in the court. One had ferried a woman from central Raqqa; the other had brought four men from the Sunni Triangle of Iraq. Gabriel had sent along the coordinates of the house to Adrian Carter at CIA Headquarters, and Carter had dispatched a drone from a secret base in Turkey. Occasionally, the aircraft passed through the Ofek 10’s image, circling lazily twelve thousand feet above the target, piloted by a kid in a trailer in another desert on the other side of the world.

Adrian Carter had brought additional resources to bear on the target as well. Specifically, he had instructed the NSA to gather as much cellular data from the house as possible. The NSA had identified no fewer than twelve phones present, one of which had been previously linked to a suspected senior ISIS commander named Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti, a former colonel from Iraq’s military intelligence service. Gabriel suspected it was al-Tikriti who was questioning his agent. He felt sick to his stomach but took small comfort in the fact that he had prepared her well. Even so, he would have gladly taken her place. Perhaps, thought Gabriel, looking at Uzi Navot seated calmly in his designated chair, he was not cut out for the burden of command after all.