Gabriel Allon: The Black Widow Part 7

Later that day the AIVD, the Dutch security and intelligence service, confirmed that Margreet Janssen had traveled to Syria eighteen months previously, had remained there for approximately six months, and had been allowed to return to the Netherlands after convincing the Dutch authorities that she had renounced her ties to ISIS and the global jihadist movement. The security service placed the woman under electronic and physical surveillance, but the surveillance was subsequently dropped when she exhibited no signs of continued involvement in radical Islamic activities. Obviously, said an AIVD spokesman, it was an error in judgment.

Within minutes the cyberrooms of the digital caliphate were ablaze with excited chatter. Margreet Janssen was suddenly the new symbol of the global jihad, a former Christian from a European country who was now a lethal member of the community of believers. But who was the other woman in the video? The one who did not speak? The answer came not from Amsterdam but from a fortress-like building in the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret. The second woman, said the chief of the DGSI, was Safia Bourihane, one of the perpetrators of the attack on the Weinberg Center.

Before terminating its surveillance of Margreet Janssen, the AIVD had a.s.sembled a dense dossier of watch reports, photographs, e-mails, text messages, and Internet browsing histories, along with secondary files on friends, family members, a.s.sociates, and fellow travelers in the global jihadist movement. Paul Rousseau received a copy of the dossier during a meeting at AIVD headquarters in The Hague, and upon his return to Paris he presented it to Gabriel in a quiet bra.s.serie on the rue de Miromesnil, in the Eighth Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt. The dossier had been digitized and stored on a secure flash drive. Rousseau slid it across the table beneath a napkin, with all the discretion of a gunshot in an empty chapel. It was no matter; the bra.s.serie was deserted except for a small bald man wearing a well-cut suit and a lavish lavender necktie. He was drinking a gla.s.s of Ctes du Rhone and reading a copy of Le Figaro. It was filled with the news from Amsterdam. Gabriel slipped the flash drive into his coat pocket, making no effort to conceal his action, and asked Rousseau about the mood at AIVD headquarters.

"Somewhere between panic and resignation," answered Rousseau. "They're ramping up their surveillance of known Islamic extremists and searching for the man who built the bomb and the other elements of the network." He lowered his voice and added, "They were wondering whether I had any ideas."

"Did you mention Saladin?"

"It might have slipped my mind," said Rousseau with a sly smile. "But at some point we're going to have to go on the record with our friends here in Europe."

"They're your friends, not mine."

"You have a history with the Dutch services?"

"I've never had the pleasure of visiting the Netherlands."

"Somehow, I find that difficult to believe." Rousseau glanced at the small bald man sitting on the other side of the bra.s.serie. "A friend of yours?"

"He runs a shop across the street."

"How do you know?"

"I saw him leave and lock the door."

"How observant of you." Rousseau peered into the darkening street. "Antiquites Scientifiques?"

"Old microscopes and the like," explained Gabriel.

"Interesting." Rousseau contemplated his coffee cup. "It seems I wasn't the only foreign visitor to AIVD headquarters yesterday. An American came, too."

"Agency?"

Rousseau nodded.

"Local or Langley?"

"The latter."

"Did he have a name?"

"Not one that my Dutch hosts wished to share with me. They did suggest, however, that American interest was high."

"How refres.h.i.+ng."

"Apparently, the White House is concerned that an attack on the American homeland this late in the president's second term might prove injurious to his legacy. The Agency is under enormous pressure to make sure it doesn't happen."

"I guess ISIS isn't the jayvee team after all."

"To that end," Rousseau continued, "the Agency is expecting full and complete cooperation from America's friends and partners here in Europe. The man from Langley is due in Paris tomorrow morning."

"It might be wise for you to spend some time with him."

"My name is already on the guest list."

Gabriel handed Rousseau a slip of paper, folded in quarters.

"What's this?"

"A list of additional files we need."

"How much longer?"

"Soon," said Gabriel.

"That's what you said yesterday, and the day before." Rousseau slipped the list into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. "Are you ever going to tell me where you and your helpers are working?"

"You mean you haven't figured it out yet?"

"We haven't tried."

"Somehow," said Gabriel, "I find that difficult to believe."

He rose without another word and went into the street. Rousseau watched him walk away along the darkened pavement, followed discreetly by two of Alpha Group's best surveillance men. The little bald man with the lavender necktie laid a few bills on his table and departed, leaving Rousseau alone in the bra.s.serie with no company other than his mobile phone. Five minutes elapsed before it finally illuminated. It was a text message from Christian Bouchard. "Merde," said Rousseau softly. Allon had lost them again.

12.

PARIS.

IT WAS WITH A PAIR of routine countersurveillance moves-a reversal of course along a one-way street, a brief stop in a bistro that had a rear service exit off the kitchen-that Gabriel slipped away from the finest watchers of Paul Rousseau's Alpha Group. Afterward, he made his way, on foot, by Metro, and in a taxi, to a small apartment building along the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. According to the intercom panel, the occupant of 4B was someone named Guzman. Gabriel thumbed the b.u.t.ton, waited for the snap of the automatic locks, and entered.

Upstairs, Mikhail Abramov unchained the door to him. The air was bitter with smoke. Gabriel peered into the kitchen and saw Eli Lavon attempting to extinguish a fire he had started in the microwave. Lavon was a diminutive figure, with a head of wispy unkempt hair and a face that was entirely forgettable. His looks, like most things about him, were deceiving. A natural predator and chameleon, Lavon was regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the Office ever produced. Ari Shamron had famously said of Lavon that he could disappear while shaking your hand. It wasn't far from the truth.

"How long did it take you to lose them this time?" Lavon asked as he tossed a misshapen lump of charred plastic into the sink.

"Less time than it took you to burn down the safe flat."

"A small mix-up with the time setting. You know me, I've never really been good with numbers."

Which wasn't true. Lavon also happened to be a skilled financial investigator who singlehandedly had managed to track down millions of dollars' worth of looted Holocaust a.s.sets. An archaeologist by training, he was a natural digger.

Gabriel entered the sitting room. Yaakov Rossman, a veteran agent runner and a fluent speaker of Arabic, appeared to be contemplating an act of violence against his notebook computer. Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern were sprawled on the couch like a couple of undergraduates. Yossi was a top officer in Research, which is how the Office referred to its a.n.a.lytical division. Tall, tweedy, and balding, he had read cla.s.sics at All Souls and spoke Hebrew with a p.r.o.nounced English accent. He had also done a bit of acting-Shakespearean, mainly-and was a gifted cellist. Rimona served in the Office unit that spied on Iran's nuclear program. She had sandstone-colored hair, childbearing hips, and a temper she had inherited from Ari Shamron, who was her uncle. Gabriel had known her since she was a small child. Indeed, his fondest memories of Rimona were of a fearless young girl on a kick scooter careening down the steep drive of her famous uncle's house.

The five field agents and a.n.a.lysts were members of an elite team of operatives known as Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, for their ability to gather and strike quickly. They had fought and sometimes bled together on a string of secret battlefields stretching from Moscow to the Caribbean, and in the process had carried out some of the most fabled operations in the history of Israeli intelligence. Gabriel was the team's founder and leader, but a sixth member, Dina Sarid, was its conscience and inst.i.tutional memory. Dina was the Office's top terrorism specialist, a human database who could recite the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of Palestinian or Islamic terrorism committed against Israel and the West. Her talent was to see connections where others saw only a blizzard of names, numbers, and words.

She was small in stature, with coal-black hair that fell about a soft, childlike face. At present, she was standing before a seemingly haphazard collage of surveillance photos, e-mails, text messages, and phone conversations. It was the same place she had been standing, three hours earlier, when Gabriel had left the safe flat for his meeting with Paul Rousseau. Dina was in the grip of the fever, the frightful creative rage that came over her each time a bomb exploded. Gabriel had induced the fever many times before. Judging by her expression, it was about to break. He crossed the room and stood beside her.

"What are you looking at?" he asked after a moment.

Dina took two steps forward, limping slightly, and pointed toward a surveillance photo of Safia Bourihane. It had been taken before her first trip to Syria, in an Arab-style cafe in the heavily immigrant Paris banlieue of Saint-Denis. Safia had recently taken the veil. Her companion, a young woman, was veiled, too. There were several other women in the cafe, along with four men, Algerians, Moroccans, sharing a table near the counter. Another man, angular face, clean-shaven, slightly out of focus, sat alone. He wore a dark business suit, no tie, and was working on a notebook computer. He might have been an Arab-or he might have been a Frenchman or an Italian. For the moment he was of no concern to Dina Sarid. She was gazing, spellbound, at the face of Safia Bourihane.

"She looks normal, doesn't she? Happy, even. You'd never suspect she'd spent the entire morning talking to an ISIS recruiter on the Internet. The recruiter asked her to leave her family and travel to Syria to help build the caliphate. And what do you suppose Safia told him?"

"She said she wanted to stay in France. She said she wanted to marry a nice boy from a good family and have children who would grow up to be fully a.s.similated French citizens. She said she wanted no part of a caliphate run by men who behead and crucify and burn their enemies alive."

"Isn't it pretty to think so." Dina shook her head slowly. "What went wrong, Gabriel? Why have more than five hundred young Western women joined the ranks of ISIS? Why are the bearded ones the new rock stars of Islam? Why are killers cool?" Dina had devoted her life to the study of terrorism and Islamic extremism, and yet she had no answers. "We thought they would be repulsed by the violence of ISIS. We were wrong. We a.s.sumed a.s.similation was the answer. But the more they a.s.similated, the less they liked what they saw. And so when a recruiter from ISIS comes knocking on their digital door, they're vulnerable."

"You're too charitable, Dina."

"They're children." She paused, then added, "Impressionable girls."

"Not all of them."

"That's true. Many are educated, much more educated than the men who've joined ISIS. They're forbidden to fight, the women, so they take on important support roles. In many respects, it's the women who are actually building the caliphate. Most of them will also take a husband-a husband who's likely to soon be a martyr. One in four women will become widows. Black widows," she added. "Indoctrinated, embittered, vengeful. And all it takes is a good recruiter or talent spotter to turn them into ticking time bombs." She pointed toward the slightly-out-of-focus figure seated alone in the Arab-style cafe. "Like him. Unfortunately, the French never noticed him. They were too busy looking at Safia's friend."

"Who is she?"

"She's a girl who watched a few beheading videos on the Internet. She's a waste of time, money, and manpower. But not Safia. Safia was trouble waiting to happen." Dina took a step to the right and indicated a second photograph. "Three days after Safia had coffee with her friend in Saint-Denis, she came to the center of Paris to do a bit of shopping. This picture was taken as she was walking along the arcades of the rue de Rivoli. And look who's walking a few steps behind her."

It was the same man from the cafe, the clean-shaven man with an angular face who might have been an Arab or a Frenchman or an Italian.

"How did they miss him?"

"Good question. And they missed him here, too."

Dina pointed toward a third photograph, the same day, an hour later. Safia Bourihane was leaving a women's clothing store on the Champs-elysees. The same man was waiting outside on the pavement, pretending to consult a tourist guidebook.

"Send the photos to King Saul Boulevard," said Gabriel. "See if anything turns up."

"I already have."

"And?"

"King Saul Boulevard has never made his acquaintance."

"Maybe this will help." Gabriel held up the flash drive.

"What is it?"

"The life and times of Margreet Janssen."

"I wonder how long it will take to find Safia's secret admirer."

"I'd hurry if I were you. The Americans have her file, too."

"I'll beat them," she said. "I always do."

It took Dina fewer than thirty minutes to find the first surveillance photograph of Margreet Janssen and the man who had shadowed Safia Bourihane in Paris. An AIVD team had snapped the picture at a quaint Italian restaurant in central Amsterdam where Margreet, having left her dreary home in Noordwijk, was waiting tables for starvation wages. It wasn't difficult to spot him; he was dining alone with a volume of Sartre for protection. This time, the camera managed to capture him in focus, though he was somewhat different in appearance. A pair of round eyegla.s.ses had softened the sharp edges of his face; a cardigan sweater lent him a librarian's unthreatening air. Margreet was his server, and judging from her wide smile she found him attractive-so attractive, in fact, that she agreed to meet him for drinks later at a bar on the edge of the red-light district. The evening ended with a well-executed slap, delivered with Margreet's right hand to the man's left cheek and witnessed by the same surveillance team. It was, thought Gabriel, a nice touch of tradecraft. The Dutch wrote the man off as a cad and never tried to establish his ident.i.ty.

But what was the connection between the two women, other than the man who might have been an Arab or a Frenchman or an Italian? Dina found that, too. It was a Web site based in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar that sold clothing for Muslim women of piety and taste. Safia Bourihane had surfed it three weeks before the man's visit to Paris. Margreet Janssen had stopped there just ten days before the slap in Amsterdam. Dina suspected that the site contained a pa.s.sword-protected room where ISIS recruiters could invite promising young women for a private chat. These encrypted rooms had so far proved almost impenetrable to the intelligence services of Israel and the West. Even the mighty National Security Agency, America's omniscient signals intelligence service, was struggling to keep pace with ISIS's digital hydra.

There is no worse feeling for a professional spy than to be told something by an officer from another service that he should have already known himself. Paul Rousseau endured this indignity in a small cafe on the rue Cler, a fas.h.i.+onable pedestrian shopping street not far from the Eiffel Tower. The French police had erected barricades at the intersections of the cross streets and were checking the handbags and backpacks of everyone who dared to enter. Even Gabriel, who had nothing in his possession other than a manila envelope filled with photographs, was thoroughly searched before being allowed to pa.s.s.

"If this were ever to become public," said Rousseau, "it would be deeply embarra.s.sing for my service. Heads would roll. Remember, this is France."

"Don't worry, Paul, your secret is safe with me."

Rousseau leafed again through the photos of Safia Bourihane and the man who for two days had followed her around Paris undetected by the DGSI.

"What do you suppose he was doing?"

"Watching her, of course."

"Why?"

"To make sure she was the right kind of girl. The question is," said Gabriel, "can you find him?"

"These photographs were taken more than a year ago."

"Yes?" asked Gabriel leadingly.

"It will be difficult. After all," said Rousseau, "we still haven't been able to find out where your team is working."

"That's because we're better than he is."

"Actually, his track record is rather good, too."

"He didn't travel to the cafe in Saint-Denis on a magic carpet," said Gabriel. "He took a train, or a bus, or he walked along a street with security cameras."

"Our network of CCTV cameras is nowhere near as extensive as yours or the British."

"But it exists, especially in a place like Saint-Denis."

"Yes," said Rousseau. "It exists."

"So find out how he got there. And then find out who he is. But whatever you do," Gabriel added, "do it quietly. And don't mention any of this to our friend from Langley."