House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(38)
The call to prayer slowly faded, along with the last of the light. Gabriel gazed across the darkening fields toward the bungalow. Where the hell were his bodyguards? He was grateful for the reprieve; he could not remember the last time he had been completely alone. All at once he heard the voice of a woman calling his name. For an instant he imagined it was his mother. Then, turning, he glimpsed a slender figure bounding toward him along the track, pursued by two men in an ATV. Suddenly, he felt a stab of pain at the small of his back. Or was it guilt? It’s what we do, he reassured himself as he rubbed away the pain. It is our punishment for having survived in this land.
21
Nahalal, Israel
Like Gabriel, Dr. Natalie Mizrahi had had the distinct displeasure of seeing Saladin in the flesh. Gabriel’s encounter with the monster had been fleeting, but Natalie had been obliged to spend several days with him in a great house of many rooms and courts near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. There she had treated Saladin for two serious wounds suffered in an American air strike, one to his chest, the other to his right leg. Unfortunately, Natalie and Saladin had met again, in a tiny A-frame cabin in rural Northern Virginia. A Caravaggesque painting depicting the instant before her rescue hung in Gabriel’s appalling gallery of memory. Try as he might, he had been unable to remove it. This, too, was something he and Natalie had in common.
The story of her journey into the dark heart of the caliphate of ISIS was one of the most remarkable in the annals of the Office. Indeed, even Saladin, who knew only part of it, predicted that one day someone would write a book about it. Born and educated in France, fluent in the Algerian dialect of Arabic, she immigrated to Israel with her parents to escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism in her homeland and took a position in the emergency room at the Hadassah Medical Center in West Jerusalem. Her arrival in Israel did not escape the notice of the talent spotters of the Office. And when Gabriel was searching for an agent to feed into Saladin’s network, it was to Natalie he turned. At the little farmhouse in Nahalal, he peeled away the many layers of her identity and transformed her into Leila Hadawi, an Arab woman of Palestinian lineage, a black widow bent on vengeance. Then, with the help of Paul Rousseau and the Alpha Group, he fed her into the pipeline of French and other European Muslims heading to Syria to fight for ISIS.
She spent nearly a month in the caliphate, in an apartment house near al-Rasheed Park in downtown Raqqa, in a training camp in the ancient city of Palmyra, and, finally, at the house near Mosul where, threatened with death, she had saved the life of the greatest terror mastermind since Osama bin Laden. During the period of his recovery, he had shown her great kindness. He had referred to her only as Maimonides, the philosopher and Talmudic scholar who served as one of the real Saladin’s court physicians in Cairo, and allowed her to be in his presence without veiling her face. Never once did she leave his side. She had monitored his vital signs, changed his bloody dressings, and muted his pain with injections of morphine. Many times she considered shoving him through death’s door with an overdose. Instead, bound by her oath as a doctor and her belief that it was essential she report what she had witnessed, she had nursed Saladin back to health, an act of mercy he repaid by dispatching her to Washington on a suicide mission.
It had been three months since that night, and yet even now Gabriel noticed remnants of Leila Hadawi in Natalie’s bearing and in her dark eyes. She had shed Leila’s veil and Leila’s rage, but not her quiet piety or her dignity. Otherwise, there was no visible trace of the ordeal she had suffered in the Islamic caliphate or in the cabin in Virginia, where Saladin had personally subjected her to a brutal interrogation. It had been his intention to execute Natalie in ISIS’s preferred manner, by taking her head, and her imminent death had the effect of loosening his tongue. He admitted he had served in the Iraqi Mukhabarat under Saddam Hussein, that he had supplied material and logistical support to rejectionist Palestinian terrorists such as Abu Nidal, and that he had joined the Iraq insurgency after the American invasion of 2003. Those three elements of his curriculum vitae represented the sum total of what the intelligence services of the West knew of him. Even his real name remained a mystery. Natalie, however, had been granted access to Saladin’s inner court, at a time when he was physically enfeebled. She knew every inch of his tall, powerful body, every mole and birthmark, every scar. It was only one of the reasons why Gabriel had come to the farm in Nahalal, in the valley of his birth.
The evening turned cold quickly, as it always did in the Galilee. Nevertheless, they sat outside in the garden, at the same table where ten months earlier Gabriel had conducted Natalie’s initial recruitment. Now, as then, she sat very straight, with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She wore a snug-fitting blue tracksuit and neon-green trainers, soiled by the dust of the farm roads. Her dark hair was drawn away from her face and constrained at the base of her neck by an elastic band. Her wide, sensuous mouth was set in a half-smile. She looked happy for the first time in many months. Suddenly, Gabriel felt another stab of pain. This time it was real.
“You know,” said Natalie, her expression serious, “you’ll heal faster if you take something.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’re leaning to one side to keep pressure off the fractures.”
Grimacing, Gabriel tried to imitate Natalie’s erect posture.