By then, Jalal’s flat in Chilton Street had been emptied of its hidden cameras and microphones, leaving the team across the street with no option but to observe their quarry the old-fashioned way, with binoculars and a camera fitted with a telephoto lens. From afar, he seemed like a man without a care in the world. Perhaps it was a bit of performance art. But the more likely explanation was that Saladin had failed to inform his operative that the British, the Americans, the Israelis, and the Jordanians knew of his connection to the network and to the attacks in Paris, Amsterdam, and Washington. At King Saul Boulevard—and at Langley, Vauxhall Cross, and an elegant old building on the rue de Grenelle—this was seen as an encouraging sign. It meant that Jalal had no secrets to divulge, that the network, at least for the moment, was dormant. For Jalal, however, it meant that he was expendable, which is the worst thing a terrorist can be when his master is a man like Saladin.
At seven that evening the Jordanian spread a mat upon the floor of his tiny sitting room and prayed for the last time. Then, at seven twenty, he walked to the Noodle King on Bethnal Green Road, where, alone, he ate a final meal of fried rice and spicy chicken wings, watched over by Eli Lavon. Leaving the restaurant, he popped into the Saver Plus for a bottle of milk and then set off toward his flat, unaware that Mikhail was walking a few paces behind him.
Later, Scotland Yard would determine that Jalal arrived on his doorstep at twelve minutes past eight o’clock. It would also determine that, while fishing his keys from his coat pocket, he dropped them to the pavement. Stooping, he noticed Mikhail standing in the street. He left the keys where they lay and, slowly, stood upright. He was clutching the shopping bag defensively to his chest.
“Hello, Jalal,” said Mikhail calmly. “So good to finally meet you.”
“Who are you?” asked the Jordanian.
“I’m the last person you’re ever going to see.”
Swiftly, Mikhail drew a gun from the small of his back. It was a .22-caliber Beretta, with no suppressor. It was a naturally soft-spoken weapon.
“I’m here for Hannah Weinberg,” he said quietly. “And for Rachel Lévy and Arthur Goldman and all the other people you killed in Paris. I’m here for the victims in Amsterdam and America. I speak for the dead.”
“Please,” whispered the Jordanian. “I can help you. I know things. I know the plans for the next attack.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, I swear.”
“Where will it be?”
“Here in London.”
“What’s the target?”
Before Jalal could answer, Mikhail fired his first shot. It shattered the bottle of milk and lodged in the Jordanian’s heart. Slowly, Mikhail moved forward, firing nine more shots in rapid succession, until his target lay motionless in the entrance, in a pool of blood and milk. The gun was empty. Mikhail rammed a new magazine into the grip, placed the barrel to the dead man’s head, and fired one last shot. The eleventh. Behind him, a motorcycle pulled to the curb. He climbed onto the back, and in a moment he was gone.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE BLACK WIDOW IS A work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Visitors to the rue des Rosiers in the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris will search in vain for the Isaac Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France. Isaac’s granddaughter, the fictitious Hannah Weinberg, created the center at the end of The Messenger, the first novel in which she appeared. Hannah’s van Gogh painting, Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table, is also fictitious, though its tragic provenance is quite obviously drawn from the terrible events of Jeudi Noir and the Paris Roundup in July 1942.
I wish I could say that the anti-Jewish attacks described in the first chapter of The Black Widow were cut from whole cloth. But sadly they, too, were inspired by truth. Anti-Semitism in France, much of it emanating from Muslim communities, has compelled thousands of French Jews to leave their homes and emigrate to Israel. Indeed, eight thousand departed in the twelve months following the brutal murder of four Jews at the Hypercacher kosher market in January 2015. Many French Jews pass their afternoons in Independence Square in Netanya, at Chez Claude or one of the other cafés that cater to a growing francophone clientele. I can think of no other religious minority or ethnic group that is fleeing a Western European country. What’s more, the Jews of France are swimming against the tide, moving from the West to the most dangerous and volatile region on the planet. They are doing so for one reason only: they feel safer in Israel than they do in Paris, Toulouse, Marseilles, or Nice. Such is the condition of modern France.
Alpha Group, the secret counterterrorism unit of the DGSI portrayed in The Black Widow, does not exist, though I hope for all our sakes that something like it does. For the record, I am aware of the fact that the headquarters of Israel’s secret intelligence service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. I have chosen to keep the headquarters of my fictitious service there in part because I like the name of the street much more than the current address, which I shall not mention in print. There is indeed a limestone apartment building at 16 Narkiss Street in Jerusalem, but Gabriel Allon and his new family do not live there. During a recent visit to Israel, I learned that the building is now a stop on at least one guided tour of the city. My deepest apologies to the residents and their neighbors.
There was once an Arab village in the Western Galilee called al-Sumayriyya, and its current condition is accurately rendered in the pages of The Black Widow. Longtime readers of the Gabriel Allon series know that it first appeared in Prince of Fire in 2005, as the family home of a female terrorist named Fellah al-Tamari. Deir Yassin was in fact the site of a notorious massacre that occurred during the darkest days of the sectarian conflict in 1948 that gave birth to both the modern State of Israel and the Palestinian refugee crisis. The old village is now the home of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center, a psychiatric hospital that utilizes some of the old buildings and homes vacated by Deir Yassin’s original Arab residents. Kfar Shaul is affiliated with the Hadassah Medical Center and specializes in the treatment of Jerusalem syndrome, a disorder of religious obsession and delusion that begins with a visit to God’s fractured city upon a hill. Leah Allon’s condition is far more serious, as are her physical wounds. I have always been slightly vague about the exact address of the hospital where she is a permanent patient. Now we know its approximate location.