I AM INDEBTED TO MY WIFE, Jamie Gangel, who listened patiently while I worked out the plot of The Black Widow and then skillfully edited the enormous pile of paper that spilled from my printer after seven months of intense writing. She has been at my side from the very beginning of the Gabriel Allon series, a warm sun-dappled morning in Georgetown when I first had the idea of turning an Israeli assassin into an art restorer. Now the morose, grieving man we first met in The Kill Artist is the chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. It is an outcome I never could have imagined, and I would not have arrived at it without Jamie’s constant support. Nor would it have been possible without the love of my two children, Lily and Nicholas. Each day, in ways large and small, they remind me that there is more to life than words and paragraphs and clever plot twists.
To write sixteen books about a man from Israel has required me to spend a great deal of time there. I have traveled the country from end to end, and parts of it I know as well as my own. Along the way I have made many friends. Some are diplomats or academics, others are soldiers and spies. Without fail, they have treated my family with enormous kindness and generosity, a debt I have repaid by slipping bits and pieces of them into my plots and characters. I turned a friend’s historic farm in the moshav of Nahalal into a safe house where I prepared a woman for a mission no one of sound mind would undertake. And when I think of Uzi Navot’s beautiful home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva, I am actually seeing the home of a friend who lives a short distance away. I also think of my friend’s brilliance, his pitch-perfect sense of humor, his humanity, and his amazing wife, who bears absolutely no resemblance to the domineering Bella.
I, too, have been summoned with scant notice to the old hotel in Ma’ale Hahamisha—not by Ari Shamron but by Meir Dagan, the tenth director general of the Mossad, who died as I was finishing this novel. Meir painted in his spare time and, like Ari, he loved the northern Galilee, where he lived in the historic town of Rosh Pinah. The Holocaust was never far from his thoughts. In his office at Mossad headquarters hung a haunting photograph of his grandfather taken in the seconds before he was shot to death by the SS officers. Mossad agents were made to look at it one last time before departing on missions abroad. On that afternoon in Ma’ale Hahamisha, Meir gave me a tour of the world I will never forget and gently chided me for some of the plot choices I had made. Every few minutes an Israeli in a swimsuit would pause at our table to shake Meir’s hand. A spy by nature, he did not seem to relish the attention. His sense of humor was self-deprecating. “When they make the movie about Gabriel,” he said with his inscrutable smile, “please ask them to make me taller.”
General Doron Almog and his beautiful wife, Didi, always open their home to us when we come to Israel and, like Chiara and Gilah Shamron, they prepare far more food than we can possibly eat. I did not know Doron when I created Gabriel’s physical appearance, but surely he was the mold upon which my character was based. One never quite knows who might show up at Doron’s dinner table. Late one evening a very senior IDF general stopped by for a nightcap. Earlier that day, in a European port, a threat to Israel’s security had been quietly and cleverly eliminated. When I asked the general whether he’d had anything to do with it, he smiled and said, “Shit happens.”
The remarkable staff of Hadassah Medical Center allowed me to roam the hospital from its rooftop helipad to its new state-of-the-art operating suites far beneath ground. Dr. Andrew Pate, the eminent anesthesiologist, helped me save the life of a terrorist under less than ideal circumstances. Thanks to his expert instruction, I now feel that, in a pinch, I could treat pneumohemothorax.
I am forever indebted to David Bull, who, unlike the fictitious Gabriel, truly is one of the world’s finest art restorers. A heartfelt thanks to my legal team, Michael Gendler and Linda Rappaport, for their support and wise counsel. Louis Toscano, my dear friend and longtime editor, made countless improvements to my manuscript, and my eagle-eyed personal copy editor, Kathy Crosby, made certain the text was free of typographical and grammatical errors.
We are blessed with many friends who fill our lives with love and laughter at critical junctures during the writing year, especially Betsy and Andrew Lack, Caryn and Jeff Zucker, Nancy Dubuc and Michael Kizilbash, Pete Williams and David Gardner, Elsa Walsh and Bob Woodward. Also, a special thanks to Deborah Tyman of the New York Yankees for taking a chance on an untested right-hander with a bad shoulder. For the record, I didn’t bounce it.
I consulted hundreds of books, newspaper and magazine articles, and Web sites while preparing this manuscript, far too many to name here. I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention the extraordinary scholarship and reporting of Joby Warrick, Paul Cruickshank, Scott Shane, and Michael Weiss. I salute all the courageous reporters who have dared to enter Syria and tell the world of the horrors they have seen there. Journalism—real journalism—still matters.
It goes without saying that this book could not have been published without the support of my team at HarperCollins, but I shall say it anyway, for they are the best in the business. A special thanks to Jonathan Burnham, Brian Murray, Michael Morrison, Jennifer Barth, Josh Marwell, Tina Andreadis, Leslie Cohen, Leah Wasielewski, Robin Bilardello, Mark Ferguson, Kathy Schneider, Carolyn Bodkin, Doug Jones, Katie Ostrowka, Erin Wicks, Shawn Nicholls, Amy Baker, Mary Sasso, David Koral, and Leah Carlson-Stanisic.
Finally, a special thanks to the staff of Café Milano in Georgetown, who always take good care of our family and friends when we are fortunate enough to get a table. Please forgive the fictitious unpleasantness in the climax of The Black Widow. Let us hope a night such as that never comes to pass.