“She tried, but I sent a couple of the boys with her. They took one of the ATVs. None of us can keep up with her.”
Smiling, Gabriel entered the bungalow. Its furnishings were spare and functional, more office than home. Once, the walls had been hung with outsize black-and-white photographs of Palestinian suffering—the long dusty walk into exile, the wretched camps, the weathered faces of the old ones dreaming of paradise lost. Now there were paintings. Some were Gabriel’s, youthful works, derivative. The rest were his mother’s. They were Cubist and Abstract Expressionist, full of fire and pain, produced by an artist at the height of her power. One depicted a woman in semi-profile, gaunt, lifeless, draped in rags. He recalled the week she had painted it; it was the week of Eichmann’s execution. The effort had left her exhausted and bedridden. Many years later, Gabriel would discover the testimony his mother had recorded and then locked away in the archives of Yad Vashem. Only then would he understand that the Cubist depiction of an emaciated woman in rags was a self-portrait.
He went into the garden. Smoke rose above the Carmel Ridge like the plume of an erupting volcano, but the skies above the valley were clear and perfumed with the smell of earth and bovine excrement. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder and saw he was alone; his security detail seemed to have forgotten about him. He followed a dusty track past the animal enclosure, watched by blank-eyed dairy cows. The farm’s pie slice of cropland stretched before him. The portion nearest the bungalow was under cultivation of some sort—Gabriel affected a resentful ignorance of all matters farming—but the distant section of the parcel lay tilled and fallow and awaiting the seed. Beyond the outer boundary was Ramat David, the kibbutz where Gabriel had been born and raised. It was established a few years after Nahalal, in 1926, and derived its name not from the ancient Jewish king but from David Lloyd George, the British prime minister whose government had looked favorably upon the idea of establishing a Jewish national home in the land of Palestine.
The residents of Ramat David were not from the East; they were largely German Jews. Gabriel’s mother arrived there in the autumn of 1948. Her name was Irene Frankel then, and she soon met a man from Munich, a writer, an intellectual, who had taken the Hebrew name Allon. She had hoped to have six children, one child for each million lost to the Holocaust, but one was all her womb would bear, a boy she named Gabriel, the messenger of God, the defender of Israel, the interpreter of Daniel’s visions. Their home, like most in Ramat David, was a place of sadness—of candles burning for parents and siblings who had not survived, of terrified screams in the night—and so Gabriel passed his days wandering the ancient valley of the tribe of Zebulun. As a child he had thought of it as his valley. And now it was his to watch over and protect.
The sun had slipped behind the burning ridge; daylight was in retreat. Just then, Gabriel heard what sounded like a distant cry for help. It was only the first notes of the call to prayer drifting down from the Arab village perched on the slopes of the hills to the east. As a child, Gabriel had known a boy from the village named Yusuf. Yusuf had referred to him as Jibril, the Arabic version of his name, and had told him stories of what it was like in the valley before the return of the Jews. Their friendship was a closely guarded secret. Gabriel never went to Yusuf’s village, Yusuf never came to his. The divide had been unbridgeable. It was still.
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.