SHE WAS TO BE GIVEN no trial, for none was necessary; with a press of her detonator button she had admitted her guilt. There was only the matter of her confession, which would be recorded for dissemination on ISIS’s myriad propaganda platforms, and her execution, which would be by beheading. It might all have been handled quite swiftly were it not for Saladin himself. The brief delay was by no means an act of mercy. Saladin was still a spy at heart. And what a spy craved most was not blood but information.
The success of the attacks on Washington, and the prospect of Natalie’s imminent death, had the effect of loosening his tongue. He acknowledged that, yes, he had served in the Iraqi Mukhabarat under Saddam Hussein. His primary duty, he claimed, was to provide material and logistical support to Palestinian terrorist groups, especially those that rejected absolutely the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. During the Second Intifada he had overseen the payment of lucrative death benefits to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Abu Nidal, he boasted, was a close friend. Indeed, it was Abu Nidal, the most vicious of the so-called rejectionist terrorists, who had given Saladin his code name.
His work required him to become something of an expert on the Israeli secret intelligence service. He developed a grudging admiration for the Office and for Ari Shamron, the master spy who guided it, on and off, for the better part of thirty years. He also came to admire the accomplishments of Shamron’s famous protégé, the legendary assassin and operative named Gabriel Allon.
“And so you can imagine my surprise,” he told Natalie, “to see him walking across the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, and to hear you speak his name.”
After completing his opening remarks, he commenced questioning Natalie on every aspect of the operation—her life prior to joining Israeli intelligence, her recruitment, her training, her insertion into the field. Having been told she would soon face beheading, Natalie had no reason to cooperate other than to delay by a few minutes her inevitable death. It was motive enough, for she knew that her disappearance had not gone unnoticed. Saladin, with his spy’s curiosity, had given her the opportunity to run a little sand through the hourglass. He began by asking her real name. She resisted for several precious minutes, until in a rage he threatened to carve the flesh from her bones with the same knife he would use to take her head.
“Amit,” she said at last. “My name is Amit.”
“Amit what?”
“Meridor.”
“Where are you from?”
“Jaffa.”
“How did you learn to speak Arabic so well?”
“There are many Arabs in Jaffa.”
“And your French?”
“I lived in Paris for several years as a child.”
“Why?”
“My parents worked for the Foreign Ministry.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“A very good one.”
“Who recruited you?”
“No one. I applied to join the Office.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to serve my country.”
“Is this your first operation?”
“No, of course not.”
“Were the French involved in this operation?”
“We never work with other services. We prefer to work alone.”
“Blue and white?” asked Saladin, using one of the slogans of the Israeli military and security establishment.
“Yes,” said Natalie, nodding slowly. “Blue and white.”
Despite the exigencies of the situation, Saladin insisted that her face be properly veiled during her questioning. There was no abaya to be had in the cottage, so they covered her with a sheet stripped from one of the beds. She could only imagine how she looked to them, a faintly comic figure draped in white, but the cloak did have the advantage of privacy. She lied with the full confidence that Saladin could see no telltale trace of deception in her eyes. And she managed to convey a sense of inward calm, even peace, when in truth she was thinking only of the pain she would feel when the blade of the knife bit into her neck. With her vision obscured, her sense of hearing grew acute. She was able to track Saladin’s labored movements around the sitting room of the cottage and to discern the placement of the four armed ISIS terrorists. And she could hear, high above the cottage, the slow lazy circling of a single-engine aircraft. Saladin, she sensed, could hear it, too. He fell silent for a moment until the plane was gone and then resumed his interrogation.
“How were you able to transform yourself so convincingly into a Palestinian?”
“We have a special school.”
“Where?”
“In the Negev.”
“Are there other Office agents who have infiltrated ISIS?”
“Yes, many.”
“What are their names?”
She gave him six—four men, two other women. She said that she did not know the nature of their assignments. She knew only that, high above the little A-frame cottage, the plane had returned. Saladin, she thought, knew it, too. He had one final question. Why? he asked. Why had she saved his life in the house of many rooms and courts near Mosul?
“I wanted to gain your trust,” she answered truthfully.
“You did,” he admitted. “And then you betrayed it. And for that, Maimonides, you will die tonight.”
There was a silence in the room, but not in the sky above. From beneath her death shroud, Natalie asked one final question of her own. How had Saladin known that she was not real? He gave her no answer, for he was listening once again to the drone of the aircraft. She followed the tap and scrape of his slow journey across the room to the front door of the cottage. It was the last she ever heard of him.
He stood for several moments outside in the drive, his face tilted toward the sky. There was no moon but the night was bright with stars and very quiet except for the plane. It took some time for him to locate it, for its wingtip navigation lights were dimmed. Only the beat of its single propeller betrayed its location. It was flying a steady orbit around the little valley, at an altitude of about ten thousand feet. Finally, when it reached the northernmost point, it turned due east, toward Washington, and then disappeared. Instinctively, Saladin believed the plane was trouble. They had failed him only once, his instincts. They had told him that a woman named Leila, a gifted doctor who claimed to be a Palestinian, could be trusted, even loved. Soon, the woman would be given the death she deserved.