Which left no option, he added, but to start from the beginning. Under his relentless interrogation, Natalie’s sense of time deserted her. For all she knew a week had passed since her sleep had been interrupted. Her head ached for want of caffeine, the bright lights were intolerable. Even so, her answers flowed from her effortlessly, as water flows downhill. She was not remembering something she had been taught, she was remembering something she already knew. She was Natalie no more. She was Leila. Leila from Sumayriyya. Leila who loved Ziad. Leila who wanted vengeance.
Finally, the man on the other side of the table closed his file. He looked toward the figure on his right, then the left. Then he unwound the headscarf to reveal his face. He was the one with pockmarked cheeks. The other two men removed their keffiyehs, too. The one on the left was the forgettable wispy-haired man. The one on the right was the one with pale bloodless skin and eyes like ice. All three of the men were smiling, but Natalie was suddenly weeping. Gabriel approached her quietly from behind and placed a hand on her shoulder as it convulsed. “It’s all right, Leila,” he said softly. “It’s all over now.”
But it wasn’t over, she thought. It was only beginning.
There exists in Tel Aviv and its suburbs a series of Office safe flats known as jump sites. They are places where, by doctrine and tradition, operatives spend their final night before departing Israel for missions abroad. Three days after Natalie’s mock interrogation, she drove with Dina to a luxury apartment overlooking the sea in Tel Aviv. Her new clothing, all of it purchased in France, lay neatly folded atop the bed. Next to it was a French passport, a French driver’s permit, French credit cards, bank cards, and various medical certificates and accreditations in the name of Leila Hadawi. There were also several photographs of the apartment she would inhabit in the heavily immigrant Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers.
“I was hoping for a cozy little garret on the Left Bank.”
“I understand. But when one is fishing,” said Dina, “it is best to go where the fish are.”
Natalie made only one request; she wanted to spend the night with her mother and father. The request was denied. Much time and effort had been expended transforming her into Leila Hadawi. To expose her, even briefly, to her previous life was deemed far too risky. An experienced field officer could move freely between the thin membrane separating his real life from the life he led in service of his country. But newly trained recruits such as Natalie were often fragile flowers that wilted when exposed to direct sunlight.
And so she passed that evening, her last in Israel, with no company other than the melancholy woman who had wrenched her from the refuge of her old life. To occupy herself, she packed and repacked her suitcase three times. Then, after a carryout dinner of lamb and rice, she switched on the television and watched an episode of an Egyptian soap opera that she had grown fond of in Nahalal. Afterward, she sat on the balcony watching the pedestrians and the cyclists and the skateboarders flowing along the promenade in the cool windy night. It was a remarkable sight, the dream of the early Zionists fully realized, yet Natalie regarded the contented Jews beneath her with Leila’s resentful eye. They were occupiers, children and grandchildren of colonialists who had stolen the land of a weaker people. They had to be defeated, driven out, just as they had driven Leila’s ancestors from Sumayriyya on a May evening in 1948.
Her anger followed her to bed. If she slept that night, she did not remember it, and in the morning she was bleary-eyed and on edge. She dressed in Leila’s clothing and covered her hair with Leila’s favorite emerald-colored hijab. Downstairs, a taxi was waiting. Not a real taxi, but an Office taxi driven by one of the security agents who used to follow her on her runs in Nahalal. He took her directly to Ben Gurion Airport, where she was thoroughly searched and questioned at length before being allowed to proceed to her gate. Leila did not take offense at her treatment. As a veiled Muslim woman she was used to the special attention of security screeners.
Inside the terminal she made her way to the gate, oblivious to the hostile stares of the Israeli traveling public, and when her flight was called she filed dutifully onto the plane. Her seatmate was the gray-eyed man with bloodless skin, and across the aisle were her pockmarked interrogator and his wispy-haired accomplice. Not one of them dared to look at the veiled woman traveling alone. She was suddenly exhausted. She told the flight attendant, demurely, that she did not wish to be disturbed. Then, as Israel sank away beneath her, she closed her eyes and dreamed of Sumayriyya.
23
AUBERVILLIERS, FRANCE
TEN DAYS LATER THE Clinique Jacques Chirac opened to muted fanfare in the northern Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers. The minister of health attended the ceremony, as did a popular Ivory Coast–born footballer, who cut a tricolor ribbon to the rain-dampened applause of several community activists assembled for the occasion. French television ran a brief story about the opening on that evening’s main newscast. Le Monde, in a short editorial, called it a promising start.
The goal of the clinic was to improve the lives of those who resided in a troubled suburb where crime and unemployment were high and government services scarce. Officially, the Ministry of Health oversaw the clinic’s day-to-day operations, but in point of fact it was a classified joint undertaking by the ministry and Paul Rousseau’s Alpha Group. The clinic’s administrator, a man named Roland Girard, was an Alpha Group operative, as was the shapely receptionist. The six nurses and two of the three physicians, however, knew nothing of the clinic’s split personality. All were employed by France’s state-run hospital system, and all had been chosen for the project after a rigorous screening process. None had ever made the acquaintance of Dr. Leila Hadawi. Nor had they attended medical school with her or worked at her previous places of employment.
The clinic was located on the Avenue Victor Hugo, between an all-night laundry and a tabac frequented by members of a local Moroccan drug gang. Plane trees shaded the pavement outside the clinic’s modest entrance, and above it rose three additional floors of a handsome old building with a tan exterior and shuttered windows. But behind the avenue soared the giant gray slabs of the cités, the public housing estates that warehoused the poor and the foreign born, mainly from Africa and the former French colonies of the Maghreb. This was the part of France where the poets and the travel writers rarely ventured, the France of crime, immigrant resentment, and, increasingly, radical Islam. Half the banlieue’s residents had been born outside France, three-quarters of the young. Alienated, marginalized, they were ISIS recruits in waiting.