“Did I do something wrong?” she asked.
“You’re doing beautifully, Leila. But please start again from the beginning. And this time,” he added, “it would be helpful if you spoke French instead of Arabic.”
It was at this point that they were confronted with their first serious operational dilemma—for within the walls of the ancient cathedral of Senlis, Jalal Nasser, Saladin’s man in Western Europe, had told his potential recruit that more attacks were coming, sooner rather than later. Paul Rousseau declared that they were compelled to inform his minister of the developments, and perhaps even the British. The goal of the operation, he said, had been to roll up the network. Working with MI5, they could arrest Jalal Nasser, interrogate him, learn his future plans, and scoop up his operatives.
“Call it a day?” asked Gabriel. “Job well done?”
“It happens to be true.”
“And what if Nasser doesn’t crack under the friendly interrogation he’ll receive in London? What if he doesn’t reveal his plans or the names of his operatives? What if there are parallel networks and cells, so that if one goes down the others survive?” He paused, then added, “And what about Saladin?”
Rousseau conceded the point. But on the question of bringing the threat to the attention of higher authority—namely, his chief and his minister—he was unyielding. And so it was that Gabriel Allon, the man who had operated on French soil with impunity and had left a trail of dead bodies stretching from Paris to Marseilles, entered the Interior Ministry at half past ten that evening, with Alpha Group’s chief at his side. The minister was waiting in his ornate office, along with the chief of the DGSI and Alain Lambert, the minister’s aide-de-camp, note taker, food taster, and general factotum. Lambert had come from a dinner party; the minister, from his bed. He shook Gabriel’s hand as if he feared catching something. Lambert avoided Gabriel’s eye.
“How serious is the threat of another attack?” the minister asked when Rousseau had completed his briefing.
“As serious as it gets,” answered the Alpha Group chief.
“Will the next attack come in France?”
“We cannot say.”
“What can you say?”
“Our agent has been recruited and invited to travel to Syria for training.”
“Our agent?” The minister shook his head. “No, Paul, she is not our agent.” He pointed to Gabriel and said, “She is his.”
A silence fell over the room.
“Is she still willing to go through with it?” the minister asked after a moment.
“She is.”
“And you, Monsieur Allon? Are you still willing to send her?”
“The best way to learn the time and place of the next attack is to insert an agent directly into the operation itself.”
“I take it your answer is yes, then?”
Gabriel nodded gravely. The minister made a show of thought.
“How comprehensive is your surveillance of this man Nasser?” he asked.
“Physical and electronic.”
“But he uses encrypted communications?”
“Correct.”
“So he could issue an attack order and we would be completely in the dark.”
“Conceivably,” said Gabriel carefully.
“And the British? They are unaware of his activities?”
“It appears so.”
“Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, Monsieur Allon, but if I had an agent who was about to go into Syria, I wouldn’t want the man who sent her there to be arrested by the British.”
Gabriel did not disagree with the minister, largely because he had been thinking the same thing for some time. And so late the following morning he journeyed across the channel to inform Graham Seymour, the chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, that the Office had been covertly watching a high-ranking ISIS operative living in the Bethnal Green section of East London. Seymour was predictably appalled, as was Amanda Wallace, the chief of MI5, who heard the same confession an hour later across the river at Thames House. For his penance, Gabriel was forced to make the British services nonvoting partners in his operations. All he needed now was the Americans, he thought, and the disaster would be complete.
The woman now known as Dr. Leila Hadawi was unaware of the interservice warfare raging around her. She tended to her patients at the clinic, she idled away her spare time at the café across the street from her apartment, she ventured occasionally into the center of Paris to shop or stroll. She no longer viewed extremist material on the Internet because she had been instructed not to. Nor did she ever discuss her political beliefs with friends or colleagues. Mainly, she spoke of her summer holiday, which she planned to spend in Greece with a friend from her university days. A packet containing her airline tickets and hotel accommodations arrived three days before she was due to depart. A travel agent in London named Farouk Ghazi handled the booking. Dr. Hadawi paid for nothing.
With the arrival of the packet, Gabriel and the rest of the team went on a war footing. They made travel accommodations of their own—in point of fact, King Saul Boulevard handled the arrangements for them—and by early the next morning the first operatives were moving quietly toward their failsafe points. Only Eli Lavon remained behind at Seraincourt with Gabriel, a decision he later came to regret because his old friend was distraught with worry. He watched over Natalie as a parent watches over an ailing child, looking for signs of distress, changes in mood and demeanor. If she was frightened, she gave no sign of it, even on the last night, when Gabriel spirited her into Paul Rousseau’s lair on the rue de Grenelle for a final briefing. When he gave her a last chance to change her mind, she only smiled. Then she composed a letter to her parents, to be delivered in the event of her death. Tellingly, Gabriel did not refuse to accept it. He placed it in a sealed envelope and placed the envelope in the breast pocket of his jacket. And there it would remain until the day she came out of Syria again.
ISIS supplied most of its European recruits with a detailed list of items to pack for their trip. Dr. Leila Hadawi was no ordinary recruit, however, and so she packed with deception in mind—summer dresses of the kind worn by promiscuous Europeans, revealing swimwear, erotic undergarments. In the morning she dressed piously, pinned her hijab carefully into place, and wheeled her suitcase through the quiet streets of the banlieue to the Aubervilliers RER station. The ride to Charles de Gaulle Airport was ten minutes in length. She glided through unusually heavy security and onto an Air France jet bound for Athens. On the other side of the aisle, dressed for the boardroom of a Fortune 500 company, was the small man with an elusive face. Smiling, Natalie peered out her window as France disappeared beneath her. She was not alone. Not yet.