North of R Street, Wisconsin Avenue sank for a block or two before rising into the neighborhoods of Burleith and Glover Park. Ahead, Natalie saw a blue-and-yellow awning that read BISTROT LEPIC & WINE BAR. It was the restaurant Safia had ordered her to bomb. She stopped and peered through the window. It was a charming place—small, warm, inviting, very Parisian. Safia had said it would be crowded, but that wasn’t the case. Nor did the people sitting at the tables look like French diplomats or officials from the Foreign Ministry in Paris. They looked like Americans. And, like everyone else in Washington, they looked frightened.
Just then, Natalie heard someone calling her name—not her own name but the name of the woman she had become in order to prevent a night like this. She turned sharply and saw that a car had pulled up at the curb behind her. At the wheel was a woman with open-air skin. It was Megan, the woman from the FBI.
Natalie crawled into the front seat as though she were crawling into the arms of her mother. The weight of the suicide vest pinned her to the seat; the detonator felt like a live animal in her palm. The car swung a U-turn and joined the northward exodus from Georgetown, as all around the sirens wailed. Natalie covered her ears, but it was no use.
“Please turn on some music,” she begged.
The woman switched on the car radio, but there was no music to be found, only the terrible news. The National Counterterrorism Center, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, Harbor Place: the death toll, it was feared, could approach one thousand. Natalie was able to bear it for only a minute or two. She reached for the radio’s power button but stopped when she felt a sharp pain in her upper arm, like the bite of a viper. Then she looked at the woman and saw that she, too, was holding something in her right hand. But it was not a detonator switch upon which her thumb rested. It was the plunger of a syringe.
Instantly, Natalie’s vision blurred. The woman’s weather-beaten face receded; a passing police cruiser left time-lapse streaks of red and blue on the night. Natalie called out a name, the only name she could recall, before a darkness descended upon her. It was like the blackness of her abaya. She saw herself walking through a great Arabian house of many rooms and courts. And in the last room, standing in the molten light of an oculus, was Saladin.
67
CAFé MILANO, GEORGETOWN
FOR A FEW SECONDS AFTER the explosion there was only silence. It was like the silence of the crypt, thought Mikhail, the silence of death. Finally, there was a moan, and then a cough, and then the first screams of agony and terror. Soon there were others, many others—the limbless, the blind, the ones who would never be able to gaze into a mirror again. A few more would surely die tonight, but many would survive. They would see their children again, they would dance at weddings and weep at funerals. And perhaps one day they would be able to eat in a restaurant again without the nagging fear that the woman at the next table was wearing a suicide vest. It was the fear that all Israelis had lived with during the dark days of the Second Intifada. And now, thanks to a man called Saladin, that same fear had come to America.
Mikhail reached for the door latch but stopped when he heard the first gunshot. He realized then that his phone was vibrating in his coat pocket. He checked the screen. It was Eli Lavon.
“Where the hell are you?”
In a whisper, Mikhail told him.
“Four men with guns just entered the restaurant.”
“I can hear them.”
“You’ve got to get out of there.”
“Where’s Natalie?”
“The FBI is about to pick her up.”
Mikhail returned the phone to his pocket. From beyond the lavatory’s thin door came another gunshot—large caliber, military grade. Then there were two more: crack, crack . . . With each shot, another scream went silent. Clearly, the terrorists were determined to see that no one left Café Milano alive. These were no video-game jihadis. They were well trained, disciplined. They were moving methodically through the ruins of the restaurant in search of survivors. And eventually, thought Mikhail, their search would bring them to the lavatory door.
The American man with gelled hair was shaking with fear. Mikhail looked around for something he might use as a weapon but saw nothing suitable. Then, with a sideways nod of his head, he instructed the American to conceal himself in the stall. Somehow, the restaurant still had power. Mikhail killed the lights, muffling the snap of the switch, and pressed his back against the wall next to the door. In the sudden darkness, he vowed that he would not die this night in a toilet in Georgetown, with a man he did not know. It would be an ignoble way for a soldier to depart this world, he thought, even a soldier of the secret variety.
From beyond the door there was the sharp crack of another gunshot, closer than the last, and another scream went silent. Then there were footsteps outside in the corridor. Mikhail flexed the fingers of his lethal right hand. Open the door, you bastard, he thought. Open the fucking door.
It was at that same instant that Gabriel realized his hearing loss was not permanent. The first sound he heard was the same sound that many Washingtonians would associate with that night, the sound of sirens. The first responders were rolling up Tysons McLean Drive toward what had once been the security checkpoint of the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Inside the ruined buildings, the less seriously injured were tending to the gravely wounded in a desperate attempt to stem bleeding and save lives. Fareed Barakat was looking after Paul Rousseau, and Adrian Carter was looking after what remained of Gabriel’s operation. With borrowed mobile phones he had reestablished contact with Langley, FBI Headquarters, and the White House Situation Room. Washington was in chaos, and the federal government was struggling to keep pace with events. Thus far, there had been confirmed attacks at Liberty Crossing, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, Washington Harbor, and Café Milano. In addition, there were reports of more attacks along M Street. It was feared that hundreds of people, perhaps as many as a thousand, had been killed.
At that moment, however, Gabriel was focused on only two people: Mikhail Abramov and Natalie Mizrahi. Mikhail was trapped in the men’s room at Café Milano. Natalie was walking north on the west side of Wisconsin Avenue.
“Why hasn’t the FBI brought her in?” he snapped at Carter.
“They can’t seem to find her.”
“How hard can it be to find a woman wearing a suicide vest and a red jacket?”
“They’re looking.”
“Tell them to look harder.”