He thought of the man he had seen in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. The large Arab named Omar al-Farouk who walked with a limp. The large Arab who had left Café Milano a few minutes before Safia detonated her suicide vest. Was he truly Saladin? It didn’t matter. Whoever he was, he would soon be dead. So would everyone else associated with Natalie’s disappearance. Gabriel would make it his life’s work to hunt them all down and destroy ISIS before ISIS could destroy the Middle East and what remained of the civilized world. He suspected he would have a willing accomplice in the American president. ISIS was now two hours from Indiana.
Just then, Gabriel’s mobile phone pulsed. He read the message, returned the phone to his pocket, and walked to the edge of Route 123. A few seconds later a Buick Regal appeared. It stopped only long enough for Gabriel to slide into the backseat. On the floor were two AR-15s and several magazines of ammunition. The Second Amendment, thought Gabriel, definitely had its advantages. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw Mikhail’s frozen eyes looking back at him.
“Which way, boss?”
“Take the GW Parkway back toward Key Bridge,” said Gabriel. “The Beltway is a fucking mess.”
69
HUME, VIRGINIA
NATALIE AWOKE WITH THE SENSATION of having slept an eternity. Her mouth seemed to be stuffed with cotton, her head had lolled sideways against the cool of the window. Here and there, over front porches and in lace-curtained windows, a light faintly burned, but otherwise the atmosphere was one of sudden abandonment. It was as if the inhabitants of this place, having learned of the attacks in Washington, had packed their belongings and taken to the hills.
Her head throbbed with a hangover’s dull ache. She tried to raise it, but could not. Casting her eyes to the left, she watched the woman drive, the woman she had mistakenly believed to be Megan from the FBI. She was holding the wheel with her right hand; in her left was a gun. The time, according to the dashboard clock, was 9:22. Natalie, through the fog of the drug, tried to reconstruct the evening’s events—the second car in the parking garage, the wild ride into Georgetown, the quaint little French restaurant that was supposed to be her target, the bomb vest with the red stitch in the zipper. The detonator was still in her right hand. Lightly, she ran the tip of her forefinger over the switch.
Boom, she thought, recalling her bomb training in Palmyra. And now you are on your way to paradise . . .
A church appeared on Natalie’s right. Soon after, they came to a deserted intersection. The woman came to a complete stop before turning, as instructed by the navigation system, onto a road with a philosopher’s name. It was very narrow, with no yellow centerline. The darkness was absolute; there seemed to be no world at all beyond the patch of asphalt illuminated by the car’s headlights. The navigation system grew suddenly confused. It advised the woman to make a U-turn if possible, and when no turn was forthcoming it fell into a reproachful sulk.
The woman followed the road for another half mile before turning into a dirt-and-gravel track. It bore them across a pasture, over a ridge of wooded hills, and into a small dell, where a timbered A-frame cottage overlooked a black pond. Lights burned within the cottage, and parked outside were three vehicles—a Lincoln Town Car, a Honda Pilot, and a BMW sedan. The woman pulled up behind the BMW and switched off the engine. Natalie, her head against the glass, feigned a coma.
“Can you walk?” asked the woman.
Natalie was silent.
“I saw your eyes moving. I know you’re awake.”
“What did you give me?”
“Propofol.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I’m a nurse.” The woman climbed out of the car and opened Natalie’s door. “Get out.”
“I can’t.”
“Propofol is a short-duration anesthetic,” lectured the woman pedantically. “Patients who are given it can typically walk on their own a few minutes after awakening.”
When Natalie did not move, the woman pointed the gun at her head. Natalie raised her right hand and placed her thumb lightly atop the detonator switch.
“You haven’t got the guts,” said the woman. Then she seized Natalie’s wrist and dragged her from the car.
The door of the cottage was a walk of perhaps twenty yards, but the leaden weight of the suicide vest, and the lingering effects of the propofol, made it seem more like a mile. The room Natalie entered was rustic and quaint. Consequently, its male occupants looked obscenely out of place. Four wore black tactical suits and were armed with combat assault rifles. The fifth wore an elegant business suit and was warming his hands before a wood-burning stove. His back was turned to Natalie. He was well over six feet tall and his shoulders were broad. Still, he looked vaguely infirm, as though he were recovering from a recent injury.
At length, the man in the elegant business suit turned. His hair was neatly groomed and combed, his face was clean-shaven. His dark brown eyes, however, were exactly as Natalie remembered them. So, too, was his confident smile. He took a step toward her, favoring the damaged leg, and stopped.
“Maimonides,” he said pleasantly. “So good to see you again.”
Natalie clutched the detonator tightly in her hand. Beneath her feet the earth burned.
70
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
IT WAS A SMALL DUPLEX, two floors, aluminum siding. The unit on the left was painted granite gray. The one on the right, Qassam el-Banna’s, was the color of a shirt that had been dried too many times on a radiator. Each unit had a single window on the ground floor and a single window on the second. A chain-link fence divided the front yard into separate plots. The one on the left was a showpiece, but Qassam’s looked as though it had been chewed bare by goats.
“Obviously,” observed Eli Lavon darkly from the backseat of the Buick, “he hasn’t had much time for gardening.”
They were parked on the opposite side of the street, outside a duplex of identical construction and upkeep. In the space in front of the gray-white duplex was an Acura sedan. It still had dealer plates.
“Nice car,” said Lavon. “What’s the husband drive?”
“A Kia,” said Gabriel.
“I don’t see a Kia.”
“Neither do I.”
“Wife drives an Acura, husband drives a Kia—what’s wrong with this picture?”
Gabriel offered no explanation.
“What’s the wife’s name?” asked Lavon.
“Amina.”
“Egyptian?”
“Apparently so.”
“Kid?”
“Boy.”
“How old?”
“Two and a half.”
“So he won’t remember what’s about to happen.”
“No,” agreed Gabriel. “He won’t remember.”
A car moved past in the street. The driver had the look of an indigenous South American—a Bolivian, maybe Peruvian. He seemed not to notice the three Israeli intelligence operatives sitting in the parked Buick Regal across the street from the house owned by an Egyptian jihadi who had slipped through the cracks of America’s vast post–9/11 security structure.
“What did Qassam do before he got into the moving business?”
“IT.”
“Why are so many of them in IT?”
“Because they don’t have to study un-Islamic subjects like English literature or Italian Renaissance painting.”
“All the things that make life interesting.”
“They aren’t interested in life, Eli. Only death.”
“Think he left his computers behind?”
“I certainly hope so.”
“What if he smashed his hard drives?”
Gabriel was silent. Another car moved past in the street, another South American behind the wheel. America, he thought, had its banlieues, too.