The Black Widow

A visitor to the fifth floor might have mistaken it for the office of a private Swiss bank. It was somber and shadowed and quiet, save for the Chopin that occasionally drifted through Paul Rousseau’s open door. His long-suffering secretary, the implacable Madame Treville, occupied an orderly desk in the anteroom, and at the opposite end of a narrow hall was the office of Rousseau’s deputy, Christian Bouchard. Bouchard was all things Rousseau was not—young, fit, sharply dressed, and far too good-looking. Most of all, Bouchard was ambitious. The chief of the DGSI had foisted him upon Rousseau, and it was widely assumed he would one day be Alpha Group’s chief. Rousseau resented him only a little, for Bouchard, despite his obvious shortcomings, was extremely good at his job. Ruthless, too. When there was bureaucratic dirty work to be done, invariably it was Bouchard who saw to it.

Three days after the Weinberg Center bombing, with the terrorists still at large, there was a meeting of department heads at the Interior Ministry. Rousseau loathed such gatherings—they invariably devolved into political point-scoring contests—so he sent Bouchard in his stead. It was approaching eight that evening when the deputy finally returned to the rue de Grenelle. Entering Rousseau’s office, he wordlessly placed two photographs on the desk. They showed an olive-skinned woman in her mid-twenties with an oval face and eyes that were like kaleidoscopes of hazel and copper. In the first photo her hair was shoulder length and brushed straight back from her unblemished forehead. In the second it was covered by a hijab of unadorned black silk.

“They’re calling her the black widow,” said Bouchard.

“Catchy,” said Rousseau with a frown. He picked up the second photo, the one where the woman was piously attired, and stared into the bottomless eyes. “What’s her real name?”

“Safia Bourihane.”

“Algerian?”

“By way of Aulnay-sous-Bois.”

Aulnay-sous-Bois was a banlieue north of Paris. Its crime-ridden public housing estates—in France they were known as HLMs, or habitation à loyer modéré—were some of the most violent in the country. The police rarely ventured there. Even Rousseau advised his streetwise case officers to meet their Aulnay-based sources on less dangerous ground.

“She’s twenty-nine years old and was born in France,” Bouchard was saying. “Even so, she’s always described herself as a Muslim first and a Frenchwoman second.”

“Who found her?”

“Lucien.”

Lucien Jacquard was the chief of the DGSI’s counterterrorism division. Nominally, Alpha Group was under his control. In practice, however, Rousseau reported over Jacquard’s head to the chief. To avoid potential conflicts, he briefed Jacquard on active Alpha Group cases but jealously guarded the names of his sources and the unit’s operational methods. Alpha Group was essentially a service within a service, one that Lucien Jacquard wished to bring firmly under his control.

“How much does he have on her?” asked Rousseau, still staring into the eyes of the woman.

“She popped up on Lucien’s radar about three years ago.”

“Why?”

“Her boyfriend.”

Bouchard placed another photograph on the desk. It showed a man in his early thirties with cropped dark hair and the wispy beard of a devout Muslim.

“Algerian?”

“Tunisian, actually. He was the real thing. Good with electronics. Computers, too. He spent time in Iraq and Yemen before making his way to Syria.”

“Al-Qaeda?”

“No,” said Bouchard. “ISIS.”

Rousseau looked up sharply. “Where is he now?”

“Paradise, apparently.”

“What happened?”

“Killed in a coalition air strike.”

“And the woman?”

“She traveled to Syria last year.”

“How long was she there?”

“At least six months.”

“Doing what?”

“Obviously, she did a bit of weapons training.”

“And when she returned to Paris?”

“Lucien put her under surveillance. And then …” Bouchard shrugged.

“He dropped it?”

Bouchard nodded.

“Why?”

“The usual reasons. Too many targets, too few resources.”

“She was a ticking time bomb.”

“Lucien didn’t think so. Apparently, she cleaned up her act when she came back to France. She wasn’t associating with known radicals, and her Internet activity was benign. She even stopped wearing the hijab.”

“Which is exactly what she was told to do by the man who masterminded the attack. She was obviously part of a sophisticated network.”

“Lucien concurs. In fact, he advised the minister that it’s only a matter of time before they hit us again.”

“How did the minister take the news?”

“By ordering Lucien to turn over all his files to us.”

Rousseau permitted himself a brief smile at the expense of his rival. “I want everything, Christian. Especially the watch reports after her return from Syria.”

“Lucien promised to send the files over first thing in the morning.”

“How good of him.” Rousseau looked down at the photograph of the woman they were calling “la veuve noire”—the black widow. “Where do you suppose she is?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say she’s back in Syria by now, along with her accomplice.”

“One wonders why they didn’t wish to die for the cause.” Rousseau gathered up the three photographs and returned them to his deputy. “Any other news?”

“An interesting development regarding the Weinberg woman. It seems her art collection included a lost painting by Vincent van Gogh.”

“Really?”