The Black Widow

“And guess who she decided to leave it to.”

By his expression, Rousseau made it clear he was in no mood for games, so Bouchard quickly supplied the name.

“I thought he was dead.”

“Apparently not.”

“Why didn’t he attend the funeral?”

“Who’s to say he didn’t?”

“Have we told him about the painting?”

“The ministry would prefer that it remain in France.”

“So the answer is no?”

Bouchard was silent.

“Someone should remind the ministry that four of the victims of the Weinberg Center bombing were citizens of the State of Israel.”

“Your point?”

“I suspect we’ll be hearing from him soon.”

Bouchard withdrew, leaving Rousseau alone. He dimmed his desk lamp and pressed the play button on his bookshelf stereo system, and in a moment the opening notes of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor crept into the silence. Traffic moved along the rue de Grenelle, and to the east, rising above the Seine embankments, glowed the lights of the Eiffel Tower. Rousseau saw none of it; in his thoughts he was watching a young man moving swiftly across a courtyard with a gun in his outstretched hand. He was a legend, this man, a gifted deceiver and assassin who had been fighting terrorists longer than even Rousseau. It would be an honor to work with him rather than against him. Soon, Rousseau thought with certainty. Soon …

3 (#ulink_0db4fdb6-f7cf-5280-974e-17a5294a8d2b)

BEIRUT (#ulink_0db4fdb6-f7cf-5280-974e-17a5294a8d2b)

THOUGH PAUL ROUSSEAU DID NOT know it then, the seeds for just such an operational union had already been sown. For on that very same evening, as Rousseau was walking toward his sad little bachelor’s apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques, a car was speeding along Beirut’s seafront Corniche. The car was black in color, German in manufacture, and imposing in size. The man in back was long and lanky, with pale, bloodless skin and eyes the color of glacial ice. His expression projected a sense of profound boredom, but the fingers of his right hand, which were tapping lightly on the armrest, betrayed the true state of his emotions. He wore a pair of slim-fitting jeans, a dark woolen pullover, and a leather jacket. Beneath the jacket, wedged inside the waistband of the trousers, was a 9mm Belgian-made pistol he had collected from a contact at the airport—there being no shortage of weapons, large or small, in Lebanon. In his breast pocket was a billfold filled with cash, along with a well-traveled Canadian passport that identified him as David Rostov. Like most things about the man, the passport was a lie. His real name was Mikhail Abramov, and he was employed by the secret intelligence service of the State of Israel. The service had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Men such as Mikhail referred to it as the Office and nothing else.

He looked into the rearview mirror and waited for the eyes of the driver to meet his. The driver’s name was Sami Haddad. He was a Maronite, a former member of the Lebanese Forces Christian militia, and a longtime contract employee of the Office. He had the gentle forgiving eyes of a priest and the swollen hands of a prizefighter. He was old enough to remember when Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East—and old enough to have fought in the long civil war that had torn the country to pieces. There was nothing Sami Haddad didn’t know about Lebanon and its dangerous politics, and nothing he couldn’t lay his hands on in a hurry—weapons, boats, cars, drugs, girls. He had once procured a mountain lion on short notice because the target of an Office recruitment, an alcoholic prince from a Gulf Arab dynasty, admired predatory cats. His loyalty to the Office was beyond question. So were his instincts for trouble.

“Relax,” said Sami Haddad, finding Mikhail’s eyes in the mirror. “We’re not being followed.”

Mikhail peered over his shoulder at the lights of the traffic following them along the Corniche. Any one of the cars might have contained a team of killers or kidnappers from Hezbollah or one of the extreme jihadist organizations that had taken root in the Palestinian refugee camps of the south—organizations that made al-Qaeda seem like dowdy old Islamic moderates. It was his third visit to Beirut in the past year. Each time, he had entered the country with the same passport, protected by the same cover story. He was David Rostov, an itinerant businessman of Russian-Canadian descent who acquired illicit antiquities in the Middle East for a largely European clientele. Beirut was one of his favorite hunting grounds, for in Beirut anything was possible. He had once been offered a seven-foot Roman statue, remarkably intact, of a wounded Amazon. The cost of the piece was $2 million, shipping included. Over endless cups of sweet Turkish coffee, he convinced the seller, a prominent dealer from a well-known family, to drop his price by half a million. And then he walked away, earning for himself the reputation of both a shrewd negotiator and a tough customer, which was a good reputation to have in a place like Beirut.

He checked the time on his Samsung mobile. Sami Haddad noticed. Sami noticed everything.

“What time is he expecting you?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Late.”

“Money never sleeps, Sami.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Shall we go straight to the hotel, or do you want to take a drive first?”

“Your call.”

“Let’s go to the hotel.”

“Let’s take a drive.”

“No problem.”

Sami Haddad turned off the Corniche into a street lined with colonial French buildings. Mikhail knew it well. Twelve years earlier, while serving in the Sayeret Matkal special forces, he had killed a terrorist from Hezbollah as he lay sleeping in the bed of a safe house. To be a member of such an elite unit was the dream of every Israeli boy, and it was a particularly noteworthy achievement for a boy from Moscow. A boy who had to fight every day of his life because his ancestors happened to be Jewish. A boy whose father, an important Soviet academic, had been locked away in a psychiatric hospital because he dared to question the wisdom of the Party. The boy had arrived in Israel at the age of sixteen. He had learned to speak Hebrew in a month and within a year had lost all traces of a Russian accent. He was like the millions who had come before him, the early Zionist pioneers who had fled to Palestine to escape the persecution and pogroms of Eastern Europe, the human wrecks who came spilling out of the death camps after the war. He had shed the baggage and the weakness of his past. He was a new person, a new Jew. He was an Israeli.

“We’re still clean,” said Sami Haddad.

“Then what are you waiting for?” replied Mikhail.

Sami wound his way back to the Corniche and headed to the marina. Rising above it were the twin glass-and-steel towers of the Four Seasons Hotel. Sami guided the car into the drive and looked into the mirror for instructions.

“Call me when he arrives,” said Mikhail. “Let me know whether he has a friend.”

“He never goes anywhere without a friend.”

Mikhail collected his briefcase and overnight bag from the opposite seat and opened the door.

“Be careful in there,” said Sami Haddad. “Don’t talk to strangers.”

Mikhail climbed out and, whistling tunelessly, breezed past the valets into the lobby. A dark-suited security man eyed him warily but allowed him to enter without a search. He crossed a thick carpet that swallowed his footfalls and presented himself at the imposing reception desk. Standing behind it, illuminated by a cone of overhead light, was a pretty black-haired woman of twenty-five. Mikhail knew that the woman was a Palestinian and that her father, a fighter from the old days, had fled Lebanon with Arafat in 1982, long before she was born. Several other employees of the hotel also had troubling connections. Two members of Hezbollah worked in the kitchen, and there were several known jihadis in housekeeping. Mikhail reckoned that approximately ten percent of the staff would have killed him if informed of his true identity and occupation.

He smiled at the woman, and the woman smiled coolly in return.

“Good evening, Mr. Rostov. So good to see you again.” Her painted nails clattered on a keyboard while Mikhail grew light-headed from the stench of overripe azaleas. “We have you for just one night.”

“A pity,” said Mikhail with another smile.

“Do you require assistance with your luggage?”

“I can manage.”

“We’ve upgraded you to a deluxe sea-view room. It’s on the fourteenth floor.” She handed him his packet of room keys and gestured toward the elevators like a flight attendant pointing out the location of the emergency exits. “Welcome back.”

Mikhail carried his bag and briefcase into the elevator foyer. An empty carriage waited, its doors open. He stepped inside and, grateful for the solitude, pressed the call button for the fourteenth floor. But as the doors were closing, a hand poked through the breach and a man entered. He was thickset, with a heavy ridge over his brow and a jawbone built to take a punch. His eyes met Mikhail’s briefly in the reflection of the doors. A nod was exchanged, but no words passed between them. The man pressed the button for the twentieth floor, almost as an afterthought, and picked at his thumbnail as the carriage rose. Mikhail pretended to check his e-mail on his mobile and while doing so surreptitiously snapped the blunt-headed man’s photograph. He forwarded the photo to King Saul Boulevard, the location of the Office’s anonymous Tel Aviv headquarters, while walking along the corridor to his room. A glance around the door frame revealed no evidence of tampering. He swiped his card key and, bracing himself for attack, entered.

The sound of Vivaldi greeted him—a favorite of arms smugglers, heroin dealers, and terrorists the world over, he thought as he switched off the radio. The bed had already been turned down, a chocolate lay on the pillow. He went to the window and saw the roof of Sami Haddad’s car parked along the Corniche. Beyond was the marina, and beyond the marina the blackness of the Mediterranean. Somewhere out there was his back door. He was no longer allowed to come to Beirut without an offshore escape hatch. The next chief had plans for him—or so he had heard through the Office grapevine. For a secure institution, it was a notoriously gossipy place.

Just then, Mikhail’s mobile blossomed with light. It was a message from King Saul Boulevard stating that the computers could not identify the man who had joined him in the elevator. It advised him to proceed with caution, whatever that meant. He drew the blackout shade and the curtains and switched off the room lights one by one until the darkness was absolute. Then he sat at the foot of the bed, his gaze focused on the thin strip of light at the bottom of the door, and waited for the phone to ring.

It was not unusual for the source to be late. He was, as he reminded Mikhail at every opportunity, a very busy man. Therefore, it was no surprise that ten o’clock came and went with no call from Sami Haddad. Finally, at quarter past, the mobile flared.