The Black Widow (gabriel Allon, #16)

The novel, the sixteenth in the Gabriel Allon series, opens with a devastating terrorist attack in Paris. Hannah Weinberg, director of the Isaac Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France, has organized a conference on the future of French Jewry. On the morning of the event, two masked attackers arrive at the center on the rue des Rosiers in a van packed with explosives. They shoot security guards and bystanders, then move to a nearby boulangerie (bakery) and kill everyone inside. The van's pre-set bomb detonates at ten o'clock, the conference's scheduled start time, leveling the building and much of the street. The female attacker returns to execute the wounded, including Hannah. Paul Rousseau, chief of Alpha Group, a secret counterterrorism unit within France's DGSI, its internal security service, vows to find the mastermind. His deputy identifies the female attacker as Safia Bourihane, a young Frenchwoman of Algerian descent who had traveled to Syria and returned.

In Beirut, Mikhail Abramov, a field agent for Israel's secret intelligence service, known as the Office, meets with Clovis Mansour, a Lebanese antiquities dealer on the Office payroll. Mansour reveals that a Syrian dealer tried to sell looted antiquities to fund a high-ranking ISIS leader known as Saladin, who is building a Western terror network. Shortly after Mikhail departs, both Mansour and the Office's longtime Lebanese contract employee, Sami Haddad, are killed, suggesting the network detected the meeting. Uzi Navot, the outgoing Office chief, recognizes Saladin as a threat of extraordinary ambition.

Gabriel Allon, the legendary Israeli operative officially listed as dead, has been restoring Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence at the Israel Museum. Recruited by the Office's former chief, Ari Shamron, after the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Gabriel killed six members of Black September, the Palestinian group responsible for the attack, in a covert campaign of retribution. A car bombing in Vienna killed his young son Daniel and left his first wife Leah permanently institutionalized. Now remarried to Chiara, a younger Italian-Jewish former Office agent, he has infant twins and is expected to become the next Office chief. When he sees Hannah Weinberg's photograph on television, he reacts with anguish. Hannah was a personal friend whose will leaves Gabriel her van Gogh painting, Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table, which hangs in her locked childhood bedroom in Paris.

Navot informs Gabriel that the French want his help finding Saladin and are holding Hannah's van Gogh as leverage. Gabriel agrees and flies to Paris, where he and Rousseau negotiate an operational accord. A second ISIS attack, a market bombing in Amsterdam carried out by a Dutch convert named Margreet Janssen, intensifies the urgency. Gabriel's elite team discovers that the same man shadowed both Safia and Margreet before their attacks. Alpha Group identifies him as Jalal Nasser, a Jordanian graduate student at King's College London.

Gabriel travels to Amman to meet Fareed Barakat, a senior figure in Jordan's General Intelligence Department (GID). Fareed confirms that Saladin is likely a former Iraqi military or intelligence officer directing ISIS's external operations. The two agree to a three-way partnership with the French. Back at King Saul Boulevard, the Office's Tel Aviv headquarters, Gabriel tells Navot he plans to insert a female agent into Saladin's network.

Dr. Natalie Mizrahi works in the emergency room at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. From a family of Algerian-Jewish origin that settled in Marseilles before emigrating to Israel, she is fluent in French, Arabic, and Hebrew. The Office brings her to a farmhouse in the Jezreel Valley, where Gabriel asks her to infiltrate ISIS by posing as a radicalized Palestinian doctor. Natalie initially refuses, but Dina Sarid, the Office's terrorism specialist who lost her mother and sisters in a 1994 bus bombing, persuades her. Natalie tries on a hijab, sees her transformation, and asks for her cover name. Dina tells her: Leila.

Natalie undergoes months of intensive training, memorizing the life of Leila Hadawi, a Palestinian doctor whose family originated from Sumayriyya, a destroyed Arab village in the Galilee. Gabriel walks her through Sumayriyya's ruins to make the Palestinian narrative visceral. After passing a brutal mock interrogation, she is deployed to a medical clinic in Aubervilliers, a predominantly Muslim suburb of Paris. Living as Dr. Hadawi, she treats immigrant patients and browses extremist websites under the pen name Umm Ziad.

To engineer Natalie's recruitment, Gabriel's team captures Nabil Awad, a young Jordanian ISIS operative, on a quay in the Molenbeek district of Brussels. Fareed interrogates him until Nabil reveals his role as a talent spotter. The team plants an encrypted message recommending Leila to the network. After a tense wait, Jalal Nasser approaches Natalie in Paris and, inside the Gothic cathedral of Senlis, invites her to travel to Syria.

ISIS arranges Natalie's journey through Greece and Turkey into Syria. In Raqqa, she encounters the caliphate's horrors: public executions, religious police, and near-total deprivation. She undergoes a grueling interrogation by Abu Ahmed al-Tikriti, a former Iraqi intelligence colonel, then trains at Camp Saladin near the ancient city of Palmyra alongside Safia Bourihane. She is then taken blindfolded to a house near Mosul, where a man lies critically wounded by an American air strike. Working with minimal supplies, Natalie performs emergency surgery. After twenty-four hours, the man regains consciousness, and Abu Ahmed tells her to call him Saladin. Over several days, Saladin reveals his Iraqi army background and tells Natalie she will play a major role in an upcoming attack. Sensing he intends it as a suicide mission despite his assurances, Natalie is smuggled back through Turkey to Paris.

Months of silence follow. Just before a political deadline, the network sends Natalie a plane ticket to Washington, arriving the day before the French president's state visit. Gabriel and Fareed brief Adrian Carter, the CIA's director of operations, at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Carter agrees to let Natalie enter under surveillance. At a hotel in Arlington, Safia joins Natalie and presents two suicide vests. The FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) monitor the room. Saladin has traveled to Washington under a Saudi cover identity. Gabriel spots him at the Four Seasons Hotel, but Carter dismisses his concerns.

ISIS launches coordinated attacks across Washington. Two trucks, each carrying a thousand-pound ammonium nitrate bomb, devastate the NCTC and the adjacent Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Gabriel, inside the NCTC, survives with injuries. Simultaneous strikes hit the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, and waterfront restaurants. Safia drives Natalie to Georgetown and orders her to detonate her vest inside Bistrot Lepic, a French restaurant, then speeds to Café Milano, where Saladin confirms the attacks' success and departs moments before Safia detonates her own vest. Mikhail, trapped in Café Milano's restroom, kills all four ISIS gunmen who enter to execute survivors.

Alone on the street, Natalie borrows a phone and contacts the Office in Tel Aviv. Carter directs the FBI to retrieve her, but the woman who arrives is an ISIS operative who drugs Natalie and delivers her to Saladin at a cottage in rural Virginia. Saladin plays recordings proving Natalie's betrayal, including her crying out Gabriel's name in Hebrew while sedated, and orders her beheading. Gabriel's team traces the terrorists' phones to the home of Qassam el-Banna, an Egyptian-born ISIS operative in Alexandria, Virginia, and from el-Banna's computer discovers the cottage's location. As the executioner prepares to behead Natalie on camera, Mikhail fires through the window, killing the terrorists in rapid succession. Gabriel cuts Natalie free. Saladin has already escaped.

More than 700 people die in the attacks. Natalie recovers at the Nahalal farmhouse, where she has post-traumatic stress disorder. A romantic relationship develops between her and Mikhail. Gabriel donates Hannah's van Gogh to the Israel Museum and is publicly announced as the new Office chief, bearing the title memuneh, "the one in charge." He visits Leah at the psychiatric hospital and introduces her to his children in a brief scene before she slips back into her memories. At a family gathering at Shamron's villa, Gabriel authorizes a final act: Mikhail shoots Jalal Nasser eleven times on his London doorstep, one for each Israeli Olympic team member murdered at Munich, in the tradition of Operation Wrath of God, the Office's original campaign of retribution for the massacre. Saladin remains at large, and the conflict between the two men is far from over.