The Black Widow

The World Is Not Enough

Daniel Silva has created one of the finest espionage thrillers in recent times featuring Gabriel Allon, an Israeli spy-assassin, who is also an extraordinary art restorer. So, the books are often as much about art history as about the Israeli intelligence services battling international terrorism.

Silva is so eerily prescient that what he writes about leaps right out of the news headlines. Over eighteen books his hero tracks and destroys terrorists from Iran, to Palestine, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and other hotbeds of unrest and radicalisation, particularly groups that endanger Israel. In his latest, bestselling novel, The Black Widow, an ISIS run terror outfit carries out bombings in Paris and Amsterdam, which really happened a few weeks later. Silva writes in his foreword, that he began writing The Black Widow before the Paris attacks of 2015, and he considered putting aside his typescript, but made the decision to let it be published. He notes in a sad tone, “I only wish that the murderous, millenarian terrorism of the Islamic State lived solely on the pages of this story.”

His novels provide a concise history of the troubles in the Middle East, and don’t soft peddle Islamic terrorism. He names the terrorist groups Allon sets out to fight in each book, with a team of dedicated officers. Allon is on friendly terms with heads of other intelligence organizations in the world, and they often help one another in their mission to battle extremists.

Allon was a talented art student with a promising career, when he was picked by the head of the Israeli secret service to avenge the murder of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972 by Palestinian militant group Black September. He was one of the elite team that hunted and killed the murderers.  His art career ruined, he joins the Israeli security agency known simply as the Office. Allon suffers tragedy himself, when a bomb kills his young son and maims his wife; he subsequently falls in love with and marries fellow intelligence agent Chiara, and in The Black Widow tries to keep work away and look after his new born twins. He is also waiting to take over as Chief of the Office, when the ISIS bombing that kill his friend Hannah Weinberg, one among many, bring him back into the field,.

The man responsible for the bombings is the mysterious Saladin, and the only way of reaching him is by planting an undercover agent into his network. The woman chosen and trained for the highly dangerous mission is a Jewish doctor, Natalie Mizrahi, who is given a new Palestinian identity and past so that she can infiltrate the ISIS hideout.

She takes on the assignment reluctantly, but once she is in, Natalie, or Leila Hadawi as she is renamed, acts with exemplary courage, losing her nerve just once before she is to be thrown into the lion’s lair. For the reader every page is full of tension and a heart-in-the-mouth feeling for Natalie and her suffering.  It can be very difficult to become another person, to the extent that even her dreams belong to Leila. One slip could mean death not just for her, but thousands of innocents to be targeted in attacks being planned by terrorists.

The Black Widow is a terrific book, close enough to reality to be scary, but also tempered with the softness of emotions—love, friendship, loyalty and devotion to a cause. In a sense Gabriel Allon and Saladin are not that different—only one seeks to protect and the other to destroy.

The Black Widow

By Gabriel Allon

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 544