The Twelfth Imam

by Joel C. Rosenberg

“Finish the article.”

  “You’re crazy! I didn’t have time.”

  “You’re lying. Now, give me the rest of the article. Word for word. I know you can do it. I know all about you, David. I know you’ve tested at genius levels. I know you had a straight 4.0 average before Claire Harper died and her only daughter, Marseille, moved to Portland with her dad.”

  The hair on David’s arms stood up.

  “You have a photographic memory,” the man continued. “You’re only sixteen but you’re supposed to graduate early—two years early—this June. You scored a 1570 on the SATs. The Ivy Leagues were in your future before you began to implode. That’s actually where you and I were supposed to meet, a few years from now. But your little departure into self-destruction made me intervene sooner than I’d planned. Now cut the bull and recite the rest of the article for me, son. Before I walk out of here a very disappointed man.”

  The room was silent for at least a minute, save the buzz from the fluorescent lamps above them. David stared at the man for a while, then at the magazine, crumpled in the man’s hand. Then he closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and began reciting from memory.

  “‘It was an impressive group, among the most diverse, most experienced ever hired by the CIA. Ages ranged from twenty to over sixty-five. More than half have spent significant time overseas, and one in six is a military veteran. They bring backgrounds as diverse as forestry, finance, and industrial engineering. And they’re a well-educated bunch. They represent schools ranging from Oregon State, UCLA, and the University of Denver to the U.S. Naval Academy, Princeton, and Duquesne. Half the new recruits sport a master’s or PhD. And if you want to work for the CIA’s analytic corps, the directorate of intelligence, you’d better keep your grades up—the average grade-point average is a respectable 3.7.’”

  “So why am I here?” the man asked. “Simple—to recruit you.”

  “You want me to work for the CIA?” David asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “And you’re looking for a few good ex-cons?” David quipped.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, son. Two weeks in this Holiday Inn hardly qualifies as hard time. For most people, a criminal record—even a juvenile record—would disqualify them. But not in your particular case.”

  “My particular case?”

  “You’re fluent in Farsi, German, and French. You’re conversational in Arabic, and I suspect you’ll master that pretty quickly once you put your mind to it. You’re already five-foot-eleven. In a few more years, you’ll be six-two or six-three. You know how to handle yourself. You could be valuable.”

  “Valuable for what?” David asked.

  “You really want to know?”

  David shrugged.

  The man shrugged too and stood up to leave.

  “No, wait,” David said, jumping to his feet. “I really do want to know. What would I be valuable for?”

  The man looked back at David. “I have no use for pretenders.”

  “I’m not pretending.”

  “Then I’ll tell you—hunting bin Laden.”

  David stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You want me to help hunt down Osama bin Laden?”

  “Actually,” the man said, “I want you to bring us his head in a box.”

  26

  David was stunned.

  He had to admit, he was electrified at the prospect. He hated bin Laden. The man had destroyed Marseille’s life and as a result had come close to destroying David’s. He wanted revenge so badly he could taste it. But as appealing as it was, this whole conversation still made no sense.

  “Why me?” David asked. “I’m only sixteen.”

  “That will make things a little more complicated.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning usually I recruit college students. But with your behavior in recent months, I was concerned you might not make it to college. And I’ve been following your story too closely to have it end with disappointment for both of us. So like I said, I had to intervene earlier than I’d planned. The good news is that no one really knows who you are. You’re not on the grid. You have no identity. You’ve just been kicked out of school. Your parents love you, but they don’t know what to do with you. They’re about to ship you off to boarding school for the rest of the semester. Your friends don’t expect to see you again. It’s a perfect time to get you on board, to begin building you a cover story, and in a few years, you’ll be ready—”

  “Wait a minute,” David interrupted. “I have to ask—how exactly do you know so much about me?”

  “I’m friends with your parents.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since before you were born.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Jack,” the man said, finally putting his cards on the table.

  “Jack?” David said. “As in Jack Zalinsky?”

  Zalinsky nodded.

  “As in the Jack Zalinsky who rescued my parents from Tehran?”

  Zalinsky nodded again.

  “So my parents sent you here?”

  Zalinsky laughed as the guard electronically unlocked the door. “Not a chance. In fact, they would kill me if they knew I was here. And this will never work if they know, David. You can’t ever tell them we’ve met or what I’m about to take you into. Not if you want us to infiltrate you into the al Qaeda network and bag yourself a high-value target. It would be too risky for you and too risky for them. This has to be hush-hush, or it’s over. Understood?”

  The room was quiet again for a moment.

  Then David finally said, “I’m in.”

  “Good,” Zalinsky said.

  “So what do I do next?”

  “Let your parents get you out of here tomorrow. Go home with them. Be a good boy. Let them put you in the boys’ school in Alabama. I’ll make sure you get accepted. Then finish the year with straight A’s without getting into any more fights. Get yourself in shape. And when it’s time, I’ll come get you.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we’ll see if you’ve got what we need.”

  And with that, Jack Zalinsky was gone.

  27

  David buckled down and studied hard.

  But physics and trigonometry weren’t his passion. Nor was making new friends. With every spare moment, David locked himself away in his dorm room and studied the life of Osama bin Laden. He ordered books from Amazon. He pored over every magazine and newspaper story he could find in the school library. He began watching C-SPAN and the History Channel in what little spare time his new school afforded him, and in time a profile began to emerge.

  What surprised him most was to find that bin Laden didn’t fit the standard image of a terrorist. He wasn’t particularly young. He wasn’t poor or dispossessed or stupid or uneducated. Nor did he come from a violent or criminal family, much less one particularly bent on jihad, or “holy war.” Born in late 1957 or early 1958—no one seemed to know for sure—Osama, David discovered, was the seventeenth of at least fifty-four children. His father, Mohammed bin Laden, was a wealthy Saudi who had founded one of the largest construction companies in the Middle East. His mother, Alia Ghanem, was a Syrian woman of Palestinian origin who met Mohammed in Jerusalem while he was doing renovation work on the Dome of the Rock. David was shocked to learn that Alia was only fourteen years old when she married Mohammed, and she wasn’t his only wife—or one of three, or even ten. She was one of twenty-two wives the man had at various times through the years.

  When Osama was only four or five years old, his parents divorced, and the little boy and his mother were forced to move out. Young Osama was now effectively an only child being raised by a single mother in the rigid, misogynist, fundamentalist culture of Saudi Arabia.

  And then tragedy struck. Not long after the divorce, Osama’s father died in a plane crash. Years later, Osama’s brother Salem would also die in a horrific plane crash. David wondered if
this was when the idea of planes and death and the psychological torment they could cause had been planted in Osama’s heart.

  In June 1967, as he approached his tenth birthday, Osama watched along with the rest of the Arab world as the tiny Jewish State of Israel devastated the military forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in just six days. Emotionally rocked, Osama wondered whether Allah was turning his back on the Arab forces.

  As best David could determine based on his in-depth studies, the first time Osama bin Laden heard an answer that made sense to him was in 1972. During his freshman year of high school, Osama met a gym teacher who happened to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic jihadist group founded in Egypt in the 1920s by a charismatic radical Sunni cleric named Hassan al-Banna. The gym teacher explained to bin Laden that the Muslims had turned their back on Allah by embracing the godless Soviets. In turn, Allah was turning his back on the Muslims. Apostasy was crippling the Muslim people. Only if they purified themselves, turned wholly and completely to following the teachings of the Qur’an, and launched a true jihad against the Jews and the Christians could they ever regain Allah’s favor and the glory that was once theirs.

  As bin Laden approached his sixteenth birthday in 1973—and underwent a massive growth spurt that left him six feet six inches tall and 160 pounds—the young jihadist-to-be was again stunned and horrified to see the Muslims of Egypt and Syria decisively defeated by the Jews of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Now the Muslim Brotherhood argument made even more sense: Muslims were being humiliated by the Israelis because they had lost their way. They had forgotten the path of the prophets. How could they ever regain the glory that had once been theirs unless they returned to the teachings of the Qur’an with all that they were?

  Often, David lay awake at night, poring over the pieces of bin Laden’s life. He wanted to know this man inside and out. He wanted to be able to pick out his voice in a crowd. He wanted to be able to recognize him at a glance. He wanted to be able to think like him, talk like him, move like him. It was the only possible way, David decided, of penetrating al Qaeda and being drawn into the inner circle, which in turn was the only way of bringing this monster to justice. And what struck David again and again was how young bin Laden had been when he had begun to make his choices.

  Bin Laden was just sixteen, David realized, when he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and began reading the collected works of radical Sunni author Sayyid Qutb. He was only seventeen when he got married for the first time, to a devout fourteen-year-old Muslim girl who was a cousin of his from Syria. What’s more, bin Laden was only in his young twenties when Ayatollah Khomeini led his Islamic Revolution to victory in Iran in 1979, an event that electrified Sunni radicals who disagreed with Khomeini’s Shia theology but loved his tactics and envied his accomplishments.

  During these formative years, David noticed, bin Laden had wrestled with hard questions. Why had he been born? What was the meaning of life? Was his father right—was life about building empires, making billions, and marrying as many women as he possibly could? Or was there something more? What if man was born not to please himself, but to please Allah? What if the path to eternal life and happiness was not in a comfortable life but in a life of jihad?

  David despised every choice bin Laden had made. But at the tender age of sixteen, David was beginning to understand why those choices had been made. And it began to make his own choices that much easier.

  28

  Montgomery, Alabama

  June 2002

  Zalinsky pulled up alongside David as he was walking down Main Street.

  “Get in,” he told his young protégé.

  Glad to see Zalinsky, David complied immediately. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  David knew Zalinsky had been tracking him closely. Just days after David had enrolled in the private boys’ academy in Alabama to finish his high school diploma, he’d found a program installed on his laptop that allowed Zalinsky to read all of his incoming and outgoing e-mails and instant message conversations and to track all Internet usage. He knew the agent had tapped his cell phone and undoubtedly had someone recording his calls and listening to many of them, especially those with his parents and his brothers. He was even aware of a young operative enrolling at the same academy, posing as a transfer student, going to all of the same classes as David, talking to many of the same people.

  David didn’t mind the scrutiny. Zalinsky wasn’t just watching David’s back and making sure he didn’t get in trouble again. He was carefully monitoring David’s ability to keep a secret. Would he confide in someone—anyone—his plans with Zalinsky? Was he bragging to anyone that he might join the CIA? Was he a security risk in any other way? The fact that the veteran Agency man was finally making contact had to mean that he was sufficiently convinced that David Shirazi could keep his mouth shut.

  Soon they were pulling into Montgomery Regional Airport, a joint-use facility for military, commercial, and private aviation. David had been in and out of the airfield several times, usually on a U.S. Airways Express flight. But Zalinsky wasn’t headed for the commercial side. Rather, he pulled his silver Audi alongside a Cessna 560 Citation V, a sleek business jet that seated eight passengers more than comfortably. Minutes later, they were in the air, just the two of them and their two CIA pilots. David still had no idea where they were going, but he didn’t really care. He was relieved to see that Jack Zalinsky was a man of his word and eager to get started.

  “First of all, happy graduation,” Zalinsky said when the pilot turned off the seat belt sign.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re the youngest prospective candidate in the history of the Agency. You still want in?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good. Your security check is complete. It was a little challenging to get it done without letting your family and friends know what we were up to. I told my team to ask questions as if you were applying to work at SunTrust Bank.”

  “And that worked?”

  “Like a charm.” Zalinsky pulled a black file folder from his briefcase, opened it, and set it on a small conference table in the back of the plane. Inside was a stack of false documents.

  David picked up the first one on the pile—a birth certificate. “Reza Tabrizi?”

  “That will be your alias,” Zalinsky explained. “In Farsi, reza means ‘to consent or accept.’”

  “I know what it means,” David replied.

  “Of course you do. Well, anyway, you’ll be a German citizen. Your parents moved from Tehran to Munich in 1975 and became citizens. In 1984, they moved to Edmonton, Alberta. You were born and raised in Canada. Your dad worked in the oil sands industry, but he and your mom were killed in a small plane crash just before you graduated from high school. You have no siblings. Your grandparents died when you were young. You never felt like you fit into life in Canada. So after your parents died, you moved to Germany. You bounced around a bit—Bonn, Berlin, and finally to Munich, where your parents were from.”

  David studied the dossier that Zalinsky had prepared on his new life.

  “My team created a German passport for you. As you get a little older, we’ll help you get a German driver’s license, European credit cards, an apartment, a car, and so forth.”

  “What kind?” David asked.

  “What kind of what?”

  “What kind of car?”

  “As we like to say in the Middle East, we’ll blow up that bridge when we get to it,” Zalinsky replied. “But listen, you’ve already been accepted into a college in Germany with this cover. We want you to pursue a degree in computer science from the University of Munich—they call it Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich there, or LMU. You’ll need to finish becoming fluent in Arabic. When you’re done, we want you to get an MBA to finish the cover. We’ll pay for everything, so don’t worry about the cost.”

  “But that will take years,” David protested.

 
“Exactly,” Zalinsky agreed. “When you get to Munich, you’ll join a mosque—a Shia one, obviously, given your background. We want you to become part of the Shia community there. You need to appear to be a practicing Muslim, fluent in the customs and traditions of Shia Islam. Meanwhile, you’ll also start getting martial arts training through the college. In the summers, we’ll have you doing an ‘internship’ overseas. That’s what your friends and professors will hear. You’ll actually be training with us at one of several facilities. When you’re all done and we think you’re ready, we’ll place you in a job with a company doing business in Pakistan and Afghanistan. You’ll have a perfect cover to be traveling in and out of central Asia. Then, if he hasn’t been caught, you’ll begin hunting Osama bin Laden. There’s just one catch.”

  “What’s that?” David asked.

  “You cannot, under any circumstances, tell your parents, your brothers—anyone—about any of this. I cannot stress this point enough.”

  “And if I do?” David wondered aloud.

  “You’ll go straight to prison,” Zalinsky explained matter-of-factly. “You’ve already signed about a dozen nondisclosure forms. Believe me, we take this stuff very seriously.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” David assured him. “But what do I tell my parents I’m doing?”

  “You tell them you’re going to college in Paris,” Zalinsky said. “You’ve already applied and been accepted. You got a full scholarship. We’ve already rented you an apartment near campus and got you a post office box and a cell phone from a French company. Everything’s been thought of. It’s all in that folder. There are even brochures and other materials you can give your parents.”

  David glanced through page after page of details.

  “What about the job with SunTrust in Montgomery?” David smiled. “The one I supposedly applied for and am getting a background check for? What do I tell my parents and brothers about that?”

  “Tell them you didn’t get it.”