But a million Muslims lived in Paris and its suburbs. Even if Wells excluded every woman, and every man under twenty-five, he would be left with hundreds of thousands of potential suspects. Two aliases wouldn’t be enough. To have a real chance at the guy, Wells needed at least one more tidbit. His last name would be best, though Hani was very unlikely to give that up. His job, if he had one. Where he lived. Some unusual physical trait.
“Call him whatever you like. Call him Prince Charles. I don’t see the point.”
“The point is that this Puma, the French, they trust him, see? They think he’s one of the good ones.” Hani laughed.
“Because he’s educated. Mouths all the right words.” Hani didn’t contradict Wells, but he didn’t offer more details either. “A scientist? A politician? An imam?” Nothing. Wells gave up. “Like the kaffirs can see our hearts. Like they have any idea of what we believe. When they can’t imagine Allah’s glory.”
“You are a philosopher, Samir.”
“In the mountains, I had time to think. But I’m glad to hear you have this one in France. That’s something that we never had, a commander in America who could bring the war to the kaffirs. If we had one like that—”
Wells hoped Hani would take the bait, brag about the Islamic State’s man in Washington. Nope. “Soon, Insh’allah, we’ll do something in France that makes September 11 look like nothing.”
But was Hani serious? Or bragging? He’d been in here a while already. Any big attack he knew was coming would probably have happened by now. Wells suspected he was blowing smoke, trying to impress Samir Khalili. Wells decided to frustrate his impulse to brag, and, not coincidentally, try again to shift the conversation. “France isn’t America. When we hit those towers, we started another world war.”
“A world war? Samir—”
“Why are you here, then? And me? How many countries have the Americans attacked since then? They’re more powerful than the rest of the world put together. Their army, their CIA”—the three magic letters. He hoped he hadn’t shoehorned them too obviously.
“The United States is much harder to, but you know that. Even if—”
But Hani stopped there, seeming to think the better of whatever he was going to say next.
Even if we have someone inside the CIA? “Even if what?”
Hani didn’t answer. Wells knew he had pushed as far as he dared.
The men finished their prayers. Wells pushed himself up. The sudden movement inflamed his groin, and he groaned and leaned hard against the wall. No need to playact.
“Careful, Samir. We need you.”
“And I you, brother.” Wells, thinking, Wish I could tell you how much.
—
IN HIS CELL he sat on his too-thin mattress, trying to find a position that didn’t amplify the ache between his legs. Without Hani to distract him, the pain was worsening again.
Wells saw now that the guards should have put him closer to Hani’s cell so they could have talked more easily outside of the prayer room. Maybe the warden had thought interfering that way would be too obvious. Maybe he had given that order, but the guards hadn’t listened. Or maybe he had a prison to run and hadn’t even considered the idea.
Whatever the reason, at least seven precious days would pass before his next conversation with Hani. Wells could almost see the sand slipping past.
18
PARIS
THE GUIDE led Soufiane Kassani over the border at dawn. A kilometer inside Turkey, three sedans waited, white and anonymous. Kassani spread the bottles among them, as the caliph had instructed. Eleven one-liter bottles in two trunks. Twelve in the third. Each bottle half full. Seventeen liters of DF in all, ninety percent pure on average. Enough to pack a subway train or concert hall with corpses.
Kassani watched with something like nostalgia as the cars pulled away and bumped along a dirt track to parts unknown. A year’s work in those trunks. He wondered if he’d see the precious cargo again. He knew his next stop, but not much more.
A pickup arrived, a new Nissan with leather seats, air-conditioning. The drive turned out to be long but straightforward, no roadblocks to bypass or bandits to outrun. The pickup’s driver kept to the speed limit. He had obviously been told to defer to Kassani. He barely spoke as the hours passed.
Darkness had fallen by the time they pulled off the E80 in Gebze, an eastern suburb of Istanbul. The driver wound through an industrial neighborhood, parked beside a low concrete building marked by a discreet sign, white letters on a dark red background: Five-Star Mehmet Import-Export.
Inside, the office was dark and stank of smoke. An old man sat on a soft brown couch, his face lit by the glow of a movie playing on an Apple laptop. “As-salaam alaikum.”
“Alaikum salaam.”
“Is Adnan here?” Adnan was the trader who’d bought the lab equipment for Kassani. They’d spoken three times, emailed dozens more, never met.
“Brother.” The man creaked to his feet. He was in his seventies, his pouchy cheeks marked with black moles that even Kassani’s untrained eyes recognized as cancers-in-waiting.
“You’re Adnan?” He’d been so aggressive about finding the equipment. Kassani had imagined him young, a fire-breather.
The man wrapped skinny arms around Kassani’s shoulders. “Not what you expected?” He led Kassani into a cluttered back office. Blue binders were stacked along a wall, samples of carpet spread over a desk.
“You made good use of what I sent.”
“You have the stuff?”
“Don’t worry about that. It’ll be waiting for you in Paris.”
Paris. No one had mentioned Paris. The caliph had told him only that he’d meet Adnan in Istanbul. Ghaith had told him to pack light, leave his Quran but bring his atropine syringes. Neither man had said, You won’t be coming back. They hadn’t needed to.
Kassani wondered if he’d have to take a boat from Turkey, pretend to be a refugee. Plenty of Islamic State fighters had returned to Europe that way. With so many migrants, European nations couldn’t run decent background checks. Countries like Italy hadn’t even guarded their refugee camps before the Paris attacks in 2015. Now some countries had tightened up. But even in the best-run camps, a determined refugee could sneak off.
Still, going in as a migrant would be inherently risky. The Greeks no longer simply waved refugee ships through. What if they sent Kassani’s vessel back to Turkey? Or he wound up in a camp he couldn’t escape? Too many variables he couldn’t control.
“They didn’t tell you about Paris?”
Kassani shook his head.
“Beautiful. If only the French weren’t there to ruin it.”
“You’ve been?” Kassani had, too, as a child. His parents had taken him and his brothers to a hotel industry convention. He vividly remembered a boat ride on the Seine, passing under bridges with a breeze in his face, so unlike Tunisia.
“When I was young. Before I understood.” The old man shook his head, at his own youthful mistakes or the sins of the French or both. “You’re tired. A long journey today.” He nodded at the back wall of the office, where a passport photo camera pointed at a blue curtain. “I need your picture.”
Kassani stood before the curtain and offered the pained half smile a billion travelers knew.
The camera clicked. “There’s a room in the back. Sleep. It’s a narrow bed but clean.”
Kassani dreamt he was floating down the Seine, pouring isopropyl bottles into a river of pure DF.
—
HE WOKE TO the smell of good strong coffee, impossible to find in Raqqa these days. He was pouring himself a cup when Adnan appeared, carrying a black plastic bag.
“Like it here, Soufiane? Want to stay? Drink my coffee?”
Kassani found himself charmed by this tumorous old man. “They’d miss me in Paris.”
Adn
an handed him a passport with a dark purple cover and golden letters: EUROPESE UNIE. KONINKRIJK BELGIË.
“Belgian.”
“Nam. And valid.”
Kassani flipped through the pages, wondering if he’d see the photo that Adnan had taken the night before. He was no expert, but the passport seemed real. It had a biometric chip in the cover. Its end pages were slick-coated paper, covered with holographic seals, hard to tamper with or re-create. It was less than two years old and had only a few stamps. The most recent was from Istanbul immigration four days before. It carried the name of Beji Nounes, whose birthday was exactly two months after Kassani’s.
The picture was the surprise. It was close. He and Beji could have been cousins. But it wasn’t his. Even a sloppy immigration officer wouldn’t miss the differences.
“Memorize the birthdate, the place of issue,” Adnan said.
“I don’t understand. How do I use this?”
“You don’t.” Adnan took back the passport, tore it in half along the spine, a satisfying rip. “The Belgians are going to give you a new one. With your face in it.”
He reached into his bag, came out with an official-looking form, two pieces of paper covered in Turkish. “A police report. You reported it stolen yesterday. You were in the Grand Bazaar, and when you went back to your hotel, it was gone. Someone bumped into you, maybe your pocket was picked. Not your wallet—that was in your front pocket—just the passport. The truth is, maybe you dropped it. But you’d never admit that.”
Kassani held up the papers. “I can’t read this.”
“No one expects you to. Repeat what I said back to me.”
Kassani did. And twice more, on Adnan’s prompting.
“Good. You don’t have to be perfect on every detail, Soufiane. You’re upset.” Adnan laid a fresh piece of paper on the table. “You’re supposed to be back in Belgium tomorrow night. Here’s your itinerary.”
He—Beji—was booked on a Turkish Airways nonstop, leaving Istanbul at 3:30 p.m., landing Brussels 6 p.m.
“You have to catch it. You don’t have the money for a new ticket, and you need to get back to work.”
“Where do I work?”
“A café in Molenbeek.”
“They’ll accept this?”
Adnan spread a handful of cards across the table. “Once you show them these, they will.”
A key card from a Turkish hotel. A bank card for Beji Nounes. And the crowning touch. A mint-green piece of plastic with four languages across its top, including English: BELGIUM / IDENTITY CARD. It looked real to Kassani, and it carried Beji Nounes’s name. All the details matched the passport. Except the photograph. It was the one of Kassani that Adnan had taken the night before.
“You made this?”
“Not me. But, yes. The passport is hard to fake, this is easy. Now, this morning, we walk around the Grand Bazaar for a few minutes, so you see it, see how you lost your passport there. Then to the Belgium consulate. You tell them Beji Nounes of 18B Rue van Mulder, Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Brussels, needs a new passport by tomorrow.”
“They’ll be suspicious.”
“Maybe, but Beji doesn’t pray at the mosques they watch. He’s not a troublemaker, not on their lists. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have let him on the plane to come here. So he lost his passport. People go to Istanbul and get pickpocketed and lose their passports. Even Arab Belgians.”
“I don’t speak much French.”
“Lots of brothers don’t.”
“Are there other names I need to know?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is Beji married? Does he have children?”
“No. And they won’t ask. They won’t be thinking of this, that you’re not him. Not once they see your identity card. Their main concern, are you in the jihad? Did you see the brothers in Syria? But you’ve only been here four days, so they won’t be too worried. They’ll ask, you tell them no, that’s it. At worst, they’ll give you a temporary passport for a single trip. Good enough. But probably they give you a full replacement. Then you can travel all around Europe, no problem. Even the French police, if they stop you with that, they’ll just let you go.”
“Because I’m Beji.”
“Because you are Beji. And Beji is very nice. Too bad you can’t meet him.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“He’ll go to Syria. Don’t worry about him. Worry about Brussels. You’ll wear this when you come out of the airport there.” Adnan dumped out the last goodie in his bag, a brand-new cap, powder-blue, a golden double-headed eagle embossed across the front. The logo of the Manchester City Football Club. “Someone will pick you up. After that, I don’t know. But it’s been arranged.”
Kassani grinned
“Why do you smile?”
“How lucky we are to have Beji here.” But even as Kassani spoke, he realized his mistake.
“He came to Istanbul for this reason only, to give you his name. Come on, you didn’t think we would put you with the refugees?”
—
KASSANI SPENT the morning at the consulate, answering questions. The Belgian clerks didn’t like the missing passport. But their annoyance seemed to have as much to do with the extra work it caused them as with any suspicion about him. They asked if he was sure he hadn’t left it at his hotel. They warned him processing a new one overnight would cost ninety euros in extra fees. They sent him away for lunch, and when he returned, they brought him to an office he hadn’t seen before. No tourist posters in here, just a metal table, bare except for a single folder. Standing behind it, a thirty-something Belgian with an interrogator’s hard eyes and short hair. Kassani wondered what he’d done wrong, how they’d found him.
“I’m Bernard. Sit, please.”
Kassani sensed the name was as fake as his own. “Beji.”
“You’re sure you’ve lost your passport.” He spoke excellent Arabic.
“Yes.”
“In the Grand Bazaar?”
“I think so.”
“How?”
“A pickpocket, I assume.”
“They didn’t take your wallet.”
“It was in my front pocket.”
The man who called himself Bernard leaned close enough for Kassani to smell the cigarettes on his breath. “Did you throw it in the Bosphorus? Was there a stamp you don’t want us to see?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You went to Lebanon this week? Iraq?”
“Non, monsieur.”
“Syria? To see your Daesh friends?”
Kassani didn’t point out that he probably wouldn’t get a stamp in that case. “I’ve hardly even seen Istanbul.”
“Why come here at all?”
“I’ve always wanted to visit.” He waited for Bernard to trip him up, ask what he’d seen, pry into the last few days, with questions he couldn’t answer.
Bernard said only, “Such a long trip. Why not London? Paris?”
“Men like me aren’t always welcome in London right now.”
“Tunis, then? Go home?”
“Belgium’s my home.”
Bernard flipped open the file, pushed photos across the table. Surveillance shots of Arab men. “Recognize anyone? From Molenbeek or here?”
Kassani studied the photos, wondering who these men were, if he’d meet them. “Sorry. I wish I could help.”
Bernard gathered the pictures, riffled through Kassani’s forms. Suddenly he seemed weary, and Kassani understood why Adnan was so sure the Belgians would give him the new passport. This man must be trying to track dozens of men. He had no more time for the curious case of Beji Nounes.
“Do you support the Islamic State, Beji?”
“No. They don’t do us any good.”
Bernard waved his hand at the door. �
��Come back tomorrow, you’ll have your passport.”
—
TWO DAYS LATER, Kassani found himself in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in northeastern Paris. The graveyard stretched across a hundred acres on a low hillside that offered beautiful views of the city. It had hosted hundreds of thousands of burials in its two centuries. But it was best known as the eternal home of Jim Morrison. The Doors’ lead singer lay in a grave protected by barricades and strewn with flowers.
Kassani walked past it now, wearing the light blue cap that had become his calling card.
—
“YOU’LL HAVE an hour to walk around this graveyard,” his driver had said that morning as they drove south through the French countryside. “Wander. Make sure no one is watching. Be at Jim Morrison’s tomb at one p.m.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
The driver passed Kassani a map of the cemetery, a number circled near the center. “I don’t either, but it’s marked here. A tall man in a white shirt will be there. Long sleeves. He’ll ask you about Napoleon’s tomb. If you’re sure you aren’t being followed, you say, ‘The other side of the river.’ If you’re afraid someone’s watching, you say, ‘Invalides, I think.’”
“Invalides, I think.”
“Yes.”
“Why all this? How could anyone be watching me? They’d have to be following us now.”
“I know. But you’re both too important to take chances.”
—
A TALL MAN in a long-sleeved white shirt walked toward him.
“Do you know where I can find Napoleon’s tomb?” He had a long nose, eyes deep in his face, sandy desert skin. A North African like Kassani, Algerian or Tunisian.
Kassani was sure no one had followed him. Or even noticed him. “Napoleon? That’s the other side of the river.”
“I must be lost.” The man stepped closer. “Walk with me, Soufiane.”
They left the tourists gawking at Morrison’s grave and tiptoed along narrow paths through the tombstones until no one was within thirty meters. Only the dead were crowded in this place.
The Prisoner Page 26
