by Deva, Mukul
‘No, we will not be doing any assembling. You will meet them one by one in your suite.’
‘Why not all together? After all, barring one of them, there is no difference in what each has to do.’
‘No! They must not be allowed to meet. The less they know about each other, the better. In fact, you are the only one who will meet all the others. They will only know you, Cheema and me.’
‘You don't trust them?’
‘I do. As much as I trust you.’ A brief smile played on Salim's lips. ‘We are all Allah's soldiers after all, but no one will be given any more information than they need to have. After all, what you don't know, you can't disclose even by mistake.’
‘Excellent!’ Mai exclaimed. ‘Like I said, you have covered all the bases. Call me when you need me.’
Salim was smiling as Mai left.
Over the next few days, while his wife relaxed on the beach, Mai kept an almost constant vigil on the water villa occupied by Murad Salim. He saw the burly white man in his mid-thirties walk up to the door of Salim's suite early the next morning.
KARL GUNTHER WAS A HUGE MAN AS FAR AS HIS PHYSICAL size and his ego went. Otherwise, in every possible way, he was as small as a man could be. The wide-girthed Karl with straw blond, thinning hair and a rapidly receding hairline was the only son of a working class German family. He, too, was trying hard to blend in with the other holiday makers at the resort, but the bright shirt and even louder shorts sat on him uneasily. Trying vainly to fight the dross sweaty smell emanating from him was the cloyingly sweet deodorant that Karl had applied on himself all too liberally.
Karl's father had been a machinist and his mother a telephone operator. Both of them completed their trajectory on earth and passed on without leaving much of a mark on it. It is almost certain that Karl too would have passed through the corridors of life without leaving any trace behind if it had not been for three totally unrelated events.
The first incident occurred when Karl was twenty-three years old. While working in a small factory, he lost his left hand to a machine that suddenly went berserk. Karl was safely tucked away in a hospital bed when the owner of the factory determined that the machine had misbehaved primarily because it had not been maintained in a proper manner. Acutely aware of the huge legal liability that he was open to, the owner made a quick deal with Karl. Thus it came about that the unfortunate Karl lost a limb but was assured of a job that did not overly strain his not too considerable mental or physical faculties. Over a period of time, with the help of a reasonably well crafted prosthetic, Karl's life limped back to the monotony of mediocrity that it had been suspended in before his accident.
It would have continued on this same plane had it not been for a chance encounter with a childhood friend who had recently embraced Islam and was now busy converting as many people as possible to his new faith. The eloquence of this recent convert along with hours of research on the internet, for which Karl had all the time in the world, soon put him firmly on the path to the nearest mosque. Thus Karl Gunther was reborn and became a true believer and follower of the One God. Even then Karl would have probably left this earth unnoticed upon the expiry of his time if Murad Salim had not started looking for a factory worker.
‘My requirement is quite simple,’ Salim told his most trusted talent scout in Berlin. ‘I need a Berlin-based factory worker not of Asian origin, who has been injured, preferably disabled. He must be a true believer, preferably unmarried… and it would help if he wasn't too high on intelligence.’
Fate again stepped in because the talent scout coincidentally worshipped at the same mosque as Karl and had not only seen him there on several occasions, but also struck up a passing acquaintance. It did not take long for the scout to ascertain that Karl met all the requirements stipulated by Salim.
‘What about a wife or a girlfriend?’ Salim had asked.
‘Wait till you meet him, boss,’ the scout had replied confidently. ‘He is not likely to have one anytime soon.’
‘Hmmm… okay, if you're sure that he fits the bill, then send him to me.’
That was how Karl came to be on the Austrian Airlines flight from Berlin to Vienna, thence onto Colombo, and finally to Male. And that was how Karl came to be walking up to Salim's suite.
There was a rare eager spring in Karl's stride as he came up to the door of the suite. This, after all, was his first – and possibly last – chance at glory. Karl would die rather than let it go by.
Mai had a good look at the seriously overweight blond haired, blue-eyed man before the door opened and Karl vanished inside. It took the scientist barely five minutes of logical thinking and twenty minutes of searching on the net to find the profile that Karl would be using on the meetyourmatch website: ‘gkarl234.’ Mai muttered the name to himself as he tried, ineffectively, to climb into Karl's mind.
THE SCIENTIST WAS STILL BROODING OVER KARL'S SCANTY profile when, an hour or so later, he saw two dusky, obviously Asian girls in their early twenties walk up to Salim's suite. The diminutive and wafer-thin girls were so alike that they had to be sisters. From their slow, uneasy, shuffling gait they also appeared to be suffering from some serious physical deformity.
Mai had a good look at them as they waited for the door to open. They were still inside when he located the identity that had been created for one of them on meetyourmatch. com. It was the girl who had been leading the way. kkismat234. Self-employed. Never married, her profile proclaimed.
‘Will you have the guts to roll the dice when the time comes?’ Mai asked the photograph of the subdued looking girl on the screen. ‘Will you two have the guts to shut your mind to the shock and the agony as death begins to scream all around? Will you be able to do it?’
The girl's photograph gazed back at him silently.
SAHIBA AND KISMAT WERE NOT JUST SISTERS, THEY WERE twins. Born into a typical middle-class family in the central Indian city of Bhopal, they had still been in their mother's womb when tragedy struck.
Their mother had been in her eighth month of pregnancy when there was a leak in the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. Carried westwards by a brisk breeze, the cloud of poisonous fumes raced through the city. The tiny house on the third floor, which was occupied by the pregnant woman, lay directly in the flight path of the toxic gas. She called her husband who was away at work when the sense of suffocation became too strong. By the time the hapless husband rushed home and discovered his unconscious wife, the damage had been done and it was irreversible. In fact, had it not been for the fact that he himself was a doctor, it is certain his wife would have died the and there.
As things turned out, she did die, but only after an agonizing month of pain and trauma. She even managed to deliver the twin bundles of joy that she had nurtured in her womb all those months. Moments later, she died and her agony came to an end. Her God was kind enough to ensure that she was saved the final agony of not having to see the damage the savage fumes had inflicted on her precious babies.
Sahiba and Kismat were never going to lead normal lives.
‘The gas has not only affected their limbs, it has also left them with a host of respiratory disorders.’ The doctor's tone was not unkind but he spoke plainly, knowing that the grieving man standing before him was also a doctor. ‘You have to be strong, bhai.’ He placed a comradely hand on his colleague's shoulder. ‘These two will need a lot of support from you.’
‘I know.’ Looking at the two tiny lives cocooned in the incubators, the father controlled his tears with an effort. ‘It's ironic, doctor. You know we were to leave for the West Indies.’
‘I know. I believe you have landed a very good job there. The superintendent was telling me about it just the other day.’
‘Yes, in fact we were just waiting for the delivery and then we would have gone.’ The tears began to flow.
‘Don't change your plans,’ the doctor counselled the grief-stricken man. ‘It will be good for you to get away from all this and start afresh.’
Traumatized by the double tragedy, the distraught man left India and moved with his twin daughters to the lovely city of Kingston. To help him care for his motherless children, his aging parents accompanied him. The unfortunate twins blossomed with the love their kindly grandmother showered on them. It was their grandfather who imparted to them a basic understanding of Islam and an irrational hatred for the kafir.
‘Never forget that it was a factory owned and mismanaged by the gore shaitan that blighted your lives,’ he would remind them every so often. ‘They only care about money. Our lives have no meaning for them.’
It was in the shadow of this hate that they grew up. Their disabilities became more and more pronounced as they grew order. So did their hatred for the white-skinned kafir.
In the end, that was what sealed their fates. Their disabilities made them the ideal weapons as far as Salim was concerned. And the hatred sheathed deep inside them made it easy for Salim's scouts to recruit them.
THE RESORT HAD ALMOST GONE TO SLEEP BY THE TIME SAHIBA and Kismat emerged from Salim's suite. Even the echoes of the orchestra that had been playing near the restaurant on the beach had subsided into silence sometime ago. Now, only the occasional laugh of a guest or a resort employee broke the relentless roar of the ocean. Otherwise, everyone slept. So did Mai. Exhausted by a day of turmoil and his constant watch, he entwined himself around his wife, and was soon snoring softly.
MAI HU WOKE ONCE IN THE EARLY HOURS OF THE MORNING. The satin warmth of his wife's supple body aroused him and, shaking her awake, he made love to her, slowly, languorously. Then, with his head buried in her breasts, he slept again. When he finally awoke, the sun was pouring into the room through the huge glass windows facing the ocean. His wife was sunbathing on the private wooden deck facing the sparkling blue-green ocean that seemed to stretch endlessly. As far as the eye could see, there was nobody in sight. And the two tall, arrogant looking men in their late twenties who had crossed the globe for their meeting were already inside Salim's suite. Dressed like typical American tourists, the men exuded an arrogance which was enhanced by the superb state of physical fitness that they were both in; not surprisingly, since both were soldiers in the United States Army.
BOTH LIAQUAT ALI AND RAHIM KHAN WERE CITIZENS OF America by birth. Their grandparents had migrated from Pakistan to the land of opportunity within a few weeks of each other. They shared a lot of other similarities. Both were born in New York in the same year, although a few months apart. Both had been brought up in the same borough in New York City and had attended the same school. Both had been decidedly mediocre students, but were blessed with impressive physiques. Both had grown up envying the big cars and bigger houses that their more fortunate classmates flaunted. Both had been subjected to the same Fuckin’ Paki slur by the same classmates. This, more than anything else, threw them together into a bond of friendship.
But what brought them truly close was the fact that both used to accompany their parents to the same mosque. Both were recruited at the same time by the same Al Qaida scout who also doubled as a freelance ISI agent. The scout was yet another of the many devilish protégés spawned and deployed all over the world by terror maestros like Murad Salim. He had subverted dozens of young second-generation Muslim lads and then, as he had been told to do, motivated them to join a multitude of professions.
‘We must infiltrate all aspects of life in the very heart of our enemies’ and.’ That was what Murad Salim told all his scouts. ‘Our warriors must penetrate every nook and corner of their society and be ready to strike as and when we call upon them. Then… and only then… can we hope to defeat these kafirs.’
‘We have a special task for both of you.’ The terror scout noted the physique of his recruits and guided them accordingly. ‘You should join the US Army.’
‘What?’ The shocked expression on the face of the clean-shaven Liaquat mirrored precisely what his taller, leaner fellow jihadi Rahim was also feeling. With their unmistakable accents and slightly swarthy complexions, both men could easily pass off as native Americans.
‘Of course. Can you think of a better way than to have the enemy train our army?’
‘Oh! Right!’ Rahim grinned wickedly. ‘When you put it like that, it makes perfect sense.’
‘Of course it does.’
That was how, by the time they got the call from Salim, both closet jihadis had clocked in a good three years of military service in the US Artillery and were fully conversant with the handling of all kinds of weapons. Now in their late twenties, they were perfectly suited and thoroughly trained for the task that Salim had in mind for them.
Unseen by anyone who mattered, they entered Salim's suite even as the morning sun was struggling to breach the horizon.
BARELY A HUNDRED METRES AWAY, UNEXPECTEDLY AROUSED BY the sight of his beautiful wife lounging on their private patio, Mai cajoled her back into the room and onto the huge bed. For the next twenty minutes they romped with all the enthusiasm of newly weds. They were lost in the throes of passion when the two young American soldiers emerged from Salim's suite.
And that was why Mai neither saw them enter nor leave.
HOWEVER, MAI DID SEE THE WHIPCORD-THIN MAN WITH BLUE eyes and white-blond hair who walked up to Salim's suite after breakfast.
Abraham Reis was an extremely reserved and soft-spoken man. He had been born with an innate sense of courtesy that had been nurtured and developed over the years by his father. His softness and politeness were somewhat tempered by the nature of his job as the senior maintenance manager at the new, soon to be inaugurated, BMO Field Stadium at the Exhibition Place in Toronto.
Despite this, he was known to be a pushover, one of the few managers whom his subordinates could rely on to fall for any old sob story and help them to change their shifts, or get that unplanned day off. Even people who did not report to him would often request him to speak to their managers. So almost anyone who worked at the new stadium was in some way or the other indebted to Reis.
Not one of them was aware of the fact that Reis, the son of a Canadian airman and a Pakistani immigrant educationist, had been brought up as a true, practising Muslim. Not one of them knew how intense Reis's feelings were about the way America was conducting its wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Not one of them was aware of the hatred he felt for the brutal manner in which the Israelis were persecuting the Palestinians. All this hatred and anger simmered unseen and unheard beneath the gentle, polite façade that masked the real Abraham Reis.
It had not been hard to recruit Reis and prepare him for this mission. Actually, there had been no need to do either since his mother, who had been part of the ISI's long-term global strategy, had already done both. Much like the sleeper agents of the post-World War II era, Reis's mother was one of the several hundred jihadi agent provocateurs who had been trained by the ISI, told to migrate, and then left in deep cover, to be called upon when the right time came.
Well, the time had come.
As a second generation deep-cover jihadi, Abrahim Reis was the ideal weapon. In his late thirties, Reis was older than the average terrorist. He was also ideally placed in the correct target location, had no police record of any kind and was fully integrated into the society that he was now going to wage war against.
Mai watched the gentle, unobtrusively dressed man with a slow, ambling gait walk up to Salim's suite and knock on the door. It opened immediately, and the suite swallowed him up.
MAI ALSO SPOTTED THE TALL MAN ON THE WRONG SIDE OF forty, with a wasted body and long unruly hair, who approached Salim's suite about an hour after Reis had departed. His unsure walk suggested a distinct lack of self-confidence.
There had been a time when it was almost certain that Erik Segan from New Orleans would be counted as one of the leading lights of American Jazz music and his name would be taken in the same breath as Billie Holliday, Count Basie and Benny Goodman. Erik was standing on the threshold of greatness and glory when he found drugs. Or, it would be more co
rrect to say, when drugs began to rule him and his life. Soon, the rhythm and beauty of music was lost in a blur of detox centres and the occasional prison cell.
He finally managed to kick the habit and returned to music, only to find that the magic had deserted him. The dejected man was now eking out a miserable existence on the fringes of the music world as part of one of the several, nondescript music groups that thronged the streets of New Orleans. He would almost certainly have gone back to the cloudy safety of drugs had it not been for Azhar Mahroof.
Erik Segan had met Azhar Mahroof at one of the many rehabilitation centres that he had been in and out of. Mahroof was a devout believer of the One God and had dedicated his life to helping druggies kick the habit. In his other avtaar, he was also one of the many scouts employed by Murad Salim to dredge the back alleys of life and seek potential recruits.
It was Mahroof who kindled in Erik the burning desire to do something for the cause. Something bold that would give him the glory that he had always hankered for and which had once nearly been his. It was this quest for greatness that found Erik Segan on the long flight from New Orleans to Male. It was this quest that delivered him to Salim's doorstep today.
Like Mahroof, it did not take Salim long to recognize Erik's desperate need for recognition.
‘There has never been anything so bold attempted by any of our brothers –’ Salim played the man like the expert puppeteer that he was – ‘They will remember you for generations to come. You shall become an everlasting beacon for millions of jihadis the world over.’
Salim's words stirred a deep sense of excitement in Erik. He could feel himself coming alive. His heart was throbbing with anticipation when, an hour later, he left Salim's suite and walked back to his own room on the other side of the tiny island resort.
HAD MAI GOT UP TO FETCH HIS COFFEE EVEN ONE MINUTE before he actually did, he would have missed the dark, not so tall, fit looking man in his mid-thirties, who came to Salim's door barely twenty minutes after Erik left. The man exuded the confidence of one who has travelled extensively and seen the world.
