by Gary Haynes
Dressed in a pale cream dishdasha and a pair of scuffed brown sandals the Amir was sitting on a dusty armchair, its fabric shaded by sunlight and age. The room was ten blocks from where the Mossad operative had been tortured and, apart from the men inside the building, was guarded by rooftop snipers and three backup teams in nearby pickup trucks.
Ibrahim considered the old man before him. He appeared to be of average height and bony. He was wearing small, round eyeglasses over his mahogany-coloured eyes. He had a fleshy nose, and his ears resembled small fists. Beneath his black skullcap his hair, like his beard, was a mass of straggly grey hair.
He was in fact eighty years old, and although his body was uncooperative, his mind was as fresh as when he’d been a medical student at Kabul University. To a Westerner’s eyes he would have been deemed to be a man who was ill at ease in the modern world; an anachronism. They would have been wrong. He didn’t hanker after the past. Like all ambitious and charismatic men, he wanted to shape the future.
He used a handkerchief to dab the sides of his mouth. His hands had obvious signs of burns, the skin still looking pink and raw. They’d been blistered once. Ibrahim couldn’t help but glance at them as he held them in his lap now.
“My hands got burned badly in a war,” he said. “It doesn’t matter which one. There have been so many. They aren’t pretty. And arthritis has set in. In the winter, the doctors give me a dozen pills a day just so I can get out of bed without fainting.” A slight smile broke across his thin lips. “I suppose you are wondering why I’m being so honest. Well, I have no intention of being anything but honest with you. This is how we shall be with one another, from the start. Now sit down, my brother.”
Like the chair the Amir was sitting in, the only other chair was dated and dust-ridden. As Ibrahim sank down into it, the air seemed to fill with its musty odour. The windows were half barricaded with sand bags, the backs of the doors reinforced with crisscrossed steel. Beside the Amir was a small, low-lying table upon which was a cellphone and a laptop.
“People believe what they see and read on the Internet. Our young brothers use it to great effect, as you no doubt know. It’s like owning our own television station,” he said. “It is a wonderful thing. We shunned it at first, so full as it was with the West’s vile pornography and materialism. But now we embrace it. It is Allah’s will, I believe.”
“So it is,” Ibrahim replied.
“Now we shall speak of greater things.”
Ibrahim told him about the Mossad operative and that he’d betrayed their plans, at least in part, so the Israelis would know the locations of all the safe houses the Jew had been to. These now had to be regarded as imminent targets, he said.
The Amir nodded. “The Jews will come looking for him. If they can’t find him, they will kill our people in revenge. But our day of revenge has almost come. We will act soon, and the world will change forever. It is prophesied.”
“The End of Days, prophesied by the Prophet, peace be upon him,” Ibrahim said. “Are they truly upon us?”
The Amir spoke then in his characteristically soft voice for the next ten minutes. As foretold, Syria has already been destroyed, and it was the duty of every Muslim to prepare for the war ahead between the Mahdi, the Prophet’s direct descendant, and Al-Dajjal, the Antichrist.
What the Amir had planned would assist this greatly. When the West’s military crumbled, a flood of jihadists would arise, a thousand times more than had come to war-torn Syria and Iraq. Then Isa would come, too. The Christ, the Crusaders called him, but in Sunni Muslim eschatology, Jesus, son of Mary, was a Muslim leader, who would be sent to judge the unbelievers, the enemies of Islam. The Levant would be restored, stretching from southern Turkey to the Mediterranean shores of Lebanon and Israel.
“May Allah grant me the sight of Isa among the white minarets of El Sham. May he hasten the End of Times. May he hasten the last battle at the gates of Damascus,” the Amir said. He lent forwards. “Strength lies in your resilience, brother, and destroying hundreds of thousands of the US and Western military will be something that will assure your immortality. Come now and I will show you our great weapon.”
Chapter 38
The old man picked up the cellphone and spoke. Two men entered the room soon afterwards and lifted him from the chair, carrying him on their interlinked arms. Ibrahim followed them up a flight of stairs to a short corridor where armed men in ballistic vests guarded the door to another room. The nearest to it used a key to unlock the door before opening it. Another door was immediately behind the first, but this one was made of reinforced steel.
Moments later, the men eased the Amir forwards and he pressed the end of his forefinger against the plasma square to the right of the door, as if he was pressing a doorbell. No one could get into the room beyond but him. The radio frequency signals detected his unique patterns, located in the highly conductive layer of skin beneath the surface of his digit, and the door swung open.
Inside the windowless room a man lay on white sheets on a metal bed that had been screened off and quarantined with reinforced Plexiglas. It was an Arab man and he was on a ventilator, his limp and sweaty body being kept alive by a mixture of drip feeds.
“In one week he will be dead,” the Amir said, still being held aloft. “Who would believe that he is the deadliest man alive?”
Ibrahim nodded.
“Prepare our brothers in the West,” the Amir said. “Then return to us, your family.”
In truth as Ibrahim left the room he didn’t know if he believed in the Amir’s vision of the End of Days or not. He guessed that people tended to focus more on such things as they got older. He did believe fervently in the ideals of their group, and others such as the Islamic State and the worldwide al-Qaeda-based jihad against the unbelievers. Whether a true Muslim was in Nigeria or Yemen, he believed that they all wanted the same basic thing: a powerful caliphate founded on Sharia law.
But his own role in the struggle was a particular one. One aimed almost exclusively at the US military and their immediate families and the flunkies who served them on bases. The best of it was that he didn’t even have to get onto the bases, so all the security that had been put in place, or would be, was futile.
He would target specific individuals on the outside, in shopping malls and restaurants, and such like. These people, both men and women from many ethnic backgrounds and spanning ages from eighteen to sixty-five, would then go about their work in the bases as they always did, without knowing that they were even contaminated and contagious. Mostly they were menial workers. Those who worked in the kitchens, the repair men, the postal workers and administration staff.
The Silent Jihad. It was perfect.
By the time Ibrahim had gotten back to the basement where the Mossad operative was being held, the doctor had arrived, carrying a black bag. He was a squat man, his flabby gut bulging over his tan pants. He looked somewhat nervous. The Jew was still naked on the floor and was mumbling now and then through his cracked and swollen lips. The doctor took the man’s pulse and checked his breathing with a stethoscope.
He produced a slim flashlight from the bag and began examining the Jew’s eyes. Despite the state he was in the Mossad operative tried his best to move his head away. Ibrahim just thought he was being awkward and beckoned over a Hamas fighter, who knelt down and grabbed the man’s head in what looked like a vice-like grip.
The doctor looked quizzical and checked the right eye again.
“What is it?” Ibrahim asked.
“I can’t be certain.”
“Be certain,” Ibrahim said, taking a few steps towards the doctor.
“I’ve seen this only once before. But…” He hesitated.
“But what?”
“I would need to examine the eye out of the socket.”
The Jew flinched then and Ibrahim heard something like a whimper emerge from his russet lips.
“What is it you see?” Ibrahim asked.
“A fle
ck, nothing more. But it could be an adaptation of optical nanotechnology.”
Ibrahim felt an uncharacteristic sense of foreboding. “What exactly does that mean?”
“A camera. The Mossad could be watching us.”
Ibrahim stepped back, feeling a surge of panic. The Jew had laid his eyes upon him.
Chapter 39
The hotel Tom had booked into was a ten-bedroom, family-run place in the Kizilay neighbourhood of Ankara, which was famous for its retail stores, fish markets and restaurants. He’d spent the last few hours lying on the single bed reading all the articles on the Turkish mafia that Crane had sent via a link to the secure smartphone. It had been grim reading.
He rubbed his sore eyes, decided to get up and relax for a while. He headed over the patterned carpet, with its cigarette burns, past the ironing board resting against the faded yellow wall and the ancient-looking mahogany closet, towards the wooden door, with its chipped white paint.
He knew that Lester would bitch relentlessly about his choice of hotel, but it was suitably inconspicuous. Once he’d briefed him on Crane’s plan, he knew Lester would also say that it wasn’t the kind of place a couple of successful people traffickers who were going to do a massive deal with the Turkish mafia would be found in, but Tom hadn’t planned on inviting them over to dinner.
If he was ever asked about it, he’d say that he and Lester knew the benefits of leading a less than ostentatious life, especially on foreign soil. They liked to be seen as down on their luck. Besides, Lester was working for Crane now, a member of Department B, although he didn’t know that either yet.
Outside the corridor was poky and dimly lit. He decided to check out the guppies in the tropical fish tank that was on a metal stand at the end of the corridor, which he’d seen when he’d arrived.
As he got to it and squatted down, the hotel owner, a guy with grey hair and a limp, was coming up the adjoining short flight of stairs, a stack of blankets in his arms. Tom stood up.
He grinned. “You like the fish, American?”
“I do.”
“Too small for fish market,” he said, revealing his nicotine-stained teeth. “Guests’ little ones like them, too.”
Tom thought him a friendly man. He’d noticed four tanks, which were situated in communal areas throughout the three-storey building. Perhaps the old man thought it made up for the lack of modern decor.
The owner shuffled off and Tom squatted down again. He reckoned the guppies were real used to people, especially little ones sticking their faces close up to the glass and putting their hands on it. The front glass was smeared with small fingerprints, and the fish weren’t bothered by him at all. He thought about his own fish back in his farmhouse that darted for cover as soon as the door inched open.
Standing he thought about his father who might be dying. He thought about the Turkish mafia plying their heinous trade, and Ibrahim, who sought to kill many of his fellow Americans. He thought about the meaning of a life worth living and what was worth dying for.
But a memory rose up stubbornly. An incident back in Louisiana when Lester had come to stay a couple of years after he’d dug him out of the rubble in Nairobi. They’d been out night fishing for redfish on Lake Hermitage Bayou.
It had been still dark, the heavy rain looking like hail under the headlights. But dawn wasn’t far off. A swath of coral-pink marked the distant horizon. Tom had jabbed a finger at the eject button on his CD player, and had asked Lester, who’d been sitting beside him, to re-case the Miles Davis disc. Lester loved Miles Davis.
The only place open had been an all-night diner called Sammy’s Place. A neon sign flickered above the flat roof, half illuminating a handful of station wagons and pickup trucks parked on the tarmac lot. Tom parked his silver Buick Century, and they got out and ambled in. The furniture and flooring looked thirty years out of date. A huge brass ceiling fan with oak blades remained motionless above their heads. They’d still had their mud-ridden steel toe-capped boots on, but it hadn’t looked like anyone would’ve given a damn.
They’d sat at a booth adjacent to the door. There were a dozen or so people, including a family with three kids and a couple of men who preferred to sit at the counter on high stools rather than occupy the booths. Tom thought the bearded guy in denim and a ball cap sitting opposite a skinny woman with corn-coloured hair looked like trouble. But they’d been fishing most of the night and had needed refuelling, and Lester had said that if they didn’t stop soon, he’d have an embarrassing accident.
There’d been a washroom in back, which might have led to a yard, but otherwise the only door had been the one they’d walked through. The guy with the cap had his back to them. But his girlfriend with yellow hair was glancing over. She smiled, revealing uneven teeth. Tom nodded back in the hope he didn’t appear patronizing. Lester turned around and was still grinning when he turned back again. Tom noticed that the checked-woollen jacket the guy was wearing stretched across a broad-shouldered back.
The guy turned around, staring at Lester’s back, his wide, vein-stained face so screwed up that his eyes were two dark slits, the peak of his New Orleans Saints ball cap lifted high on his forehead. He turned back, said something to the woman, who curled up her lip and looked down at her breakfast. But Ball Cap had looked around again, this time for longer.
After ordering eggs and coffee, Lester had risen and had headed for the washroom for what he’d said was a well-overdue leak. After he’d walked through the men’s door, Ball Cap had gotten up and had strolled over to Tom.
The guy had been a redneck asshole out for trouble, which had been based on the flimsy excuse that Lester had been flirting with his girl. The guy had raccoon shit for brains. He said he’d wait for them on the lot. When Lester had returned, Tom hadn’t said anything, hoping that Ball Cap had been a bluffer or had gotten bored, although the woman had been still sitting at the booth.
Tom had been glad he’d left his SIG in the glove box. If things got all animated, he wasn’t going to give the local sheriff an excuse to use his shotgun on something other than wild turkeys. He looked over at the woman. She had her head down as if she was praying. But he glimpsed a cellphone in her hand, her thumbs moving over the keys texting someone. It was a rule that he and Lester didn’t carry cells when they went fishing. Nothing could spoil the ambience like a ring tone, and they’d both agreed that it would have been kind of crass in any event.
Tom had decided that neither of them had deserved to deal with the guy, so he’d called the waitress over. He figured he’d get the cops to deal with Ball Cap. The diner had a payphone, but it hadn’t been working for a month or more, the waitress said. By the time they finished their breakfast and strolled out into the lot, the rain had stopped and muted sunlight was breaking through a copse of bald cypress trees, casting a veneer of the shimmering gold over the wet bark.
It would have been a pretty sight, except that Ball Cap was waiting there just as he said he would, leaning against a customized red pickup truck. He reached over and took out a crowbar from the bed of the truck. He nodded towards a large wooden shack a few yards from the diner, which abutted a field of straggly, green-leafed sugarcane. Tom looked around. One of the kids, a moon-faced girl with brown curly locks, was staring out of the window. That meant they’d have to walk over to the shack. He’d sighed.
As they’d all gotten to the shack, a tailgate truck had skidded into the lot, with five white guys hanging onto the back, whooping and shouting like they’d been downing moonshine all night long. There was the sound of a barking dog, too, and Ball Cap grinned. The dog, a flesh-coloured pit bull, was unleashed, leaping off the back of the truck. It ran snarling at Tom. He lashed out with his boot, the dog sinking its teeth into the steel cap. Lester moved at lightning speed, bending down and splitting the dog’s belly open with his scaling knife. The dog had yelped briefly before dropping dead to the tarmac.
Ball Cap had run forwards, wielding the crowbar above his head. But Lester was up
and, sidestepping and weaving his head to avoid the blow, slashed at the man’s arm, severing an artery. Ball Cap squealed as a geyser of blood spurted out. But Lester wasn’t finished with him yet. He lunged at Ball Cap, headbutting him squarely on the nose. The back of the man’s skull hit the tarmac with a loud crack. As the five guys from the truck reached them, Lester broke teeth and bones. Tom took out a couple of them, but Lester had fire in his eyes. When it’d been over, he’d looked disappointed.
It had been Lester’s look of disappointment that still troubled Tom. But there was nothing to do now other than wait.
Chapter 40
The centuries-old Afghan sword had been given to the young Saudi to keep as decided, its ancient blade bright red with fresh blood. Ibrahim had beheaded the Mossad operative a few minutes ago, the eyes removed from the corpse. It had been filmed with the video recorder for propaganda; posterity, too, he liked to think. After telling the Saudi to clean the blade thoroughly with oil, he’d changed into khaki pants, a short-sleeve shirt and a ball cap and had left the safe house with two Hamas bodyguards.
They’d walked past the half-empty, open-fronted stores, selling everything from second-hand radios to goat meat, and had headed for the rat-infested alleyways close by. He’d carried the sword into battle in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and it had become a sort of fortuitous talisman, as well as a means of eliciting fear. But he no longer had use for such things. He was on his way to his brothers in the West to check everything was prepared. It had begun.
Walking now between the flaking, graffiti-ridden walls of two apartment blocks, flanked by the young, clean-shaven bodyguards, he watched scruffy kids playing with toy guns by a stagnant puddle. But as they emerged into the busy street, he grimaced as he heard the unmistakable sound of fast-approaching military helicopters, a sound as common in Gaza as police sirens in Western cities. He didn’t believe in coincidences. He knew they were looking for him.
