State of Attack (15 page)

He’d been tortured in an obscene manner with a lump hammer, a battery-operated drill, and a
scalpel. He had holes in his hands and feet, and several bones were shattered; others merely broken. He’d blurted out something that Ibrahim had known to be a crazy made-up story. He was beginning to believe that the Jew really didn’t know anything of substance, and what he did know he’d said over and over again, mechanically.

A name, a Jewish name, and the false Arabic name, and that the operative had infiltrated Hamas. He’d said he didn’t know where the operative lived in Gaza. Ibrahim knew enough about how the Mossad worked to know that that kind of information wasn’t shared among deep-cover operatives for the simple reason that one could easily give the other’s location up, just as the Israeli would have done if he’d known.

He bent down low to the victim, sensing that he was on the verge of unconsciousness.
“Your whole family,” Ibrahim said, “all of them, whoever they are and wherever they are, will die by my sword. Your wife and daughters first. It will be slow. So, tell me and I give you my word on the Holy Qur’an that they will not be harmed.”

The Mossad operative whispered then. He had told the Israelis matters of significance. That there was a plot to cause multiple deaths of the West’s military, but he didn’t know how. He’d told the Mossad about a jihadist leader called Ibrahim, too, but the name was all he knew, and apart from the operative he’d spoken about he didn’t know of any other Mossad operatives in Palestine.

“And the Amir? Did you tell them about the Amir?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“No.”

The Israeli convulsed, as if what was left of his rational mind had given up, as if his body was trying to save him from further torment and had decided to shut down of its own volition. But Ibrahim had to be sure.

“Get the doctor,” he said.

The doctor would check him out and ascertain if he was fit to go on, or had to rest for a day or two. He could pep the Israeli up with amphetamines and a drip feed of essential minerals and vitamins. He’d seen it done a couple of times before, and then they would start on him again.

He handed the Saudi the sword, who took it reverently.

T
he Amir had asked for him and he would see him before hearing what the doctor had to say.

Chapter 37

The Amir was a radical cleric, an extremist even among jihadist fighters. He had a boil-like mark on his forehead, the
zebiba
, or raisin, the result of many decades of praying by touching his head to the floor. He’d lost an eye fighting the Russians in Afghanistan and an arm fighting the Americans there back in 2001. Those who underestimated him called him a Zawahiri, shorthand for an inadequate and humourless religious fanatic.

No one knew his name, not even Ibrahim, who had entered the now empty room where the Amir had been holding a form of court a few minutes earlier. The Amir was said to guard his anonymity both jealously and pragmatically. Ibrahim knew that many jihadist leaders had been targeted by the Americans in drone strikes in the Middles East, and that the pull of a notorious form of fame was just too strong for them. The Amir was evidently not concerned with earthly matters.

He had in fact been a devoted family man, a man who’d put the happiness of his children and the contentment of his wife above all things. That had been before they’d all been murdered by a Russian gunship on the Af-Pak border. They’d been literally cut to pieces thirty years ago by twin Gatling guns fixed to the underside of the helicopter’s stub wings. There had been so many pieces of flesh and bone scattered over the valley in the foothills of the Hindu Kush that it had taken him a day to collect them before they could be buried. That was something that stayed with a man, fuelling hatred in a few to a form of insanity. And yet when it was so long ago, the days before such a tragedy happened sometimes morphed into an idealized world, such as are imagined in a perfect dream.

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 fleck, 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?”