The Devil's Light (21 page)

I
n the deep of night, the dhow lowered its auxiliary skiff, and a nameless crew member steered Al Zaroor and his cargo toward a desolate island off the coast of Kuwait.

Nearing the beach, Al Zaroor saw the beam of a single flashlight. The crewman cut his motor, and the prow of the boat kissed the sand. The beam moved toward them. Al Zaroor tensed, his hand on the Luger wedged in his belt. Then the light traced a circle, and Al Zaroor stepped from the boat.

“Allahu akbar,”
a voice called out.
God is great.

Now Al Zaroor could see him in the moonlight. Stopping on the beach, he waited until the outlines of three other men appeared at their leader's side. Quietly, the man said, “I am Omar Haj.”

Stepping forward, Al Zaroor appraised him. “Haj” was a pseudonym. This man had brought it glory in Iraq; the smile that lit his bearded face did not extinguish the light in his eyes, the look of a fighter prepared to die. “How is it in the world?” Al Zaroor inquired drily. “I've been at sea.”

Haj's face became solemn. “The world is much changed. Osama has spoken. He lives, my friend.”

Al Zaroor's face showed nothing. Watching Haj's men retrieve the cargo, he answered softly, “He will live for a thousand years. Tell me his words.”

Haj answered in an undertone that bespoke awe and wonder. “We have a nuclear bomb, my brother. Osama has pledged to destroy an American city.”

Al Zaroor repressed a smile. “And how was this received?”

“Overnight, the Americans became rabbits. Their stock market is sinking, and panic is spreading. Neighbors inform on neighbors with brown skins.” Haj's voice filled with rapture. “The veneer of power slips away. Soon Bin Laden will be their master.”

“God is great indeed.” Even in his pleasure, Al Zaroor scanned the darkness that enveloped them. “What of this island?”

“Failaka is almost deserted. You have chosen well.”

And carefully, Al Zaroor thought. Once pretty and well inhabited, Failaka Island was a casualty of war, largely abandoned since Saddam had invaded Kuwait more than twenty years before. The Iraqis had moved the inhabitants to the mainland, then used their schools and homes and offices for target practice. Allied bombing of Iraqi positions completed the demolition. What remained was a virtual ghost town—cratered streets and abandoned buildings—lightly populated by Kuwaitis clustered miles from where they stood. “We should take cover,” Al Zaroor said simply.

Nodding, Haj gave orders to his men. They lifted the crate, one man grunting with its weight, and began plodding inland through waves of sea grass. The sounds of the motorboat receded, headed for the unseen dhow; Al Zaroor and the bomb were in the hands of al Qaeda fighters who knew their role and nothing more. “No one comes here,” Haj assured Al Zaroor. “If they did, we'd kill them.”

Ahead, Al Zaroor saw the shell of a building, perhaps an abandoned home. “Is our plan intact?”

“Yes. In two nights' time, we'll smuggle your package by Zodiac boat into Iraq, landing near the harbor at Umm Qasr. A truck will wait there, sent by our Sunni brothers.”

“You're still certain they're reliable?”

“Yes. We've used them many times, for men and arms to kill our enemies. Even at the height of the American intrusion, they've had no problem: Our friends pay the police, the army, and the militia—Shia or Sunni.” He glanced at Al Zaroor. “As you anticipated, the American withdrawal has aided our cause. They hide in their bases as Iraq descends into chaos. As for the Jews, they have no assets here to speak of. We will leave you nearer your destination, wherever that may be.”

Al Zaroor permitted himself a smile. “God willing,” he answered softly.

* * *

At eight that evening, despite his need for rest, Grey took Brooke Chandler to dinner at the Cosmos Club. “Might as well enjoy my membership,” Grey remarked, “while the club is still standing.”

The dining room was too empty, a tribute to Bin Laden. But the dimly lit room itself, Brooke judged, had changed little in a hundred years. Waiters of long standing glided among the white-covered tables, serving men who bore themselves with the amiable authority of those whose success had been settled long ago. Raising his tumbler of bourbon to Brooke's martini glass, Grey gave the toast he reserved for members of the agency. “Present company. And absent friends.”

Some of those friends had died in service; that Grey included Brooke in their company was a sign of honor. Then Grey said abruptly, “Make me a believer in the destruction of Tel Aviv. Before I start running interference, I need to know why.”

Brooke felt his frustration spill over. “Everyone in that room today knows that faking one operation to conceal another is a standard ploy. In World War Two, the Brits concealed their invasion of Sicily by allowing the Germans to ‘intercept' communications about their imminent landing in Greece. By comparison, al Qaeda doesn't even flatter us into believing we've stumbled onto a ‘secret.' Yet we're tripping over ourselves to do exactly what he wants.”

“Perhaps,” Grey allowed. “But Bin Laden always put America first. His goal is to bring down the West and its values. Israel is just an outpost.”

“Not so,” Brooke said sharply. “For Bin Laden, no crime of the West was more evil than Israel's creation, no wound to Islam more humiliating than giving the holy land of Palestine to Zionists, no threat more imminent than a nuclear arsenal aimed by Jews at Muslims. Bin Laden may have attacked America. But he also dispatched Richard Reid, the future shoe bomber, to scout Tel Aviv—”

“Concerning holy sites,” Grey interrupted, “wouldn't Bin Laden worry about polluting them with nuclear poison?”

“Not if he detonates this bomb from a plane. An airburst will cause less fallout. Tel Aviv disappears; Jerusalem remains.” Brooke sipped his martini. “The existence of Israel helped goad Bin Laden into becoming who he is. In his vision of the caliphate, the Temple Mount is sacred ground, the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

“So one of his goals was to liberate Jerusalem. In Bin Laden's mind—and I'm sure in the mind of whoever planned this—Israel's military prowess and nuclear weapons made that close to impossible. But there's an Achilles' heel: a nuclear attack.”

Grey parsed this. “I've met with the Israeli minister of defense. He insists, as they all do, that Israel could survive a single nuclear strike.”

“Utter bullshit,” Brooke snapped. “What did you expect them to say?”

Grey smiled a little. “Precisely that.”

“Which, at best, suggests a massive failure of imagination. I dearly hope I'm wrong. But if I'm right, we'll see what they say after al Qaeda destroys Israel's center of industry and commerce, wipes out its electrical grid, levels its major airport, ruins its sources of coal-based power, and kills ten percent of its population. Except that they won't live to say it.” Brooke softened his tone. “But even if you managed to survive, and the center of your bite-sized country was a nuclear desert, what would you do? Take out a building permit?”

Grey regarded him gravely. “The survivors will be angry people with nuclear weapons. Backed by the sympathy of the world.”

“The kind of sympathy you feel at a funeral,” Brooke rejoined, “which would last about as long. Then what? A country of psychologically damaged people without a future, staring at the ashes of their dream. Would you stay, Carter? Would you ask Anne to stay, or anyone you loved? Would you want your children and grandchildren to even breathe that air? In two years Israel will become a Masada state, populated by a cadre of religious fanatics prepared to watch their families die rather than yield an inch of their atomic wasteland.” Pausing, Brooke thought of Anit—already vanished from his life, perhaps about to vanish from this world. “The result would be unspeakably sad—the end of Israel as we know it. It's Bin Laden's last and only chance to destroy an entire nation, the act of a vengeful Islamic God in a nuclear age.”

Grey's eyes were as bleak as Brooke's words. “A Masada state,” he finally said, “could respond with a nuclear attack.”

“Oh,” Brooke retorted glumly, “Bin Laden knew that, too.”

Grey sipped his whisky, contemplating the amber liquid that remained. “It's part of Bin Laden's modus operandi, to be sure. Before he pulled off 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wanted al Qaeda operatives
to recruit pilots from the Royal Saudi Air Force, who would then fly their own aircraft to bomb the Israeli city of Elad. His idea was to incite an Israeli counterattack on the Saudis, pitting two American allies against each other in an all-out war.” Grey put down his glass. “Fortunately, we captured him before he could bring this masterstroke to fruition.”

“But his concept is timeless.” Pausing, Brooke drained his martini. “Two questions, Carter—either of which answers the other. If Israel responds with a nuclear strike, who would they target? And who did Bin Laden despise almost as much as America and Israel?”

Absorbing this, Grey's face betrayed his interest. “Iran, of course. And Hezbollah. They're both Shia, and they've both eclipsed Bin Laden as symbols for Muslims who despise the West.” Grey considered this, then said, “So you think Israel would go after the Iranians.”

“Quite possibly. They can't bomb al Qaeda—it has no known location. But the Iranians do, and the Israeli right is fixated on Ahmadinejad. They might lash out like a wounded beast.” Brooke smiled without humor. “We're the prime example of how this works—after all, we pretended that Saddam had his fingerprints on 9/11 so we could invade Iraq. Would Israel be more judicious after suffering an atomic holocaust? Maybe so. But I think whoever planned this imagines the Israelis handing al Qaeda a bonus. The nuclear destruction of Tehran.”

Grey hunched in the chair, closing his eyes. For a long time, Brooke thought he was warding off pain. Then he opened his eyes again. “No matter what outsiders think,” he began, “the CIA tends to be more rigorous than any other agency of government. There's room to make your case. But you'll have to prevail against some very smart people—some in the Outfit, some not—who believe in their own judgment as much as you do in yours. Not to mention all the others so frightened by the image of a mushroom cloud over Washington that they'll refuse to listen. You'll need a first-rate analyst to back you, and friends in very high places.”

“Not Alex Coll.”

“Then it had better be Brustein and Azzolino. If need be, they can get past Coll to the president.” Grey paused for emphasis. “What you've got is a theoretical case. Now you need to enter the mind of your operative.
When you're done, I want you to tell me how he gets this bomb to Tel Aviv.”

“Through Lebanon—”

“I'm not asking for directions,” Grey interrupted curtly. “You need to figure out exactly how he does this, from beginning to end, until Brustein and Azzolino can believe it—and do that quickly. We don't have much time.”

T
hat night, twenty-four hours after leaving Dubai, Brooke tried to sleep.

This proved difficult. Stirring restlessly, he could not shake his conviction that al Qaeda was deluding his country and its people. His ultimate fear—the nuclear destruction of Tel Aviv and its people—filled his imagination with terrible specificity, its face becoming that of Anit Rahal. He wondered if she were there, and why he could not find her. At length, his thoughts turned to a night, ten years before, when Anit was with him still.

In February, Brooke and Anit had their first dinner with his parents.

As their cab headed toward Central Park West, Anit seemed distant, gazing silently at the foul winter weather. It did not help her mood that Ariel Sharon had been named prime minister of Israel. At last she turned from the sleet-covered window. “I know why they invited us,” she said. “But from all you say, we're from completely different worlds. I hope we don't end up sniffing at each other like strange dogs.”

“Don't worry,” Brooke joked. “My father's like a Saint Bernard. As for my mother, the Doberman, she firmly believes the Holocaust was uncalled for.”

To Brooke's relief, Anit mustered a fleeting smile.

Peter and Isabelle Chandler lived in a commodious penthouse above Central Park. The doorman, knowing Brooke, waved the couple to the elevator.

On the way to the top, Brooke imagined Anit's reaction to the man and woman who had raised him. Peter Chandler did, indeed, have the aura of a Saint Bernard turned denizen of Wall Street—a round, pleasant face; gray-flecked brown hair; black, thick glasses; modest jowls to match his paunch. With this came an unruffled air that, at any given moment, could suggest a sound, placid temperament, or complete and utter indifference to what was happening all around him. Brooke, who found his father an enigma, could never quite distinguish his serenity from cluelessness.

Isabelle Chandler was of a different mettle altogether. Immediately impressive was the blond, imperishable beauty that in Brooke had translated into good looks so strikingly similar that Peter Chandler wryly called himself “biologically irrelevant.” What Brooke did not inherit from his mother was the imperiousness of someone who, privileged at birth, could not imagine being anyone else. In the sixties, at Wellesley, Isabelle had discovered a passion for politics, and issues to inflame her sense of rebellion—Vietnam, civil rights, the environment, abortion, and the enactment of the equal rights amendment. Most, if not all, of these causes had Brooke's sympathy. But his mother's politics wearied him; he had never heard her say a surprising thing. And all too often, his mother's statements were stamped with the imprimatur “as I said to Hillary”—or Mario, or whomever. It was not these worthies' fault, Brooke knew, that the toils of fund-raising required them to treat Isabelle Chandler's pronouncements like Einstein's theories, swelling her self-assurance to steroidal proportions. But the fallout was that he had to listen, knowing that dissent was pointless.