Dara said, "That isn't much if some guys are worth twenty-five."
"You'd think they'd be breaking down the door," Suzanne said. "Try to get them to come in and rat out someone they know. It's not easy."
Dara said, "They didn't come in, did they?"
"Or phone," Suzanne said. "We put in a request to National Police, see if they can locate them. They might or might not. You never know whose side they're on. We can't nose around ourselves, search apartments in someone else's country. We do have people keeping their eyes open."
"Billy's right, you have to go by the book," Dara said. "I'll find them."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
BEFORE HE WAS JAMA Raisuli or Jama al Amriki he was James Russell, pronounced Russelclass="underline" picked up twice on suspicion of armed robbery and released; arrested in Miami Beach with controlled substances and sent to the Stockade to await a court date. James said to the lawyer appointed for him, "Do I look like a drug dealer to you? I'm a college student happen to have some blow on me I'm picked up, some weed for my depressed state of mind. I don't sell my medications."
The federal prosecutor asked James's lawyer, "What'd he have, a few ounces?"
The lawyer said, "A pound or so of weed. The boy has a smart mouth. I'll plead him on possession, you offer us three to five and we'll take it, skip the trial."
This was how James Russell came to Coleman FCI in the middle of inland Florida to hang with Muslims, a means of surviving in here, twenty years old doing his first fall. He told the Muslims he was a member of the Nation of Islam, having seen the movie Malcolm X and remembered how the brothers addressed one another. Have some serious Muslims around him and not get used by skinheads for their immoral purposes. Jamming a broom handle up his butt.
James caught the eye of a three-timer who talked up Allah in the Muslim part of the yard and went by the name Tariq, an African American Sunni Muslim. He said to James, "You in the Nation of what? Islam? Those people no more Islamic than the white fools call theirselves Shriners, wear a fez on their heads. The Nation say they black and play to it. All right, but me and you…are we black? We more a mellow shade of tan, like our Arab brothers the Wahhabi, spreading the word of Allah with explosive devices. You know how else we different? We don't have woolly heads. We have hair we can comb, let grow long if we want."
"I notice that," James said. "I'm looking at Islam as the way to go. But what do I get out of it?"
Tariq had to grin, showing what teeth he had. He loved this boy. He said, "You quiet, you show respect. What is it you hope to become in your life?"
"Famous," James said. "I been looking at ways."
"Become a prophet?"
"I don't tell what will happen, I do it."
"Dedicate yourself to jihad?"
"That's a way to go, yeah."
Tariq said, "Do you know what you talking about?"
"I have the gift to remember every word I read," James said. "Everything you people tell me."
"There is a verse," Tariq said, "'Oh ye who believe, fear Allah and make your utterance straightforward.'"
James said, "'He that obeys Allah and his messenger has already attained a great victory.'"
"It's 'attained the great victory.' But you close. You know the Koran?"
"I read it in the Stockade." HE KNEW THEY WERE watching him: see if he was a punk or the kind wanted his own way. He was a restless age but seemed at peace with himself. The only time he was hostile, he'd stand away from them in the yard and stare at the skinheads, James with one hand holding his package, and motion to the skins to come over and try him.
He cleaned the kitchen with one of them found stabbed to death with his own knife that said FOR NIGGERS scratched into the wood hilt.
Tariq said, "Don't the guards know you did it?"
"Me?" James said. "I don't cause commotions, I read. It's skinheads always being thrown in the hole. Musta been another skin done it." He could go back and forth from intelligence to street.
A time came Tariq said, "You don't talk much or make noise. But I see you with the one doing time for molesting boys…"
James said, "Don't worry about it."
Tariq took his time. "Listen, I ask around of my brothers, if they think you could learn to speak Arabic. I don't mean 'Can you direct me please to the Mosque,' but as we speak and swear at one another. They say no, he can't do it. They say they would always hear your American sound. Your black American sound in our words. No, he can never speak as we do."
"How much you bet I can?"
"If I believe you can learn to speak our language in, what, six months?"
"Three," James said, "having the gift. I'll be speaking like a camel jockey in three months. You can lay three to one I'll do it and get the population betting against me. They'll hear me say Allah's making me do it and put me down as a fool."
Tariq said, "In only three months?"
"Three more. I been learning Arabian from Short Eyes since I started hanging with y'all. I know how to recite 'Your mother fucks pigs' and other kinds of Arabian sayings. Get that man reading to be a cleric everybody trusts to judge can I do it or not. But how you gonna collect from people making fourteen cents an hour, the ones working?"
"The women bring it in or they send money. Don't worry, we always get it." Tariq said, "But listen, when you become Muslim we'll give you a name that will please Allah."
James said, "I've already thought of one I like the sound of. Jama Raisuli."
Tariq looked at the name in his mind. "How did it come to you?"
"From Allah," James said.
It took almost a year to collect the entire twenty-three hundred he won speaking Arabian in the test, even the sayings and idioms. HE WAS RELEASED FROM prison the day he completed three years less two months: released the same day, the same hour, the Twin Towers were destroyed, blown to rubble 9/11, and James said it again, "From Allah." This time believing it was the Lord's personal sign, a gift to him.
Allah told him to leave Florida and take a flight into Egypt using his new James Russell passport good for ten years. Three flights from Miami to Sharm el Sheikh on the tip of the Sinai Peninsula and hopped on a boat to take him down the Red Sea full of ships to Djibouti. Once he was getting the feel of the Arab world and speaking the language, he used letters of introduction from inmates to put him in touch with jihadists. Now he was going by Jama Raisuli and they began calling him Jama al Amriki.
In Djibouti he met another Amriki, Assam the American, charged back home with treason, a Jew converted to Islam who broadcast threats, promised attacks that would leave the streets of America running with blood. Assam wrote powerful shit about hating America, but speaking proper Arabic like he'd learned it in school. Jama spoke street Arab, was accepted as an African and believed he was. But couldn't see blowing himself up next to a school bus in Tel Aviv, his life precious to him. He didn't know what he'd say if they asked him to become a martyr. He kept busy translating Assam's speeches to Arabic, making them sound meaner.
He didn't see being a jihadist made him a traitor any more than selling blow or holding up a liquor store did. He let his hair grow to his shoulders, wrapped a scarf around it and wore a saronglike kikoi over his trousers, a Walther P38 in his back pocket. Jama had stopped in a shop that sold guns, kept the clerk busy looking for pistols he wanted to see, the clerk distracted as Jama slipped the Walther under his kikoi and left the shop.
On the street an Arab dressed as he was stopped him and said, "You need bullets, don't you?"
It was Qasim al Salah, an al Qaeda hero walking around in plain sight in this quarter. Assam, the other Amriki, had shown Jama pictures of him and spoke of Qasim as a saint: the man who perfected the use of vehicles as improvised explosive devices. In '83, still a lad, he helped plan the destruction of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon, a truck bomb carrying twelve thousand pounds of explosives; 246 killed. He planned and directed the bombing of the U.S. Consulate in Karachi; the bombing of the embassy in Mombasa, Kenya; the Air Force Barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Now, Assam said, Qasim was planning a radioactive "dirty bomb" for a second attack on America.