He had chosen Detroit as a departure point to add another layer of deception, but before he had even reached the customs barrier, two US Customs and Border Protection officers suddenly appeared at his side, the big blue ‘Department of Homeland Security’ flashes prominent on their sleeves. al-Falid turned to face them. The older of the two must have been nearly 18 stone, he reflected, the officer’s stomach hanging over his heavy, black pistol belt, scalloping the buttons on his dark blue uniform. The other officer was a young woman al-Falid judged to be about twenty-five, and from the bars on her shoulders, she was the senior of the two. al-Falid fought to keep his anger in check at the sight of the infidel flaunting her sexuality. Her blonde hair hung over her shoulders and her lips were covered with a purple gloss. An outline of the customs officer’s breasts and nipples strained against the flimsy blue material of her uniform. al-Falid took a deep breath. The Imams in Australia had been right, he thought, yet they had been roundly criticised for sermons about scantily clad women.
‘Mr al-Falid?’ the young woman asked briskly.
‘Yes.’
‘You will come with us – now,’ she demanded.
Amon al-Falid forced himself to remain calm. Even though he was inwardly incensed that he was being ordered about by a woman, he had trained himself for situations such as this. Now that the US Customs and Border Control had swept up the old Customs, Immigration, Plant and Animal Health into one powerful organisation, al-Falid had found himself being subjected to more and more interrogations and strip searches, even on domestic travel. He knew that computer crosschecks now linked more than twenty different federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA databases, but he reassured himself that in the tens of thousands of movements that occurred each day, his Egyptian passport had yet to be linked to his United States passport. Nor had the infidel given any indication they had any inkling of his membership of al Qaeda.
‘You were born in Egypt?’ the young woman asked, looking first at al-Falid, and then at the photo in his passport. The photo showed a man with a swarthy complexion, the lower part of his face covered with a short black beard and a neatly trimmed moustache. He had a hooked nose, black hair and full lips. Behind the large black-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were dark and alert.
‘As you can see, Cairo 1954,’ al-Falid replied evenly. al-Falid had long ago decided that the best way to deal with one of the infidel’s interrogations was to answer all of their inane questions firmly but politely.
The customs officer placed al-Falid’s passport under a microscope to check it for any sign of forgery. The microscope and the nearby computer looked strangely out of place in the starkly furnished and windowless interrogation room with its grey, bare walls. The interrogator’s obese colleague was leaning against the opposite wall. A third officer, thin and wearing thick glasses suddenly entered the room and extracted al-Falid’s laptop from its black leather case. He plugged it into the wall socket, switched it on and pushed it towards al-Falid.
‘Activate it,’ he demanded. al-Falid shrugged and began to type in his codeword. His face was inscrutable. al-Falid had the ability to break into all but the most sophisticated of computer databases and wiping the internet searches that might incriminate him from his laptop had been child’s play. He’d kept all his research results on the weak points of the various target cities on his computer in his office behind firewalls. al-Falid had constructed them to be as safe as any bank and much safer than any notes on paper. He watched as the customs officer scrutinised a mind-numbing array of sites on the architecture of the Silk Road.
‘What is your reason for travelling to Pakistan,’ the female officer asked.
‘I’m on a sabbatical from Michigan State University. I have an interest in Asian history, especially the early architecture of Pakistan,’ al-Falid said as he faced his interrogator. Keep calm, and keep your answers short and accurate, he told himself. Short, but not too short. Give out the absolute minimum of information without appearing to hold anything back.
‘Why did you leave Egypt,’ she asked suddenly. al-Falid recognised the question for what it was. It was a question out of left field that was designed to throw him off balance and elicit any sign of nerves. He was ready for it.
‘I came here to study for my doctorate at Harvard University,’ he replied calmly. ‘When I completed it the university sponsored me for a green card and I was lucky enough to be accepted,’ he said. ‘Lucky enough to be accepted’ was al-Falid’s first lie of the interview but it was a well-practised one. Momentarily his thoughts flashed back to a time when he’d been taunted by American students at the university. A time when Khalid Kadeer had befriended him as he’d walked past one of the student bars. A group of Harvard footballers, joined by their scantily dressed cheerleaders, had taken over the tables on one of the balconies and called out to him.
‘Hey towel head!! Why don’t you let your hair out of your towel and come and have a drink!’ The footballers were celebrating their win and their loud laughter encouraged the verbal barbs of their quarterback, one of the more arrogant of their number.
‘I’m talking to you, dickhead!’ the Harvard quarterback yelled after him, as al-Falid kept walking.
‘Why don’t you go back to your stinking camels and your sandpits, you arrogant asshole!’ another one yelled.
‘No wonder you prefer vestal virgins! You wouldn’t know what to fucking do with it!’ yelled another. The cheerleaders broke into a fit of the giggles.
‘Ignore them. Like many Westerners, they’re threatened by difference. They have shallow minds and think that theirs is the only society worth living in.’ al-Falid turned to find a tall man beside him. The man was slightly older than al-Falid and was dressed in western clothes but wore an elegant handwoven cap, the culture of which he didn’t recognise. ‘I’m Khalid Kadeer. I’m doing a doctorate in microbiology. There is a quiet coffee shop around the corner that sells green tea.’
Had it not been for the friendship and support of the brilliant Uighur microbiologist, al-Falid was certain he would have returned home to Cairo without completing his MBA. Kadeer had convinced him that one day the infidels and the Chinese would pay for their ignorance and for their contempt of Islam. The need for ‘sleeper cells’ to deliver warnings had been one example of Kadeer’s vision for the future, and al-Falid had given thanks to Allah, the Most Kind and the Most Merciful, that such a need had finally come to reality. Although as he put the master freedom fighter’s complex plans in place, al-Falid also found himself at odds with his mentor. Even after the humiliation at the hands of the West and the Han Chinese, Khalid Kadeer still seemed ready to forgive. If only the West and the Han Chinese would give Islam the respect it deserved. For al-Falid, forgiveness didn’t come into it. al-Falid was convinced that there was only one true path, the path of Islam, and the great Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, had laid out that path very clearly. The United States, Britain, Australia and all other western countries would be taken over by Islam and operate under strict Sharia law. Eventually the one true religion would take over the world with a wondrous encompassment of pan-Islam, the way Allah, the Most Kind, the Most Merciful had always intended.
‘What places are you going to visit in Pakistan, exactly?’ The customs officer’s exasperation at al-Falid’s calm responses was beginning to show. She pushed her hair over her shoulder with a contemptuous flick.
‘I will be spending some time studying sixteenth and seventeenth century architecture in Islamabad,’ al-Falid replied, fighting to hide his disgust at a woman doing the job of a man, ‘After that, provided the authorities will give me a permit, I hope to spend some time in the North-West Frontier Province as I have a great interest in the area and I’m writing a book on architecture and the Silk Road.’ al-Falid reminded himself that there was no need to mention the specifics of Peshawar, although he still needed to be prudent. al-Falid knew that the results of the interrogation would be fed into the CIA’s computers and if they followed him in Pakistan, he wanted his trip to look as close to the way he had described it as possible. Except for his planned visit to Darra Adam Khel, the mountain village where you could buy anything from an AK-47 to a stinger missile. It would be very necessary, al-Falid reminded himself, to make sure he wasn’t being tailed when he visited Darra Adam Khel.