Zalinsky looked to David.
“Very,” David said. “Chameleon is the one who said we needed to find Dr. Malik because Malik was the key to understanding exactly what Iran had.”
“And he was right.”
“He was.”
“But you guys don’t believe him when he says the weapons aren’t in Hamadan anymore. Why not?”
Zalinsky answered that. “That’s not exactly what we’re saying, sir. Chameleon could be right. We certainly believe that Darazi and Hosseini told him that the warheads were no longer in Hamadan. But we still have questions.”
“Such as?”
“Was the president being told the whole truth by Saddaji and his team? Were they planning to move the weapons but hadn’t yet? If they were really moving the warheads, were they fully assembled, or were parts being moved? It’s dangerous to move fully assembled nuclear warheads, not so much because they might go off but because someone could hijack the convoy and suddenly a fully assembled warhead is in the hands of a rogue element of the military or a terrorist group or whatever.”
“Bottom line?” Allen asked.
“The bottom line, sir, is that maybe all the weapons were scattered. Maybe they weren’t. We simply don’t know, which means Iran has eight operational two-hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads, and we don’t have any idea where they are.”
14
The motorcade finally departed the airport grounds.
Jacques Miroux, following the Mahdi in a rented compact Renault, expected the entourage to head directly up Hafez El Asad Drive, where hundreds of thousands of Lebanese lined both sides of the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of their beloved Twelfth Imam as he made his way to Beirut’s largest stadium to deliver a major address. But at the last moment, to his surprise, the Mahdi’s SUV and the six other vehicles filled with heavily armed bodyguards diverted off the expected path, heading north on Al Imam El Khomeini Boulevard. A few minutes later, they turned northwest and made an unscheduled detour and stop inside the Shatila refugee camp.
It was a brilliant move, Miroux realized instantly — bold, risky, unconventional, and populist to its core. It was exactly what a typical head of state wouldn’t do. Indeed, he couldn’t think of a single world leader — especially an Arab leader — who had ever visited the twelve thousand impoverished souls crammed into the one square kilometer that was the Shatila refugee camp. The Mahdi was going to identify directly with the Palestinian cause. He was going to see and feel and touch and smell the misery of these refugees, and in so doing he was likely to win not only the hearts of the four hundred thousand or so Palestinians living in Lebanon but of the nearly four million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the nearly three million in Jordan, the million and a half living in Israel proper, the million living in Syria, and the pockets of Palestinians living in nearly every other country in the Middle East and North Africa.
Sure enough, as word spread through the camp of what was happening, Miroux watched the place become electrified. Thousands of Palestinian boys and girls, dirt-poor but smiling and cheering, came running to the motorcade, shouting, “The Holy One has come! The Holy One has come!”
The bodyguards assigned by the Lebanese government to protect the Mahdi scrambled to take up positions and attempted to build a corridor of protection around their principal. But as the Mahdi stepped out of the SUV, he ignored their movements and their counsel and immediately plunged into the throng. The crowd went wild. Mothers, clad head to foot in black chadors and holding babies in their arms, came running, as did fathers and sons, all of them unemployed, few of them sacrificing anything more important to do.
The crowd pressed in closer and closer. They tried to touch the Mahdi. They tried to kiss his hands and feet. The elderly and infirm tried to get close, hoping to touch the hem of his garment, that their ailments might be healed, and Miroux wrote furiously in his notepad to get it all down.
He noted that the Mahdi didn’t try to speak but for a few words of thanks and appreciation to those nearest to him. The crowds wouldn’t have been able to hear him anyway, but they loved him.
Ahmed was only eleven.
He was playing soccer with his friends near the trash dump when he heard the rumor come rifling through the camp. Could it really be? he wondered. Could the Lord of the Age be near us? Could he really be walking among us? It seemed impossible.
Ahmed had no access to a television. His parents could not afford any books. All they had was a Qur’an, and he studied it morning and night. He knew he was not that bright; his father told him constantly. Still, he was trying to memorize it all. His memory was terrible, certainly compared to his older brothers. But he wanted to learn. He wanted to be faithful. What more could he do? He prayed constantly for Allah to have mercy on him. It seemed impossible. He was only a poor Palestinian refugee. Forgotten by the world. Alone and scared. What could he do for Allah but perhaps one day join Hezbollah and become a martyr waging jihad against the Zionists?
He picked up his soccer ball and took off running, leaving his less-devout friends bewildered and screaming after him to come back or at least leave them the ball. But the ball was his only worldly possession. And he knew what he had to do. Down one muddy, sewage-filled alley after another he ran, as fast as his little legs could take him. He was smaller than most children his age, and when he saw the enormous crowd near the center of the camp, his first instinct was to cry. He would never get close enough to see the Mahdi.
Fighting back tears, determined not to give up, Ahmed pushed together several empty crates lying nearby and used them to climb up on the corrugated tin roof of a makeshift medical clinic. Scrambling to the top, he stood on his tiptoes and found himself in awe of what lay before him. There were masses of people as far as the eye could see — and more coming from every direction. People were chanting praises to Allah at the top of their lungs. He counted six — no, wait, seven — white vehicles in the center, nearly engulfed by the crowd, and figured that had to be where the Mahdi was. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t see the one he had come for. Nor could he imagine a way to get closer.
Suddenly, he saw in the swirling dust something hovering in the sky over the center of the crowd, something almost glowing, right over where he was sure the Mahdi must be standing. It was a figure of some kind, Ahmed realized, bathed in a yellowish-white light. He had never seen anything more beautiful. Then, to his amazement, the apparition seemed to turn and look at him directly. And then it began to speak.
“Ahmed, do you know who I am?”
“I do not, my Lord,” the boy replied, trembling.
“I am the angel Gabriel, Ahmed. I have come to proclaim to you the one you seek, the one over whom I now stand, is the Promised One, and you shall be his servant, the servant of the ruler of the Caliphate now rising. Submit to him, Ahmed, and you shall live.”
Miroux saw it and was mesmerized.
Not that he wanted to be. He didn’t. He wasn’t religious. Far from it. He’d been raised near Lyon by atheist parents, who taught him from his childhood that religion was dangerous, anti-intellectual, a crutch for the masses, and a game for the foolish, the poor, and the hypocrites. For him, covering the Twelfth Imam was a fascinating diversion from typical stories about wars and rumors of wars and peace talks that never went anywhere. This story, he believed, was about the rise of a new political leader in a tumultuous political environment. The man was building a new Caliphate, an Islamic kingdom, or so he claimed. Few people in the West had ever heard of Muhammad Ibn Hasan Ibn Ali even a month earlier. Now he was a rock star.