The Muslim world was full of Boutenflikas, corrupt false potentates and princes who went to mosque each holy Friday and denigrated the Qur’an, made hollow the Shari’a on Saturday. Islam had enemies both outside and within. And the faith to which he belonged, to which he clung, still, like a black tick on the neck of a mehari, required soldiers to defend her. And so he had gone to Lebanon, and met the infamous El Aqrab.
Gulzhan was right. He would become shahid. The story of his own, small, personal jihad was written. He would burn as brightly as one of El Aqrab’s incendiary devices, bright as an atom bomb, a Ghusl ablution of flame, and awaken in the gardens of Heaven. Of this, Hammel was convinced. God would protect him from the tiniest mistake. Hammel accepted this without doubt, without bothering to ask how, or even why; as he accepted the bila kayf and all the mysteries of faith.
He stared down at the cold Atlantic, at the glassy swath the freighter cut behind her as she ploughed the waves, a path as temporary and fragile as any in the desert.
The only permanence was Allah, Hammel thought. The rest, just like these waves, just like the dunes of In Salah, like Man himself, was fleeting — a windspout in the wastes of the Sahara. When the bomb had done its work, when he was dead, it would not be these days, but only their perfection that would linger.
Chapter 19
There was an eerie, almost palpable silence in the corridor, shattered only by the jingling of keys. Decker stood outside the metal apartment door and waited for the landlord to let him in. No one had entered the apartment since the time of the sealing. Strands of solar yellow POLICE LINE — DO NOT CROSS tape still hung across the door. Decker removed the plastic cobwebs with a single sweep of the hand. “Thanks,” he said to the landlord, stepping forward. “I’ll lock up when I’m finished.”
He flipped on the light and made his way into the living room, past the dingy off-white nubby sofa, the wicker coffee table with the broken leg, across the well-worn carpeting, to the little wooden table with the Dell PC. He didn’t waste any time. He curled into the seat like a question mark and turned on the computer.
Recent news stories had brought the theft of the HEU in Kazakhstan to the world’s attention. In New York, that irrepressible hack Gallagher of WKXY-TV had done a good job scaring half the city to death. Citizen and union groups demonstrated daily outside of City Hall, and each morning saw another truckload of irate letters delivered to His Honor, Mayor Greenberg. There had been four myocardial infarctions, dozens of asthma attacks, and an elderly couple in Queens had taken their own lives in the face of the impending radioactive doom. The Manhattan DA was looking into pressing charges against Gallagher and WKXY-TV but the case was dubious at best. The First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press was hard to bridle even in this time of heightened vigilance.
Decker waited for the machine to boot up.
One good thing had come out of the El Aqrab Affair, as it soon came to be known: The nation’s alert status had increased from Yellow to Orange. Armed with a new sense of urgency, Decker’s boss, SAC Jerry Johnson, submitted a request to re-search the apartment in Queens under the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A FISA panel of judges convened in secret and issued the search warrant. It did not have to be displayed. The raid could be done in secret, night or day. And this time, the PC hard disk was in play.
Decker linked up his portable burn unit to the computer and copied the files from the hard disk. The process took only a few seconds. There wasn’t a whole lot on the PC; he could have used a memory stick. With a loud sigh, Decker got up, packed his gear into his gym bag, and left the apartment.
As soon as he got back to FBI headquarters, Decker stopped by the Computer Lab on the third floor and downloaded a copy of the hard disk for analysis. Then he walked the four flights back to his department.
No one greeted him as he entered the bullpen. Other agents occupied the desks around him. But they were off in their own worlds, on the telephone, or with their eyes glued to their PC screens, typing reports.
Decker sat down at his desk and started pouring through his e- and snail-maiclass="underline" new HR protocols; a retirement party for some guy in Accounting named Trumbel; an irritating set of questions about his expense report from SAC Johnson; a joke from Tony Bartolo… Decker froze. He looked at the name again: Anthony Bartolo. And he saw the body gradually unfurl, with that puzzled look upon his face. Decker couldn’t stand it any longer. He pulled the CD burner from his gym bag and linked it to his own PC.
It took him only a few minutes to transfer the data to his Compaq and run a recovery program, unscrambling the FAT. It looked like one of the suspects — probably Mohammed bin Basra — had erased some of the files just before bolting from the apartment: a pair of.doc file letters that seemed innocuous enough; a host of Quicken files tracking an account worth thirteen thousand dollars — nothing appeared to be coded; some PDF files of speeches by an Imam in Brooklyn; and, finally, four different wallpapers, with different arabesque designs and Arabic calligraphy, which he reviewed with PhotoShop.
The first turned out to be the same design that he had seen at the apartment in Queens, the one Professor Hassan had called masjid, the Individual prayer. He translated the Arabic script that ran along the qibla and confirmed that it was from the Al-Takwir, Sura 81. Except that only a part of the text had been used in the design — the words, “… ten-month pregnant she-camels are discarded as a means of transportation… ” and then, “… when hell is stoked up.” He remembered what Hassan had said the phrases meant to Muslim clerics: Real trains and other high-speed means of transportation have supplanted camel trains. And the reference to helclass="underline" Could be volcanoes like Mt. St. Helens and Etna. But many clerics believe it refers to nuclear power and the bomb. Then it hit him. Trains and bombs! The HEU stolen by Gulzhan Baqrah had been transported on a train. Could these strange quotes be harbingers of things to come, some planned but yet unexecuted crime? The date of the file was older than the theft itself — by several weeks. But what did the number 540,000 mean?
With mounting excitement, Decker examined the other wallpaper files. He had never seen the second one before. The illustration looked similar to the one he’d discovered in Moussa’s locker, similar — with a qibla line and minbar — but not identical. Could it represent the second prayer Hassan had called the jami’ masjid, used in the Congregational mosque on Fridays? He tried to translate the calligraphy but only a few words were discernable: “How many a deserted well.” And then, perpendicular to the transversal axis, “Hell is the rendezvous.” He couldn’t make out the rest, except for another number: 205,200. The calligraphy was simply too ornate. He made a note of the translation and moved on.
The third wallpaper seemed identical to the illustration he’d found in Moussa’s locker, the third prayer Hassan had referred to as musalla or idgah, the Community mosque used during the festivals of ‘Id al-Fitr and ‘Id al-Adha. But, once again, he could only decipher a solitary phrase, no matter how hard he tried: “Death will overtake you… ” And the number 54,000. I must be missing something, he thought.