PARIS
LEAFY VINES TANGLED LIKE thick ropes around the bars of a big wrought-iron gate that had stood open day and night for almost ten years on a quiet street in the Nineteenth Arrondissement. The property owner had tired of having to open and close it. Thieves came over the walls, despite embedded shards of sharp glass and alarm systems, so what was the point? Then a new owner had arrived and there still was no need to close the gate, for hard-eyed men stood guard, and word spread among the footpads of Paris that it was better to prey on targets that would not cost them their lives. The house now belonged to al Qaeda.
The neighborhood in the northeast section of Paris was in an inevitable transition toward a gentrified future, but pockets of the past still existed in its multiethnic heritage. The mixed aromas of foreign food and spices wafted from the restaurants, and people of all nationalities moved through the streets. Juba was just another face.
Shadowed by the foliage of the gate, he entered the old courtyard and smelled the combined scent of flowers and rot. The concrete slabs of the parking area were uneven, buckled by a century of shifting earth, and a creamy white Mercedes was parked in the center. Juba brushed his hand across the hood as he walked by. Warm to the touch, so the vehicle was recently used, probably to deliver Saladin to the meeting at the three-story home.
A nervous young man with a ragged haircut over a thin hyena face stepped from the shade of the doorway and motioned Juba to stop. The visitor was expected but would be searched nevertheless. Juba obediently raised both arms, then very slowly lowered his left hand to open his Prada sport coat wide enough to show the guard the holstered pistol that rested on his left hip. The young man’s eyes went to the gun, which would have to be removed before the visitor could go inside. Juba helpfully opened the coat a bit more, using the diversion to keep the man’s attention away from his right arm, which was slowly extending all the way up. When the elbow locked straight, a mechanism strapped to the inside of his forearm was tripped and a small Ruger pistol and silencer slapped into Juba’s palm. He shot the approaching guard twice in the head at a distance of only three feet, the blood and brain matter spraying backward onto the paving stones. Juba grabbed the bleeding corpse by the shirt and hauled it into the cool, dark space beneath the stairwell.
He checked his clothes to make sure no blood had spattered on him and then trotted up the steep, curving stone staircase, making plenty of noise so the second bodyguard knew he was coming. His feet slapped with a steady rhythm against the old stones that a scrubwoman had washed by hand that morning. As he neared the top, the gun was hidden at his side. He huffed a bit, as if panting, and called to the guard. “Long way up,” he said in French. This man was larger, standing with his hands crossed in front of him. He had a lot of bulk that was more fat than muscle. A thick unibrow stretched in a line across both eyes, and a few gold teeth glinted on the left side of a frowning mouth. A ragged scar ran down his forehead. He was not alert because the visitor had been cleared by the entryway guard. Juba came up the final few steps, raised the Ruger, and fired his last three bullets. The scowling man collapsed where he stood.
Juba put the little gun away and gave the fallen man a look of utter contempt. They still do not train them well. The bodyguards chosen to protect the head of the entire al Qaeda operation in France should have been the best combat veterans available instead of a couple of waterfront thugs hired because they looked mean and could handle themselves in a barroom brawl. Both died because they were stupid. He stepped inside the house.
The door opened into an area between a neat kitchen that was the color of buttermilk and a living room where tall windows gave a view of other courtyards and buildings on this crowded edge of the city. The fading sunlight was orange and bright. He blinked. As his eyes adjusted, two silhouettes in the living room became a pair of middle-aged men seated in comfortable chairs directly across from each other, separated by a low table.
“My son! Welcome, welcome,” said one, rising and coming to greet him with hugs and traditional cheek kisses.
Juba bowed his head. “Father. It is good to see you again.” He had not seen his spiritual father, the man known as Saladin, in six weeks and was pleased to find him smiling with a warm greeting, particularly under the circumstances. Al Qaeda was demanding that he hand over the formula, and that Juba deliver it in person. Both of them realized their lives would be worthless the moment that the details of the new and virulent nerve agent were out of their possession, so that could not be allowed to happen.
Saladin appeared undisturbed. He had a handsome face with a well-trimmed beard and sharp black eyes that flashed intelligence, and he was dressed in a dark business suit and a subdued pearl gray tie. Actually taller than Juba, he weighed less and was thin. “You look well, and you have done well,” he said as he squeezed Juba affectionately on the shoulder. “I am so proud. Come, please, and meet our host.”
The second man stood. In contrast to Saladin, he wore a cheap suit that could not be buttoned over his stomach, and his belly overlapped the creased belt. The collar tips of his brown shirt flared like dirty wings, and a clump of chest hair had wiggled out above the second button.
“Let me introduce our new friend, Youcef Aseer, a very important leader among our al Qaeda comrades,” said Saladin with some deference. The fat man’s tiny eyes did not leave Juba’s face.
“I am honored,” said Juba and gave a slight bow. He was not about to embrace this unclean fat man who carried the smell of shallots and sweat.
“No, it is I who enjoy meeting you, the famous Juba. Your work in London has left the infidels in panic. God is great! Well done, young man.” The voice was oddly small for such a large man.
They took seats, and Saladin got straight to business. “I know you were surprised by this summons, Juba, but something very important has happened to change our plans. Since the London episode, Youcef Aseer has been designated by al Qaeda to see that we all should henceforth work together. It is a great opportunity for us. Al Qaeda offers a generous sum of money and also manpower-dedicated foot soldiers, street demonstrators, and willing martyrs-that we can use in certain situations. In turn, we supply the formula and our field leadership. They want a strike in France, to subdue this wicked nation like a whipped puppy.”
Youcef Aseer chuckled. “We are closer here than in any other Western nation. One good push is all we need! Imagine an Islamic government in France!”
Saladin clapped his hands. “Exactly, my friend.” He turned to Juba. “Our friend Youcef here is now within our small circle of trust. You are to do as he says, Juba. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Father.” Juba understood very clearly: Al Qaeda was taking over.
“Good. See, Youcef! I told you there would be no difficulty. It will be good to work with al Qaeda again,” said Saladin. “Let Juba see your list.”
The al Qaeda chieftain handed over a small envelope. The small move was peremptory, the sort of wave of a hand that a master gives an underling. This was his home, and his bodyguards were skillful. Unless these two renegades cooperated, he would have them killed.
Juba rose from his chair, and since he could not go between the two because of the table, he circled behind the al Qaeda leader. “Excuse me. The light is better by the window.” He looked out at the fading sunlight playing with shadows on the rooftops and ran his thumb beneath the gummed flap of the envelope, pulled out the paper, and read three names, three addresses, all in the southern part of the country. Of course. The port of Marseille had been the initial arrival point for the first waves of immigrants from North Africa.
Aseer grinned. “The first is a judge who has sentenced our brothers to long terms in prison, the second an undercover detective with a particular skill for infiltrating our group, and the third simply a worthless traitor. Juba, I want you to kill them all to show that our enemies cannot escape the Prophet’s justice.”
“And the attack in France?”
“You leave that to us. We will have our own chemists and physicists construct the weapon under your supervision.”
“It is not yet ready. The London experiment showed the dispersal rate remains too high.”
“Another batch just like that will be more than enough for our purposes,” said Aseer. “We will finish the refining process as time allows.”
Juba nodded and turned to Saladin. “When do you wish me to start, Father?”
“Immediately, my son. The sooner you complete this, the sooner we can move on.”
They both knew that they would not be moving at all if they remained in the grip of al Qaeda.
“Very well.” Juba slid the note into his jacket’s right pocket. The light was dim and purple in the room as he walked back toward his chair. When his hand emerged from the pocket, there was something in it, invisible in the dying, gloomy light. Passing directly behind Aseer, he moved in a blur and looped the strand of piano wire around the neck of the al Qaeda man and yanked hard on the wooden handle in each hand. The wire sliced into the throat like a razor, and the fat man grabbed at the tightening garrote until his eyes bulged and his tongue hung out.
Juba’s hatred of al Qaeda pulsed through his strong biceps and forearms and hands and into the killing wire as he slowly lifted his victim all the way over the back of the chair while the struggling man clawed to hold on to the life draining away from him. He could have finished it quickly but did not want death to come easily to this piece of al Qaeda filth. He tightened the wire more, strangling the man as he twisted the body out of the chair and let it fall onto a burgundy rug that was almost the same color as the blood oozing from the deep neck wound. Aseer urinated in his pants as he died.
Saladin remained calm. What a macabre pleasure it was to watch his son at work. The moves were so clean and economical and perfect, like a ballet dancer’s, and there was a cold passion to his mastery of so many skills. A maestro of death. “Imagine, Juba, this fool actually believed we were frightened.” He spat on the body.
“They will come after us again.”
“No, I think they will simply become a customer. This death signals that the formula still belongs to Unit 999 and no one else. It took us twenty years to develop, and we have repeatedly had to defend our ownership. Now that we are so close to success, no one can be allowed to stop us.”
Juba washed his hands in the kitchen sink. “I will take care of this one, and our men will remove the two guards.”
“Very good, my son.” Saladin refilled his cup of strong coffee. “The London task was flawless, but of course I expected nothing less from you. I assume the announcement is ready for distribution?”
“Yes. I downloaded the pictures I took in London onto discs and posted them, along with your message, by FedEx, to North Korea, China, Brunei, and Tehran. The packages will arrive at any time and someone will have to sign for them, which guarantees delivery.”
“Then it is done. The word will spread from those seeds. Now we wait.”
“You can wait, my father. I have no time to waste. I will relax when it is all done.”
“Would you rather be back in Iraq, taking target practice?” Saladin teased his assassin.
“No. Paris is better. It is too bad that I cannot stay longer. I long for a few days in which I can just be a pure Muslim and sit at your feet again and study the Koran. Physically I am fine, but spiritually I am an empty vessel. My role is difficult.”
“Which is why you are the only one who can do it,” replied Saladin. “I promise plenty of time in the future for you to walk openly as one of the faithful and even go on a hajj to Mecca and Medina. For now, you must remain who you are. The Prophet bestowed special gifts upon you, Juba. I know your inner struggle and intercede with prayers for you every day. Until the right time comes, you must carry on. You know that.”
“Yes. I am but an instrument of the Prophet. Show me the path and I will follow. But tonight I leave for Iran again to observe one final test. The director of our remaining laboratory there thinks the formula will be complete after a final adjustment improves the staying power of the gel. The gas in London still spread too fast.”
Saladin laughed to break the serious tone. “Good. We are finally so very close to the end. After you dispose of this trash, we can go out and have time for a nice dinner before you leave.”
Juba opened the door and summoned two more men to help with the corpses as the slow sun set and the lights of Paris illuminated the night. Saladin stood at the window, feeling the rhythm of the city alter from a daytime center of commerce to a nightscape dedicated to personal pleasures. He liked this house and decided to stay here for a while.
He heard the men removing the body behind him but did not turn to watch. The al Qaeda fool actually believed an Islamic government could be seated in Paris. It was true that France had more Muslims than any other Western European nation, but that was still less than 10 percent of the overall sixty-four million Frenchmen. Aseer must have thought he commanded some German army. Al Qaeda thought in such small terms.
If Saladin had any real problem that evening, it was the knowledge that he must devote considerably more energy to his protégé. Anyone who did not think twice about setting off a device that condemned unknown hundreds of people to painful deaths obviously required careful handling.
He wondered if Juba ever looked deeply into a mirror or thought about the deadly paradox that he had become. The sniper felt betrayed by his home country, England, and most recently by al Qaeda, which had recruited him so many years ago. He had lost faith! Saladin had long listened to Juba’s spoken outward devotion to Islam and his dream of cutting himself off from the outside world and living like a penniless peasant in the service of the Prophet. The true dedication, however, was not there, and the dream was so unrealistic that it could never be fulfilled.
For while he was a skilled assassin and soldier, Juba’s motives were muddled and corrupt. He lived in the moment and was never more alive than when in combat, where his senses tingled with anticipation. He was a perfect fit for the sniper hides and the combat holes, but those assignments did not last forever. In between, in the down time, he had learned to live the good life. He had been ordered to do so and had been declared exempt from violating the Koran! Years of five-star hotels, luxury cars, exquisite tailoring, top-shelf whiskey, and the company of beautiful women in trendy clubs was the lubrication that kept the deadly machine running and ready to strike. The adopted and addictive Western lifestyle cost a great deal of money, and that was the rub: the final rivulet of water needed to bring down his stone bridge back to Islam. Juba had lost his religion, and probably everything else, and didn’t really know it. He had learned to like money more than the stern lifestyle preached by the fanatics.
Saladin played along, keeping him on a leash, just as a snake charmer must carefully play a cobra in a basket. Cobras do not care who they bite, and Juba no longer truly killed for any cause, not even vengeance; he killed because he enjoyed killing.
LEBANON
2002
Saladin remembered his own coming to terms with the future, sweating on the day he stood before Saddam Hussein. At the time, he was just an anonymous lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi army, second in command of the United States Battalion of Unit 999, Saddam’s elite terrorism force. The unit was charged with developing what the Iraqi leader called “special ammunition for special circumstances,” meaning terrible weapons of mass destruction. There were nine battalions in all, up to five hundred men each, based in various regions and countries with orders to strike within those areas if war came to Iraq. Regardless of such a conflict actually on the horizon after the 9/11 attack on America, the crazy dictator was shipping the materials from Iraqi military stores into Syria and Lebanon and even Iran!
Saladin and his commanding officer had been called to one of Saddam’s many palaces to report the status of the United States Battalion’s mission to develop a virulent biochem nerve agent that could be deployed within the United States. The work had been going on since the 1980s, slowly and steadily, but with the many starts and stops of any major scientific research program. Much of the research had even been done within the United States itself, under the noses of the FBI and sometimes with the willing assistance of the CIA. In the years in which Iraq was fighting Iran, and Afghanistan was fighting the Soviets, the United States had been quite helpful.
They snapped to rigid attention before Saddam, who was smoking a cigar as he stared at them. Flanking the dictator were Uday and Qusay, his two murderous sons, and at the end of the table was Ali Hassan al-Majid, the man known as Chemical Ali. Those four had created Unit 999 and kept its terrible objective as a secret among themselves.
When Saddam quietly asked if the weapon was ready, Saladin knew his life rode on the dictator’s reaction to the answer. Not quite, replied the commander of the United States Battalion. Perhaps one more year of research and development would be required. Maybe even two years. Uday and Qusay exchanged glances and grinned. Saddam tapped his cigar ash and nodded his head, as if in understanding of the difficulties involved.
A burly bodyguard stepped forward without a sound and crushed a long iron bar onto the right shoulder of Saladin’s superior officer, who crumpled in agony when the bone broke. Two more bodyguards joined in the pounding as Saladin struggled to remain at rigid attention while his friend and colleague was beaten to death by his side. He could still recall the crunching of the bones, the spreading pool of blood, and the screams, with the uncaring eyes of Saddam Hussein watching him, not the man being beaten to death. When it was done, Saddam leaned forward and said, “You are now a full colonel and the new commander of the United States Battalion of Unit 999. You have three months to finish the work. You may go.”
Saladin saluted, turned on his heel and marched out of the palace, found a quiet place, and threw up.
Saddam Hussein was crazy, the plan was crazy, and if he stayed in this job, he was crazy, too.
The new colonel was required to stay around Baghdad for a while to help transfer much of the technology and equipment comprising the Iraqi stock of weapons of mass destruction onto railroad cars and refitted Boeing planes to shift the components out of Iraq. He consigned some of it to go to America, through a front company in Jordan.
It had been at dinner in a quiet Baghdad café one night during that time that he was introduced to a unique young warrior called Juba, who, it was said, had been waging a one-man sniper campaign in Afghanistan and was a superb killer of infidels. The man was quiet, with a sense of spiritual loneliness, and Saladin, who was a scholar as well as a soldier, decided to exploit that missing piece. This could be his way out of the disaster that was surely coming toward Saddam Hussein’s army.
At nights and in the mosques, he guided his new friend deeper into the Book, behind the words of the Koran and into the concepts of what it truly meant to be a Muslim. He steered the conversations easily toward the approaching war, and Juba agreed totally that Iraq would lose.
Since Juba was so bitter about his experiences in Afghanistan, it was not difficult to convince him that Muslims needed a goal higher than squandering their lives to achieve another round of fourteenth-century squalor.
“There will never be a rebirth of any united nation of Islam, unbound by colonialist borders and not ruled by worthless kings,” he said. “But that does not mean the struggle should cease.”
Juba snorted and sipped some tea. “We will lose. Iraq is doomed.”
“What would you say, my friend, if I told you there is a better way that you and I can serve the Prophet?”
“I’ve heard that promise before, and it was worthless.”
There were only the two of them in the room, studying the Koran. Saladin spread his fingers and laid his hand on the Book. “I tell you now, and take an oath on the Book, that we can carry on the battle no matter what happens to Saddam Hussein. I am building a weapon that will make the Crusaders weep for their children,” Saladin said. “I need a strong man I can trust, you, to protect me while I finish the work.”
“So we will not change the world?” the warrior asked.
“No. That is impossible,” the scholar said. “While Saddam will be defeated, we will continue our work in secret. The project will belong to us then, and together we will unleash Allah’s vengeance and fury upon the infidels’ own homelands.”
Then the Iraqi colonel inducted Juba into the secrets of Unit 999 and chose to assume a secret identity of his own, the name of the famous warrior-king of ancient times-Saladin.