“Excuse me?” Khadri said.
“Your fingerprint and photo. It’s standard procedure.”
Khadri did not want his prints and picture on file with the United States government. As far as he knew, no intelligence service had ever taken his photograph. He was as close to anonymous as anyone could be: medium height, medium weight, straight black hair, relatively light skin for a Pakistani, and an uncanny ability to mimic accents, a great gift in his line of work. He could pass for Egyptian, Iranian, Filipino, maybe even Italian. Even so, giving up a fingerprint would lock him into using this passport every time he came to America. He much preferred being able to change names.
“Sir? That a problem for you?”
“It’s a rule?” Khadri wished he weren’t so tired. Fatigue muddied his thinking, and he felt an unexpected fear, not for himself, but for this week’s operation.
“Same for everyone, sir.” A hint of a smirk crossed the agent’s face. If you don’t like it, tough, she didn’t quite say. You can always go home.
Khadri fought down his irritation as he looked at her black face. He did not like black people, especially black Americans. This woman was a trained monkey, a combination of American arrogance and African savagery. But Khadri decided to be polite; he didn’t want the trained monkey looking too hard at his passport. “I’ll be glad to,” he said.
The procedure took only a few seconds. He put his index finger on a digital reader and looked into a small digital camera. A few seconds later the agent’s computer beeped and she waved him on.
“Welcome to the United States.”
“Good to be here,” Khadri said.
ON HIS FLIGHT to LAX the next morning, Khadri silently raged at himself. He should have been familiar with the new fingerprinting rules, which had been publicly announced. He couldn’t make mistakes like that. In their paranoia, Americans seemed to think that al Qaeda was an all-powerful killing machine. But Khadri knew the group’s weaknesses all too well.
True, al Qaeda was in no danger of going broke. Sheikh bin Laden had squirreled away tens of millions of dollars around the world during the 1990s, and new cash still flowed in quietly. But money alone was not enough. Al Qaeda’s biggest problem was finding good operatives. Plenty of men wanted to die for the cause. But only a handful had gotten inside the United States before America clamped down on immigration from Muslim countries. Even fewer could be trusted for difficult missions. One bad decision, a moment of panic, could destroy a plan years in the making.
A flight attendant rolled her cart up. “Coffee? Tea?”
“Coffee. Two sugars and milk.” Naturally, Khadri did not drink or use drugs, but — like many devout Muslims — he had a sweet tooth and a serious coffee habit.
He sipped his coffee and wondered how history would judge him. He fully expected that one day the world would know his name, his real name. Biographers and historians would examine his life. But if they were looking for a traumatic event, something they could “blame” for clues to his “crimes,” they would be disappointed, he thought.
He had grown up in Birmingham, England, the oldest child and the only boy among six children. His father, Jalil, was an engineer who had emigrated from Pakistan, a sour man with a quick temper. His mother, Zaineb, had trained briefly to become a nurse’s aide but never worked. Jalil and Zaineb were deeply religious, and strict. Khadri had felt the lash of his father’s belt more than once as a child, and he had learned quickly not to disagree. He was a mostly solitary child; his father didn’t allow him to spend time outside school with unbelievers, and Jalil’s definition of “unbeliever” included most Muslims. So Khadri had escaped into his math and science textbooks, and the Koran. At the school library, where his father couldn’t see, he turned to philosophy, trying to understand power, looking for clues in Nietzsche and Machiavelli and Hobbes. Infidels all, but they showed him how strong men forced their will on the weak. One day he would prove his strength to the world, and his father.
As the years passed, his hatred of Britain and the West grew fiercer. Unlike some al Qaeda soldiers, he could not point to a specific incident that had turned him against the
Yet Khadri’s religious fervor had limits. Yes, he believed in Allah, believed that Mohammed was the last and truest prophet. He prayed five times a day. He never polluted his body with alcohol or drugs. He hoped to see paradise when he died. But when his companions sang tales of black-eyed virgins who would pleasure them for eternity, Khadri turned away to hide his embarrassment. Paradise wasn’t an amusement park, and only fools were eager for their own deaths. Khadri did not try to build his faith by promising himself rapture. Jihad was an obligation, not a game. Paradise might await in the next world, but Islam needed to triumph here and now. As always, Mohammed had set a fine example, Khadri thought. He had been a commander, not just a prophet. His armies had swept Arabia, and though he was a wise and just ruler, in battle his ferocity knew no bounds. He had aimed for conquest, and had viewed martyrdom as a tool to that end, not an end in itself.
Khadri made good use of the fanatics. Any man willing to die could be a dangerous warrior. But he did not fully trust them. They were irrational, and rational men like him were needed to win this war. America, Britain, and the rest of the West might be rotten, but they were still fierce enemies, none fiercer than the United States. Thousands of American agents dreamed of sending him and his men to Guantanamo or the execution chamber. They had tools and weapons that he could hardly imagine. So he needed to be perfect. Because he and al Qaeda spoke for a billion Muslims. For every Iraqi killed by an American soldier, every Palestinian torn apart by an Israeli missile. We speak for Islam, he thought. And on September 11 we spoke loud and clear. The attack that day had been genius. Using the enemy’s own weapons to destroy its biggest buildings. He did not mind that the targets were civilian office towers, the missiles passenger planes. Only by bringing the war to American soil could al Qaeda succeed. One day armies of Muslim soldiers would fight the crusuaders everywhere, as they already did in Iraq. Meanwhile, al Qaeda would fight with the weapons at hand, and if they happened to be jets like this one, so much the better.
Khadri had only one regret about September 11. He had wanted to target the Capitol and the White House, not the Pentagon, but the sheikh had insisted on attacking the American military directly. Unfortunately, the Pentagon was too big to be seriously damaged, even by an airplane. Destroying the Capitol would have killed hundreds of congressmen and senators. The American government would have fallen into chaos.
Nonetheless, the attacks had been a strategic triumph. In their wake America had sent its Christian crusaders into two Muslim countries. The whole world could see the battle between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb, the place of peace and the place of war. But September 11 was slipping from the world’s memory. Al Qaeda needed to remind the
We must win, Khadri thought. And we will. For Allah is with us. He drank the last of his coffee. He felt refreshed, invigorated. The thought of attacking America always excited him.
EXLEY SAT AT her desk, sifting through Wells’s file, looking for something new and knowing it wasn’t there. She rolled her head, trying to relax the tension that had been building in her since Heather Murray called the day before. The call had sent a jolt through the CIA or, more accurately, through the handful of officials to whom the name John Wells meant something. Vinny Duto, the chief of the Directorate of Operations, had immediately dispatched a couple of internal security officers to interview Heather and Kenny, but they hadn’t gotten much from either one.
Exley looked again at the polygraph test and psychiatric interview Wells had taken when he’d joined a decade before. He had smoked pot but nothing harder, he’d said. He drank occasionally. He had never had a
