“They’re hurting you.” Rough treatment was common at Tora, but Bashir was surprised that the guards would hurt his uncle. Though he wasn’t well-connected politically, Ayman had plenty of money. And he wasn’t a terrorist. He believed the government should be replaced, but peacefully, through elections.
“They’re afraid, these guards,” Ayman said. “Afraid of their masters, afraid they’ll wind up in here with us if they treat us like humans and not animals.” He checked over his shoulder to be sure the guard wasn’t lurking outside the door, then leaned forward, toward Bashir. “I want you to promise me something.”
“Of course.”
“If I don’t get out of here, you won’t forget what I’ve told you. About Mubarak and especially the Americans. The Americans are behind it all.”
“What do you mean, if you don’t get out?” Bashir hoped his voice didn’t betray his panic. He called Ayman his uncle, but in truth the man was more like a father to him.
“I’ll be fine. But I want you to promise, just in case.”
“All right. I promise.”
“Good. Now tell me about your auntie.”
“She misses you terribly.” Bashir began to fill him in about Noor, but after a few minutes the guard reappeared.
“Time’s up.”
Bashir couldn’t help himself. “Time’s up! We’re supposed to have an hour. It’s hardly been five minutes.”
“Time’s up.”
“You can’t — I won’t—”
“Don’t argue,” Ayman said under his breath. “You’ll just make it worse.”
The guard pulled Ayman up as Bashir fumbled in his pocket for the bottle of pills he’d brought. “Uncle, here,” he said. He reached out to tuck the bottle into Ayman’s T-shirt pocket, but the guard — Bashir never did find out his name — grabbed the bottle.
“What’s this?”
“It’s only medicine,” Ayman said. “For my heart.”
“It’s contraband,” the guard said. “Illegal.”
Bashir couldn’t believe the man was serious. Did he really think these pills were contraband? The guard shook the bottle sideways, rattling the pills inside, squinting at the words on the label. He can’t read, Bashir realized. He can’t read and he won’t admit it.
“Please,” Ayman said. “I swear to Allah—”
“Illegal,” the guard said again. He twisted the cap open and spilled the pills down and ground them into the concrete with his cheap black shoes. “You’re lucky I don’t arrest you,” he said to Bashir. He reached behind Ayman’s back and dragged him toward the door.
“I’ll get you your medicine,” Bashir shouted to his uncle. “Tomorrow.”
But Bashir couldn’t keep his promise. Every day for a week, he fought through Cairo’s traffic jams to return to the prison. But the guards wouldn’t let him meet Ayman no matter how much money he offered. On the eighth morning, as he was finishing his breakfast and preparing to leave, the phone rang. Noor picked it up and listened. Without saying a word, she dropped the phone and fell to her knees and began to scream and beat her head against the yellow linoleum floor of the kitchen. Bashir knew immediately. On the day that his father died, his mother had screamed the same way.
The Mukhabarat officers said Ayman had been found dead in his cell. A heart attack. Nothing anyone could have done. He was unwell, as anyone could see. They offered honest and heartfelt sorrows, a thousand condolences, an endless epic in true Egyptian style, and every word emptier than the next. They’d murdered him. Whether they’d actually beaten him to death or killed him by withholding his medicine was irrelevant. They’d murdered him.
On the day of Ayman’s funeral, Bashir promised he would avenge his uncle. And, intuitively, he understood the path to take. He’d been planning to study law at university, following in his father’s footsteps. Now he reconsidered. Why become a lawyer in a country that had no law? The Mukhabarat had never connected him to the Brotherhood. He had no police record. His name was clean. And so he transferred to the medicine program at Cairo. Every country in the world trusted doctors, no matter their nationality or religion. If he could earn an American medical degree, even the United States would be glad to have him. He studied madly at Cairo for three years, biology and chemistry and physics, earning the best grades of anyone in his class, paving his way to Ohio State.
All along he quietly kept in touch with his uncle’s friends in the Brotherhood, making sure they knew that he was still with them. Like him, they understood his potential value, and the need for patience. After finishing his residency, Bashir joined a program that offered foreign medical graduates American citizenship if they would practice in underserved areas for five years. Even the Americans needed doctors, just as he’d figured.
In the months before he started his new job, he came back to Cairo, looking for a wife. Noor, his aunt, introduced him to the daughter of her second cousin, Thalia, only nineteen, a twittering sweet girl with almond eyes and thick black hair and breasts that jutted from her robes despite her best efforts to keep them hidden. Bashir wanted her immediately. Even better, he knew she had been raised to be a good Muslim wife. America, Egypt, Pakistan; their future would be whatever he said. They were married six weeks after their first meeting.
The call Bashir had awaited for so long came just a few weeks after he and Thalia moved back to the United States. A nameless Arab, Iraqi by the sound of his voice, said they had mutual friends and asked if they could meet in Montreal.
Wandering through the big botanical garden just east of Montreal’s downtown on a fine April day, the Iraqi — Sayyid Nasiji was his name— explained what he needed. A big space where they wouldn’t be disturbed, a lathe, a vacuum furnace, a PC with some basic engineering software, and a dozen other tools.
“How much will it all cost?”
“Money won’t be a problem,” Nasiji said.
“And what’s the point of all this equipment?” Bashir said.
“I think you can guess.”
“A bomb.”
“A big bomb.”
“The biggest?”
Nasiji stopped, put a hand on Bashir’s shoulder, an oddly intimate gesture. “Are you ready for that, Doctor? They told me about you and your uncle and I thought you would be. But you spend your days stitching these Americans together, saving the sick ones. So if this is too much—”
Bashir thought back to the casual cruelty of the guard at Tora, and about all he’d learned about the United States in his years living there. His uncle had been right. The Americans were behind it all, behind the corruption in Egypt and all over the Arab world, behind the war in Iraq, the stifling poverty in Pakistan. “Yes,” he said. “I’m ready.”
LEARNING TO USE the vacuum furnace, the lathe, and the rest of the equipment wasn’t easy, especially since Bashir kept up his work at the hospital. Fortunately, he’d always been good with tools, and his training as a surgeon had refined his hand-eye coordination. After ordering some basic metallurgy textbooks and videos, he got to work practicing, first with aluminum, which melted at relatively low temperatures, and then with iron and steel. He found the equipment was surprisingly finicky, especially the vacuum furnace. Too much heat, applied too fast, and the molds melted down instead of casting the material inside them.
But over a year’s worth of late nights, Bashir grew comfortable with the equipment. The simplicity of the shapes he was trying to create helped him. After successfully casting several steel molds, he began training on depleted uranium. Depleted uranium was the opposite of enriched uranium, the metal left over from the enrichment process, and actually contained less of the radioactive U-235 isotope than natural uranium ore. It was useless for nuclear weapons, and so it was legal to purchase and to own without a license. But its melting point and density were practically identical to that of the uranium used in bombs, so it was ideal for practice casting.
In the years since their first meeting, Bashir had met Nasiji several more times in Montreal. But Bashir was under no illusions about who was in charge of the operation. Its ultimate success or failure would fall on Nasiji. It
