“A Jordanian. Recruited from the Hussein mosque in Amman three years ago. A soldier, nothing more. The same mission was proposed last year by our people in Benghazi. We declined it.”
“How many dead?”
“Six to eight of ours. None of theirs.”
“Praise God for that.” With no hostages killed, the Western press would quickly forget about the incident, and often where the press’s attention went, so, too, did intelligence agencies’. Such was the burden of fighting their “global war on terror.” They were the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.
“Do we know who he recruited?”
“We’re looking into it. Also, we don’t know whether anyone survived the raid—except for al-Kariim himself,” Tariq added. “He didn’t participate, in fact.”
“Imbecile! So this . . . nothing plans a mission without our approval, then botches it and doesn’t have the good sense or honor of dying in the attempt. . . . Do we know where he is now?”
“No, but he shouldn’t be hard to find. Especially if we extend our hand. He’ll be on the run, looking for safe haven.”
The Emir nodded thoughtfully. “Good. Do that. Offer him an olive branch, but at a distance. Have Almasi handle it.”
“And when we have him?”
“Make him an example for the others.”
34
IN PARIS’S Montparnasse Arrondissement Shasif Hadi sat, sipping his coffee and doing his best not to appear nervous.
As promised, his connection at Topanga Beach had made contact the day after their meeting and given him instructions where he should pick up the return packages, each of which he’d found at rented mailboxes in the Los Angeles area. He was unsurprised to find each package contained an unlabeled CD-ROM but was surprised to find a typewritten note attached to one of them—“Indiana Café, Montparnasse, 77 Av Maine”—along with a date and time. What Hadi didn’t know was whether this was simply another courier mission or something more.
Algerian by birth, Hadi had emigrated to France in his early teens as his father sought gainful employment. Hadi spoke good French, with the accent of a pied-noir, a “black foot,” the name applied two hundred years before to French colonial citizens of what had been the French colony on the North Coast of Africa, erased in the early 1960s after a bloody and prolonged colonial/ civil war that the French Republic had more left than lost. But Algeria had not exactly flourished, and so the Arabs had exported millions of its citizens to Europe, where they had been marginally welcomed, all the more so in the last decade of the twentieth century, when they’d discovered their Islamic identity in a country that still held to the idea of the melting pot. Speak the language (pronounce the words properly), adopt the customs, and you were French, and the French race didn’t particularly care what color your skin might be. Though nominally a Catholic country, the French didn’t care what church you might attend, since they were not a nation of churchgoers, either. But Islam had changed that. Perhaps remembering the victory of Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732, they knew that they’d fought wars with Muslims, but mostly they objected to the fact that Muslim immigrants rejected their culture, adopting modes of dress and customs that did not fit in with the wine-drinking bons vivants, and thus leaped out of the melting pot. And why would any man or woman not wish to be French? they asked themselves. And so the myriad French police agencies kept an eye on such people. Hadi knew this, and therefore made an effort to fit in, in the hope that Allah would understand and forgive him out of His infinite mercy. And besides, he was hardly the only Muslim who imbibed alcohol. The French police took note of this and consequently ignored him. He had a job, as a salesclerk in a video store, got along well with his workmates, lived in a modest but comfortable flat on rue Dolomieu in the 5th Arrondissement (“district” in Paris), drove a Citroën sedan, and made no trouble for anyone. They did not notice that he lived somewhat in excess of his means. The cops here were good but not perfect.
Nor did they notice that he traveled a little, mostly within Europe, and occasionally met people from out of the country, usually at a comfortable bistro. Hadi particularly enjoyed a light red from the Loire Valley, not knowing that the