The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,113

a mildly prestigious university in the eastern United States, and after a lengthy struggle had convinced the Americans to let him remain in the country to work. And for all his efforts he had been rewarded with a life of uninterrupted tedium. It was a distinctly American tedium of traffic jams, credit card debt, fast food, and weekend trips to the Tysons Corner mall to push his son past shop windows hung with photographs of unveiled, half-naked women. For a long time he blamed Allah for his plight. Why had he given him visions of greatness, only to make him ordinary? What’s more, Qassam was now forced by the folly of his ambition to reside in the House of War, in the land of the unbelievers. After much reflection he had come to the conclusion that Allah had placed him in America for a reason. Allah had provided Qassam el-Banna with a path to greatness. And with greatness would come immortality.

Qassam lifted his Samsung from the bedside table and silenced the muezzin’s tinny nasally wail. Amina had slept through it. Amina, he had discovered, could sleep through anything—the cry of a child, thunder, fire alarms, the tap of his fingers on the keyboard of his laptop. Amina, too, was disappointed, not with Allah but with Qassam. She had come to America with reality-TV visions of a life in Bel Air, only to find herself living around the corner from a 7-Eleven off Carlin Springs Road. She berated Qassam daily for failing to earn more money and consoled herself by driving them deeper into debt. Her latest acquisition was a new luxury car. The dealership had approved the sale despite their abysmal credit rating. Only in America, thought Qassam.

He slipped soundlessly from bed, unfurled a small mat, and prayed for the first time that day. He pressed his forehead only lightly to the floor to avoid giving himself a dark callused prayer mark—it was known as a zabiba, the Arabic word for raisin—like the marks on the religious men from his village. Islam had left no visible marks on Qassam. He did not pray in any of the Northern Virginia mosques and avoided other Muslims as much as possible. He even tried to play down his Arabic name. At his last place of employment, a small IT consulting firm, he had been known as Q or Q-Ban, which he liked because of its vaguely Hispanic and hip-hop sensibilities. He was not one of those Muslims with his face on the ground and his ass in the air, he would say to his colleagues over beers in his faintly accented English. He came to America because he wanted to escape all that. Yes, his wife wore a hijab, but that had more to do with tradition and fashion than faith. And, yes, he had named his son Mohamed, but it had nothing to do with the Prophet. That much, at least, was true. Qassam el-Banna had named his son after Mohamed Atta, the operational leader of the 9/11 plot. Atta, like Qassam, was a son of the Nile Delta. It was not the only trait they had in common.

His prayers complete, Qassam rose and went quietly downstairs to the kitchen, where he popped a capsule of French roast into the Keurig. Then, in the living room, he performed two hundred push-ups and five hundred abdominal crunches. His twice-daily workouts had reshaped his body. He was no longer the skinny kid from the Delta; he had the body of a cage fighter. In addition to his exercises, he had become a master of both karate and Brazilian jujitsu. Qassam el-Banna, Q-Ban, was a killing machine.

He finished the workout with a few lethal movements of each discipline and then headed back upstairs. Amina was still sleeping, as was Mohamed. Qassam used the third bedroom of the little duplex as his office. It was a hacker’s paradise. Entering, he sat down at one of the three computers and quickly surfed a dozen e-mail accounts and social media pages. A few more keystrokes took him to a doorway of the dark net, the murky Internet world hidden beneath the surface Web that can be accessed only if the user has the proper protocol, ports, passwords, and software applications. Qassam, an IT professional, had everything he needed—and more.

Qassam passed easily through the door and soon found himself standing before another. The proper password admitted him, a line of text wished him peace and inquired as to his