The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,67
during a Hizb gathering in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets. Jalal Nasser had already crossed the line—the line between Islamism and jihadism, between politics and terror. In time, he took Nabil Awad with him.
“When exactly did you meet him?” asked Fareed.
“I don’t remember.”
“Of course you do, habibi.”
“It was the spring of 2013.”
“I knew you could do it,” said Fareed with a paternal smile. He had removed the bindings from Nabil Awad’s wrists, and had given him a cup of sugary tea to keep his energy up. Fareed was drinking tea, too—and smoking, which Nabil Awad, a Salafist, did not approve of. Gabriel was no longer present; he was watching a video feed of the interrogation on a laptop in the next room, along with the other members of his team. Two other teams were monitoring the interrogation as well, one at GID headquarters, the other at King Saul Boulevard.
With a nudge, Fareed encouraged Nabil Awad to expound on his relationship with Jalal Nasser, which he did. At first, he said, Jalal was guarded around his fellow Jordanian, wary. He was afraid he was an agent of the GID or MI5, the British security service. But gradually, after several conversations that bordered on interrogations, he took Nabil into his confidence. He said that he had been dispatched to Europe by ISIS to help build a network capable of striking targets in the West. He said he wanted Nabil to help him.
“How?”
“By looking for recruits.”
“Recruits for ISIS?”
“For the network,” said Nabil Awad.
“In London?”
“No. He wanted me to move to Belgium.”
“Why Belgium?”
“Because Jalal could handle England on his own, and he thought Belgium was promising territory.”
“Because there were many brothers there?”
“Many,” answered Nabil Awad. “Especially in Brussels.”
“Did you speak Flemish?”
“Of course not.”
“French?”
“No.”
“But you learned to speak French.”
“Very quickly.”
“You’re a smart boy, aren’t you, Nabil—too smart to be wasting your time with this jihad shit. You should have finished your education. Things might have turned out differently for you.”
“In Jordan?” He shook his head. “Unless you are from a prominent family or connected to the king, you don’t stand a chance. What was I going to do? Drive a taxi? Work as a waiter in a Western hotel serving alcohol to infidels?”
“Better to be a waiter than where you are now, Nabil.”
The young Jordanian said nothing. Fareed opened a file.
“It’s an interesting story,” he said, “but I’m afraid Jalal tells it somewhat differently. He says that you approached him. He says that you were the one who built the network in Europe.”
“That’s not true!”
“But you see my problem, habibi. He tells me one thing, you tell me the complete opposite.”
“I’m telling you the truth, Jalal is lying!”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“Tell me something that I don’t already know about Jalal. Or better yet,” Fareed added almost as an afterthought, “show me something on your phone or your computer.”
“My computer is my room in Molenbeek.”
Fareed smiled sadly and patted the back of his prisoner’s hand. “Not anymore, habibi.”
Since the beginning of the war on terror, al-Qaeda and its murderous offspring had proven remarkably adaptive. Chased from their original Afghan sanctuary, they had found new spaces to operate in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, and a district of Brussels called Molenbeek. They had also devised new methods of communication to avoid detection by the NSA and other Western eavesdropping services. One of the most innovative was an advanced 256-bit encryption program called Mujahideen Secrets. Once Nabil Awad settled in Belgium, he used it to communicate securely with Jalal Nasser. He simply wrote his messages on his laptop, encrypted them using Mujahideen Secrets, and then loaded them onto a flash drive, which would be carried by hand to London. The original messages Nabil shredded and deleted. Even so, Mordecai had little difficulty finding their digital remains on the hard drive of the laptop. Using Nabil’s fourteen-character hard password, he raised the files from the dead, turning seemingly random pages of letters and numbers into clear text. One of the documents concerned a promising potential recruit, a Frenchwoman of Algerian descent named Safia Bourihane.
“You were the one who brought her into the network?” asked Fareed, when the interrogation resumed.
“No,” answered the young Jordanian. “I was the one who found her. Jalal handled the actual recruitment.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“Molenbeek.”
“What was she doing there?”
“She has family there—cousins, I think. Her boyfriend had just been killed in Syria.”
“She was grieving?”
“She was angry.”
“At whom?”
“The Americans, of course, but mainly the French. Her boyfriend died in a French air