Critical Mass (7 page)

“Nabila, I want this to go to the prelim, but I’ll need more if it’s going to make the final.”

Nabila swallowed her surprise. Marge was referring to nothing less than the Presidential Daily Brief.

But this—how could this go so far so fast? Further up the ladder, maybe they knew something Nabila didn’t. Even the mention of getting near the briefer excited her. Getting in the briefer—in her world, that was game, set, and match.

She thought for a moment. How could she advance this? “Let me take a look around,” she said. “I’ll see if I can get anything more.”

She could put in a request to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to do a backward lookdown for identifiables on the ground at the Finnish university, but that would be futile. Such requests had to be vetted on both sides of the fence. The CIA might not let it go out. The NGIA might not let it come in. In any case, it would take the request hours to move between stovepipes, if it ever did.

No, the only way to get anything done was to jump the fence—that is to say, call somebody over there directly. That meant dealing with her brother, which was not a pleasant thought. They shared the house, at this point, in silence. Still, she dialed his number.

Day by day, his disapproval of her was growing. She’d seen by the way he prayed, the extra hand movements, that he was becoming Salafi. At home, she wore the veil. Increasingly, though, he spoke of purdah.
Hijab
for him, okay. Draping herself in a damned shroud, no way.

The phone rang. She did not want to despise her brother, but she did despise the strictures on women—the rejection of half the human species—that had grown up in Islam over the years, spreading like some sort of soul cancer.

It rang again. Her heart began beating harder. It was almost sickening to ask him for help—but she loved him; she did. He was her little brother, who had clung to her in fear when they went to the seaside and he saw the waves.

The female members of Mohammed’s family had never been in purdah. If Mohammed and Jesus were to return and see what had become of their faiths, she thought—no, knew—that they would be sickened.

Rashid picked up.

“Rashid,” she said, “good afternoon.”

“Hello,” he answered, sounding as if he had forced the word out through a sphincter.

“Brother, I need a lookdown-backed-up twenty-four hours of all the physicals at a Finnish university. I need it, specifically, around a coffee bar called Origo, which is on the top floor of the library. You’ll see the building on your map. Entries and exits.”

People in intelligence knew not to ask why. But that was not what mattered. “Who wants this?”

“It’s for the briefer,” she said smoothly.

Now the silence became as sharp as a blade. But facts were facts: he was male but not as senior, largely because his language skills weren’t as important in the technical post he held. So his advancement was even more constrained than hers. He did not report to somebody who could propose for the briefer. Rashid’s work might end up there on occasion, but it would be background.

“I am looking at the location,” he said. “I’ll do a run now.”

“I’ll find comparables.” She then went into the university’s database, which proved to be a relatively easy process, and found three names that matched the CIA’s internal watchlists. She e-mailed him the photos off their dossiers.

“One,” he said.

She was so stunned she could hardly speak.

“Which?”

“The Indonesian.”

“Thank you, Rashid.”

“Your husband also telephoned.”

“I thought he was in Afghanistan.”

“Where he called from is not known to me. But I provided him, also.”

“With related information? Why are you telling me?”

“Because he is your husband. I am telling you to let you know he is alive.”

She could think of nothing more than to thank him and hang up. Jim
was not her husband; Rashid had to face that. They had divorced in American law. But Jim had not divorced her in Šar
’ah, because, as he put it, “I’m not Muslim.” Anyway, she didn’t want it, either.

She looked at this Indonesian. He had entered the coffee bar six days ago, at three in the afternoon, local time. The site had gone up six minutes later. With only the single page, that would have been easy even for a complete amateur. Because it was so small, it had taken the ’bots all this time to find it. It had not been pushed to her, after all.

She telephoned Marge. “I have an Indonesian male, Wijaya, means ‘victorious.’ Patronymic is Setiawan. Thus, Sumatran. And matronymic Padang. Thus, also, a Minangkabau. This group is a center of Islamist reaction. He has been at university for two years. His police record is clean. Driving violation, wrong side of road, forgiven due to recent arrival. Bank account in order, no strange activity. He has traveled a lot. His results at the university in civil engineering are average.”

“So, why is he on our list?”

“There is an access level on the file. You’ll need to run it by Counter-terrorism.”

“Thank you, Nabila.”

Nabila hung up. For a moment, she rested her head against the edge of the desk. This man was a known terrorist; she was certain of it. That would be what was behind the “no access” part of the file.

She had gone deep, and found gold . . . perhaps.

INSHALLA

On the day that the Americans found the message, the wind boomed in the long
tunnels of the old base in Pamir, but down here in the long-abandoned command center the air was always still and cool, smelling of tobacco and people and the cook fires of the women.

Aziz had been designated the receptacle of the hidden Imam, the Mahdi, two years ago. Although Sunni, he had accepted the ancient title, and with it the belief that the Imam had actually entered his body and become him. The brotherhood of Inshalla intended that both Sunni and Shia would accept the Mahdi as savior. They were relying on the Arab love of legend to overcome the antipathy between the sects, and the idea that he had at last come out of his long ages of hiding by entering the body of a believer would inspire them.

Before this, Aziz had been a very Westernized Arab, had shaved himself and kept a closet full of fine English suits in his villa in Peshawar. All this he had given up to follow the law to the letter. The villa was behind him now, to be used only in case of emergency. He’d lived too many places to have a home anymore. The world was his home.

“Oko is up,” his assistant said softly.

“Ah.” He glanced up from the writing he was doing, a poem to commemorate the coming day, which would be first day of the new world.

October 10 had been chosen because it was the anniversary of the Battle of Tours, which had driven the Children of God from Europe and condemned the poor Europeans to live now for more than a thousand years in misery, separated from God.

Tomorrow, there would be a little moment of suffering among the worst sinners, but then Islam and happiness would come at last.

Emir Abdul Rahman al-Ghafiqi, chosen of God, blessed of name, had seen defeat on October 10, in the year 117 Hirja, the Christian year of 732. Charles Martel—the Hammer—had shattered the emir’s faithful soldiers on that day, God have mercy on their souls.

So tomorrow, all these years later, came another October 10, and this time the victory would go to God.

Inshalla, God’s Will, was the name of the organization that was doing this work, of which he was now, as Mahdi, the head. Before Al Qaeda, there had been Inshalla. Al Qaeda had been born out of rage, after the Saudi king brutally murdered people of faith who had entered the Grand Mosque. Their holy mission had been to correct the apostasy of the king’s stooge of an imam.

Inshalla had been created in an apartment in Brooklyn in 1981, long before the present troubles had begun. It had been created not in reaction to a crime but out of the simple joy that comes from being close to God and the desire that this joy creates in the heart to bring it to others.

Even though Inshalla was a small group, for further security it was divided into cells of no more than four. Although it was unknown to most intelligence services, it was one of the most powerful entities on earth, behind only the Western nuclear powers, in terms of its weaponry. It also had two gigantic advantages over them, which Aziz believed would enable it to rule the world. First, it was invisible. Second, its nuclear weapons were already sited in their target countries and could be detonated quickly.

Even as the fires of Islam resurgent rose all over the world, Inshalla had remained hidden, doing its patient work. They moved small things—a bolt here, a casing there, a bit of radioactive material to another place. It was all in the good cause of freeing mankind to taste the joy of Šar
’ah and indulge in the sweetness of Islam.

Now all preparations were done. When it had been founded, Aziz had been twenty years old. Now, at forty, he had been named Mahdi, not because
he was of the Ahul al-Bayt, the House of Mohammed, in blood, but because, he had been assured, he was of the house in piety. However, everyone knew perfectly well that this was not true. God forgive him, he was a worldly man. He wanted to believe that he had been chosen by Allah’s mysterious hand, but Aziz thought there were other reasons. First, he was rich and could afford to keep everybody in this place supplied. Also, he was not important to the brotherhood. He was not a member of the council. In all truth, his death would be no loss. The title of Mahdi would then be passed to some other equally expendable man.

Eshan reminded him, “Oko is up.” Eshan, faithful clerk, Inshalla’s eyes and ears.

Aziz sighed. He was watched, always. He turned on the shortwave radio, tuned to the correct frequency, and listened to the numbers. Oko was a Russian number station broadcasting to the Kremlin’s spies in China, Afghanistan, and Japan.

From Inshalla’s contacts in Russia they had acquired the one-time letter pads necessary to decode the Oko ciphers. Because each cipher was used only once, breaking the code was essentially impossible. But the use of the system was difficult, especially because the same set of numbers meant different things on different pads, and the Russians were not aware that anybody was piggybacking messages onto their system.

The result of this was that decoded messages were often ambiguous and subject to interpretation. As he was the only person outside of the council who knew the whole structure of the plan, he was generally also the only one who could resolve these ambiguities.

As he worked, Eshan copied the numbers coming from the station, handing another tissue to him whenever he was ready for a new page.

A fly came and went, buzzing into his luncheon dish. He let it feast on his
palaw.

Here in the Pamir Panhandle, the Russians had dug deep enough to defeat the American missiles of the day, and they had built to last. They had never expected that they would lose this base. How could they lose? They were the Soviet Union. The mujahideen were the mujahideen, ragged, reeking, and armed with little more than Chinese-made Kalashnikovs that would melt after a few rounds. Nobody with weapons you could bend across your knee was going to beat the Red Army. Unless, of course, they
were also armed by the United States, which provided weapons that did not break, most certainly not. Terrible weapons, the Americans made. They were a clever people.

The Russian intention in Pamir had been to construct missile installations that could threaten China and, potentially, other Asian states and deepen Russia’s relations with India by giving the Indians some tangible support . . . and also something to think about, should they become too interested in turning toward America.

There was space for fifty large missiles in the tunnels, as well as control facilities and personnel housing. Immediately after 9/11, Osama bin Laden had used them—to hide not from the Americans but from the far more dangerous Afghans, both the Taliban, who wanted more money to leave him alone than he could raise, and the Northern Alliance, who wanted to collect the American reward that was on his head.

Aziz said to his clerk, “It is done,” and Eshan withdrew. Aziz put the thin tissue of the one-time pad into his rice and ate it, then burned his thicker worksheet in the little brazier that kept his food warm.