The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (30 page)

1

In the Davids’ living room, I began to accept that what I had learned about Christians and Americans was a lie. And if that was a lie, founded in the teachings of radical Islam, what else had I learned that was untrue? I had devoted my life to Allah, spilled my blood for him, killed for him.

After I left the Davids’ house, a spiritual earthquake shook the depths of my soul. It was like the collapsing hotel roof times one thousand, the walls and ceilings of my faith crashing down on my head.

I wanted with every particle of my soul to believe Islam. I did not want to believe that I had committed my whole life to a lie. That I had
killed
for a lie.

In my apartment, there was a place I prayed, a window facing east. One morning not long after I moved out of the Davids’ house, I fell on my knees there, the sun streaming onto my face.

My heart desperate within me, I raised my hands to heaven and cried out, “Allah, my Lord and my King! Why did you allow such a thing to happen to me? Why did you put me in the hands of those Christian people?” I do not remember the exact words of my prayer, but they poured out of me in a torrent of confusion. The Davids and their friends did not seem to be the evil people I had always hated. They were people who call on their God and received what they prayed for. They prayed
for healing and received healing. They prayed for answers and received answers. “They hear their God speak,” I cried. “I want to have a relationship like that with you.”

But the room rang with silence.

Dimly, I was aware of the thick layer of dust that coated every surface of the apartment, the result of many weeks of neglect. The sun beat on me through the eastern window.

“I want to hear your voice!” I cried. “Allah, I want to hear that you
love
me. If you are real,
speak
to me.”

I poured all my hope and faith into my prayer. But there was only silence. Stillness. Not one dust particle moved.

A deep sadness engulfed me. My whole life had been a vain masquerade, I decided. Empty and void.

There is no place for me to go. There is nothing left for me.

My mind skipped across the apartment to the laundry room. There, under the carpet near the washing machine, I kept several weapons. I stood and went to retrieve a 9 mm. What was left except to put it to my head and pull the trigger? An eye for an eye. My eye for many eyes.

But as I bent to lift the edge of the carpet, I heard a voice.

“Kamal, the Muslims believe in the God of Father Abraham, and so do the Jews and the Christians. Why don’t you call on the God of Father Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?”

The voice was so strong, so powerful, so
real.

And I knew I would never have thought such thoughts on my own.

Terrified not to listen, I rushed back to the window and fell on my knees again. I cried out in a loud voice, with every fiber within me, “God of Father Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, if you are real,
speak
to me! God of Father Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, if you are real, I want to know you!”

Then, for the first time in my life, a miracle happened in front of me. The window brightened until its frame disappeared. The entire room was flooded with light. In this light, there was overwhelming peace and joy. My heart leapt within me because I knew it was the light of God.

“Who are you, my Lord?” I cried.

A voice spoke in my heart: “I am that I am.”

“What does that mean?” I called out.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the voice said. “I have known you since before the foundation of the world.”

“My Lord, I will live and die for you!” I said.

“Do not die for me,” the voice said. “I died for you that you may live.”

At that moment, I knew I met the Christian God. I knew I had met my Creator. There was no turning back.

Through the Christian Businessmen, I relearned what I knew about Jesus: that he was a Jew, not a Muslim, as I had been taught. That he really was the son of God, not merely a prophet or even merely the greatest prophet. That he died for the sins of the world and on the third day rose again. That he had made recompense before a holy God for every sin of every man who would simply declare faith in Him. Even
my
sins, which were worse than those of any man I knew.

Did that mean I might not someday have to pay an earthly price for the death and destruction I had caused? No. But I knew God had accepted me. Even if I someday reaped human consequences of my crimes, my soul was safe. That truth burned in the center of my soul like a sacred fire and rinsed my heart clean like a holy rain. I felt in my bones the words of King David: “In my anguish, I cried out to the LORD,” he wrote in the Book of Psalms. “And he answered by setting me free.”

About ten weeks after I rolled into the Davids’ home in a wheelchair, I was able to walk out the front door on my own. To replace my totaled RX-7, the Christian Businessmen bought me a nearly-new used car, and I used it to explore a remarkable new freedom. Now I did not see the future through a narrow tunnel of hatred that would lead to many deaths including my own, but as broad and without limits, promising such simple joys as Abu Fox had offered me outside the cave in Afghanistan.

To enjoy this new freedom, I employed my old tricks, melting permanently into my identity as a Frenchman and moving only in the areas of the city where I knew my old network had not penetrated. We had targeted poor neighborhoods and prisons. My new friends were affluent Christians living and working on the opposite end of a sprawling major city. I quit my old life, as if cutting the chain to an anchor that had kept me stranded on treacherous rocks. I changed my phone num
ber, bank accounts, everything. It was not difficult to avoid running into radical Muslims. But just to be sure, I got a job in a place where I knew no fundamentalist Muslim would ever set foot: a bar and grill that served alcohol and pork.

My new life was like a school where I learned about Americans. They were a rowdy, friendly group of many colors, I found. They loved to laugh. They embraced all faiths, and thought nothing of building a church, a synagogue, a temple, and a mosque on four corners of the same intersection. They respected their women, made them friends and partners. I remembered how my father and uncles treated their women as maids and incubators and contrasted that with American men, who did not merely
allow,
but expected their women to have their own wings.

Americans fought for their own country and for others, not to take them over, but to set them free. When disaster struck overseas, they sent aid to the hurting without asking first what gods that country worshipped. They griped noisily about their leaders and did not have to worry that they might be killed for it.

And where Americans had once seemed blind and foolish to trust someone like me, I began to appreciate their embrace of all cultures as a strength that had made this country great.

I fell in love with America. I fell in love with her people, who, I discovered, were mostly good-hearted, even when they were being blind and human.

After I left the Davids’ house, I began visiting churches on Sundays and learned that in Christianity, houses of worship are as diverse and wonderfully messy as American life itself. At a Southern Baptist church, I heard the Bible preached, but to my Middle Eastern ears, it was as though the preacher was speaking Martian. At a different kind of Baptist church, I could understand the teaching better, but the people were so hoity-toity that I felt out of place. Then I went to an Eastern Orthodox church and found a worship style so similar to Islam that I ran for the hills.

Having lived for a lie all my life, I now thirsted for truth like a man emerging from the Sahara. At every church I visited, I asked the pastor a simple question: “Why should I worship here?” Many denominations
gave me a troubling answer that went something like this: “Because we’re not sure those other churches have their doctrine just right.”

One Sunday, I was driving down the expressway and saw a huge white church with a tall steeple and a packed parking lot. I decided to pull in. As soon as I opened my car door, I heard music spilling from the building, not organs and choir voices as I had heard else-where, but drums and guitars. Inside, a man in his thirties dressed in blue jeans greeted me with a smile and handed me a program. Now I could hear rapturous singing, as though thousands of people sang with one voice.

I had never heard anything like it. “What’s going on?” I asked the usher.

“They’re celebrating God!”

I was astonished. “Where is He?”

“He’s here!”

Entering the church sanctuary through wide double doors, I encountered a Sunday celebration such as I had never seen. In the cavernous, modern room, I saw thousands of people, smiling as they sang, some raising their hands to heaven. I sat down in a back row and watched, amazed.

They
know
Him
, I thought.
They know God!

After the service, I found the pastor, an athletic, well-spoken man in his fifties, talking with people near the pulpit. I waited in line for a chance to speak with him. When it was my turn, I introduced myself and told him I was a former Muslim.

“Why should I go to church here?” I asked.

The pastor put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. “It doesn’t matter where you go to church. God is everywhere. All you need to do is find a church home where they teach the Word. You’re welcome here while God helps you find your way.”

He invited me up to his office and we chatted awhile about my spiritual journey. Of course, I left out the part about bombings and shootings and coming to America to destroy her. It would be nearly twenty years before I told another living soul about that.

2

It turned out I was a very good bartender. I could talk to anyone about anything for as long as they wanted to talk about it, all the while revealing very little about myself. Who could have known that all the years I spent finding common ground with people in order to manipulate them could be applied harmlessly in a real job?

In 1987, being a “Frenchman” helped me land a bartending job at a five-star European-style hotel, the city’s finest, the destination of movie stars, politicians, and presidents. Very quickly, I was promoted to food and beverage manager of the property’s fine dining restaurant, as well as every lounge, and even room service.

Two years into hiding, I still prayed daily that I would not cross paths with anyone from my old life. Meanwhile, I grew into myself, discovering a talent for management, dealing with the public, and smoothing the ruffled feathers of the wealthiest guests. After sweet-talking millions from Saudi sheikhs, I was not intimidated by American fat cats—though some of their wives, when displeased, were almost as scary as Saddam Hussein.

One Sunday morning, shortly after my promotion, I arrived early in the restaurant’s kitchen to nurse along the hotel’s Sunday brunch, a star attraction in the city. The brunch was so famous that even the famous would wait in line for hours to eat, so I was used to seeing “the beautiful people” line up at the restaurant’s antique Austrian doors, peering in eagerly through the leaded glass. But I was unprepared for the beautiful blonde who appeared outside that day.

A cream-colored dress crocheted its way from her neck to her knees, and as she laughed and chatted with her brunch companions, her smile seemed to compete with the sun.

Mike, one of my waiters, saw me staring. “That’s the D.O.M.,” he said, meaning the hotel’s director of marketing. “Her real name is Victoria-something, but everybody calls her the Velvet Hammer.”

Her reputation preceded her. She was part of the Who’s Who in the city, I had heard, lunching with dignitaries, sitting on all kinds of
boards and committees. The rumor mill said she was tough and smart, with a Southern charm that blunted the pain when she bent you to her will.

But no one had told me about those green eyes. I was mesmerized.

Mike elbowed me in the side, then walked off to tend a table. “Don’t even think about it, man,” he said over his shoulder. “She eats people like you for breakfast.”

I watched where the hostess seated Victoria-something and then, for show, made a round of the tables, chatting up my regular clientele. As soon as I thought I would not appear too eager, I sailed over to her table and extended my hand.

“You must be Miss Victoria,” I said.

She shook my hand, and her smile sent electricity straight to my brain. “You must be Kamal, our new manager.”

We talked for a few minutes and I felt an instant rapport, as if we had known each other for a very long time. Instantly, I wanted to know her more.

Despite the difference in our rank—she was an executive and I a low-level manager—we quickly became friends. I was drawn to her forthright honesty and regal style. It turned out we attended the same church, and so we began to go together some Sunday mornings. Since I was still a new Christian, I wanted to learn more about the faith quickly and sometimes felt like a starving man with a cracker—I could not fill up with knowledge quickly enough. But Victoria had just completed a series of courses at a Bible institute, so she poured her new knowledge into my mind as fast as I could receive it.

We shared casual dinners and movies—not dating, just spending time together, comfortable in each other’s company. Over the weeks and months, we grew closer, our hearts knitting together in deep friendship as we shared trials and joys.

Victoria was a woman in charge of her environment, at the top of her field, respected even by her competitors. Politicians and corporate leaders sought her advice, and soon, so did I.

“You are constantly going out with all these bigwigs,” I used to tease her. “Why do you keep wasting time with me?”

The truth was, I was jealous of the time she spent with “important” people. I thought no one was good enough for her, including me. At these times, Victoria would look at me very seriously and say, “There’s something extraordinary about you, Kamal. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but God has something special planned for your future.”