Foreign Influence

As talented as he was, though, he often could be obsessive about details and got angered when others didn’t listen to him or follow his plans. Marwan attempted to calm him down. “The man doesn’t know enough to be a danger.”

“Give me my phone back so I can throw it at you again.”

“You worry too much, Shahab.”

“It’s my job to worry,” said Rashid as he walked behind his boss’s desk, parted the blinds, and looked out the office window over the showroom floor. “You should worry too.”

“Why?” said the older man with another wave of his hand. “You worry enough for both of us. Everything will be fine. We are in no danger. We will send Mohammed Nasiri back to Pakistan.”

“We can’t send him back to Pakistan now. The police are looking for him. His name is going to be on the no-fly list.”

“Then we’ll kill him.”

It was a choice made as casually as someone ordering off a menu.

“Wow, Marwan. You really wrestled with that decision, didn’t you?”

“Mohammed Nasiri will be a martyr for the cause of Allah. That is all that matters.”

“Did you ever stop to think,” asked Rashid, “that maybe Allah values success more than martyrdom?”

Jarrah smiled again. “Are you about to give me another lecture on our duties to Islam?”

“Consider it a lesson in management economics. We have a project to complete. This project must be completed on time. We have limited resources. If we remove Nasiri from the production line, we will miss our deadline.”

“Not if you take his place.”

Rashid was shocked and didn’t even try to hide it. “I can’t believe it. You want me to be a Shahid? After all that we have been through, you’re asking me to martyr myself?”

“It would put to rest all of the questions about whether or not we can really trust you.”

“Yeah, permanently. I’d rather you continue to doubt my loyalty.”

Jarrah laughed. “We both know you’re much too valuable to become a martyr. Besides, I’d be lost without your company.”

“What you’d be lost without is my ability to move amongst our enemies.”

“You have been a great blessing to us,” the older man said as he raised a finger in caution, “but never underestimate our opponents. You must never believe yourself completely beyond their grasp. When that happens, you will get careless. And when you get careless, that is when you will start making mistakes.”

“Which brings us right back to Nasiri.”

Jarrah sighed. “What do you want to do?”

“I want to bring him in; protect him. He made a mistake, but I don’t want the rest of us to suffer because of it.”

The older man began to speak, but Rashid held up his hand. “Wait, Marwan. Hear me out. Nasiri has been loyal to the cause. He will do whatever we tell him to do. He can still be useful. In fact, we may even find a completely different use for him.”

That remark piqued Jarrah’s interest. “A different use? What are you thinking of?”

“The police want him for his hit-and-run accident. Maybe we can use that to our advantage. We may be able to use him as a decoy of some sort.”

“That is interesting.”

“I haven’t figured the whole thing out, but I know that we can’t use him for anything if he’s dead.”

“You’re too soft,” said the older man, baiting him.

This time, Rashid laughed. “Listen, if I can’t figure out a use for him, I’ll kill him myself.”

“Fine. Next issue. Where are we going to keep him?”

“Give me my phone back first.”

“Why?” asked Jarrah. “Are you going to throw it at me again?”

“No. I don’t want you to throw it at me.”

CHAPTER 25

PARIS

Samir Ressam took another drag on his cigarette and tried to look bored as he walked down the Boulevard Saint-Michel toward the Seine. He had made his martyrdom video and knew that within the next half-hour it would be uploaded to the Internet along with the videos of seven other martyrs.

The setting for his had been particularly brazen. A graduate student at the International Film School of Paris, Ressam had eschewed the traditional backdrop of a black Islamic flag. This was to be his final film. It would be seen all over the world and he wanted it to be special. Therefore, it had to grab people, move them.

The introduction was shot in a park across the street from the U.S. Embassy and contained a raging diatribe about America’s imperialism as well as its moral and cultural decline.

The film transitioned to a montage of American tourists at different attractions across the city, focusing on the heaviest and most unattractive ones he could find. He conducted man-on-the-street interviews, asking Americans their opinions about Islam and the involvement of their country in the affairs of various Muslim nations. All of the responses were then edited to make America look as evil as possible.

In what would become a chilling reminder from beyond the grave, he spliced together a series of shots of unattended bags in churches, parks, sidewalk cafés, metro stations, and department stores.

It ended with Ressam reading several passages from the Qur’an set to a popular jihadist tune from his ancestral home in Algeria. The picture then faded to black, and the music was replaced with the sound of French revelers counting down the final ten seconds to midnight on New Year’s Eve. At zero, there was the audio and visual of a large, Hollywood explosion. Scenes of the 2005 Bali bombings were juxtaposed against scenes of supposed American atrocities against Muslim civilians and set to the music of the American national anthem.

Finally, the word fin appeared and the video was finished. There was a reason Ressam had never been able to find any work in the French film industry.

At this moment, though, it made no difference. As Ressam crossed the Boulevard Saint-Germain, he had no misgivings, no second thoughts. He was about to launch his greatest production ever. It was all in the name of Allah the most merciful, the most compassionate.

Had he been struck with a change of heart, there would have been nothing he could do about it and he knew it. He understood why the cell phone had been wired to the vest he wore beneath his clothes. If he tried to back out, his handler would complete the job for him-from a distance of course.

Twice he thought he caught sight of the man, but each time he looked back, the figure was gone. The sensation was somewhat disquieting. Why that would bother him considering what he was about to do didn’t make much sense, and the ridiculousness of the emotion made him laugh nervously to himself.

Ressam crushed out his cigarette on the sidewalk and lit another. He held the smoke deep in his lungs and thought about his family. As he exhaled, he banished all worldly emotion from his heart. Like the tendrils of smoke, the last vestiges of humanity within his soul were banished from his body and whisked skyward into the warm Parisian night.

The crowd of tourists thickened as he wound his way deeper into the warren of narrow, twisting streets around the Rue Saint-Séverin. Predominantly off-limits to cars, it was one of the greatest concentrations of restaurants in all of Paris. It had almost every cuisine imaginable. Being in the shadow of Notre Dame guaranteed its popularity with tourists, particularly with Americans.

He had wanted to detonate inside one of the city’s many McDonald’s restaurants and had argued with his handler about it at great length. While the man agreed that it would have been wonderfully symbolic, the idea was to create the largest death toll possible and to make the Americans realize that there was no place they would ever be safe.

Firm in his belief that Islam could only prevail by slaughtering as many nonbelievers as possible, Ressam strode down the middle of the street to the busiest section of restaurants. All of the outdoor areas were packed. He checked his watch. He was right on time.