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“He averages five minutes and twenty-three seconds. Quickest time is four minutes and eighteen seconds. He was late for prayer and in a hurry. Longest time was just over ten minutes. He stopped to talk to someone along the way.”
“Any signs of surveillance by the police or the intelligence service?”
“Nothing.”
Rapp frowned. “That’s strange.”
“I thought so at first, but then I got to thinking that maybe they’ve got someone on the inside.”
“A fellow worshiper?”
“Yeah.” Coleman pointed to an eight-by-ten surveillance photo of the mosque. “We’ve picked up some chatter. Not everyone agrees with his radical interpretation of the Koran.”
Rapp’s right eyebrow shot up in surprise. “You’ve got the mosque wired?”
“No. We’ve been able to monitor the worshipers as they come and go using parabolic mikes. Caught a couple older guys yesterday after Khalil delivered his Friday afternoon sermon. They think he’s a cancer in their community. A bad influence on the kids. Filling their heads with all of this talk of jihad and martyrdom.”
This did not surprise Rapp. The overwhelming majority of Muslims did not agree with what these terrorists were doing in the name of Allah. Rapp just wished they were more vocal about it.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. He’s a real pious bastard, this one. We got into his apartment yesterday during the afternoon sermon. The whole building empties out, so we figured it was pretty safe. We took a look at his computer.” Coleman extracted a memory stick from his pocket. “Copied his hard drive for you.”
Rapp grinned and took it. “Thank you.”
“It’s filled with porn.”
“No way?”
“Dead serious. A lot of really kinky shit. Mostly bondage.”
Rapp studied the memory stick. “You just never know with these idiots, do you?”
“Nope, but it doesn’t surprise me one bit.”
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right. They’re all running from something. What else?”
“Best spot to hit him is obviously between the mosque and the apartment. Five round trips a day. Before sunup, just after noon, late afternoon, just after sunset, and then my favorite…his ten o’clock trip.”
“Why not early in the morning?”
“It would work,” said Coleman, “but the sunrise call to prayer has double the attendance that the evening one does. By the time he heads home it’s almost eleven, and the streets are empty.”
“He walks alone?” Rapp asked, still not believing the intel report he’d received earlier in the week.
“Yep.”
This guy was a real moron, but pretty typical when you looked at his early years. Khalil Muh
ammad, Egyptian by birth, had grown up in the clutches of an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, indoctrinated into the strict unyielding brand of Islam perpetuated and funded by the Wahhabis out of Saudi Arabia. At the age of fifteen he and a group of peers stoned a reporter to death for writing an article that was critical of the madrasa they attended. The religious school he attended had sent every single one of its graduates off to fight in the Afghani war against the Soviets. It was rumored that many had been sent against their will.
While the others stood trial for the stoning, Khalil fled to Saudi Arabia, where he received further religious instruction at the hands of the Wahhabis. In his early twenties he completed his studies and became an Imam. At twenty-six he immigrated to Canada with the express purpose of building a new mosque and spreading the Wahhabi faith to North America. His mosque grew rapidly and as a reward he was granted funding to build a second mosque in France.
Khalil’s comings and goings went unnoticed for the most part. Until 9/11. After that everything changed. When Khalil was finally arrested by the French it was due to his involvement in a plot to pull off a Madrid-style train bombing in Paris. He had recruited six young men, none of them over the age of seventeen, to act as martyrs. Khalil had promised them great rewards in paradise. They would be purified and exalted. They would be remembered as heroes and their families would be taken care of and given great respect. His recruits would do all the heavy lifting. Khalil would remain in the shadows. It would have worked, but the CIA was already on to Khalil. The hackers at Langley were breaking through firewalls as fast as they could in an effort to track the money the Saudis were sending overseas. They stumbled across Khalil and alerted the French DST.
When the authorities went to raid his apartment they came up with nothing incriminating. But the dogs that had come along on the raid seemed unusually interested in a separate apartment down the hall. They broke down the door and found suicide vests and enough explosives to level the building. Khalil went to jail along with the six boys. They all kept their mouths shut and there they sat for over a year while the intelligence services tried to figure out how much they could tell the police without giving away the family jewels. By the time the case ended up in front of a judge, Franco-American relations were near an all-time low. The judge was appalled by the lack of hard evidence put forth by the state. In the case of Khalil, no crime had been committed. He was a religious man who was guilty of nothing more than association with some bad apples. The judge ordered his immediate release. The six boys were charged with possession of dangerous materials and given a paltry sentence. Khalil was sent back to Canada. Within a week he was back in his mosque calling the young men to jihad and decrying the very authorities who protected his right to do so. The French judge had infused him with a false sense of invincibility.
In truth Rapp had bigger problems to worry about, but this guy had gotten under his skin. Three weeks earlier in Afghanistan a car had smashed into a barricade outside a U.S. facility. When the guards approached they found a rock on the gas pedal and a semiconscious boy chained to the steering wheel. The car was filled with explosives which thankfully didn’t go off due to a faulty detonator. The boy was cut free and soon afterward began telling his story to anyone who would listen. He said that his parents had immigrated to Canada from Yemen when he was a child. Sheik Khalil Muhammad had arranged for him to go to Saudi Arabia for religious instruction, but upon arriving in Mecca he was bound, gagged, and knocked unconscious. The next thing he remembered was being pulled from the car by American soldiers.
