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Karim did not worry that he would fall under the spell of the highly addictive heroin, but he worried about his friend Hakim. Even more troubling, though, was the complete lack of judgment by the al-Qaeda leadership. That they would lower themselves to the status of common drug dealers was beyond belief. That they would so willingly participate in something that the prophet was so against was an affront to their very faith, and it deeply affected his willingness to volunteer on their behalf.
Karim looked at the half-loaded pallet, shook his head sadly, and said, “I don’t know if he will forgive us for this.”
“Oh,” Hakim moaned, “there are times when I would like to choke you.” He jumped out of the plane and walked over to the pallet, where he picked up one of the bricks. “Do you have any idea how much this is worth?”
“You told me if we were lucky we could get a million dollars for it.”
“Yes,” laughed Hakim, “but you never said there would be this much. You were talking about loading several duffel bags. This…” Hakim backed away, held out his hands, and spun in a circle. “This is worth…I’m not even sure…ten million, maybe more.”
Karim could not hide his surprise. “Ten million?”
“Yes. Maybe more.”
“I had no idea…”
“Now how do you feel about drugs?” Hakim grabbed his friend and put his arm around his shoulder. “I told you this would work. Think of what you can do with that type of money. You will never again have to ask them for permission. You will be able to fund and run your operations.”
Karim smiled ever so slightly. He would never forget what his friend had told him nearly two years earlier while they were sitting by the campfire one night. Karim had been in a particularly pious mood that night and was angry with Hakim for spending too much time with the drug-dealing Afghanis. The argument had started with a simple premise on Hakim’s part: How was opium any different from oil? Karim was shocked by the stupidity of the question, but not for long. Hakim stated his case very clearly, that opium was a resource no different than any other commodity. When Karim tried to argue that oil did not destroy people’s lives, Hakim had laughed at him. What good had all of the oil profits done Saudi Arabia? They had discussed this many times while in college. That oil was corrupting their country. Hakim furthered his point by saying that Karim was a hypocrite. That he willingly took oil money to wage their jihad, but somehow the profits from the local crop were not good enough for the cause.
That night they had gone to bed as mad at each other as they had ever been, but later Karim began to ask himself what Allah would want. He wanted them to win, that was for certain, but at any cost? Karim wasn’t sure, but as the al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership proved increasingly inept, he’d been looking for other ways. Other avenues to carry the fight to the enemy without the aid of al-Qaeda. Karim left them not long after that. He wanted to make his own money. Money he would never be able to make in Saudi Arabia, for there was no upward mobility. The royal family and their friends had a monopoly on power and wealth.
When Karim laid eyes on the airstrip and the drug operation the first person he thought of was Hakim. Over the next month he thought more and more about having a backup plan and isolating himself from al-Qaeda. In a coded e-mail he sent the idea to Hakim, who immediately embraced it. When the other two cells disappeared, Karim made up his mind that he would have Hakim fly them out.
“This is a very good day, Karim.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Are you going to smile? At least show you are happy.”
“Allah likes us to be humble.”
“Allah also wants you to be happy and today is a day for you to be happy.”
Karim allowed himself a brief smile, and then he remembered what lay ahead. His expression turned solemn and Hakim asked him what was wrong. Karim looked at his men, sitting on the ground, drinking from their canteens. Within a week or two they would all be dead. Those perfect young bodies so full of life would be smashed and broken. Probably riddled with bullets. His only consolation was that they would make America feel pain. Real fear, and then there would be the second act and the third and the fourth. After their success, many more would step up to take their place. They would hit America with wave after wave. He would lead a real jihad. Not one grand attack and then sit back and do nothing. The current leadership of al-Qaeda disgusted him.
“What is wrong?” Hakim asked.
“When we begin killing Americans, I will allow myself to smile. Until then, there will be no celebration.”
CHAPTER 30
WASHINGTON, D.C.
NASH hopped on the Beltway and circled back around the city in a counterclockwise motion. He’d made three seemingly random stops: a gas station, a coffee shop, and a drugstore. Both his phones were turned off and the batteries removed. The internal GPS computer on the minivan had been disabled long ago. This way if they ever tried to pull his records there would be no record of his stopping at these various locations every week. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on New York and D.C., none of this had been necessary. In Saudi Arabia and Syria, yes. He was used to being followed when he operated over there, but not here in America.
When they’d decided to launch their own operation in America, though, everything changed. For political reasons, the FBI wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of sending deep-cover operatives into mosques. The idea had been suggested by many people, more times than anyone could count. The folks at the bureau knew it was the right thing to do in terms of national security, but they also knew whoever signed off on it would be crucified up on the Hill, so the bureau found a middle ground. Their solution was to stay out of the mosques and instead focus on Muslim charities. It was a good start and early on they had a lot of success, especially on the money side. That’s what the bureau was really good at. They could investigate the hell out anything. Throw a hundred bright and motivated agents at a problem and inhale it. Collect every little bread crumb until they’d pieced together an amazing picture of what was going on.
With the charities, they found out that a lot of these seemingly innocuous organizations were actually fronts for more militant terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. Just like organized crime, the groups adapted. They changed the way they did things and slowly withdrew behind the walls of their mosques, and the FBI stopped at the imaginary line. A line shrouded in the First Amendment. The right to practice one’s religion, to say what you’d like, and associate with whomever you saw fit. They’d beat this one to death—“they” being all of the men and women who staffed the National Counterterrorism Center, or NCTC. The nerve center of the fight against terrorism in all its emerging forms.
The few who dared to speak out said that this was not about the First Amendment. The decision to stay away from the mosques was political correctness at its apogee. It was a fear of being painted bigots for spying on minorities practicing a minority religion, and it was born out of the illogical, emotion-based, feel-good philosophy of the sixties. Because Islam was different, they dared not criticize it. One of Nash’s counterparts at the FBI summed it up best one time when he said, “If four abortion clinics were blown up tomorrow, killing hundreds of people, and a group of white men who were all part of a Southern Baptist antiabortion group took credit for the attacks, do you think we would hesitate for a second to send undercover agents into their churches?”
The question was never answered. The word came down from on high that they were to continue investigating the charities, but they were to stay away from the mosques. That had been nearly two years ago and that had supposedly been when Kennedy, Stan Hurley, and a few select senators got together and agreed that something needed to be done. They pulled Rapp and Nash in and gave them their walking orders. Everything would be funded off the books. A budget of ten million was provided to start with. The initial million was culled from safety deposit boxes at an old bank in Williamsburg. More was flown in from overseas and not a single receipt was kept. Everything was shredded every step of the way. Kennedy had placed her trust in Rapp and Nash that they would spend the money wisely, and they did. The hardest part had been recruiting the agents. They started with four and hooked them with service to their country and a pile of cash. One million per guy, all tax-free, and they could choose to keep as much or as little of it offshore as possible.
They targeted four mosques. One in Washington, one in Philadelphia, and two in the New York area. They were now up to eight agents, and the intel was pouring in. It was where they’d first learned that al-Qaeda was training commando teams to send to America for coordinated attacks against individuals and infrastructure. The last six months had been an intelligence bonanza. They were steadily connecting the dots of a terrorist network that was being built to help fund and support jihad in America. Two cells had been intercepted and a third had finally been confirmed. And now he was being asked to pull the plug on the entire thing. Roll it up and make it go away. Get ready for the investigation.
Nash pulled through the security checkpoint at the NCTC and parked in the underground garage. He didn’t know what he dreaded more, going upstairs or having to go before the Intelligence Committee later in the afternoon. At least with most of the people on the Intelligence Committee he knew where he stood, which was pretty much that he didn’t respect three-quarters of them. Upstairs was filled with people he liked. People he respected and people he was going to have to lie to yet again. The internal conflict was wearing on him, which made him think of Hurley and his comments on how it was all tied together.
