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PRELUDE
Rabat
Morocco
IT was just after midnight and Rabat felt largely deserted. Prince Talal bin Musaid stared out at the densely packed residences built into the hills overlooking the city. His eye was attracted to a human outline ducking into an alley to his right, but through the glass of his Mercedes S-Class it didn’t seem real. The layer of dust covering everything, the cracked façades, the ragged laundry hung out to dry—none of it had ever been part of his existence. This was the world of the faceless masses. The people he became aware of only when they failed to do his bidding.
Four days short of his thirty-ninth birthday, his life had become a blur of private jets, beautiful women, and luxury homes. London, Monaco, Paris, New York—they were indistinguishable to him now, existing only to house the opulent nightclubs and shops that he and his companions required. Exclusive places that precious few people knew about and even fewer would ever be admitted to.
He could still be coaxed back to Saudi Arabia when family politics demanded, but more and more it was a place to be avoided. A place of bitter memories, betrayals, and reminders of a birthright stolen from him.
His driver eased onto a side street barely wide enough to allow passage, and bin Musaid looked away from the concrete tenements lining it. The boredom and disdain he normally felt when surrounded with this kind of squalor had been drowned out by excitement and anticipation. No more waiting. No more words. This overwhelming sense of exhilaration could only be generated by one thing. Action.
He slid a suitcase filled with American dollars onto his lap and felt the satisfying heft. It was the unfamiliar weight of purpose, he knew. The weight of power.
He was the nephew of King Faisal, but had never been treated with the respect that position demanded. After his parents’ untimely death, bin Musaid had been sent to Europe, where he was forced to absorb the insult of Western schooling. His teachers—many women—had not only refused to defer to his station but had lorded their authority over him in a pathetic effort to obscure their own inferior birth. They’d given him poor marks and reported back to the king with stories of women, liquor, and violence.
All of this would have been of little consequence, but Faisal sided with them—with the British infidels who mocked both the House of Saud and Allah himself. Bin Musaid had finally been called back to Saudi Arabia after a meaningless incident with a female student. She had been a typical Western whore and he had treated her accordingly, no better or worse than required. In any event, he had welcomed the opportunity to take his rightful place in the ruling class.
It was not to be, though. Instead of a respected government post, he had been shuttled into an endless series of menial tasks and obscure, low-level positions. The king spoke enthusiastically of his bright future when they were together but never took steps to make that future a reality. Betrayed by his own family, bin Musaid had finally left the country of his birth and cut ties to the degree possible without jeopardizing the flow of family money.
He knew now that none of it was of any importance. The Saudi Arabia that had rejected him was doomed. King Faisal was old and weak, a puppet of America who was losing control of the forces gaining power within his borders. He didn’t understand the true destiny of his country. Instead of crumbling and besieged, the Saudi royalty should have been taking a place at the helm of the new caliphate. It was the House of Saud’s privilege and responsibility to lead the forces of Islam as they exterminated their enemies throughout the world.
His driver leaned forward to search the darkness for a rare street sign.
“Left, you idiot,” bin Musaid said.
He’d been poring over the maps and satellite images on Google for days, anticipating this moment. They would drive straight for another kilometer, where the street would dead end. From there he would continue on foot into the dark maze of souks that climbed even higher above the city. The journey would take approximately seven minutes at a pace designed not to attract undue attention from anyone he might pass. Finally he would arrive at his destination: a nondescript apartment building where an ISIS representative was waiting.
The money in the suitcase would be used to finance a large-scale attack inside the United States—something ISIS saw as critical to advancing their already wildly successful propaganda campaign. The lone-wolf attacks that they had inspired were unquestionably glorious but lacked sufficient weight in a country where mass shootings were a daily event.
It was critical that America’s Muslims join the fight, but thus far they had been reticent—lulled into complacency by their prosperity and integration into the patchwork of immigrants and mutts that made up their adopted country. Cracks were beginning to form, though. America was already turning against its Muslim population. It just needed a final push for it to go from shunning Mohammed’s followers to isolating, attacking, and discriminating against them. When that came to pass, there would be millions of young disaffected men ready to be recruited into the army of God.
Saudi Arabia’s leadership had taken similar actions in the past. In fact, two of bin Musaid’s older cousins had been directly involved in the financing and planning of 9/11. While bin Laden had become the face of that attack, it would have been utterly impossible without the support of other powerful men familiar with America’s vulnerabilities.
The prince smiled in the darkness, remembering the video footage of the burning towers and the terrified Christians throwing themselves to their deaths. It wasn’t those glorious images that lifted his spirits, though. It was that the American politicians had known about Saudi Arabia’s involvement but had been too cowardly to take action. Instead, they had made a hasty backroom deal with King Faisal. He would crack down on the subversives and keep the oil flowing. In return, the Americans would ignore the fact that the attack had been carried out almost entirely by Saudi nationals and instead divert their people’s attention with the punishing quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Those wars and the lingering effects of the West’s financial collapse had divided the American people to a degree not seen since the Civil War. America was a wounded animal. And he had become the lion.
CHAPTER 1
Above al-Shirqat
Iraq
