Authors: Mukul Deva
Not one of them was aware of the fact that Reis, the son of a Canadian airman and a Pakistani immigrant educationist, had been brought up as a true, practising Muslim. Not one of them knew how intense Reis's feelings were about the way America was conducting its wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Not one of them was aware of the hatred he felt for the brutal manner in which the Israelis were persecuting the Palestinians. All this hatred and anger simmered unseen and unheard beneath the gentle, polite façade that masked the real Abraham Reis.
It had not been hard to recruit Reis and prepare him for this mission. Actually, there had been no need to do either since his mother, who had been part of the ISI's long-term global strategy, had already done both. Much like the sleeper agents of the post-World War II era, Reis's mother was one of the several hundred jihadi agent provocateurs who had been trained by the ISI, told to migrate, and then left in deep cover, to be called upon when the right time came.
Well, the time had come.
As a second generation deep-cover jihadi, Abrahim Reis was the ideal weapon. In his late thirties, Reis was older than the average terrorist. He was also ideally placed in the correct target location, had no police record of any kind and was fully integrated into the society that he was now going to wage war against.
Mai watched the gentle, unobtrusively dressed man with a slow, ambling gait walk up to Salim's suite and knock on the door. It opened immediately, and the suite swallowed him up.
MAI ALSO SPOTTED THE TALL MAN ON THE WRONG SIDE OF
forty, with a wasted body and long unruly hair, who approached Salim's suite about an hour after Reis had departed. His unsure walk suggested a distinct lack of self-confidence.
There had been a time when it was almost certain that Erik Segan from New Orleans would be counted as one of the leading lights of American Jazz music and his name would be taken in the same breath as Billie Holliday, Count Basie and Benny Goodman. Erik was standing on the threshold of greatness and glory when he found drugs. Or, it would be more correct to say, when drugs began to rule him and his life. Soon, the rhythm and beauty of music was lost in a blur of detox centres and the occasional prison cell.
He finally managed to kick the habit and returned to music, only to find that the magic had deserted him. The dejected man was now eking out a miserable existence on the fringes of the music world as part of one of the several, nondescript music groups that thronged the streets of New Orleans. He would almost certainly have gone back to the cloudy safety of drugs had it not been for Azhar Mahroof.
Erik Segan had met Azhar Mahroof at one of the many rehabilitation centres that he had been in and out of. Mahroof was a devout believer of the One God and had dedicated his life to helping druggies kick the habit. In his other avtaar, he was also one of the many scouts employed by Murad Salim to dredge the back alleys of life and seek potential recruits.
It was Mahroof who kindled in Erik the burning desire to do something for the cause. Something bold that would give him the glory that he had always hankered for and which had once nearly been his. It was this quest for greatness that found Erik Segan on the long flight from New Orleans to Male. It was this quest that delivered him to Salim's doorstep today.
Like Mahroof, it did not take Salim long to recognize Erik's desperate need for recognition.
‘There has never been anything so bold attempted by any of our brothers –’ Salim played the man like the expert puppeteer that he was – ‘They will remember you for generations to come. You shall become an everlasting beacon for millions of jihadis the world over.’
Salim's words stirred a deep sense of excitement in Erik. He could feel himself coming alive. His heart was throbbing with anticipation when, an hour later, he left Salim's suite and walked back to his own room on the other side of the tiny island resort.
HAD MAI GOT UP TO FETCH HIS COFFEE EVEN ONE MINUTE
before he actually did, he would have missed the dark, not so tall, fit looking man in his mid-thirties, who came to Salim's door barely twenty minutes after Erik left. The man exuded the confidence of one who has travelled extensively and seen the world.
Yakub Khan had first worked as the representative of a buying house and then later as the owner of a small but thriving export unit located in Delhi, which specialized in exporting cotton garments to the American markets.
Yakub Khan had been in Ayodhya on work on the day the Hindutva men brought down the Babri Masjid and torched his brethren in Mumbai and Gujarat. But he was no fanatic and was careful to keep his anger to himself.
There was no doubt, however, that he was a powder keg just waiting to blow when he was recruited by a vigilant Hizbul scout.
Once again, Yakub was the ideal recruit for the mission Salim had in mind. He was a family man with two children, had no criminal record, was well established in his profession, and was older than the typical terror recruit. The man was fully conversant with the area he would be operating in and especially the area where he would execute the final strike.
‘His only drawback is that he has no experience of any kind when it comes to handling weapons,’ Cheema had pointed out to Salim when they were discussing the various profiles in order to shortlist the strike team.
‘That's okay,’ Salim assured him. ‘We can fix that with some training. After all, the weapon he is going to use can be easily handled by anyone with a basic working knowledge of computers.’
MAI HAD JUST RETURNED FROM LUNCH WHEN HE SPOTTED
the tall, bulky Dutchman with a prominent beer belly who walked up to Salim's door with an arrogant swagger. There was something in his walk and attitude that bespoke the military or the police and indeed, Lars Borge was an ex-cop. Not so long ago, he had walked the streets of Copen-hagen in a smart police uniform. Now Lars was employed in the security detail at Copenhagen's Kastrup Airport.
Lars had always been a good, honest cop. He had been cruising through life with the comforts and conveniences afforded to him by an affluent society that boasted one of the highest quality-of-life indices in the world when one day, without any warning everything fell apart.
It was barely half an hour after Lars left for work that the two men broke into his house. Both were very young, very stoned on some potent concoction of drugs, and looking for some money to feed their next fix. No one would ever know for sure what triggered off the orgy of violence in the house, but by the time it was over, Lars’ wife, who was in the fourth month of her first pregnancy and his mother, who had been visiting them, had been completely and brutally dismembered by the two junkies. Hardened though he was by his years as a cop, Lars could not stop throwing up for hours after he saw what remained of them. The heartbreak, of course, lasted much longer.
To add insult to injury, thanks to a minor legal technicality, both killers got away with a sentence that would have made a drunk driver happy. Lars was inconsolable. And angry. His helplessness at being unable to protect his family was overshadowed by his anger at the government's inability to bring the guilty to book. Both combined to become the stepping-stone that eventually led to the birth of the completely new, cynical and embittered Lars.
‘In my country they would have given them the death penalty,’ the usually silent lady from the house next door said to him. She had come over to comfort her grieving neighbour. Lars barely knew her, though he knew that Helga, his wife, had spent a lot of time with her. ‘Islamic law is very clear and very simple. You steal and they cut your hand off. You kill and your life is forfeit.’
Lars did not say anything to her at the time, but Lina's words festered in his head; and the more he pondered over them, the more they seemed to make sense. He began to seek out Lina and spend more time in her company.
Thirty-year-old Lina Gazzaz was a first-generation immigrant from Saudi Arabia. She had lost her husband to a hit-and-run driver barely three years after they had settled down in Copenhagen. The killer was never traced. Suddenly alone in an alien land, yet by now accustomed to the huge personal freedom she enjoyed in this liberal society, Lina refused all offers by her family to help her return to Saudi Arabia. Her decision was made simpler by the fact that her late husband had been covered by a rather handsome insurance policy. With the passage of time, the pain of his leaving began to recede, but not the anger she felt against the unknown person who had widowed her. Lina took solace in her religion, of which she was a devout follower, and her painting, for which she was wooed by the local art galleries.
Neither Lars nor Lina could ever be sure why and when the relationship between them deepened. Maybe it was just a matter of two lonely individuals leaning on each other for sustenance. Maybe it was the manner in which they had lost their spouses and the fact that the killers had walked free. Or maybe it was just karma. Barely six months after the brutal murder of his wife, Lina and Lars had become inseparable. A few months later began the unplanned but thorough indoctrination of Lars Borge by Lina Gazzaz.
By the time Salim's scouts closed in on him, Lars had been honed into the ideal terror weapon. Because of his police training and background, he knew exactly how the security network functioned. He knew what he should
not
do, to ensure that he did not feature in any criminal record or files. And, like most of the death-dealers activated by Salim for this operation, he was not of Asian origin, nor a Muslim by birth, and was fully integrated into the society he was going to attack.
Within fifteen minutes of Lars's departure from Salim's suite, Mai had located his profile on meetyourmatch.com. On an impulse, he even wrote him a message from his own profile. The message was innocuous enough and would raise no flags, yet it did link the two.
THE MAN FROM LONDON CAME IN LAST. HE WAS UNLUCKY
enough to have missed his flight on the first day. But that was nothing new for Ben Ashton. Bad luck had dogged him for the better part of his life.
The only son of an Iraqi nursing professional, the stunningly beautiful Nahida Hanani, who had fallen in love with a handsome British doctor on her shift, Ben's misfortunes began with his birth, which happened six weeks prematurely. This early exit from the safety of his mother's womb into the cold, cruel world ensured that Ben's early years were fraught with repeated visits to the hospital. By the time he was ten years old, the neighbourhood joke was that he spent more time at the hospital where his parents worked than they did.
It was on Ben's sixteenth birthday that Nahida got the call from her father in Baghdad. ‘Your grandfather is in bad shape; the cancer has totally wasted him. He wants to see you for the last time, before…’
‘He was my constant childhood companion,’ a teary Nahida told her husband David when he returned home that evening. ‘I would really like to go back and meet him before he…’ She burst into tears.
Dr David Ashton was as besotted with his wife now as when he first set eyes on her. He could stand everything but her tears. ‘Of course you must go, darling,’ he consoled her, ‘but I may not be able to get away so quickly. Why don't Ben and you go ahead and I'll join you two later.’
‘Thank you so much, David,’ a tearful Nahida replied. ‘This will also be a good opportunity for both of you to meet my family and see my country.’
That was how, two days later, Ben found himself with his mother on board an airliner headed for Baghdad. Despite the troubled times Iraq had been through in the recent past, both of them were full of excitement, one at the thought of revisiting her family and the other at the thought of the exotic journey his mother had promised him.
But Ben's ill-luck ran true to form. What was supposed to be a meet-the-family and see-the-country expedition turned out to be something else altogether.
Although several months had elapsed since that fateful day in January 1991 when the US-led air armada had pulverized Iraq and decimated its infrastructure, the effects of the ‘collateral damage’ caused by the ‘sixty thousand tons of high explosives’ dropped on Iraq in the six-week long air war were evident everywhere. Nahida had been following the march of events in her country closely through various news media and should have been better prepared for what lay ahead, but she was not.
The omnipresent scenes of death and destruction that she witnessed plunged Nahida into the depths of despair. From this despair arose a vice-like hatred that gripped her.
The Americans must be made to pay… they need to be thrown into a living hell for this… monstrosity that they have inflicted on my beloved Iraq.
It was a very subdued duo that boarded the flight back to London a few weeks later. It was an even more subdued Ben who dropped out of college a few years later, much to David's disappointment. David had always hoped that the quiet but intelligent Ben would follow him into the medical profession. But his disappointment was short-lived since his own existence was abruptly terminated by a cardiac arrest. In Ben's troubled head his father's death signalled the final break from the society that he had been born and bred in, and his mother's bitter rhetoric against the West finally held sway. A few months later, the young man officially converted to Islam, his mother's religion.
By the time the thirty-year-old Ben was elected as an office bearer in the National Union of Railwaymen, his indoctrination was complete.
Yet again, as life would have it, Ben's run of ill-luck continued and a couple of years later he was blown out of the corridors of power by the politics that flourishes in every labour union. This was the final nail in the coffin; it left him disillusioned with life in general and the country he lived in, in particular. When Salim's scout approached him, it seemed to Ben a heaven sent opportunity to make up for all the wrongs, real and perceived, that he had suffered.
Mai spotted him as he was walking up to Salim's suite. But the sun had already plunged over the horizon, and he was unable to make out anything except that he was Caucasian.