The Silent Man Page 12

  On an overpass over the main western highway out of Baghdad, two Toyota 4Runners forced Khalid’s BMW to a stop. Four men jumped from the Toyotas, AK-47s poised, shooting even before their feet hit the pavement. They blasted out the BMW’s windows and kept firing. Thirty seconds later, they were gone.

  Nasiji reached the overpass a few minutes later. The BMW’s metal skin was pockmarked with too many holes to count. Blood and bone and gristle festooned the interior. The shooters had fired so many rounds at such close range that Khalid’s skull was almost gone and the green of his uniform had turned black with blood.

  On the sedan’s hood the killers had left a mocking present, a wall clock whose background was a picture of Saddam. In the old days, Saddam had presented favored members of the Baathist Party with trinkets like the clock as signs of his affection. A note lay beside the clock, crudely scrawled Arabic: “All Baathists die! Revenge for the Shia! Iraq for Iraqis, not Saddam’s vermin!”

  AS HIS BROTHER AMIR had reminded him on September 11, Nasiji knew how to fight. He was only five-nine, but he had a middleweight’s build—lean, muscular, and quick. Growing up, he and his brothers had gained a reputation as bullies. They knew that their father could save them from trouble with a word to the local cops.

  During brawls, Nasiji used his speed to overcome bigger kids, ducking inside their looping punches and hitting them until they ran or went down. He was the fiercest of his brothers, always ready for a fight. Yet he’d grown almost afraid of the excitement he felt when he knew a brawl was coming, the way his mouth grew dry and his hands seemed to swell.

  One afternoon, a Shia teenager from Shula, a slum north of Ghazaliya, bumped into Nasiji’s sister in a local market. The contact was accidental, but Nasiji didn’t care. As the Shia—Nasiji never did find out his name—walked home, Nasiji pushed him onto a side street off the main road.

  The Shia was skinny, not a fighter. Nasiji looked around to be sure no one was watching, then dragged the kid into a garbage-strewn alley invisible from the road. He punched the Shia in the stomach until the boy doubled over. The kid’s shoulders heaved as he gasped for breath.

  “You’re nothing,” Nasiji said. “Say it.”

  “I’m n-n-nothing.”

  The kid looked up. Nasiji caught him across the face with a straight right, snapping back his head. The boy collapsed onto the broken concrete.

  “Please,” he said. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Give me your hand,” Nasiji said. The Shia limply raised his arm. Nasiji grabbed the boy’s hand and twisted his pinky sideways until it snapped. The kid pulled back his arm and screamed, a sharp animal cry. Nasiji lined up to kick him. And something more. Hurt him. He didn’t know where the words came from, but suddenly he had an overwhelming urge to hear the boy scream. Nasiji looked around for a brick, a stone, anything. Kill him. The Shia must have seen the madness in Nasiji’s eyes, for he scrabbled backward, his legs kicking wildly.

  “Allah. Please. I beg you. I’m sorry. Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry.”

  Nasiji looked away from the boy to find a brick. When he turned back he saw for the first time how pathetic the Shia really was. The kid’s T-shirt was dirty and his sneakers didn’t match. Tears and snot flowed down his face. Nasiji’s rage faded and a heavy shame filled his belly. He stepped back. “Filthy cur. Go back to Shula and never touch a girl in Ghazaliya again. We don’t want your fleas.”

  The kid scrambled and ran. Nasiji walked out of the alley, his head pounding, heart beating so quickly that even an hour later it hadn’t returned to normal. What if a rock had been handy? What if he hadn’t had those few seconds to collect himself?

  Nasiji told no one about what had happened that day, what he’d almost done. He stopped fighting and devoted himself to studying. For a decade, he pushed aside his murderous thoughts, locked down the beast inside him.

  On the overpass in Ghazaliya, beside the bloodied bodies of his father and mother and sister and brother, he opened the cage.

  HE JOINED THE SUNNI MILITIA battling the Shia for control of Ghazaliya. But he quickly tired of fighting other Iraqis. The Shia weren’t to blame for this madness. Everything had been fine until the invasion. The United States had destroyed Iraq. Nasiji saw the truth now.

  So Nasiji left Ghazaliya for Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, where former Baathists were organizing the Sunni insurgency. He was easily accepted. Everyone in Tikrit knew what had happened to his father. Nasiji had only one quirk. He had no interest in operations against the Shia. Only Americans.

  He quickly gained a reputation as fearless and vicious. In early 2006 he led an ambush against an American convoy traveling through Mahmoudiyah. His men killed three soldiers and kidnapped two more, hiding them in a farmhouse a few miles south of Fallujah. Nasiji interrogated the men for a few days, but they didn’t have much to tell. He told them he’d let them go if they begged for their lives. They knew he was lying, perhaps, but they couldn’t help themselves.

  He watched their mouths move as they spoke, but he couldn’t hear them at all, only the little voice in his head whispering, Kill them. When their pleas were done, he blew out their brains and left their bodies in a field for dogs to eat. Then he uploaded the video to a jihadi Web site, to prove to the world that Americans were weak when they didn’t have tanks or helicopters to protect them.

  After the Mahmoudiyah operation, Nasiji’s anger curdled into something calmer and nastier. Over the course of a year, he and his men had killed two dozen soldiers with ambushes and roadside bombs. A good haul. But hardly enough to make a difference in this war. The American bases were impenetrable. He could only pick soldiers off one by one as they traveled in convoys. Eventually he’d be shot in a firefight, or the Americans would learn his name and seek him out. Inevitably they’d get him. Besides, how would killing even a hundred soldiers make a difference? The Americans didn’t care how many of their soldiers died here, or how much damage they caused.

  “Ordinary people die all the time here and they don’t care,” his brother Amir had said on September 11. “Now they understand.”

  But Amir had been wrong. The Americans hadn’t understood the message of September 11 at all. To teach them, Nasiji would need to give them a lesson they would never forget. He would need to use the knowledge he’d gained in Munich to turn their cities into lakes of fire.

  NASIJI WENT BACK to Tikrit with an unusual request. He heard nothing for two weeks, and he wondered if he’d overreached. Then, near midnight, as he rested in a house in Ghazaliya, his phone trilled. “Sayyid. It’s arranged. For tomorrow.” The voice belonged to a Syrian he knew only as Bas. “Tell me where you are.”

  Nasiji gave his location.

  “I’ll send a car at six a.m. Whoever you’re with, don’t tell them. Just go.”

  “Of course. Bas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  That night Nasiji hardly slept. Curled on his metal cot, his AK laid neatly on a sheet on the concrete floor beneath him, he folded his arms behind his head and wondered: Would the sheikh listen to him? He was nothing, a jihadi like a million others. He closed his eyes and saw his father’s BMW on the overpass. What he’d first seen that day wasn’t the bodies or even the bullet holes, but the puddles of oil and gas leaking from the car. As if he hadn’t been willing to look into the BMW itself, as if the fluid took the place of the blood he knew he’d see when he looked up—

  And then he had, he had looked up—

  No. Enough. Put it aside. “Not what they’ve done to you,” he murmured to himself. “What you’ll do to them.” He passed the night half-asleep, his eyes fluttering open every few minutes. He was glad for morning.

  Six a.m. came and went, and then seven. Nasiji worried that his driver had been ambushed or arrested. But as he was about to call Bas, a white Toyota Crown with tinted windows pulled up outside the house.

  FOUR HOURS LATER, Nasiji found himself in a house south of Ramadi, kissing the hand of a he
avy man in a dishdasha, the flowing white robe favored by Saudis.

  The man was Sheikh Ahmed Faisal. He and his cousin Abdul were third-tier Saudi princes—and the biggest source of cash for the Iraqi insurgency. The Faisals did in Iraq what Osama bin Laden had once done in Afghanistan, funneling in cash and jihadis to fight the United States. Abdul rarely left Riyadh, but Ahmed came to Iraq every so often to track the progress of the war.

  Ahmed raised his hand. “Please sit,” he said. The Saudi’s black beard was neatly trimmed, his robe immaculate, making Nasiji conscious of his own scruffy beard and dirty jeans.

  “Thank you, Sheikh,” Nasiji said. “This visit is an honor. Every day, all of us in Iraq appreciate your great kindnesses.”

  “I’ve seen the video from Mahmoudiyah. If we had more soldiers like you, the Americans might be gone already.” Ahmed spoke a refined classical Arabic that Nasiji had heard only on Al Jazeera. The sheikh tapped the silver case on the table between them. “Cigarette?”

  “No, thank you. I’m sure you have many men more important than me to see, so I won’t take much of your time.” Quickly, Nasiji outlined his plan.

  When he was done, Ahmed lit a fresh cigarette and took a deep drag. “Young man,” he said. “Many others have had this idea. They’ve all failed.”

  “I have certain advantages.”

  “Your training. Yes. If not for that, I would not have met you.”

  “If I get the material, I won’t waste it.”

  “But there’s something else. You must understand the consequences of this. When the moment comes, you won’t have doubts?”

  “Has anyone told you what happened to my family?”

  The Saudi nodded. For a few seconds the room was so quiet that Nasiji could hear his own breathing. “These Americans,” Ahmed said finally.

  “They need a taste.” Nasiji didn’t tell the sheikh that if his plan succeeded it wouldn’t destroy just New York or Washington, but all of America. That vision might have been too much even for this man.

  Ahmed stubbed out his cigarette. “Let me ask you, then. What will you need?”

  “To start? A Canadian or American passport, a real one. Also one from Europe. Safe houses in Germany and Russia. Men I can trust in both places. And money, lots of it.”

  “It’s a long list.”

  “It’ll get longer as we get closer.”

  The sheikh nodded.

  “Most of all, we need someone in the United States we can absolutely trust, someone with a bit of land. A few acres so we won’t be bothered.”

  “Inside the United States? Why?”

  “We’ll need to assemble the bomb there. The material itself isn’t very noticeable, but the finished weapon is.”

  “Do you really think you can do this?”

  “I can’t promise success. But it’s not impossible. Acquiring the material is the most difficult part. If God wills that . . .”

  “Inshallah,” the sheikh said. “Inshallah.” He clapped his hands together. “All right. First, let’s get you out of Iraq before the Americans find you. We’ll meet in Amman in a week and talk more about your plans. You’ll have the chance to revenge your family, I promise you that.”

  To his astonishment, Nasiji felt his eyes well with tears. He turned away so the Saudi couldn’t see his face.

  FOR THE NEXT THREE YEARS, Ahmed Faisal kept his word to Nasiji. All over the world Faisal and his cousin knew men who wanted to support the jihad. In Montreal, the director of an Algerian community center. In Berlin, the owner of an Afghan restaurant. In Sarajevo, a used-truck dealer. In Chelyabinsk, an imam. All willing to help Nasiji without question. They put him up in their homes, so he didn’t leave a paper trail. They passed along cash. A few provided more crucial support. The Canadian passport in Nasiji’s pocket identified him as Jad Ghani of Montreal. Nasiji didn’t have to worry that an immigration officer would identify the passport as fake—because it wasn’t.

  Jad Ghani actually existed. He was mildly retarded, lived at home, and had been born in Montreal the same year as Nasiji. Jad’s father, a fervent believer, had been more than happy to apply for a passport for his son, using photos of Nasiji. And so Nasiji had a genuine Canadian passport, which would easily get him through border controls anywhere in Europe or the United States.

  Nasiji’s first big break came when Faisal put him in touch with Yusuf al Haj, who’d served for six years as an engineer in the Syrian army. Yusuf had two great virtues. He spoke excellent Russian. And he was a stone-cold psychopath. The Syrians had discharged him for beating an enlisted man nearly to death when the soldier argued with an order he gave. But Nasiji knew how to deal with madmen. He’d seen Iraqi jihadis as crazy as Yusuf. The key with them was never to show weakness. They were wolves, these men. If they smelled doubt or fear, they would turn instantly.

  Slowly, Nasiji put together his network. He arranged a transport system and put together a workshop in the United States. Along the way he discovered certain weaknesses in his plan that he now believed he’d fixed.

  But without the material, his plans meant nothing. He’d be practicing dry runs and designing dummy bombs for the rest of his life. Russia was his best bet, he knew. The North Koreans couldn’t be trusted, and the Pakistanis were so paranoid about what the Americans would do to them if their bombs went missing that the security of their stockpile was actually quite good.

  So Nasiji and Yusuf traveled across southern Russia, pretending to be traders who wanted to export Russian motorcycles to the Middle East. For months, they got nowhere. They traveled freely into the closed cities, but the bases where the bombs were held were another matter. Then the imam in Chelyabinsk told them of a security worker in Ozersk who might be willing to help.

  Nasiji plotted the theft but left Yusuf in charge of handling the Farzadov cousins. If the Russians unearthed the plot, Yusuf was replaceable. Anyway, Yusuf had a talent for this work. He frightened people so much that they would agree to almost anything just to keep him calm.

  Nasiji had decided on the Black Sea route because he wasn’t sure what the Russians would do once they discovered the theft. They wouldn’t want to cause a worldwide panic, so they probably wouldn’t make a public announcement. But they might try to close their borders, and the Kazakhs might cooperate with them. Best to get the material into Europe quickly.

  Despite everything, Nasiji had scarcely trusted his eyes when he saw the twin bombs in Yusuf’s Nissan. He pulled a handheld radiation detector from his pocket to be sure. Yes. The radiation signature was faint but distinct. They were real.

  He reached inside the toolboxes and touched the cylinders, one hand on each, the steel cold under his fingers. An electric charge ran through his body, as if he were conducting current from one warhead to the other.

  “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Nasiji said.

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s what the Americans said when they blew up the first bomb.”

  “Someone said that?”

  “Oppenheimer. A Jew American physicist. It comes from a book of Indian prayers. The fireball went up and Oppenheimer said, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

  “That’s how I felt, too, when I saw them. Only I wasn’t sure how to say it.”

  “Do you know what the scientists call them?”

  “Bombs?”

  “Gadgets.” Nasiji said the word in English.

  “Gadget?”

  “It doesn’t translate well into Arabic. It means, a sort of toy. A mechanical device.”

  “Why this word?”

  “Don’t you see? It’s a joke. Such a powerful weapon, and they call it a gadget. Like it’s a mobile phone.”

  “Gidgit.” Yusuf smiled, trying to play along.

  Nasiji closed the trunk. “You’ve done well, Yusuf.”

  AFTER THE TRIP over the Black Sea, which gave Yusuf the chance to dispose of the Farzadov cousins, the bombs arrived in Turkey. Yusuf watched over the
m in a rental apartment in an Istanbul suburb for four days, and then the next step was ready.

  For a year, Nasiji had been buying toolboxes and cabinets from a factory in central Turkey. He bought them in lots of eight hundred, enough to fill a forty-foot shipping container, and sent them by ship to Trieste, Italy, and then on to Hamburg, where he sold them at cost to German hardware stores.

  Nasiji wasn’t trying to start a hardware business. He wanted to build a pattern of shipments, a key to avoiding scrutiny by customs agents. Hundreds of thousands of containers came through Trieste each year, far too many for customs authorities to examine. So the agents concentrated their efforts on new shippers, shippers who had a history of evading duties, and shippers from countries that were known to be problematic, like Nigeria. Anyone outside those categories—say, a once-a-month shipper from Istanbul with a clean record—had a better chance of being hit by a meteor than being randomly searched.

  The Turkish tool cabinets were delivered to a warehouse in Istanbul’s bustling harbor district. There Yusuf added his own packages, stowing them inside crates 301 and 303. The crates were packed in a container that was put aboard the UND Birlik, a ship that regularly ran the Istanbul-Trieste route. Five days later, the container was offloaded at Trieste and transferred to a truck for the drive to Hamburg. As Nasiji had expected, no customs agent ever even looked at the container.

  NOW NASIJI AND THE CONTAINER had arrived in Hamburg.

  In the courtyard on the Reeperbahn, one of the whores finally found a customer, a young man in a denim jacket. She wrapped her arm in his and they walked toward the little streets where love hotels provided cheap beds by the hour. The man’s eyes slid over Nasiji as they walked past, but he didn’t break stride. No surprise. Nasiji could hang out in the courtyard all night and no one, not even the whores, would bother him. Strangely enough, despite the noise and constant traffic, he found the Reeperbahn a good place to think.