I Am Pilgrim(153)

The officer glanced at the return ticket, ran the passport through his scanner and looked at the computer screen. Of course it came back clear: the book was genuine and that name had never been on any kind of watch-list.

‘How long will you be staying?’ he asked.

‘Two weeks,’ the Saracen replied. ‘Maybe a little more, depends on how long the money lasts.’ He smiled.

The officer grunted and stamped the passport for three months. Everyone got three months. Even if the passport of a card-carrying member of al-Qaeda had come back clear, he would have been given three months. Germany wanted its Messe visitors to stay – it liked the money they spent.

Of course, the Saracen planned to stay longer than two weeks but, even if the immigration officer had just granted him the fortnight, it wouldn’t have mattered. The Saracen knew what every illegal immigrant in the world was well aware of – immigration enforcement in Europe was even more slack than border control. Keep your nose clean and your shoulder to the wheel and you could stay as long as you wanted. The long-term future was fine too – every few years, they offered an amnesty. Where was the incentive ever to leave?

The Saracen picked up his bag from the carousel, suffered the indignity of seeing the snide glance between the customs officers, was sent on his way and walked into the kerbside chaos of the huge airport. Squeezing along the sidewalk, he dumped the girlie magazine and its temptations into a trash can, found a bus to take him into the city and vanished into the alternate universe of Islamic Europe.

It was a strange world, one which I had experienced when I was stationed in Europe. Chasing down leads and contacts on a dozen different cases, I had walked through scores of grim industrial cities and visited the countless Stalinist-style housing estates on their outskirts. But for anyone who hadn’t seen such places, it would have been hard to credit the gradual transformation that had taken place. The most common name for a baby boy in Belgium was now Mohammad. Three million Turkish Muslims lived in Germany alone. Almost 10 per cent of the population of France were followers of Islam.

As a Swiss writer once said, ‘We wanted a labour force, but human beings came,’ and what nobody had foreseen was that those workers would bring their mosques, their holy book and huge swathes of their culture with them.

Because of Islam’s commitment to charity and the explosion in the size of the Muslim population, every city quickly came to host an austere, male-only hostel – supported by donations – where devout Muslim men could eat halal food and bed down for the night. It was to the Frankfurt branch of such a ‘safe house’ that the Saracen travelled on his first day in Europe, still amazed at the ease with which he had crossed its border.

The following day, poorly dressed in jeans and scuffed workboots, he put his luggage into a long-term locker at Frankfurt’s main railway station and bought a ticket from a vending machine. Already letting his beard grow out – just another face among the mass of blue-collar Muslims – he caught a train to Karlsruhe. Situated on the edge of the Black Forest, the city had been bombed back into the Stone Age during the Second World War and the decades which followed had seen it rebuilt as a sprawling industrial centre. Among its factories was one which was crucial to the Saracen’s plan.

While he was still living in his apartment in El-Mina he had spent hours trawling the Web until he located a mosque with the exact geographical attributes he needed. As a result, when he got off the train from Frankfurt, he knew exactly where he was going. He found his way to Wilhelmstrasse and, halfway along it, saw a former corner shop – ironically, once owned by a Jewish family killed in the Holocaust – that sported a tiny minaret. The only feature that distinguished it from the twelve hundred other Islamic prayer centres in Germany was that it was almost within sight of the chosen factory, the European subsidiary of a major US corporation.

It was Friday and, right on schedule, the Saracen entered the mosque moments before evening prayers. Once they were finished, as tradition demanded, the imam approached the stranger and welcomed him on behalf of the congregation. Invited to take tea with them, the Saracen – reluctantly, it seemed to the men who had gathered around – explained that he was a refugee from the latest war in Lebanon.

Giving a credible performance as just one more displaced person looking for a new life in Europe, he said he had paid a group of people smugglers almost everything he had to take him by boat to Spain and from there across a borderless Europe by truck. He looked up at his fellow worshippers and his voice faltered, making it impossible for him to go into detail about the terrible journey.