Although she was about five years his senior, there was something – the shape of her eyes, her hunger for life – that reminded him of the elder of his sisters. He hadn’t had any contact with his family since the day he had left Bahrain, and a sharp wave of homesickness suddenly hit him.
By the time he had ridden it out, the woman was saying something about ‘the near enemies’.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Could you repeat that?’
She turned her large eyes on the self-possessed young man, the one somebody had told her was a deeply devout medical student but who she guessed from the weather-beaten face was almost certainly a returned jihad warrior. She knew the type – the Jabalia camp was full of muj veterans.
Addressing him with the great respect he deserved, she said that nearly all the Arab world’s problems were caused by what could be called their near enemies: Israel, of course; the ruthless dictatorships scattered throughout the region; the corrupt feudal monarchies like Saudi Arabia who were in the pocket of the West.
‘I hear all the time that if our near enemies are destroyed then most of the problems would be solved. I don’t think it’s possible – the near enemies are too ruthless, too happy to oppress and kill us.
‘But they only survive and prosper because they are supported by the “far enemy”. A few forward thinkers – wise people – say that if you can defeat the far enemy, all the near enemies will collapse.’
‘That’s what I like about theories,’ the medical student replied, ‘they always work. It’s different if you have to try to implement them. Is it even possible to destroy a country as powerful as America?’
She smiled. ‘As I’m sure you know, the jihadists broke the back of an equally powerful nation in Afghanistan.’
The Saracen walked the five miles home in turmoil. He had never had a clear idea of how to bring down the House of Saud, and he had to admit there was a reason why all Saudi dissidents were based overseas: those who lived or travelled inside its borders were invariably informed upon and eliminated. Look at what had happened to his father. But never to enter the country and yet force the collapse of the Saudi monarchy by inflicting a grievous wound on the far enemy – well, that was a different proposition!
By the time he turned into the doorway of his tiny apartment he knew the way forward: while he might still become a doctor, he wasn’t going back to Saudi Arabia. Again, he didn’t know how to do it yet – Allah would show him when the time was right – but he was going to take the battle to the one place which loomed larger than any other in the collective Arab imagination.
It would take years, on occasions the hurdles would seem insurmountable, but his long journey to mass murder had begun. He was going to strike at the heart of America.
Chapter Eight
TEN YEARS AFTER the saracen’s revelation and half a world away, I was on a sidewalk in Paris arguing with a stranger, a black guy with a limp.
Lieutenant Bradley would end up holding my life in his hands but, in the short term, I was silently cursing him to hell. In telling me that he wanted to discuss my book, he had comprehensively destroyed all the layers of false identities I had so carefully constructed around myself.
Seemingly unaware of the detonation he had caused, he was now explaining that an hour earlier he had arrived outside my apartment just in time to see a person who he thought was me get into a cab. He had grabbed his own taxi, followed me to the place de la Madeleine, circled the block trying to find me and, when that failed, had returned to the apartment to pick up the trail. It was he who had knocked on the door and, not sure whether I was inside or not, had decided to wait in the street to see if I turned up.
I got the sense he thought this was all pretty amusing and I started to dislike him even more. As much as I wanted to blow him off, I couldn’t – I was scared. He’d found me and, if he could do it, so might someone else. The Greeks, for instance. Everything, my feelings included, had to be set aside until I found out how he had done it.
‘Fancy a coffee?’ I said pleasantly.
Yeah, he’d like that, he said, volunteering to pay. That was a mistake. Given the part of Paris we were standing in, he’d probably have to cash in his pension plan for an espresso and an eclair, but I wasn’t in the mood to show any mercy.
We started walking down rue François 1er a few paces apart, in silence, but we hadn’t gone more than five yards before I had to stop: Bradley was gamely trying to keep up, but the limp on his right leg was worse than I had realized.
‘Birth defect?’ I asked. I can be fairly unpleasant when I’m angry.