The materials he needed hadn’t arrived, and he was furious.
He should have received the C-4 and the radio receivers and the transmitter and the blasting caps two weeks ago. The planning phase was over. The boy was ready. But the material for the devices had not arrived, and he had no idea what was causing the delay or how long he’d have to wait.
The materials were coming from Germany to Mexico, then across the Mexican border into Texas, after which someone would bring them to him in Cleveland by car. He couldn’t simply make a phone call to find out what had happened; they had to assume that all the lines were monitored by the NSA these days. The same with e-mail; they didn’t know the limits of American technology. So they communicated the old-fashioned way, by sending letters written in code and waiting for a response the same way. And the letters didn’t go directly to the recipient; they were mailed and then mailed again before reaching their destination.
If he had been in another part of the world—or had he not been an Arab—he could have picked up the C-4 easily, almost as easily as buying bread from one of the giant American markets—or super markets, as they called them. Even their grocery stores were monuments to excess and decadence.
So he would wait. He would continue to mold the boy, to make sure his resolve stayed firm, although he wasn’t particularly worried that the boy would change his mind. His only task at this point was to make sure he wasn’t arrested and to plan, as best he could, for the next operation.
There was that other boy in Santa Fe he’d read about. The boy had received an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy, which most likely meant that he was very bright. But the Air Force Academy had a large fundamentalist Christian faculty and was located in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which had one of the largest evangelical churches in the country. The boy was harassed so relentlessly that he was driven from the academy, and when his father, not a rich man, tried to sue the air force, he and his son were humiliated by the government’s lawyers. The last article he’d read about the boy in Santa Fe said that he was working in a movie theater, serving popcorn, while he tried to save up enough money to attend another college. Would that boy have the same fire in his belly as this boy in Cleveland? He wouldn’t know until he saw him, until he looked into his eyes.