26

NORTHERN FRANCE

IT WAS AN ALL-TOO-FAMILIAR story—a story of disillusion and dissatisfaction, of needs unmet, of economic and marital hopes dashed, of rage against the Americans and Jews over their perceived mistreatment of Muslims. Half the jihadists in the world could have told the same sad tale; it was, thought Gabriel, well-trod territory. Yes, there were a few bright minds and young men from good families in the upper ranks of the global jihadist movement, but the foot soldiers and the cannon fodder were, for the most part, radical losers. Political Islam was their salvation, and ISIS was their paradise. ISIS gave purpose to lost souls and promised an afterlife of eternal copulation to those who perished for the cause. It was a powerful message for which the West had no antidote.

Nabil Awad’s version of the story began in Irbid, where his father tended a stall in the central market. Nabil was a diligent student and upon graduation from secondary school was admitted to London’s University College. The year was 2011; Syria was burning, British Muslims were seething. No longer under the thumb of the Jordanian Mukhabarat, Nabil quickly began associating with Islamists and radicals. He prayed at the East London Mosque and joined the London chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Sunni Islamic organization that supported the resurrection of the caliphate long before anyone had heard of a group called ISIS. The Hizb, as it was known colloquially, was active in more than fifty countries and counted more than a million followers. One was a Jordanian from Amman named Jalal Nasser, whom Nabil Awad met during a Hizb gathering in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets. Jalal Nasser had already crossed the line—the line between Islamism and jihadism, between politics and terror. In time, he took Nabil Awad with him.

“When exactly did you meet him?” asked Fareed.

“I don’t remember.”

“Of course you do, habibi.”

“It was the spring of 2013.”

“I knew you could do it,” said Fareed with a paternal smile. He had removed the bindings from Nabil Awad’s wrists, and had given him a cup of sugary tea to keep his energy up. Fareed was drinking tea, too—and smoking, which Nabil Awad, a Salafist, did not approve of. Gabriel was no longer present; he was watching a video feed of the interrogation on a laptop in the next room, along with the other members of his team. Two other teams were monitoring the interrogation as well, one at GID headquarters, the other at King Saul Boulevard.

With a nudge, Fareed encouraged Nabil Awad to expound on his relationship with Jalal Nasser, which he did. At first, he said, Jalal was guarded around his fellow Jordanian, wary. He was afraid he was an agent of the GID or MI5, the British security service. But gradually, after several conversations that bordered on interrogations, he took Nabil into his confidence. He said that he had been dispatched to Europe by ISIS to help build a network capable of striking targets in the West. He said he wanted Nabil to help him.

“How?”

“By looking for recruits.”

“Recruits for ISIS?”

“For the network,” said Nabil Awad.

“In London?”

“No. He wanted me to move to Belgium.”

“Why Belgium?”

“Because Jalal could handle England on his own, and he thought Belgium was promising territory.”

“Because there were many brothers there?”

“Many,” answered Nabil Awad. “Especially in Brussels.”

“Did you speak Flemish?”

“Of course not.”

“French?”

“No.”

“But you learned to speak French.”

“Very quickly.”

“You’re a smart boy, aren’t you, Nabil—too smart to be wasting your time with this jihad shit. You should have finished your education. Things might have turned out differently for you.”

“In Jordan?” He shook his head. “Unless you are from a prominent family or connected to the king, you don’t stand a chance. What was I going to do? Drive a taxi? Work as a waiter in a Western hotel serving alcohol to infidels?”

“Better to be a waiter than where you are now, Nabil.”

The young Jordanian said nothing. Fareed opened a file.

“It’s an interesting story,” he said, “but I’m afraid Jalal tells it somewhat differently. He says that you approached him. He says that you were the one who built the network in Europe.”

“That’s not true!”

“But you see my problem, habibi. He tells me one thing, you tell me the complete opposite.”

“I’m telling you the truth, Jalal is lying!”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“Tell me something that I don’t already know about Jalal. Or better yet,” Fareed added almost as an afterthought, “show me something on your phone or your computer.”

“My computer is my room in Molenbeek.”

Fareed smiled sadly and patted the back of his prisoner’s hand. “Not anymore, habibi.”

Since the beginning of the war on terror, al-Qaeda and its murderous offspring had proven remarkably adaptive. Chased from their original Afghan sanctuary, they had found new spaces to operate in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, and a district of Brussels called Molenbeek. They had also devised new methods of communication to avoid detection by the NSA and other Western eavesdropping services. One of the most innovative was an advanced 256-bit encryption program called Mujahideen Secrets. Once Nabil Awad settled in Belgium, he used it to communicate securely with Jalal Nasser. He simply wrote his messages on his laptop, encrypted them using Mujahideen Secrets, and then loaded them onto a flash drive, which would be carried by hand to London. The original messages Nabil shredded and deleted. Even so, Mordecai had little difficulty finding their digital remains on the hard drive of the laptop. Using Nabil’s fourteen-character hard password, he raised the files from the dead, turning seemingly random pages of letters and numbers into clear text. One of the documents concerned a promising potential recruit, a Frenchwoman of Algerian descent named Safia Bourihane.

“You were the one who brought her into the network?” asked Fareed, when the interrogation resumed.

“No,” answered the young Jordanian. “I was the one who found her. Jalal handled the actual recruitment.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“Molenbeek.”

“What was she doing there?”

“She has family there—cousins, I think. Her boyfriend had just been killed in Syria.”

“She was grieving?”

“She was angry.”

“At whom?”

“The Americans, of course, but mainly the French. Her boyfriend died in a French air strike.”

“She wanted revenge?”

“Very badly.”

“You spoke to her directly.”

“Never.”

“Where did you see her?”

“A party at a friend’s apartment.”

“What kind of party?”

“The kind that no good Muslim should ever attend.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Working.”

“You don’t mind if your recruits drink alcohol?”

“Most do. Remember,” Nabil Awad added, “Zarqawi was a drinker before he discovered the beauty of Islam.”

“What happened after you sent your message to Jalal?”

“He instructed me to find out more about her. I went to Aulnay-sous-Bois to watch her for a few days.”

“You’re familiar with France?”

“France is part of my territory.”

“And you liked what you saw?”

“Very much.”

“And so you sent a second encrypted message to Jalal,” said Fareed, waving a printout.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“By courier.”

“What’s the courier’s name?”

The young Jordanian managed a weak smile. “Ask Jalal,” he said. “He can tell you.”

Fareed held up a photograph of Nabil Awad’s veiled mother. “What’s the courier’s name?”

“I don’t know his name. We never met face-to-face.”

“You use a dead drop system?”

“Yes.”

“How do you summon him?”

“I post a message on Twitter.”

“The courier monitors your feed?”

“Obviously.”

“And the dead drop sites?”

“We have four.”

“In Brussels?”

“Or nearby.”

“How does the courier know which site to clean out?”

“The location is contained in the message.”

In the adjoining room, Gabriel watched as Fareed Bakarat placed a yellow legal pad and a felt-tip pen before Nabil Awad. The broken young Jordanian reached for the pen quickly, as a drowning man reaches for a lifeline tossed upon a stormy sea. He wrote in Arabic, swiftly, without pause. He wrote for his parents and his siblings and for all those who would bear the Awad name. But mainly, thought Gabriel, he wrote for Fareed Barakat. Fareed had beaten him. Nabil Awad belonged to them now. They owned him.

When the task was complete, Fareed demanded one more name from his captive. It was the name of the man who was directing the network, approving the targets, training the operatives, and building the bombs. The name of the man who called himself Saladin. Nabil Awad tearfully claimed not to know it. And Fareed, perhaps because he was growing weary himself, chose to believe him.

“But you’ve heard of him?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Is he Jordanian?”

“I doubt it.”

“Syrian?”

“Could be.”

“Iraqi?”

“I’d say so.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s very professional. Like you,” Nabil Awad added quickly. “He’s serious about his security. He doesn’t want to be a star like Bin Laden. He just wants to kill infidels. Only the people at the top know his real name or where he comes from.”

By then, night had fallen. They returned Nabil Awad hooded and bound to the formerly white van and drove him to Le Bourget Airport outside Paris, where a Gulfstream aircraft belonging to the Jordanian monarch waited. Nabil Awad boarded the plane without a struggle, and just six hours later was locked in a cell deep within GID headquarters in Amman. In the parallel universe of the World Wide Web, however, he was still very much a free man. He told friends, followers on social media, and the manager of the print shop where he worked that he had been compelled to return to Jordan suddenly because his father had taken ill. His father was not available to contradict the account, because he, like all the members of the extended Awad clan, was now in GID custody.

For the next seventy-two hours, Nabil Awad’s mobile phone was besieged with expressions of concern. Two teams of analysts, one at GID headquarters, one at King Saul Boulevard, scrubbed each e-mail, text, and direct message for signs of trouble. They also drafted and posted several dire updates on Nabil Awad’s Twitter feed. It seemed the patient had taken a turn for the worse. God willing, he would make a recovery, but for the moment it didn’t look good.

To the uninitiated eyes, the words that flowed onto Nabil Awad’s social media pages seemed entirely appropriate for the eldest son of a man who was gravely ill. But one message contained a somewhat peculiar syntax and choice of words that, to one reader, meant something quite specific. It meant that an empty can of Belgian beer had been hidden in a gorse bush at the edge of a small pasture not far from the city center of Brussels. Inside the can, wrapped in protective plastic, was a flash drive that contained a single encrypted document. Its subject was a Palestinian doctor named Leila Hadawi.