part0051

Rachid Dib sat comfortably in the Turkish Airlines’ first class cabin. He had won the day and even sipped champagne to celebrate— something he wouldn’t be able to do once he assumed his place of command in the budding Islamic Liberation Front in Dabiq, a northern dustbowl of a town in Syria. He would land in Aleppo and travel by car to Dabiq. He would transform himself once again into a strict and observant Muslim. Paris had corrupted him in more ways than he cared to enumerate.

His Arab-Muslim Tunisian family did not understand his new ties to a group of “unkempt men with long beards” as they called them, with whom he prayed over Skype. He had found them in an internet chatroom last summer and decided to travel to Syria to complete his spiritual transformation. There was something in the air in the Arab World. He found it all together exhilarating, enticing, and as yet unnameable. It was in Dabiq that he had learned to master shooting with a rifle. The leadership of FBB agreed that the journey would be an invaluable undertaking. Réda understood he was an Arab Muslim who also wanted to visit the capital of Arab nationalism. Syria.

When he returned, he no longer attended the mosque in the outer-city. He found the followers inauthentic and too accommodating to the ways of France. His family believed he had been indoctrinated. Besides his family, only Réda Halimi knew of his deepening ties to the Islamic Liberation Front. He though thought it was a passing fancy, the whims of young man in search of himself.

Réda had been like a brother to him. It troubled him now only slightly that he had had to choose between saving him and saving the American professor. The professor represented his and the ILF’s future. Réda was his past. A glorious one, but a past nonetheless tied to a country mired in apostasy.

After he shot Gaston Carpentier, he had to make a choice. He knew Gerard Louis would try to avenge Carpentier’s death. Louis had known about the plan to wound Carpentier and kill Havilah Gaie as part of his boss’s media and voter redemption strategy. Louis sat at the café’s table, quietly sipping a café crème while soaking in every word. Rachid had chosen the future. He had been purposely and intensively trained for the future in computers, technology, social media, hacking— in all the things a group like FBB and now ILF would need. He had to choose that future.

He gathered up his rifle from the small, grassy knoll at Vaux-le-Vicomte and immediately called Réda to warn him. But Réda of late had been in a severe funk over the deaths of Didier Gilbert and Eva Amri. In those depressive moments over the last three days, he often wandered off for hours and turned off his cellphone. Instead of going to the outer-city to protect him, Rachid went to the professor’s apartment in Paris. He could have killed the agent posted at her building’s entrance, but there was no need. He only needed to create a panic so that the police would descend on the building in droves. If she returned there, the security would be such that she’d be safe from Gerard Louis. Rachid consoled himself with the prophetic notion that Réda had at least died for the future and that he also died not knowing Rachid had killed his best friend and comrade Didier Gilbert.

He had tracked Gerard Louis from his cellphone. Louis had gone directly to the outer-city after leaving Hervé Simone at the Palais de Justice. He then returned to his home before heading to Venice. Rachid knew then that he was going to kill Professor Havilah Gaie, for Rachid too had been following her movements.

He had outfitted the encrypted jump drive with tracking malware. She had lied to him about viewing its contents at Le Meurice. He knew because he could trace and track when she viewed it. He knew when it was out of her possession. He was disappointed that she did not trust him enough then to share its contents— of which he already knew. She wanted to protect the life of a man who had thought so little of hers.

Gaston Carpentier had gladly signed her death warrant during Rachid’s meeting with him that afternoon at the café Deux Magots . He then turned over in his head his and Havilah’s little quid pro quo. For her lie, Rachid had fed her a misdirection about Simone and Carpentier to keep her preoccupied. Still, despite her blatant lie— he hated most when women lied as they were supposed to be the transmitters of culture— he drove all night to protect her and the future of ILF. He took another sip of the champagne, as the plane glided smoothly through the night’s air.

He thought about his betrayal of Didier whom he had until last summer worshipped. The ILF thought Didier weak and untrustworthy, especially after he had made the decision to meet up with Gaston Carpentier. Rachid was initially conflicted but he came to see the wisdom of their counsel. Didier too had to be sacrificed for the future.

Before Rachid had been prompted to kill him, he had even helped Didier record Gaston Carpentier. He downloaded their conversations to the jump drive. Rachid had encrypted the drive so that the data would disintegrate— except when opened on any device or cloud linked to Professor Havilah Gaie. He had hoped that Didier would use the recordings immediately to destroy Carpentier and the OFS— even after taking their $300,000 euro pay off. During that early morning meeting between the leadership of FBB and OFS, it was clear that that was not Didier’s intention.

Didier had been willing to work with Carpentier. For Rachid, that was a bridge too far. Rachid then added his voiceover to the audio. Nous sommes tous foutus. He rubbed his hand across his freshly shaven head, thinking about how clever he had been to slip those words on the jump drive’s audio. It was a final message about FBB and his decision to abandon the organization’s cause for a greater one. Didier had destroyed the organization with his bargaining with the enemy.

At the point Rachid decided to murder Didier, he had set his second plan in motion, one that would launch him as a hero into the annals of the Arab Muslim world. His message would be heard the world over with the help of the American professor. Just as Didier had intended to use her good name and media access, so too would he and ILF. She would help them remember his name and ILF. She would repeat the story of her involvement over and over for the frenetic and insatiable twenty-four-hour-news-driven media and its panicked public. She would even lay the deaths of Didier and Eva at his feet— all the while saying his name and that of Islamic Liberation Front’s over and over. She would help legitimize him and the ILF as God’s avenging army described in the Islamic apocalyptic prophesies. This is why he absolutely had to confess to her just before he boarded the plane in Istanbul. He knew he would be in Syrian airspace before the authorities figured out where he was headed. He smiled, revealing two bottom rows of uneven teeth.

“Something else, Monsieur Shakur?”

“Water, please.” He had barely heard the small, dark-haired flight attendant over the thrum of music under Tupac Shakur’s lyrical dexterity.

Rachid had carefully crafted his travel plans and new identity. He had shaved his head, donned glasses, and paid a substantial amount of money for a Swiss passport. With Didier dead and Réda distracted, he had been appointed to the leadership of FBB with full access to the organization’s capital. He siphoned off those funds, moving them into various bank accounts in Aleppo for future use. He selected the middle name of his favorite American rapper— Amaru, as his traveling identity. Tupac Amaru Shakur he knew was an infidel but his life and struggles in America seemed to parallel his own in France. He counted his own fascination— admiration even— for many things American as part of the corrupting influence of the West.

“Monsieur Shakur, please fasten your seatbelt. There is some turbulence.” The soft voice jostled him out of his reflections. He heard the announcement from the flight deck. They would be landing in forty minutes.

His journey was now ending where it had begun: Syria. The news of his success, his villainy to some, was now broadcast globally. The ILF would give him the hero’s welcome he believed he richly deserved and had painstakingly earned.

Meanwhile, several rows behind Dib, a nondescript Frenchman sat calmly in his aisle seat. He closed his eyes, replaying the conversation he had had with his boss, Hervé Simone, nearly four hours earlier in Paris, just before take-off. He wasn’t exactly en route to his long-promised “mandatory family trip to Annecy,” but the vacation served as an appropriate cover nevertheless.