MURDER WAS JUST a job to Reza. Someone paid him to kill and he killed. It didn’t matter who gave him the money. It didn’t matter who had to die. He didn’t think about it much. He just did what he was paid to do.
Today, it was a Russian. The man was staying at a small hotel in a white town house in Earl’s Court, a busy corner of London. He had phoned for a car to take him to a restaurant across town in Soho. The car showed up at 6 p.m., just after dark. Reza was the driver.
The Russian got in the backseat. He was talking on a cell phone. “I understand,” he said into the phone in English, “but we can’t trust his methods.” He shut the car door and gestured to Reza in the mirror: Get going. Reza nodded and put the car in gear.
He drove about a quarter of a mile, then turned the car into a pleasant and secluded little alley off busy Cromwell Road.
“Excuse me,” the Russian said. He was speaking to Reza though he was still holding the cell phone to his ear. “This isn’t the right way. Where are we going?”
Reza brought the car to a stop. Turned in his seat. Smiled politely. And shot the Russian twice in the chest with a silenced 9mm pistol.
The Russian slumped where he sat, dead. His hand fell to his side, still holding the cell phone. Reza could hear a voice chattering on the other end of the line.
Reza left his gun on the seat of the car, got out, and walked away. He came out of the alley and blended with the crowds of pedestrians on the busy city street. Earlier, he had parked an old Citroën nearby—his escape car. He reached it, got in—and escaped.
An hour and a half later, he arrived at a small airfield outside the city. A Piper jet was waiting for him on the tarmac, its single engine already running. Inside, his old friend Ibrahim was waiting for him. The two men sat across from each other, comfortably ensconced in tall blond-leather armchairs. They were the jet’s only passengers. A stewardess brought them each a gin and tonic.
“Look at your face, Reza,” Ibrahim said, shaking his head. He was a squat, tubby man with a round face and a thin mustache. He was dressed casually in gray slacks and a colorless windbreaker.
Reza—a slender man with lean, sharp features—lifted his hand to stroke his chin. “What’s the matter with my face?”
“It has no life in it anymore. No passion. No faith. You used to fight for a reason. For a cause. You used to fight for the God. Now . . .” Ibrahim shrugged. “You’re empty inside. I can see it.”
Reza didn’t answer. He sipped his gin and turned to look out the window as the jet taxied to the head of the runway. The aircraft paused for a moment, then fired forward and raced into the wind. A moment more, and its wheels left the earth and it shot skyward.
Ibrahim was right, Reza thought, watching the distant skyline fall away, watching the night sky fill the windows. It was true: He had lost his passion. He had lost his faith. He had once believed the God was on his side, that the God would help him to win his battle against all those who did not believe. Then came the New York mission, and everything had changed.
He had been one of a small group of men living in Brooklyn. They had developed a plan to set off a number of bombs in Grand Central Terminal at rush hour. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, would have been killed or maimed. The entire city—the entire United States of America—would have been crippled with terror. Reza had never doubted he would succeed. The God would make sure of it. The God would be with him every step of the way, helping him to destroy the infidel.
But that’s not the way it happened. Instead, the American FBI had infiltrated his group. Three of his brother bombers had been killed in a gunfight. Five others had been arrested. Only Reza had escaped, unharmed.
Unharmed, but not unaffected. As Ibrahim said, his faith was gone. He believed in nothing now. He fought for nothing. He sold his skills and killed for money. And yes, he was empty inside. But the truth was: he didn’t care.
“What you need, my friend,” Ibrahim said now, raising his voice over the noise of the jet, “what you need is a new god to believe in. Or, at least, a man who is as powerful as a god, a man who can give you what you want: the cities of America on fire. Her people in chains. Her rivers running with blood.”
Reza turned from the window and looked at his friend. “Is that where you’re taking me? To meet such a man? My new god?”
Ibrahim raised his glass as if to make a toast. “You don’t believe me,” he said. “But you’ll see.”
They flew for four hours. When they began their descent a little after midnight, Reza judged they were somewhere off the coast of Africa. As the jet sank lower, he could make out dark patches in the white-capped ocean: islands, unlit, probably uninhabited. He didn’t ask where they were. It didn’t matter to him.
They landed on a dirt airstrip in the middle of a dense jungle. Reza could see the black shapes of the trees against the starlit sky. A long limousine met them on the tarmac. They rode together in the backseat. There was nothing to see out the windows but deep darkness.
“Have you ever heard of a man who goes by the name of Kurodar?” Ibrahim asked after a few minutes.
Reza gave a small start of surprise. “I saw him once. In Afghanistan. Someone pointed him out to me. A small, ugly little Russian. They acted as if I was supposed to be impressed.”
“You should have been,” said Ibrahim, his round head bobbing up and down. “You should have been. He may be small and ugly. He may even be Russian. But he is a great genius.”
The limo went through a gate in a barbed-wire fence, past guards armed with automatic rifles. It came to a stop outside a building. It was hard to make out in the darkness, but the building seemed faceless, a large, square white structure with few windows.
Ibrahim led the way inside, showing his identification to the rifleman at the entrance, pressing his eyeball to the scanner that opened the inner doors.
The two men moved shoulder-to-shoulder through an enormous lobby, empty except for the thick, round pillars that held up the ceiling. They reached a silver elevator at the rear. Ibrahim pressed his thumb into a sensor, and the elevator door slid open. Reza followed the squat man into the box. The door closed immediately and the elevator started down. It seemed to descend for a long time.
When the elevator door opened, Reza found himself in a long, windowless corridor lit by cold, blue-white fluorescents. As he walked beside Ibrahim through yet another checkpoint, Reza found himself beginning to feel excited. It was a startling sensation: the first excitement he had felt in a very long time. America on fire, he thought. Her people in chains. Her rivers running with blood. After all the failure and frustration, was it possible that his dream could still be realized? If there was a man who could give him that—yes, he would fall down and worship him.
They had reached a final door: a heavy slab of steel like the door of a bank vault. The rifleman stationed there nodded at them. Ibrahim punched a code into a keypad, then put his eye to one sensor and his palm to another. With a loud grinding noise, the huge door slid slowly open.
Ibrahim stepped back and made a theatrical gesture toward the room beyond.
“Enter, and find your faith,” he said.
Reza hesitated a moment—then moved through the entranceway.
He came into a cramped, shadowy chamber. He stood before a chaos of screens and wires, panels and flickering monitors. It took a moment before his mind could make any sense of it, before he could see and comprehend what was there in front of him . . .
Then Reza—even Reza—a man who had killed more people than he could remember—who had waged war and practiced torture and committed every manner of atrocity—even he staggered back a step, choking down his disgust at what he saw. The slimy white-and-purple thing strapped to the chair in the center of the room. The pulsing arteries connected to plastic tubes. The shuddering wires linked to the naked brain. The open torso. The flashing screens. The huge, staring eyes . . .
“Behold your new god,” said Ibrahim.
Reza stared in openmouthed horror.
He could not tell where the man ended and the machines began.