Alex Berenson - The Faithful Spy

“So it would be foolish for us to send soldiers?”

Wells reminded himself not to be too negative. “We cannot stop them from destroying Saddam. But afterward, when they have taken over, they will be more vulnerable. Inshallah, we can hit them every day, small attacks, grinding them down.” At this Wells felt a pang of guilt, wondering how many American soldiers would die in the kind of war he had proposed. But bin Laden would surely have reached that conclusion anyway. Guerrilla wars were the only way to fight the U.S. Army.

Bin Laden stroked his beard, looked away, looked back at Wells with cunning narrow eyes. Finally he smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Thank you, Jalal.” And with that the sheikh waved him out.

TWO YEARS LATER Wells had been taken to a different cave for another meeting, where bin Laden had asked him about the Hoover Dam. “Is it a great symbol of America?” he had said. Wells had answered honestly. Most Americans had no idea what or where the Hoover Dam was.

“Are you sure, Jalal?” bin Laden said. He sounded disappointed.

Wells looked at the guards flanking bin Laden and wished for a gun or a knife tipped with rat poison. Even a chip in his shoulder so a B-2 could drop a bomb on this stinking hole. “Yes, Mujaddid, ” he said.

Bin Laden nodded. “Shukran,” he said, and the guards escorted Wells out. He did not know how much credit he deserved for the fact that the Hoover Dam was still in one piece.

NOW, AS HE sat in the Toyota, Wells wasn’t sure what to think. If they had wanted to kill him they could have taken him into the mountains, or even shot him while he slept. The Pakistani cops wouldn’t exactly launch an all-out investigation. The police hardly came into the North-West Frontier without Pakistani Army escorts.

But they weren’t going into the mountains. They were heading toward Peshawar. Wells figured that increased his chances of survival. As long as they didn’t get hit by a bus. The roads in Pakistan were a constant game of chicken, and Bassim drove as though he wanted to catch afternoon tea with Allah. Wells’s head snapped back as Bassim swerved into oncoming traffic to pass a truck stuffed with cheap wooden furniture. As an oncoming gasoline tanker blasted its horn, Bassim cut in front of the furniture truck and back into his own lane, nearly sliding off the road and into a ravine.

“Easy, Bassim,” Wells said. Bassim turned to stare at him, ignoring the road. The Toyota accelerated again, closing in on a tractor dragging a cartload of propane cylinders.

“You don’t like how I drive? You want to drive?”

Jesus Christ, Wells thought — a mental tic he supposed he would never lose. The whole Muslim world suffered from a massive testosterone overdose, and the jihadis were the worst. “Of course not,” Wells said, careful to keep a straight face. If he as much as smiled Bassim really would take them into the ditch, just to prove he could. “You drive great.”

A long honk pulled Bassim’s attention back to the road. They were about to slam into the back of the propane cart. Bassim stamped on the brakes and the Toyota skidded to a stop by the side of the road. “See,” Bassim said. “There is nothing wrong with my driving. My reflexes are superb.”

“Nam,” Wells said.

“My father was a famous driver. I learned from him.”

“Your father,” the otherwise silent Shihab said from the back seat, “died in a car accident.”

Bassim turned to glare at Shihab as Wells bit his lip to stifle his laughter. Finally Bassim tapped the gas and they lurched back into traffic. No one said anything the rest of the trip.

TWO HOURS LATER the Toyota rolled into Peshawar, the biggest city in the North-West Frontier, a million-person jumble of crumbling concrete buildings and brick huts. Bassim nosed the sedan through a slum clogged with donkey carts hauling propane tanks and garbage. The roads became so crowded that the car could go no farther. In front of a tiny shop whose windows were filled with dusty tins of condensed milk, Bassim killed the engine. Shihab hopped out and opened Wells’s door.

“Come,” he said, tugging Wells down the street. The rich heavy stench of sewage and mud filled the air. Wells stepped through piles of rotten fruit and donkey shit. Children ran around them, kicking cans and a torn sphere that had once been a soccer ball. So many children. They were everywhere in Pakistan. They sat on the streets, selling toys and overripe bananas, eyes shining with hunger. In neighborhoods like this one they surrounded anyone standing still, their hands out, smiling and asking for “rupees, rupees.” The lucky ones found their way to the madrassas, Islamic schools that educated them well in the Koran and badly in everything else. What would they do when they grew up, if not join the jihad?

Bassim pushed open the rusting steel door of an apartment building and pulled Wells inside. “Third floor.” He and Shihab seemed desperate to get off the street. Wells wondered whether bin Laden would really risk living here.

The stairwell was dark and smelled of piss and onions. When they reached the third floor, Bassim tugged Wells toward the back of the building. He knocked twice on a steel door, then paused and knocked twice again.

“Nam?” a voice said from inside.

Bassim said nothing but knocked twice more. The door swung open. A man in a turban waved them in with his AK.

The room was dark and dreary, lit by a trickle of fading daylight that leaked through the dirty window high on the back wall. Beneath the window, a small poster of bin Laden had been pinned up carefully.

“Sit,” the guard said, pointing to a bench covered with tattered red cushions. Wells took a closer look around. Behind a blue beaded curtain, a narrow corridor led to the back of the apartment. In a corner, water boiled on a stove beside scissors, a razor, and a blue plastic mirror. The only other furniture was a wooden chair that had been placed atop a bunch of newspapers.

The minutes ticked by. No one said a word. Wells had never seen Arab men quiet for this long. He wondered if they really planned to shoot him in here. So be it. He had done his best. Nonetheless, he looked around, half-consciously plotting escape routes. That boiling water would come in handy.

Wells heard the shuffle of footsteps in the corridor. “Stand,” the guard said quickly, gesturing with his rifle. As they jumped up, the curtain parted and four men walked in, led by a heavy man wearing square steel glasses. Ayman al-Zawahiri. Wells understood why his minders had been so nervous. Zawahiri was bin Laden’s deputy, a man almost more important to Qaeda than the sheikh himself. He knew the details of the group’s operations, its financing, where its men were hidden. Bin Laden set broad strategy and spoke for the organization, but without Zawahiri Qaeda could not function. Zawahiri hugged Shihab and Bassim and nodded to Wells.

“ Salaam alaikum, Jalal.”

“ Salaam alaikum, Mujahid.”

“Allahu akbar.”

“Allahu akbar.”

“We have much to talk about. But first you must shave.” Zawahiri pointed at the pot of water.

“Shave?” Wells was proud of his thick, bushy beard, which he had not trimmed since coming to the North-West Frontier. Every Qaeda member wanted “a beard the length of a fist,” which fat-was — religious edicts — had decreed the minimum acceptable length. Wells’s was even longer.

“The Prophet would not approve,” Wells said.

“In this case he would.” Behind the glasses, Zawahiri’s eyes were flat.

Wells decided not to argue. “To the skin?”

“Nam,” Zawahiri said. “To the skin.”