Frederick Forsyth - The Kill List

The robed figure held something in his right hand, which he turned over and over in his fingers. His amber eyes moved to his prisoner and settled on the frightened Opal.

“It seems you were right, my young friend,” he said in Arabic. “My servant had indeed crashed his truck into the bank of the wadi and died there. The cause”—he held up the object in his fingers—“this nail. My people found it in the tire. You spoke the truth.”

He rose and crossed the room to stand in front of the young Ethiopian, looking down at him speculatively.

“How is it you speak Arabic?”

“I studied in my spare time, sir. I wanted the better to read and understand our Holy Koran.”

“Any other language?”

“A little English, sir.”

“And how did you come by that?”

“There was a school near my village. It was run by a missionary from England.”

The Preacher went dangerously quiet.

“A nasrani . An infidel. A kuffar . And from him you also learned to love the West?”

“No, sir. Just the opposite. It taught me to hate them for the centuries of misery they have inflicted on our people and to study only the words and the life of our prophet Muhammad, may he rest in peace.”

The Preacher considered this and smiled at last.

“So we have a young man”—he was clearly speaking to his Somali secretary—“who is honest enough not to take money, compassionate enough to fulfill the wish of a dying man and wishes to serve only the Prophet. And who speaks Somali, Arabic and some English. What do you think, Jamma?”

The secretary fell into the trap. Seeking to please, he agreed their discovery was fortunate indeed. But the Preacher had a problem. He had lost his computer expert, and the man who brought him his downloaded messages from London, while never revealing that he himself was in Marka, not Kismayo. Only Jamma could replace him in Kismayo; the rest were not computer literate.

That left him short a secretary but facing a young man who was literate, spoke three languages apart from his Ogaden dialect and sought work.

The Preacher had survived for ten years on the basis of a caution bordering on paranoia. He had seen most of his contemporaries from Lashkar-e-Taiba, the 313 Brigade, the Khorosan executioners, the Haqqani clan and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen group, traced, tracked down, targeted, wiped out. More than half of these had been betrayed.

He had shunned cameras as the plague, changed residence constantly, altered his name, hid his face, masked his eyes. And stayed alive.

He would tolerate in his personal entourage only those he was convinced he could trust. His four Pakistani bodyguards would die for him but had no brains. Jamma was clever, but he needed him now to oversee the two computers in Kismayo.

The new arrival pleased him. There was proof of his honesty, his truthfulness. If he took him into his employ, he could be monitored night and day. He would communicate with no one. And he needed a personal secretary. The idea that the young man facing him was a Jew and a spy was inconceivable. He decided to take the risk.

“Would you like to become my secretary?” he asked gently. There was a gasp of dismay from Jamma.

“It would be a privilege beyond words, sir. I would serve you faithfully, inshallah .”

The orders were given. Jamma was to take one of the pickups in the compound and drive to Kismayo to take over the managership of the Masala warehouse and the Preacher’s sermon-broadcasting computer.

Opal would take over Jamma’s room and learn his duties. An hour later, he pulled on the bright red baseball cap with the New York logo on it that he had been given by the wrecked truck. It had belonged to the Israeli skipper of the fishing boat who had had to give it up when fresh orders came through from Tel Aviv.

Out in the courtyard, he wheeled his trail bike over to the decrepit shed in the wall to store it out of the sun. Halfway across, he stopped and looked up. Then he slowly nodded and walked on.

In a buried control room outside Tampa, the figure far below the circling Global Hawk was seen and noted. An alert call was made and the image patched through to a room in the U.S. embassy in London.

The Tracker looked at the slim figure in dishdash and red cap, staring at the sky in faraway Marka.

“Well done, kid,” he murmured. Agent Opal was inside the fortress and had just confirmed all Tracker needed to know.

The last killer neither stacked shelves nor served on a garage forecourt. He was a Syrian by birth, well educated and with a diploma in dental studies, and he worked as assistant to a successful orthodontist on the outskirts of Fairfax, Virginia. His name was Tariq Hussein.

He was neither refugee nor student when he arrived from Aleppo ten years earlier but a legal immigrant who had passed all the tests for legitimate entry. It was never established whether he bore with him, that far back, the raging hatred for the West in general and America in particular that his writings revealed when his neat suburban bungalow was raided by the Virginia state police and the FBI or whether he developed it during his residence.

His passport revealed three journeys back to the Middle East during that decade, and it was speculated he may have become “infected” with his rage and loathing during those visits. His diary and his laptop disclosed some of the answers but not all.

His employers, neighbors and social circle were all intensively questioned, but it seemed he had fooled them all. Behind his polite, smiling exterior, he was a dedicated Salafist, subscribing to the meanest and harshest brand of Jihadism. In his writings, his contempt and loathing of American society emerged from every line.

Like other Salafists, he saw no need to wear traditional Muslim robes nor grow a beard nor pause for the five daily prayers. He was clean-shaven daily, with neat, short black hair. Living alone in his detached suburban bungalow, he nevertheless socialized with work colleagues and others. With the American love of friendly-sounding diminutives for first names, he was Terry Hussein.

Among these friends at the local bar, he could explain his teetotalism as a desire to “keep in shape,” and this was accepted. His refusal to touch pork or sit at a table where it was being consumed was not even noticed.

Because he was single, a number of girls made eyes at him, but his rebuffs were always polite and gentle. There were one or two gay men who frequented the neighborhood bar, and he was asked once or twice whether he was one of them. He remained polite as he denied it, simply saying he was waiting for Miss Right.

His diary made plain he believed gay men should be stoned to death as slowly as possible, and the thought of lying beside some fat, white pig-eating infidel cow filled him with revulsion.

It was not the teaching of the Preacher that created his rage and hatred, but it channeled it. His laptop showed he had followed the Preacher avidly for two years but never betrayed himself by joining the fan base, though he longed to contribute. Finally, he decided to follow the Preacher’s urging: to perfect his adoration of Allah and His prophet by the act of supreme sacrifice, and go to join them in paradise eternal.

But also to take with him as many Americans as he could and die a shahid , a martyr, at the hands of their infidel police. For this, he would need a gun.

He already had a Virginia driver’s license, the principal photo ID, but it was in the name of Hussein. Given the media coverage that several assassinations that spring and summer had already generated, he thought the name might be a problem.

Staring at his face in the mirror, he realized that with black hair, dark eyes and a swarthy skin, he looked as if he might have come from the Middle East. The surname would prove it.