Joel Rosenberg - The Twelfth Imam

“‘It was an impressive group, among the most diverse, most experienced ever hired by the CIA. Ages ranged from twenty to over sixty-five. More than half have spent significant time overseas, and one in six is a military veteran. They bring backgrounds as diverse as forestry, finance, and industrial engineering. And they’re a well-educated bunch. They represent schools ranging from Oregon State, UCLA, and the University of Denver to the U.S. Naval Academy, Princeton, and Duquesne. Half the new recruits sport a master’s or PhD. And if you want to work for the CIA’s analytic corps, the directorate of intelligence, you’d better keep your grades up-the average grade-point average is a respectable 3.7.’”

“So why am I here?” the man asked. “Simple-to recruit you.”

“You want me to work for the CIA?” David asked.

“Exactly.”

“And you’re looking for a few good ex-cons?” David quipped.

“Don’t flatter yourself, son. Two weeks in this Holiday Inn hardly qualifies as hard time. For most people, a criminal record-even a juvenile record-would disqualify them. But not in your particular case.”

“My particular case?”

“You’re fluent in Farsi, German, and French. You’re conversational in Arabic, and I suspect you’ll master that pretty quickly once you put your mind to it. You’re already five-foot-eleven. In a few more years, you’ll be six-two or six-three. You know how to handle yourself. You could be valuable.”

“Valuable for what?” David asked.

“You really want to know?”

David shrugged.

The man shrugged too and stood up to leave.

“No, wait,” David said, jumping to his feet. “I really do want to know. What would I be valuable for?”

The man looked back at David. “I have no use for pretenders.”

“I’m not pretending.”

“Then I’ll tell you-hunting bin Laden.”

David stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“You want me to help hunt down Osama bin Laden?”

“Actually,” the man said, “I want you to bring us his head in a box.”

David was stunned.

He had to admit, he was electrified at the prospect. He hated bin Laden. The man had destroyed Marseille’s life and as a result had come close to destroying David’s. He wanted revenge so badly he could taste it. But as appealing as it was, this whole conversation still made no sense.

“Why me?” David asked. “I’m only sixteen.”

“That will make things a little more complicated.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning usually I recruit college students. But with your behavior in recent months, I was concerned you might not make it to college. And I’ve been following your story too closely to have it end with disappointment for both of us. So like I said, I had to intervene earlier than I’d planned. The good news is that no one really knows who you are. You’re not on the grid. You have no identity. You’ve just been kicked out of school. Your parents love you, but they don’t know what to do with you. They’re about to ship you off to boarding school for the rest of the semester. Your friends don’t expect to see you again. It’s a perfect time to get you on board, to begin building you a cover story, and in a few years, you’ll be ready-”

“Wait a minute,” David interrupted. “I have to ask-how exactly do you know so much about me?”

“I’m friends with your parents.”

“Since when?”

“Since before you were born.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Jack,” the man said, finally putting his cards on the table.

“Jack?” David said. “As in Jack Zalinsky?”

Zalinsky nodded.

“As in the Jack Zalinsky who rescued my parents from Tehran?”

Zalinsky nodded again.

“So my parents sent you here?”

Zalinsky laughed as the guard electronically unlocked the door. “Not a chance. In fact, they would kill me if they knew I was here. And this will never work if they know, David. You can’t ever tell them we’ve met or what I’m about to take you into. Not if you want us to infiltrate you into the al Qaeda network and bag yourself a high-value target. It would be too risky for you and too risky for them. This has to be hush-hush, or it’s over. Understood?”

The room was quiet again for a moment.

Then David finally said, “I’m in.”

“Good,” Zalinsky said.

“So what do I do next?”

“Let your parents get you out of here tomorrow. Go home with them. Be a good boy. Let them put you in the boys’ school in Alabama. I’ll make sure you get accepted. Then finish the year with straight A’s without getting into any more fights. Get yourself in shape. And when it’s time, I’ll come get you.”

“And then what?”

“Then we’ll see if you’ve got what we need.”

And with that, Jack Zalinsky was gone.

David buckled down and studied hard.

But physics and trigonometry weren’t his passion. Nor was making new friends. With every spare moment, David locked himself away in his dorm room and studied the life of Osama bin Laden. He ordered books from Amazon. He pored over every magazine and newspaper story he could find in the school library. He began watching C-SPAN and the History Channel in what little spare time his new school afforded him, and in time a profile began to emerge.

What surprised him most was to find that bin Laden didn’t fit the standard image of a terrorist. He wasn’t particularly young. He wasn’t poor or dispossessed or stupid or uneducated. Nor did he come from a violent or criminal family, much less one particularly bent on jihad, or “holy war.” Born in late 1957 or early 1958-no one seemed to know for sure-Osama, David discovered, was the seventeenth of at least fifty-four children. His father, Mohammed bin Laden, was a wealthy Saudi who had founded one of the largest construction companies in the Middle East. His mother, Alia Ghanem, was a Syrian woman of Palestinian origin who met Mohammed in Jerusalem while he was doing renovation work on the Dome of the Rock. David was shocked to learn that Alia was only fourteen years old when she married Mohammed, and she wasn’t his only wife-or one of three, or even ten. She was one of twenty-two wives the man had at various times through the years.

When Osama was only four or five years old, his parents divorced, and the little boy and his mother were forced to move out. Young Osama was now effectively an only child being raised by a single mother in the rigid, misogynist, fundamentalist culture of Saudi Arabia.

And then tragedy struck. Not long after the divorce, Osama’s father died in a plane crash. Years later, Osama’s brother Salem would also die in a horrific plane crash. David wondered if this was when the idea of planes and death and the psychological torment they could cause had been planted in Osama’s heart.

In June 1967, as he approached his tenth birthday, Osama watched along with the rest of the Arab world as the tiny Jewish State of Israel devastated the military forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in just six days. Emotionally rocked, Osama wondered whether Allah was turning his back on the Arab forces.

As best David could determine based on his in-depth studies, the first time Osama bin Laden heard an answer that made sense to him was in 1972. During his freshman year of high school, Osama met a gym teacher who happened to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic jihadist group founded in Egypt in the 1920s by a charismatic radical Sunni cleric named Hassan al-Banna. The gym teacher explained to bin Laden that the Muslims had turned their back on Allah by embracing the godless Soviets. In turn, Allah was turning his back on the Muslims. Apostasy was crippling the Muslim people. Only if they purified themselves, turned wholly and completely to following the teachings of the Qur’an, and launched a true jihad against the Jews and the Christians could they ever regain Allah’s favor and the glory that was once theirs.