Otto Penzler - Agents of Treachery – Spy Stories

One of the guards, sensing his cue, stepped forward. He held a long cardboard box, the kind used for long-stemmed flowers, and opened it on the floor in front of Nabil. Inside was a rather beautiful sword.

Four days later, on Sunday, after he’d finished his Dhuhr prayer and was packing to return to the continent he understood, where when you left you could say exactly what you had accomplished, the American knocked on his hotel room door. He found a light-haired but dark-eyed man in the spy hole who said, “Signore Nabil Abdullah Bahdoon?”

“Si?”

The man peered up and down the corridor, then lowered his voice and spoke in English. “My name is Sam Wallis. I’m here with a business offer. May I come in?”

Though his impulse was to send the man away, he remembered, We will come to you, young Nabil, and opened the door.

Once inside, Sam Wallis was surprisingly-perhaps even refreshingly-straightforward. He wanted information on the pirates. He represented some companies interested in securing their shipping lanes through the Gulf of Aden. “I don’t know what your rank is,” Sam told him, “but I’ll lay odds that the money I can give you will move you upward.”

“Upward?”

“In your organization.”

Nabil frowned. “What do you think my organization is?”

“Does it matter?” Sam said, flopping his hands in an expression of nonchalance. “There’s always some position above our heads that we’d prefer to fill.”

“You think like an American.”

“I think like a human being.”

Despite his pretty face, Nabil was a man of broad experience. He’d trained for three months in the mountains of Afghanistan, then spent a harrowing six months in Iraq on the front lines; then, once his worth was proven, he helped plan pinpoint strikes. Despite what Paul Fisher would later think, Nabil had not had to prove himself to his fellow fighters for years, and it was because of this respect that he would never find himself driving a truck or a speedboat laden with high explosives. He was too valuable to be wasted like that.

It was why he had been chosen to be Aslim Taslam’s envoy to Ansar al-Islam’s Roman cell. His comrades knew that he would think through each detail and come to the correct conclusions.

So when Sam Wallis offered a half million euros for intelligence on the pirates-a sum that Aslim Taslam needed desperately to further its plans-he did not answer immediately. He stepped back from the immediate situation and tried to see it from the outside.

You may or may not recognize us-that is of no concern. You should act as you believe correct.

Could this relaxed American be a messenger-witting or unwitting-from the Imam? Might this be the initial stage of the test? He pulled the blinds in the room, turned on the overhead lamp, and examined the American’s dark eyes. Refusing money from an infidel was a morally unambiguous way of dealing with the situation. But perhaps too simple for the Imam. Too simple to assist the jihad.

If the money was real, then it could buy weapons. Using the infidels’ technology and finances against them was a historically proven method of jihad. As for the information on the pirates, it could easily be manufactured, though there was no love lost between Aslim Taslam and those drunken thugs of the high seas.

“If you’re serious,” Nabil told him, “come to Africa and we’ll discuss it further. Mogadishu.”

Sam Wallis shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere near Mogadishu. I’m paid well, but not that well. Next week I’ll be in Kenya for the Kajiado Cross-Country Rally. Can we meet in Nairobi?”

Nabil was careful not to keep this a secret. He was thinking in layers now. If he kept the American a secret from his comrades, it would look to Ansar al-Islam’s observers-who he had to assume were everywhere-that he was either planning to keep the American’s money himself or hiding him because he was going to sell real information. Neither of these were true, and in a small house east of Botiala he sat with his five most trusted men and talked them through it.

All five of these tall, dark men were from his village, and in another world they would have remained fishermen like their fathers. But in this world the fish started to disappear from the gulf, their sleek bodies absorbed by the big trawlers from Yemen and Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They watched as the other young fishermen, many of them friends, learned that taking to the seas with speedboats and weapons, full of liquor and marijuana, could bring in more money than fishing ever had. They blew their money on satellite televisions and four-by-fours they sped up and down the coastline, sometimes running over children on the way. Nabil and his friends watched, remembering what the visitors from Afghanistan had taught them.

There were no fish left, and piracy was despicable to them. But there was a third way. A better way.

When he told them of the American, they pulled back visibly, so he took them through his line of reasoning. While the pirates were not their friends, giving them up was not an option. So they would fabricate the information. Transit routes, bank accounts, hierarchies. “And if it looks as if the American is going to cheat us, we will kill him.”

“But what of the Imam?” asked Ghedi, looking for unambiguously good news.

That he suspected the American had been sent by the Imam was too much for them to absorb, so he only said, “He wants to teach us patience.”

He returned to Kenya by one of the softer land routes, and on Saturday, before the start of the cross-country rally, he entered Sam Wallis’s Intercontinental room with a look of pain on his face. “I’m sorry, I cannot risk it. It’s an impressive amount of money, but in my region of Somalia if you become an enemy of the pirates, your life is no longer worth anything.”

Sam settled on the end of his bed and considered the problem. “It’s one reason I came to you, you know. Your group separated from Al-Shabaab because of their cooperation with the pirates. I thought you’d have the balls to stand up to them.”

“You think you know a lot about me, Mr. Wallis.”

“My employers think they do.”

“We may not like the pirates, but we still have to live in their country.”

“You needn’t stay in Somalia.”

“It’s our home.”

Clearly, this argument carried no weight with the American, but he accepted it as the logic of primitive peoples. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said after some thought, “but my bosses say I can go up to two million euros. So I’ll do that. The offer is now two million.”

It was as Nabil had suspected. No opening offer is a final one, and now he had quadrupled Aslim Taslam’s income. “How will you pay it?”

“Account transfer. I can get one of the bank employees to come to Nairobi to take care of it.”

“We would prefer diamonds.”

“We’d all prefer diamonds, but I’m limited by what my employers are willing to do.”

“How quickly can it be prepared?”

Sam considered this. “The race ends next Sunday, then I’ll go to Switzerland to set everything up. I can be back the following Wednesday. I’d guess that the banker could make it by Thursday. Will that work?”

Before returning home, Nabil set up a meeting with Daniel Kwambai, the man who had originally connected him to Ansar al-Islam. For the appropriate fees, Kwambai had been useful to Aslim Taslam, as well as to Al-Shabaab before Nabil and his comrades left.

They had met face-to-face a few times before, but this was Nabil’s first visit to one of Kwambai’s houses, a four-bedroom in the low hills north of the Karura Forest. In the comfort of his own house, fat Kwambai chain-smoked and sipped whiskey as if it were water. His house was full of representational art that made a mockery of Creation. It was an unnerving place to be.