A Gentleman's Game

4

London-Vauxhall Cross, Office of D-Ops 07 August 1807 GMT Normally, access to D-Ops was restricted. Those who wanted face time with Paul Crocker had to get past his personal assistant, Kate Cooke, and her desk in Crocker's outer office first, a labor most of the Intelligence staff considered not worth the result. Those who came to gaze upon Kate herself, widely considered the finest bird in SIS, left disappointed. Kate guarded her master's door with the same tenacious ferocity that the Royal Marines employed at embassy gates throughout the world.

Crocker had been assigned his first personal assistant immediately upon his promotion to Director of Operations, a fifty-six-year-old matron by the name of Gloria Bowen who had spent the preceding eleven years as lead pool secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee. Gloria didn't last the week, unable to keep pace with the spastic tempo of the office and, more critically, the legendary Crocker misanthropy.

None of the six assistants to follow fared any better, all chewed up and spat out over the next two months, until Personnel, housed on the fourth floor, found itself on the verge of conceding defeat.

Kate Cooke fell into the job almost by accident, jumping several more senior assistants in the process. She'd come to SIS as a clerk, working as a junior secretary on the South American Desk, where she was primarily responsible for trafficking the reports, memos, and pacts that made their way through the Intelligence infrastructure. Shortly after joining the SA Desk, she had been asked to rewrite a report delivered by the Argentine Number Two on possible troop movement in the Falklands region; she had objected. The objection turned into a shouting match, whereupon Kate had left the office, with report in hand, and walked it directly to Simon Rayburn herself.

Rayburn, about to brief the MOD on the very subject, had been grateful. Kate's Head of Section had not, and the next day she found herself transferred to SE-1168, Joint Operation Archives, housed off-site in a dismal basement in Whitehall.

It was Rayburn who had urged Kate to apply for the position of Crocker's PA, and it was Rayburn again who had prevailed upon Crocker to give the young woman a chance. Crocker had grudgingly agreed, as had Kate, and throughout their first week together the hallway leading to Crocker's office had echoed with his shouts, growls, and endless demands.

Kate had survived, primarily because she saw right through him, or thought she did. Crocker was demanding, he was overbearing, he was arrogant, he was outright rude, all these things were true. And while these traits sparked fear, loathing, and resentment in nine out of ten SIS staff, Kate didn't mind them in the least. She understood Crocker as a zealot, and her way to deal with him was to be just as zealous in her job in turn. He did not frighten her, and both understood that.

When Francis Barclay had become C, he had invited her to come work for him instead. Kate had politely declined, claiming that she preferred to work directly under a single master rather than on a team.

It was a half-truth. Kate had long ago decided that only two things would move her from her job: Crocker's own departure or a fortuitous marriage to an ungodly wealthy movie star. Since the latter did not seem to be forthcoming, she was content to stay.

"Besides," she'd told Crocker on more than one occasion, "without me, you'd fall apart."

To which Crocker had responded, characteristically, "Shut up." • It didn't surprise Crocker, therefore, to find Kate behind her desk when he entered the outer office after his meeting with C. Saturday early evening, God only knew how long it had taken her to make it to the office, but there she was, working away at her terminal, and the coffeemaker on the supply cabinet behind her was on, the carafe still filling.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded.

"I was bored," Kate said. "Minder One is waiting in your office."

Crocker glanced to the open door, saw Chace seated in front of his desk in the inner office, a file open on her lap. "How long has she been there?"

"She was here when I arrived." Kate stopped typing long enough to look from the monitor to him. "I made coffee."

"So you're good for something. Pull everything we've got on the HUM, Harakat ul-Mujihadin, including HUM-AA, and get it on my desk. Then get onto Cheng at Grosvenor Square, tell her we need to meet."

"She already called for you. She's with her ambassador until late, but she says she'll call when she's finished."

Crocker grunted, stepped into his office, and closed the door. Grunting again, this time in acknowledgment to Chace, he moved around behind his desk, taking off his suit coat and hanging it on the wobbly wooden stand in the corner. The inner office wasn't much larger than the outer, and spare. The desk was old, pitted beneath the blotter, its surface neat with everything in its place-two phones, one black for general calls, one red, used for urgent internal communications. With the press of a button, Crocker could reach the Ops Room, the Deputy Chief, Rayburn, C, or, should the situation warrant it, the Special Projects Team, SIS's commando unit. A terminal for use on the in-house network balanced the desk, and a small stack of folders waited in the in-tray.

Aside from the coat stand, there wasn't much more to see. A safe stood by the door, and beside it a rickety bookshelf with the latest editions of the various Jane's titles. A framed black-and-white print of a stylized Chinese dragon hung on the wall behind the desk, and two chairs sat opposite it, with a third backed into the far corner, beneath the window. Through the glass, a view of the Thames, and when Crocker looked, he could see thin black smoke still rising from Central London.

He took his seat, fishing his cigarettes and lighter from his vest pocket. He watched Chace as he lit one, and she closed the folder she had been reading and settled it back atop the stack in his tray. The folder was pink, stamped SECRET at the top with a bar code beside it, and beneath that was its title: "Impact Analysis-U.K. Commerce Zimbabwe, Q3-Current."

Crocker exhaled smoke, looking her over, frowning. "Your hands are green," he said.

"I was painting." Chace brushed hair behind an ear. "Who did it?"

"The BBC received a tape, apparently claiming responsibility. Looks like the HUM."

"HUM doesn't play in Western Europe. Certainly never has moved against us."

"I am well aware."

Chace pulled on her lower lip with her teeth for a moment. "You don't buy it?"

"I'd like to hear what the CIA has to say before we start making plans."

Chace nodded. "Lankford and Poole are in the Pit, pawing the ground like irate bulls. They want you to point them at someone."

"Not you?"

Chace shrugged, smiled by way of answer. When she smiled, she looked ten years younger than she truly was, and the weight of the job evaporated for a moment. Crocker saw the expression for what it was. Of course she was pawing the ground, of course she wanted the job. If the day's events had occurred when he had been Minder One, he'd have wanted it, too.

"May not be us, Tara." Crocker tapped the end of his cigarette into the square glass ashtray next to the phones. "Might be a military response."

Chace's smile grew a fraction, and she shook her head. "No, it won't, you and I both know that, Boss. Military action would require that another sovereign nation be held responsible, and if it's the HUM, we're not about to invade Pakistan."

"If that's where they're based."

"Farooq Kashmiri isn't anti-West as much as he's anti-India, isn't he?"

"If Kashmiri is still running the show. And that precludes confirming that it was the Abdul Aziz faction that we're dealing with, in which case we're now talking about invading Saudi Arabia, and that will never happen, as we both well know."

"More likely it's AA, then. Killing Londoners on the Underground, that doesn't really help to liberate Kashmir, does it?"

"No, it doesn't."

"So it's someone else. HUM-AA."

"Perhaps."

Chace shifted in the chair, brushed more hair back behind an ear. "If we're talking a job on foreign soil, I'm going to want Poole to back me up. I don't want a repeat of St. Petersburg."

"I just had this conversation with C. There is no job yet."

"But there will be."

"And again, I say perhaps." Crocker turned the cigarette in his fingers, knocked more ash into the tray, appraising her. "You're worried I won't give it to you."

The smile came back, almost sheepish.

"You don't have to worry," Crocker told her. "If there's someone we need to kill, you'll be the one to do it." • Chace's office, which she shared with the two other Minders, was near the end of a long and dull corridor in the first sublevel of the building. Also on the hall was a lavatory, a storage closet, three archives, and a very large, very secured room that housed perhaps one-quarter of the data-storage and computer servers used by the in-building network. As in the rest of the building, the rooms were marked in exactly the same fashion, with black plastic rectangles mounted to the left of each doorframe, declaring-as cryptically as possible-what lay within.

The plate beside the door to her office read "SB-01-213-S-Ops." Nowhere was the word "Minder," and nowhere was the word "Pit." Once, nearly four years ago, Kittering had decided to change that. Spurred by a fit of boredom, he'd come to work with a box of wax crayons and spent the better part of a very slow morning coaxing what few artistic skills he had onto paper. When he was finished, he had a multicolored cartoon of the three Minders at the time-himself, Chace, and Wallace-in a deep dark hole, over which, in ragged and bloodred letters, he'd inscribed the words "The Pit."

The cartoon had survived on the door of the office for almost a week before the Deputy Chief, on one of his walk-throughs of the building, had caught sight of the sign and torn it down himself. He'd then delivered an angry, if brief, lecture to them all on the need for departmental security and discretion, before heading back upstairs to complain to Crocker. They'd received a memo from the latter that afternoon reiterating the point.

Chace stopped at the door, hand out, ready to open it, remembering, and felt the echo of sadness swell briefly in her chest. She hadn't thought about Ed in a while, in almost six months. No, that wasn't quite true. If she was going to be honest with herself, she thought about Ed Kittering quite a bit; what was more accurate was that it had been almost half a year since the thinking of him had caused her pain.

Standing in the empty, anonymous hall outside the office, the pain was back, and it surprised Chace with its intensity. They'd carried on the affair out of the office, with as much discretion as they could muster, knowing that Wallace knew and disapproved, afraid that Crocker would know and bring the hammer down.

On the floors above, tandem couples-personnel involved with each other-were permitted, even encouraged. It made awkward questions easier when both parties knew what the other did for a living, when both parties knew the boundaries of their secrets, of their work. If analysts were sharing a bed, well, at least Internal Security, not to mention the folks at Box, knew who everyone was sleeping with, and as a result-to beat the metaphor to death-everyone could rest easier.

Not in Special Operations. Not when the two people creaking the bedsprings at night might be called upon the next day to parachute into northern Iraq, for instance. Not when one might be required to leave the other behind or, worse, leave nothing behind at all. In Paul Crocker's book that translated to an operational liability, and the Minders had enough of those already; he wasn't about to countenance personal feelings jeopardizing the job as well.

When she'd ended it, she'd known that Ed was in love with her, and was deathly afraid that she'd fallen in love with him. She'd tried to be precise and quick, to limit the pain for each of them, and of course had failed utterly. For the three months following the end of the affair, their interactions had been confined to tepid pleasantries in the office and almost no contact outside of the job.

Almost.

Exactly six weeks after she'd ended it, Chace had spent a Saturday in Camden, visiting the market, killing the day slowly by herself. Off Kentish Town Road she'd stopped in a pub for a pint and an early dinner, and there had been Ed, at a table in the corner, his back covered, a black-haired and far-too-young pretty thing half in his lap, her tongue alternately in his mouth and his ear, or so it seemed. Ed had seen her immediately, and for an infinite second they had stared at each other, caught in one of fate's crueler little bear traps.

Then Tara had left, and they had never spoken of it, and nine days later Ed was sent to Caracas to back up the station on a surveillance job, and two days after that he was discovered dead in his bed in the Caracas Hilton. There'd been no sign of foul play, no sign of violence, and when the autopsy was completed, cause of death was attributed to a cerebral aneurysm, to natural causes.

Chace shook the memory off, wondering why it had come back now, wondering if it was the death of the day or something else that was making her remember things she'd rather forget. She had a stack of folders beneath her arm, courtesy of D-Int by way of Kate, everything that could be scrounged up on HUM and its associations and activities, and it was brain-time now, not heart-time.

And she would be damned if she'd let Nicky Poole and Chris Lankford see their Minder One looking anything less than ready to do the job at hand. • "We were starting to think you'd been eaten," Poole said as Chace entered.

"And a tasty treat I'd be," Chase responded.

The Pit was aptly named, a cube of a room, dead-white cinderblock walls with no windows and poor ventilation, gray carpet that utterly failed to diminish the cruelty of the concrete floor beneath it. Each Minder's desk faced out from three of the walls, so that the Minder Two desk faced the door from the hall, and the Minder One desk, on the left as one entered, faced Minder Three's. The remaining space was occupied with two metal filing cabinets, a coat stand by the door, and a file safe, on top of which sat the go-bags, one for each agent. Inside each small duffel were the bare essentials-toiletries and clean underwear and socks. The only decorations were, above Minder Two's desk, an old dartboard, and above Minder Three's, a map of the world that had been printed in 1989.

Chace dumped the folders she carried onto the already cluttered surface of her desk. "The Boss was in with C when I got up there, kept me waiting for most of an hour."

"Are we on, then?" Lankford asked.

Chace began sorting the folders, speaking without looking up. "It's going to be a while, Chris, if there's going to be action at all."

"How long a while?"

"Days? Weeks? Months?" Chace finished breaking down the folders into their stacks, then picked up the stack closest to her and walked it across the room to Lankford's desk, handing it over. "Maybe never. Crocker says the response might be military."

"Then why the hell did they call us in? What are we supposed to do?" Lankford took the folders without looking away from her, and again, she could read the frustration in his gaze.

"It's hurry up and wait, you knew that was the job when you signed up. Months of sitting on your soft end punctuated by bouts of bowel-freeing panic. Just because the tragedy was local doesn't mean it moves any faster."

Lankford hesitated, frowned, then gave her a grudging nod of comprehension.

Chace gathered the second pile, dropped it with Poole, then returned to her desk.

"Harakat ul-Mujihadin, Abdul Aziz faction," she told them. "No positive ID yet, but it's the working theory. D-Ops wants anything useful, anything vaguely operational. Start reading."

Without a word, Poole and Lankford dove into the folders.

Chace took her seat, wooden and designed, it seemed, by one of England's crueler chiropractors, and began working through her own pile. Most of the information was already known to her, and the files served as a refresher course more than anything else.

The HUM began as the Harakat ul-Ansar, formed in central Punjab in Pakistan in the early 1980s by Islamic religious elements. The group almost immediately began sending fighters into Afghanistan to assist the Afghani Mujihadin in their war against the Soviet occupation. Fighters were recruited from both central Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and the CIA estimated up to five thousand troops had entered Afghanistan to join the fight by 1987, with recruitment funding coming from Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, including the bin Laden family.

As the war in Afghanistan progressed, more recruits were drawn from Muslim communities in other countries, including Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines, and of course Kashmir. Recruits were trained in camps set up in the Paktia province of Afghanistan and run by Hezb Islami (Khalis) Afghan Mujihadin leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who later went on to join the taleban leadership as Minister of Tribal Affairs.

The file noted that Haqqani was still alive and at liberty, presumably hiding in the mountains of western Pakistan.

Following its initial entry into the conflict, the HUM established its own camps in Afghan territory, and Chace found herself leafing through old satellite surveillance shots, views of tents and training courses, and clusters of men engaged in all manner of paramilitary training. The camps were constructed just across the Miran Shah in the NWFP, and declassified Russian intelligence stated that some of the Soviet army's fiercest opposition had come from HUM-trained soldiers.

After the Mujihadin taking of Kabul in 1992 and the establishment of the taleban government, the HUA merged with the Harakat ul-Jihad-al-Islami, another Afghani partisan organization, and took the new name Harakat ul-Mujihadin, now directing its energies to defending the rights of Muslims all over the world. It expanded operations to those same countries it had drawn recruits from, and added Chechnya, Bosnia, and Tajikistan for good measure.

In the aftermath of the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Americans launched cruise missile attacks at the HUM training camps, and then again during the Coalition action in Afghanistan, virtually destroying the groups' training infrastructure and scattering its various elements. D-Int's assessment, and here Chace found a corresponding CIA analysis, was that the HUM had been driven out of Afghanistan entirely and pursued underground in Pakistan. Given the activity in the region, and the HUM's ideological similarities to other radical Islamist-read Wahhabist-organizations, it was likely that those HUM elements still surviving had been absorbed into other militant groups throughout the region.

It was out of these surviving elements that the Abdul Aziz faction was believed to have been born, founded by Sheikh Abdul Aziz Sa'id, an Arab of unknown origin who had been linked to Muslim extremist organizations throughout the Middle and Far East. Abdul Aziz was suspected of supplying material and support to al-Qaeda operatives in northern Africa, as well as providing the Semtex used in the recent Jamaat al-Islamiyya bombings in Micronesia.

As with all such organizations, information on HUM finances was hard to come by. It was known that the HUM took donations from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf and Islamic states, as well as from individuals and organizations inside Pakistan and Kashmir. Rayburn noted that the HUM also solicited donations via magazine advertisements and through pamphlets, videotapes, and the like. The extent of the group's holdings was unknown, but since the crackdown in Pakistan in late 2001, it was assumed much of its money had been redirected into more legitimate ventures-real estate, commodities trading, and the production of consumer goods.

Chace shut the last folder and sat back, rubbing her eyes. Her watch now read nine minutes to ten, and she realized that she was both tired and ravenous.

"You find anything in the circulars?" she asked Poole.

Poole looked up from his file, shook his head slowly. He was a big man, perfect for rugby or leg-breaking, and, if he was to be believed, had spent much of his youth doing both. He certainly was adept with violence, though whether that was a result of his time in the SAS or something else seated far deeper, Chace didn't know and, in fact, labored to avoid drawing conclusions. It mattered less where the Minders were from than what they could learn, and Chace herself was living proof of that. Everything in her own upbringing and education should have led her to a good marriage and a proper job, and yet here she was.

Still, of any Minder she had ever known, it was Poole who looked most like the thugs Whitehall and the FCO and all the rest took the Special Section to be. He wasn't, of course; Crocker would suffer no bullies and no violence junkies, gourmet cooking notwithstanding. Chace trusted and respected Poole, all the more since he hadn't batted an eye when Tom had left and they had all shifted desks anticlockwise, with Tara taking the first chair. Poole treated her exactly as he had treated Wallace, and Chace was grateful for that.

"No mention of HUM, no mention of anything brewing targeted at us." Poole pushed aside the folders on his desk and pulled open his desk drawer, rummaging about. "Unless something got dropped through the cracks, this one was a complete surprise."

"I'm not sure I like that very much," Chace said.

"Suppose it could be a good sign, at least with regard to follow-ups. You have to figure if they moved more than three men into England, someone somewhere would have noticed something."

"You're putting a lot of faith in the boys at Box."

"I am a pillar of faith," Poole said, smiling now, with a rubber band dangling from an index finger and a paper clip held between two others.

"Christ, I hate this," Lankford said abruptly. "I bloody hate this."

Chace canted her head toward him, curious. "All fired up, are you, Chris?"

"If you're asking if I want a chance to hit back for this, that's a no-brainer, Tara. I'd give a year's pay for a crack at these bastards."

"And who, exactly, would you hit, Chris? Any suggestions? Unless you're planning on taking on the whole of the Harakat ul-Mujihadin? And that's assuming, of course, that it was the HUM and not someone else."

Lankford's chair groaned with dismay as he tilted back in it, looking to Poole, trying to conceal a growing frown. "You know that's not what I meant. I'm talking about cutting off the head, not taking pieces out of the body."

"You're talking about assassination."

He looked back to Chace, and his expression surprised her with its certainty. "Absolutely," he said.

Chace didn't respond, instead glancing to Poole, who was studiously avoiding involvement in the conversation by tilting back in his chair and trying to snatch the darts embedded in the board above him with the makeshift grappling hook he'd made from the rubber band and the paper clip. She didn't know his stories, but the action told her that Poole understood, in the same way that Lankford's certainty made it clear that the new Minder Three didn't.

After a moment, Chace said, "If it comes, it'll be D-Ops who tasks it, not us. We just complete the mission, we don't lobby for the action."

"Won't be you, anyway, Chris," Poole said, snagging one of the darts and then quickly scooting his chair back as the missile fell, point down, to the floor. "If they call for a hit, it'll go to Minder One, with me as backup."

"Because I'm the baby?"

Poole grinned at Lankford over his shoulder. "That's right."

"It's academic," Chace interposed. "It'll be weeks before anything is authorized, and that's if anything is authorized. They'll want to be damn sure we're going after the right people before initiating any op."

Lankford's frown deepened. "Then what the hell are we doing here?"

"Nothing productive. If you boys want to shove off, I've no problem with it."

Poole grunted and tilted his chair forward, getting to his feet almost immediately. "You'll tell the Watch?"

Chace nodded.

Poole moved past, fetching his coat from the stand.

"The Boss won't think we're ditching?" Lankford asked.

Chace shook her head. If Crocker had a problem with her turning Poole and Lankford loose, he'd bring it to her, not to them. And Chace doubted that he would have a problem. The fact was, until there was more data, until there was a mission in the offing, the three of them were just killing time. And time didn't seem inclined to die without a struggle, not while all London was still holding its breath.

Lankford hesitated, looked from her to Poole, watching the big man pull on his coat before rising to follow suit.

"For what it's worth," he told Chace, "if he asks, tell him I'll do the job."

"Of course you will, Chris," Chace told him. "That's why you're here." Preoperational Background Leacock, William D. Some nights, before plummeting into his exhausted sleep, Sinan bin al-Baari would stare at the shadowed ceiling of the tent and think about names.

At twenty-two years old, he had already gone through two, not counting the odd handful that had served as covers or other deceptions, or the dozens that had been thrown unkindly in his direction throughout his youth. He had been christened William Leacock, but that name was long dead to him, and when his thoughts did stray to it-something that happened less and less frequently these days-it seemed to him the name of a boy he had known only briefly and had not much liked.

Then he had found Allah and taken the name Shuneal bin Muhammad, as was appropriate to one who had found the True Faith. It was the name he'd used upon reaching Egypt, during the months he'd spent studying in Cairo. It was the student's name, and though he would never be mistaken for an Arab, by that name he was always known as a Muslim. It was that student who had entered his first madrassa, had read ibn Abdul Wahhab's Book of Tawhid. It was that student who had begun collecting the cassette tapes sold outside of mosques throughout Cairo, sermons by the great Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia. In his room, shared with Aamil and six other students, they had listened to the tapes for hours. To the sermons of the late Abdul Aziz bin Baz, to the passion of Sheikh Wajdi Hamzeh al-Ghazawi, to the fury of Sheikh Safar al-Hawali, and, most of all, to the faith of Dr. Faud al-Shimmari.

It was Shuneal bin Muhammad who had first heard jihad described as the Sixth Pillar of Islam. It was Shuneal bin Muhammad who had nodded his head in agreement at al-Ghazawi's words when his recorded voice said, "Jihad is the peak of Islam."

It was Shuneal bin Muhammad who, with Aamil and two others, had begun lurking in the mosques and cafes of Cairo in the vain hope of making contact with some member of the Jamaat al-Islamiyya. But although Shuneal bin Muhammad was a Muslim, even perhaps a Wahhabist, he was not, and would never be, an Egyptian. After three months of fruitless attempts at contact, it had been a lean and quiet man named el-Sayd who had explained it to him in the back of a Cairo cafe, off Sharia Muski, in the Islamic Quarter.

"We fight to free our country," el-Sayd had said quietly. "We fight to overthrow this government of mushrikun, to make Egypt a true Islamic state. That is not your fight, Shuneal, and you have no place in it."

"I want to be a jihadi," Shuneal had answered in his best Arabic, the tongue finally beginning to sound natural on his lips. "I am a Muslim, and I must follow all the teachings, and you would deny me the Sixth Pillar of our faith. If you will not take me, where do I go?"

El-Sayd had started to answer, then bitten it back, instead finishing his coffee. Shuneal bin Muhammad had waited, unmoving in his seat, staring. Aamil, seated beside him, seemed to barely breathe.

"Continue your studies," el-Sayd had said finally. "Be true in your faith. Allah, all praise to Him, will provide a way."

And with that, Shuneal and Aamil were escorted out of the cafe, to return to the madrassa with their disappointment.

Less than a week later, the imam of the school spoke to Shuneal and Aamil after isha', the evening prayer.

"You are favored," he told them both. "Prince Salih bin Muhammad bin Sultan, may Allah watch and keep him, has offered to bring certain of our students to Madinah, that they may make the Hajj. You have both been chosen." • Sponsorship for the Hajj wasn't unusual, but Shuneal felt fortunate nonetheless. To properly perform the Fifth Pillar-to make the pilgrimage to Makkah-was to guarantee one's entry into Paradise, the desire of every Muslim. That Shuneal and Aamil had found a benefactor was remarkable; that such good fortune fell upon them at such a young age was extraordinary. There were millions who, in their lives, would never have the opportunity to see Makkah, to walk in the Prophet's shadow, prevented by either poverty or other provenance.

Near the end of January, Shuneal and Aamil flew from Cairo to Madinah in a private jet, supplied by Prince Salih bin Muhammad bin Sultan. Eighteen others traveled with them, young madrassa students like themselves, gathered from other schools in Egypt, Tunisia, and Sudan.

The jet was like nothing Shuneal had ever experienced, and it spoke loudly of the Prince's generosity and wealth, from the walnut-inlaid fixtures to the thick red carpeting on the floor and the marble-topped counters in the bathroom. They sat on comfortable couches and in overstuffed chairs, and Aamil drove the blood from his hands as he clutched the armrests of his seat when the plane climbed into the air, and Shuneal realized he had never flown before.

At the airport, they were met by a guide from the Prince himself. He escorted them to an air-conditioned coach, then drove them to a private home in Madinah. There they were given rooms to share and a meal to eat, then taken to Masjid al-Nabee, the Mosque of the Holy Prophet, for prayers and the recitation of ziyrat. Kneeling toward Makkah, so close to the Holy City, Shuneal found it impossible to clear his head, to focus on his worship. Here, where it was said that one prayer was worth more than a thousand prayers offered anywhere else, except in Makkah, he felt insincere, and the more he fought his mind to concentrate and focus, the more obsessed with his thoughts he became.

After the mosque, they returned to their lodgings, to settle in for the night. There were rumors that Prince Salih would be coming to greet them, to receive their thanks, and Shuneal imagined the encounter, practicing the different things he might say. He wanted to make a good impression, to show that he was humble and sincere, that he was grateful for this opportunity to mark his place in Paradise.

But it was not the Prince who came to visit them that night at all, but a man named Abdul Aziz. He arrived late, nearly one in the morning, and of the sixteen students in the house, all were asleep and had to be awakened. They were brought into the dining room of the home, told to sit on the floor and to listen.

Abdul Aziz was a short man, dressed in a simple white cotton thobe and a white-and-red-checkered kuffiyah held in place on his head with the traditional black wool igaal. His face was hard, as if set and blasted by the kiln-heat of the desert, and Shuneal studied the starburst scar on his left jaw that shone in the low light of the room. The look Abdul Aziz ran over the students as each took a seat was critical, if not nakedly suspicious.

"I am Abdul Aziz," he told them. "You have come to Madinah to reach the Fifth Pillar, and I am here to tell you of the Sixth. I am no imam, I can teach you nothing. You seek to secure your place in Paradise, but I tell you that my place is already ensured. You will walk with your brothers, but in your heart, look to yourself and ask if this is all that Allah, all praise Him, would have of you. What more can you give to His glory? What more can you give to your brothers, oppressed and hunted by Satan even today?

"You will stone the three Jamrah, you will strike at Satan, and when you do, see not stones, but see the enemies of Islam. See the Big Satan and the Little Satan, and ask yourself if a stone is enough, and ask yourself if there isn't more Allah, all praise Him, would have of you.

"I will be here when you return. And if you are righteous, and if I have seen that righteousness in you, I will show you the way to the Sixth Pillar." • On the eighth day of Dhul-Hijah, they began their pilgrimage, purifying themselves as directed, donning their ihram, the unsewn white garments that stripped away their status, their wealth, their identity, making them all equal before God. One of almost two million, Shuneal made the pilgrimage to Makkah and came to the Holy Mosque, the most sacred place on earth. Right foot first, he entered the Ka'bah and spoke the words, "In the name of Allah, may peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of Allah. Oh Allah, forgive me my sins and open to me the doors of Your mercy. I seek refuge in Allah the Almighty and in His Eminent Face and in His Eternal Domination from the accursed Satan."

With crowds at his sides, gently jostling him, he approached the Black Stone, the stone that was given to Adam upon his fall from Paradise, the stone that was once white but had turned black with the sins absorbed from the millions of pilgrims who had touched its smooth surface. He touched the stone and spoke as was proper, "In the name of Allah, Allah is the greatest. Oh Allah, with faith in You, belief in Your book, loyalty to You, faith to the way of Your Prophet Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him."

Then he walked, keeping the Ka'bah to his left, seven times around the Holy Mosque, first with the small steps meant to increase his pace, three times, and then four times at his normal speed. Reaching the Rukn Al Yamani, he touched it, saying, "Our Lord, grant us good in this life, and good in the hereafter, and save us from the torment of the Hellfire. Oh Allah, I beg of You forgiveness and health in this life and in Paradise."

Each time he passed the Black Stone, he said, "Allah is the greatest."

He did all these things, and while he believed in everything he did, he did not feel what he hoped he would feel, the transcendence, the oneness, the peace. Try as he might, Shuneal found his brain cluttered again, cluttered with too many thoughts, too worried about how he looked from without rather than within, and he cursed himself for squandering this opportunity.

He ran seven times between Mount Safa and Mount Marwah, giving prayers as he reached the summit of each, and they were hardly mountains now at all, mere bumps in the terrain, but he ran between them as was required, and others ran with him. He listened as the other pilgrims around him gave their thanks to Muhammad and to Allah, and he wondered at following the Prophet's footsteps in this way, wondered if they were not, perhaps, deifying the Prophet himself, and this troubled him.

The second stage of the Hajj began, and Shuneal and almost two million others made their way to those holy places outside Makkah, to Mina first, praying as was required of him, and then the next morning to Arafat, entering the Namira Mosque to hear the sermon and to pray to Allah over and over again, until his back ached from the motion and his legs felt cramped folded beneath his body. Around him others broke away from their supplication, engaged in quiet conversation, reading silent passages from the Qu'ran. But Shuneal found strength in his prayers, here, in the words, "There is no God but Allah, He has no equal. All dominion and praise are His, and His power is absolute over all things," and he supplicated himself until the sun had all but vanished from the horizon.

Without rest, he left Arafat the same night, making his way with a thinning crowd to Muzdalifah, and arriving just before midnight, with barely enough time to spare to pray. He offered thanks and supplications to Allah until just before sunrise, and though he had taken water on the journey, he felt himself wearied and weakened, his head felt light, and his thoughts wandered again. But this time they wandered not with his doubts but with his thoughts on Paradise and Allah and the Will of God. His worship had distanced him from his body.

Just before sunrise, Aamil helped him to his feet, and the two young men made their way slowly back to Mina. Taking the pebbles they had gathered, they reached the first pillar, the Jamrah al-Aqaba, the one standing closest to Makkah, and they threw their stones at Satan himself, and Shuneal put what strength he had left in him into his arm as he let each fly, and with each throw he said, "God is the greatest," his voice intense and cracking.

He watched the pebbles bounce harmlessly from the Jamrah, and he felt himself begin to weep.

He understood. Satan was not a pillar. Satan would not be stopped with a pebble. Shuneal looked on the Jamrah and saw instead his parents in Sheffield, complacent and arrogant in their simplicity; he saw Americans rolling into Baghdad and the British rolling into Basra; he saw Coalition bombs falling on Afghanistan; he saw Israeli rockets in Gaza.

He threw his pebbles and offered his choked prayer, and when he had thrown the last, he bent to scoop more, enraged, and Aamil had to stop him then, to grab his hands and pull him away, telling him to be calm, that he understood, that he had seen it as well. Shuneal trembled with the anger, the effort of self-control, and though he could once again see the Jamrah for what it was, the image remained dancing before his eyes. Even as he ate of the goat that had been prepared, even as Aamil and he and the others shaved the hair from their heads, he found himself swimming in memories of fire and blood.

"How do you fight Satan?" he asked Aamil insistently.

"With everything," his friend answered. • Shuneal completed the Hajj, returning again to the Ka'bah, making the prescribed circuits once again, finishing the pilgrimage as it had been completed for over a thousand years. He and the others returned to Madinah, back to the house that Prince Salih had arranged for their comfort. All of them, it seemed, had been touched by their journey, each feeling its effects in privately profound ways. Some of the students, freed from the weight of their pilgrimage, began to laugh and joke again, talking of what they had seen and experienced, speaking of what they would do upon returning to Egypt. Their time was almost at an end, their visas, specially acquired for them by the Prince himself, soon to expire.

The impending departure filled Shuneal with a growing sense of despair. He had tried Egypt already and had been told there was no place for him there. He was not an Egyptian, not even an Arab, just a Muslim. After the past two weeks with other pilgrims, wrapped in the ihram, he had forgotten such distinctions mattered. But returning to Cairo reminded him, and he did not want to leave.

So when Abdul Aziz came to the house for a second time, Shuneal knew it was his only chance. • A cassette player rested on the dining table this time, and once everyone was seated and still, Abdul Aziz moved to it and, without a word, set the tape to play.

The voice that filled the room was immediately familiar to Shuneal.

"You who have come to make Hajj, give thanks to Allah, all praise to Him," Dr. Faud bin Abdullah al-Shimmari told them. His voice crackled, distorted through the tiny speaker on the cassette player. "You who have come to secure your place in Paradise, know that you have spared yourself Hellfire. You have achieved the fifth pillar of our faith, but there is a sixth, and who of you dare to reach it?

"To be muwahhidun, to be the greatest advocates of oneness, should be your highest aspiration. Jihad is a great deed, indeed, and there is no deed whose blessing, whose reward, is that of it. For this reason, if none other, it is the greatest thing you, any of you, can volunteer for.

"The warrior who gives his life in a true jihad becomes shahid, guaranteed that rarest place in Paradise. You must rub the sleep from your eyes, my brothers, and rise to jihad! Find the ember in your soul, and let your breath give life to the flame! Let that flame feed your hatred of those who defile and damn us, of those Jews and Christians and infidels who would steal from you that which is yours, your future as the One True Religion! We know the Jews are the objects of Allah's avowed wrath, all praises sung unto Him, while the Christians have long since fallen from the path of righteousness. The Qu'ran tells us the Jews are a nation cursed by Allah, a nation he turned into apes and pigs, who worship idols.

"You live in great times, the days before the Days of Judgment, with civilizations in conflict, with the civilization of the corrupt West on the verge of collapse. While the West seeks to steal our youth from us, to diminish our heritage as the One True Religion, we see they are weak, immoral, and corrupt. The battle before you is not one simply of ideas, but one to be fought with bloodshed, with the rifle, the airplane, the word, the bomb. This is a new phase in our great Crusade, to accelerate that collapse, to return in kind a thousandfold what they have laid at our feet.

"Allah will take revenge against the tyrants with His sword in this world, and in the world to come. We beseech Allah to grant Mujihadin everywhere speedy victory, and forsake America, and those who help and are allies with her, and bring destruction upon her and her friends. It is Allah's will, and it will be done.

"Allah's prayers upon you, you who would be jihadi." • The silence after the tape ended was heavy, broken only by the sound of their breathing, the students seated on the floor. Abdul Aziz did not move, letting the cassette run out, and there was a shocking snap as the button on the player popped up once more. From the corner of his eye, Shuneal saw several of the students start at the noise, surprised.

Abdul Aziz took the cassette player from the table, tucked it beneath his arm, and, still without uttering a word, turned and walked out of the room. Shuneal could hear him moving away, the echo of his steps on the tile floor, and then the sound of the door opening and closing. Around him, other students exchanged looks of confusion and loss.

Shuneal moved first, taking a step forward, then stopping, looking back. Aamil, still seated, hesitated, then rose to follow. Shuneal heard the rustle of cloth as more of the students got to their feet, but he didn't wait, and he didn't look back, now moving faster, suddenly afraid that Abdul Aziz wouldn't wait for him. He reached the door, pushed it open, and rushed out into the cool Madinah night.

Abdul Aziz stood at the back of the battered military surplus truck that had pulled up outside. Canvas covered the sides and back of the bed, but as Shuneal approached, Abdul Aziz reached up and drew it back, then pulled the latch and dropped the gate. Shuneal started forward, reached out to hold on to the side of the vehicle to help pull himself inside, but Abdul Aziz put a hand on his breast, a forceful pressure just short of a push.

"Give me your name, boy."

"Shuneal. Shuneal bin Muhammad."

Abdul Aziz's face broke into an amused smile and the shining scar on his jaw seemed to climb to reach his eye. "You are British?"

"I am a Muslim."

"Do you still have your passport?"

Shuneal couldn't understand why it mattered. "Yes, with my belongings."

"In the house?"

"Yes." Shuneal dropped his hand from where he was still gripping the side of the truck, felt a swell of desperation so acute and so sudden, he was afraid it would bring him to tears. When he spoke, he tried to keep the whine from his voice. "Please, I understand. I understand what you told us, before we made the pilgrimage, I saw it, I saw the Jamrah, Abdul Aziz. I saw it."

"I know." He said it with such flat conviction that Shuneal realized all at once that Abdul Aziz had been watching him throughout the Hajj. "Shuneal bin Muhammad?"

"Yes, the name I took when I avowed my faith."

"No, no more."

Abdul Aziz reached out and took hold of Shuneal's still newly shaven head in a surprisingly strong grip, and turned him to face Aamil and the others who had come outside.

"See your brother," Abdul Aziz said. "He has the heart of a jihadi, and I give him the name of one now, the name Sinan bin al-Baari. The spearhead of God."

He released his grip.

"Get on the truck," Abdul Aziz ordered.

And Sinan bin al-Baari, who had been Shuneal bin Muhammad and who had been christened William Dennis Leacock, climbed aboard and began his long trip to his new home in the Wadi-as-Sirhan.