Jihad

CHAPTER 83

Friday afternoon prayers were held in a storefront mosque, a humble, shabby building at the outer edge of Detroit. The brothers, about two dozen in all, were mostly young men whose fathers had immigrated; to a man they were struggling to find their way in their ancestors’ faith.

Asad, who had passed through a similar challenge himself, noted how carefully the imam answered their questions. The man was not the most eloquent — he rambled and at times lost the thread of his thoughts — but he had studied with the right teachers and lived in Afghanistan for a time, before the triumph of 9/11 had brought the struggle to the next phase. His message to the small congregation was a strong one, even if his sentences were not: the Followers of God must do all that they could to survive the Devil’s onslaught.

A call to arms, yet one that could not be faulted by the most severe police spy.

“This way, sheik,” Kenan told Asad as the others began filing out.

Asad followed him to a back room and then down a set of creaking steps to a dank basement populated with cobwebs. For a moment his faith deserted him. Asad worried that he had been betrayed, brought here to die. He tensed, waiting for the inevitable blow even as he followed Kenan into a pitch-black room.

The young man retrieved a small flashlight from his pocket. Its dim beacon fluttered across a floor of bare dirt, picking its way across cement blocks and an assortment of dilapidated pieces of wood.

I am walking through the outer precincts of hell, Asad thought. The devil will tempt me and test my courage, but I will not fail.

Kenan stopped before a large metal door. He held up his hand to Asad, gesturing that he should be silent. Then he knocked twice. The door swung open; light flooded into Asad’s eyes. When he blinked, a man with an M16 stood in front of him.

“Muhammad’s Lion is here to join us,” Kenan told the man with the gun, his hushed voice full of reverence.

The man stepped back.

The room looked like the inside of an expensive coffee-house in Egypt. It smelled of sweet tobacco, though none of the dozen occupants were smoking. As Asad entered, all of the men rose quickly, bowing their heads and even closing their eyes in respect. Asad had personally chosen only Kenan and Nathan Green; the others had been selected by the imam, with some additional vetting by another al-Qaeda operative.

“Sheik, we have waited night and day for your return!” thundered Nathan. A short and stocky man whose light-skinned face had the look of a jester, Nathan was given to overblown rhetoric and superlatives. But he was dependable, and as far as Asad could tell from their encounters, sincere though emotional.

They embraced.

“We are safe here,” said Nathan. “Let me show you.”

He gestured at one of the brothers nearby, who produced a small radiolike device and began waving it around the air. “For bugs,” added Nathan.

Asad, appreciating that his host was attempting to be discreet, smiled and held out his hands. “You must check me like you check everyone. There should be no margin for error.”