The Caliphate, André Gallo [best books to read ever .TXT] 📗

     “Well, I can tell you also that my father has the greatest respect for you.”

***

The next day Abdelhaq took Steve to the airport at five a.m. for his Air France flight to Paris. Abdelhaq’s people, in plainclothes, were on both the public and the passengers-only sides of the passport check-in booth and security control area. Steve was wearing his disguise. Steve went through police and customs control with his fake passport with no problems.

     Abdelhaq took Steve to the VIP lounge and took his Canadian passport.

     “It will be easier for you now to travel under your true name. Ian Ross is registered on our airport records as having left Morocco today. That fills our need. If anyone is looking, you are still here. By the way, did I tell you that we arrested Benjelloun and his crew, the team that tried to shoot you? After we knew from you that they had been in Khemisett, it was easy to find them.”

     “Was that the whole cell? Is everyone under lock and key?” Steve asked.

     “Unfortunately, the leaders, one named Hussein, a Syrian, and Lahlou, a Moroccan, were able to leave the country. We’re dealing with the most dangerous and the most ambitious Salafist group. Their leader is Tariq al Khalil. He sometimes masquerades as a moderate intellectual, as you know.”

     “Al Khalil again!” Steve cried out.

     He told Abdelhaq how al Khalil’s name had come up during his lunch with Colonel Spaceck.

     “Today, we asked your embassy to send their defense attaché home. That was your friend Spaceck. He was part of the problem. It seems that he fingered you to Benjelloun as a CIA officer.”

     Steve, eyebrows raised in surprise, said “Why the hell would he say that? I never had a good feeling about that guy. He seemed out for the main chance. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was just the tip of the iceberg.”

    Steve’s flight number was called out over the loudspeaker as boarding. Abdelhaq briefly gripped his upper arm and said, “I want to thank you for the part you played in getting rid of this Salafist cell. It’s not over but we’ve a got on line on the others. We’ve gotten you a seat in first class, by the way.”

     He gave him a fatherly hug and told him to convey his greetings to Marshall.

***

Steve sat back in the Air Bus that would take him to Paris on the first leg of his trip back to the United States. As the two Pratt & Whitney 6122 engines lifted the aircraft up to its cruising altitude of thirty-thousand feet, Steve became aware of his heartbeat—it was normal for the first time in several days. He felt good he had been able to draw the Salafists out of their holes, even if it was only by playing the role of the tethered goat Abdelhaq had chosen for him. He had taken a measured risk, which he now realized had been based on false information, that Abdelhaq’s men would protect him. But he had made his own luck.

     Later, on his connecting flight to Washington Dulles Airport from Charles de Gaulle, he realized he had learned something else about himself. Being a successful businessman would never be enough. He needed to be a part of something bigger.

13. Timbuktu, Mali

Al Khalil entered the impoverished town of mud and sand and likened its decay to the decay of Islam. He knew that twenty-first-century Timbuktu was a far cry from its days as a center of trade and scholarship. A visitor needed to bring the history of Timbuktu with him or be disappointed.

     The Malian Office of Tourism claimed that the oldest Islamic law library in the world was in Timbuktu. Although the United Nations and private foundations were providing resources to keep this institution from disappearing completely, it was only a dusty shadow of its former self.

     Al Khalil found it hard to imagine that the town had once been fabulously wealthy and that pirogues loaded with gold from the Malinke Empire of Sundiata Keita had once come up the Niger River to meet the caravans from Libya and Egypt carrying spices and other goods.

     His cover, his front organization, was the International Muslim Relief Agency. His office occupied a mud-walled building distinguished from similar buildings only by a green banner with the initials IMRA. Warm breezes pulled on the banner’s loose ties.

     The day after al Khalil’s return to Timbuktu, Mamadou Diallo, his moneyman in Mali, came to report. The year before, Diallo had brought the director of the Morila goldmine on board. The mine had an output of eight-hundred-million dollars that year, and Diallo made sure that a ten-percent “tithe” was embezzled and placed in Tariq’s Swiss bank account. There were gold mines on the other side of the Guinean border to the south and west of Timbuktu as well, and he hoped to be able to work similar arrangements there.

     He stepped around people waiting outside in the shade of the building and went into the IMRA offices past a guard sitting in the in the open doorway. The IMRA offices were surprisingly well furnished, a step up from the bare Malian Government offices. Several Afghan rugs were on the floor, Arabic posters of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque and Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock hung on the walls and, instead of the usual photograph of the current Malian president on the highest place on the wall, green Islamic calligraphy spelled out the word “Allah.”

     Diallo walked by the case handlers talking to their applicants and knocked on the door to an internal office. He wiped the sweat from his face on the sleeve of his mud-cloth bubu before walking in. He exchanged greetings with al Khalil and went to an open case of water bottles in the corner of