14

Beirut, Lebanon

The motorcade finally departed the airport grounds.

Jacques Miroux, following the Mahdi in a rented compact Renault, expected the entourage to head directly up Hafez El Asad Drive, where hundreds of thousands of Lebanese lined both sides of the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of their beloved Twelfth Imam as he made his way to Beirut’s largest stadium to deliver a major address. But at the last moment, to his surprise, the Mahdi’s SUV and the six other vehicles filled with heavily armed bodyguards diverted off the expected path, heading north on Al Imam El Khomeini Boulevard. A few minutes later, they turned northwest and made an unscheduled detour and stop inside the Shatila refugee camp.

It was a brilliant move, Miroux realized instantly—bold, risky, unconventional, and populist to its core. It was exactly what a typical head of state wouldn’t do. Indeed, he couldn’t think of a single world leader—especially an Arab leader—who had ever visited the twelve thousand impoverished souls crammed into the one square kilometer that was the Shatila refugee camp. The Mahdi was going to identify directly with the Palestinian cause. He was going to see and feel and touch and smell the misery of these refugees, and in so doing he was likely to win not only the hearts of the four hundred thousand or so Palestinians living in Lebanon but of the nearly four million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the nearly three million in Jordan, the million and a half living in Israel proper, the million living in Syria, and the pockets of Palestinians living in nearly every other country in the Middle East and North Africa.

Sure enough, as word spread through the camp of what was happening, Miroux watched the place become electrified. Thousands of Palestinian boys and girls, dirt-poor but smiling and cheering, came running to the motorcade, shouting, “The Holy One has come! The Holy One has come!”

The bodyguards assigned by the Lebanese government to protect the Mahdi scrambled to take up positions and attempted to build a corridor of protection around their principal. But as the Mahdi stepped out of the SUV, he ignored their movements and their counsel and immediately plunged into the throng. The crowd went wild. Mothers, clad head to foot in black chadors and holding babies in their arms, came running, as did fathers and sons, all of them unemployed, few of them sacrificing anything more important to do.

The crowd pressed in closer and closer. They tried to touch the Mahdi. They tried to kiss his hands and feet. The elderly and infirm tried to get close, hoping to touch the hem of his garment, that their ailments might be healed, and Miroux wrote furiously in his notepad to get it all down.

He noted that the Mahdi didn’t try to speak but for a few words of thanks and appreciation to those nearest to him. The crowds wouldn’t have been able to hear him anyway, but they loved him.

* * *

Ahmed was only eleven.

He was playing soccer with his friends near the trash dump when he heard the rumor come rifling through the camp. Could it really be? he wondered. Could the Lord of the Age be near us? Could he really be walking among us? It seemed impossible.

Ahmed had no access to a television. His parents could not afford any books. All they had was a Qur’an, and he studied it morning and night. He knew he was not that bright; his father told him constantly. Still, he was trying to memorize it all. His memory was terrible, certainly compared to his older brothers. But he wanted to learn. He wanted to be faithful. What more could he do? He prayed constantly for Allah to have mercy on him. It seemed impossible. He was only a poor Palestinian refugee. Forgotten by the world. Alone and scared. What could he do for Allah but perhaps one day join Hezbollah and become a martyr waging jihad against the Zionists?

He picked up his soccer ball and took off running, leaving his less-devout friends bewildered and screaming after him to come back or at least leave them the ball. But the ball was his only worldly possession. And he knew what he had to do. Down one muddy, sewage-filled alley after another he ran, as fast as his little legs could take him. He was smaller than most children his age, and when he saw the enormous crowd near the center of the camp, his first instinct was to cry. He would never get close enough to see the Mahdi.

Fighting back tears, determined not to give up, Ahmed pushed together several empty crates lying nearby and used them to climb up on the corrugated tin roof of a makeshift medical clinic. Scrambling to the top, he stood on his tiptoes and found himself in awe of what lay before him. There were masses of people as far as the eye could see—and more coming from every direction. People were chanting praises to Allah at the top of their lungs. He counted six—no, wait, seven—white vehicles in the center, nearly engulfed by the crowd, and figured that had to be where the Mahdi was. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t see the one he had come for. Nor could he imagine a way to get closer.

Suddenly, he saw in the swirling dust something hovering in the sky over the center of the crowd, something almost glowing, right over where he was sure the Mahdi must be standing. It was a figure of some kind, Ahmed realized, bathed in a yellowish-white light. He had never seen anything more beautiful. Then, to his amazement, the apparition seemed to turn and look at him directly. And then it began to speak.

“Ahmed, do you know who I am?”

“I do not, my Lord,” the boy replied, trembling.

“I am the angel Gabriel, Ahmed. I have come to proclaim to you the one you seek, the one over whom I now stand, is the Promised One, and you shall be his servant, the servant of the ruler of the Caliphate now rising. Submit to him, Ahmed, and you shall live.”

* * *

Miroux saw it and was mesmerized.

Not that he wanted to be. He didn’t. He wasn’t religious. Far from it. He’d been raised near Lyon by atheist parents, who taught him from his childhood that religion was dangerous, anti-intellectual, a crutch for the masses, and a game for the foolish, the poor, and the hypocrites. For him, covering the Twelfth Imam was a fascinating diversion from typical stories about wars and rumors of wars and peace talks that never went anywhere. This story, he believed, was about the rise of a new political leader in a tumultuous political environment. The man was building a new Caliphate, an Islamic kingdom, or so he claimed. Few people in the West had ever heard of Muhammad Ibn Hasan Ibn Ali even a month earlier. Now he was a rock star.

But this was different. This was strange. This was news, but would anyone, his editors included, actually believe him? He grabbed his digital camera and started snapping pictures, and to his shock, when he checked the result on the viewfinder, the ghostly image hovering over the Mahdi was as plain as day.

* * *

Langley, Virginia

Director Allen turned to Eva.

“Now let’s get back to Dr. Najjar Malik, whom you referenced earlier. I take it your interrogations of the good doctor are bearing fruit, Agent Fischer?”

“They are, sir. Very much so.”

“He’s cooperating?”

“Absolutely.”

“What can I pass along to the president and the NSC?”

Eva got up and handed out a black folder marked EYES ONLY, containing a five-page summary of key findings from her several days’ worth of interrogations. “Dr. Malik, as we’ve already established, is the highest-ranking living Iranian nuclear scientist at the moment, and thanks to David, he is presently secured in a CIA safe house in Oakton, Virginia. We’ve covered a lot of ground in the last few days. You’ve got the highlights there. But the headline would be this: Dr. Malik has helped us identify two new high-priority targets, both of whom were the senior deputies to Dr. Saddaji in the Iranian weapons development program. The evidence we have suggests these two scientists were doing most of the actual technical work day to day on building the warheads.”

“Do you have names?” Allen asked.

“Yes, sir. The first is Jalal Zandi. He’s forty-seven. An Iranian national. Born in Tehran. Holds one PhD in physics from Tehran University and another PhD in nuclear physics from the University of Manchester in the UK.”

“And the second?”

“The second is Tariq Khan. Fifty-one, Pakistani national. We don’t have a bio on him yet, but we know he’s a nephew of A. Q. Khan and worked closely with his uncle on the Pakistani nuclear program during the nineties. These are the guys who know where the bodies are buried. Find them, and I think we find the warheads.”

“So how do we find them?” the director asked.

“I don’t think we have any choice,” Eva said. “We need to send David back into Iran immediately.”