The stated position of Her Majesty’s Government and New Scotland Yard was that the two men who prevented the terrorist from detonating his dirty bomb were members of Met’s SCO19 special firearms division. The Met refused to make public their names. Nor did it agree to the media’s request to release CCTV images of the operation. Somehow, there was only a single video of the incident, shot by an American tourist who happened to be standing at the security gate of Downing Street at nine o’clock. Out of focus and tremulous, it showed one man firing several rounds into the terrorist’s head while another man held the detonator switch in the terrorist’s left hand. The shooter immediately left the scene in the back of a car. As it raced up Whitehall, he could be seen embracing a woman in the backseat. His face was not visible, only a patch of gray, like a smudge of ash, at his left temple.
But it was his partner, the one who held the terrorist’s thumb to the detonator for three hours while technicians disarmed the dirty bomb, who received most of the media’s attention. Overnight, he became a national hero; he was the man who had selflessly risked his own life for Queen and country. But such stories rarely survive long—not in the graceless age of twenty-four-hour news and social media—and soon there appeared numerous stories calling into question his identity and affiliation. The Independent claimed he was a former member of the Special Air Service who had served notably in Northern Ireland and the first Iraq War. The Guardian, however, weighed in with a dubious claim that he was actually an officer of MI6. Lines had been blurred, the newspaper said, or perhaps even crossed. Graham Seymour took the unusual step of issuing a denial. Officers of the Secret Intelligence Service, he said, did not engage in law-enforcement activities, and few ever bothered to carry a firearm. “The allegation,” he declared, “is laughable on its face.”
Nearly lost in the finger-pointing was the fact that Saladin, the author of a transatlantic trail of bloodshed and broken buildings, was no more. At first, his legion of followers, including some who openly walked the streets of London, refused to believe he was really gone. Surely, they claimed, it was nothing more than a piece of black American propaganda designed to weaken ISIS’s grip on a generation of young Islamic radicals. The photograph of Saladin’s lifeless, retooled face didn’t help matters, for it bore little resemblance to the original. But when ISIS confirmed his passing on one of its primary social media channels, even his most ardent supporters seemed to accept the fact he was truly gone. His closest lieutenants had no time to mourn; they were too busy dodging American bombs and missiles. London was the last straw. The final battle—the one ISIS hoped would lead to the return of the Mahdi and commence the countdown to the end of days—had begun.
But what were the exact circumstances of Saladin’s death at the compound in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco? The White House—and the president himself—gave several conflicting versions of the story. Complicating the issue further was a report from an independent Moroccan news site concerning three Toyota Land Cruisers found in the southeast corner of the country, not far from the sand sea at Erg Chebbi. One of the SUVs appeared to have crashed, but the other two were burned-out shells. The Web site claimed they were destroyed by an American Predator drone, a claim supported by an accompanying photograph of Hellfire missile fragments. The White House denied the report in the strongest possible language. So, too, did the government of Morocco. Then, for good measure, it shut down the Web site that had published the photos and tossed its editor in jail.
The allegation of an American drone strike on Moroccan soil ignited protests across the country, especially in the Bidonvilles where the ISIS recruiters plied their deadly trade. The unrest nearly overshadowed the brutal killing of Mohammad Bakkar, Morocco’s largest producer of hashish, the self-proclaimed king of the Rif Mountains. The deplorable condition of the body, said the gendarmes, suggested Bakkar had been the target of a drug-related vendetta. Harder to explain was the fact that Jean-Luc Martel, the wildly successful French hotelier and restaurateur, had been found lying a few feet away, with two neat bullet holes in the face. The Moroccans were not terribly interested in trying to determine how Martel had met his fate or why; they wanted only to move the matter off their plate as quickly as possible. They delivered his body to the French Embassy, signed the necessary paperwork, and bid JLM a fond adieu.
In France, though, Jean-Luc Martel’s violent end was an occasion for serious investigation, both by the press and the authorities, and no small amount of soul-searching. The circumstances surrounding his death suggested that the rumors about him had been true after all, that he was not a businessman with a golden touch but an international drug trafficker in disguise. As details found their way onto the pages of Le Monde and Le Figaro, once-promising political careers crumbled. The French president was forced to issue a statement of regret over his friendship with Martel, as were the interior minister and half the members of the National Assembly. As usual, the French press approached the matter philosophically. Jean-Luc Martel was viewed as a metaphor for all that was ailing modern France. His sins were France’s sins. He was evidence that something, somewhere, was amiss with the Fifth Republic.
Arrests soon followed, from the headquarters of JLM Enterprises in Geneva to the streets of Marseilles. His hotels were padlocked, his restaurants and retail outlets shuttered, his properties and bank accounts seized and frozen. In fact, the only thing the French government didn’t lay claim to was his corpse, which languished for several days in a Paris morgue before a distant family member from his village in Provence finally requested it for burial. The funeral and graveside services were poorly attended. Notably absent was Olivia Watson, the beautiful former fashion model who was Martel’s companion and business partner. All efforts to locate Miss Watson, by the French authorities and the media, were without success. Her gallery in Saint-Tropez remained closed for business, its display window overlooking the Place de l’Ormeau empty of paintings. The same was true of her clothing boutique on the rue Gambetta. The villa she shared with Martel appeared deserted. Curiously, so, too, did the garish palace on the opposite side of the bay.