Not surprisingly, Qassam’s journey had begun in cyberspace, where, his identity carefully shielded, he had indulged in his unquenchable appetite for the blood and bombs of jihadist porn—an appetite he had developed during the American occupation of Iraq, when he was still at university. One evening, after a miserable day at work and a nightmarish commute home, he had knocked on the cyberdoor of an ISIS recruiter and inquired about traveling to Syria to become a fighter. The ISIS recruiter had made inquiries of his own and had convinced Qassam to remain in suburban Washington. Not long after, a month or so, he realized he was being followed. At first, he feared it was the FBI, but it soon became clear he was seeing the same man again and again. The man finally approached Qassam in a Starbucks near Seven Corners and introduced himself. He was a Jordanian who lived in London. His name was Jalal Nasser.
The rain was coming down in torrents, more like a summer thunderstorm than a slow and steady autumn soaker. Perhaps the doomsday scenarios were true after all, he thought. Perhaps the earth was irrevocably broken. He continued along Route 7 into the center of Alexandria and made his way to an industrial park on Eisenhower Avenue. Wedged between a transmission repair shop and a shooting range were the offices of Dominion Movers. Two of the company’s American-made Freightliner trucks were parked outside. Two more were parked on the floor of the warehouse, where they had been for the past six months. Qassam el-Banna was the moving company’s nominal owner. He had twelve employees. Seven were recent arrivals in America, five were citizens. All were members of ISIS.
Qassam el-Banna did not enter the premises of his moving enterprise. Instead, he engaged the stopwatch function on his mobile and headed back to Eisenhower Avenue. His Korean sedan was quick and nimble, but now he drove it at the slow, lumbering pace of a fully loaded moving truck. He followed the Eisenhower Avenue Connector to the Capital Beltway and the Beltway in a clockwise direction to Route 123 in Tysons. As he was approaching Anderson Road, the traffic light turned to amber. Normally, Qassam would have put his foot to the floor. But now, imagining he were behind the wheel of a laden truck, he slowed to a stop.
When the light turned green, Qassam accelerated so slowly that the driver behind him flashed his headlamps and sounded his horn. Undeterred, he proceeded at five miles below the speed limit to Lewinsville Road, where he made a left. It was less than a quarter mile to the intersection of Tysons McLean Drive. To the left, the road rose gently into what appeared to be the campus of a high-tech firm. Qassam turned to the right and stopped next to a bright yellow road sign that read WATCH FOR CHILDREN. Qassam watched his phone instead: 24:23:45 . . . 24:23:46 . . . 24:23:47 . . . 24:23:48 . . .
When it reached twenty-five minutes exactly, he smiled and whispered, “Boom.”
50
GEORGETOWN
THE RAIN POURED STEADILY DOWN for the remainder of the weekend, returning Washington to the swamp it had once been. Gabriel was largely a prisoner of the N Street safe house. Once each day he journeyed to the Israeli Embassy to check in with his field teams and with King Saul Boulevard, and once each day Adrian Carter rang him with an update. The FBI and the other agencies of American homeland security were closely monitoring more than a thousand known or suspected members of ISIS. “And not one of them,” said Carter, “appears to be in the final preparations for an attack.”
“There’s just one problem, Adrian.”
“What’s that?”
“The FBI is watching the wrong people.”
By Monday afternoon the rains began to slow, and by that evening a few stars were visible through the thinning clouds. Gabriel wanted to walk to the Four Seasons for his dinner with Paul Rousseau, but his CIA security detail prevailed upon him to take the SUV instead. It dropped him outside the hotel’s covered entrance and, trailed by a single bodyguard, he entered the lobby. Several bleary-eyed French officials, their suits wrinkled by transatlantic travel, waited at reception, behind a tall, broad-shouldered man, Arab in appearance, who looked as though he had borrowed Fareed Barakat’s London tailor. Only the Arab-looking man took note of the thin Israeli who was accompanied by an American security guard. Their eyes met briefly. Then the tall Arab-looking man turned his gaze once more toward the woman behind the desk. Gabriel inspected his back as he passed. He appeared to be unarmed. A leather attaché case stood upright next to his right shoe. And leaning against the front of the reception desk, black and polished, was an elegant walking stick.
Gabriel continued across the lobby and entered the restaurant. It seemed the bar had been commandeered by a convention of the hard of hearing. He gave the ma?tre d’ a name not his own and was shown to a table overlooking Rock Creek Parkway. Better still, it had an unobstructed view of the lobby, where the tall, impeccably clad Arab was now limping slowly toward the elevators.
He had requested a suite on the uppermost floor of the hotel. His request had been granted, in no small part because the hotel’s management believed him to be a distant relative of the king of Saudi Arabia. A moment after he entered the room, there was a discreet knock at the door. It was the porter with his luggage. The tall Arab admired the vista from his window while the porter, an African, hung his garment bag in the closet and placed his suitcase on a stand in the bedroom. The usual pre-tip banter ensued, with its many offers of additional assistance, but a crisp twenty-dollar bill sent the porter gratefully toward the door. It closed softly and once again the tall Arab was alone.
His eyes were fixed on the traffic rushing along Rock Creek Parkway. His thoughts, however, were on the man whom he had seen downstairs in the lobby—the man with gray temples and distinctive green eyes. He was almost certain he had seen the man before, not in person but in photographs and news accounts. It was possible he was mistaken. In fact, he thought, it was likely the case. Even so, he had learned long ago to trust his instincts. They had been sharpened to a razor’s edge during the many years he served the Arab world’s cruelest dictator. And they had helped him to survive the long fight against the Americans, when many other men like him had been vaporized by weapons that struck from the sky with the suddenness of lightning.
He removed a laptop computer from his attaché case and connected it to the hotel’s wireless Internet system. Because the Four Seasons was popular with visiting dignitaries, the NSA had undoubtedly penetrated its network. It was no matter; the hard drive of his computer was a blank page. He opened the Internet browser and typed a name into the search box. Several photos appeared on the screen, including one from London’s Telegraph newspaper that showed a man running along a footpath outside Westminster Abbey, a gun in his hand. Linked to the photo was an article by a reporter named Samantha Cooke concerning the man’s violent death. It seemed the reporter was mistaken, because the subject of her article had just crossed the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington.
There was another knock at the door, soft, almost apologetic—the obligatory fruit plate, along with a note addressed to Mr. Omar al-Farouk, promising to fulfill his every wish. At the moment he wanted only a few minutes of uninterrupted solitude. He typed an address for the dark net, picked the lock of a password-protected door, and entered a virtual room where all was encrypted. An old friend was waiting there for him.
The old friend asked, HOW WAS YOUR TRIP?
He typed, FINE BUT YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHO I JUST SAW.