Rotten Gods (3 page)

Marika runs down the steps, head pounding, mouth dry. Dr Abukar's words ring in her ears:
I have left samples of these explosives in my room on level three at the residential complex
.

At the first checkpoint plastic chain gates have closed. An agitated security guard asks for identification, and they are forced to slow. Troops brandish automatic weapons, looking for a target. Marika gets through last, begrudging every moment of the slow examination of her ID.

Nikulina and three young Dubai policemen are ahead of her now, down the long corridor into the residential complex. Marika makes up ground on the straight, then turns into the stairwell, faster than an elevator for just a couple of floors. The steel capped shoes of the men in front ring on the marble steps.

Reaching the floor above, swinging onto the next flight of stairs, Marika recognises the danger. Dr Abukar will not wait for forensics and processing labs to test his samples. The demonstration of the efficacy of his explosives will, by necessity, be immediate.
God, how can such a gentle man do this?

‘Stop!' she screams at the others, but the sound of echoing feet drowns her out. She tries again, throat tearing with the strain, then attempts to move faster, knowing that the men ahead are as fit as she, and probably a little quicker.

What had he said that morning? Fifty million people unable to procure sufficient calories to sustain themselves. Is this his way of redressing the balance?

The sound of a door opening so hard that the handle pounds against the wall. Footsteps receding. Marika makes the third floor in time to see two figures sprint away down the carpeted corridor.

‘Stop!' she tries again.

Marika comes around the corner as Nikulina opens the door to room 308. He is two paces inside when there is a roar, and a flash of light, the explosion slamming him back against the corridor wall, collecting a Dubai police sergeant on the way. Marika's ears ring, and her feet falter from the proximity to the blast. An explosive stench fills the air, mingling with the burned pork smell of Nikulina, his body and clothes smoking.

Sirens whoop through the sudden stillness. Hesitating at the door, Marika clears her head and charges inside. Blackened, cracked, sagging plaster. Shattered windows. Flames scale the curtains like rope climbers. Cotton bed sheets smoulder. No sign of human presence.

Out in the corridor men scream for medics. Others move inside. Marika backs away, eyes streaming from the gathering
smoke, throat burning. Forensics will comb the room. There will be nothing to find here until they have done their work.

From deep within rises a terrible and irrepressible guilt. One man is dead. One injured. More will surely follow.

 

The nine mujahedin stroll through the checkpoints like celebrities. Some are pale skinned, some dark. Most wear full beards, jeans, T-shirts, and light jackets.

Marika stands back with the rest of the security staff, lining the corridors, helpless and sullen as the mujahedin pass through, pausing to pull compact automatic weapons from sports bags. Marika recognises an Uzi, and a PM63.

One walks ahead of the others, his cheeks sunken and lean, proud and watchful, with the glare and stride of a predatory animal. Marika realises that Dr Abukar is not the architect of this event. Here is the real commander, and her job is to know such people. Her mind trawls through hundreds of grainy snapshots. The leaders have histories. All of them do.

The man who walks in front of the others is known to Marika from just two file pictures. The name he goes by is Zhyogal. Hunted on three continents. Key member of the African Salafi terror group, known as al-Muwahhidun, or Almohad. Spearhead of the new wave of terror.

Please God
,
not them,
she pleads.
Please, why did it have to be them?

The antechamber is almost empty of people now, but those who remain cower back from the nine men as they walk through the entrance, into the amphitheatre, down the tiers and to the front. The gunmen take up their positions around the room.

Head thrown back, face engorged with blood, veins and tendons standing proud on his neck, the leader raises his right hand, index finger pointing skywards. The others follow his lead, all shouting, ‘Allahu akbar.'

Zhyogal's voice is filled with triumph and a religious fervour so visceral and powerful it might be sexual.

‘In the name of God, the most gracious and merciful. Your faithful have taken possession of this room and everyone inside it. Let the overlords of taghut, of tyranny, prepare to die.'

The main doors hiss closed and Marika stands, still staring, a feeling of dread in the pit of her belly.

 

Faces recoil from the horror of what is coming, remembering stories and recalling images of beheadings and executions, each aware of their own mortality — that no matter how important a man or woman might be in this life, they are still no stronger nor less fallible than a beating heart and a collection of tissue and nerve endings.

The President of the United States, halfway through his term, imagines the media frenzy back home. Wonders how his media director will shape his image in the wake of this disaster. The Republican grip on power is tenuous at best, and is predicted to become even more shaky after the impending midterm elections.

How can this happen, he thinks to himself, when his country spends untold billions every year to hold back terrorism? When the sharpened point of the enemy is five hundred or, at most, a thousand, Islamists with the funds, skills and organisational backing to pose any real threat. He wonders how the little people of America will react if he is killed here. Wonders if anyone apart from his wife and three sons will give a damn.

The prime ministers of Britain and Australia tuck themselves back into their less ostentatious circles of advisors and force a phlegmatic front over the inner panic. And beneath it all is an unfounded, yet ingrained, belief that Western civilisation will always dominate.

They cannot win, because they are not like us. They cannot win because they do not have our institutions, our facilities, our industrial strength, and our veneer of invincibility.

Neither man remembers the lessons of history: that it was no industrial power, but the Goths and Vandals who reduced Rome to a smoking ruin.

 

Isabella Thompson, four rows back, feels the hammering of her heart, recites a prayer over and over again, the lone survivor from memories of Sunday school, the vicar's spinster daughter leading hushed voices from the front of the room, eyes closed and fingers interlocked.

Our Father, who art in Heaven,

Hallowed be Thy name …

If You truly exist, if You love me You will bring my beautiful girls back to me now. You will remove these bastards from the face of the earth and give my girls back to me. I will do anything You want in return … give thanks for the rest of my life if only You spare them and bring them to me alive … and punish these men who stole them away from me …

The mujahedin place bricks of semtex, carried in the sports bags, around the room, wired together with thin red cable to a central control box. Wired to blow from the plastic remote control Ali Khalid Abukar carries: an electronic gadget so clever it uses fine tendrils of water as conductors, tuned to explode all the charges, including those in the briefcase.

Isabella's eyes fix on Zhyogal — the lover's mask removed so that he is no longer handsome, but the face of death itself, with skin stretched tight as tissue paper over a kite frame, the sunken cheeks and the eyes recessed, showing the hatred freely now. For just an instant their eyes meet and there is no regret there, only triumph.

She feels other eyes on her. Her own people. It seems to her that they know she is the one who betrayed them. Betrayed those who employed and trusted her for so many years. Helped bring this viper into a room that holds the most powerful men and women of her generation. Of course they had not told her what was inside the briefcase, but she had known in her heart.

Head in her hands, Isabella begins to weep. Wanting it to be over, knowing she does not deserve this. She has always been so sensible.

Until she met
him
in Nairobi.

The role of British assets in protecting and ensuring the delivery of humanitarian aid to the refugee camps in Northern Kenya was politically sensitive, and it was her job to smooth the way. Hard, demanding work against bull-headed negotiators, many of whom saw the mere existence of the camps as a threat to national security.

Rami caught her at a weak moment — handsome, debonair, charming, apparently a financier. The meeting seemed to be an accident, a traveller sharing her table at the crowded Kengeles restaurant, unhurriedly engaging her in conversation.

Nairobi can be a lonely city, even dangerous when you are by yourself …

At first she resisted, but he was persistent. Cancelling a planned engagement at the embassy, she accepted his invitation to dinner.

I'm single now. Hell, why shouldn't I have any fun?

Nightclubs frequented by Westerners in Nairobi are few, and have in the past been the target of terrorist attacks, like the grenade strike on the Mwauras Club that injured twelve people a few years earlier. Isabella hesitated when he first suggested they go dancing, but felt safe in his arms at the popular New Florida Club, the décor of which was once described by travel writer Paul Chai as looking like a spaceship crash-landed on a service station. Kelly and the children watched DVD movies back at the hotel while Isabella and Rami shared their first kiss.

On the second night she went to his charming suite at the Safari Club on University Road with its antique furniture and colonial feel, a willing subject to an intense and intelligent seduction. When she moved on to Yemen, trying to patch relations with a country devastated by the long revolution, he followed. They spent two more nights together in Aden.

‘My English rose,' he joked.

‘My desert stallion,' she laughed back.

The knowledge that the man who now patrols the conference room with a gun, touched her as a lover, makes her shake with anger and shame. When he catches her eyes it is with complete detachment. She glares back with all the vitriol and hatred that floods her soul, remembering that moment at Aden Airport when she realised that the girls were gone. Remembering how the luggage carousel blurred. How the man who had introduced himself as Rami gripped her arm.

‘What are you doing? You're hurting me.'

‘Stop drawing attention to yourself. Your daughters are safe, for the time being.'

‘Where are they?'

‘Safe. Listen to me. Continue your journey as planned. Tell anyone who asks that your daughters are with relatives.'

‘No, please, I need them … Rami.'

‘Shut up, woman, my name is not Rami. Listen to me. You will be contacted and given further instructions at Rabi al-Salah. Make arrangements to stay at the centre itself. If you alert police, or anyone at all, your children will die. Understand this. They will die a terrible death … I will personally cut their hearts from their chests.'

Isabella looked at the man who had touched her in the most intimate way. Believing his words.

‘They are calling your flight. Board it. Now.'

Walking on as if in a nightmare, holding back tears …

Day 1, 12:00

Zhyogal's voice, when it comes, is the self-satisfied howl of a wild dog that brought down its victim in the night, of a cat with a mouse lying quiescent between its paws. The voice of an anti-god who promises destruction and death. That of a man who has sifted poison and hatred from a system of belief.

First he restores communications with a flick of the bank of switches, then places both hands on the dais and glares out at the cameras and the delegations in their rows. ‘On behalf of our brothers in all lands, we make the following demands. First, the United States must withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia, home of the two most sacred Islamic sites, Maccah and Medina. If they do not, every person in this room will die.

‘The United States must disband its AFRICOM military command, and remove all troops from the continent: Somalia; Mauritania; Nigeria. States moving to Sharia law will do so without interference. Foreign journalists will leave these countries without delay, or every person in this room will die.

‘All Western troops, military advisors and security firms will abandon their crusade against the nations of Islam: Iraq; Libya; Afghanistan; Somalia; Pakistan; Yemen. They must withdraw immediately. Or every person in this room will die.

‘Catastrophic global warming is killing Africa and Asia. Coal-fired power stations will be shut down. Immediately. Coal mining will cease. Immediately. High-emissions industries will stop production. All major cities must provide free public transport … the manufacture of luxury goods must cease … the production of immoral products such as Western music and fiction books …

‘The governments of the West have seven days to act. If they do not, at the moment of Maghrib — sunset — on the seventh day, this room and everyone inside it will be destroyed.

‘I make the following arrangements for the physical needs of the people in this room. There will be no tea, no coffee, no cakes, no biscuits. At sixteen hundred hours this afternoon I will allow the main doors to open while supplies are brought in. The only allowable food will be United Nations-issue emergency humanitarian ration packs.' His voice rises. ‘Let the leaders of nations eat what refugees eat, what the luckiest of those dispossessed by their policies subsist on. You are free to use the toilets but no cubicle door will be closed. You will know what it is like to lack privacy.

‘Finally, I warn that war criminals present in this room will be tried under Sharia law. Those found guilty will be executed, beginning one hour from now.'