The Twelfth Imam (12 page)

25

Syracuse, New York

March 2002

“Rise and shine, Shirazi—you’ve got a visitor!”

David heard the words but had no desire to open his eyes, much less get out of bed. He had caught a stomach flu. He’d spent much of the last few nights puking his guts out. But the guard kept rapping his nightstick on the steel bars, and just to make him stop, David leaned over, put his glasses on, set his feet on the cold tile floor, and ran his hands through hair in desperate need of a trim. It was day thirteen of a fourteen-day sentence in juvie hall.

One more day in hell,
he told himself.

His parents visited every day, looking older and grayer each time he saw them. His father said he was working on getting him admitted into a private, all-boys academy in Alabama where he could try to salvage his education and get his life back on track. David knew he should be grateful, but he wasn’t.

David quickly threw on his standard orange jumpsuit over his boxer shorts and slipped into the white tennis shoes he’d been given. When the guard ordered his cell to be electronically unlocked, David was led down a series of hallways to a small meeting room not far from the director’s office. He had expected to see his parents or his lawyer or both. Instead, he found an older gentleman in his late fifties or early sixties flipping through a magazine and fidgeting as if he badly needed a cigarette. As David entered the room, the man stood and smiled warmly. Sporting a gray beard, black-rimmed glasses, and an ill-fitting green suit, he was not anyone David had ever seen before, but David immediately had the impression that the man knew him from somewhere.

“Fifteen minutes,” the guard said.

When the guard then stepped out of the room and closed the door, the man shook David’s hand firmly and suggested that they both sit down.

“I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again for a long time, David,” he began.

“Have we met before?” David asked.

“We’ll get to that in a minute. I’ve heard you’re a pretty sharp kid.”

“And yet . . . here I am,” David said, looking down at his shoes.

“You made a mistake, David. You’re not the first kid to beat the crap out of a couple of morons who deserved it. I don’t suspect you’ll be the last.”

David looked up again. Who was this guy?

“Actually, they didn’t deserve it,” David confessed, suspecting that this might be someone from the DA’s office checking up on him.

“Sure they did,” the man said. “Didn’t one call you a raghead?”

“I still shouldn’t have hit them,” David answered, remembering that all their conversations were being monitored and recorded.

“Fair enough,” the man continued. “But you clearly know how to handle yourself. I’ve seen your file. You won every fight you were in at Nottingham, even when you were outnumbered.”

“Not exactly something you can put on your résumé.”

“Well, that depends, son.”

“On what?”

“On what kind of job you’re applying for.”

Then the man slid a magazine across the table to David. It was a recent issue of
U.S. News & World Report
. He pointed to a headline that read, “Not Your Father’s CIA.” Puzzled, David looked at the headline, then into the man’s eyes. The man nodded for David to begin reading.

Cautiously, David took the magazine and scanned it quickly.

The CIA is growing—and fast. To fend off America’s enemies and take on terrorists and other bad guys worldwide, the nation’s premier spy agency is undergoing the most rapid growth since its inception almost sixty years ago. . . . The CIA has embarked on a nationwide ad campaign, hoping to attract a new generation of spies. For a look at its new pitch to young people, check out the agency’s online rock-and-roll recruiting ads. . . . Trailers at movie theaters and posters at airports have tempted the adventurous with positions in the National Clandestine Service—the latest name for the agency’s fabled directorate of operations, which recruits spies, steals secrets, and runs covert operations.

Suddenly, the man grabbed the magazine back from David.

“Hey, what the . . . ?”

But the man quickly cut David off before he could complete his sentence.

“Finish it,” he said.

“Finish what?”

“Finish the article.”

“You’re crazy! I didn’t have time.”

“You’re lying. Now, give me the rest of the article. Word for word. I know you can do it. I know all about you, David. I know you’ve tested at genius levels. I know you had a straight 4.0 average before Claire Harper died and her only daughter, Marseille, moved to Portland with her dad.”

The hair on David’s arms stood up.

“You have a photographic memory,” the man continued. “You’re only sixteen but you’re supposed to graduate early—two years early—this June. You scored a 1570 on the SATs. The Ivy Leagues were in your future before you began to implode. That’s actually where you and I were supposed to meet, a few years from now. But your little departure into self-destruction made me intervene sooner than I’d planned. Now cut the bull and recite the rest of the article for me, son. Before I walk out of here a very disappointed man.”

The room was silent for at least a minute, save the buzz from the fluorescent lamps above them. David stared at the man for a while, then at the magazine, crumpled in the man’s hand. Then he closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and began reciting from memory.

“‘It was an impressive group, among the most diverse, most experienced ever hired by the CIA. Ages ranged from twenty to over sixty-five. More than half have spent significant time overseas, and one in six is a military veteran. They bring backgrounds as diverse as forestry, finance, and industrial engineering. And they’re a well-educated bunch. They represent schools ranging from Oregon State, UCLA, and the University of Denver to the U.S. Naval Academy, Princeton, and Duquesne. Half the new recruits sport a master’s or PhD. And if you want to work for the CIA’s analytic corps, the directorate of intelligence, you’d better keep your grades up—the average grade-point average is a respectable 3.7.’”

“So why am I here?” the man asked. “Simple—to recruit you.”

“You want me to work for the CIA?” David asked.

“Exactly.”

“And you’re looking for a few good ex-cons?” David quipped.

“Don’t flatter yourself, son. Two weeks in this Holiday Inn hardly qualifies as hard time. For most people, a criminal record—even a juvenile record—would disqualify them. But not in your particular case.”

“My
particular
case?”

“You’re fluent in Farsi, German, and French. You’re conversational in Arabic, and I suspect you’ll master that pretty quickly once you put your mind to it. You’re already five-foot-eleven. In a few more years, you’ll be six-two or six-three. You know how to handle yourself. You could be valuable.”

“Valuable for what?” David asked.

“You really want to know?”

David shrugged.

The man shrugged too and stood up to leave.

“No, wait,” David said, jumping to his feet. “I really do want to know. What would I be valuable for?”

The man looked back at David. “I have no use for pretenders.”

“I’m not pretending.”

“Then I’ll tell you—hunting bin Laden.”

David stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“You want
me
to help hunt down Osama bin Laden?”

“Actually,” the man said, “I want you to bring us his head in a box.”

26

David was stunned.

He had to admit, he was electrified at the prospect. He hated bin Laden. The man had destroyed Marseille’s life and as a result had come close to destroying David’s. He wanted revenge so badly he could taste it. But as appealing as it was, this whole conversation still made no sense.

“Why me?” David asked. “I’m only sixteen.”

“That will make things a little more complicated.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning usually I recruit college students. But with your behavior in recent months, I was concerned you might not make it to college. And I’ve been following your story too closely to have it end with disappointment for both of us. So like I said, I had to intervene earlier than I’d planned. The good news is that no one really knows who you are. You’re not on the grid. You have no identity. You’ve just been kicked out of school. Your parents love you, but they don’t know what to do with you. They’re about to ship you off to boarding school for the rest of the semester. Your friends don’t expect to see you again. It’s a perfect time to get you on board, to begin building you a cover story, and in a few years, you’ll be ready—”

“Wait a minute,” David interrupted. “I have to ask—how exactly do you know so much about me?”

“I’m friends with your parents.”

“Since when?”

“Since before you were born.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Jack,” the man said, finally putting his cards on the table.

“Jack?” David said. “As in Jack Zalinsky?”

Zalinsky nodded.

“As in the Jack Zalinsky who rescued my parents from Tehran?”

Zalinsky nodded again.

“So my parents sent you here?”

Zalinsky laughed as the guard electronically unlocked the door. “Not a chance. In fact, they would kill me if they knew I was here. And this will never work if they know, David. You can’t ever tell them we’ve met or what I’m about to take you into. Not if you want us to infiltrate you into the al Qaeda network and bag yourself a high-value target. It would be too risky for you and too risky for them. This has to be hush-hush, or it’s over. Understood?”

The room was quiet again for a moment.

Then David finally said, “I’m in.”

“Good,” Zalinsky said.

“So what do I do next?”

“Let your parents get you out of here tomorrow. Go home with them. Be a good boy. Let them put you in the boys’ school in Alabama. I’ll make sure you get accepted. Then finish the year with straight A’s without getting into any more fights. Get yourself in shape. And when it’s time, I’ll come get you.”

“And then what?”

“Then we’ll see if you’ve got what we need.”

And with that, Jack Zalinsky was gone.

27

David buckled down and studied hard.

But physics and trigonometry weren’t his passion. Nor was making new friends. With every spare moment, David locked himself away in his dorm room and studied the life of Osama bin Laden. He ordered books from Amazon. He pored over every magazine and newspaper story he could find in the school library. He began watching C-SPAN and the History Channel in what little spare time his new school afforded him, and in time a profile began to emerge.

What surprised him most was to find that bin Laden didn’t fit the standard image of a terrorist. He wasn’t particularly young. He wasn’t poor or dispossessed or stupid or uneducated. Nor did he come from a violent or criminal family, much less one particularly bent on jihad, or “holy war.” Born in late 1957 or early 1958—no one seemed to know for sure—Osama, David discovered, was the seventeenth of at least fifty-four children. His father, Mohammed bin Laden, was a wealthy Saudi who had founded one of the largest construction companies in the Middle East. His mother, Alia Ghanem, was a Syrian woman of Palestinian origin who met Mohammed in Jerusalem while he was doing renovation work on the Dome of the Rock. David was shocked to learn that Alia was only fourteen years old when she married Mohammed, and she wasn’t his only wife—or one of three, or even ten. She was one of
twenty-two
wives the man had at various times through the years.

When Osama was only four or five years old, his parents divorced, and the little boy and his mother were forced to move out. Young Osama was now effectively an only child being raised by a single mother in the rigid, misogynist, fundamentalist culture of Saudi Arabia.

And then tragedy struck. Not long after the divorce, Osama’s father died in a plane crash. Years later, Osama’s brother Salem would also die in a horrific plane crash. David wondered if this was when the idea of planes and death and the psychological torment they could cause had been planted in Osama’s heart.

In June 1967, as he approached his tenth birthday, Osama watched along with the rest of the Arab world as the tiny Jewish State of Israel devastated the military forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in just six days. Emotionally rocked, Osama wondered whether Allah was turning his back on the Arab forces.

As best David could determine based on his in-depth studies, the first time Osama bin Laden heard an answer that made sense to him was in 1972. During his freshman year of high school, Osama met a gym teacher who happened to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic jihadist group founded in Egypt in the 1920s by a charismatic radical Sunni cleric named Hassan al-Banna. The gym teacher explained to bin Laden that the Muslims had turned their back on Allah by embracing the godless Soviets. In turn, Allah was turning his back on the Muslims. Apostasy was crippling the Muslim people. Only if they purified themselves, turned wholly and completely to following the teachings of the Qur’an, and launched a true jihad against the Jews and the Christians could they ever regain Allah’s favor and the glory that was once theirs.

As bin Laden approached his sixteenth birthday in 1973—and underwent a massive growth spurt that left him six feet six inches tall and 160 pounds—the young jihadist-to-be was again stunned and horrified to see the Muslims of Egypt and Syria decisively defeated by the Jews of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Now the Muslim Brotherhood argument made even more sense: Muslims were being humiliated by the Israelis because they had lost their way. They had forgotten the path of the prophets. How could they ever regain the glory that had once been theirs unless they returned to the teachings of the Qur’an with all that they were?

Often, David lay awake at night, poring over the pieces of bin Laden’s life. He wanted to know this man inside and out. He wanted to be able to pick out his voice in a crowd. He wanted to be able to recognize him at a glance. He wanted to be able to think like him, talk like him, move like him. It was the only possible way, David decided, of penetrating al Qaeda and being drawn into the inner circle, which in turn was the only way of bringing this monster to justice. And what struck David again and again was how young bin Laden had been when he had begun to make his choices.

Bin Laden was just sixteen, David realized, when he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and began reading the collected works of radical Sunni author Sayyid Qutb. He was only seventeen when he got married for the first time, to a devout fourteen-year-old Muslim girl who was a cousin of his from Syria. What’s more, bin Laden was only in his young twenties when Ayatollah Khomeini led his Islamic Revolution to victory in Iran in 1979, an event that electrified Sunni radicals who disagreed with Khomeini’s Shia theology but loved his tactics and envied his accomplishments.

During these formative years, David noticed, bin Laden had wrestled with hard questions. Why had he been born? What was the meaning of life? Was his father right—was life about building empires, making billions, and marrying as many women as he possibly could? Or was there something more? What if man was born not to please himself, but to please Allah? What if the path to eternal life and happiness was not in a comfortable life but in a life of jihad?

David despised every choice bin Laden had made. But at the tender age of sixteen, David was beginning to understand why those choices had been made. And it began to make his own choices that much easier.