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The place was bustling and noisy, but there was a table free in a corner. Out of habit, Ben sat with his back to the wall so he could observe the entrance. A hurried waiter took his order for a large café noir and the compulsory fresh-baked croissant.
While he waited for his order to arrive, Ben sat quietly and absorbed the chatter from other customers. Predictably the subject of the day, here as everywhere in the city, was the riots. A pair of middle-aged men at the next table were getting quite animated over whether or not the president should declare martial law, order the rebuilding of the Bastille prison, stuff the whole lot of troublemakers behind bars and throw away the key.
When his breakfast arrived Ben gave up eavesdropping on their conversation, took a sip or two of the delicious coffee and tore off a corner of croissant to dunk into his cup. A Gauloise would have rounded things out nicely, but such pleasures as smoking inside a café were no longer to be had in the modern civilised world. He went back to thinking about the strange woman who had bumped into him. What was she so frightened of? Where had she been running from, or to? He had to admit it, he was intrigued. And sooner or later, he was going to have to do something about the phone in his pocket.
Curiosity getting the better of him, he took it out to examine more closely. If the screen happened to be locked, there might not be much he could do except just hand it in to the nearest gendarmerie as lost property. But when he flipped open the leather wallet he soon discovered that the phone wasn’t locked.
Which left him a number of potential ways to find out who the woman was and where she lived, allowing him to return the item to her personally. Ben was good at finding people. It was something he used to do for a living, after he’d quit the SAS to go his own way as what he’d euphemistically termed a ‘crisis response consultant’. A career that involved tracking down people who didn’t always want to be found, especially when they were holding innocent child hostages captive for ransom. Kidnappers didn’t make themselves easy to locate, as a rule. But Ben had located them anyway, and the consequences hadn’t been very pleasant for them.
By contrast, thanks to today’s technology, ordinary unsuspecting citizens were easy to track down. Too easy, in his opinion.
Feeling just a little self-conscious about intruding on her privacy, he scrolled around the phone’s menus. There were a few emails and assorted files, but his first port of call was the woman’s address book. She was conservative about what information she stored in her contacts list. There was someone called Michel, no surname, and another contact called ‘Maman/Papa’, obviously her parents, but no addresses for either, and no home address or home landline number for herself. But the mobile’s own number was there.
Ben took out his own phone to check it with. Damn these bloody things, but he was just as bound to them as the next guy. He’d got into the habit of carrying two of them: one a fancy smartphone registered to his business, the other a cheap, anonymous burner bought for cash, no names, no questions. Its anonymity pleased him and it came in handy in certain circumstances. But for this call he used his smartphone. He punched in the woman’s mobile number. Her phone rang in his other hand. You could tell a lot about a person from their choice of ringtone. Hers was a retro-style dring-dring, like the old dial phone that stood in the hallway of the farmhouse at Le Val. Ben liked that about her. He ended the call and the ringing stopped. So far, so good.
Next he used his smartphone to access the whitepages.fr people finder website, which scanned millions of data files to give a reverse lookup. When a prompt appeared he entered the woman’s mobile number and activated the search. Not all phone users were trackable this way, only a few hundred million worldwide. Which was a pretty large net, but still something of a gamble. If it didn’t pay off, he still had other options to try.
But that wouldn’t be necessary, because he scored a hit first time. In a few seconds he’d gained access to a whole range of information about the mystery woman: name, address, landline number, employer, and the contact details of two extant relatives in the Parisian suburb of Fontenay-sous-Bois a few kilometres to the east. If he’d been interested in offering her a job, he could run a background check to verify her credentials and see if she had any criminal record. If he was thinking of lending her money, he could view her credit rating. As things stood, he only needed the basics, which he now had.
Piece of cake.
Her name was Mme Romy Juneau. All adult women in France were now officially titled Madame regardless of marital status, since the traditional Mademoiselle had been banned for its alleged sexist overtones. But her parents’ shared surname matched hers, suggesting she was unmarried. Some traditions still prevailed. Ben guessed that the phone contact called Michel was probably a boyfriend. She worked at a place called Institut Culturel Segal, ICS for short. The Segal Cultural Institute, whatever that was, in an upmarket part of town on Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
More important to Ben at this moment was her home address, which was an apartment number in a street just a few minutes’ walk from where he was sitting right now, and in the direction she’d been heading when they’d bumped into one another.
It seemed safe to assume that she hadn’t been going to work that morning. Maybe she had the day off. Whatever the case, it was a reasonable assumption that she’d been making her way home. From where, he couldn’t say, and it didn’t really matter. If she was heading for her apartment, there was a strong likelihood that she’d have got there by now, considering the hurry she’d been in.
Ben scribbled her details in the little notebook he carried, then exited the whitepages website and punched in Romy Juneau’s landline number. As he listened to the dialling tone, he thought about what he’d say to her.
No reply. Perhaps she hadn’t got home yet, or was in the bathroom, or any number of possibilities. Ben aborted the call and looked at his watch. The morning was wearing on. He needed to be thinking about finishing breakfast and heading over to see Gerbier at his offices across town. Romy Juneau would have to wait until afterwards.
He was slurping down the last of the delicious coffee when his phone buzzed. He answered quickly, thinking that Romy must have just missed his call and was calling him back. His anticipation soon fell flat when he heard the unpleasantly raspy, reedy voice of Gaston Gerbier in his ear.
The estate agent was calling, very apologetically, to cancel their morning appointment because his hundred-year-old mother had started complaining of chest pains and been rushed off to hospital. It was probably nothing serious, Gerbier explained. The vicious old moo had been dying of the same heart attack for the last thirty-odd years and false alarms were a routine thing. Still, he felt obliged to be there, as the dutiful son, etc., etc. Ben said it was no problem; they could reschedule the appointment for next time he was in town. He wished the old moo a speedy recovery and hung up.
There went his morning’s duties. Ben couldn’t actually say he was sorry to be missing out on the joys of Gerbier’s company. And never mind about the apartment. It wasn’t going anywhere. With a suddenly empty slate and nothing better to do, he decided now was as good a time as any to play the Good Samaritan and deliver the lost phone back to its owner in person. Given the nervous way she’d acted around him before, so as not to freak her out still further by showing up at her door he’d just post it through her letterbox with a note explaining how he’d found it. And that would be that. His good deed done, he could wend his way back to his apartment, jump in the car and be home at Le Val sometime in the afternoon.
Ben munched the last of his croissant, paid his bill and then left the café and set off on foot in the direction of her address. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, the day was his to do with as he pleased, and he felt carefree and untroubled.
He had no idea what he was walking into. But he soon would. He was, in fact, about to meet Mademoiselle Romy Juneau for the second time. And from that moment, a whole new world of trouble would be getting ready to open up.
Chapter 3 (#uf400a57b-b30e-5b48-a121-0fcbff9e90b9)
Romy Juneau lived in a handsome 1920s period apartment building near the end of a busy little street called Rue Joséphine Beaugiron, fifteen minutes’ walk away, flanked by a travel agency and a corner bar-restaurant called Chez Bogart.
Like Ben’s own neighbourhood, the street hadn’t survived last night’s riot completely unscathed. The quaint old antiquarian bookshop opposite Romy’s building had taken a hit, and like Habib the grocer its owner was surveying the damage with a sour look of disgruntlement as two carpenters fitted a sheet of plywood over the broken window. Why anyone would attack a specialist book store filled with nothing but a bunch of dusty old tomes by dead writers, Ben couldn’t say. Maybe the rioters were intent on procuring some edifying literature to alleviate the boredom of throwing firebombs at the police.
Romy’s building had an art deco archway, once grand, now slightly grungy, on which someone had recently sprayed an obscene slogan about the president. It had tall carved double doors, firmly locked, with a smaller inset door, also firmly locked. On the wall by the door was a buzzer panel with twelve buttons, one for each apartment, each with a corresponding name plate with the initial and surname of the resident. R. Juneau was in apartment 11.
He pressed the button for apartment 6, labelled J. Vanel, waited for some guy’s voice to crackle ‘Qui est-ce?’ out of the speaker grille, and said he had a delivery for Vanel that needed signing for. A moment later the buzzer buzzed and the inset door clicked open, and Ben pushed through into a brick foyer that led to a small interior courtyard. A short, stumpy concierge lady with curlers in her hair was sweeping the floor and barely glanced at Ben as he walked in. The hallway walls were streaked with dirt and a row of wheelie bins smelled of mouldy garbage. Not the best-kept apartment building in Paris, but not the worst either, not these days.
To his left was the door to the concierge’s ground-floor apartment, to his right a spiral stairway with a worn antique banister rail. Set into the centre of the stairway was an original period cage lift apparently still in service, all ornate black wrought iron. A Gothic death trap, to Ben’s eye. On the opposite wall were fixed twelve separate grey steel mailboxes, one for each resident, marked with their names. He took Romy’s phone from his pocket, along with his notebook and pen. He wrote a brief note to the effect that he was returning her property, signed it, folded it inside the phone’s leather wallet and was about to pop it into her mailbox when he noticed that two of the other boxes had had their locks forced open with something like a screwdriver, the grey paint scratched through to the bare metal.
Hardly the most confidence-inspiring level of security. The building was obviously a little too soft a target for thieves, unlike Ben’s place which had a hardened steel security door you’d need a cutting torch to break through. He didn’t want to have gone to the trouble of returning Romy’s phone to her, only for it to be nicked by some light-fingered opportunist punk before she could get to it. He decided to hand it to her in person, face to face. She’d surely realise she had nothing to be frightened of, if he smiled a lot and acted his usual charming self. If she asked how he’d found her address, he’d admit the truth and advise her to erase her own number from her contacts list because it made her far too easy to track online. There were too many suspicious characters around these days to be taking risks.
Choosing the stairs over the Gothic death trap, he started to climb. The stairs were worn and creaky with age, spiralling up around the central lift shaft. The first-floor landing had apartments numbers 1 to 3, the second floor numbers 4 to 6. By his reckoning that made number 11 the middle door on the fourth floor, right at the top of the building.
As he headed towards the third floor, Ben heard the rattle and judder of the lift descending, sounding like it was going to shake itself apart and bring the whole building down, and he was glad he’d taken the stairs. Through the wrought-iron bars he saw the lift’s passenger, a lone man making his way down from an upper floor. Ben gave him only the briefest of glances, but his eye was trained to notice details. The guy was standing with his back to Ben and his face turned away. He was broad-shouldered and well built, about Ben’s height at a shade under six feet. He wore black leather gloves and a long dark coat, quality wool, expensive, with the collar turned up. His hair was short and black, silvering in streaks. Ben caught a whiff of aftershave. The man didn’t turn around as the death trap rattled on its way downwards.
Ben watched the lift disappear below him between floors, then kept on climbing the stairs. A strange, vague feeling had suddenly come over him, as though something at the back of his mind was needling him. He had no idea what it was, and quickly forgot about it.
Moments later he reached the top floor. As he’d guessed, apartment 11 was the middle door of the uppermost three apartments. He paused on the landing for a moment, thinking of the most innocuous way to introduce himself. Honesty and openness were the best policy. She would soon realise he was the friendliest and least menacing guy on the planet. At any rate, he could be that guy when he wanted.
He removed the handwritten note from her phone case, since he’d no longer need it. Then raised his hand to ring the doorbell with a knuckle. Force of habit. In his past line of work, leaving fingerprints often wasn’t a good idea.
Then he stopped. Because he’d suddenly noticed that her door wasn’t locked. Not just unlocked, but hanging open an inch. He used his fist to nudge it gently open a few inches more, and peeked through the gap. The apartment had a narrow entrance passage papered in tasteful pastel blue, with glossily varnished floorboards. There were four interior doors leading off the hallway, one at the far end and one to the left, both closed, and two more to the right, both of which were open though Ben couldn’t see into the rooms from where he stood.
He called out in French, ‘Hello? Anybody there? Mademoiselle Juneau?’ He hoped it wasn’t being too sexist to assume her marital status.
There was no reply. Ben tentatively stepped inside the hall passage. He felt uneasy about doing it, since a lone male stranger didn’t ideally want to be seen to be lurking in the apartment of a young single woman.
The first odd thing he noticed was the smell of something burning, which seemed to be coming from the nearer open door on the right. The second was the little stand in the passage that had been knocked over on its side across the middle of the hallway floor. A pretty ceramic dish lay smashed on the floorboards, various keys scattered nearby. The camel coat Romy Juneau had been wearing earlier looked like it had been yanked down from a hook by the entrance and was lying rumpled on the floor.
Ben moved a little further up the passage, stepped past the coat and the fallen stand, and peered around the edge of the first open door on the right. The door led to a small kitchen, clean and neat, with worktops and cupboards the same pastel blue as the hallway and a table for one next to a window overlooking the street side of the building. The burning smell was coming from a coffee percolator that had been left on the gas stove. It had bubbled itself dry and was giving off smoke. Ben went in and took the coffee off the heat, using a kitchen cloth because it was hot. Then he quickly flipped off the gas burner with a knuckle. Force of habit, again.
Whoever had been in the middle of making coffee had taken a carton of non-fat milk from the fridge and a delicate china cup and saucer from the cupboard and laid them out ready on the worktop next to a little pot of Demerara sugar and a tiny silver spoon. All very dainty and feminine. Ben presumed that someone was the apartment’s occupant. So where was she, and what was all the mess in the hallway?
By now the alarm bell was jangling in the back of his mind. Something wasn’t quite right. He stepped back out into the hallway and called again, a little more loudly, ‘Hello? Mademoiselle Juneau?’
Still no reply. He nudged open the closed door to the left, which was a bedroom. Romy Juneau evidently had a thing for that shade of blue. It was everywhere, the bed covers, the curtains, the walls. But she wasn’t in the room. He stepped up to the further open door on the right, which he now saw led to a salon.
It was inside the salon that Ben now saw Mademoiselle Romy Juneau for the second time.
It would be the last time.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_fe0ce73c-59a6-54f8-993d-ac94ceb86cc8)
As far as Romy Juneau was concerned, she would only ever have met Ben on the single occasion they’d bumped into one another in Rue Georges Brassens. She was oblivious of their second encounter, and always would be, because she was lying sprawled on the Persian rug inside her living room with a broken neck. That much Ben could tell at a glance from the unnatural angle of her head to her body.
He stood frozen in the doorway for an instant. He had seen many dead people before now. But never quite in such circumstances. His shoulders dropped and something tightened inside his throat at the pathetic sight of her lying there. The leather satchel she’d been carrying earlier had been emptied and left lying along with its contents on the rug a few feet away.
He went over to her and knelt next to the body. She was very still, with that special quality of inertia that only death can confer on a person. If there had been any blood, it would have been easy to see against the white cashmere top she was wearing. It looked as though a single strike to the neck had killed her. Ben looked around him for any kind of impact weapon, but there was nothing. A very strong man could have done it using his bare hands, but it would have taken a blow of tremendous force.
Her eyes were open and staring sightlessly straight at him, the vividness of their colour faded like the wings of a dead butterfly. Ben reached out and laid two fingers on the side of her throat. He had expected no pulse and found none. Her soft skin was still warm, also expected, because this had happened to her only minutes ago. While she’d been waiting for her coffee to brew.
Her death touched Ben deep, though he didn’t know why. It was as if he’d known her, somehow. As if part of his mind was trying to reconnect with an old scrambled memory lost somewhere in the murk of the dim and distant past. It was a strange feeling.
He lingered next to her body for a couple more seconds, then stood up and walked grimly to the living-room window. It was the archetypal Parisian floor-to-ceiling iron window with the ornate knobs and designer rust, flanked by gauzy white drapes. It overlooked the same side of the building as the kitchen. He looked out at the street below. The carpenters had finished fixing the plywood to the bookshop window. Cars, vans, bikes were passing by on the road, pedestrians strolling along the pavements, normal city life going on as usual.
And up here on the floor behind where Ben was standing, a young woman with a snapped neck.
He was about to turn away from the window when he saw a man emerge from the building and step towards the edge of the kerb. About Ben’s own height, though it was hard to tell from the downward angle. He was wearing a long dark coat. Quality wool, expensive. Black leather gloves that matched his shiny black shoes. He was well built with broad shoulders. Black hair, streaked with silver.
The man from the lift.
He stood at the kerbside with his back to the building and looked down the street as though he was waiting for a taxi to come by. Ben couldn’t see his face, but now he was seeing him again there was something oddly familiar about the guy – and not just from their fleeting brush a couple of minutes ago. Ben felt a weird tingle up his back, like a knife blade drawn along piano strings.
Just then, the man turned and craned his neck to look straight up at the window of Romy Juneau’s apartment. He was in his early forties, with the olive skin that hinted at Mediterranean ethnicity. He could have been taken for anything from Italian to North African to a Middle Easterner. His features were strong and square, not unhandsome, and his eyes were dark and clear and intelligent. They found Ben’s and stared right at him through the window.
And the tingle up Ben’s back turned icy cold. That was when it hit him. It couldn’t have hit him harder if the man down in the street below had pointed a gun and shot him. Because in that dizzy moment Ben realised what it was that his mind had been trying to reconnect just now. It wasn’t Romy Juneau who had triggered a distant memory from the past. And the strange feeling he was getting had started before he’d set foot in this apartment.
It was the man in the lift who had set it off.
The man now standing staring up at the window.
Ben now realised that he knew this man. And as the memories were suddenly unlocked and rushed into his mind, he was able to pinpoint exactly when and where he knew him from, and why they had met before, and what had happened on the last occasion they’d crossed paths.
None of the memories were good ones.
For just the briefest instant, Ben closed his eyes. He was suddenly transported back in time. He flashed on another face. A very different face, one with deep dark eyes that looked into his. And he thought, Samara.
As the instant ended Ben opened his eyes and was brought back to the present. The man in the black coat was still looking up at the apartment window, frowning as though similar thoughts were going through his mind, too. Then a silver Mercedes Benz saloon pulled sharply up at the kerbside next to him with a screech of tyres. Its tinted driver’s window slid down and another olive-skinned, swarthy-looking guy inside started gesticulating and beckoning. Ben couldn’t make out the words, but it was obvious the driver was urging the man in the black coat to get in the car.
The man hesitated for a second, as though he was thinking about turning back and returning inside the building. Ben wished he would. But then the man changed his mind and hurried around to the car’s passenger side, yanked open the door and flung himself into the seat, and the door slammed and the driver hit the gas and the Mercedes took off with another squeal of tyres, accelerating hard away down the street.
By then, Ben was already racing from the apartment. He jumped over the body of Romy Juneau, sprinted through the hallway and hammered down the stairs and slid down the spiral banister rail to descend the last two floors more quickly. Reaching the entrance foyer he burst out of the inset door into the street.
But the silver Mercedes was already long gone, and the man in the black coat with it. All that remained in his wake was the memory of his name, who he was and the things he had done.
And the fact that he was supposed to have been dead years ago.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_009c7ba7-40af-5dc8-8992-40cadee67dae)
Ben didn’t return upstairs to Romy Juneau’s apartment. There was nothing more he could do. He had left no trace of his visit; it was as though he’d never been there at all.
He was burning up inside with anger and confusion and frustration. But he kept his pace slow and measured as he walked up to the end of Rue Joséphine Beaugiron and went inside the bar-restaurant called Chez Bogart. The interior was all decked out with framed posters and stills from old movies. Whoever owned the joint was obviously a big Bogie fan. And doing good business, too. Most of the punters were the late breakfast crowd, noisily enjoying their brioche French toast and buttered baguettes sprinkled with grated chocolate and bowls of café au lait while defenceless women got battered to death just down the street.
It was still a little early in the day for hard drinking, even for him, but Ben was willing to make an exception. He ordered himself a double shot of Glenlivet at the bar, no ice, no water, and carried it over to a corner table beneath a giant blow-up still from Casablanca, the classic image of Bogart in white tux, loitering by the piano as Dooley Wilson sang ‘As Time Goes By’. He took a long drink of his scotch and thought about peculiar coincidences and the return of figures from the past whom you’d never thought you’d see again.
Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world.
Ben knocked the whisky down fast and soon felt the alcohol go to work to settle his nerves. Then he set down his empty glass and headed for the men’s room. It was empty, which was what he needed because he wanted no witnesses. And quiet, which was also good, because when anonymously reporting a murder it was generally preferable to leave no clues as to where you were calling from. He took out his phone, the prepaid burner this time. This was exactly the kind of purpose it served. He dialled 17, police emergency, got through quickly, and just as quickly gave the call handler the necessary details. Victim’s name and address, but not his own. He had no desire to spend the next two days being grilled by police detectives about what he was doing in her apartment around the time of her death.
Ben could easily have told them the name of the man he’d seen leaving the scene of the crime, but he held that information back too. There would have been no point. Whatever identity the guy had used to enter France would certainly be fake. Ben strongly doubted that his real name would even come up on the INTERPOL crime database, except in certain classified files to which regular cops would have no access. Any one of a variety of aliases Ben could have given them might have triggered a response. The kind that would have the whole street and surrounding area closed down by paramilitary forces armed to the teeth, searching door to door and stopping cars with K9 units on standby.
But that would have been just as pointless. They wouldn’t stand a chance of catching the guy. He was far too good for them. And if they somehow did succeed, it would probably be the last thing they ever did.
Ben cut off the police emergency call handler’s questions and left the restaurant through a tradesmen’s back exit that led into an alleyway. He lit a Gauloise and slowly walked back around the corner, crossed the street and made his way along Rue Joséphine Beaugiron as far as the antiquarian bookshop opposite Romy’s building, from where he could monitor events at a discreet distance. He finished his cigarette outside the shop and then wandered inside and spent a while browsing the shelves of dusty old books.
Fourteen minutes later he heard the police sirens screeching to the scene. By then he’d picked out a handsome old deluxe volume of the collected poetry of Charles Baudelaire. A present for his friend and colleague Tuesday Fletcher at Le Val, possibly the only ex-British Army sniper in the world with a taste for nineteenth-century French poetry. Ben ambled up to the front desk with the book in hand. The sirens were growing loud outside, filling the street. He said to the shop proprietor, ‘What’s happening now?’
‘God only knows,’ the guy grumbled. ‘This whole city is going to shit, if you ask me.’
The two of them stood in the shop doorway watching as a pair of marked cars and a gendarmerie van screeched to a halt across the street, a team of uniforms scrambled out looking highly purposeful and disappeared inside Romy Juneau’s building. Just regular police, responding to a regular incident. If only they’d known who they were really dealing with.
‘Dear me, I hope nobody got hurt,’ Ben said. The bookshop owner just grunted, threw up his hands in resignation at the terrible state of the world and returned to his desk. If only he knew, too.
The cops would soon call in the coroner and start asking questions up and down the street in search of potential witnesses to the incident. It was time for Ben to be moving on. He paid for his purchase, tucked the book under his arm and left the store at a relaxed pace, nice and easy, drawing no attention from anyone. The best way to disappear in a crowded city was to go underground. He headed for the nearest Métro station, joined the fast-moving crowd heading for the tunnels, and caught a packed train that took him on a winding, circuitous route back towards the safehouse.
His original plan had been to lock up the apartment, jump in his BMW Alpina and set off for Le Val. He’d have been enthusiastically greeted by Storm, his favourite of the pack of German shepherds that roamed and guarded the compound. To stretch his legs after the drive, he might have pulled on his running shoes and gone for a cross-country five-miler around the woodlands and fields, with the dog trotting happily along behind him. Later, dinnertime would have seen him sitting at the table in the big country kitchen with Jeff and Tuesday, the three of them digging into some delicious casserole provided by Marie-Claire, the local woman employed at Le Val to feed the troops and ruin everyone’s waistlines with her indecently tasty French rustic cooking. Then after dinner he’d have relaxed in the company of his friends by the fire, Storm curled up at his feet; maybe a game of chess with Jeff, a glass or three of ten-year-old Laphroaig, a haze of cigarette smoke drifting pleasantly overhead as he told them about his India trip.
But that cosy future would have to be put on hold for a while. He now had other business to finish before he could go home. Business he’d thought had already been done and dusted back in August 2016. Apparently not, it seemed. Which begged a lot of questions to which Ben now needed the answers.
The name of the man Ben had crossed on the stairs and seen leaving the apartment building was Nazim al-Kassar. He was, in the plainest terms, a terrorist. Or had been, many years earlier when he and Ben, then a newly promoted officer with 22 Special Air Service, had first crossed paths in Iraq. Ben found it hard to believe that Nazim could have changed tracks since that time. Men so single-mindedly committed to an ideology of warfare, terror and destruction didn’t just lose interest and switch career paths.
And Nazim had been one of the most committed of all. Meaning one of the worst, most viciously ruthless, and most lethally dangerous individuals out of all the long list of such men Ben had ever come across.
Ben was the only man who had ever been able to catch him. Nazim’s capture had come at a heavy cost in terms of lives lost, on both sides. For all that, he hadn’t remained a prisoner for long. Ben recalled clearly the events of the day when Nazim al-Kassar had got away from him, never for the two men to meet again.
Until this day, sixteen long years later.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_42cf16a4-1ba3-5ddd-a2fa-19a7fa7991fb)
The story began with one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian Muslim born in 1966. From an early age al-Zarqawi had been a committed jihadist, dedicated like his millions of fellows to the cause of spreading Islamic fundamentalism worldwide with the ultimate goal of creating a global Caliphate that would banish and eradicate all false religions, in particular Christianity and Judaism.
At the age of twenty-three, al-Zarqawi had travelled to Afghanistan in the hopes of joining up with the jihadist Mujahideen in their struggle against the Soviet troops who had, in their view, invaded their country. In fact, the Russians were there by invitation, having come to the aid of the pro-Soviet Afghan government in 1979 to help against the rise of rebel militants generously funded and armed by the CIA. America’s financial and military support of the Islamist rebels would ultimately prove disastrous to the West, but back then Communism was the bogeyman and the Carter administration, followed by that of Reagan, were each too blind to see the future nightmare they were sleepwalking into.
The Islamists, with their own agenda, were only too happy to grab the guns and money and get stuck in, favouring hit-and-run guerrilla tactics against the Russians. The word ‘Mujahideen’ in Arabic meant simply ‘those who fight’, in the sense of jihad or holy war. And fight they did, hard and relentlessly. The cruel war of attrition had lasted more than nine bloody years, ending with the withdrawal of the battered, miserably defeated Soviet troops in early 1989. It had been Russia’s own Vietnam, and it crippled their economy so badly that it became a factor in the fall of the USSR.
Arriving on the scene that same year, the young al-Zarqawi was dismayed to find the war all wound up and his chances of dying gloriously in the name of jihad dashed, at least for the moment. Undeterred, he soon began looking for new avenues into which to channel his religious zeal. Among the various contacts he established was a certain Osama Bin Laden, the son of Mohammed Bin Laden, a Jeddah property development billionaire with close ties to the Saudi royal family. Bin Laden Junior had inherited some $30 million following his father’s death and left the business world behind to pursue his own interests, with a little under-the-table help from the CIA, who at that time still naively regarded him and his fellow jihadists as useful assets in the fight against Communism. While the war against the Soviets drew to a close and victory appeared imminent, Bin Laden had already started forming plans for the future. He had a vision to expand his operations on a grand scale, and to this end co-founded a new outfit called al-Qaeda, meaning ‘the Foundation’, a subtle reference to the worldwide Islamic Caliphate he wanted to create.
But this was still the early days, and Bin Laden was looking out for keen young talent to help him grow his operation. As plans developed, he later donated $200,000 to al-Zarqawi, with which to build a large jihadist training camp in Herat, Afghanistan. Many of al-Zarqawi’s fellow Jordanians came to join him there, and he happily set about building an army of fierce fighters ready and willing to die for Allah.
From the start, al-Zarqawi had been known for his extreme views – so extreme, in fact, that even Bin Laden considered him somewhat radical. He took a rock-hard line against other Muslims whom he considered too soft on nonbelievers and thereby heretical – such as all Shi’ites, who he felt ought to be wiped out en masse. He despised the Jews even more strongly, as he had been taught to do from childhood; but his most rabid loathing was reserved for the Western oppressors of the Muslim world, the UN and America.
In 1999 al-Zarqawi’s little army became officially known as Jama’at al-Tawid wal-Jihad, or JTJ for short. Its name meant, in Arabic, ‘The Organisation of Monotheism and Jihad’, which sounded deceptively academic compared to the brutal reality. Al-Zarqawi had founded his merry band of cutthroats with the main intention of leading it back to his homeland and toppling the Kingdom of Jordan, which he considered an example of heretical un-Islamic leadership. He was then still based in Afghanistan, which for the last three years had been largely controlled by its own Islamic Emirate, a.k.a. the Taliban. It was a safe haven for jihadist terror groups like the JTJ, which continued to thrive and attract new membership.
However, that all changed when al-Zarqawi’s former associate Osama Bin Laden orchestrated the September 11, 2001, attack on US soil that sparked the ‘War on Terror’ and a whole new era began. As thousands of American and British troops flooded into Afghanistan and started ferociously attacking Taliban enclaves and training camps, al-Zarqawi decided things were getting a little hot for him there and moved his operation instead to Iraq. There he met and befriended a loyal new disciple, one Nazim al-Kassar.
Nazim was thought to have been born in Ramadi, Iraq, in either December 1977 or January 1978 depending on whichever intelligence source would later prove correct. Little was known about his family background, or what kind of formative experiences and upbringing had prompted him to embrace radical ideology with such enthusiasm in his late teens and early twenties. In common with his like-minded peers he believed devoutly that one day, thanks to the heroic efforts of warriors in this holy struggle against the infidels, the kuffar, Islam would rule over every corner of the world.
By the time he became a keen young disciple of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Nazim al-Kassar was already utterly devoted to the cause and ready to do whatever it took to show his allegiance both to his mentor and his faith. When al-Zarqawi travelled to Syria to oversee the training of Islamist fighters there, Nazim accompanied him and took a leading role in the expansion of their army, proving a strong leader of men as well as a highly proficient warrior himself, as skilled with the AK-47 rifle as he was with pistol and knife. He underwent training in strategy, counterintelligence and explosives, and learned to speak English perfectly. He was also deployed to different countries to assist in missions and assassinations at his master’s behest, one of which was the murder of an American diplomat in Jordan. Before his twenty-fifth birthday, Nazim already had infidel blood on his hands, and he was ready for more.
It wouldn’t be long in coming.
In 2003, two years after invading Afghanistan in reprisal for the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, the Americans along with their coalition of Western allies launched the second major wave of their so-called War on Terror. This time, the target was Iraq. The objective: to complete the job left unfinished in the First Gulf War and bring down the regime of Saddam Hussein, believed to be plotting further terror attacks on the West.
It was at this point in history that Nazim’s path was set to cross for the first time with that of his deadly enemy, Ben Hope.
