The professor served the American more tea with his own hands. He had servants, but it pleased him to make his tea personally.
“Constantly. For thirteen hundred years, scholars have studied and composed commentaries on that one single book. Collectively, they are called the hadith. About a hundred thousand of them.”
“Have you read them?”
“Not all. It would take ten lifetimes. But many. And I have written two.”
“One of the bombers, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the one they call the blind cleric, was . . . is . . . a scholar, too.”
“And a mistaken one. Nothing new in that in any religion.”
“But I must ask again: Why do they hate?”
“Because you are not them. They experience deep rage at what is not themselves. Jews, Christians, those we call the kuffars, the unbelievers who will not convert to the one true faith. But also those who are not Muslim enough. In Algeria the Jihadists butcher villages of fellaghas, peasants, including women and children, in their Holy War against Algiers. Always remember this, Lieutenant. First comes the rage and the hatred. Then the justification, the pose of deep piety, all a sham.”
“And you, Professor?”
The old man sighed.
“I loathe and despise them. Because they take the face of my dear Islam and present it to the world twisted with rage and hatred. But communism is dead, the West weak and self-serving, concerned with pleasure and greed. There will be many who will listen to the new message.”
Kit Carson glanced at his watch. It would soon be time for the professor’s prayers. He rose. The scholar noticed the gesture and smiled. He, too, rose and accompanied his guest to the door. As the American left, he called after him.
“Lieutenant, I fear my dear Islam is entering a long dark night. You are young, you will see the end of it, inshallah. I pray I shall not be forced to witness what is coming.”
Three years later, the old scholar died in his bed. But the mass killings had begun with a huge bomb in an apartment block favored by American civilians in Saudi Arabia. A man named Osama bin Laden had quit Sudan and returned to Afg
hanistan as an honored guest of a new regime, the Taliban, which had swept the country. And the West continued to take no measures to defend itself but continued to enjoy the locust years.
PRESENT DAY
The little market town of Grangecombe in the English county of Somerset attracted a few tourists in the summer to stroll through its cobbled seventeenth-century streets. Otherwise, being off all main roads to the beaches and coves of the Southwest, it was a quiet enough place. But it had a history and a royal charter and a town council and a mayor. In April of that year, he was His Worship Giles Matravers, a retired clothier, entitled to wear the mayoral chain, fur-fringed robe and tricorn hat.
And that was what he was wearing as he opened a new Chamber of Commerce building just behind the High Street when a figure rushed out of the small crowd of onlookers, covered the ten yards between them before any of them could react and plunged a butcher’s knife into his chest.
There were two policemen present, but neither was armed with a handgun. The dying mayor was tended by his town clerk and others, but to no avail. The policemen tackled the killer, who made no attempt to flee but repeatedly shouted something no one understood but which experts later recognized as Allahu-akhbar, or Allah is great.
One officer took a slash to the hand as he lunged for the knife, then the assailant went down under two blue uniforms. Detectives duly arrived from the county town of Taunton to institute the formal inquiry. The assailant sat dumbly in the police station and refused to answer questions. He was dressed in a full-length dishdash, so an Arabic speaker was summoned from county police HQ, but he had no more success.
The man was identified as a shelf stacker from the local supermarket, living in a one-room bed-sitter in a boardinghouse. His landlady revealed he was an Iraqi. At first it was thought his action might have stemmed from rage at what was happening in his country. But the Home Office revealed he had arrived as a refugee and been granted asylum. Youngsters from the town came forward to testify that Farouk, known as Freddy, had until three months earlier been a partygoer, drinker and dater of girls. Then he had seemed to change, becoming withdrawn, silent and contemptuous of his earlier lifestyle.
His bed-sitter revealed little but a laptop, whose contents would have been very familiar to the police of Boise, Idaho. Sermon after sermon by a masked man sitting in front of a sort of backcloth inscribed with Koranic inscriptions urging the devout to destroy the kuffars. Bemused Somerset police officers watched a dozen, for the sermonizer was speaking in virtually accentless English.
While the killer, still silent, was being arraigned, the file and the laptop were sent to London. The Metropolitan Police passed the details to the Home Office, who consulted the Security Service, MI5. They had already received a report from their man in the British embassy in Washington about an event in Idaho.
1996
Back in the U.S., Capt. Kit Carson was assigned to Camp Pendleton for three years, the place where he was born and spent the first four years of his life. During those years, his paternal grandfather, a retired colonel of the Corps who had fought at Iwo Jima, died at his retirement home in North Carolina. His father was promoted to general with two stars, a promotion his own father was puffed with pride to witness just before his death.
Kit Carson met and married a Navy nurse from the same hospital where he had been brought into the world. For three years, he and Susan tried for a baby, until tests showed she could not conceive. They agreed to adopt one day, but not just yet. Then, in the summer of 1999, he was assigned to the Command and Staff College back at Quantico and in 2000 was promoted to major. Following graduation, he and his wife were posted again, this time to Okinawa, Japan.
It was there, many time zones west of New York, seeking to catch the late-night newscasts before turning in, that he witnessed, unbelieving, the images that would later simply be designated 9/11 in 2001.
With others in the officers’ club, he sat out the night watching the slow-motion shots of the two airliners ploughing first into the North Tower and then the South, in silence, over and over again.
Unlike those around him, he knew Arabic, the Arab world and the complexities of the religion of Islam, subscribed to by over a billion of the planet’s inhabitants.
He recalled Professor Abdulaziz, gentle, courtly, serving tea and prophesying a long dark night for the world of Islam. And others. He listened to the rising buzz of rage around him as the details came through. Nineteen Arabs, including fifteen Saudis, had done this. He remembered the beaming smiles of the shopkeepers of al-Jubail when he greeted them in their own tongue. The same people?