Amsterdam 2012 (34 page)

“I’m sorry, Ann.
 
But as I said, it didn’t feel like I really had a choice.
 
They had already decided I was going to work for them.
 
Baron Fairchild told me I should do it.”

“Did they tell you how long you would be at
Guantánamo
?”

“I knew it would be for a few months.
 
As an American, it’s nearly impossible to gain the trust of these guys.
 
I had to appear legitimate.
 
I had to suffer.
 
The FBI didn’t tell the interrogators anything, so I was treated like any other prisoner.
 
I got grilled.
 
I got humiliated and hurt.
 
Nobody from Homeland Security or the FBI talked to me for a whole month.
 
I thought I was going to go crazy.
 
I didn’t know if I was a real prisoner or not.
 
I guess they wanted my desperation to seem real.
 
It was.

“They kept us pretty isolated, but I made two friends, an Afghan and an Egyptian.
 
They helped me with the
Quran
, and gave me the names of some people I could contact once I got out.
 
Since I was American, they assumed I wouldn’t be there forever.”

“Did they tell you about terrorist plots?”

“Hell no.
 
Nothing like that.
 
They didn’t accept me as one of their own.
 
I guess they kind of wanted to recruit me for the same reason the FBI did.
 
I could pass both as an American and as an Islamist.”

“When you escaped at Ronald Reagan Airport—that was planned?”

“Yes.
 
I made my way down to Tampa to the address of a safe house where I was taken in.
 
They had been told about me—I don’t know how.
 
They kept track of all the prisoners at
Guantánamo
.
 
The safe house was pretty awful—about a dozen guys sleeping on mattresses on the floor, sitting on newspapers to eat their pizza dinners, windows covered with sheets, no music, no television, prayers and Allah talk day in and day out.
 
We weren’t allowed to speak to women.
 
The walls were covered with sayings of the Prophet.”

“How did you contact the FBI?”

“I didn’t.
 
Not for six months.
 
But they knew where I was.
 
They put a chip inside me.”

“Like a dog?”

“Exactly.
 
Right here.”
 
He took my finger and rubbed it over a bump in his scalp behind his ear.

He stayed in the area for two and a half years, moving from one safe house to another in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, living with between eight and twelve guys at each place, all young radical Islamists.
 
For a time, he worked at an Islamic Society in Tampa as a security guard.
 
He studied the
Quran
, prayed five times a day, and performed daily supplications called
salat
.
 
In the evening the safe houses held discussion groups where they analyzed passages of the
Quran
, and discussed what was or was not
haram
or forbidden in Islam, which turned out to be almost everything—short skirts, beer, boys and girls holding hands.
 

Slowly he was let in and discovered the elaborate network across the world, organized in a manner that was a cross between an army and a corporation, with a chain of command, each person assigned to a task and a level of intelligence.
 
Cells, some as small as eight people, operated independently.
 
Training and setup were uniform throughout the world, with daily instructions on the Internet, distributed through many different websites so no one could tell where the instructions originated.
 
Information about terrorist plots was not discussed on the Internet, but through messengers, people who did a great deal of traveling in their normal jobs, and whose movement would not seem unusual, often women, Europeans, or home-
growns
.
 
Thousands of men passed through the network of safe houses.
 
A whole separate network of people operated the complex task of keeping track of security and logistics for the safe houses.

“I was a member of the media committee.
 
I did translating, and produced
jihadist
videos for the Internet and cable, which were also shown in Islamic cultural centers and
madrassahs
.
 
I worked on video games, too.
 
Part of my job was to come up with strategies to convert American youth and strengthen the American
jihadist
movement.”

“Did you plan terrorist attacks?”

“No.
 
I wasn’t even supposed to know about them.
 
But I found out, and I passed on information to Homeland Security.
 
They planned some major shit that didn’t happen.
 
Las Vegas and the Golden Gate Bridge.
 
Stuff in LA, too.”

Peter was in Hollywood to assist the group of moneyed Islamists investors who had bought
EyeUniverse
, the media conglomerate.
 
His job was to help with the television station in LA.
 
He had been here several months putting together the sitcom about a Muslim family in Dearborn, a drama, cartoons, and several other shows.
 
His job was to get the Hollywood liberal elite involved, and several big name producers were signed on to various projects.

“If they think television is evil, how could they buy a television station?”

“They use the sword of the infidel against him.”

“Your parents know nothing about this?
 
Or where you are?”

“No.
 
They can’t know.”

“My God, your poor mother.”

Peter looked like I’d slugged him.
 
For a moment I saw him as I remembered him, sleepy-eyed on my pillow, when we stared at each other for minutes at a time, shyly probing, emotions flooding our chests, feeling things we had never felt before, until tears, for no apparent reason, leaked down our cheeks.
 
We had greater things to fear now than exposing our naked souls.
 

“The FBI forced you into this job.
 
Why do you stay with it?
 
Can’t you get out?
 
Even soldiers get to leave after their tour is over.
 
Haven’t you paid your dues yet?”

“There are no dues in war.
 
You fight until it’s over.”

“War?”

“Yes, war in America, not just in Europe.
 
It’s here.”

I couldn’t help it.
 
Tears began to leak from my eyes.
 
I let them slip down my cheeks, unchecked.
 
“Why didn’t you contact me before?”
 

Peter looked exasperated, hurt,
helpless
—then his eyes turned opaque.
 
“You have to get out of LA.
 
You need to leave the country, to Mexico or Canada, or further if you can.
 
Get your family out.”

“Why?
 
What’s going on?”

“I don’t know everything.
 
Something big is going to happen, something they’ve been working on for ten years.
 
When bin Laden saw 9/11 kind of backfired on Al Qaeda, he realized one or two big acts of terrorism
wasn’t
going to bring America down.
 
It was too vast and powerful.
 
They had to infiltrate, setup a strong network, then, when the time was right, commit many different kinds of terrorism all over the country simultaneously to completely break down the infrastructure.
 
Then Al Qaeda could step in.
 
They are about to make their move—about a dozen attacks all over the country.
 
LA is one of the targets.
 
They’re going nuclear—here, in New York, and in Washington.”

As Peter explained how Al Qaeda got nuclear weapons, he leaned forward and took my hands, massaging my fingertips with his thumbs.
 
Osama bin Laden, he said, first got his hands on several so-called “suitcase bombs” when nuclear weapons were withdrawn from the Soviet republics and taken to Soviet storage facilities in the early nineties.
 
The weapons bin Laden bought were old, however, and the nuclear devices required routine maintenance—the tritium and the neutron generator needed replacing every six months to remain viable.
 
All they were good for was the small amounts of weapons-grade fissile materials.

Peter kissed the tips of my fingers and continued.
 
Bin Laden was not deterred, and over the next fifteen years pulled the pieces together to make a nuclear weapon from a number of sources.
 
He bought technology and expertise primarily from the Pakistani scientist Abdul
Qadeer
Khan, who ran a nuclear arms racket, selling nuclear technology and expertise to Libya, Iran, and North Korea and anyone else who was interested.
 
Whatever else Al Qaeda needed it bought from components stolen by underpaid employees at nuclear storage facilities in Russia.

Over the years Al Qaeda smuggled these components into the United States through Mexico.
 
When
Qasim
bin Laden took command, he arranged for bombs to be assembled at automobile machine shops in San Jose, Tampa, and Jersey City.
 
Each bomb used one hundred pounds of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium.
 
Their design was simple, like the Hiroshima bomb which fired two pieces of uranium at each other from opposite ends of an artillery tube.
 
Each bomb was then fitted into the back of a truck.

The UNI and its Al Qaeda led army were now ready to use them.

“How much destruction does a one kiloton bomb make?”

Peter dropped my hands and took a sip from his drink.
 
“About a one-half mile radius.
 
It makes
a fireball 300,000 degrees
Celsius no matter what the size of the bomb.
 
The fireball creates a blast wave—sixty mile per hour winds—that tosses people and objects around, then crushes them with pressure.
 
Radiant heat creates fires.
 
A lethal dosage of radiation, about 400
rads
will kill everyone within the half-mile radius.
 
A radiation dose of 30
rads
per hour will reach 25 square miles.
 
Is that enough to convince you to leave?”

“You don’t need to get mad.
 
I just asked.”

“Now you fucking know.”

We stared at each other in silence, aroused, furious,
frustrated
.
 
The world was spinning out of control and we were thrown apart, pressed against the edges.
 
No amount of willpower could bring us together.
 
That didn’t stop us from wanting each other.
 
“Cynthia is dead,” I said finally, “the flu.
 
Alex is in the Marines, in Turkey.”

“Then get your parents out.
 
You don’t have much time.”

“How much?”

“Goddamnit, Ann,” he said furiously.
 
“I don’t know.”
 
I thought he was going to hit me.
 
Slowly he cooled, his eyes softening.
 
“I’m sorry about Cynthia.
 
She was special.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You want some food?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“Let’s go.”

Peter lived in a two-bedroom bungalow in the Hollywood Hills that overlooked the LA basin, a not unpleasant aspect of his cover as a young television producer.
 
It was simply decorated—modern Swedish.
 
Peter told me the furniture was rented.
 
We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about his interior design.
 
Or the fabulous view.

If you had told me when I was in college that I would go without sex for two years, I would have laughed in your face.
 
Yet it was two years since I had touched his face, tasted his lips, felt his weight.
 
We fell on each other like starving animals.
 
Furious with a lust that was almost
hate
, banging our heads and teeth against each other, wrestling off our clothes, tripping and pinning each other.
 
Making love as if this was it, the last either of us would ever have with anyone.

Then the after—our cheeks pressed together, my fingers tracing his long face, his nose, his jaws, his cheekbones, and eyes.
 
When he kissed my brow, I tasted salt from my tears on his lips.