Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2) (30 page)

Boys and young men are dressed in army fatigues, with balaclavas
around their faces and heads. 
The only language they have in common is a smattering of English, the language of the enemy.  They do not need language.  They follow the others across monkey bars, shooting targets, crawling on their bellies—all with terrifying ferocity. 

“Don't mind them,” says Michael.  “They're just getting into shape.”

The organizers of the camp call themselves Al Ansar, which means
The Supporters.
Turns out Khalid and Michael are recruiters for the camp.

Without any way to get back to Switzerland, Kazan decides to play along.  There isn't really anything else he can do.  And considering Europe is mired in a war that doesn't look like it will end anytime soon, learning to shoot a rifle might not be such a bad thing. 

Everyone is friendly to him.

The day begins at 3:30 in the morning, with a call to wash.  At 5:30 AM, there is prayer and reading of the Quran until sunrise.  At 7:30 AM, a ninety-minute run led by a former Egyptian special-forces officer named
Mullah Faisal.  Breakfast is at 8:30 AM, followed by two hours of tactical lessons with unloaded weapons and simulated attacks.  Kazan learns how to handle various weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s.  Lunch, then more classes, chores, dinner, and more prayers. 

The young men hurl themselves through the exercises.  Kazan follows along, and sings their chants,
We are the sword of Allah.  We are the hand of jihad. 
At meal time, they seem intoxicated, spouting clichés and aphorisms, nodding and gesturing frenetically.  Their faces gleam with belief. 

Other times they seem perfectly normal, talking about girls or soccer.

Mullah Faisal stands behind Kazan on the firing range.  “Have you ever shot one of these?  It's a real kick in the pants.”

Kazan likes the weight of a gun in his hands.  He likes the calisthenics and the running.  He doesn't even mind the Islamic diatribes.  He likes being part of a group.  It's fun.

In the evening, he is treated to speeches and videos.  A leader brags about UNI advances and victories.  “The West is crumbling,” he says.  “The green crescent star flies over England, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and Spain.  We must kill the enemies of Allah in every corner of the world.  We must rid it of the descendants of pigs and monkeys who have been dining from the tables of Zionism and capitalism.”  They watch archived lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki.  They watch footage of battles in Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, and other jihadi conflict zones.

Sleeping in a dormitory with twenty other boys, he thinks of home for the first time in a long time.  Not Amsterdam, but Turkey, his dusty little village on the Anatolian plains, the sounds of roosters in the morning, the smell of
gözleme
baking in the village tandori, young boys kicking up dust storms, driving a soccer ball through the streets, the flowers by the spring, the smell of dung fires, the thud of rain on a straw roof, the tangerine dawns, his younger sister Melis, following him around with such trust in her eyes, his brother Faruk, dancing his bizarre little dances, while grandpa sings an old Turkish song, unaccompanied.

Is this what the jihadists want?  A return to preindustrial innocence?  Where everyone in the village thinks the same, lives the same, dreams the same.  Is that such a bad thing?   

After two weeks, Kazan hunts down Michael and tells him he has to get back to Zürich.  At first Kazan doesn't think he heard him.  Then Michael says, “Sure.  Khalid and I are headed back to the Islamic Republic of Deutschland anyhow.  We'll take you as far as Innsbruck.  But first there is someone I want you to meet.”

Kazan follows him into a stone farmhouse at the edge of the camp.  Michael leaves him, and he enters a room.  Mullah Faisal is sitting beside a middle-aged European-looking man with a short beard.  He pours him a cup of tea and asks him to sit down.

“Seventy thousand people have been trained here in general warfare, only a tenth receive advanced terrorist training,” says the older man.  “We think you'd be an excellent candidate.  Would you be interested in a martyrdom operation?”

For the first time, Kazan is afraid.  He wonders, for a moment, if they will let him leave.  “I will have to discuss it with my father.”

“Would you be interested in a U.S. or European target?”

“I will honor his wishes.”

“You might consider spending part of the summer with us.  We seek those whose love of God is unqualified, and who thirst for the glory of paradise.  Are you such a one?”

“I'll have to get back to you on that.”

“I understand.  It is important to honor your father's wishes.  We will be in touch.”  With that Kazan is dismissed.

He is never so thankful than when he sees the Bergisel ski jump tower at Innsbruck the next day.

Goethe Platz

Kazan begins to sense he is being followed.  He often carries small bags of gems on his trips, so he is accustomed to practicing vigilance, looking around, avoiding crowds.  But here in Zürich, he carries no gems—only the books he needs for his classes at the university.  He can think of no reason why he would be followed, and he has yet to spot anyone suspicious.

Is he becoming paranoid?  He doesn't think so.  But he often feels a laser-like concentration singe the hairs on the back of his neck.  He turns, but no one is there.

He gave Michael Chalhoub a false phone number, but somehow he found Uncle Osman's unlisted private line.  He calls Kazan two or three times a month, inviting him to coffee or a meeting, which he turns down.  Kazan wonders if he is having him followed.

Before he even realizes what he is doing, he instinctively crosses streets in the middle of the block, changing up his routes and routines.  He pauses in front of display windows and checks the reflection of what's behind him.  He gets on buses, and immediately gets off.  He enters stores from one entrance and leaves through another, while assisting an old woman with her packages.  He goes to his classes early, and sits in empty classrooms, waiting.  He never goes to the same café twice.

When he makes a deflective move, he feels a buoyancy behind him, as if leaving a tunnel.  His suspicion becomes a certainty.

Uncle Osman notices a change in him, a jumpiness.  “Why don't you get a girlfriend, or visit a friend from school.  It isn't good to hang around an old fart like me all the time.”

Friends from school.  Right.  That's just who he's trying to avoid. 

Then he thinks of Laszlo, and has an intense desire to know what he's up to.  He hasn't seen him since graduation.  He gives his mother a call.

“Kazan! 
Tesoro!
  How wonderful to hear from you.  What are you doing?  Where are you living?”  Ana Luzzatti is full of questions, and fills him in on the family.  “Laszlo finished his Israeli military service and lives in Frankfurt now.”

“He didn't go to Harvard?”

“I wish he would, but he's decided to put it off until after the war.  Why don't you give him a call.  He'd love to hear from you.”

Within a few weeks, Kazan finds himself in Frankfurt on business for Uncle Osman, and gives Laszlo a call.  It's amazing.  He sounds exactly like he used to—as if they'd seen one another just a couple of days ago.  They talk for an hour, and agree to meet at an outdoor café on Goethe Platz the next day.

Laszlo is already sitting there drinking beer, when Kazan walks across the plaza.  He is taller, still skinny, with a silly little goatee—a French painter from La Belle Époque.  He breaks into a wide grin and gives Kazan a percussive hug.  Kazan can feel how strong he is under his loose tweed jacket.  Sinewy, with arm muscles where he used to have sticks, his back rock hard.

They drink beer and reminisce.  “Mom still has that Turkish rug you gave her.  She treasures it, you know.  She thought you were special.  Christ, she still talks about you.  How about your family” 

“I lost my grandfather.”

“The one who lived in Turkey?  Who told you all those great stories about the Mongols?”

“Yeah.  I don't think he ever wrote them down.”

“You should do it, you know, before you forget them.”

Most of what they discuss in Goethe Platz is about the old days.  Laszlo offers almost no information about himself, but he apparently is not going to school, and does a lot of traveling in Europe.

Kazan isn't sure why he doesn't mention running into Chalhoub and Chahine.  He is kind of embarrassed about it.  He tells Laszlo he's working with his uncle in the antique business and going to Zürich University, studying engineering.

Politics does not come up.  The state of the war does not come up.  Kazan's status as a Swiss citizen does not come up.

Before they part, Laszlo gives him a different number than the one his mother gave him, a number in Paris.  Kazan can always get in touch with him there.  “If you want to mail me, send it here.”  It is an address in Israel.

Krankenhaus

Kazan finally got Uncle Osman to go to the doctor, and now he sits in an austere light-blue room at the hospital, waiting for him to get an MRI. 

He's the only father I've ever had. 
This is what he thinks as he stares at his shoes, elbows on his knees.  If he put together all the times he'd seen Ahmed, he doesn't think it would come to more than a few weeks.  All through his childhood, Ahmed breezed into the village in his silver-metallic Mercedes, handing out presents and money, had a few serious discussions with the village elders, then a drink of coffee, a pat on the head, disappearing again in a cloud of dust.  He got monthly calls when he was at Berchtold, no visits.  In the few times he's been to visit family in Amsterdam, his father was rarely there.

Uncle Osman has always treated Kazan like an adult, a companion, a friend.  It always gave him comfort to hear him puttering around in the workshop, fussing with a difficult stone, looking at it a hundred times before breaking it.  He was his anchor.

The doctor comes out, sits beside Kazan, and tells him that Uncle Osman has “squamous cell carcinoma, which has spread to his lymph nodes in his neck and esophagus.  We could give him radiation to ease his discomfort, but there is no cure.” 

The doctor gives him three to six months.

#

One morning Uncle Osman asks Kazan to go to a Turkish bakery for him.  “I dreamed last night of biting into
tulumba,
orange-blossom honey oozing down my fingers.”

Kazan grins, eager to please, grateful his uncle is hungry.

Osman's favorite bakery is way out in District 11, a place called Simit Dünyasi, several tram changes away.  It will take him a couple of hours for the errand, and the weather is wretched out.  Yet it is the first thing Osman has shown interest in since he got back from the hospital; there is no way Kazan can say no.

Too impatient to wait for the second tram, he ends up walking.  The temperature is in the low thirties, and a cold, piss-freezing wind whips across the lake.  It starts to drizzle.

He is about to step off a curb, when a black Mercedes with dark tinted windows screeches to a stop in front of him. Two men jump out.  Kazan instinctively backs up, and turns to run, but the men are on him. 

A black bag is shoved over his head.  Twitching and struggling, he thinks he has a chance.  His muffled cries go nowhere.  Hands with vise-like grips shove him into the backseat of the car.  Doors slam.  

He tries to sit up, trying to remember if he saw anyone on the street, anyone who might help.  His mind goes blank.

Someone kneels on him, yanks his hands behind his back, and cuffs him.  The nose of a pistol stabs him under his jaw.  “
Schön unten bleiben,”
barks a voice.  Stay down.

The car sways through the streets of Zürich, not fast, not to attract attention, bumping over cobblestones, stopping at lights, every vibration terrifying.  Kazan loses all sense of direction. 

Kidnapped.  Not entirely unexpected, he thinks, trying to calm himself. 

He assumes Michael Chalhoub is behind it.  He wants something from Kazan.  Money.  Or plans to blackmail him into working for the Islamists.  Or use him for propaganda, a beheading to show the Swiss government that neutrality is not an option. 

If it's money he wants, Uncle Osman will pay.  But will Osman know how much to pay?  Terrorists never ask for a number.  Bidding too low leads to mutilations, presents of ears and fingers.

The hood muffles the men's voices, but he thinks they are speaking a Slavic language.  The rain-soaked hood clings to his face; he gets a mouthful of fabric every time he breathes.  The cuffs dig into his wrists, and make leaning back uncomfortable.

He figures they are taking him back to the jihadi training camp in Slovenia—eight hours away—but then senses they are on small roads, not Via A10, which they'd probably take west to Munich, down through Salzburg and into Slovenia.

The car's transmission shifts down, his weight thrown backward.  They are going into the mountains.  They could be winding their way south, then get on the A4 to Milan and east to Slovenia.  Longer, for sure, but they might go that way to evade police.