Chapter 3 #4
Most of the money had gone to “the Cause.” Freedom for Palestine. The destruction of the Jews. And where better to make the money for that destruction than in the belly of the beast, Manhattan?
His brethren in Hamas had worked hard on this. Twenty years training him to blend in, and three years of planning, of procurement, evading the sensors of the NSA and the spies who were everywhere.
Muhammed had worked a lifetime for what would happen over a few hours in five days’ time. The day before the celebration of the Fourth of July. An apt moment to bring America down. By the Fourth of July, Manhattan would be a wasteland and America brought to her knees.
The plan was perfect. Forty martyrs in a secret hold of a ship. Several canisters of cesium 137, to be apportioned in equal parts to the martyrs. Forty martyrs wearing shaheed explosive belts laced with radioactive cesium, detonating at the same moment on July 3 throughout Manhattan.
Muhammed knew Manhattan, knew exactly where the financial nerve points were. He’d pinpointed forty buildings, the very nerve centers of the American and the world economy. Banks, brokerage houses, hedge funds. The SEC. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The martyrs didn’t have to go up to the offices, necessarily, though Muhammed had made appointments under false names with the CEOs and directors and presidents for all of them.
But if they couldn’t make it to the heart of the buildings, it would be enough to enter the lobbies and blow themselves up to make the buildings uninhabitable.
The tens of thousands of workers in the buildings would have to exit from the irradiated lobbies and would never go back to work again.
Only hazmat teams would ever enter the buildings.
By the next day, all of Manhattan would be evacuated.
All the paperwork, the computers holding the economy together—gone. Completely unusable. All the drones working in the financial mills—dying of radiation poisoning.
Perfect.
Finishing the work begun on long-ago September 11 and making the entire island a radioactive desert for thirty years, the way the West had made his homeland a desert.
Bringing the West to its knees has been his dream since he had been recruited into the organization at the age of ten.
They’d found him in the camps, a homeless orphan, scrounging scraps from the destitute, dressed in rags, this blond, blue-eyed, light-skinned freak.
They had taken him in, given him a family and a purpose. He was like an arrow, aimed straight at the heart of the corrupt and licentious West. Hamas had brought in tutors, instructing him not only in the language of the West, English, but in its ways.
At times, he had sensed that they were afraid that he would succumb to its lures, but there was no risk of that. None. There was no honor and no solidarity to be found among the infidels. Muhammed’s heart and soul belonged forever to Hamas and to his people, to the day of his death.
They’d fought, his handlers and him. He wanted to become a warrior, shaheed, a martyr. It was the purest life he could imagine, exacting vengeance against the countries who were trying to crush Islam. Giving his life up seemed like the noblest purpose he could imagine.
But it was felt that the gift of his coloring, his looks, was too precious to waste.
So Muhammed watched with sullen jealousy as other young men in the secret training camps were dispatched to meet a noble warrior’s death while he spent his days and nights with tutor after tutor, instilling in him the ability to infiltrate the enemy with ease, the better to destroy him.
English, French, literature, music, math, science.
And the terrible pop culture of the West, filled with shameless movies and music, whoreish women and soulless men.
His head was filled with the useless knowledge necessary to pass as one of them.
It turned out that he even had an aptitude for studies, which in his secret heart filled him with as much shame as his appearance.
His young heart had ached to be just like his brethren, to move and live with them as one.
But he’d been told over and over again that Allah had singled him out for a special mission.
That which had singled him out as a homeless boy in the camps, made everyone look at him with loathing and suspicion, was to be used in the name of Allah to slay their enemies.
So Muhammed studied hard, becoming well versed in the ways of the West. An identity was created: Paul Preston.
One entire edge of the Strip borders the Mediterranean. It was easy enough to smuggle him out and get him into Italy, where he emerged in Rome with a new US passport and a business-class ticket to California.
He was sent to Stanford to study economics, where he excelled. It was his way of combating the enemy, by studying its face, understanding its corrupt black soul.
He became Paul Preston, born of an American father and an English mother. He graduated summa cum laude in economics, with a network of future movers and shakers to use.
He was set up in Manhattan with a million dollars and orders to join a brokerage firm. Hamas’s backers had plenty of money, and had been willing to write the sum off.