Nemesis (FBI Thriller #19)(55)
He remembered his mother carping and whining after his father had struck her, Samir so used to it he paid it little mind. He couldn’t wait for the day he left his family and Algeria, bound for Paris and the Sorbonne. He’d been unhappy in Paris as well, because his Algerian French accent was mimicked with a contemptuous twang, and he was looked down on, despite his family’s money, his academic success, and his good looks. He practiced his English, anxious to leave the French bigots behind him, and went on to take his doctorate in economics at Berkeley, California. He’d found his home at this fascinating place where he could say anything he wanted—the more outrageous, it seemed, the more he was considered to be an intellectual and accepted, the women always eager to sleep with him. And the wine was good. At Berkeley, he hadn’t been an outsider. He’d been embraced. He might have stayed on if he hadn’t known he was destined for greater things.
His three sisters, the worthless cows, had reveled in the rich lifestyle their father’s lands provided and had all married moneyed Frenchmen and enjoyed the fruits of Paris. But not Samir. He had chosen a different path. It had all come to him so gradually, it seemed, spawned in America, in the belly of the enemy, and there surely was irony in that.
Every year he traveled to Algeria to visit his father and mother, always during Ramadan. Last year Ramadan had fallen in July and a surprise awaited him. His father was lying in bed, his left side paralyzed from a stroke, and his mother now ruled the household. He was no longer a happy alcoholic who struck out when it pleased him, he was now a supplicant.
His mother glowed. Another irony. She’d talked mostly of wanting him to marry, about wanting grandchildren from her only son. All his father wanted was a drink.
Samir took another sip of his chardonnay, let it settle first on his tongue, then slide smoothly down his throat, and he smiled. Perhaps he would marry someday, perhaps Lady Elizabeth Palmer. He saw his dark hands on her smooth white flesh, heard her screaming his name when she came. What would their children look like?
His parents believed he was a big-shot intellectual, and he was, actually, a noted speaker and a professor at the London School of Economics. But he was much more than that. Neither of them had a clue that the man they called Hercule, the nickname his grandfather had bestowed on him, was also known as the Strategist, a shadowy figure, feared and spoken of in whispers, a man whose reputation continued to grow throughout Europe and the Middle East for the simple reason that he could always be trusted to fulfill a contract for any job desired, from an assassination to an exploded building. Jihadists believed him to be one of them, and Hercule knew his plan, his Bella, was a terrorist’s wet dream and would make them admire him even more. What they didn’t know was that the destruction of the West’s sacred cathedrals, for him, the Strategist, was something else entirely. In the future, after three or four of the world’s famous cathedrals had fallen into ruin from his hired bombers, all it would take was the threat of a specific target cathedral, and the payoffs would become a source of huge revenue to him.
He remembered Imam Al-H?di ibn Mirza had christened him the Strategist after a particularly intricate plan he’d devised to kill a Shiite banker in Syria who was helping to fund Hezbollah. Hercule had profited handsomely from that plan, seizing a shipment of large bills before the man died in a hail of bullets. The imam never learned that detail. The imam thought of Hercule as a committed genius who would help him bring the world to Islam, a true believer to whom money meant little. So did dozens of hardened fighters who had worked for him and who feared his name. He’d heard one of his most trusted, skilled men, Bahar, call him the iron fist inside the imam’s velvet glove. Until he decided otherwise, for the moment, he would continue to be tied to the imam.
He’d been based in London for seven years now, and each year he’d learned from his mistakes. Some had cost lives and, more important, cost him money. He had won the right to choose the targets the imam funded, putting Hercule in command of dozens of jihadists. He agreed with some of their grievances, but he saw them as misguided thugs who did as he asked for very little money. What better cover could he ask for than mindless acts of terrorism when there was an opportunity for profit?
It had been years since Hercule had allowed the imam to help plan an operation, but this time, against his better judgment, he had. Nasim Conklin had been a big mistake. Hercule wouldn’t have used that kind of leverage. It was too uncertain, too unpredictable. You could always count on a true believer, but using a man’s family as a sword over his head was taking too big a risk. The imam had been certain Nasim would make the perfect tool. He would give up his life for his family, the imam was certain. He had refused to approve Bella without his being used, and Hercule needed the imam’s backing for this project. The stakes were too high. But there was more, Hercule knew it simply because he knew the imam so well, knew he hadn’t told him his real reason for wanting Nasim Conklin to give up his life at JFK.
He got up to ease his frustration. He cracked his neck and stretched as he walked to the wide suite windows that looked toward the Charles River. He couldn’t actually see the water, not in the middle of the night, but knowing it was there was somehow satisfying. The endless flow, the gentle lash of waves against the docks, the water lipping the sloping grassy shoreline: it was like watching the Thames from his apartment window in London. It helped him think.
Hercule turned away from the window. He was tired but knew he couldn’t sleep yet. It was time to meet the failures of the past few days head-on, to look at every step taken, every decision, and why each had failed. He had to salvage what he could of his meticulous plan, his brilliant project, Bella, named after a particularly inventive lover he’d enjoyed for several months in the South of France.