Through his drug-induced haze Imad realized that he might have gone a little too far. He nodded modestly. “Just be here when I get back.”
“Someone will be waiting for you at the east entrance. Do not talk to him. Do not look him in the eye. Just hand him the tape, turn around, and leave. Do you understand?”
Imad nodded again, and he took off without looking back. This whole gig was starting to feel bad in his mind. For the first time since he had started dabbling in the struggle, his fears were not being suppressed by the hash. Achmed was one of the crazy ones. Imad saw it in his eyes. Mujahideen, they called themselves: warriors for God. Those types would just as soon kill you as look at you.
Tonight he was backed into a corner. He had to deliver the tape to the television network. There was no turning back. But he didn’t have to go back for his money, nor did he have to accept any other missions. It’d be his luck that next time they would want him to be a suicide bomber.
Learn by example, his father said. Either take up the construction business and become a multimillionaire. Or take up arms and live in a cave in Afghanistan.
Imad decided that he was claustrophobic after all.
He followed the broad Corniche Boulevard as it gracefully curved away from the waterfront toward the Bin Omran District where the U.S. Embassy had put up its new building. To the right was the upscale New District, where the American new chancery was located, and farther out the city’s tall buildings quickly gave way to residential neighborhoods, and suddenly, as if cut off by a switch, the city ended and the desert began.
Traffic was light, with only the occasional delivery truck or private car, but Imad was getting spooked. He was convinced that someone was watching him. Unseen eyes somewhere in the darkness were monitoring his progress to make sure he didn’t screw up.
He wanted to be anywhere else except here in Doha. But he could not turn back. They would kill him if he did.
He decided that when he got back home he would go up to Riyadh and tell his father everything. Together they would figure out how to get him out of the mess that he was in.
The Al Jazeera studios were in a small, nondescript building on a tree-lined street in one of Doha’s more fashionable districts of professional offices and expensive homes set behind painted walls. Qatar was safe, but these days everyone in the Middle East felt more comfortable sleeping nights behind tall walls.
The only outward signs that betrayed the studio’s purpose were a rooftop bristling with satellite dishes and a Qatar Army Humvee parked in front. The studio’s front and side entrances were barricaded by sandbags.
Imad couldn’t see any soldiers when he made his first pass and turned the corner at the end of the block, but he knew they were there. Watching. Waiting. Over the past few years there had been a number of attacks on Al Jazeera bureaus and its correspondents.
The television network was underwritten in part by the Qatari government, so the army had placed guards at the home studios. If there was going to be any further trouble, it would not be here in Doha.
The problem, as Imad saw it, was that if he stopped at the east entrance and tried to deliver the tape, the army guards would first demand to see his identification. That was something he did not want to happen. He did not want his name listed on some roster of suspected terrorists when it was discovered he had delivered a tape for al-Quaida to the studio.
Yet he could not toss the tape in a trash can and go home. Al-Quaida would find him and kill him.
He turned around in the middle of the block and stopped. The Vespa idled softly in the balmy night air. How had he gotten himself into this situation? What had once seemed like a lark now seemed to be a terribly dangerous enterprise. He wanted to be done with it and get out of there.
The tape was like a brick of hot lead against his belly. Achmed said to hand it to a man who would be waiting at the east entrance. But there were soldiers there, behind the sandbags.
Imad suddenly gunned the Vespa and accelerated down the street. He had to slow down for the corner, but then he accelerated again.
A soldier stepped out from behind the Humvee and raised his hand.
Imad cranked the throttle full open, the Vespa’s engine buzzing like a million bees. At the last possible moment, he maneuvered around the soldier and yanked the videotape out of his jeans. As he passed the east entrance, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a shadowy figure in the doorway six or seven meters away.
He threw the tape toward the figure at the same instant the soldier behind him shouted, “Halt!”
Twenty meters from the corner, something like a bee sting, but with the power of a sledgehammer, slammed into his back, lifting him off his motor scooter.
He grunted as all the breath was knocked out of him, and the night went black as he smashed face-first into the pavement.
TWENTY-ONE
Kelley Conley got to her desk on the second floor of the U.S. Embassy in Doha at 8:00 A.M. sharp as she did every morning, six days per week. She was a slightly built, attractive woman, who at thirty-two was the youngest assistant to any U.S. ambassador in the world. Divorced three years earlier, she had to send her two children to live with her parents in Waterloo, Iowa, until she was either reassigned to Washington or given a post in what she believed was a more stable part of the world.
As a result she was ambitious and earnest almost to a fault. And she was almost always nervous, expecting the Islamic struggle against the West to blow up in her face at any moment.
As far as she was concerned, all Americans living and working in the Middle East were on borrowed time.
Ambassador Peter Sorensen was in Washington this week, so all problems facing American interests in Qatar ended up on her desk. This morning the first two items were a reported shooting the night before in front of the Al Jazeera studios, less than a half-mile from where she sat. And the second was the arrival of Kamal Isomil, a senior news editor with the Arab television network.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the two things were related.
And all of that was in addition to the attempted kidnapping yesterday of Secretary of Defense Shaw. Every U.S. embassy and consulate in the world was on high alert. Everyone was jumpy.
“Did he say why he’s here?” she asked the receptionist downstairs at the security desk.
“No, ma’am. Just that it was a matter of some importance.”
“Very well. Have someone escort him up,” she told the receptionist.
She buzzed her secretary to say that Isomil was on the way, and two minutes later the Al Jazeera senior editor showed up with a plain padded envelope, which presumably had been checked by the Marine guards and bomb-sniffing dogs outside at Post One, the gate to the compound.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice and at this early hour,” Isomil said, graciously, in English. He was a short, somewhat paunchy man with wavy gray hair, dark eyes, and a ready smile. This morning, however, he was serious.
Kelley had gotten to her feet when he came in. “You have piqued my curiosity.” She motioned him to sit down.
“It’s not necessary, Mrs. Conley. I’ve only come to deliver this.” He handed her the padded envelope. “It’s a copy of a videotape that was delivered to our studios last night.” He seemed relieved to be rid of it.
“There was a shooting.”
Isomil nodded gravely. “The messenger did not stop when he was ordered to by the army, and unfortunately he was shot to death.”
“Good heavens,” Kelley said.