The Assassin (Max Doerr Book 1) (12 page)

After
the surgery and months of intense rehabilitation, Doerr was back on his feet.
He could do pretty much everything just like before; running was the only
activity that gave him a twinge in his leg.

DOERR
WAS BACK in New York, continuing his therapy.

“Why
don’t you take it easy for another month.” Lazarus called one day. “Maybe you
got a little rusty after being out for a while.”

“All
the rust is gone, Lazarus,” Doerr said. “I have to find my son’s killer. I only
have pain in my chest. That pain is more intense than anything else.”

“We
want to make sure you’re fine. But…”

“I’m
fine, Lazarus,” Doerr interrupted. “My leg is fine. I want to go to Amsterdam
today and start my operation. I want to go there
today
.”

“You
can’t go today. Maybe next week. I will send the flight and other details.”

Doerr
hung up the phone. He made some coffee and drank it. He turned all the lights
off, sat in a reclining chair, and kept thinking. Darkness helped him to contemplate
better.

Samuel’s
vile face flashed in his mind. Sitting in his apartment was not working, so he decided
to take a walk outside and get some fresh air.

He
walked for about a mile. His legs felt fine. On his way back he felt a small
niggle in his hip, which he was sure would go away soon.

He
arrived back at his apartment and heard a beep from his phone. There was a
message waiting. He hit the play button and listened.

Max,
don’t try to be smart. Just do your job and forget about me. What is done is
done. If you come after me, there will be consequences. You got injured in
Paris, and I’m sure you don’t want to be hurt again. So don’t look for me.
Don’t seek revenge. 

From
the voice, Doerr had no doubt who the caller was – Samuel. Doerr could never
forget his voice.

Doerr
checked the caller ID. The LCD displayed ‘unknown.’

Doerr
grabbed the phone and threw it on the floor in frustration. The device
shattered into pieces.

Samuel
was trying to threaten him. Samuel knew everything Doerr was doing.

But
how?

Did
Samuel pay off someone in the agency? Maybe a techie, who had access to all the
data stored in the computers?

Doerr
didn’t know, and he didn’t care. Catching and killing Samuel was his goal.

ABU
HALIM WAS the eldest among nine sons and four daughters; his father had three
wives and had produced many heirs. Halim’s affinity for leadership started
early in his life. He graduated from the University of Dubai in Business
Administration with an eye to take over his father’s oil business one day. He
proceeded to Oxford Business School for a year, to earn an MBA.

But
Halim never finished his MBA. Three months into it, his mother died. Halim
immediately returned home, planning to mourn his mother’s death alongside his
father, only to see his father move on in his life, seemingly without grief,
with his two younger wives. Halim cried alone. He remembered those nights when
his father had screamed at his mother, and Halim used to put his arms around
his mother as his father slammed the door, heading for the bedroom of one of
his other wives.

Days
and weeks passed after his mother’s death. His tears stopped, but the pain in
his heart only swelled. The desolation waned only when he took a silent vow in
the mosque, while praying, to kill his father and both stepmothers.

The
next few weeks he acted in a very friendly way with his younger stepmother,
Nasrin. She was just five years older than him. He started having breakfast and
dinner with her every day – even reading the
Quran
with her. On a Sunday
afternoon, when the whole family was having a gala lunch with shish kabobs,
made from halal goat meat, and lamb curry, his father smiled when Halim told
him that Nasrin was his new mother. With his lips pursed, Halim also smiled – inside
his mind. Outside, he maintained a serious face. His plan was working.

Exactly
three months after his mother’s death, Halim was having dinner with Nasrin. It
was nine p.m., and some of his brothers and sisters were in bed already. During
the middle of dinner, one of Nasrin’s sons cried and called for her from the
next room – the three-year-old boy needed something – and Nasrin abandoned her
meal to tend to him. That presented the opportunity Halim had been waiting for.
He quickly took out a small bottle from his pocket and poured its contents,
succinylcholine, on Nasrin’s dinner.

Nasrin
came back within a few minutes after placating her son. She adjusted her
niqab
and resumed consuming the rice and chicken curry from her plate. A few seconds
later, she reached for her water glass and drank deeply. She picked up some
more rice, but it never made it into her stomach. She pressed her left arm against
her chest, struggling to breathe, and then dropped to the floor.

“Call
a doctor,” screamed Halim and ran outside. He ran down the lane to the house
where the doctor lived. He kept banging on the door. “Doctor, doctor, please
come,” he begged. “My
Ummu
is sick.” Halim was surprised by his own
acting capability.

The
doctor was in bed already. He took minutes to dress, and when he finally came
to see Nasrin, it was too late. The doctor checked her pulse and shook his
head. Halim cried – inside his head, he laughed with glee.

Nasrin
had a blood disease. The doctor had prescribed Coumadin, a blood thinner, but
she often neglected to take her medicine and often complained of the leg pain
the medicine gave her. After she had been pronounced dead from a heart attack,
no one suspected a thing. One day before her funeral, one of Halim’s aunts
pointed at Halim and bemoaned, “That boy cannot catch a break.”

After
a few months had passed, Ramadan started. If Halim’s father was sad about the
deaths of two of his wives, he kept it well hidden. The father was hinting
that, at the age of forty-seven, he needed to marry again. Halim’s father ate
like a pig at the
Iftar
, the meal at the end of the day-long fast. The
father ate at least twenty dates and consumed a pound of goat meat every day.
He had the habit of taking a walk outside after the big meal and enjoying a
solitary smoke. He wasn’t aware that Halim had been following him with an eight-inch-long
serrated knife hidden in his pocket.

It
was three days before the end of Ramadan. The moon was hiding, and the street
was dark. Halim’s father took a deep drag from his America-made cigarette, when
most people in the neighborhood were praying or sleeping inside their house.
The father brought the cigarette to his dark lips, unaware that death was
closing in.

Halim
watched his father walk by the house that was under construction. A ladder
stood leaning against the three-story building. The steel rods poked out of the
concrete pillars, and the roof was yet to be finished. Halim took one last look
around to make sure no one was watching, and then he sprinted toward his
father. Halim grabbed the old man by his neck, shoved him inside the half-built
house, and with his strong arms, threw him to the ground. As his father fell to
the soil, his father’s head hit the edge of a brick; the father wrapped his
arms around his head and shrieked in pain.

Halim
sat on his father’s chest. “Why?” he asked his father in a hushed but angry
voice.

“You,
Halim?” the father said in a shocked voice. “Why what?”

“You
don’t know?” Halim plunged the knife into his father’s chest. “You disrespected
my mother.”

Halim
was sure that the knife pierced the older man’s heart the first time. But he
stabbed him two more times, right under the sternum, and then moved off his
father’s chest carefully, so as not to get any of the copious amount of blood
on his clothes. His father’s body was limp. Halim watched the motionless body
for a minute. His father’s unfinished cigarette smoldered close to his body, a
trail of smoke drifting up through the air.

Halim
stooped and sliced the dead man’s throat out of anger, and wiped the knife
clean on his dead father’s striped shirt before placing it back in his pocket.
He pulled out his father’s wallet and took all the dirham notes and then threw
the wallet next to the dead body. He carefully walked out of the house after
looking around one more time.

Halim
felt neither happy nor sad when he read the third-page report in the
Khaleej
Times
which detailed how his father, a respectable and successful
businessman, was stabbed to death under the cover of darkness by a robber, just
for a few hundred dirhams. The report cried foul of the deteriorating law and
order situation in the city.

After
his father’s death, the responsibility to run the family business fell on
Halim’s shoulders as he was the eldest son. It was arduous for him to take over
his father’s business, as he had never looked into it before. But he knew this
was something that had to be done, and he worked twelve to fourteen hours a
day. During this period, most of the partners and the men who had helped run
the business were supportive of Halim. But there were a few who weren’t and
questioned Halim’s capability. Halim marked all those enemies and later
eliminated them from his company one by one.

About
a year after his father’s death, he had good control over the large oil
business that his father had built over twenty years. He did not forget that
his other stepmother was yet to be taken care of. The woman was a mother to
three boys and a girl. The youngest son was just a year and half old, but that
did not deter Halim.

A
month later, he employed the same method of adding succinylcholine to food
about to be eaten by his stepmother. After her death, many in the extended
family were relieved that the widow died a natural death, paving the way for
Halim to be the eldest person in the family.

Halim
shed tears of joy and relief at the funeral, which people read as a sign of
sadness. Later, he prayed in a mosque near his house. He fulfilled the promise
he had made to himself little more than a year ago, to deliver death to his
father and two stepmothers. With his knees on the ground, he bent his body to
touch the ground with his head and thanked Allah for strength he had in
himself, and tears soaked the ground.

When
Halim took over his father’s business in the early nineties, the world economy
was booming and so were the United Arab Emirates. The total revenue from his
father’s business back then was around five hundred million dollars. He
invested the huge profits from oil extraction into shipping, construction, real
estate and agriculture. Within five years, his company’s revenue approached a
billion dollars.

What
Halim did to his business next was construed as strange by many. He broke it up
into six smaller companies and transferred ownership of five of them to his
five trusted brothers, keeping one for himself. He gave the biggest company to
his favorite brother Raafiq, who not only ran it well but also helped Halim
raise money for his passion – to attack America. Unlike Halim’s other brothers,
Raafiq was smart and well educated, and he could speak English and French
fluently, but Raafiq had a vice; he liked Caucasian women and ignored the four
wives he had in Dubai, but Halim forgave him.

Halim
continued to control how the business was being conducted as the brothers were
completely loyal to him. Halim married a sixteen-year-old girl, who never
forgot to wear her burqa and read the
Quran
eight times a day. Halim
transferred the ownership of the sixth company to her. Now, officially, he
owned nothing, except a few real estate properties, but everyone in town knew
Halim owned the entire conglomerate.

During
the late nineties, Halim wanted to buy two new oil rigs, right outside Dubai,
but was outbid by an American oil company. After that incident, his hatred for
America increased exponentially. He reached out to the local Intifada group
that decried America every day, and he funneled large amounts of cash to them.
But Halim soon realized that the local group was all talk, and its leaders were
simply pocketing most of the cash; they did little to really harm America.

Halim
made contacts with Hamas, al-Qaeda, and other like-minded terrorist groups and
started funneling money to them. Soon, he was interacting with the top tier
leaders of Hamas and al-Qaeda.

He
invested his money away from home – bought stakes in a bank in Zurich, a
retailer in London, a technology business in India, a fashion designer in
Paris, a publishing house in New York and oil firms in Libya and Riyadh. The
investments were not made with making money in mind, he had plenty already;
they were made so that he could travel virtually anywhere in the world with
impunity.

Halim
was overjoyed when al-Qaeda attacked the USS
Cole
in October 2000,
killing seventeen Americans. The following month he met Osama Bin Laden in
Afghanistan, and Zawahiri, the second top-man in al-Qaeda back then.

In
2001, he traveled to London, Paris, Manila, Rome, Zurich, Riyadh, Oslo and
Kuwait City. On paper, the trips were for business, but in reality, he went to
gather cash for terrorist organizations. The rich America-haters in Western countries
sent money in small amounts to banks in Riyadh, Kuwait City, London, and
Frankfurt. Money would then be transferred to Halim’s accounts in Zurich, all
transactions masked to mimic payments for commodities traded by Halim’s
companies.

In
November 2001, Halim held a lunch meeting in Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich and invited
the financers and the terrorists. It had only been two months since 9/11, and
the Western world was angry. Muslim leaders decried the attacks, and many were
fearful of the Western action that was sure to follow. Halim knew that a
section of the Muslim population condoned it, and that section included
ultra-rich Muslims around the world, and Halim was determined to get their
money and route it to the right people.

A
meeting was held, over caviar and the most expensive smoked salmon so that the
capital-providers could get a firsthand account of the progress being made by
the terrorists against America.

A
black-suited burly man, from Riyadh, leaned back in his chair and took a sip of
the fine Petrus vintage wine and threw a quick glance at the beautiful view of
Lake Zurich through the window as he listened to the al-Qaeda point-person from
Pakistan.

“We
must recruit heavily in Iraq,” the al-Qaeda leader said. “Americans are going
there. It will be a killing fest.”

“Don’t
you think it is too soon?” the burly man asked and rolled his eyes as twenty
other men, including Halim, watched.

“What
do you know about timing?” the al-Qaeda man said angrily. “Have you ever fought
on the ground? Or taken aim with a rifle? Do you know how it feels to be living
in a cave?”

“Calm
down, calm down,” Halim interrupted. “I know we need to recruit in Iraq. But
right now the Americans are raining bombs in Afghanistan and killing innocents.
And we need to protect the top al-Qaeda leaders.”

The
burly man and the al-Qaeda man silently nodded.

“Now.”
Halim turned to the burly man. “How much money can you offer this month?”

“Seven
hundred thousand dollars,” the burly man said. “Business has slowed down since
September.”

“One
point two million,” another man at the table said.

Halim
noted down all the numbers on a piece of paper and then added them up. “Total
collection is twenty-three point four million,” he said. Then he wrote ‘6.6
million’; that was how much he was going to give. He wrote ‘thirty million’ at
the bottom of the paper and drew a circle around it.