The Assassin (Max Doerr Book 1)

by Jay Deb

  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 busin
ess 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.

  “This is how much we are going to have.” He raised the piece of paper in his hand so that everyone at the table could see it.

  “Thank you,” a chorus of voices said. “Lion of Dubai.”

  That meeting happened more than five years ago. And now Halim was known as the financer, the Lion of Dubai in terrorist circles, and he loved it. The nickname made him feel like a king.

  Chapter 14

  When Lazarus entered Stonewall’s room, she sat, leaning back in her black leather chair, deep in thought. A report from the intelligence chief of the UAE, which she had finished reading a few minutes before, was playing in her mind. Looking out through the window, she barely noticed Lazarus walking in.

  Lazarus cleared his throat. Stonewall turned to face him and showed him the chair.

  “How is the Amsterdam work going?” Stonewall asked. “Is Doerr able to do his job?”

  “Doerr is doing quite well. He is almost done,” Lazarus said. “He should return in a few days. Consider the job complete.”

  “Good.” Stonewall moved forward and placed her elbows on the table. “I am worried about this report I just received from Kassem.”

  “What does the report say?” Lazarus asked.

  Stonewall clasped her hands together and said, “It is about the Lion of Dubai. We have tried everything. We unleashed the Israelis and the Saudis, but he knows how to evade each of them.”

  “He goes to Saudi Arabia a lot,” Lazarus said, turning in his chair. “How come they can’t get him?”

  “You know how it is over there, one branch goes after the terrorists and another branch tips them off before the raid. And this asshole is unmarried, which I find really very hard to believe. He must have a couple of wives tucked away somewhere. Anyway, the point is, this guy is well respected by many, including religious leaders, especially because how much money he gives away.”

  “True, but he gives most of his money to terrorists. Doesn’t he? To folks in Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, according to the last report I read. We should really go after the people who give him the money.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more. But even that has proved hard, since he has multiple legitimate companies around the world that do legal business. It is hard to make out which money is legal and which isn’t. I have information here that he will be in Riyadh next month. The Saudis are getting ready to arrest him, but I don’t have much hope.”

  “I have the right person in mind who can take down Halim.”

  Stonewall didn’t take the hint, and they continued to talk about the Lion of Dubai until Lazarus brought the same issue back again. “I think Doerr will be a good option for this kind of operation.”

  “I don’t think so,” Stonewall disagreed. “We need someone who we can completely trust. Someone who has worked with the agency for a very long time, and whose loyalty is beyond question. This Lion of Dubai is a very crafty man. Since we killed Osama Bin Laden, he has become operationally involved in various terrorist operations. Earlier, Halim just used to provide funds. But now it appears he is planning a direct hit on US soil, but we don’t know the details. We need to bring this guy down.”

  “The intel chief of the UAE is a good guy. Let us send Doerr and another operative to Dubai. Let them work together. I am sure something good will come of it.”

  “You really have a lot of confidence in this Doerr guy, don’t you?” Stonewall said.

  “Yes, I do.” Lazarus looked at Stonewall through the corner of his eye. “Trust me on this one. When he takes up a job, he does not think about anything else. He is totally focused and unafraid. He is one of the best that the agency has produced. He isn’t called the assassin for nothing.”

  “Okay, let me think about it. I’ll talk to some other people and make a decision.” Stonewall smiled. “I am going to miss you, Lazarus, after you retire. You’ll be leaving in less than a year, right?”

  “Yes, ten months and nineteen days, to be exact. Have you decided who you are going to pick as deputy director once I leave?”

  “Yes and no; I have some names in my mind. But I haven’t decided yet,” Stonewall said. The phone started ringing. Stonewall leaned toward the phone, saw the caller ID on the LCD display and said, “I have to take this. Thanks for coming by.”

  “Thanks, Madam Director.” Lazarus rose to leave Stonewall’s office.

  “You’re welcome,” Stonewall said to Lazarus and picked up the phone. “Hello, Senator Brushback. How are you?”

  After pleasantries, the senator quickly got to the point. “I think Ross Calpone will make a great deputy director. He is a good communicator, and he knows how to motivate people. I say let us groom him for the job. We have almost a year in hand.”

  “Ross may be good in certain areas, but I don’t think I will pick him for the job. I dug into his file.” This was not the first time Brushback had tried to con Stonewall. But she knew how to deal with him and
play the tough game with the senator. She had encountered many men like Brushback while she was in the Army. She neither rejoiced in such encounters nor was she afraid. “He was ready to quit after just one field job, and the only reason he was kept and promoted was that the case he worked on was a high-profile case and very successful.”

  “So there you said it. He can bring success. Don’t you think we need someone like him to jump-start things at the agency?”

  “Well, the job that ended up well fifteen years back was because it was planned very well by the people at Langley. Ross contributed very little, really.”

  “Mrs. Stonewall, I strongly suggest that you choose Ross unless you want to have a hard time in the briefing meetings from now on.”

  “How dare you talk to me like that?” Stonewall said angrily and sat up straight. “Are you trying to force in Ross because his father and his buddies contribute heavily in your campaigns?”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “Preposterous? I have your campaign contribution list right here. Do you want me to read it to you?” Stonewall slammed the phone down.

  DOERR BOARDED A KLM flight from Schiphol airport, heading for JFK. His job in Amsterdam was done. The plane journey was as uneventful and boring as the cab ride to his apartment in New York. It was early morning when he returned, and he could hear the birds chirping.

  Once home, Doerr woke up Gayle. She made some coffee and breakfast for him. After a chat, Doerr hit the bed, hoping for some sleep. But he felt restless, thinking about whether the NYPD detective had made any progress with Billy’s case. He wanted to go to the police department right away, but he was aware that they would not be open till nine a.m.

  Putting on a black leather jacket over his jeans, he started out at eight thirty the next morning. The police station was within walking distance. At nine thirty, Doerr met the detective, who opened a file and rummaged through some papers. Doerr knew what that kind of behavior meant. The detective did not have any good news.