"How long has he been here?" Ansar said.

"Two months," Bilal said.

Ansar shivered.

"Ansar," Bilal said.

"What?"

"Does he truly think Isa was betrayed to the West? And that one of us betrayed him?"

Ansar, his equilibrium restored by the cold bite of the winter air, said, "He is old. The old have fancies."

Bilal noticed that Ansar took care to keep his voice down so the rest of them could not hear, and lowered his own voice accordingly. "But he is right. They were waiting for Isa in Baghdad. He barely escaped."

"But he did escape," Ansar said.

"You sound as if you wished he hadn't."

Ansar shrugged. "It is true, I don't trust him. He is not one of us. He was educated in the West. And someone betrayed our brother Zarqawi to the infidels."

"You think it was Isa?"

"I think Isa is not the first person to be seduced by his own ambition." Ansar's eyes strayed to the tiny cottage from which they had just emerged. "And he won't be the last."

Bilal looked troubled, and Ansar slapped him on the back. "Come! Let us return before the light is gone, and we are lost and fit only for food for the wolves."

"And Isa?"

"I will send word." Ansar gave an elaborate shrug. "What Isa does when he receives it is another matter."

"What happens if he does not come?"

"The old man can send word." Ansar's smile was thin and humorless. "What he does when Isa does not respond is another matter."

A WEEK LATER IN AN INTERNET CAFE IN ISLAMABAD, A MESSAGE DULY went out. A month later, when there was still no response, this was reported to the old man.

He sighed and covered his eyes. After a moment he dropped his hand. "Find him," he said. "Find him and bring him to me."

DOSSELDORF, JUNE 2007

If 9/11 had taught them anything it was that the simplest plan was the best plan. A small cell, independent, autonomous, well-funded. A clearly defined target. A strong leader to give the cell a focus, and to help them keep it. And most important, a clearly stated expectation of results, which Akil had found to be most motivational. Not a threat of what would happen if there were no results, no, no, nothing so crude, but the implication was there, and he made sure it was frequently reinforced.

Money was the least of his worries, a huge relief, but over the past twelve months since Zarqawi's death and his departure from Iraq, he had taken the precaution of emptying out the account in Bern in small increments and placing them into a series of other accounts in various banks in different Western nations. He had learned a great deal answering the phone for the bank in Hayatabad all those years ago, Zarqawi had filled in the blanks he hadn't been able to fill in for himself, and he put it all to good use now.

The result was a tidy sum of working capital resting anonymously in three different bank accounts, one in the Grand Caymans, one in Hong Kong, and the third in the original bank in Bern, naturally under a different name. Sooner or later, al Qaeda would come looking for that money, and he wanted to be certain it would be well out of their reach.

Sooner or later, they would come looking for him, too, and they wouldn't stop until they found him.

Or until he returned to them, trailing clouds of glory, his own man, master of his own wildly successful organization, and owing fealty to none. He smiled at the thought.

He opened two more accounts, one in New York and another in Miami, with the minimum balance necessary to avoid fees. One of the things he despised most about capitalism was the rapacious capacity of Western banking institutions to bleed their customers dry in fees. Did not the Koran say that which you give that it may increase your wealth has no increase in Allah, but that which you give in charity shall have manifold increase?

But then so much of Western culture was haraam. It amused him to use their own unclean practices to bring them down, and this was where his time in the West informed his actions. He'd chosen the American banks on the basis of the quality and efficiency of their web sites, and set up an automatic bill pay plan to deposit monthly amounts from one to another that approximated a credit card payment and a car payment, respectively. Nothing was more sure to draw unwanted attention than sums of money sitting idle, thereby accruing no income to their hosts.

All this took time, since haste in withdrawals and deposits was another flag for official attention, but he was in no hurry. He got a job drawing blueprints for the new Düsseldorf airport extension and worked himself seamlessly into the local expatriate Muslim community, forging friendships with young Muslim men of promise.

Identifying likely recruits was never difficult, especially since the West had seeded the ground so well for the introduction of Muslim extremism. Everything about their various societies, their creeping secularism, their capitalistic greed, their abominably unfettered women, and above all their support for the state of Israel and their acquiescence to the subsequent subjection of Palestine, affronted the very ideals of Islam, firing the imams to denunciations and calls for action that fell on ready ears. The resulting harvest of disaffected young men was thick on the ground in every Western nation and ripe for the picking.

Germany was no different. As in France, England, and Austria, Muslims, imported for cheap labor, had taken up residency and settled in to produce a second generation that by features, coloring, and dress alone were guaranteed to grow up isolated, alienated, and angry about it. In

Düsseldorf there was a small, provincial colony of them, and within this colony AMI looked to replenish the cell of Abdullah.

One man, Rashid Guhl, seemed at first very promising, bright, inarticulate, and a rapt follower of the local imam who preached a carefully obscure jihad against the Far Enemy every Friday from the local mosque. Isa cultivated Rashid's friendship over some months, and then Rashid repaid him by falling suddenly in love with the daughter of the owner of an appliance store. Isa knew better than to try to talk him out of it, instead attending the wedding to wish Rashid and his new bride the very best of luck, but afterward he allowed himself to withdraw gradually from Rashid's new life. There was nothing more debilitating to a sense of mission than family entanglements.

Instead he concentrated on Yussuf al-Dagma and Yaqub Sadiq, Yussuf another engineer in his own firm, and Yaqub Yussuf's best friend from childhood, now a traffic engineer in Düsseldorf. Both were of Lebanese descent, with parents who had immigrated in search of relief from the constant conflict with Israel. Both were single. Both spoke English, albeit with the hideous British accent of their primary schoolteacher, and both held dual citizenship in Germany and Lebanon. Neither was quite as religious as Rashid, who was now beating his Western-born wife into wearing the hijab, and Yaqub was something of a ladies' man and a little erratic. They both regarded themselves as strangers in a strange land, though, and Akil played on that sense of exile. It was not to be expected that these men, softened by a birth and an upbringing in a Western culture that at least pretended to tolerance, would be of that same burning, single-minded drive and that matchless experience and ability as his original men, veterans of the streets of Gaza and Beruit. He did not dare show his face in either place, however, not yet, and so had to make do with the clay at hand.

The three of them took to meeting over coffee after work and talking long into the night, the core of a group of young men with shared feelings of dislocation from their homelands, of not fitting into their new worlds whether they'd been born into them or not, and of revulsion of Western mores from the consumption of alcohol to the length of women's skirts to Western, particularly American, imperialism. To them, the invasion of