Darkness descended with unwelcome speed. Then darkness embraced everything.

Not just darkness. Blackness.

Yuan was smart enough to know: light was not something he would ever see again. He settled in. So did death’s messenger in a place like this: the bitter Alpine cold.

His mortal end arrived with astonishing ease.

NAPLES, ITALY, AUGUST 26

On a Saturday evening, Jean-Claude al-Masri stepped out of the passenger side of a Citroën in front of an Islamic school in Naples. He closed the car door behind him and surveyed the block. He noted a man waiting for him, a man twice his age, seated on the front steps of the school.

After establishing eye contact, Jean-Claude returned a very slight smile. They had negotiated earlier. He then glanced back to the Citroën and two others stepped out.

The man on the front steps rose to greet the arrivals. The visitors were expected.

The Islamic school was operated by a rotund, personally engaging man named Habib, an Islamic militant from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan. Habib was the gentleman who waited in greeting on this evening.

Habib was not a professional educator. While he was trained as a chemist, he had also been a merchant in Cairo several years earlier, selling everything from dried meat to television sets to small weapons, such as knives and handguns. Black market, white market, gray market. It didn’t matter. These days, however, police across western Europe suspected Habib of being a liaison with radical homegrown Muslim cells in Europe. There wasn’t a significant police agency from Athens to London that didn’t have a dossier on him. And among those same radical Islamic groups, he wasn’t just suspected of being a liaison. He was known to be one of the best.

Jean-Claude was a French citizen of Algerian origin. He had grown up in both France and Algeria, hauled around as one of seven children by an itinerant French father and illiterate Bedouin mother. Jean-Claude had bolted from his family at age sixteen and went to work as an underground laborer at the Tirek Amesmessa gold mines in southwest Algeria close to the border of Mali in north Africa. The experience toughened him and educated him to the mean unyielding ways of the world, as well as the use of demolitions and an ability to navigate through narrow underground passageways. It also incubated within him a burning hatred of the better-off people of the world; those whose fingers, wrists, ears, and other body parts glittered with the gold that came out of the earth at such an extortionate physical cost to those who worked in the mines.

After he turned twenty, Jean-Claude moved to Algiers where he fell into a life of prosperous petty crime. He worked as a burglar, a freelance hold-up man, and a break-in specialist. He drifted further under the influence of Islamic radicalism, as it was angrily preached in the mosques he attended in the afternoon and the cafes he frequented in the evenings.

Jean-Claude wasn’t a theoretician and wasn’t an intellectual. But what he sometimes lacked in intelligence he made up for in viciousness and anger. He learned his way around and beneath the old city of Algiers, the back alleys, the unknown side passageways through the stinking slums and the fetid subterranean routes used for centuries by traders in narcotics and human flesh. He relished these dark, unseen corridors of a barely visible world in a way that only an embittered ex-miner could. He gained some weight, some muscle, and some added meanness and social resentment.

In Algiers also, he cheerfully murdered his first two men. His victims were an English pimp, whose stable included a Tunisian girl he was sweet on, and an Israeli gem merchant, whose diamonds Jean-Claude coveted. The second murder evolved from a nighttime break-in-avec-stick-up gone bad. The slayings took place within ten days of each other, and in their aftermath, Jean-Claude saw fit to buy an off-the-books passage across the Mediterranean to France.

The Tunisian girl went with him but stayed only a few weeks. More importantly, he fenced a dozen beautiful diamonds with an obese Dutch middleman who knew better than to ask questions. Jean-Claude stayed in Toulouse for two years, continuing his same lifestyle and perfecting the occasional burglary or nighttime smash-and-grab. Then he moved on to Madrid, the Spanish capital, in 2006 when some plainclothes French police appeared in his neighborhood, asking nosy questions.

So now he was in his late twenties as he stood before Habib on a warm Italian summer evening. In Madrid over the last few years, he had acquired all the personal components that made him attractive to the radical Islamic movement in Spain: a raging sense of anger, a desire to do something grand for the cause, and a talent for theft and murder.

A few months earlier a Saudi man had been brought to him by acquaintances. The man had no name and was shown great deference by Jean-Claude’s friends. The man outlined a small, simple, but highly ambitious plan for an operation in Spain, one for which some knowledgeable people felt Jean-Claude would be perfect.

Would Jean-Claude be interested in considering such an operation, even if it might end in martyrdom? Surprisingly to everyone, including himself, Jean-Claude said yes. He was brimming with self-confidence these days, so the idea that the operation wouldn’t end in success never occurred to him.

And so here he was this evening before Habib. He had no interest in Habib’s school, its students, or any aspects of formal education. The school, located in a decaying gray building that had once been a bakery, was in a section of Naples known as Little Egypt. The neighborhood was home to a growing number of Arab immigrants from the Middle East.

Jean-Claude’s arrival at Habib’s school was at 8:00 p.m., exactly as promised. He was a tall wiry man, Jean-Claude, an inch over six feet, mocha-complexioned, and stronger than he looked. He carried a small attaché case. As he moved toward the entrance to the school, he was accompanied closely by the two other men. The latter were both larger and heavyset.

Habib greeted his visitors in Arabic on the uneven brick steps to the school. Jean-Claude’s two backups uttered little in any language. They kept their jittery eyes on the surroundings.

“It is very good of you to be here,” Habib said. “My blessings upon you and Allah’s blessings upon you. Come. Let us discuss things.”

Habib produced a key that undid a drop bolt to the aging wooden door. Beyond this outer door there was an entrance foyer with heavy plate-glass walls. Then there was a second door. This one was made of very thick glass, steel reinforced and locked electronically, like a gate to a vault.

Habib unlocked this second door by a combination that he had memorized. As he did this, he shielded his hands from view.

Once the door opened, Habib brought his new contacts into the building. He brought his guests down a long hallway within the center of the first floor. A large gray cat seemed ready to greet Habib but then scurried out of the way at the sight of the visitors.

Habib led his guests into a small room, the principal’s office. Habib drew the blinds and illuminated a small desk lamp.

“Well, welcome,” he said again. “You’ve traveled far?”

“Far enough,” said Jean-Claude.

“Of course,” Habib said. “Of course.”

Habib and his school had frequently been at odds with Italian educational authorities. The government saw Habib’s institution as pushing its own Islamic agenda and not meeting the state standards of the Italian Ministry of Education. Arabic and Koranic schools in Italy were known as gateways of radicalization for European Muslims. Habib’s school was not accredited by the Italian education authorities, and yet three hundred students, mostly the sons and daughters of Egyptian and Syrian immigrants, attended it.