Chapter Thirty-one

WHEN THE CUSTOMS officers opened the Saracen’s well-worn luggage they found neatly folded slacks, two dress shirts, a doctor’s kit of a stethoscope and thermometer, a copy of the Holy Qur’an and an English magazine. It wasn’t the Economist or the British Medical Journal. It was called Bra-Busters and offered at least a D-cup on every page.

The two customs officers didn’t say anything but exchanged a look that spoke volumes. ‘Typical Muslim, ’ they appeared to say, ‘devout on the outside and, like everybody else, a dog on the inside. ’

Had the men been a little more observant, they would have noticed that the holy book was zipped into a completely separate pocket of the carry-on, as if it had been quarantined from the filth with which it had been forced to travel. The Saracen had bought the magazine at the airport in Beirut in case German immigration had directed him to one of their interview rooms and put him through the hoops. The last thing he wanted was to look like a devout Muslim – the way the world had developed, if you had to cross a border, it was safer to be a hypocrite than a man of God.

In the event, though, the magazine wasn’t necessary. He had arrived at Frankfurt airport – Europe’s largest and busiest – at the height of the morning rush, just as he had planned. He knew from experience that a visitor was far less likely to be scrutinized when the lines were long and the immigration officers tired and overworked.

After an hour in a queue he presented himself to a young officer in a drab brown uniform. The man glanced at the photo in the Lebanese passport then at the person smiling in front of him: nice suit, beard trimmed to little more than a stubble, handsome face. A doctor, according to the arrival card he had filled in.

‘The purpose of your visit? ’ the young officer asked, first in German and, when that received a blank stare, in English.

‘A medical conference, ’ the Saracen replied. Apart from banking, Frankfurt’s major commercial activity was hosting huge conventions and trade fairs – all at a specially constructed showground called the Messe. The Saracen produced the tickets and pass that he had purchased online and laid them on the desk. The officer barely looked at them, but the Saracen knew that it was the details – things like the girlie magazine and, in Damascus, the dirt under the fingernails – which turned a legend into reality.

The officer glanced at the return ticket, ran the passport through his scanner and looked at the computer screen. Of course it came back clear: the book was genuine and that name had never been on any kind of watch-list.

‘How long will you be staying? ’ he asked.

‘Two weeks, ’ the Saracen replied. ‘Maybe a little more, depends on how long the money lasts. ’ He smiled.

The officer grunted and stamped the passport for three months. Everyone got three months. Even if the passport of a card-carrying member of al-Qaeda had come back clear, he would have been given three months. Germany wanted its Messe visitors to stay – it liked the money they spent.

Of course, the Saracen planned to stay longer than two weeks but, even if the immigration officer had just granted him the fortnight, it wouldn’t have mattered. The Saracen knew what every illegal immigrant in the world was well aware of – immigration enforcement in Europe was even more slack than border control. Keep your nose clean and your shoulder to the wheel and you could stay as long as you wanted. The long-term future was fine too – every few years, they offered an amnesty. Where was the incentive ever to leave?

The Saracen picked up his bag from the carousel, suffered the indignity of seeing the snide glance between the customs officers, was sent on his way and walked into the kerbside chaos of the huge airport. Squeezing along the sidewalk, he dumped the girlie magazine and its temptations into a trash can, found a bus to take him into the city and vanished into the alternate universe of Islamic Europe.

It was a strange world, one which I had experienced when I was stationed in Europe. Chasing down leads and contacts on a dozen different cases, I had walked through scores of grim industrial cities and visited the countless Stalinist-style housing estates on their outskirts. But for anyone who hadn’t seen such places, it would have been hard to credit the gradual transformation that had taken place. The most common name for a baby boy in Belgium was now Mohammad. Three million Turkish Muslims lived in Germany alone. Almost 10 per cent of the population of France were followers of Islam.

As a Swiss writer once said, ‘We wanted a labour force, but human beings came, ’ and what nobody had foreseen was that those workers would bring their mosques, their holy book and huge swathes of their culture with them.

Because of Islam’s commitment to charity and the explosion in the size of the Muslim population, every city quickly came to host an austere, male-only hostel – supported by donations – where devout Muslim men could eat halal food and bed down for the night. It was to the Frankfurt branch of such a ‘safe house’ that the Saracen travelled on his first day in Europe, still amazed at the ease with which he had crossed its border.

The following day, poorly dressed in jeans and scuffed workboots, he put his luggage into a long-term locker at Frankfurt’s main railway station and bought a ticket from a vending machine. Already letting his beard grow out – just another face among the mass of blue-collar Muslims – he caught a train to Karlsruhe. Situated on the edge of the Black Forest, the city had been bombed back into the Stone Age during the Second World War and the decades which followed had seen it rebuilt as a sprawling industrial centre. Among its factories was one which was crucial to the Saracen’s plan.

While he was still living in his apartment in El-Mina he had spent hours trawling the Web until he located a mosque with the exact geographical attributes he needed. As a result, when he got off the train from Frankfurt, he knew exactly where he was going. He found his way to Wilhelmstrasse and, halfway along it, saw a former corner shop – ironically, once owned by a Jewish family killed in the Holocaust – that sported a tiny minaret. The only feature that distinguished it from the twelve hundred other Islamic prayer centres in Germany was that it was almost within sight of the chosen factory, the European subsidiary of a major US corporation.

It was Friday and, right on schedule, the Saracen entered the mosque moments before evening prayers. Once they were finished, as tradition demanded, the imam approached the stranger and welcomed him on behalf of the congregation. Invited to take tea with them, the Saracen – reluctantly, it seemed to the men who had gathered around – explained that he was a refugee from the latest war in Lebanon.

Giving a credible performance as just one more displaced person looking for a new life in Europe, he said he had paid a group of people smugglers almost everything he had to take him by boat to Spain and from there across a borderless Europe by truck. He looked up at his fellow worshippers and his voice faltered, making it impossible for him to go into detail about the terrible journey.

I have to say it was a nice touch, and most of the listeners – blue-collar workers too – nodded in understanding: the details may have been different, but they too had entered Europe in a similar fashion.

The so-called illegal immigrant said he had been staying with a cousin in nearby Frankfurt but, desperate for work and down to his last few euro, he had made his way to Karlsruhe in the hope of finding a job. With the hook baited, he claimed he used to work in the shipping department of a big corporation in Beirut.

‘Insha’Allah, maybe there is something like that available in the large factory at the end of the road? ’ he asked.

Nearly all the worshippers worked at Chyron Chemicals and, exactly as he had anticipated, they promptly took the bait and offered to make inquiries among their workmates and colleagues. He thanked them by offering an obscure but appropriate quote from the Qur’an, which confirmed to them that their first impression of him had been correct: most assuredly, he was an honourable and devout man.

Telling them that he was embarrassed, he said in a quiet voice that he didn’t have money for food or another rail fare and he was wondering if there might be one of the ‘safe houses’ he could stay at until he found work. Of course the congregation took him in, arranging meals and shelter – after all, one of the Five Pillars of Islam was to provide for the poor.

And so, without even realizing it, in little more than an hour, the Saracen had become their responsibility. They were the type of men who took such things seriously and, three days later, their inquiries and advocacy paid off: a Turkish supervisor in Chyron’s dispatch department reported that there was a place for the refugee as a storeman on the graveyard shift.

After prayers that night the men, so happy for him they took him to a café for dinner, told the Saracen about the remarkable working conditions he would enjoy: the on-site health care, the subsidized cafeteria and the beautiful prayer room. What none of them mentioned, however, was that all the jobs had once been held by Americans.

The old Nobel laureate in Virginia had been right when he had asked if the greatest industrial nation in history actually produced goods and machinery any more. Millions of jobs, along with most of the country’s manufacturing base, had been exported over the decades, and a great deal of the nation’s safety had disappeared with them. As for Chyron Chemicals, the danger was particularly acute – it was a drug manufacturer and exporter, one of the most respected in the world. Though few people realized it, the heartland of America was really only as safe as an anonymous factory in a city hardly anybody had ever heard of.

In a better world, the Saracen – seated in the café with its laminated tables and strange Turko-German music – would have had a final hurdle to overcome. Indeed, for a time, he believed it was the single thing most likely to cause his plan to fail. Surely, he had asked himself back in El-Mina, wouldn’t the American Food and Drug Administration inspect drug shipments for possible contamination?

He found the answer on the Web – a transcript of a congressional hearing into the FDA which told him that one country alone had over five hundred factories exporting drugs and their ingredients to the USA.

‘How many of those facilities did the FDA inspect during the previous year? ’ a congressman asked.

‘Thirteen, ’ came the reply.

The Saracen had to read it through again to make sure he had understood it correctly: only thirteen out of five hundred factories had been inspected. And that country was China, the nation with the worst history of product safety in the world. He knew then that nothing from Chyron – a subsidiary of a US corporation based in a First World country – would ever be inspected.

At 10 p. m. on the night following the celebratory meal he walked along a deserted Wilhelmstrasse, presented himself at Chyron’s security gates, was issued an employee pass and given directions to the distribution warehouse. There he met the Turkish supervisor, who, escorting him past endless pallets of drugs awaiting shipment to cities across the United States, explained his duties to him. None of the pallets were guarded, nothing was locked and sealed – they never had been; nobody had ever thought it necessary. Then again, nobody had ever thought it necessary to lock the cockpit doors on passenger jets either.

After the supervisor had left for home and the Saracen was alone in the cavernous warehouse, he took out his prayer mat, pointed it towards Mecca and said a prayer. A child who had been introduced to misery in Saudi Arabia, a teenager who went to wage jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a deeply devout Muslim who had graduated with honours in medicine, a man who had fed a stranger to wild dogs in Damascus, a zealot who had dosed three foreigners with smallpox and watched them die in agony, gave thanks to Allah for the blessings which had been bestowed upon him.

Before he finished, he rendered one final thanks to God – for the woman in Turkey who had done so much for him.