Direct Action by John Weisman

or that Iran was Persian and al-Qa’ida was Arab meant little. In the Middle East, the old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” paradigm still held sway.
“To mark this new alliance, the Seppah will facilitate and help coordinate a major al-Qa’ida strike against the Americans—an attack equal to or bigger than 9/11.”
There he goes again. Tom had heard it all before—and he was hugely dubious. “It’s easy to talk about an alliance between al-Qa’ida and Tehran. I read about it all the time in the Telegraph op-ed pages. It’s a constant litany sung by the neocon pundits. But what about proof?”
Shahristani balanced his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. He took an elegant, gold-cornered Asprey pocket secretary from his jacket pocket and extracted a three-by-five photograph from it.
“This,” he said. “This is proof.” He slid the photograph across the table.
Tom pulled a pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket and slipped them on. He looked down at what appeared to be a surveillance photo. In the foreground was the blurred hood of a car. Behind the vehicle, two men were walking past a café or bistro with sidewalk tables. One man was slightly in front of the other. Tom looked up, puzzled. “Here.” Shahristani handed him a pocket magnifier.
Tom shifted his wine out of the way, laid the photo on the tablecloth, and squinted into the thick glass, playing it back and forth over the photo. Behind the two figures, he saw an awning with writing on it. Squinting, Tom played with the magnifier. “L’Étrier?”
“Justement.”
“Is this Paris?”
“Yes.” Shahristani drew deeply on his cigarette and nodded. “Rue Lambert in Montmartre.”
“Who’s the mark?”
“There are two of them. Don’t you know?”
Tom shrugged. “Never seen either one before.”
“Yes, you have—one of them you know.”
Tom pulled the reading glasses off and looked skeptically at Shahris- tani. “Stop playing games, Shahram.”
“They are coming from a meeting at a safe house next door to the bistro.” The Iranian stabbed the Dunhill out, leaned over, cupped his hand across the side of his face so what he said couldn’t be lip-read from across the room. “I believe the man in front to be a mercenary currently working for al-Qa’ida. He was born a Moroccan, of that much I am reasonably certain, although one of his two or three current passports is French, and was issued in the name of Tariq Ben Said, born Tunis, August of 1958.”
“Tariq Ben Said.”
“Yes, so let’s call him that. What his real name is, who can tell. When he was first brought to my attention about three years ago, he was working freelance.”
“By whom?”
“By whom?”
“Who brought him to your attention?”
Shahristani deflected Tom’s query. “He is a killer by trade. His instru- ment of choice is plastique explosive. Clandestine bombs, although I believe the current fashionable term is IED, for improvised explosive device.”
“An IED maker?”
“There is nothing improvised about his bombs, Thomas. He is said to have used case studies.”
Tom shrugged. “Such as?”
“It sounds perverse, but he bases much of his technique on what the Israelis pioneered.”
“Really?”
“Yes. When you look at it coldly, Tom, the Israeli secret services perfected most of the techniques currently used by terrorists. Remotely detonated devices? That’s how Mossad got Ali Hassan Salameh, the operations chief of Black September and architect of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. Remember? In 1979, Mossad remotely exploded a Volkswagen as Salameh’s car passed by on rue Madame Curie in Beirut.” Shahram’s eyes flicked toward the ceiling. “As I recall, the operation was run by a woman—something something Chambers.” 11
He returned his gaze to Tom. “Exploding cell phones—they pioneered that technique, too, and put it to good use in counterterror operations on the West Bank and even in Europe. Czech plastique—Semtex—molded into