Direct Action by John Weisman Page A

everyday items? That tactic, too, was enhanced by Mossad. And now—”
“Shahram,” Tom interrupted. “Ben Said—please.”
“He is more than a bomb maker, Tom. He is an assassin. Others use a knife or a gun. He uses plastic explosive. He has killed hundreds— hundreds. He is a chameleon. His tactics are fluid; he changes his appearance regularly. He has had plastic surgery half a dozen times. He uses”—the Iranian paused as he searched for the right word—“des prosthétiques—devices to change his appearance.”
“And now?”
“And now he has allied himself with al-Qa’ida.” The Iranian set his water glass down. “For money, of course. Tens of millions of Euros. I have been reliably told that the bomber Ben Said was recently seen in the company of this man.” The Iranian produced a second photograph and slid it across the table. “Yahia Hamzi. Based in Paris. He imports Moroccan wine—a company with the unlikely name Boissons Maghreb, with a small warehouse near the rue du Congo near the Pantin industrial zone. Hamzi himself is secular, not religious at all. But he is very active in civic affairs out beyond the nineteenth.”
Tom examined the photo, which had obviously been duplicated from a passport because a portion of an official seal was visible in the bottom right-hand corner. The clean-shaven man had sharp Arabic features and curly hair—what might almost be described as an Afro. He wore the sort of thick-framed eyeglasses favored by old-fashioned Parisians.
“Hamzi.” Tom looked up from the photo. “The nineteenth, you say?”
“Affirmative.”
It made sense. The nineteenth arrondissement was out near Aubervilliers and Pantin, where there were huge apartment blocks of suburban slums known as banlieues, as bad as the worst Chicago, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles had to offer—filled with North African immigrants. And gangs. Drugs were rampant, killings commonplace. The north end of the nineteenth was a hotbed of Islamist activity. “What’s the Iranian angle?”
“Hamzi uses the importing business to launder money for a Salafiya splinter group known as the CIM, for Combatants Islamiques Marocains.”
Tom took a sip of his wine. “Don’t know of them.”
“No one knows of them. The reason is because CIM does not exist. It is a cover name, created by Seppah to throw hunters like you and me off the scent. Just the way Seppah created the Islamic Jihad Organization in Lebanon during the 1980s to fool Western intelligence. CIA treated the IJO as an Iranian-sponsored organization. It wasn’t. IJO wasn’t Iraniansponsored; it was a creation entirely molded by Tehran. By the Seppah.”
The Seppah again. Tom frowned. Shahristani wasn’t making sense. “CIM is a Seppah creation?”
“That is my guess. And therefore Hamzi is a Seppah agent. I believe he is also what you might call Ben Said’s banker.”
“Might call?”
In response, Shahristani shrugged. Tom decided to take another tack. “You just said Ben Said is al-Qa’ida’s man.”
“By his own choice. He also takes contracts from Tehran.” Shahristani made a face. “You should have dealt with them years ago.”
“You have no argument from me about that.”
The Iranian nodded. “It appears to me,” he said, “that much of the original structure of al-Qa’ida is fractured. Degraded. Dispersed.”
Tom had no idea where Shahram was going. But he played along. “Agreed.”
“So what do they do? They adapt. They improvise. They metamorphose. They transmogrify.”
“You mean they change identity?”
“No, Thomas. I mean that like a pilot fish on a shark, al-Qa’ida attaches itself to an existing organization, uses it for a while, and then moves on. I believe Ben Said, whose real name could be anything, is also a pilot fish. Now he has attached himself to both al-Qa’ida and the Seppah.” “Do the French know about Ben Said?”
“No. They keep an eye on Hamzi from time to time—they think he may be engaged in smuggling.