Obsession (Year of Fire) Read online

  Rauf also learned that he couldn’t depend on his parents for survival; if he wanted to eat, he would have to find food for himself. He went to the souk with other Palestinian boys, where he begged, stole, bartered, haggled, bought and sold. At sixteen he led a band of petty thieves whose earnings yielded enough to rent a small house for his parents and their siblings, and provide them with a few luxuries. At that time he met a Palestinian medical student, Fathi Shiqaqi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a man with a lot of natural talent for leadership and spreading religious fervor. Rauf’s life took a radical turn. From being a simple criminal on the streets of Cairo, he became the head of a group with nobler, loftier objectives. In his quest to do works that would lead him to paradise at the right hand of the Prophet (may the peace and blessings of Allah be with him), jihad was first and foremost and, though Rauf hadn’t lost interest in money or comfort, nothing came before his struggle: expelling the Zionists from the Middle East and restoring his beloved Palestine.

  In the early eighties, he traveled to a South American country in turmoil, Argentina, where he had planned to put the finishing touches to an arms deal with a rebel group determined to continue the struggle for the “revolution” of Che Guevara. The exchange of guns for money would take place in a peaceful location in a small town in Córdoba called Carlos Paz, in a chalet near the San Antonio River, where the armaments were hidden. On the appointed day, when Al-Abiyia and the rebel group were sealing the deal, a squad of soldiers pounced on them and threw them in jail. Through an interpreter, Rauf’s lawyer informed him that an infiltrator in the group had given the military authorities all the details about the operation, even that the FAMAS assault weapons being sold had been stolen from the French Foreign Legion’s arsenal in the Republic of Djibouti. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, which was eventually reduced to five. There were two silver linings to the cloud of Rauf Al-Abiyia’s incarceration in San Martín prison in Córdoba: a fluid command of Spanish and the friendship of Aldo Martínez Olazábal.

  What was this man, no older than fifty, with an aristocratic bearing—his alcoholism had not yet softened his elegant aquiline features—doing in this Allah-forsaken hole, surrounded by the dregs of humanity?

  “I was found guilty of fraudulent bankruptcy,” Aldo explained in perfect English, shaking and sweating profusely from alcohol withdrawal.

  In prison, you could get anything, even a fine cognac. If you had enough money.

  “I don’t have a cent. They seized everything and sold it off to settle my debts. My family only eats thanks to my sisters, who pay their bills.”

  Aldo Martínez Olazábal’s banking venture had ended badly. At the end of the seventies, tired of managing the crops, counting the livestock and stepping in manure, he convinced his father and father-in-law to invest in the up-and-coming business of the time, one that rich people had invented overnight: a financial entity that would later be given the status of a bank. He founded the Banco Independencia and money started to flow freely and the instant success made him dizzy with power. He, a philosophy major, whose mother had predicted would have a mediocre future, owned one of the most important homegrown banks in the market, with several branches and significant financing projects. He became a public figure, was summoned to give talks at the stock exchange, classes at universities, advised the secretary of the treasury, was invited to jet-set parties and showed up in gossip magazines with a glass of Lagavulin in one hand and a cigar in the other, surrounded by beautiful women. His wife, Dolores, followed him everywhere, blinded by jealousy, neglecting the education of their daughters, Dolores, Celia and Matilde, whom she left in the care of her grandmother at the old familial mansion in Córdoba.

  In the mideighties, a businessman friend of Aldo’s, whom he had met at one of the jet-set parties, asked him for a loan of a few million dollars and, to sweeten the deal, offered to pay him a rate two points higher than market. Aldo agreed, though reluctantly, and since the businessman needed it urgently, he waived the required audits and scrutiny of financial statements. Within a matter of weeks, his friend’s business declared bankruptcy, the employees occupied the factory, refusing to allow the assets to be stripped, and the government intervened. That was how the debacle started, and problems subsequently crashed down onto the Banco Independencia in an avalanche. At the Central Bank and other financial institutions, people began to whisper that Martínez Olazábal was no longer a safe bet. Investors pressured him to return their money, while his debtors vanished.

  “The bubble I was living in,” Aldo told Rauf, “didn’t burst overnight. It took months, and to save what was already lost, I let my advisers take over and it was them who ended up burying me. I was blind. I always had been. After all, what did I really know about deposits, fixed rates, trades, reserves, financing or any of that? Nothing, absolutely nothing. In the end,” he confessed, “I had lost every trace of moral responsibility. My friends and my lawyers filled their pockets with my clients’ money, and I was left ruined and eventually locked inside this dump.”

  Rauf Al-Abiyia became Aldo’s nurse during the most difficult part of his withdrawal. While he dried his sweat and put broth to his lips, he spoke of Allah, the Prophet Mohammed and the five pillars of Islam. Aldo emerged from the alcoholic vapors like a spirit purified by fire and, thanks to Rauf’s support, lived day by day without drinking a drop, even though his daughter Matilde, the only one who visited him, gave him a little money with which he could have bought a demijohn of wine. Aldo’s conversion was the logical course of action of someone who found salvation at the hands of another creed. He learned Arabic by reading the Koran—Rauf called it the Quran—and memorized the fundamental tenets of Islam. He studied the life of the Prophet, for whom he developed an admiration that Christ had never inspired in him. Almost without realizing it, whenever he named him, he got used to using Rauf’s pet phrase: may the peace and blessings of Allah be with him. He accompanied Al-Abiyia in the five daily prayers and they strictly observed the fast during the month of Ramadan. Eventually, an imam visited San Martín prison, and Aldo took his shahada, an act of faith, which converted him into a new man, as though he had just emerged from his mother’s womb.

  “La ilaha illa-llahu, Mohammed rasulu-llah,” he said, knowing that he was declaring, “There is no other god than God, Mohammed is the messenger of God.”

  “New man,” the imam called him in Arabic, “what name do you wish to bear?”

  “Mohamed Abu Yihad.” The name of the Prophet and “father of strength,” though in the West it might be mistranslated as “father of holy war.”

  The friendship was cemented that day, and from that moment on they called each other brother and looked out for each other. The other prisoners didn’t like Al-Abiyia for being foreign and Muslim, and “Blondie” for being blond, white and posh. Aldo, or Mohamed, got out of the San Martín jail three months after his friend Rauf, who met him at the gate.

  As they hugged outside the prison, Rauf said, “Brother, today your new life begins.”

  Rauf Al-Abiyia stepped onto the teak deck of Aldo’s magnificent new yacht and gave a low whistle of admiration. Business must be good, he thought. On top of the abundant earnings from weapons and heroin trafficking, he was enjoying the profits of a new business venture: smuggling in Iraq. At the end of the Gulf War in early 1991, a United Nations Security Council resolution declared an embargo on the defeated country: the sale of oil and purchase of weapons were prohibited. Iraq quickly suffered the consequences of losing the oil income. The quality of life, already devastated by the war, sank to an alarming level, with an infant mortality rate that brought an outcry from humanitarian organizations. Food, medicine and basic supplies became scarce. Smuggling became the only way to survive. Rauf Al-Abiyia and Mohamed Abu Yihad, taking advantage of their extensive web of contacts and the structure they used to sell weapons and drugs, smuggled everything into Iraq, from food and medicine to clothes and shoes and replacement parts for vehicles and ma
chinery, at reasonable prices that Iraq’s exhausted coffers could afford. This earned them the friendship of important figures in the Iraqi administration, such as Uday Hussein, Saddam’s eldest son, whom everyone said was demonic, and Kusay, his second son, who was the head of the presidential police department, the Amn al Khass. To get the supplies in, they used clandestine landing strips hidden in the desert, or Bedouin caravans and trail guides who lived in the Kurdish mountains. Rauf Al-Abiyia, for having helped Iraq during its time of disgrace and need, had been conferred the honor of being received by the sayid rais, the president himself, in his palace in Sarseng, 259 miles north of Baghdad, in the Kurdish region.

  In 1996, the UN oil-for-food program came into effect in an attempt to help ordinary Iraqis, but it only succeeded in enriching Hussein, his associates, friends and employees and keeping the shelves of their secret stores well stocked while Iraqi children continued to die in scandalous numbers. Rauf and Aldo were in the right place at the right time when money started flowing in Iraq once more. Aldo’s 260-foot yacht was a clear symbol of the juicy profits they were reaping from their business with the Hussein family.

  “It’s an old refrain, my brother,” Rauf said: “L’argent fait la guerre, and I would go so far as to say: Et la guerre fait de l’argent. Look at this magnificent boat! And you baptized it Matilde, after your lovely daughter.”

  Aldo preferred to forget the hysterical fit his daughter Celia had thrown when she found out he had named his yacht Matilde. He didn’t even attempt to placate her; he couldn’t explain why he loved Matilde more. Eventually he promised that when he bought a house in Marbella it would be named Celia, to which the model shouted, “Céline, Papa!” Since then, his middle daughter had refused to answer his calls or e-mails. He found the situation ironic since, while Celia had been elated when she saw the boat—at least until she read her sister’s name on the prow—Matilde didn’t even know Aldo had it. His younger daughter wouldn’t be remotely excited by it, instead, she would give him the look that pierced him to the core and ask him, almost in a whisper, where he had gotten the money to buy it, what he really did, what did “brokers” actually do? Matilde suspected the true nature of his business, and her assumptions tormented him. Only once, thirty years before, had he sought the approval of a woman, Francesca De Gecco, and then he had lost it out of cowardice. He couldn’t bear to lose Matilde’s approval. After experiencing poverty so vividly in prison, he wasn’t about to deny himself luxuries or discard his ill-gotten wealth and the power that came with it. In a way, he loved the associated danger; the fact that he risked his neck every day gave him a burst of adrenaline, filling him with youthful energy.

  “Come, Rauf. You got here just in time for the Isha prayer. Come in. There’s a restroom here for your ablutions.”

  Once they had finished the Koranic ceremony, Aldo showed his friend the rest of the yacht.

  “Have you eaten? Let’s go to the dining room. I have some delicious snacks in there.”

  As they ate the delicacies, Rauf and Aldo discussed the terms of the meeting that would take place in this same room the next day.

  “Anuar Al-Muzara is coming tomorrow in person?” Aldo was surprised to hear that he would meet the ringleader of the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of the Palestinian group Hamas, whose motto was, “We fight therefore we exist.”

  “Yes. They’ve passed on the coordinates for the meeting.” He pulled out a piece of paper, which Aldo read all the way through. “I understand he’s the brother of Sabir Al-Muzara, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year.”

  “They may as well be enemies,” Al-Abiyia declared. “One’s ideology is diametrically opposed to the other’s. While Anuar advocates the restoration of Palestine through armed conflict, Sabir seeks peace and conciliation with the Zionist thieves.”

  “What do you know about this Anuar? Who did he come through to contact you?”

  “Don’t worry, Aldo. I did my homework, it’ll be fine. Don’t forget, I still have my friends in Islamic Jihad, and they serve me well in these matters. Anuar will arrive in a motorboat at dawn and he’ll bring the down payment with him.”

  “Where is he getting the money? The last I heard, they were in economic dire straits.”

  “Hamas has received a magnificent gift from Muammar Qaddafi.” Rauf was referring to the president of Libya. “They say he’s seething over the Oslo Peace Accords and is handing out money left, right and center to foment armed conflict. Now tell me, brother, how did it go in your country? Can we get hold of the weapons?”

  “No. My contact at the Ministry of Defense was indicted and suspended over some irregularities discovered by congressional auditors. In the short time I was in Buenos Aires, it was impossible for me to find another.”

  “Oh, what a shame. The good thing about buying weapons from corrupt government employees is that it saves us a lot of problems.”

  “I haven’t lost hope. My contact is trying to get them to give us the certificate for the arms shipment. If that fails, the only option will be to visit Madame Gulemale in the Congo. She can always solve our stock problems.”

  “At an high price,” Rauf complained.

  “In the meanwhile, we can supply part of Al-Muzara’s order with what’s left in the deposit in Cyprus. We have more than four hundred thousand Parabellum cartridges, some RPG-7s, two dozen Kalashnikovs, if my memory serves, a few M-26 grenades, and kilos of gunpowder, so the men of Ezzedin al-Qassam can entertain themselves building their own homemade missiles.”

  “No explosives? They need them for suicide attacks.”

  “Nope, no cordite, no Semtex. Nothing.”

  “You know, Mohamed, I just realized that we could ship the arms from the deposit in Cyprus to wherever Al-Muzara tells us in the Matilde.” He spread his arms to indicate the space around him. “We would save thousands of dollars on transport.”

  Aldo stood up and looked at what was left of the food. It upset him to hear his daughter’s name mentioned in relation to his business.

  “No, not on the Matilde. We’ll keep doing it the way we always have, renting crappy boats with crews who don’t ask questions. I’m going to rest, Rauf. I can barely stand. Take whatever room you like best.”

  Aldo rested his head on the pillow and let out a moan as the tension filtered from his extremities. In spite of his exhaustion, he couldn’t sleep. He was thinking about Roy Blahetter and his desperation. It hurt him that he and Matilde had separated. He loved Roy like a son and Matilde was the most important thing in his world. She had conquered him when she was a little girl, even before she could walk. He had seen a unique quality in his youngest daughter, a serenity and control—she rarely cried—that were of comfort to him as his marriage and life went down the drain.

  He was also thinking that he hadn’t mentioned the issue of Roy’s centrifuge to Rauf Al-Abiyia. “I should do it,” he urged himself, feeling as though the omission was a betrayal. After all, it was Rauf who had the network of connections that would provide him with access to the people with the power, money and audacity to buy Roy’s damn contraption. Eventually, he decided to tell Rauf once the meeting with the man from the Ezzedin al-Qassam was finished.

  The next day, when the sun was barely peeking over the horizon, Anuar Al-Muzara and his personal bodyguards boarded the Matilde. They pulled up on the starboard side in a boat with an outboard motor. The terrorist’s appearance surprised Aldo. For some reason he had imagined that he would be dealing with a short, potbellied man. On the contrary, the head of the Ezzedin al-Qassam was dressed elegantly but simply. It was hard to reconcile his appearance with a man who organized suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. He wasn’t armed; his guards, however, brandished the AK-47s, Kalashnikovs, across their chests.

  Anuar Al-Muzara detested arms dealers, who wallowed in cash and didn’t comply with the third pillar of Islam, zakat, or giving alms. He yearned for the golden age of communist Russia, when the Cold War showed no
signs of ending and the Soviet Union provided arms at bargain prices or even free to Marxist and Leninist liberation movements. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, revolutionary groups had been obligated to turn to black-market arms dealers such as Adnan Khashoggi, Rauf Al-Abiyia and this Mohamed Abu Yihad, a man who didn’t inspire much confidence. Still, as much as he disliked them, he needed them. For the strike he was planning, the riskiest of his career, he would need to restock, especially with explosives. So he greeted them politely, wishing that the peace of Allah be with them.

  “As-salaam-alaikun.”

  “Alaikun salaam,” Aldo and Rauf chorused back.

  Some of the guards stayed on deck, scanning the sea as well as the sky; two of them accompanied their boss down into the boat. There was sugary tea, as the Arabs liked, and an excellent Sanani Mocha coffee. The dialogue continued on good terms, but Aldo sensed an underlying tension that prevented him from enjoying the successful conclusion of the million-dollar deal. When the meeting was finished, the prices were agreed, the handover locations for the weapons were fixed and the fifty-million-dollar down payment collected, machine-counted and checked for forgeries, Anuar Al-Muzara stood up and saluted them in the traditional manner, touching his lips and forehead with the tips of his fingers before extending his hand and bowing.