“Yes, Colonel Jackson.”
“I want you to screen it on the Jihadist Internet channel, the one the Preacher always uses.”
It went worldwide an hour later. The Preacher sat in his usual chair, talking directly into the camcorder and thus to the Muslim world. With an hour of preannouncements, the entire fan base would be listening, plus millions who were not converted to extremism but were interested, and every counterterrorist agency in the world.
They were all surprised, then riveted. The figure they saw was a hard-looking man in his early to mid-thirties, but this time he wore no covering drawn from his headdress over his lower face. He had a full black beard, and his eyes were of a strange amber hue.
Only one man watching knew that the eyes were contact lenses and that the speaker was Tony Suárez, who lived in Malibu and could not comprehend a word of the Koranic inscriptions on the sheet behind him.
The voice was accent-perfect, the tones of the British mimic who had listened to only two hours of previous sermons before producing an identical replication of the voice. And the screening was in color, not black and white. But to the faithful, it was undoubtedly the Preacher.
“My friends, brothers and sisters in Allah, I have been missing from your lives for some time. But I have not wasted my time. I have been reading, and studying our beautiful faith, Islam, and contemplating many things. And I have changed, inshallah.
“I wonder how many of you have heard of the Muraja’at, the Revisions of the Salafist-Jihadist cause. These are what I have been studying.
“Many times in the past, I have urged upon you all to dedicate yourselves not simply to worship of Allah, may His name be praised, but also to hatred of others. But the Revisions teach us that this is wrong, that our beautiful Islam is truly not a creed of bitterness and hatred, even of those who think differently from us.
“The most famous of the Revisions are those of the Series for the Corrections of Concepts. Just as those who taught us hatred came out of Egypt, so also did the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyyas, who wrote the Corrections, and I now understand that it was they, not the teachers of bigotry and loathing, who were right.”
The Tracker’s phone in the embassy room rang. It was Gray Fox from Virginia.
“Am I hearing correctly or has something very weird happened?” he asked.
“Listen a while longer,” said the Tracker, and hung up.
On the screen, the uncomprehending Tony Suárez carried on.
“I have read the Revisions now a score of times in English translation, which I recommend to you all who speak and read no Arabic and to those who do in the original tongue.
“For it is clear to me now that what our brothers the al-Gama’a say is true. The governmental system known as democracy is perfectly compatible with True Islam, and it is hatred and lust for blood that is alien to every word ever spoken by the Prophet Muhammad, may he rest in peace.
“Those who now claim to be the True Believers and who call for mass murder, cruelty, torture and the death of thousands are in truth like the Kharijite rebels who fought against the Prophet’s Companions.
“We must now consider all Jihadists and Salafists like those Kharijites, and we who worship only the one true Allah and His blessed prophet Muhammad must destroy the heretics who have led His people astray these many years.
“And we True Believers must surely destroy these advocates of hatred and violence as the Companions once destroyed the Kharijites long ago.
“But now is my time come to declare who I really am. I was born Zulfiqar Ali Shah, in Islamabad, and raised as a good Muslim. But I fell and became Abu Azzam, a killer of men, women and children.”
The phone rang again.
“Who the hell is this?” yelled Gray Fox.
“Hear him out,” said the Tracker. “It’s almost over.”
“So, before the world, and especially before you, my brothers and sisters in Allah, I pronounce my tawba, my true repentance, for all that I have done and said in a false cause. And I declare my complete bara’a, my disavowal, of all that I said and preached against the true teachings of Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate.
“For I showed no mercy and no compassion, and must now beg you to show me that mercy, that compassion, which the Holy Koran teaches us may be extended to the sinner who truly repents his former sinful ways. May Allah bless you and be with you all.”
The screen faded. The phone rang again. In fact, phones were ringing right across the umma, the world community of Islam, many of them to give vent to screams of rage.
“Tracker, what the hell have you done?” asked Gray Fox.
“I hope I have just destroyed him,” said the Tracker.
He recalled what the wise old scholar at al-Azhar University had told him years ago when he was a student in Cairo: “The merchants of hatred have four levels of loathing. You may think you Christians are at the top level. Wrong, for you are also believers in the one true God and thus, with the Jews, also People of the Book.
“Above you come the atheists and idolaters, who have no god but only carved idols. That is why the Mujahideen of Afghanistan hated the communists more than you. They are atheists.