Chapter 24: Mosque Not Get Caught

Friday, August 28^th, 2015. Royal palace, guest annex.

The next morning I called Asim and offered to cook for him, so I’d be able to intercept any packages that might be delivered to his house. He was glad to have me and I took delivery of five boxes while he was out. I made us roast duck (honey roasted, with creamed cauliflower) and an old-fashioned trifle and then I stole one of his outfits: guthra, igal, thobe and sandals. Two thobes, actually, just to be sure. He only had fourteen left, I think.

“So, what are you going to do with your week off?” he asked from his sofa, playing Grand Theft Auto IV while I walked past him with his own clothes in a paper carrying bag. I don’t think he’d have cared even if he had known I was taking his stuff, but I said:

“Let me think about that while I put this away, okay?” and put it in the back of the white Land Rover he said I could use. A palace car would attract too much attention for my plans that night.

“Well?” he said, as Nico Bellic fell face forward onto the asphalt of Liberty City. “AAHH! Not again!”

“I loved that game. But there’s a new one out, right?”

“I finished that. Then I wanted to play this again. So, what are your plans?”

“I don’t know. Do some reading. Visit that Belgian coffee shop. Take in some exercise, because I’m getting a bit stiff. The Guest Palace has a pool, but you can’t really use it because it’s in the courtyard so theoretically someone could see you.”

“Yeah, that’s stupid,” laughed Asim. “You can swim here, any time. Anyway, I guess no parties for you, my friend. That would be far too exciting, right?”

“My life is exciting enough as it is. Speaking of same, have you had a chance to speak with Oleg?”

“YES! Yes, I forgot! He transferred twenty thousand dollars on Tuesday. We weren’t sure how many songs you sang, but I remember at least five. I’m dying here! AAAAAH!”

“Sounds about right. Well, thank you so much for your help. I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to get the money.”

“What are you going to do with it? Please tell me it’s something fun! I DON’T BELIEVE IT! AGAIN! WHY?!”

“I think you’re in too much of a hurry. Squat behind that desk and just pick ‘em off one by one. After the first wave you have at least ten seconds. I’d go to that corner, plant some plastic explosive and set it off when the next wave comes in.”

“But it’s only a desk. They can shoot me.”

“It’s a computer game. It treats the desk as a solid object. You might as well be hiding behind a newspaper: unless it’s designed to break up into pieces, it’s bullet proof. Go on, give it a go.”

“Okay. Anyway, what are you going to do with the money?”

“I’ll find a good use for it.”

He paused the game and put down the controller.

“Carstairs, what will you do with that money? I want to know.”

“Well, if you insist. Remember that poor woman who was beheaded the other week?”

“Yes. Omar made you pray with her.”

“Exactly. Well, she left behind a son and her mother. I’ve sent them fifteen thousand dollars, as an advance on Oleg’s payment. I might send them five thousand extra, or maybe find an orphanage to give it to.”

I’d sent the recording I’d made to Peter Fox, asking him to track down the family and send them the money. He had dispatched a reliable local attorney, who had found them and helped them set up a bank account. Sadly, the boy hadn’t even been told his poor old mum had been executed. The embassy had informed his grandmother, but she hadn’t had the heart to tell him yet. And even though 15,000 US dollars is about 5 annual salaries in Indonesia, that young boy had one of the worst days in his life when a stranger in a suit came to his door.

Asim obviously said he thought it was a nice gesture, but then he grinned and said:

“Have you told my cousin?”

“No. Why?”

“Well, because he has always said he wants to be an instrument of Allah’s will. And now it turns out he was, and he doesn’t know it.”

“Excuse me, what now?”

“He made you pray with that poor woman. You took pity on her and gave her family money. Money which you made because he also made you entertain the guests. If not for Omar, none of that would have happened.”

“I suppose not.”

“And you are also an instrument of God, my friend. Maybe this is why you had to come all the way to the Kingdom.”

“I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the reason. Anyway, now I have to research Indonesian orphanages. That boy is set for life as it is.”

Asim resumed his game, to try out the tactic I had suggested.

“Just give it to the Imam.”

“WHAT?”

“Give it to the Imam. He knows all the good charities. Omar gives him money all the time. NO NO NO, DON’T WALK INTO WALL, you idiot!”

I could have said something acerbic about my money ending up funding research into suicide vests, but I didn’t. What’s the point, anyway.

“I’m sure the Imam is a lovely man, but I’ll figure it out for myself.”

“HA! No, he isn’t. That man is awful. And the people who come to his mosque are awful. Except my cousin, obviously. THIS AGAIN! I kill this guy five times now!”

“But you want me to give him money?”

“Asim says he does good things. And you know, zakat.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Zakat. Charity. It is one of the five pillars. You give two and a half percent of your wealth to charity each year. And it can only be used for the poor and the needy. Carstairs, sometimes I think you are a better muslim than I am. You give to the poor, you don’t drink unless I insist, you don’t seem to like pork, you don’t chase women, you don’t...”

“Don’t what?”

“You don’t have fun. Same as my cousin.”

“Well, I’ll promise to have fun this week.”

“Good! Let me know if I can join in!”

“I will. Well, if you’ll excuse me? I’m going to hit a couple of bars, see if I can’t get laid tonight. Maybe do a few lines of coke, I don’t know. I feel like daaaaanciiiiiing, yeah!”

“Huh? You ... Oh! HAAAA! Hahahhaaaaahaaaa! Hahahahahahaha!! You really made me ... OH NO FUCKING SHIT NOW I DIE AGAIN!!! AAAARGH!”

I won’t pretend I wasn’t nervous that evening, given what I was planning to do. I often manage to remain calm under pressure, but that’s because I never see all that misery coming. Now I had the entire evening to think about the consequences of my actions. I could call it off at any time, go back to my family or at least think about my approach some more, but somehow I felt this had to be the night. And so I left the palace grounds at ten p.m., drove Asim’s white Land Rover to the garage and spent two hours waiting for Isha’a prayer to roll around. After that I’d have about four hours to search the mosque.

I contacted K-T and ordered her to quietly alert me if anyone came within 10 metres of the mosque’s front doors. I then drove to the Hittin mosque and parked in a side street. A weapon would be really comforting right now, but I’d left mine in the desert.

Mosque doors, like church doors, are never locked. I watched the building as it emptied after their joint brainwashing session, which was attended by only about seven people, and saw Imam Musa leaving, just a minute or two after the light in his office was turned off. I checked my toolkit for the hundredth time or so, got out and casually walked to the front door. It opened without too much noise.

Without writing an entire manual about picking locks, let me just give you the basics: inside a lock there are tumblers, all protruding at different lengths. When you insert a key, with its jagged edge, the tumblers suddenly all line up. Only when they are all on a single line, will the lock turn. And so picking a lock involves two actions: one is to find each individual tumbler and lift it up. The second is to exert pressure on the bit of the lock that rotates, with a so called tension bar. (You rarely if ever see tension bars being used on TV shows. Keep an eye out.)

The pick is usually very thin, but the tension bar only needs to be inserted into the first two or three millimetres of the lock. Each time you manage to lift a tumbler, which you can feel or sometimes even hear as a click, putting pressure on the tension bar keeps the tumbler fixed in place, up in its chamber. You can then move on to the second tumbler, and so on. Once you reach the final tumbler, the tension wrench rotates the lock, and the lock is opened.

This is hard. Rat bastard hard, in fact. You can’t see the tumblers, you have to be really alert to feel if you’ve managed to manipulate the tumbler and worst of all, your thumb will hurt like a motherfucker after about ten minutes of pushing it against a lock, sat on your knees, in a dark mosque where anyone can saunter in off the street. I’d had a bit of practice at MI6 and even tried my luck on two doors in Asim’s house, but even then I wasn’t very good at it and that was while I was working under zero pressure and with the lights on.

The previous time I had examined this lock I had optimistically guessed I’d need no more than five minutes to get in. Well, that may be under laboratory conditions, but after fifteen minutes my left hand was shaking so hard and was so slippery from sweating into my latex gloves that I gave up. I had a three millimetre thick groove in my left thumb from the torsion wrench and I had gotten exactly nowhere. Fuck all those TV-shows where someone says: ‘Cover me for a minute, okay?’ and they get down on one knee, poke around with a toothpick for all of five seconds (without a tension bar) and then the bloody door swings open. Bullshit!

I stood up and decided to do something else, if only to dry up. I entered the main hall of the mosque, now also dark, which smelled of incense, perfume and sweat. If someone came in, I’d just pretend to have fallen asleep or something. Or I’d knock them out and do a runner.

The Qur’an was displayed on a stand next to a lectern. Most mosques have several copies. If they’re in a book case, they are always on the top shelf. After all, nothing else should be higher than the word of God. I had no business with that book, but simply because I was looking for ways to cause mischief I examined the lectern. It had a drawer underneath it. In the drawer I found a key.

The key didn’t open the door. What’s this, Leisure Suit Larry? It wasn’t even the same type. This was a tiny key and I knew it would be pointless even before I walked to the door. That didn’t stop me from getting needlessly mad, though.

“FUCK!” I hissed, kicking the very sturdy looking door in the hope that the lock would just give in. If it did, I’d nick a few things and make it look like a burglary.

The actual key fell off a ledge above the door frame.

USE key ON door.

You insert the key and open the lock.

OPEN door.

The door is open. You see an office. It is dark. There are two desks. Go (i)n or© lose door. Dumbass.

I closed the door behind me. Wooden shutters kept out all the light and it was tempting to flick the light switch next to my shoulder, but for now I made do with the small, pencil thin flashlight I’d brought with me. I’d covered the lens with a red piece of see-through paper from a piece of candy I’d been offered after my dinner at the House of Pancakes, because red light is far less noticeable and also apparently keeps your eyes adjusted to the dark. Fun fact (because I love fun facts, which is a fun fact about me I’m sure you had no idea of): chickens can’t see blue light. It just doesn’t register with them. So when the time comes to empty a barn and load them all into crates, they turn on blue lights and the Poles who ... excuse me, the workers who gather them up can easily chase them down, because as far as the chickens are concerned it’s pitch black. Cool, huh? I’m not sure if you are into trivia, but if you are I’ll try to insert one or two more facts like these throughout this journal. If I can remember to do so, that is.

The tiny key did open something, as it turned out: one of the solid metal filing cabinets underneath one of the desks. It had two drawers. In the first bottom I found dozens of hanging folders, each filled with indecipherable (to me) handwritten notes in Arabic. Photographing them would take a while and it might be a waste of time, because I had no idea what they said. Printed Arabic is one thing, but handwritten? No chance, mate. I struggle with my own handwriting at the best of times.

I picked five documents at random, turned on the big, orphaned printer (there was no PC or laptop around) and made copies. He’d never miss five sheets and it wouldn’t tax the cartridge, either. If this was valuable information, MI6 or the CIA could come and get the rest for themselves.

The top drawer had no folders, but contained a lock box with the key dangling out of it. Laziness and routine are a spies’ best friend, I’m told. By actual spies, as it happens. Well, the key on the doorframe was proof of that. Inside the lockbox I found thick stacks of bank notes, mostly 500 riyal bills. One of those is equal to one hundred US dollars, so there was a couple of thousand bucks here. There were a few stacks of other currencies, such as UAE dirhams and Qatari riyal, but also a fat stack of very smelly Afghani currency. That’s worth exactly shit, but it smells like it, too.

I also found six passports and some drivers’ licences, all belonging to suspicious looking characters. I wasn’t sure if any of them were on the list I’d found earlier, but it was no problem to copy them three at a time. There were also three old cellphones (hello Nokia 6210! That’s been a while!), some boxes with pills in blister strips and a double resealable plastic bag with what I was sure was not baking powder (though it might be literally anything else for all I know about drugs).

Behind the lock box I found ... a half-empty bottle of Scotch. Cutty Sark, if you’re interested. That’s hardly an expensive brand, although I imagine even a bottle of Jack McFungus’ Bathtub Surprise would be appreciated around here. (Don’t bother: I made that up. I did research bad Scotch just for this joke, but it seems the worst Scotch in the world is in fact ... Dutch. Look for ‘t Koelschip 2010 Single Malt, if you want to upset and possibly blind your boss. The apostrophe is part of the name.)

This was all very well, but I hadn’t actually come here to convince myself that the Imam was a bad boy. I had other plans, and for that I opened the fold away attic ladder. I am not a man who should be using those, not so much for my weight (I’m fine these days, thanks), but for my circumference, particularly around the shoulders. Any rugby team would pay through the nose to have me, particularly if they hadn’t yet seen me getting out of a chair first. And so it was a bit of a squeeze on this ladder, which was just about the width of both my sandals. Still, I managed and as soon as I was upstairs, I took out my phone and turned on the flashlight.

When I first visited this mosque, I noticed the suspended ceiling. This struck me as very utilitarian, and also a bit odd. Some mosques are very lavish, but they can’t all be like that and so many local ones are rather simple. This one, for instance. Even so, it is a place of worship so it can’t look too much like a boarding school dormitory and the prayer room is usually spruced up a bit, with nice lamps and an ornate ceiling. They can’t do too much, because there’s no furniture and pictures of humans or animals are forbidden, and the floors have to be covered in carpets, so it’s usually up to the ceiling to add a bit of atmosphere. Some have decorative, narrow skylights that create a bit of contrast, others have kaleidoscopic tableaus made from ceramic tiles or coloured glass, and some are just stark and bare. But they don’t generally look like the ceiling at Dunder Mifflin, as far as I know. Prayer rooms in schools and at airports sometimes do, especially when they have only grudgingly been made available, but proper mosques have standards. So why these mineral fibre squares? They reduce noise, but that is not a priority when you’re sucking up to God, is it? You want a bit of an echo for that.

So that ceiling, combined with the height of the building and the presence of this small ladder made me think there was something going on between the roof and the prayer room ceiling. And as it turns out, I was right. I found an entire floor there, just high enough for me to stand upright but not quite high enough for me to be able to walk without grazing my head. The surface area was about twenty by thirty metres and the odd thing was that in the centre of that space I saw the top of a dome. I wasn’t sure if it would hold my weight, but I didn’t much care, either. It was dirty and dusty: clearly hardly anybody had walked there since the building had been constructed. The question was: why hide this dome from view?

Around the dome, the top of which was about a metre high at this level, was a flat walkway wide enough to walk two abreast. I saw some metal pipes, which might have been part of the scaffolding, and a surprisingly large number of footprints in the dust, plus some tracks as if something had been dragged away. It was pitch black and so I turned up the illumination from my phone’s flash LED.

A few metres to my right I found a large, grey tank filled with water. At first I thought it served the washroom, where dozens of people would want to spruce up before prayer, but then I noticed a grid of pipes emanating from the tank and all these pipes ran off to the dome. It took me a minute or two to figure it out, but then I remembered there were fire extinguishers in the center tile of every block of nine on the ceiling below. This tank fed a fire suppression system, which was installed in the suspended ceiling below me. I am not really all that familiar with building requirements, but surely a mosque, in a country where smoking is banned in public spaces and also considered haram, could make do with a bit less than this? I mean, it’s clearly terrible (to them) if the Qur’an catches fire, but this seemed a bit drastic. Had this building been repurposed? Was this once a laboratory, or a fuel depot? Do those come with domed interior ceilings?

I walked around the dome and found a door on the other side, near where I assumed the toilets and wash basins were on ground level. It opened to a concrete staircase, which I followed downstairs. The door on the ground floor was locked, but through a gap I could see the empty washroom. So there was an easier way to get here, if you had a key.

I went back upstairs and completed the circle. There I found three wooden crates, measuring about fifty by fifty by fifty centimetres. Two were nailed shut, but one opened easily on a hinge. In it I found six bundles, wrapped entirely in brown packaging tape and all the size and weight of a two kilo bag of sugar. Except this couldn’t possibly be sugar.

I walked on to complete the circle and found twelve cardboard boxes lined up against the far wall. Didn’t even have to open one to see the contents: seven boxes of Johnny Walker, five of Hennessy VS. One box was open, with three bottles of cognac out of six left.

Okay ... Let’s review. Someone covered a nice, domed ceiling to hide the fact this building had a powerful fire suppression system. Which it presumably had because if it ever caught fire, the occupant would have to explain the fact the hidden floor was used to store drugs and booze. Made sense, I suppose. I don’t know how often mosques go up in flames, but someone had clearly felt the need to make this smuggler’s den a bit more secure. Maybe they had once stored something a bit more combustible than booze, who knows?

I looked around some more and found nothing of interest, except a steel cannister with fire extinguishing foam next to the water tank. The water from the tank would be mixed with the contents of this cannister and air, so that vast amounts of foamy bubbles would come out of the extinguishers below. That way, the tank would stretch even further. I took some pictures of it all and made my way back to the attic ladder, which I had obviously pulled up behind me. As I was examining the mechanism to see how I could lower it, K-T signalled me. My watch display turned red and the housing buzzed like mad. I touched the button on the side.

“I’m listening,” I whispered.

“Two people approaching entrance.”

“Thanks. Only text me from now on. Keep me updated.”

The screen flashed the word ‘understood’ almost immediately.

I wasn’t too worried. I was certain I hadn’t triggered any alarms, and people went in and out of this building all the time. Maybe someone just wanted to use the toilets, or...

Who was I kidding: it was well past two in the morning right now. The next prayer wouldn’t be until sunrise. (Fun fact: if you follow Islam, you technically can’t ever get a solid eight hours of sleep. There just isn’t that much time between prayers.) So what were these two people doing here?

My watch buzzed. As I turned my wrist, the display lit up. In mute green on a black background it said: ‘Advisory: set phone to silent.’

Underneath it showed a checkbox, with the caption: ‘Mute phone’. I ticked it.

One possibility, which I raise with some trepidation because it is a nasty subject, is that these were just two guys looking to have a tea party. Muslim men are gay at the same rate as everybody else, and mosques are open all hours but abandoned most of the night. And even if they aren’t: it’s not so weird if you’re found there at odd hours, ostensibly praying. Just make sure to wipe the semen from your upper lip, okay?

My phone buzzed, which I almost didn’t notice now that it was in the pocket of my dishdasha. K-T had sent me a picture. It had been taken by her infrared camera and showed two men, one dressed traditionally and one in Western clothing, entering the front door. They were holding something box shaped, but the image was in black and white and taken from too far away.

I just stood there, safe in the knowledge I had left no traces downstairs. But then I heard footfalls on concrete and realised they were coming up the stairs! That was too close for comfort, but all of the boxes with contraband were on the other side of this floor. The water tank was large enough to hide behind, so I squatted behind it and double checked the volume on both my phone and my watch. A few seconds later the door on the other side of this floor opened and the two men came in. One had a flashlight which shone resolutely towards the stash of liquor opposite me. Between them they carried three canisters of wiper fluid, which they placed next to the cognac. Then they each took a box of Scotch and disappeared. I recognized one of them, and I also recognized the canisters. This was the Imam’s son. It seems he was using dad’s office for storage.

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Carstairs of Arabia

Ron Dudderie

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