The Last Patriot - Brad Thor [25]
“Riley trained me at an Islamic compound in upstate New York called Islamaburg. He said it was for my protection because the FBI wanted to keep my identity a secret, even from other FBI agents.”
“But here you are,” pressed Ozbek, “feeding all of these reports to Riley and nothing is happening. Doesn’t that set off any alarm bells for you?”
“Are you asking if I got frustrated?” asked Salam. “Of course I did. But what did I know? Government is famous for being slow. In fact Riley always liked to calm me down by joking that the FBI put the ‘bureau’ in bureaucratic. No matter how hot a piece of intel was that I gave him, he always assured me that it was being passed up the chain of command and being acted upon.”
When Steve Rasmussen returned with the food, Ozbek gave the prisoner a few moments to begin eating before turning the conversation to the heart of why they were there.
CHAPTER 18
“Let’s talk about the Foundation on American Islamic Relations,” said Ozbek.
Salam shook his head with disgust. “They are the worst thing to have ever happened to American Muslims. You know FAIR’s director, Abdul Waleed, actually boasted at a conference once, not knowing that there was a reporter present, that Islam wasn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. He said he believed that the Koran, not the Constitution, should be the highest authority in America, with Islam as the only accepted religion on earth. And he said he would not rest until he made that happen. That’s not the kind of Islam I practice. In fact, that’s not the kind of Islam the majority of Muslims practice.”
“Tell me about Nura Khalifa and the assassin FAIR supposedly hired.”
Andrew Salam suddenly grew much less talkative. It was obvious to Ozbek that he had touched a nerve and he felt he knew what it was. He had seen a picture of Nura Khalifa. She was stunning.
Finally, Salam said, “She was a good woman. She didn’t deserve to die.”
Ozbek had never lost anyone close to him—not in the Army, not at the CIA, not even in his regular personal life. He could only imagine how the man felt and trod as delicately as the situation would allow. “Were you two intimately involved?”
“No. It was strictly business between us.”
“Did you have feelings for her?”
Salam looked at his interrogator. “Even if I had, I would never have compromised such a valuable asset. If nothing else, at least I can say I was professional.”
“She fed you a lot of information on FAIR?”
“Tons.”
“Which you fed to Riley?” asked Ozbek.
“Yes.”
“And he was the only person claiming to be with the FBI that you ever had contact with?”
“Correct,” said Salam, “but no matter how much information about FAIR and its activities I gave him, nothing ever seemed to be done about it. I got the same line about investigations being in the works and it taking a lot of time to build strong cases and then one day Riley told me to sever all ties with Nura and back off the Foundation on American Islamic Relations.”
“Did he say why?”
“Riley claimed that the Bureau was finally beginning a full-blown investigation of the organization and that any further work I did could jeopardize my cover. I agreed. The only problem was that Nura didn’t. She was convinced by what she was seeing and overhearing that something very big was afoot.”
“What was she seeing and overhearing?” asked Ozbek.
“Abdul Waleed began having more and more meetings with a radical Saudi imam who ran several mega-mosques across the U.S. named Sheik Mahmood Omar. According to Nura, the two men seemed to be carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.
“She had overheard them complain on two separate occasions that if the threat wasn’t halted, Islam, as well as everything they had been working for, could be seriously compromised.”
Ozbek interrupted him. “What threat? What are we talking about?”
“That’s exactly what I wanted to know,” replied Salam. “Nura said they had begun asking a lot of questions about her uncle, who is a Koranic scholar from