The Sleeper Read Online Free PDF Page A

whatever it took to stop the slaughter. And so we learned, ourselves, to slaughter. We waded through the blood and learned to love the fire.
    Then Abu Seif came to England. To this suburb called Ealing, with its gray rows of half-repaired houses, where I had been tracking him, watching him, looking over his shoulder now for two days and three nights in streets that smelled like curry and cigarettes, mildew and vinyl.
    Abu Seif had claimed political asylum in England. He couldn’t go back to Algeria, where he was born, he said. So he collected welfare checks. He married two women, both of them teenagers. He fathered four children in three years. He kept on preaching the duty of holy war—Good Lord, he could make it sound glorious!—inspiring the sons of Pakistani grocers and Sudanese cabdrivers, inflaming the restless younger brothers of Palestinian bankers and Yemeni doctors. He told so many tales of bravery, some of them were stories that he’d heard, some of them he made up, and all of them he claimed to have seen with his own eyes. Videotapes of his sermons were everywhere in Europe. There were French kids who’d embraced the cause, some Italians and Spaniards, and even pink-cheeked Englishmen. When Abu Seif thought the recruits were ripe for blood and fire, he helped send them to Peshawar and on to Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Philippines, while he stayed here, safe in Ealing.
    Abu Seif sat in front of his computer. He was wearing a short white robe like the friends of Muhammad were supposed to have worn. His legs were spread wide to let his belly push out. His beard was long enough now to rest on his gut. He moved his balls around with his left hand but couldn’t seem to get them in the place he wanted them.
    On the desk near the computer screen were a microphone and headphones, a jumble of Arabic newspapers, a glass full of tea, a couple of Bic pens, a few envelopes, and a letter opener that looked like a dagger. The steel blade was about four inches and engraved with red and green curlicues and crisscrosses. It had a hilt like a tiny Crusader sword. Now Abu Seif put on a pair of earphones and spoke into a microphone. “Bismallah al-Rahman al-Rahim.” I watched the words take shape on his lips. “In the name of God, most Gracious, most Merciful.” So began his sermon about hate. Every Saturday night he preached jihad online. This night, as I looked on from the gloom of his little backyard, I could see dozens of names in the chat room auditorium on his screen. He talked and talked. More names popped up. Others disappeared. As he mumbled into the microphone, Abu Seif looked like a trained bear in a glass cage, a beast in a circus who was perfectly harmless, until you were inside the cage with him.
    I knocked on the sliding door. Abu Seif turned faster than you’d think a man that fat could move. He looked at my hands and saw they were empty. Now, as he switched off his mike, he studied my face. His eyes recognized me, but he didn’t know from where. I knocked again, and he slid the door open about six inches.
    â€œSalaam aleikum,” I said. “They’re watching out front.”
    â€œ Aleikum salaam. They are watching all places.” He had not lost his heavy North African accent. His voice sounded like gravel under water. “Why do you care?”
    â€œI met you in Cazin,” I said. “I’m the American.”
    The memory surfaced behind his eyes. “And now you are in my yard? No. I do not know you,” he said.
    I braced my hand and forearm in the door and shoved it wide open. Abu Seif stepped away, but kept his balance, ready to come back at me. I held up my hands, open and empty. “You know me, brother, and if you don’t help me, I don’t know where I’m going to go.”
    â€œThis is not right,” he said. “There is no reason for you to be here.”
    â€œListen. I was in the middle of America when the thing