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Chapter 2 Paris

THE FIRST BOMB EXPLODED AT 11:46 a.m., on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The director of the French security service would later say he received no warning of the impending attack, a statement his detractors might have found laughable were the death toll not so high. The warning signs were plain to see, they said. Only the blind or the willfully ignorant could have possibly missed them.

From Europe’s point of view, the timing of the attack could not have been worse. After decades of lavish social spending, much of the Continent was teetering on the brink of fiscal and monetary disaster. Its debt was soaring, its treasuries were empty, and its pampered citizenry was aging and disillusioned. Austerity was the order of the day. In the current climate, no cow was considered too sacred; health care, university tuition, support for the arts, and even pension benefits were all undergoing drastic cuts. Along Europe’s so-called periphery, the smaller economies were falling like dominoes. Greece was sinking slowly into the Aegean, Spain was on life support, and the Irish Miracle had turned out to be nothing more than a mirage. In the smart salons of Brussels, many Eurocrats were daring to say aloud what had once been unthinkable—that the dream of European integration was dying. And in their darker moments, a few of them actually wondered whether Europe as they knew it might be dying, too.

Another article of faith lay in tatters that November—the belief that Europe could absorb an endless tide of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies while preserving its culture and basic way of life. What had started as a temporary program to relieve a postwar labor shortage had now permanently altered the face of an entire continent. Restive Muslim suburbs ringed nearly every city, and several countries appeared demographically fated to Muslim majorities before the end of the century. No one in a position of power had bothered to consult the native population of Europe before throwing open the doors, and now, after years of relative passivity, the natives were beginning to push back. Denmark had imposed draconian restrictions on immigrant marriages. France had banned the wearing of the full facial veil in public. And the Swiss, who barely tolerated one another, had decided they wanted to keep their tidy little cities and towns free of unsightly minarets. The leaders of Britain and Germany had declared multiculturalism, the virtual religion of post-Christian Europe, a dead letter. No longer would the majority bend to the will of the minority, they declared. Nor would it turn a blind eye to the extremism that flourished within its midst. Europe’s age-old contest with Islam, it seemed, had entered a new and potentially dangerous phase. There were many who feared it would be an uneven fight. One side was old, tired, and largely content with itself. The other could be driven into a murderous frenzy by a doodle in a Danish newspaper.

Nowhere were the problems facing Europe on clearer display than in Clichy-sous-Bois, the volatile Arab banlieue located just outside Paris. The flashpoint for the deadly riots that swept France in 2005, the suburb had one of the country’s highest unemployment rates, along with one of the highest rates of violent crime. So dangerous was Clichy-sous-Bois that even the French police refrained from entering its seething public housing estates—including the one where Nazim Kadir, a twenty-six-year-old Algerian employed by the celebrated Fouquet’s restaurant, lived with twelve other members of his extended family.

On that morning in November, he left his apartment in darkness to purify himself at a mosque built with Saudi money and staffed by a Saudi-trained imam who spoke no French. After completing this most important pillar of Islam, he rode a 601AB bus to the suburb of Le Raincy and then boarded an RER train to the Gare Saint-Lazare. There he switched to the Paris Métro for the final leg of his journey. At no point did he arouse the suspicions of the authorities or his fellow passengers. His heavy coat concealed the fact he was wearing an explosive vest.

He emerged from the George V stop at his usual time, 11:40, and started up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Those lucky enough to survive the inferno to come would later say there was nothing unusual in his appearance, though the owner of a popular flower shop claimed to notice a curious determination in his gait as he closed in on the entrance of the restaurant. Among those standing outside were a deputy minister of justice, a newsreader from French television, a fashion model currently gracing the cover of Vogue magazine, a Gypsy beggar clutching the hand of a small child, and a noisy group of Japanese tourists. The bomber made one final check of his watch. Then he unzipped his coat.

It was never clearly established whether the act was preceded by the traditional scream of “Allahu Akbar.” Several survivors claimed to have heard it; several others swore the bomber detonated his device in silence. As for the sound of the explosion itself, those closest had no memory of it at all, for their eardrums were too badly damaged. To a person, all recalled seeing a blinding white flash of light. It was the light of death, said one. The light one sees at the moment he confronts God for the first time.

The bomb itself was a marvel of design and construction. It was not the kind of device built from Internet manuals or the how-to pamphlets floating around the Salafist mosques of Europe. It had been perfected under battle conditions in Palestine and Mesopotamia. Packed with nails soaked in rat poison—a practice borrowed from the suicide bombers of Hamas—it carved through the crowd like a circular saw. So powerful was the explosion that the Louvre Pyramid, located a mile and a half to the east, shivered with the blast wave. Those closest to the bomber were blown to pieces, sheared in half, or decapitated, the preferred punishment for unbelievers. Even at forty paces, limbs were lost. At the farthest edge of the kill zone, the dead appeared pristine. Spared outward trauma, they had been killed by the shock wave, which ravaged their internal organs like a tsunami. Providence had granted them the tender mercy of bleeding to death in private.

The first gendarmes to arrive were instantly sickened by what they saw. Extremities littered the paving stones, along with shoes, smashed wristwatches frozen at 11:46, and mobile phones that rang unanswered. In one final insult, the murderer’s remains were scattered among his victims—everything but the head, which came to rest on a delivery truck more than a hundred feet away, the bomber’s expression oddly serene.

The French interior minister arrived within ten minutes of the explosion. Seeing the carnage, he declared, “Baghdad has come to Paris.” Seventeen minutes later, it came to the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, where, at 12:03 p.m., a second suicide bomber detonated himself amid a large group of children waiting impatiently to board the park’s roller coaster. The Danish security service, the PET, quickly established that the shahid had been born in Copenhagen, had attended Danish schools, and was married to a Danish woman. It seemed not to trouble him that his own children attended the same school as his victims.

For the security professionals across Europe it was the nightmare scenario come true—coordinated and highly sophisticated attacks that appeared to have been planned and executed by a skilled mastermind. They feared the terrorists would strike again soon, though two critical pieces of information eluded them. They did not know where. And they did not know when.