It was a good plan, he thought, one that did not seem to involve a lot of deaths to innocent civilians and would therefore be more palatable to these new warriors of the jihad. They could strike a blow for freedom without a lot of killing, which might have weighed on their consciences.
"Of course," he said, "there is some risk. You will be asked to help with final preparations and then to guard my men as they prepare the bomb. You will be given weapons for this task. But you will also be compensated so that you can live decently while continuing your efforts on behalf of the jihad. You may not know this, but the infidels keep quite a bit of currency in the building; my men will retrieve this and distribute it among you."
"How much, dawg?" asked Mahmoud Rauf, a hardened gang member who'd been among the first to swear fealty.
"About one hundred thousand dollars each…dawg," Al-Sistani replied, smiling at the different inflection he'd given dawg so that it came out as an insult.
"Damn," Rauf declared. "I'm in."
Al-Sistani smiled. "Great, Mahmoud. Now, the rest of you, are you in?" All the heads nodded. "This is good, here are your instructions."
Two hours later, Zakir prepared to turn in for the night. He lived in a small room upstairs in the back of the building. Mr. Mustafa and his men had quickly left, followed by the recruits. The killing had frightened him and he just wanted everyone to leave so he could forget about the whole thing in his slumber. He was just about to turn out the lights when there was a pounding on the front door of the mosque.
Sighing, he rose from his bed and walked down the stairs. Someone had probably forgotten something, though why they couldn't wait for the morning peeved him. He took out the.45-caliber Colt he kept in a box at the door-an imam couldn't be too careful in such a high-crime area, not with all the cash he had stuffed under his mattress.
Zakir looked out of the peephole and saw shadows moving away from the door. He could just make out a bag that had been left on the doorstep, and he smiled. Sometimes the members of his congregation left food and other items for him because they lacked cash; these had probably been too embarrassed by their pitiful donation.
He opened the door and saw a large, plastic shopping bag from Macy's. Picking it up, he was surprised by its weight. He looked inside…then started to scream and dropped the bag, which fell over on its side. Two round objects rolled out, one of them bouncing all the way down the three steps to the sidewalk, where it came to a stop.
The bearded head of Rajid Basir, a former member of the Taliban in Afghanistan, stared back at Zakir from the stoop. He assumed the round object on the sidewalk had belonged to Akmed Moammar, a Libyan who'd fought in Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He didn't really care to go find out and instead just continued screaming as lights came on in the buildings near the mosque.
In the alley across the street, two hooded shadows stepped farther back into the darker recesses. "That went even better than I'd hoped, Father," the shorter of the two shadows whispered. "He screams like a woman. Shall I go slit his throat before the police arrive?"
The taller of the shadows placed his hand on the other's shoulder. "No, my son," he said quietly. "We need this one to tell the others. Let his fear infect them."
A police siren wailed in the distance. "Come, let us depart," the taller shadow said. He took a step, then bent over as a gasp of pain escaped his lips.
"Father!" the shorter man whispered. "Are you all right?"
"Fine," his comrade said, straightening with an effort. "I am fine enough for these last days. But come, we've stayed too long."
As the screams of the siren began to drown out those of Zakir, the two shadows slipped from the alley and, unnoticed by the small group of people who'd gathered around the head on the sidewalk, moved away.
Reaching their destination several blocks away, the shadow men pulled the cover off a manhole and climbed down the ladder, pulling the cover shut just as a taxi came around the corner and nearly caught them in its headlights. Standing in several inches of filthy water at the bottom, the taller of the two mussed the hair of his comrade and sniffed.
"Ah," he said, "home sweet home."
14
Saturday, December 18
Ted Vanders reached for the breast of the naked woman in the bed lying next to him, only to have a finger bent back nearly to his wrist. "Jesus Christ!" he cried out. "What did you do that for?"
"Because I didn't want you to touch me," the woman replied. "When I want you to touch me, I'll tell you. Until then, keep your fucking hands to yourself."
Sarah Ryder stretched like a cat and then rose quickly from the bed and stood in front of the full-length mirror, turning this way and that. By and large, she was pleased with the response from men she got to the breast augmentation surgery she'd had a year earlier, changing her from a 34C to a 36DD. However, of late she'd been wondering if more was better and she should revisit her plastic surgeon and pump up the volume, so to speak. The bigger the bait, the richer the tiger, she thought.
"What do you think, Ted," she said, turning sideways. "Should I get bigger tits?
"I think they're perfect just the way they are, my love," Vanders said with a pout. "That's why I wanted to touch them…at least until you almost broke my finger."
Ryder rolled her eyes. "Fuck, why would I ask you," she sneered. "You'd think an old water balloon was a turn-on. And if I'd wanted to break your finger, I would have. Now quit with the fucking 'my love' shit, it makes me want to throw up."
Having just screwed Ted Vanders didn't mean she liked Ted Vanders. In fact, she pretty much detested Ted Vanders-from his skinny, sunken white chest and muscleless arms to his crooked teeth and myopic eyes. However, it was his imperfection that made him perfect for her plan. After all, who would believe that a hottie like Sarah Lynn Ryder, who had a body and face that real men fought over, would have anything to do with a faggy little English major like Ted?
Ted, on the other hand, was hopelessly in love with her. He actually thought that she was attracted to his stupid poetry and romanticism. My love, blech. Oh yes, she'd giggled like a virginal schoolgirl when she picked him out at the student union on the NYU campus, but she'd nearly regretted it the first time she let him have sex with her. He was so excited that it hardly lasted thirty seconds and that was if you included his amateurish attempts at foreplay. It was all she could do to keep from gagging when she told him it was all right and that "a few minutes of perfection is better than hours with another man."
After that he was hooked, and she treated him pretty much like dirt. He would do anything to have sex with her, which she kept to a minimum both because it sickened her and because she wanted him desperate. As she figured, he became so enraptured that he'd even agreed to go along with her plan to exact revenge on her professor of Russian poetry, Alexis Michalik. Of course, she'd framed it in a way-the man had used her and cast her aside-to appeal to both his jealousy and romantic nature…the bull (albeit a skinny, nearsighted bull) who sees another bull in the paddock with the heifer in heat.
Twenty-five-year-old Sarah Ryder had known for more than half her life that men found her attractive-especially when, as her spinster aunt back home in Iowa said, she'd "blossomed early." The first such man was a friend of her parents who'd come over with his wife every Friday night for a friendly game of canasta and insisted on tucking "little Sarah" into bed. He'd gone from fondling her "naughty places" to more painful exercises, all the time warning her not to tell her parents or she'd be punished. Two years later, after she figured out that he was the one who should be worried, she told him that she didn't mind the sex, but if he didn't do what she wanted him to do-including giving her a rather large allowance-she'd not only tell her parents, she'd tell the cops.