“Name, please?” Omar said.
The bearded man raised his sunglasses and looked at Omar, who preferred it when the man had been looking through him. The man smacked his knuckles against the counter again, once for each syllable he spoke. “Cole. Ran. Some. Same name as I had when I told you thirteen seconds ago.” He waved his passport in Omar’s face.
“Thank you, sir,” Omar said, smiling as he took the passport and swiped it over the reader. Scrolling through the passenger manifest on his monitor, Omar’s fake smile began to hurt his face.
The bearded man glanced out the tall windows that faced the helipad. The chopper that was about to head to the Obelisk was spooling up its engine. The other passengers were already on board.
Omar found the man’s name. Normally he would have simply waved him through. But Abdul was watching him now, so he made sure to follow procedure to the letter. He typed the man’s name into the log, then slid a clipboard across the counter. “Signature, please.”
The man signed his name, picked up his bags, and started walking toward the door. Omar traded a look with Abdul, who rolled his eyes. Even a man like Abdul got tired of kowtowing to pompous white people. Suddenly Omar noticed something on the manifest.
“Sir?” Omar called.
The white man stopped and turned. Omar had noticed on the manifest that the man’s retinal signature had been recorded yesterday and he thought this was a great opportunity to impress his boss. “I need to scan your retina.”
“Huh?” the man demanded, narrowing his eyes.
Omar pointed at the box on the wall. “Retinal scan, sir. For identification.”
For a moment the man didn’t move. His jaw worked. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. But then he walked over, stood before the box, and pressed his eye to the round glass panel. He thumbed the green button. A line of light ran back and forth across his eye.
Oh, Omar thought. It’s one of thog h¡€se things. He’d seen them in movies before, but he never knew what they were called.
Suddenly, a high-pitched alarm filled the room. The same irritating beeping sound that went off when somebody swiped their ID card in an area they weren’t cleared to enter.
Omar instantly regretted that he had tried to impress his boss. He looked to Abdul, who was looking at the bearded man. “Sir, I’m sure this is just a computer glitch, but I need to call my supervisor. So if you’ll please step away from the scanner—”
But the man stood his ground, as if he were the boss. “I don’t have time for this shit,” he said.
Abdul eyed Omar, whose chest tightened. Something about the bearded man scared him. Maybe they should just let him go through. Whoever he was, he obviously wasn’t a terrorist. White people were many things, but they weren’t terrorists.
“Sir, please step away while I call my supervisor.” Abdul picked up the phone.
What happened next happened so fast that Omar couldn’t quite make sense of it until it was too late. The white man somehow pulled Omar’s Glock from its holster and fired twice. The side of Abdul’s head exploded in a spray of blood and bone.
Omar stared as Abdul collapsed in a heap, his legs twisted at impossible angles beneath him. The phone receiver he’d been holding a second ago now dangled from its cord, bouncing, until the white man caught it and shoved it at Omar.
“Call dispatch and tell them it was a false alarm,” the white man said.
Omar did as he was told, hoping they would hear the fear in his voice and come anyway.
“Drag his body into that closet,” the man said calmly, indicating a storage locker.
Omar felt sick. But he couldn’t move. His brain still couldn’t quite process what was happening.
“Now,” the man said, lowering his voice.
Omar didn’t want to die. So he lifted Abdul’s feet and dragged his dead boss toward the closet. Abdul had somehow broken his left leg as he fell, and the bones made a grinding noise as Omar dragged him. Stuffing the dead man into the tiny closet was a messy, horrible, and slow process. After Omar was finished, he turned to find the bearded man setting an object beside the computer. It was gray, roughly the size and shape of an egg. The bearded man stuck the twin prongs of some small mechanism into the soft material.
“Come here, Omar,” the bearded man said. “Put your finger on this.” He pointed to the device he’d stuck into the egg, which was ovular and concave.
“How do you know my name?”
“Don’t make me ask you twice.”
Omar did as he was told.
“Now, Omar, from the retinal scanner over there, I can see that you know something about biometrics. Facial recognition, retinal scans, fingerprints, blah blah blah—turning biology into data. You understand what I’m saying, right?”
&¡€em">Omar nodded.
“Outstanding,” he said. “This device you’ve got your finger on? It’s a biometric trigger. If it senses any interruption in your pulse, say from taking your finger off the device and breaking contact, it will detonate this.” He pointed to the egg-shaped object. “It’s a military-grade explosive called Semtex,” the man said. “Enough to make your entire body look like your friend’s head. Do you want that to happen to you?”
Omar shook his head.
The bearded man pressed a button on the device, and a small red light started blinking.
“So I have a mission for you. It’s called Operation Omar-Doesn’t-Blow-His-Own-Ass-Up. The way it works is this: you sit here for the rest of your shift, keep your finger on the button, and smile at every asshole who walks through that door. Anybody asks you about Cole Ransom, you just shrug and act stupid. If anybody asks where your buddy went, you shrug and act stupid. I imagine you’ll be good at that.”
Omar was tempted to explain how a lack of finances was all that had prevented him from going to university, but he realized it was pointless at this particular moment.
“If you complete your mission, I’ll call you later and tell you how to disconnect the bomb. But if I get arrested or shot or the chopper gets called back or if I get spooked for any reason—obviously, I won’t be coming back. And whatever bomb squad you’re thinking of getting over here? Trust me, they’ll never figure out how to disarm this bomb.”
Omar felt a drop of sweat trickling down his neck.
“Operation Omar-Doesn’t-Blow-His-Own-Ass-Up.” The bearded man gave him a cynical smile. “You and me. We’re on the same team now, right?”
Omar nodded.
“You gonna screw up your mission?”
“No, sir. I want to live.”
“Outstanding!” The bearded man pulled out his cell phone, dialed a number, and spoke to someone on the other end of the line as he walked back out the door toward the waiting chopper, in no particular hurry. His voice was too low to hear, but Omar had managed to hear the man on the other side of the line greet the bearded man. Abu Nasir.
As soon as the bearded man boarded the chopper, it lifted off. Omar watched the chopper until it disappeared from view. Was it possible that he was really Abu Nasir?
Omar sat trembling for what seemed like an hour. He looked at the clock. Barely a minute had passed. Was the bomb really rigged the way the bearded man had said it was? Probably. Would Abu Nasir ever tell him how to defuse the bomb? Probably not.
Omar’s hand was already beginning to hurt. He began thinking about his three-year-old son. He remembered how he felt in those first few minutes after Hakim was born. The sun was just about to rise, and the sky was glowing a deep ruby color. This is the color of happiness, he remembered thinking. Another drop of sweat trickled down Omar’s neck, and he wondered if he’d ever see his son again. Probably not, Omar thought miserably. Probably not.
CHAPTER TEN
GIDEON’S FATHER HAD KEPT his guns in a windowless room with two dead-bolt locks. Whenever his father went inside that windowless room, he’d secure both locks. And when he left, he’d lock the door again, first the top lock, then the bottom, in unvarying succession.