"That was wonderful, Melanie," he said later, and kissed her in gratitude. "Thank you."
She smiled and held her hand to his cheek. "You're very sweet, Patrick. I've wanted this for a long time."
He couldn't tell if it was a lie or the truth, but he didn't really care. He sighed and reached for the robe discarded on the floor. "I'd better take a look at what you brought."
"It's a report from Mr. Rincon. He faxed it to the office this morning."
He forgot the robe and trotted over to the briefcase naked, riffling through the paperwork to find the report with the institute's deliberately vague logo, a quill pen crossed with a broadsword and the words littera scripta manet written beneath in a discreet little font. It was only when you looked more closely that you saw that the pen was larger than the broadsword and in a fair way to eclipsing it altogether.
"Mrs. Mansour was right, he is Pakistani," he said, reading rapidly. "Akil Vihari, brother of-holy shit."
"It's an awful story, isn't it," she said gravely. "Yes, I read it when it came in. I know I wasn't supposed to, Patrick, but I couldn't resist."
"I remember reading about this," Patrick said, unheeding. "It was something of a cause celebre, especially when her brother disappeared and Amnesty International and the rest of them figured he'd gone for revenge against the tribesmen and they'd killed him. It was in Time, it was on the Nightly News and BBC."
There was a picture of Adara, the one taken for her identity card. It was blurry but it looked familiar. It took him a minute before he made the connection.
"She looks like Zahirah Mansour." He thought of what they had found in the backseat of that car and felt a little sick.
She dozed off while he skimmed through the rest of the report. No wonder, he thought, looking at her slumbering form, lovingly outlined by the sheet. It was after eleven. She must be exhausted.
He'd be happy to crawl in beside her but he felt restless. The television was on. He skimmed the news channels. Nothing new; a bombing in Baghdad and another on the West Bank, a small plane crash in Alaska that everyone had walked away from, a mudslide in California and a tornado in Kansas. NASA was about to launch another space shuttle, and among the crew there was a relative of a World War II hero after whom someone had named a ship, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. There was a clip of her parents on the cutter, standing next to the captain, a fit, handsome man in his midforties who looked as if he wished he were anywhere else but there. Patrick wished he looked like him. Then maybe Melanie would have slept with him because she wanted to, not because Kallendorf did.
He clicked over to NTV for a little mindless entertainment, and watched as time-lapse photography darkened the sky over the agglomeration of ship and fuel tanks waiting next to the great steel Tinkertoy that held it upright until ignition. They were set to launch at midnight.
The scene switched to the standard NASA-issue press conference, the six astronauts dressed in the now-familiar blue flight suits with the mission patch on the breast sitting at a long table, facing a room full of reporters with notepads and microphones and cameras. It was the second mission for the commander and one of the mission specialists, the first for the pilot and the other two mission specialists. The sixth was a Qatari who worked hard at giving the impression that his job was to single-handedly launch the ARABSAT-8A, the communications satellite for the Al Jazeera news network.
The camera flashed on the mission commander, who for a moment looked like he'd been stuffed. One of the mission specialists, a woman from Alaska, diverted attention with a laughing complaint about the reporters' lack of interest in Eratosthenes, the orbiting observatory named for the ancient Greek scientist who had only been off three thousand miles when he estimated the circumference of the earth three hundred years before Christ.
That persistent little voice at the back of his mind telling him he was missing something became a full-fledged nag.
Zarqawi betrayed and killed.
Isa, Zarqawi's devotee, on his own after Zarqawi's death, breaking with bin Laden to form his own group.
Isa, recruiting Yussuf and Yaqub in Germany, and more in England.
Yaqub in Toronto, waiting for the go signal.
Mexico City, Haiti, a boatload of illegal immigrants.
Patrick paused with the glass of water halfway to his mouth.
Isa was Zarqawi's apprentice. Osama bin Laden hated and distrusted Zarqawi, and because of that Isa would never be regarded as a true member of al Qaeda.
But Isa was ambitious, and al Qaeda set the gold standard for terrorism with 9/11. Isa wanted to surpass it, and to do so he would use bin Laden's name.
One of the reasons Isa could be operating independently of al Qaeda was because he saw bin Laden's tactics change from attacking the Far Enemy on their own ground to engaging them in battle closer to home.
What was it that loser, Karim, had quoted Isa as saying? He said that Bush said that it was better to fight us on our ground than for the Americans to fight us on theirs. And then he said he thought Bush was right.
Instead of hitting the Far Enemy in Iraq, where the Far Enemy could hit them back, Isa was looking to bring the jihad back to the Far Enemy's backyard, where he believed it had belonged in the first place.
And the first thing he would look for was a target of opportunity, something universally recognized as a symbol of American might and power, something that symbolized everything the Far Enemy stood for that the true believers hated. Their technology. Their secularism. Their greed.
And their open, unabashed determination to corrupt the faithful.
He stared at the television, at the shuttle, white against the enormous fuel tank, flanked by the slender rocket boosters, steam curling up from the tail to make it look like the whole assembly was floating on air.
In the orbiter at this moment were five astronauts, two of them women, one of them black. One was a Protestant, one was Catholic, one was Bahai, and two were undeclared.
And then there was the sixth person on board.
One of the faithful.
One of the faithful, yes, Patrick thought, but from Isa's viewpoint also a Qatari, a citizen of a nation whose women would have the right to vote in the next election. A bona fide Muslim, scion of a powerful and influential Muslim family, a family that owned a controlling interest in a global media organization whose twenty-four-hour news feed could be found on every television in every coffeehouse in every souk in the near and far East.
An organization rich enough to launch its own satellite, which satellite was at this very moment tucked into the cargo bay of the shuttle he was staring at now.
Suddenly Patrick knew why Isa had boarded a boat in Haiti that was headed north.
"Fuck me," he said, and lunged for his cell phone.
23
ON BOARD FREIGHTER MOKAME
"Now?" Yussuf's whisper was agonized.
"Wait," Akil said, his voice a mere thread of sound. "Wait."
The migrants' attention was fixed fearfully on the Coast Guard small boat. They barely registered Akil and his men's presence. With every part and fiber of their being they wanted to be safely ashore in America.
The small boat came closer in an ever-narrowing circle. Once again the hail, "Attention, unknown freighter, this is the U.S. Coast Guard. This area is closed to all traffic, I say again this area is closed to all traffic. You must turn your vessel around immediately and leave this area."
The small boat's orange hull was twenty-five feet away from the Mokames stern, then twenty, then fifteen. "Safeties off," Akil said softly, "and remember, head shots. We need the uniforms."
He waited until the small boat had closed to within five feet of the Mokame, when he could see beyond the brightness of the spotlight to the members of the small boat's crew. He raised his gun and shot the coxswain between the eyes.