‘She’s related to that bastard,’ he growled, gesturing with a nod of his head toward the former President. ‘I don’t care if she was born yesterday, she’s about to become as much of a victim of his policies as my family were, as all Iraqis were!’
Ethan raised an eyebrow and shrugged as he leaned against the wall. ‘Fine, have it your way.’
Abrahem’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re bluffing, trying to buy time until the Secret Service and the Navy SEALS and the police come blasting their way here. It won’t do any good; we will all be dead long before they can stop me.’
‘I know,’ Ethan replied. ‘I just came here to watch the fireworks, to see if it was all worth it.’
Abrahem’s features twisted upon themselves in fury as he tried to figure out what Ethan was getting at. He backed further away from the President, the young girl tight in his grasp and the pistol pressed so hard against her jaw that it seemed to have punctured her skin.
‘What are you talking about?’ he sneered.
Ethan knew that Abrahem would not be able to resist, would need to know what Ethan was doing there and what he was hinting at. It was human nature, an uncontrollable desire to find out what was going to happen next, and Ethan was counting on it to give the Secret Service snipers enough time to get a bead on Abrahem and at least try to take him down.
‘All that we did,’ Ethan said as though Abrahem should know everything. ‘All that we did to fix your country, was it worth it? Did it make you the man you’ve become, or are you just some radicalized asshole who likes killing young girls for pleasure.’
‘I’m not radicalized!’ Abrahem shouted, the girl in his grip flinching with fear and whimpering. ‘This is revenge! This is justice, the kind of justice that men like him believe that they’re immune to!’
Ethan glanced at the former President, who was clearly both as upset and as baffled as Abrahem as to what Ethan was doing. Ethan looked back at Abrahem and judged the distance to his foe as perhaps eight feet. The distance to the windows beyond that looked out over the lawns and would be used by the snipers to shoot Abrahem was another ten feet, so any bullet fired would have to come in extremely low and with a low — aspect to the window to avoid the glass from deflecting the bullets from a true path.
Mitchell was standing at least ten feet from Abrahem and behind the couch, far too distant to make a move of any kind.
‘Justice,’ Ethan murmured in reply to Abrahem, ‘to commit the same evil that you consider this man to have committed? To become the very thing that you so claim to hate, to bring more suffering when there has been suffering already. You do know that an eye for an eye just makes the whole world blind, right?’
Abrahem nodded.
‘I do,’ he replied, ‘and better for a whole world to be blind and have learned from its mistakes that to see and continue to oppress and murder and maim for profit!’
Abrahem pushed the pistol harder against the girl’s jaw, lifting her almost off her feet as he snarled at Ethan.
‘Get on your knees!’
Ethan stayed where he was. He knew that Abrahem would not bluff, that he had no fear of killing, but Ethan also knew that in his own twisted way he wanted justice and that his main target, the ultimate target, was the former President. If Ethan could divert his attention for long enough to give the cavalry time to act…
‘I don’t kneel for cowards,’ he replied.
Abrahem almost pulled the pistol away from the young girl to aim it at Ethan, but he resisted the temptation at the last moment and sniggered to himself.
‘Lose the gun then or I’ll shoot her dead anyway. I have nothing to lose.’
‘On the contrary, you have everything to lose,’ Ethan replied.
The distant sound of a helicopter reverberated through the windows and Abrahem briefly glanced in the direction of the sound, but he was too far away for Ethan to make a move.
‘My family is dead,’ Abrahem replied, ‘my friends are dead or the prisoners of America. I have nothing left but to slay this family and take them with me into oblivion!’
‘That won’t bring your own family back,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘In fact, if we humans really are judged on our lives and actions after we die, I’d imagine that such an act of evil as yours would condemn you to a terrible punishment. I’d imagine that never, ever seeing your family again would be just such a punishment and…’
‘The afterlife is imaginary!’ Abrahem snarled. ‘An invention, a lie used to get people to enslave themselves to mosques and churches! I will never see my family again because they no longer exist, and if Allah did exist he would not have allowed such injustice to happen year after year in my country! My war is not with the Great Satan that is America, it is with the evil people who used that country to murder millions and steal the wealth of my Iraq!’
Ethan took a pace forward, his eyes fixed on Abrahem’s. ‘Then your war is with me.’
‘What do you mean?!’
‘I figured it wouldn’t matter to you all that much,’ Ethan replied, ‘and I guess that the guys were right all along. We should have finished you off though, done a proper job instead of letting you escape.’
Abrahem snarled at Ethan.
‘Your people could never have caught me in Washington DC! Nobody let me escape and I…’
‘Aljazaer Park,’ Ethan cut him off.
Abrahem froze as though in time and stared at Ethan, the rage gone, replaced by a wide eyed stare as though Ethan had driven a sabre through Abrahem’s heart.
‘What?’ the Iraqi uttered.
‘There were eight of us,’ Ethan replied. ‘United States Special Forces, deployed to root out terrorist units operating near the river in the park’s south east corner. Your father was an engineer, building bombs for Shia militia groups, Improvised Explosive Devices that had killed dozens of American troops.’
Abrahem was still staring at Ethan, the pistol no longer shoved under the girl’s jaw but now resting against her cheek as he tried to speak, the words barely getting out.
‘How did you know…,’
‘We knew what he was doing,’ Ethan uttered. ‘Hell, he was handing the Shias two weapons per day, all primed and ready to go. We wouldn’t have known about him if a previously built bomb hadn’t prematurely exploded as the terrorists carried it to their car, which was under surveillance. How we laughed as we watched them burn.’
Abrahem’s throat worked, his mouth apparently dry, the pistol wavering as though it were too heavy for him to hold.
‘He was helping you,’ Abrahem croaked, ‘helping the Americans, but the militia threatened to kill us all if he did not build more bombs.’
‘I know,’ Ethan replied. ‘We insisted that he continue in order to protect you all and so that we could follow the bombs back to the terrorist camps and annihilate them. It was working well, too, but then they caught on to what we were doing and traced it back to your father.’
Abrahem’s pistol fell further, pressed now against the girl’s throat.
‘You killed him,’ he gasped. ‘You killed my family.’
Ethan shrugged as though he cared little for Abrahem’s loss. ‘He could identify highly placed informants among the Shia militia, men crucial to our staying one step ahead of the enemy. We knew that he’d be broken quickly — your father wasn’t a heroic man, more a pragmatist. So we took him down, and then to ensure that nobody else could pass on any information we shot the rest of your family too. That’s war, Abrahem. It sucks.’ Ethan smiled at him. ‘But we shot them quickly to minimize their suffering. After all, we’re not barbarians and they were only Iraqis.’
Abrahem Nassir stared at Ethan for a moment and then with a cry of fury he hurled the girl aside and charged at him with the pistol pointed out in front of him as he opened fire.