‘How about an exchange?’ Cole asked, trying to ignore the gators.
‘An exchange?’ Quraishi asked as he sipped at his tea. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I’ll tell you what you want to know, and you tell me what I want to know.’
Quraishi laughed. ‘But what possible use can it do you now?’ he asked. ‘You must realize that you are going to die here, I will not insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise. The only question that should bother you is how painful the experience is going to be.’ He gestured to the murky green waters of the gator pool. ‘You are hardly in a position to barter.’
‘If I’m going to die anyway, why not tell me something?’ Cole asked, his feet pulling back reflexively from the water as the big dark gator nudged his snout towards them. ‘Like what the weapon is that you stole from the Fu Yu Shan, and what you’re planning on doing with it.’
Quraishi laughed again. ‘Oh, I see; you want me to tell you my entire plan? So that — what? So that you can go to your grave knowing that you failed to prevent the biggest massacre in US history? Would that make you happy?’
‘Try me,’ Cole said seriously.
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ Quraishi said. ‘Even my men don’t know.’ He pointed to the guards who were restraining Cole on the concrete slope, others who were monitoring the gators, keeping them away with long poles until their boss gave them the word. ‘If I told you, I would have to have them all killed to keep them quiet. And you know that the Qur’an forbids unnecessary killing.’
It was Cole’s turn to laugh. ‘It’s funny how you people twist the Qur’an to support whatever suits you at the time.’
‘You people?’ Quraishi asked with a raise of an eyebrow. ‘It is racist comments like that have damned your country.’
‘Racist? I’m not talking about Muslims. I’m talking about terrorists. Cowardly little piss-ants like you, nothing better than common criminals. You people.’ Cole spat at Quraishi’s feet. ‘The scum of the earth.’
Cole received a backhanded blow from one of the men who held him, but Quraishi held out a hand to stop him. ‘No,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘No.’ He smiled. ‘If this man wants to play games, we can accommodate him.’
Quraishi turned to the men keeping the gators at bay with their poles, and snapped his fingers. They moved back at his signal, and the alligators crept immediately closer.
‘We’ll continue our conversation after breakfast,’ he said with a smile.
Quraishi watched as his favorite, the nearly black alligator he’d called Adil — the just one — inched closer to his captive’s bare feet.
The man who had come to him as Daniel Chadwick tried to pull them back from the water, but his men continued to hold him in place, immobile. The unknown man’s hands were restrained, but his legs were free, and Quraishi looked on with enjoyment as they tried to kick out, their jerking actions an indication of the panic the man must now be feeling.
He was brave, of course; most intelligence agents were, due to the nature of their work. But he would tell Quraishi everything after just the first little nibble from Adil’s powerful jaws.
He wondered what it meant, the presence of this man here. Was he same man Richards had warned him about? And if he was, was he really working alone? And if he wasn’t, who else knew about his trip to Riyadh? Who else knew that the man had gone to the Ministry to meet Quraishi? Who else could link Quraishi to recent events?
Quraishi sipped his tea as he waited for the first screams. Did it even matter anymore? He had already accepted the fact that his life would soon change. His plan acknowledged that his role would be revealed sooner or later. But Quraishi welcomed this; it would be a relief to finally leave the public life he had created for himself. The lie.
For none of it was the real man. The al-Saud family connections, the job at the Ministry — even his wife and children — all were just affectations, a smokescreen to throw the authorities off the scent of the real Abd al-Aziz Quraishi.
For the real Quraishi was embodied in the Lion, the feared, hooded leader of Arabian Islamic Jihad. The silk hood didn’t mask his real face; the hood was his real face, and everything else was the mask.
He wondered sometimes where it came from, this drive to change the world, his passionate, zealous fury against the House of Saud and the Great Satan. The truth was, he didn’t know. His life had been blessed — he had had a happy childhood, he had never wanted for anything — and yet it had not been enough. There was something inside of him, something — unknowable? — that demanded that he take action, do what he was doing, rise up against the status quo and demolish it in its entirety.
He was destined for great things, that much he knew. And what could he ever hope to attain as a minor relative of the royal family? An assistant minister, who the corrupt regime would allow to rise no higher?
He knew that American psychoanalysis might suggest that he was driven by greed, the insatiable desire for power and control. Perhaps there were incidents in his childhood which had made this important for him — a feeling that he couldn’t control things, which had ultimately led to an overriding need to control everything, to change everything.
And yet Quraishi had no use for psychoanalysis; it was yet one more trick used by the West to conceal and hide the truth, the only thing that really mattered.
The will of Allah.
And so Quraishi never questioned his motives, his intentions. He was what he was because Allah had made him so. And if Allah had made him so, then it must be for a reason; and who was Quraishi to stand in the way of His will?
His plan was about to come to fruition, and the United States would never be the same again, and neither would Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East.
Indeed, the very fabric of the world was about to change, just as Allah required.
And if this man before him was a threat to that, then Quraishi would find out what he wanted, and make him pay for his effrontery.
Quraishi finished his tea and handed the cup back to the assistant, smiling as Adil made the final approach, his black jaws gaping wide.
8
It was now or never, and Cole didn’t have to think twice; he just reacted.
As the dark alligator opened its jaws to take its first bite, Cole pivoted up on his hips and pulled his legs free of the guards’ grasp. He had been purposefully jerking them forwards and backwards to simulate panic for the past few minutes, as well as to get the guards used to his movements, and now they arced up in the air and caught around the nearest security guard’s neck, pulling him down in one fast blur.
The man’s head was inside the alligator’s hungry mouth before anyone could react, and the writhing of his body as the jaws clamped closed, blood flying from the severed neck as the alligator twisted the head clean off, caused immediate panic in the others.
The two men holding Cole down instinctively let go to help their comrade, hands pulling the headless corpse back to the blood-drenched concrete poolside.
Cole was moving again in the same instant, on his feet and barreling into one of the men covering him with the Uzi. The startled man — his focus on his friends who were now trying to fend off the rest of the alligators — was knocked to the ground, dropping the submachine gun.