From the North Quincy T stop, it was a short walk home to Castle Sinanju, a converted church.
Remo used the kitchen telephone to report to Harold Smith. "Good news and bad news," said Remo. "Which do you want first?"
"The bad," said Smith.
"No surprise there. A local TV nitwit named Tamayo Tanaka just went public that Muslim terrorists have infiltrated the postal service."
Smith's lemony voice was now sounding startled. "What is the source of her information?"
"I think Chiun can explain that," said Remo, holding the phone down for the Master of Sinanju's convenience.
The Master of Sinanju grabbed the receiver in both hands and squeaked, "It is an impenetrable mystery without explanation. Do not attempt to fathom it lest you succumb to madness."
Remo took the phone back and said, "She got it out of him."
"She has no other sources for this?"
"No, but that doesn't seem to faze her much."
Smith vented a sigh like a creaking barn door. "What is the good news?'' he asked.
"The terrorist gave up the name of his mastermind."
"Yes?"
"Ever hear of the Deaf Mullah?"
"He is in prison."
"So is John Gotti. And I hear he can still get things done with a phone call."
"This is very useful," said Smith. "If we isolate the Deaf Mullah from outside contact, we can hobble this conspiracy overnight."
"How's the roundup going?" "The FBI has in custody seven of the principal suspects."
"That's a good dent. Anything we can do on this end?"
"Stand by. I am working on the composite sketch of Joe Camel."
"This is one terrorist I'd like to see in the flesh," Remo grunted.
"This may yet happen," said Smith, terminating the call.
Replacing the receiver, Remo said, "What say we catch up with the events of the day?"
"Only if we watch the proper Woo," Chiun said thinly.
"After Tamayo Tanaka," said Remo, "I'll take any Woo I can get."
Chapter 22
In his private quarters in the al-Bahlawan Mosque in the upper reaches of Ohiostan, the Deaf Mullah sat before his computer terminal, his ear trumpet resting on the carpet beside him, his loyal Afghan guards arrayed outside, with their Russian rifles and their sharp scimitars.
Here was the perfect method of communications with his network of mujahideen. Especially for one to whom the entire world of sound rang and rang. Tinnitus, the Red Cresent doctors had called it. The result of the premature explosion of a bomb meant for the godless modern pharaoh of Egypt. Lies. It was the voice of Allah, believed the Deaf Mullah, to whom the incessant hardship was a spur to press forward his mission on earth.
The nightly contacts were coming in now, from Chicagostan, from Washingtonstan, from Los Angelestan—all major cities where his mujahideen could wreak great, Allah-blessed terror and destruction.
And it had only begun.
The message from A1 Islam in Philadelphiastan was simple: "I await the call to arms."
"Patience," typed the Deaf Mullah. "Patience."
"When will I die with the dignity I deserve?" asked Patrick O'Shaughnessy O'Mecca in Washingtonstan.
"When Allah wills the time is correct," returned the Deaf Mullah.
There was no contact from Ibrahim Lincoln in Chicagostan, who was to have martyred himself by now. But he was often late, working the night shift as he did. Nor did Mohamet Ali in Bostonstan sign on at the ordained hour.
Time passed as the Deaf Mullah sat before his personal computer. It dragged.
At length, the computer dinged and the electronic muezzin called him to prayer.
Shifting to his prayer rug, he faced Mecca and indulged in contemplation and the evening prayer.
When he was done, the beard of the Deaf Mullah bristled at the absence of contact from many of his messengers.
After such a day of triumph, where were they? he thought bitterly. Were they men—or women afraid of what had been unleashed in Allah's name?
A message popped onto the screen from Abd Al- hazred. It was tagged, Difficulties.
Punching it up, the Deaf Mullah read with dark, eager eyes.
"Mohamet in Boston martyred himself," the message began.
"How can that be?" the Deaf Mullah typed back. "It was not yet ordained."
"The criminal FBI found him out, and to avoid capture he martyred himself. It is on all the newses."
"The only news that matters comes from Allah, on whom all blessings are meet," typed the Deaf Mullah furiously.
"Are we discovered?"
"How could that be?" returned the Deaf Mullah.
"I see no word from many of our brethren."
"They are late. But they will post at the appointed hour, inshallah."
But the hours passed, and there was no word from the missing. This was grave, the Deaf Mullah thought. This was very grave.
He considered. It was approaching the hour that the first demand was to be made. This demand had yet to be decided upon.
Perhaps the demand would be freedom for the missing, if they had fallen into godless hands.
No, that would indicate weakness, as well as show that the small group of martyrs were important in and of themselves. Better the infidel nation believe they had captured but a small number of a great many.
Then what demand would be made? What was worthy in the eyes of Allah?
The Deaf Mullah stared into the growing green screen of his Gates of Paradise network with its electronic minarets, praying to Allah to provide guidance.
It must be something that would be easy for the infidel to accede to. A political victory, not a military one. One that would show the Islamic world it was possible to foil the Great Satan, America.
As if in answer, a message popped onto the screen from Sid el-Cid, truly Siddiq el-Siddiq, and the heading was The Hypocrite Ghula Has Come!
A thin smile split the frizzled beard of the Deaf Mullah. Yes, this was the victory required.
Leaning into his keyboard, he began typing the demand that with the touch of a button would be automatically faxed to the FBI in Washingtonstan, as well as to all major news organs.
By midnight it would be the topic of "Nightmirror."
And this was only the end of the first day of the war against the infidel nation.
Chapter 23
The fax rolled out of a machine in the Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., and sat unnoticed in the tray of a plain paper Sharp faxphone as the director of the FBI tried to figure out what the hell was going on in his district offices.
"Who gave the order to arrest that subject in Boston?" he demanded of the agent in charge of the Boston branch of the FBI.
"Sir, we received a transmission this evening to pick up the subject, Mohamet Ali."
"The boxer?"
"This Mohamet Ali is spelled differently, sir."
"Who authorized that pickup order?"
"An ASAC named Smith, out of your office."
"First name?" asked the director, thinking assistant special agents in charge were as numerous as VPs at IBM.
"I'm looking at the transmittal order now, and there's no first name. Just a squiggle."
"What kind of a squiggle? Is it an initial? Can you make out an initial?"
"No, it's just a—squiggle."
"Can you make out any letter? Does the squiggle end on a recognizable letter?" "Not that I can recognize."
"We have a dead postal worker on our hands, the major media outlets want to know why this man was picked up, I'm hearing from other branches that we have better than a half-dozen postal workers in custody and no one can tell me why."
"You should ask this Smith, sir."
"Which Smith? Do you have an idea how many Smiths there are down here?"
"We have a few here in Boston, too."
"All press rel
eases and other public statements must be cleared through my office. Is that understood?"
"Yes, Mr. Director."
The director of the FBI hung up the telephone and asked himself how this was possible. At the CIA, rogue elements pulled this kind of shit all the time. Not at the Bureau. It just wasn't done.
Fortunately only the Boston incident had made news and only because the arresting agents had bungled the job. Whatever it was.
The intercom buzzed.
"St. Louis office for you, Director."
"Put him through."
"This is St. Louis Bureau Chief McBain, Mr. Director. Am I to understand we are to hold this suspect indefinitely?"
"I'm not telling you to do that," the director snapped.
"Do we release him?''
"No, don't do that, either. That was an off-the- record suggestion, by the way."
"I don't understand. What was the purpose of picking up this individual?" "As soon as I have that nailed down, you'll receive further instructions," the director growled.
"I have orders to pick up and hold a USPS employee named Sal Adin for interrogation. What I need to know is who is to interrogate this subject and on what matter?"
"He's a postal worker, isn't he?"
"A letter carrier."
"We have mailmen going postal all across the country," the director bit out. "That's reason enough for now. Just keep the bastard on ice until I have further instructions for you."
"Yes, Mr. Director."
The director of the FBI slammed down the phone, wondering if the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had anything to do with this PR disaster.
A moment later, he forgot all about ATF.
"This just came in," said his secretary, dropping a sheet of paper on his desk. "It looks important."
The director picked up the sheet and scanned it briefly. It had been a long day, so he didn't really take in the sense of the test at first, just the disconnected words themselves.
He had to read it a second time before the cobwebs melted from his fatigued brain.
"Oh, my God! "he said.
Dr. Harold W. Smith had computer taps on all levels of official Washington. If a fax came into the FBI, CIA, NSA or any of a number of official U.S. agencies, the transmission was intercepted and a duplicate fax was created in Smith's vast CURE data base.
Smith had his graphics program up and running and was meticulously filling in the blank areas of the FBI Joe Camel Wanted poster with an ad for Camel cigarettes. At first the brown cartoon face looked ridiculous. Then Smith ordered the automatic morphing program to anthropomorphize the image.
The nose receded, the eyes became humanlike and other features fluidly reconfigured what had been an exaggerated cartoon into a passable representation of a human being with a very pronounced, camel-like nose.
Since the transformation ended up as a line-drawn sketch, there was no need to concern himself with the niceties of hair and eye color. Once he had the image developed, Smith transmitted it to FBI field offices all over the country.
That task had been completed when the automatic program that captured incoming faxes began beeping. All at once. Smith knew without checking what it meant. Someone was simultaneously sending an important fax to official Washington.
Punching up the FBI faxfile intercept, Smith brought the text to his desktop screen:
The Islamic Front for the American Postal Worker's Union today decrees the following de- mandment upon the Infidel Nation:
That the apostate Abeer Ghula be barred forever from bringing her counter-Islamic poison to the shores of the Great Satan, otherwise America.
If the hypocrite Ghula steps onto American soil, she will be destroyed and a second wave of terror will be inflicted upon the Infidel Nation.
The first wave of terror you have experienced on this the dawning day of our glory.
Fail not to heed this warning, for there shall be no other. The Messengers of Muhammad are everywhere, their faces secret, their targets unknown and undiscoverable by you. We can strike anywhere and everywhere, and now that the Great Satan knows this, he cannot risk further action.
Il-Ya Islam!
Smith frowned. This was strange. He had expected a demand. And he knew what the demand had to be. The only demand that made sense.
If, as Remo and Chiun had determined in Boston, the terror group took their orders from and worked on behalf of the Deaf Mullah, the only logical first demand would be freedom for the Deaf Mullah.
If not that, then surely they would have sought the freedom of their recently captured terror agents.
Perhaps, thought Smith, they hadn't realized they had lost so many agents. It was conceivable.
But this demand was insignificant. A mere test of American political will.
For whether or not Abeer Ghula came to America or not was not worth arguing about, since among Muslim religious fanatics, she was the most fanatical of all. And the least likely to accomplish her grandiose goals to revive the guttering flame of Islam.
Chapter 24
Abeer Ghula was the most hated woman in the Muslim world.
She was not hated for her alien faith, because she herself was a Muslim. She was not hated because she was a self-avowed feminist and refused the veil. Nor was she hated because she had undergone two abortions, kept two husbands in simultaneous ignorance and slept with three women of different faiths—activities all expressly forbidden by the Koran.
Although all of these transgressions had caused the thirty-three-year-old former University of Cairo political-history instructor to be chastised and shunned by good Muslims everywhere, the transgression that caused mullahs and sheikhs and other men of faith to issue a religious edict called a fatwa, calling for her immediate and unceremonious hanging, was her attempt to revise the Koran to bring it into the '90s.
It was bad enough, this talk of the '90s. For Islam recognized not the '90s but another calendar. It was sufficient insult that Abeer Ghula went through the Koran and randomly changed the proper nouns to their opposite, so that Muhammad became a female and his wives alternately male and female. These could be forgiven as the act of a madwoman, not a heretic and murtad—a renegade.
No, the crime of crimes was that in her Women's Revised Koran, Abeer Ghula insisted through empirical reasoning that enraged Westerners and Muslims alike that Allah is a woman.
When the sixteen computer-generated copies of her revised Koran were confiscated and destroyed, Abeer Ghula went into hiding and wrote "Allah Is a Woman."
A copy went out on the Internet and was published in Great Britain, and from there it radiated out like a broadcast of poisonous dandelion seeds.
That was when the Grand Ayatollah in Iran issued his fatwa.
Abeer Ghula issued one of her own. She told the world that the Grand Ayatollah in Iran could eat her pubic hair and swallow it dry.
The Grand Ayatollah issued a codical to the fatwa—hitherto unheard of in Islam—that while being hanged from the neck, the atheist Abeer Ghula must be stoned and clubbed naked.
Abeer Ghula transmitted a public entreaty to Um Allaha—her name for Allah—that the Grand Ayatollah's penis fall off the next time he took a squat.
Islamic radicals throughout Egypt hunted in vain for Abeer Ghula. Her face was plastered on walls, placards and transmitted through all available communications links. Rewards were offered for her head. Would-be martyrs were promised instant and unquestioned access to Paradise if they were to perish in the act of snuffing out the apostate Ghula. The beleaguered Egyptian government, sensitized to the issue, posted her face at all airports and border crossings in hopes of preventing her from leaving the country. They had no stomach to prosecute her or hand her over to an Islamic court. But they knew if she made it to a Western country, she would stir up the Islamic world as no one had since Salman Rushdie.
On the day Abeer Ghula walked into the Cairo airport, ticket to New Y
ork City via Paris in hand, no one looked twice at her. No one recognized her golden eyes, which women of her desert tribe possessed, or the thick eyebrows decried by men of faith as a certain sign of Satanic influence.
That was because her supple body swayed under the all-concealing black shroud of a chador, and contrary to all oaths she had professed in the past, Abeer Ghula had taken to the veil.
With the tasteful sunglasses, it was the perfect disguise.
No one questioned her or her ticket. Nor asked to see her identification. For no one prevented persons from leaving their home countries much these days. Only entering other lands.
And so she slipped out of Egypt unhindered.
The customs.agent in New York City saw the tall, veiled apparition as she swayed toward his counter. He saw many veiled women pass through his post lately. It seemed that the Middle East was leaking citizens like a sieve these days.
This woman was unusual because she came unaccompanied. Most veiled Muslim women traveled with husbands or male family members.
"Passport," he ordered.
The woman took hold of her black garment and with a flourish, whipped it up.
It settled on Customs Agent Dan Dimmock's head like a collapsing parachute. He dragged it off his head, sputtering, "What the hell?"
The woman who stood before him now still had on her veil. That was all. Not even a stitch of underwear. Her body was a smoldering, dusky flame dotted by black brushfires.
"I am Abeer Ghula and I have come to America to spread the word of Um Allaha, creator of us all in her infinite wisdom and mercy."
"Um-?"
"Formerly known to you as Allah."
"I don't know anyone by that name."
"You are a Cross-worshiper?"
"Never heard it put that way before."
"Abandon your dead god Issa on his rude cross of misery. Um Allaha sends her kisses of love and mercy through me, her true prophet."
"I'll give you a second chance," said Agent Dim- mock, amazed at the dark vividness of her jutting nipples. "Put this on and show me your passport, and I won't have you arrested."
"Neither the mullahs nor pharaoh could arrest me. What makes you think you can accomplish this impossible task?"
"Because if you don't have a visa, you're an illegal alien and subject to deportation," Dimmock said patiently.
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