Shock Warning

by Michael Walsh

  Few of the infidel Christians knew of the Muslim devotion to Maryam. There were no fewer than thirty-four references to her in the word of Allah, and an entire sura was named after her. As the Prophet said in one hadith: “Every child is touched by the devil as soon as he is born and this contact makes him cry. Excepted are Mary and her Son.” She was the one pure woman, who gave birth to the second greatest of all Muslims: Issa ibn Maryam. Jesus, son of Maryam.

  Although tensions had been high between the small Christian community, resident in Egypt practically since the time of Christ, and the dominant Muslims, Ahmed Ali had often thought of the Zeitoun miracle. The story was told by every family in the district, Muslim and Christian alike, and Ali suspected that those who claimed to have witnessed the holy sight greatly outnumbered the entire population of the capital city at the time. How Maryam herself had appeared, high on the church’s dome, day after day, for more than a year. How the blind, the lame, the halt, and the cancer-ridden were cured. Millions saw her, photographed her. The Orthodox Church under Pope Kyrillos VI had confirmed the validity of the miracle. There could be no doubt.

  Which was why, as he trudged home on this cool evening, it was almost not a surprise when he looked up at one of the church’s five domes—one at each corner, each standing nine meters high, and a great central dome, twelve meters above the ground, one meter for each of the holy apostles—and saw her. After all, the church was named for her, and if only a minority of Coptic Christians worshipped there, the building was still deserving of some respect for its name alone.

  Ahmet Ali stopped. Cairo was a teeming city, but at this moment it was as if he were alone in the great metropolis. In every direction, the minarets stretched into the distance, proof of the rightness of the Prophet’s holy vision. Everything that had come before—the pharaohs, the Greeks, the Turks, the British—was as nothing among the sands of time. Many were the miracles witnessed here, near the sacred Nile; the history of humanity itself was writ here, not large, for the sands ultimately swept everything away, the desert consuming all. Everything, that was, except Islam.

  It was the motion that first caught his eye. At first, in the fading of the light, the glow had eluded him, and all he saw out of the corner of one eye was something moving back and forth, atop the highest dome. Then, as his sight adjusted, he saw the silhouette—the outline of a chaste female body, gleaming white and crowned by a halo. It was just as he had seen it in the photographs from half a century ago. Only this time, the image was moving.

  Corporeal, and yet not corporeal. He could not see through the figure—all was a dazzling whiteness—and yet it moved through space effortlessly, like a projection. Later, Ahmed Ali would remember small birdlike figures around the central apparition, pulsating images that swooped and hovered protectively around the sainted head. But not now.

  Now, all he could do was watch. He was not sure what to expect. Was he dreaming? Was he perhaps dead? Had Allah summarily delivered him to the oasis at which the virgins awaited him, Ahmed Ali, named after the Prophet’s own kin, a good and decent man who had tried all his life to be true to the precepts of the holy faith? At great expense to himself and his poor family, he had even made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and had worshipped at the Grand Mosque, the Masjid al-Haram that sheltered the sacred Kaaba, toward which all Muslims bowed and prayed five times a day. It was yet his dream to worship at the Dome of the Rock in al-Quds, and maybe even journey all the way to infidel Iran, to the holy well at Jamkaran, just in case. Ahmed Ali was among the most pious of men.

  But now, all this had flown from his mind. For there She was, the Holy Mother, the most blessed of women, as even the Prophet had said. The Immaculate Conception, untouched by sin.

  Now he became aware that a crowd had gathered around him. He was no longer alone in the great city, but just one man among many. And yet it was deadly silent, as if no one were there—or, rather, as if each individual were, alone, there, alone with the holy visitor.

  Soon enough the reporters and camera crews arrived, jostling their way forward through the crowd, setting up to get their shots. Ahmet Ali had no idea whether the apparition would permit herself to be revealed on film, but it was at this moment that he remembered his cell phone. He took it from his pocket and began taking pictures as well.

  He could see the image clearly as he framed it in the viewfinder. These phones were most likely the work of the devil, but with them he could talk to his family all over the world—in London and in Michigan and even his brother in the Philippines. They might not believe him if he just told them what he was seeing—“Ahmed Ali,” they would say, “surely these are hallucinations. Purify yourself and go to the imam for guidance”—but with this evidence, what could they say?

  She was moving now, moving along the top of the large dome. If he looked hard, looked through the radiant light streaming from her body, he thought he could make out another image, perhaps that of a small child. But he could not really tell.

  The street in front of the church was nearly silent. Traffic had long since stopped and even the incessant honking of Cairo traffic had receded as a kind of calm radiated out from the center. Ahmed Ali took his eyes off the Lady for a moment to steal a glance at his fellow witnesses. Their faces were rapt, aglow. He wondered if he looked like them.

  How long he stood there he could not tell. It was quite dark now and the brilliance of the light was even more striking. It was beginning to hurt his eyes. He had to look away. He looked away....

  And then, with a flash, she was gone. The light winked out, and all was darkness.

  For many moments, nobody said a word. A few murmurs, some half-mouthed prayers in several languages. Some of the infidel women made the sign of the cross.

  And then a low sound rippled through the crowd, like a great moan, but one born not out of pain but from joy. It swelled, other voices joining until it became a mighty chorus. Many of those in the crowd fell to their knees as it burst forth, divinely summoned, from a thousand throats:

  “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

  And that’s when the trouble began.

  No one knew who threw the first rock, whether it was a Muslim or a Christian. But one rock led to more rocks, and pieces of paving stone, and then pipes and other metal objects. A full-scale riot broke out as Muslims attacked the Christians, and Christians attacked the Muslims. And Ahmed Ali was in the middle of it all.

  When the fighting started, he snapped out of his reverie and began throwing punches in all directions. There was something liberating about physical combat and, after the spirituality of the apparition, it seemed only right to indulge in the profane joy of violence.

  Then the fires started. The Cairo police stayed well away from the melee for as long as they could and then they, too, waded in, truncheons flying. One unit deployed a water cannon; another opened fire on the mob. Tourists screamed and ran and died. Flames consumed some of the buildings.

  Despite the police, the riot quickly spread to other areas of the city, and then to other cities in Egypt. Long-simmering animosities that had been kept under control by the previous regime caught fire and exploded.

  The Copts suffered the most. They made up about 10 percent of the Egyptian population, and had been resident in the land since A.D. 42, but over the course of the next three days many of their churches were burned, their houses destroyed, their lives ruined.

  Only the Church of St. Mary was, miraculously, relatively unscathed.

  When the riot was finally put down, two hundred fifty-six people had been killed and millions of dollars in property damage had been done. Egypt was a tinderbox, just waiting for the next match to explode once more.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Bandar Anzali, Iran

  After she’d returned home to Kensington Park Gardens in London, home to that awful empty house, home to that place where she was monitored by him at all times, with nowhere in that vast house, one of the finest in London, to run, to escape, t
o forget. With nothing to do but heal and think and ponder and plot her revenge. In those moments she had become the Black Widow: just like the Cray supercomputer that saw everything and heard everything and knew everything, the creature that gave the Americans and their National Security Agency an advantage—that gave Skorzeny’s mortal enemy an advantage.

  An advantage Amanda Harrington now turned to her advantage.

  “Maryam, can you hear me?” she whispered in the hold of the ship, the Izbavitel.

  The beautiful dark-haired Iranian woman lying tied up before her didn’t move. Didn’t open her eyes. She might have been dead, but Amanda knew she wasn’t. Not if she was going through what she herself had gone through. Paralyzed, her breath almost nonexistent, her body wracked by pain but her face unable to show it. The poison was dreadful, and he had long since mastered the art of administering it in a dose just this side of lethal. To all outward appearance, Maryam was dead.

  Which did not mean Amanda could not communicate with her.

  Amanda knew she was playing a dangerous game, but it was worth it. No matter what happened, it was worth it. After what he had done to her, raped her, nearly killed her, caused her lover’s death and the loss of her most precious possession, anything she did to him in return was nothing. A normal human being would have suspected her loyalties, but not him. His monstrous ego, bolstered by his immense wealth and his utter self-assurance, prevented it. It was his weakness, his Achilles’ heel, and she was determined to use it against him.

  “Can you hear me, Maryam?” she repeated. When the situation had been reversed, when she had been sitting there in that double prison—the prison of Clairvaux and the prison of her own body—the best Maryam could do was give her a searching, sympathetic look. Amanda could not know then that her rescue was already under way.

  And now she held the cards. “Can you hear me, Maryam?” she whispered again.

  The boat heaved from side to side. The Caspian was far from the roughest of seas, not at all like the Channel, but Amanda had never liked the water, never wished to be a sailor. She struggled to control herself as the ship tossed, then righted itself. The monster Skorzeny had booked her back by private car from Bandar Anzali, one of the very few things for which she was grateful to him.

  Not that she intended to use it.

  Almost imperceptibly, Maryam’s eyelids fluttered. Anyone else would have missed it, but Amanda was looking for it. Good enough: she could hear.

  “I’m getting you out of here. But you must do exactly as I tell you. No deviation. No thinking for yourself. You must trust me.”

  Amanda looked again for some telltale motion, but this time there was nothing. No matter—she knew. She knew she knew.

  There was no real antidote for severe tetrodotoxin poisoning, that she knew from personal experience. Each year in Japan, half a dozen or so sushi fanciers died from ingesting an imperfectly sliced fugu fish, and in the old days, the sushi chef was obligated to kill himself from the shame. But a nonlethal dose was different. It mimicked death as perfectly as any poison could, but in this case, Amanda knew, the dose would not have been as high as it was in her case. After all, Skorzeny did not want to kill Maryam, he wanted to sell her—to use her as a bargaining chip, the way he had been using human beings ever since he was a boy in the collapsing Third Reich.

  She placed the oxygen mask over Maryam’s face and opened the tank. Fugu poisoning shut down the body’s organs, especially the respiratory system, so it was crucial to keep her supplied with oxygen on the voyage. In fact, Skorzeny himself had insisted on it. He always liked to get his money’s worth. All Amanda was doing was protecting his investment by spending a little more of his money.

  The eyelids flickered again. Good.

  “Maryam, listen to me. You’re with a friend. We both know who and what he is.”

  The motion subsided. She was losing her.

  Another shot of oxygen. Another shot of life.

  “Stay with me. I’ve been there. You saw me. You saved me. Now let me help you.”

  Amanda put her head on Maryam’s breast. Faintly, faintly, she could hear her breathing. She was still with her.

  “Listen . . .”

  The Izbavitel docked without incident. Amanda Harrington’s papers were in order, as were the shipping documents for what she was bringing with her. The panel truck was right where it was supposed to be.

  There would be almost no time. Everything had to go perfectly. Everything would go perfectly.

  She had not worked with Emanuel Skorzeny for so long without learning something about secrecy, speed, and efficiency. As head of the Skorzeny Foundation, she had watched funds rocket around the world, moving them like chess pieces, always to the precise spot where they were most needed and could do him the most good. The sheer size of his fortune brought with it an aura of intimidation, and he used it as a blunt instrument on rivals and whole nations. He was the master of the tactical surprise, as well as the strategic plan.

  Their banking relationships in the Islamic Republic were first-rate, both with Bank Melli and the Saderat Bank. The whole notion of banking was, at root, un-Islamic, but the Iranians needed an interface with the West, as well as a way to transfer funds quickly to some of their most favored proxies. Naturally, Skorzeny was not averse to doing business with them.

  The two men who met her and her cargo at the port were not at all what she first expected. She had expected big gruff true believers; what she got were a couple of kids who looked like they would be equally at home in London or Los Angeles. Then she remembered that Iran was almost entirely a country of young people, brimming with ill-concealed resentment against the fundamentalism of the mullahs: you could practically smell the coming revolution.

  Of course, they both spoke English.

  “I am Habib,” said the first one, a curly-haired boy of about twenty. “And this is my brother, Mehrdad.” They were practically indistinguishable.

  They loaded Amanda’s cargo, which had cleared customs easily, into the back of the truck. They treated it carefully and with great respect.

  They should. It was a coffin. Nobody said anything as they loaded it into the rear of the panel truck and closed the doors.

  “Where you want to sit, miss?” asked Habib.

  It was not an idle question. Here, at the port, there was an international mixture of Persians, Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Turks, but in Tehran itself an unveiled Western woman, riding with two unrelated men, might be an object for scrutiny. “I’ll sit in the back,” she said.

  “At your service, miss,” smiled Mehrdad, and off they went.

  Amanda looked at the time on her secure BlackBerry, the one he had given her especially for this trip. With it, she was supposed to check in at pre-arranged intervals, reporting on their progress by means of short transmission bursts. He knew she would be monitored wherever she went, and so had arranged for a direct satellite uplink relay; even if the mullahs shut down the entire Internet and the wireless services, she’d still be able to get signals in and out.

  The two boys in the front seat were laughing and joking a mile a minute in Farsi. She liked the Shiites, Amanda reflected. To her mind, they were far preferable to the Sunnis, consumed by tribalism and with nothing to show for thousands of years of existence except their faith and the oil the West had found for them. The Sunnis, mostly Pakistanis, dominated London’s Muslim society, and were busily transforming old Industrial Revolution backwaters like Leeds and Birmingham into Pakistani colonies—the colonial chickens coming home to roost. The visiting Arabs from the Kingdom and Emirates knew how to throw money around on opulence and women, but she had always found them charmless, overbearing, and desperately embarrassingly horny.

  The Shiites were different, especially the Persians. This part of Iran wasn’t much to look at, but as the car sped southeast toward the capital, the landscape began to change and you really could imagine yourself going back in time—not to the time of the Islamic conque
st but before, to the Sassanid Empire. Someday, she thought. Someday . . .

  “If you don’t mind my asking, who has died, miss?” inquired Mehrdad, turning around to look at her. “Not a relative, I hope.”

  “No,” she replied. “A native, going home.”

  “I am very sorry to hear of this,” said Habib, “but it is good that she has come back.”

  She? Did they know something? What message had Skorzeny passed to them, if any? Were they someone’s sons, someone who owed him a favor? Or were they sent to dispose both of Maryam and of her?

  No, that could not be. It made precisely no sense for Skorzeny to trust her after what had happened, and yet it made perfect sense. She was the old fool’s one human weakness, the one person on the planet he trusted for the simple reason that he ought not to trust her, so convinced was he of his power over her, and of his own magnetism. Her freedom, however temporary, was both the ultimate compliment and the ultimate insult.

  “How do you like Iran, miss?”

  “I like Iran very much, thank you, Mehrdad.” She had almost no Farsi, but she knew that Mehrdad meant “gift of the sun,” and was a highly prized first name among Persian boys.

  “I would be most delighted to show you the sights if you are willing,” he said, switching to English.

  “Thank you. I shall certainly consider your generous offer after my business in Tehran is settled,” she said, “but only if your most handsome and charming brother accompanies us.”

  She smiled and dropped her eyes demurely, a signal for Mehrdad to turn back around and leave her alone. It was time to think about money. Lots of money.