The XO's face softened. "Nur. Means light.'"
"How'd you meet?"
"At a college mixer for Muslim-American students. I was at the Academy, she was at Harvard."
"Harvard. No kidding. Got my first master's at Harvard."
"I know. She was probably about four years behind you, give or take. We got married the week after my graduation. She got her teacher's certificate and since I'd scored a 110 out of Chesapeake, she went to work for the Arlington School District, teaching civics and government at Patrick Henry High."
Cal winced. "Teenagers. Yikes. A brave woman."
The XO laughed a gain. "Yeah. You should have heard some of her stories. But she loved it, and from what I could see, shuttling back and forth between duty stations, they loved her." The XO paused, mashing rice with the tines of his fork.
Cal waited.
Taffy looked up, not bothering to hide the pain. "She'd never made a secret of her heritage. She used it in some of her classes, even. But then, 9/11 happened."
Cal was suddenly very sorry he'd asked.
"She was leading a small field trip to the Pentagon that day. She got the kids out, and then the building fell on her."
"Jesus," Cal said, putting down his beer. "I'm sorry, Taffy."
"Me, too," the XO said.
"No kids?"
The XO's smile was more a grimace. "We were waiting. Saving up, gonna buy a house, get more settled, a little more secure. You know."
They finished eating in silence.
"Seven years ago this September," Cal said.
"Yeah."
"Nobody else come along in that time?"
The XO shook his head. "She was one of a kind." He shrugged. "You never know, but I'm not looking for lightning to strike me twice."
Back on board that evening, Cal thought about the XO's tragic marriage. One of a kind, he'd called his wife.
Cal liked his life. He saw no reason to change how he lived it, in spite of his parents' infrequent pleas. If anything, his father's wishes in the matter moved Cal in the opposite direction. He supposed it was juvenile of him, but there it was. At least he knew what motivated him, and right at the top of the list was a disinclination to serve as a working trophy for his father.
One of a kind. Kenai was one of a kind.
They'd been seeing a lot of each other over the past eighteen months, or as much as either of their jobs would permit. So far they'd managed to keep it quiet, from their families as well as from the media. Cal harbored no illusions about his own intrinsic worth to what Harlan Ellison had so aptly named the glass teat, but the press was always on the lookout for a juicy astronaut story, and if and when his father found out about them he'd want to use Kenai on campaign tours.
His mother, on the other hand, would be terrified that marriage and- horrors!-grandchildren might be in the offing. So long as Cal didn't reproduce, Vera Beauchamp Schuyler could go on pretending she was on the right side of forty.
He wondered about Kenai's parents, what they were like. She had spoken warmly of both of them, although her father seemed to predominate over any such conversation. An ex-Alaskan Bush pilot, he sounded like a hell of a guy.
Now it was no longer a matter of when he would meet them, or if. They would be watching the launch from the Munro.
He'd shied away from meeting the families of any of his other girlfriends. It had been more than once the rock upon which the relationship had foundered, and frequently in such instances he was accused of being afraid of commitment. In vain did he protest that it was a simple matter of him liking his life as it was and that he saw no need to change it. He didn't convince any of them, but then he didn't try that hard.
The truth was he hadn't cared enough to put in the extra effort. That made him an asshole of the first water, no doubt, but it also made him a free asshole, and in the years following his escape from the mansion on Louisburg Square his freedom had been his most precious possession, the one thing he was determined never to yield, no matter how many broad hints his father gave about founding the greatest political dynasty in Massachusetts since the Kennedys.
So far, Kenai had not offered to introduce him to her parents, nor had she asked to meet his. It worried him sometimes, how easy their relationship had been so far. After a year and a half he remained interested in her, too, which also worried him. He had made an effort, met with varying degrees of success, not to think about what any of that might mean.
He called her that night in Houston. "How's the Arabian Knight?"
"Status quo," she said. "It's his friggin' satellite that's giving us fits now."
"What's wrong?"
"One of the gyroscopes keeps throwing off weird readings during testing."
"A vital piece of the package?"
"Not once it gets into the correct orbit, no. It's supposed to help get it into that orbit, though."
"I thought you just opened the payload bay doors and released it."
"Mostly, yeah, but this is, in fact, rocket science we're talking about here."
He grinned at her mock sarcasm. "I stand corrected."
"Anyway, we fixed it." She yawned. "Man, I'm beat."
"I'll let you go," he said, "but one question."
"What?"
"Do I get to see you before you depart this sphere?" The Munros were coming aboard early and sailing up the coast of Florida with them. When she got back from orbit, Kenai would make a flying trip to Miami to have a Munro family photo taken on the foredeck of Munro, the Medal of Honor banner on the lookout station in the background. Two genuine American heroes, one past, one present, one standing on the deck of a ship named for the one who died in duty above and beyond the call, and a Coastie, no less. It was hard to tell who was closer to orgasm over this PR opportunity, NASA or the U.S. Coast Guard. It was going to be hard to get around the ship without tripping over an admiral in any direction. He said, very casually, "How are we handling that, by the way?"
When she answered, she was no less casual. "We could pretend to be just acquaintances, I suppose."
"I suppose," he said without enthusiasm. "So, any chance for some alone time before this circus puts up its big top?"
"I might be able to sneak off for a couple of hours. Maybe. Possibly. If you can get up to the Cape before we go into crew quarters."
"What are crew quarters?"
"A bunch of trailers. We move in a week before launch date. It's essentially medical quarantine, so the crew doesn't catch anything from a family member or a friend and get sick during the flight. The only people we can see after that is someone checked out by the NASA flight surgeon."
"Oh." Getting checked out by the flight surgeon increased their chances of getting found out by the press.
She yawned again. "Anyway, I'm going to hit the rack." He heard the smile in her voice. "Exercise that paranormal Schuyler ability to find a really nice hotel as close as possible to KSC."
"Aye aye, ma'am," he said, and hung up with a reluctance that would have frightened the living hell out of him, if he'd noticed.
HOUSTON
Kenai had noticed, but she refused to be distracted by it. The Arabian Knight had, among many innate talents ready-made to annoy the astronaut corps, the ability to generate news coverage. A lot of this was driven by the administration, determined to make a show of hands across the sea in spite of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani dead and further in spite of the current saber rattle toward Iran. When asked, given the less than congenial state of affairs that existed between the United States and the world's Muslim nations, if he had any qualms about sending a Qatari national into space, director Milton "Alfred E." Neuman raised surprised eyebrows and said blandly, "Why, no. Should I have?"
The astronauts had some, not least of which was the Arabian Knight's propensity for the spotlight. He was a media magnet. According to the next morning's newspapers, while they were frantically working to recover the ARABSAT-8A's gyro, he was cruising Houston 's hot spots with one of the Dis
ney blondes on his arm. "I can live with a jetsetting playboy," Rick told Kenai. "What I won't live with is someone who won't do their homework. I'm not taking anyone into orbit who doesn't know how to flush the fucking toilet."
Rick Robertson rarely swore, in public or in private. "Yes, sir," Kenai said, and departed at speed. She hunted down the Arabian Knight, who was chatting on his cell phone. She removed it from his hand, ended his call, and tossed it in a nearby trash can, where it landed with a promising thud.
The Arabian Knight erupted, in Arabic.
"Shut up," Kenai said.
He kept talking.
Kenai stepped up and got right into his face. "Shut up," she said, and this time he did. "I'm going to show you how to flush the toilet on the shuttle," she said, "and this time you're going to have the procedure down before you leave, I don't care if we're here all night."
She towed him behind her like a mother towing a recalcitrant child. His face was congested with fury and he spit what sounded like serious insults at her all the way there. They passed many NASA employees who had never seen quite that expression on Kenai's face before but were quick in clearing a path for it, especially when they saw who she had in tow. The Arabian Knight was no longer a shared joke, he was a potential hazard to the successful completion of the mission. In two years they would be retiring the shuttle, they'd already lost two, and no one wanted to lose a third between now and then, especially not due to some arrogant little prick of a part-timer who had been granted a ride-along because his daddy would sign the check to launch the satellite in the cargo bay.
There were over a thousand switches, buttons, and circuit breakers in the shuttle's cockpit, but Kenai often thought it was easier to put the shuttle on orbit than it was to flush its toilet. You had to strap yourself in with thigh clamps to what was essentially a vacuum cleaner and for number two use a sight with crosshairs to zero in on the appropriate orifice. She had planned for a male colleague waiting in the wings to handle this portion of the Arabian Knight's indoctrination into waste management training but she waited until her charge had run through his vocabulary of what she was sure was first-class Arabic invective before calling him in. She had to wear a diaper on orbit herself, so her sympathy was less than sincere, but she stepped out, and then waited for a while before going back in without knocking. More swearing, and the Arabian Knight zipped up with shaking hands and fought his way out of the thigh clamps before storming off.
Kenai raised an eyebrow. "So?"
"He got it. More or less."
"He'd better have, or the first time the Arabian Knight turns a turd loose on the flight deck in zero gee Robertson will put him and the turd into orbit without benefit of spacesuit."
"Any chance you can flush him out with the rest of the urine?"
"I wish."
There was a far more serious problem the next day, in the form of an anonymous threat from some skinhead hate group none of them had ever heard of before, claiming it was a crime against the Almighty to transport
a device owned and to be operated by the heathen, and that God's Army stood ready to attack.
"For Christ's sake," Rick said.
"Exactly," Mike said.
"Just tell me we're not letting this force us into a hold," Kenai said, her jaw very tight.
"No hold," Joel said. "The FBI doesn't regard the, uh, Smoky Mountain Whites as a credible threat."
" 'Smoky Mountain Whites'?"
"That's what they're calling themselves. Evidently they're from Kentucky."
"Whatever," Kenai said, and she and Laurel left to run yet another simulation of the Eratosthenes deployment. Eratosthenes, designed to take up where the Hubble Space Telescope left off, purred through it like a kitten. "If ever mankind built a perfect machine," Laurel said, "Eratosthenes is it."
"Shh," Kenai said, "it'll hear you."
Laura gave the shiny foil exterior of the telescope a fond pat. "She already knows."
WASHINGTON, D.C.
In spite of Yaqub's complete and total meltdown in the interrogation room at Gitmo and his subsequent fervent desire to omit no detail of his work with Isa, no matter how small, he could tell them very little that was useful. Back in his Washington office, Patrick found this frustrating in the extreme.
"He knows Isa only by the alias he used in Germany, Dandin Gandhi, and by another alias in England, Tabari Yabrud," Bob said. "The first names are common first names, and the second are names of Asian and Middle Eastern martyrs, major and minor."
"At this point," Patrick said, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could type the names into his Isa database, "kinda not giving a shit what he called himself then. Kinda wanting to know what name he's using now and, oh yeah, where he is now, and what he's doing next."
"Isa told them that the plan was to take out Seatac, San Francisco International, and LAX." "How?"
"He would furnish them with credentials and they would get jobs as baggage handlers. Some of the cell are engineers, big surprise, and two are chemists. He had plans for homemade bombs made out of-" "Let me guess. Diesel fuel and fertilizer."
"Some of them, yeah," Bob said. He sounded tired. "Isa had plans for a lot of different devices, most of them to be assembled by the cell members when they arrived on scene." "What was the play-by-play?"
"For them to fly to Canada, which they did separately. Isa transferred enough funds into everyone's bank accounts to make this possible. We've got people checking on that, but Isa's some kind of Internet wizard, you know that. We'll never be able to trace any of those funds back."
"But we'll try," Patrick said, sitting back from the computer to page through an intelligence report. Three American Muslims had been arrested for praying on an airplane about to back away from a gate in Minneapolis. He couldn't find a great deal to get excited about there, every time he got on a plane anymore he prayed he'd be able to walk again after hours spent in what had to be the most uncomfortable seats ever designed for the human body. He turned the page.
"Yes, we'll try," Bob said. "When they arrived in Vancouver, they were instructed to proceed by public transportation to Lytton, a small town in the mountains north of Vancouver. There, they were to be picked up and taken to a camp even further in country, Sadiq says he doesn't know where." "Do you believe him?"
"I actually kinda do. He really is a sad sack of a terrorist, Patrick. Isa must really be desperate." The two of them contemplated the thought of a desperate Isa in silence for a moment, and then Bob added, "You might want to alert our friends north of the border."
Patrick had already sent off an email. "Will do. Did you tell Sadiq we found Isa's email instructions in Brittany 's jewelry box?"
"Yeah. He was astonished, he thought he'd hidden them so well. Now he thinks we're some kinda psychic."
"Good." There hadn't been much of use to them in the little slip of paper, but if it made Yaqub fear them, that worked for Patrick. "Why was he getting on a plane for Mexico City?"
"He says Isa emailed him that the LAX plan had been aborted due to some security breach and to get on a plane for Mexico City."
The next report in the intelligence folder was of a young woman found in the back of a Ford sedan with her neck broken, in the parking garage at Miami International Airport. Other than that the young woman was a Muslim American, it seemed unfortunate but unrelated to any of his concerns. "Last-minute orders and absolute obedience to same," he said to Bob. "That sounds a lot more like him than that whole planning session in York."
He could almost hear Bob shrug. Bob's job was to interrogate, not to interpret. "I don't think Yaqub's even close to a true believer. He thought about Isa's email for a while before he complied."
"What pushed him over?"
"He says that even if Isa couldn't find him he could probably find Yussuf, since Yussuf is apparently more of a true believer than Yaqub. He was Yussuf's friend, he said. He couldn't let him down."
"Honor among terrorists. Who'd a thunk i
t?" Patrick turned to the next report, and then he turned back to the one on the murder in the airport garage.
The body showed signs of recent and consensual sex. The ME thought she had been a virgin. She'd had no identification, but her mother had been making increasingly frantic calls to the hospitals and the police from the first morning of her disappearance, and had identified the body within hours of its discovery. Her mother had-
Patrick sat up, his attention caught. Her mother, a Mrs. Haddad Man-sour, had said that she suspected her lodger, a Mr. Daoud Sadat, of the crime. Mr. Sadat, she said, had been renting their spare room for six months, and she feared that he and her daughter had grown quite close.
Even more interesting, her description of him, precisely detailed, was very similar to the doctored photo on Adam Bayzani's passport.
A man, a Muslim terrorist who called himself Isa, or Jesus, a way of mocking the nations pursuing him.
He'd assumed the name Gandhi in Germany. After Mahatma Gandhi, perhaps? It seemed likely, even probable, especially if he then took as an alias the name of another good man, a man whose inspired leadership and vision for peace in the Middle East was a legend among all peoples, if anathema to some. "I will go to Jerusalem," Anwar Sadat had famously said. He had, and Muslim extremists had assassinated him for his vision.
"The fucker's giving us the finger again," he said, marveling, almost admiring.
"Which fucker?" Bob said.
Patrick got to his feet. "Bob, I'm sorry, I've got to go." He hung up the phone. "Melanie!"
18
HAITI
The anonymous little village was built on pilings perched on a narrow strip of tropical coastline at most a hundred feet in width between the almost vertical forest and the cerulean blue sea. It consisted in the main of a waterlogged marina with a dock ending in a ramp leading down to two wooden slips. The slips looked as if they were on the verge of going under for the third time. To the north and south of the marina were a few related businesses that looked even more tatterdemalion, and some one-room, thatched-roof homes clinging to the sides of the steep coastline that were almost tree houses. At the southern end of the village sat a shabby hotel, a one-story structure whose largest room was the bar, and a half-dozen bungalows with ancient thatched roofs teeming with insect life.
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