“Something like that.”
“I just want him to come home in one piece,” said Colarusso.
“Anthony Junior is hardcore.”
“Too damned hardcore. That attitude can get you killed.”
“Being a coward can get you killed too,” said Rakkim.
A black cop and a white cop leaned against the bar, bellowing along to Sam Cooke, slurring the words to “You Send Me,” until Father Alberto poked his head out of the kitchen and told them to shut the fuck up.
Colarusso looked into his cup of wine. “I worry about him.”
“So do I.” Rakkim hesitated. “Anthony Junior impressed a lot of people during the recent action in Alaska. Conspicuous gallantry, from what I’ve been told. General Kidd himself selected him to lead a forward strike team.”
Colarusso glared at him.
“Leading a strike team is an honor,” said Rakkim. “You should be proud of him.”
“Fedayeen exist to serve and die, right? Heaven awaits and seventy virgins feeding you cherries and pomegranates, right?” Colarusso banged the cup on the table, sloshed wine across his fingers. “I don’t believe that horseshit for a moment. Do you believe it?”
Rakkim noted the tracery of broken blood vessels in Colarusso’s nose and cheeks.
“I asked you a question, Rakkim.”
“I believe we have to act as if God is watching. As if God cares,” Rakkim said softly. “I believe we have to act as if Paradise awaits the good and the brave, and that the hottest fires of hell await those who do evil in God’s name.”
“That’s your answer? That’s the best you got for me?” Colarusso shook his head. “Anthony Junior…he’s good, isn’t he?”
“Very good.”
“His mother lights candles for him at St. Mark’s every day. Me, I do a lap around the beads before I go to sleep.”
“Can’t hurt.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Same as you. Nothing.”
The two of them clinked glasses. Colarusso drained his wine as Rakkim finished his. “You’re a poor excuse for a Muslim.”
“It’s the friends I keep,” said Rakkim.
Colarusso watched him. “So what’s bothering you?” He narrowed his eyes, the stony look that had elicited a thousand confessions. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
“I need a favor.”
“Most times people ask me for favors, they got parking tickets they want taken care of. Or the name of a good attorney who takes time payments.” Colarusso ran a hunk of bread around his plate, sopping up sauce. “Something tells me you got a bigger problem.”
“I’m going to be gone for a few weeks. Maybe longer.” Rakkim watched two vice cops from the waterfront district passing around the latest holo-graphic porn, the air shimmering and pink around them. “I want you to look after Sarah and Michael.”
Colarusso chewed with his mouth open. “Where you going?”
“Away.”
“You’ve gone away other times. You never asked me to look after Sarah and the boy before. What’s different this time?”
“I asked for a favor,” said Rakkim. “Not an interrogation.”
“If this was an interrogation, believe me, you’d know it.” Colarusso wiped his lips with his napkin, crumpled it. “’Course I’ll take care of Sarah and the brat. Just don’t make me have to. I changed enough diapers to—” He pressed a finger against his ear canal. Listening to the police command alert. He looked at Rakkim. Relieved. “Al-Faisal’s gone to the happy hunting ground.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means he blew himself up just as State Security was about to arrest him. Hamburger all over the highway.”
“Stranglers don’t die so easily,” said Rakkim. “Make sure it’s him. Don’t take State Security’s word for it.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, troop.”
Rakkim leaned closer. Close enough that Colarusso backed off slightly. “Anthony…make sure.”
Chapter 8
Massakar, the Old One’s chief physician, started to help him up from the recovery table, but the Old One waved him back. He felt better after his rejuvenation treatment than he had in weeks, his blood cleansed of impurities, his system restored to its natural vigor by the technicians and their miraculous machines, may Allah be praised. The ocean liner’s mighty engines throbbed under his bare feet, the captain running the Star of the Sea full speed at the Old One’s command. The few passengers who questioned the staff were easily mollified, given tales of tsunamis and rogue waves. In a few days, when the captain told them that there’d been a change in the itinerary, the passengers would merely nod, return to grazing over the buffet, confident that their best interests were the captain’s highest priority. Sheep fit only for slaughter.
The Old One thought of Tariq al-Faisal and how close they had come to disaster, wondered again if Allah was testing him with misfortune. He longed for the day when he did not have to work through intermediaries, when he could act directly, without need of cat’s-paws. That day was not here, he groused, not yet. He unsnapped his white cotton surgical gown, let it fall to his feet, standing there naked. He gazed at his reflection without shame, his mood brightening again—he still had the bony shanks of an elderly man, but his muscles tingled, his face radiant.
A young nurse bent to retrieve the gown and the Old One felt inspired by the perfectly straight part in her long, black hair, his newly refreshed eyes aware of every glossy hair on her head. She stood up, clutching his still-warm gown to her chest, saw him watching, and lowered her eyes.
“What is your name, child?”
“Alisha, my lord.”
The Old One nodded, noting the grace with which she moved. Women were a blessing from God and the Old One had been blessed beyond all expectation.
He had dressed by the time Massakar approached him again, deferential, head inclined. The Old One had often heard the chief medical officer berate the younger doctors, cursing them for their stupidity and slowness, even saw him once twist the ear of a new endocrinologist so hard that the man wept. First in his class from Harvard Medical and Bombay Neuro-Science Institute, board-certified in five specialties, Massakar had been the Old One’s personal physician for almost forty years, but he was starting to slow down. No one but the Old One would have noticed it, but the man’s eyes had lost a shade of brilliance, and his cuticles were rough.
Massakar bowed. “Your hormone levels and test results remain strong, Mahdi. All organs operating within anticipated parameters.” He stroked his short, gray beard. “Although within a year or so we’ll want to consider kidney replacement, just as a precaution. While we’re in there, we might as well swap out your adrenals—”
“Fine.” The Old One patted him gently on the shoulder, felt the man flinch. “I want you to bring Castle and Gleason up to speed with all your procedures and drug regimens. I’ll decide which one will replace you after we consult on the matter.”
Tears gathered in the corners of Massakar’s eyes. “Have I…have I displeased you, Grandfather?”
The Old One smiled at him. “No, little soldier,” he said, using the term of endearment he hadn’t spoken since Massakar was seven years old. “You have served me honorably and well. I find no fault in you, but time is not the friend of flesh.”
Massakar hung his head. A tear dropped onto the toe of his frost-white shoes.
The irony of the Old One’s statement was not lost on either of them. Massakar’s age had finally caught up with him, but the Old One stayed forever young…well, not young, there were limits to even the best technology, and the Old One’s unique favor in the eyes of Allah merely slowed the wheel of time. Still, while Massakar carried the faint whiff of mortality, the Old One, over sixty years his senior, was infused with a clarity and vitality the younger man could not even imagine.
The Old One kissed Massakar on the forehead and his grandson trembled before him, before backing away. The O
ld One allowed himself a small sigh, a trace of regret for all those who had passed before him, comrades and lovers, sons and grandsons and great-grandsons, all of them taking their leave while the Old One remained. Surrounded by his most loyal devotees, the Old One was utterly and completely alone. He remembered Massakar’s mother…she had been a great beauty, an Indonesian princess with eyes dark as obsidian, and an ass as firm as a ballerina’s. He could still hear her cries of passion, still see the perfect roundness of her belly…but he could no longer remember her face. Nothing. The Old One shook his head at the lapse. There had been so many wives, so many concubines…a caravan of lust swaying past, almost out of sight now. Annoyed at this sudden melancholy, he took the elevator to his bedchamber and summoned Alisha.
Alisha, the young nurse, was everything he had hoped for—shy at first, honored and embarrassed by his attraction to her, but the Old One was, if nothing else, experienced. Wise in the ways of the flesh, he drew her out, quieted her fears until she moistened under his caresses, her pleasure sweet as honey, her nipples stiffening to bursting as he kissed her. Awakening the tiger. And what a wild creature she was once roused, wrapping her hot thighs around him, gasping as he drove himself deeper into her, biting his shoulders, urging him on, wild-eyed, wanton, and free as life itself. She was no virgin, but the Old One had long since tired of virgins. The Quran’s promise of seventy virgins in Paradise might induce goatherds and students to martyrdom, but not the Old One.
He rolled her over and took her from behind, pulling back on her shoulders, her skin slick with sweat as he hammered into her, riding her hard. She bucked against him, and the sound of her rapid breathing took him back to his youth, hands wrapped in the mane of a fast horse, clinging to the beast as they raced across the hard earth, hooves pounding out sparks. He groaned with memory, released his past inside her as she pressed back against him, the two of them lost in a molten flood. He sank down beside her, his bones turned to porridge, closed his eyes, his heart so loud it drowned out everything else. She curled against him, already dozing in his great, soft bed, peaceful as a child, her small brown breasts riding high as he breathed against the back of her neck. Ah, youth…
When he regained himself, the Old One gently disengaged from her, slipped on a robe, and knotted it loosely around his waist. He glanced back at the bed, then walked to the window and looked through the one-way glass onto the main ballroom below.
A black-and-white promenade twisted and turned, touching at their outstretched fingertips, dressed in only those two colors, interlocked, shifting with every step, dizzying from this perspective. The Old One didn’t turn away, lost in the sight…he might as well have been looking through a telescope or a microscope for all the emotional impact it had on him. Today meant nothing; there was only yesterday and tomorrow.
Ibrahim, his son, his aide-de-camp, had counseled a change in strategy after they were forced to flee Las Vegas. Your caliphate need not be centered in America, Father. They are weak Muslims at best, their lands and treasure nibbled away by heathens. Better we start in Western Europe or the holy cities of the Middle East, even Nigeria would be preferable.
The Old One placed his palms on the thick glass, towering above the moving black-and-white jigsaw below, invisible as a promise. Ibrahim was wrong, of course, his suggestion as shortsighted as the rest of humanity. The Old One knew better. America was the key, not the perverse satraps of the Middle East and Western Europe: their false Islam was as contemptible as the God of Israel. America was still young and flexible, easily driven toward the truth if the hand holding the whip was strong enough, diligent enough in its application. President Kingsley’s limp leadership, his moderation, had wasted an opportunity to create a new caliphate, settling instead for a tepid theocracy. The Old One would rouse them from their lethargy soon enough. First the Islamic Republic would fall to his perfect Islam, then the Belt would hear the trumpet, see the sword raised high—convert or die, that was the only choice he offered. The Americans had been the most dynamic people in the world once; they would be so again, even greater than before, under the harsh guidance of the Old One. The rest of the world would follow.
The dancers bowed to each other, slowly returned to the edges of the ballroom, catching their breath as the Star of the Seas plowed ever closer to the Old One’s destination. He walked to the window overlooking the ocean, bored with the dancers and their petty movements, mechanical and ignorant as cicadas.
Alisha stirred, and he turned, watched her burrow deeper under the coolness of the satin sheets, lips parted, her hair spread out across the pillow, somehow even more wanton in her innocence. The temptations of this world were as vast as the delights of Paradise.
He turned back to the window, the hood of his robe framing his long, angular face. The ocean always gave him strength, its enormity and ever-changing aspect reminding him of the infinite power of Allah, his nature only glimpsed through his handiwork. There had been times in his youth when the Old One doubted that he had been chosen among all others to carry on God’s grand design, when he questioned whether his visions were arrogance or madness. He no longer had doubts. No more doubts about his role in Allah’s plan…but there were still times when he wondered if he would be able to achieve that which God had chosen him for. It wouldn’t be God’s failing, it would be the Old One’s. He watched the dark clouds along the horizon.
Sun streamed through a sudden break in the clouds, gleamed on a speck in the distance, a glistening, massive chunk of blue-white ice broken off an Antarctic glacier. He squinted…could barely make out a fleet of tugboats around the ice, probably towing it to Malaysia or Australia. Or Chile, perhaps. The world was thirsty and fresh water scarce. Glacier harvesting and desalinization plants could barely keep up with demand as it was, and someday soon water would become more precious than oil. Then wouldn’t those Saudi apostates, those languid Arab petro-ticks scream in their palaces by the sea? Pleased at the thought, the Old One watched the massive iceberg until it moved out of sight and he was forced to think of other things.
He looked down at the thin blue veins running along the backs of his hands. The deep creases in his palms. Allah used time to grow the Old One, to train him, to harden him for the struggle, but so much time had passed. Even he grew weary. Not now…not after his treatment, his blood cleansed, his cells rejuvenated. A glance back to the bed, Alisha’s hip a soft mound under the sheets, and the Old One felt himself stirred again. No…best not to waste his reborn vitality, there were other, more pressing needs. His body felt no weariness now, but there were other signs, indications of a fatigue that no amount of medical procedures could cure. His priorities were clear.
The plan, the game, the Old One’s grand design, encompassed hundreds of men across the globe, thousands even, men in all walks of life, commoners and kings, men who did his bidding without even knowing they were in his employ, or, rarest of all, men like Rakkim Epps, surprising adversaries whose challenge to him only furthered the Old One’s ambitions. An intricate skein of men and money spread out across time and space, decades of planning, minute shifts in the political landscape, everything designed for a single moment when it would all fall into place.
The Old One saw his reflection in the window, thought of all the faces that had passed before him, the mighty and the seemingly insignificant, all useful tools in proper hands. Sowing seeds, the Old One called it, thousands of seeds spread across the globe, quietly sprouting in the cracks and gutters, waiting to be harvested. A West Point graduate with an ailing sister, a liberal Muslim whose daughter was engaged to an air-traffic controller, a low-level accountant in the Brazilian Budget Office who needed an excuse for his lack of success, a Russian television executive with a taste for young boys…weeds and flowers blowing in the wind of time.
He stared into his own eyes and remembered the droopy right eyelid and coarse black hair of Kamal Hakimov, a Tajik tailor he had met just once sixty-five years ago, saw him lying in a medical tent outside Quetta, half
his beard burned away from the blast of a Russian mortar. Through his spies, the Old One helped Kamal immigrate to Hamburg, loaned him the money to open a shop. Years later, Kamal befriended Mohamed Atta, an acolyte of Osama bin Laden’s, taking him into his home and his mosque. Atta was an idiot, and bin Laden a pampered Saudi dilettante—it had been the Old One who fine-tuned bin Laden’s clumsy plan, intercepting the Saudi’s communiqués, using Kamal as his go-between. When Atta asked Kamal to make a martyrdom garment, the Old One flew to his house outside Paris and waited—after shorting the American stock market through his proxies. By the afternoon of 9/11, the U.S. economy was staggering, bin Laden was scurrying for cover, and the Old One had made approximately $23 billion. The invasion of Iraq two years later was a bonus.
The U.S. military won every battle, but they had no voice, no message that could be heard. The Old One’s servants monitored every TV station and never saw a hero, only the dead. A war without heroes, without victories. Only petty atrocities inflated for all the world to see, clucked over by millionaire news anchors and fatuous movie stars. Their president himself apologized. We must show that we are more humane than the terrorists, he said. As though the wolf should apologize for having sharper teeth than the rabbit. Good fortune beyond the Old One’s wildest dreams, an enemy who wanted to be loved. Be ashamed of the war and soon you will be ashamed of the warriors—the warriors got that message soon enough. Just as blowing the levees in New Orleans broke the bond between the government and the people, the Iraq debacle broke the nation’s spirit, hobbled its ability to defend itself. The former regime never recovered. Those on the Old One’s payroll, knowingly or unknowingly, made certain of that.
Alisha called to him from bed, her voice thick and sleepy, but he ignored her, thinking again of his strangler, Tariq al-Faisal, and how close they had come to failure at this most crucial time. A simple pickup, risky to be sure, but…Instead al-Faisal had been intercepted, the electronic device almost lost, this whole phase jeopardized. The Old One rubbed his fingertips. The device was safe. The plan intact. Still, he found himself curious about the man who had killed al-Faisal’s two Fedayeen bodyguards. Two of his best, al-Faisal had insisted, yet the man had killed them easily. One man. Darwin could have done it in the blink of an eye. So could the man who had killed him, whoever he was. The Old One made a mental note to send word to his agents in Seattle to use all available resources to locate Rakkim or that bitch Sarah. Full surveillance, every informer and covert sympathizer activated. No excuses. Rakkim and the woman were probably not involved in the near intercept of al-Faisal, but the Old One was not going to risk underestimating either of them ever again. Not now.
Sins of the Assassin Page 8
