by Bill Evans
No, it was turning back for another pass. Hunting. Adnan looked wildly for a fisherman, sailor—anyone—to haul him aboard, but saw only a fin cutting the glassy surface of the sea.
The shark circled him, a lazy, rippling whirlpool. Any second it might bump him, see if he was a living creature.
Adnan prayed, guilelessly and true for Allah to save him, and imagined his God saying, “For what? What shall I save a such a sinner for?”
Adnan gave Allah the first answer that came to mind, repeating what Parvez had whispered in his ear: A life for a life.
* * *
Rafan led the three women from the cemetery, forsaking care for a hasty retreat. He saw no gain in staying a moment longer, for now it was essential to escort Senada home before her fisherman husband returned from days at sea.
When they stepped back on the street, Musnah, dark hair cascading from under her headscarf, breathed loudly in relief. Rafan smiled to himself, for he felt the same freedom. They moved a few more steps before a voice ordered them to stop.
Imam Reza walked up to them. He’d conducted Basheera’s funeral and burial, always keeping his back to the young woman’s body, his eyes on the faithful, though Rafan knew he would question their faithfulness now. If he knows.
“You have been to the cemetery,” Imam Reza said. His beard was a dark bush that brushed his chest, and in the sparse light his turban could be glimpsed only in outline.
“Yes,” Rafan said. “I took a message from Basheera’s friends to her.”
“We watched him go,” Fatima said.
“You have no faith that your prayers can be heard in paradise?”
“Yes, Imam Reza, I’m sure they can.” Musnah spoke without looking up. “But we miss her so.”
Rafan noticed that all three women kept their heads bowed. Senada stood behind her friends, almost cowering. Imam Reza would like that.
“What prayer did you take to your sister?” Imam Reza asked him.
This was a test. Rafan refrained from glancing at Senada; as a married woman, she would not wish to be noticed under such compromising circumstances.
“The prayer of forgiveness for all my sister’s sins,” Rafan answered. “The prayer of hope for all the faithful. The prayer of memory, that she would never be forgotten.”
Imam Reza’s eyes moved over the headscarves that faced him. “Did you enter the cemetery?”
“No, they did not,” Rafan said “Only I—”
“I asked them.”
“No,” answered the women, keeping their heads low.
He doesn’t believe us, Rafan thought. But he doesn’t have to. This isn’t Iran or Waziristan. Not yet.
Imam Reza walked toward the cemetery, leaving Rafan chilled by the man’s sudden silence, by what it promised for the future. By flower petals resting on a grave, and footprints in the dust.
“Did he believe us?” Musnah whispered after they’d walked on.
“I do not know what he believed or what he saw.” Rafan looked over his shoulder. “I know only that these imams never forget.”
* * *
Senada stepped lightly toward the back door of her home, sticking close to the wall, away from the starlight. What would she say if Mehdi was waiting in their bedroom? She would tell him the truth.
That you lied to Imam Reza? That you were with Rafan?
Mehdi hated Rafan. A man who consorts with women. A man who doesn’t go to mosque. A man who doesn’t pray. A man too proud for his faith.
Senada touched the door handle, wondering if her husband had left a trace of his heat, if he’d gripped it so hard in anger, twisted it so violently—as he had her—that she could sense him even now.
But the metal was cool in the night air, and when she opened the door the room was black. Silent. She struck a match and held it out like a frightened child, peering into the pitch. Her bed was empty. She did not smell fish.
She climbed under the covers and said a prayer of gratitude: for safety, for friends, for Rafan.
* * *
“Allah saved me,” Adnan told Parvez, who stood in the door of his one-room house on the north end of Dhiggaru. A lantern burned behind him, lighting a simple desk and an open Koran. “He drove the shark out to sea after I made a vow.”
Parvez nodded knowingly, but then asked which vow. Adnan spoke without moving: “The vow of paradise.”
Parvez took the lantern and walked him along the path through the palm grove still teeming with their secrets. He didn’t stop until he brought Adnan to the end of the seawall, where he placed the lantern before putting his arm around his friend’s shoulder.
“If you could see through the darkness for many miles,” Parvez said, “you would see diamond island.”
* * *
Not its real name—what the Maldivians called the richest resort island. Adnan’s mother took a boat there every weekday to make sure that the rooms were cleaned and that every toilet was scrubbed till it shined. Then, on Saturdays, a small supply ship picked her up on its way back from Malé. She usually added a big bag of locally grown limes to the hold, already heavy with cases of champagne, caviar, chocolates, and the other everyday luxuries of diamond island. Her job, though she wasn’t paid for the crossing, was to watch the seamen for pilferage. Not a lime, not a single dark chocolate truffle could be missing when they docked. Bags and cases had to be sealed tighter than a hatch in a storm.
His mother had been astonished the first time that she’d seen the resort. The “bungalows” were larger than any house she’d ever known, almost as big as the presidential palace, but roofed with ornamental thatch to look native. Each was lavishly appointed with silver, gold plate, marble, and exotic hardwoods, and came with a staff of three, a private pool, and a yacht for $10,000 a night. More than his mother earned in four years of hard work on diamond island.
“Your mother could put the dead to rest,” Parvez said in the quiet that had fallen.
“No.” Adnan shook his head. “You said I would do this. I would put the dead to rest.”
“So you will. But your mother can do what you cannot: She can go to the heart of diamond island and stop their sins forever. Every hour of every day they slap Allah in the face.”
Liquor, sex, drugs, parties with unmarried girls. Muslim girls corrupted by the West. Muslim men corrupted by the West. And she worries about their truffles and toilets. That thought—and Parvez’s words about Allah—stung more sharply than the memory of his mother’s hand when he was nine years old. All his young life he’d waited for his father to come home. “Mother,” he’d said one afternoon when he realized that the sandy path to their house had never borne any footprints but their own, “he’s not coming home.”
She’d slapped him. Just the once. Told him that his father was a jihadist fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. “Maybe a martyr, and you say such things.”
But then she’d wrapped him in her arms, weeping as she wiped away his tears.
It is so much worse for Allah to witness the sins of diamond island, Adnan thought, than for a boy to feel even his mother’s deepest grief.
“You can bury the gift of paradise in a bag of limes,” Parvez said. “She’ll carry it to them. She’ll never know. We can time the arrival.”
“But this is what they did in Malé. They made a bomb.” And you said it was wrong.
“No, they killed many brother and sister Muslims in Malé. Out there,” Parvez turned his gaze seaward again, “the dead still wait for their rest.”
“But what about me? The vest?” So much more willing to take his own life than his mother’s.
“The vest will still be filled, and when the time is right and Allah speaks, you will wear it. You will see your mother in paradise. Someday, you will see me, too.”
Parvez turned away, leaving Adnan trembling in the sultry tropical night.
CHAPTER 5
President Victor Reynolds gripped Jenna’s hand in both of his, looked directly into her bright blue eyes,
and thanked her profusely: “Your president and your nation deeply appreciate your service.”
She was impressed. He was the president, after all, even if he was afflicted with that annoying, self-important tic of referring to himself in the third person. Indeed, his warm welcome might have overwhelmed Jenna, if she hadn’t already heard him repeat the very same words to nine other members of the newly assembled task force. And there were still a half dozen in line behind her.
Little matter, she was proud to shake the chief executive’s hand and enter the Oval Office. They’d been herded here by Vice President Andrew Percy, who was well positioned to succeed his boss in four years. The press corps had dubbed him “Hair Apparent,” hardly a unique sobriquet, but aptly applied to Percy with his wavy black locks; at sixty-three, they remained suspiciously unstreaked by gray, à la Reagan, and rose like a crown above his handsomely weathered face. It was as if every hair were straining to reach the nation’s highest office, openly betraying the man’s scantily clad ambition.
For Jenna, walking up to the White House gate this morning had come as a welcome distraction. Last night’s arrival at Washington’s historic Union Station had capped a trip horribly tainted by the terrible news from the Maldives. Bidding good-bye to Dafoe had been sweet, but the weekend’s pleasure had dimmed the moment Jenna had read about Basheera’s death. She’d made her way to the venerable Hay-Adams Hotel still stunned by the news—and grateful for the capital’s edifices of white marble with their reassuring displays of permanence and resilience. Even in Washington’s most frenetic periods, the city offered a mellower mood than New York. And the District, though hot and muggy, hadn’t endured the grisly murders that had made New York so bleak and edgy of late, perhaps because the high temperatures didn’t feel like an order of magnitude beyond what this Southern town had always known.
Jenna glanced around the Oval Office. How great is this? she asked herself. Very great. By joining the task force, she’d plunged right into the fiercely unpredictable currents of history.
As her eyes settled on the carpet’s presidential seal, she realized, with a bolt of sadness, how dearly she wished that her parents could have known about this event: Their lives had been swept away by black ice just outside Burlington three years ago, a mere month after their only child had joined The Morning Show.
The click-click-click of the White House photographer’s camera snagged Jenna’s attention as easily as the young woman behind the lens had caught her smiling minutes ago at President Reynolds, who didn’t possess all of Hair Apparent’s polish, but the president did have that uncanny, hand-in-the-cookie-jar smile, which had charmed tens of millions of voters. Another click made Jenna think that the photo of her with the president would be great for her scrapbook, if she ever got around to making one. Show it to the kids someday.
There you go again with the kid thing. That’s no biological clock you’ve got ticking, she thought. That’s a biological storm trooper beating down a door, determined to have his way with you.
Maybe you should focus on this, she scolded herself, now that the president had cleared his throat—so noisily that she worried he’d use the historic brass spittoon inches to her left. Thankfully, he did not.
“All of you are about to embark on a task critical to our nation’s future, and to the future of our children and our children’s children…”
She tried to focus—she really did—but clichés always sent her thoughts reeling, making even the most sincere sentiments sound as limp and disposable as a wet paper towel. Reynolds concluded his mercifully brief remarks with “And may God bless each of you and guide you on this momentous journey. Now, I have to go down to the Situation Room, and you’ve got your own duties to attend to.” Pausing only to grip the vice president’s shoulder for a moment, Reynolds headed out the door with that mischievous and—Jenna had to admit—appealing smile of his.
A White House aide ushered the task force out of the Oval Office—though it was likely the group would have followed Vice President Percy down the hall without the aide’s help. As she left the room, Jenna took a final look around, noting the portrait of George Washington above the fireplace. And Abraham Lincoln, just to her left as she headed out the door. She adored Lincoln and had read several biographies of him.
Jenna trailed the other task force members to a conference room where carafes of coffee awaited them. She didn’t need caffeine to get jazzed, not this morning.
The vice president, in his role as task force chair, moved to the head of the long mahogany table. As he perused his notes, another aide, as clean-cut as a pine plank, handed out confidentiality agreements that each member signed.
Though Jenna recognized a number of scientists on the task force, the person grabbing her immediate attention was Senator Gayle Higgens, who’d represented Texas until two years ago. “Tossed out with the other rascals,” was how she’d described her defeat to The Washington Post. In that interview, Higgens did not mention how deeply she’d been bankrolled by the petroleum interests so dominant in her home state, or her controversial six-figure “speaking fees.” They had become such a scandal that in the end, most voters in Texas went for the other guy … a landslide defeat that made Higgens even more memorable.
Two environmentalists of note sat to Jenna’s right. She nodded and smiled, and had to look away when the one with a white goatee—old enough, and then some, to be her father—stared too intently into her eyes. No, I’m not trolling for a date. Jesus. She was reminded, once again, of Washington’s strange sexual charge, where power—and access to power—was the dominant aphrodisiac.
Across the table she spotted two scientists who wrote immensely popular blogs on climate change. One of them, Ben Norris—balding, freckled, jowly—had been an outcast at NASA during George W.’s regime, forced to abide a callow press aide who’d monitored his every public utterance. Jenna was glad to see that Norris had finally been granted a seat at the table, literally and figuratively. She gave him a quick smile, pleased that the panel was dominated by men and women of his caliber.
“It has become painfully clear,” the vice president began, looking over the assembly of men and women from across the racial and religious spectra, “that we are nowhere near the level of reductions in greenhouse gases necessary to prevent disastrous consequences from climate change. That’s the overwhelming scientific consensus, which is no longer in serious dispute…”
Jenna sat up, astonished to hear such direct and—yes, dire—language from the VP, who was speaking far more frankly about global warming than any administration official in history.
Of course, all of us just swore to keep our mouths shut.
“Even if we had managed to convince the American people of the need to make dramatic changes in the way we live,” Percy went on, “which we’ve utterly failed to do, the developing world—especially China, India, and Brazil—has shown a tragic unwillingness to make more than nominal attempts to cut back.” Percy shook his head sadly; it didn’t look like an act to Jenna.
She shot a glance at Gayle Higgens, wondering what “Senator Fossil Fuels,” as the greenies called her, made of the vice president’s shocking admission. Higgens—Jenna could scarcely believe this—was smiling and nodding.
Have I just walked through the looking glass, she wondered, where nothing is as it appears?
The vice president paused, looked meaningfully around the room, and said, “We have to see what science and technology can do to lower the Earth’s thermostat. We have to move forward aggressively with geoengineering. I want you to consider everything that’s feasible, from CCS”—carbon capture and storage, usually underground—“to launching sulfates into space to reflect sunlight. We want to hear about whatever you think will work.”
Whoa. Jenna had assumed that geoengineering would be on the agenda—why else would they have invited her?—but not that it would be the agenda. And to talk so causally about using sulfates, in particular, was sobering to her. She’d actually h
ad a nightmare about sulfates being blasted into the atmosphere, which she was willing to bet was one of the very few dreams about that odd subject ever to afflict humankind. Desperate to awaken, she dreamed she was standing at a window watching a beautiful sunny day turn bitter cold. Her reflection in the glass showed frost coating her face, and she felt her heartbeat slowing. Worse, in the dream she heard it stop, which awakened her, ironically enough, in a sweltering pool of perspiration.
“That’s what all of you have in common,” Percy said. “You’re acknowledged experts in your fields, and you’ve all expressed deep skepticism about our country’s willingness to take the steps required to reduce GHGs.” Greenhouse gases. Percy nodded at Norris, the prodigal son from NASA, who sat grimacing with his arms crossed. “You need to understand that we basically agree with those of you who have been most critical of your government’s efforts in this regard.”
“Hold on, Mr. Vice President,” NASA’s own said. “What you’re telling us—let’s cut to the quick here—is that there’s no real commitment to reduce GHGs, so now we’re going to tinker with the planet’s incredibly fragile heating and cooling system, something our forebears did a couple of hundred years ago, which some of us are now calling the ‘Industrial Rotisserie.’”
Percy ignored the play on words. “They increased temperatures by burning carbon-based fuels, and we intend to lower them.”
“Unbelievable. Do you have any understanding of the risks? This could kill all of us. Miserably.”
“We do, of course. But we think that doing nothing will be much worse.”
“But you won’t address the risks publicly?”
“No, we won’t. We recognize that this is the most serious crisis ever faced by any administration, but talking publicly would only set off panic.”
“If you’d spoken openly five years ago when you were running for—”
“That was then, this is now. Ben, let’s not squabble over what’s done. There’s no time. Look,” Percy pushed aside his notes and leaned forward, “we’ve tried complicated international agreements, and no one, including us, has ever lived up to them. And it’s not just climate change by itself that has us worried: The CIA has just completed a two-year research project investigating the impact of what’s happening with the planet on national security. The conclusions are dreadful: In Africa alone, warming is expected to make civil war as common as drought.”