"But a glorious death," Yussuf said immediately, as he had on that day in Diisseldorf.
Akil nodded his head once, gravely. "I cannot tell you what will happen in the end. We will either convert the infidel to the true faith, make them our slaves, and have sole dominion over the earth, or we will put them all to the sword."
They looked back at him, attentive, alert, perhaps breathing a little faster, but with no timidity or faint-heartedness or second thoughts on display. Yes, Yussuf and Yaqub had chosen well. "If we ourselves die in the execution of this sacred task, Allah will take us as his own, and we will be most richly rewarded in the afterlife."
"Seventy-two virgins for each of us," Yaqub said, exactly as he had said it in Diisseldorf.
"But you are men of faith, you know what will come to you, so I need not repeat it to you here. My concern is what happens between now and then. It is not an easy task, what you have chosen to do."
"We will follow you," Yussuf said, predictably.
"Today?" Akil said to the men sitting in front of him. "Now? Are you this moment prepared to walk behind me out this door and never look back?"
They were on their feet cheering with one voice when he was finished. That the cheer was led by Yussuf and Yaqub was not noticed.
He smiled, then, patting the air with his hands. "Your joy in being about good work is music to my ears, but quietly, please, brothers, quietly." They subsided, eyes brilliant with excitement.
"You leave tonight," he told them.
"Where are we going?"
It was a natural enough question, and he saw no reason not to answer it. "You will be traveling separately, some on different planes, and I urge you not to congregate in the air or at either airport, and certainly not as you are going through customs and immigration. Yussuf has your identity papers and your airline tickets. You were each of you told to bring a suitcase large enough to be checked. Did you?" Eager nods all around. "Your destination is Vancouver, British Columbia."
" Canada." " Canada!" " Canada?"
"You will be met." There were some old contacts Akil trusted because they worked exclusively for money. "Yaqub will give you the details. You will travel by various means from Vancouver to a small training camp. There, you will learn to use small arms. The four best with the small arms will train on larger weapons." He didn't specify, and by now they knew enough not to ask. "You will also learn how to hide in plain sight, either on the move or in place, in a community such as your own here in York."
"When will we see you again, master?" Yussuf said.
"Soon," Akil said soothingly. He was keeping the timetable as vague as possible. When he gave the call, they would move into immediate action. He would withhold the target and the means of taking it out until they were on the last leg of their journey. "After your training, which should take all of your time for the next two months, you will be instructed to either return to Vancouver or go on to Calgary, Edmonton, or Winnipeg, there to hide in plain sight until you hear from me."
They digested this in silence, their awe momentarily suspended in lieu of the practical considerations involved. There were a few more questions. One of the older men had his elbows on his knees, his hands folded in front of him, his head bent over them as if he were praying. "What is it, brother?"
"My wife is pregnant."
"You are to be congratulated," Akil said courteously. "May it be a son."
The engineer raised his head, his face troubled. "I have a family, friends, a good job."
"Are you having second thoughts, brother?" Akil said softly. "There is no shame in that. The movement is not for everyone. Allah needs as many of the faithful in this world as he does in the next." A statement bin Laden would have refuted with vigor, but Akil wanted only true believers in this cell. The right touch of ideological fanaticism required so much less hand-holding down the road.
"Oh no!" The engineer was clearly shocked at the suggestion. "I see no other way," he said, more moderately, after Yaqub frowned at him and gave the door a significant look. This evening they were in a room off the main hall of a railroad workers' union headquarters, the walls oak-beamed and plastered. "Our people are being dishonored, oppressed, tortured, slaughtered by the tens, the hundreds of thousands. These people voted in this government, they support it. That makes them directly responsible for its actions, and we must hold them accountable for those actions. And then there is Palestine. No," he said. "There is no going back."
It now sounded as if Akil were in need of being convinced, which was what he had intended. He contented himself with saying mildly, "Then what troubles you?"
"I worry that after I have gone to paradise my family will suffer, my friends, my community." The engineer raised a troubled face. "It doesn't seem fair."
"Never fear, my son." Akil placed his hands on the man's shoulders and looked earnestly into his eyes. "We will do our best by them. They shall not want. And they will live in the knowledge that their husband, their father, their friend died a hero. Died for them. Died for Allah."
The engineer's face cleared. "Then I am ready to do my duty, to serve my people and my faith."
"Inshallah," Akil said. They embraced, and the others stood in a circle around them, their faces lit with a glow of righteousness and camaraderie.
Really, he had become very good at this.
THE NEXT DAY HE TOOK THE TRAIN TO LONDON. ALL AROUND HIM THE English sat, oblivious to their imminent danger and unconscious of their apostasy, every second person chattering about nothing into a cell phone, others buried in the sports sections of their newspapers, when any but a fool could see the headlines. Another car bomb and thirty more dead in Iraq. An American Army helicopter downed by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. In London Dhiren Barot sentenced to forty years in prison. Israel launching missiles into Gaza.
Madness. Madness, all of it. And his part in it maddest of all.
In London he checked into an anonymous hotel and spent the afternoon in pilgrimage, first in three rides on the tube, on the Circle Line from Liverpool Street to Aldgate, on the Circle Line again from Edgware Road to Paddington, and on the Piccadilly Line from King's Cross St. Pancras to Russell Square. From the station at Russell Square he walked and took a series of buses to Tavistock Square, where he stood in silence for ten minutes, communing with the spirits of the departed. It had been another simple plan, well executed. He only hoped his next plan was as blessed.
A pity they'd all been caught, but then there were always casualties in war, and they didn't know enough beyond their own operation to cause him any harm.
The next day he flew to Lanzarote. Adam Bayzani met him at the luggage carousel. He'd already rented a car, and a hotel room. Over cocktails, Akil played with the swizzle stick in his mai tai, loaded with chunks of pineapple, melon, and maraschino cherries, and met Bayzani's warm gaze only infrequently. Over dinner he was hesitant, curious, shy, and, in the end, willing. He allowed Bayzani to lure him out onto the beach. The sky was filled with stars, and a waxing moon rose swiftly to bathe the ocean with a benign silver glow. It was all very romantic.
When they got back to the room Akil insisted the lights be turned out before he allowed Bayzani to undress him. In bed he was timid, letting the other man take the lead, teach him how to kiss, how to touch. Bayzani was in no hurry, experienced enough to be patient, allowing the anticipation to build, certain the payoff would be all the sweeter for the wait.
He was right, it would have been, and he didn't know any better until Akil rolled over to pin him down, his hands caught beneath him, a hard knee pressing his legs apart. "Oh," he said, suddenly breathless, heart pounding. The pupil was changing places with the master. Bayzani was willing to have it so and then Akil, as a continuation of the same smooth motion, shoved the five-inch plastic swizzle stick he had palmed at the bar all the way into Bayzani's left ear. It required little force, running in all the way to the little knob at the tip.
Bayzani's breath caught on a thin scream. A
kil even had time to push the stick in and out a few times before Bayzani's body bucked once, twice, three times, legs thrashing, writhing, straining, shuddering in a cruel parody of sexual pleasure. He was young and fit and once he almost had Akil off, but by then it was too late.
He went limp. All the life sighed out of him in one long, ragged, rattling exhalation. He voided his bladder and bowels. Akil, lighting a lamp so he could see, watched Bayzani's pupils become fixed and dilated.
Adam Bayzani no longer lived there.
Akil was pleased. The swizzle stick had been an impulse, an improvisation. He was always looking for new, undetectable ways to kill with weapons that wouldn't set off a metal detector. He hadn't known the stick would work that well, guessing that at most it would reduce Bayzani to a drooling vegetable, which might have suited his purposes even better, so long as Bayzani lost the power of speech and cognitive thought. No, too chancy. Bayzani's death was preferable.
He looked down at the staring eyes almost with affection, pressed his cheek briefly against one growing rapidly colder, and unwrapped himself
from the body. He stood upright and pulled out the swizzle stick. It cleaned itself upon extraction. There was almost no blood or brains on it or on the pillow beneath Bayzani's head. He put it carefully in his shirt pocket, where he might have put it after using it to clean his teeth, and straightened the bedclothes. He pulled them to the corpse's chin, and stood in thought looking down at Bayzani with a meditative expression, as Bayzani's urine dried on his thighs.
Bayzani had rented the car and the hotel room. The restaurant where they'd had dinner was on the other side of the island from the hotel, and they had done nothing to attract anyone's attention. No, there was nothing to connect him to the body in the bed. When the maid came in in the morning it would look as though Bayzani had died in his sleep. There might not be an autopsy on this island where the authorities preferred no news stories about unusual deaths among the tourists, their main source of income, but if there was and the true means of death was discovered, by then Akil would be far away.
He showered and dressed. Bayzani's uniform fit him very well, a little tight around the waist, but that was all. He switched the tags on their two bags and pocketed Bayzani's passport, identification, and airline ticket. He waited quietly until four in the morning, not even turning on the television, before slipping from the room, placing the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob as he closed the door behind him.
There was no one in the hallway. He left by a back door. On the beach, he sat in the sand to watch the sun come up, a beautiful smear of red, orange, and gold across a tropical sky, eclipsing the moon. At eight he went in search of coffee, and at eleven he was back at the airport, boarding a flight for Dublin, and there, one for Heathrow, and finally, for Turkey.
IN ISTANBUL HE CHECKED INTO THE RENAISSANCE POLAT HOTEL AS ADAM Bayzani. It was a tall glass wedge of a building on the edge of the Sea of Marmara. The Strait of Bosphorus was just up the Sahil Caddesi, which naturally put him in mind of Byron, and indeed, Istanbul did walk in beauty like the night, especially at night. The conference didn't begin until Wednesday, so he had two days to explore the city, which he did as much as possible on foot. Anyone observing would have thought him just another tourist there to take in the sights, and for these two days he almost felt like one.
The souks were wonderful, a crowded concatenation of life, rude and smelly and noisy and dirty, merchants shouting out their wares, children scuffling in alleys, women walking about freely and scandalously without the hijab. He thought for a wistful moment of how much Adara would have enjoyed herself here. He could have bought her those gold-leaf earrings from the dark-skinned jeweler who with that nose had to be Jewish, a handful of dates from the cart pushed by a young man in a ragged tunic and a too-big fez that kept falling over his eyes, a tiny cup of thick coffee from a stand where a cloud of flies swarmed over a spill of sugar. There were stalls of silk and copper pots and spices. A mule was being shod next door to a one-room dentist's office where a patient sat in mute misery with his head back and his mouth filled with tools, and in the next stall an old man made rivets for a bucket out of tiny triangles of tin as a crowd watched with the marveling eyes of those to whom manual labor was a foreign concept. Many of them were Americans.
That evening he lay awake thinking about Turkey. They were trying so hard to push their way into the European Union. He wondered if they would succeed. He wondered if they had read through the EU constitution and knew that if they adhered to the letter of it, it would make them a target in the eyes of many Muslims. They already had enough trouble with the Iraqi Kurds on their border, and he wondered why they were courting more. He let his mind play with the idea of Istanbul as a possible future target. They could use a warning.
The next morning he rose early, showered and shaved, and dressed very carefully in the blue uniform that he had had cleaned and pressed on arrival. His registration packet, including the agenda, had been waiting for him when he checked in, and he looked over it as he rode the elevator down. On the seventh floor it stopped and a woman, a blond American in the same uniform, stepped inside. She was a commander.
This was a meeting of an international organization with member nations numbering in the hundreds and individual representatives in the thousands. It was a piece of extraordinary bad luck that the first person he would bump into would be one of Bayzani's fellow officers, and in such close quarters that contact would be unavoidable. From the wealth of information he had been able to elicit over the series of emails he had exchanged with Bayzani throughout their ripening courtship, he had learned that the U.S. Coast Guard was a relatively small government agency, with a quickly rotating duty roster. Sooner or later, everyone in the Coast Guard worked with everyone else. Would this officer have known Adam Bayzani? Served with him at a duty station or on a ship?
He must be bold, there was no alternative. Because any American man would have in this situation, he said, "Adam Bayzani, District Seventeen, law enforcement."
" Juneau?" she said, and he breathed easier.
He didn't know, but felt it safe to nod.
"Sara Lange, IMO," she said, extending her hand. Her grip was cool and firm. "I'm from Alaska, originally. Born and raised."
In spite of all his training, all the years spent pretending to be what he wasn't, he stiffened. She noticed, and he summoned up a practiced smile. "Just assigned," he said. "I don't know the place all that well yet."
"You will," she said. "You'll see a lot of action."
"So I hear." Determined to direct the conversation into safer channels, he gestured at the agenda. "Are you a presenter?"
She nodded. "Piracy and armed robbery against ships."
"Really." Again she surprised him. He wouldn't expect a topic like that to be placed in the hands of a female. But then Western females were notorious for interfering in and pretending to an expertise in subjects that should be left strictly to men. When Islam triumphed, as triumph it would, women would be put back firmly in their right and proper place. "Quite the topic. What led you to it?"
"Oh," she said, it seemed to him a little too casually, "it was the most interesting of what was on offer. When were you transferred to Juneau?"
They reached the lobby and the door opened, and he was spared the necessity of answering. He smiled. "See you in there."
She abandoned her curiosity with a pleasant nod and preceded him out of the elevator. He exited behind her, and while he was culturally disinclined to ogle women he was still a man, and he couldn't help but admire the view as she walked away, trim and supple in her neat blue uniform, blond hair confined to a simple chignon at the nape of her neck.
The eighty-second session of the IMO's Maritime Safety Committee began on Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of November, featuring panels on topics ranging from new ship construction standards to communications in search and rescue to dangerous goods, solid cargoes, and containers, among many others. He attended several,
taking care to remain always in the background, avoiding any attention, striking up no conversations beyond a pleasant greeting or a casual comment on content. Although he was greatly tempted he did not attend Sara Lange's panel on piracy, thinking that the less familiar any one attendee became with his face the better. He didn't want to give her any opportunities to trip him up over his alleged duty station, either. He'd never been to Alaska.
He made his contact as scheduled, on Friday, the last day of the conference, when most of the attendees had tired of sitting in a convention center listening to mid-level bureaucrats from a dozen different nations drone on about ship stability, load lines, and fishing vessel safety. AM spotted him during an already depopulated flag state implementation panel that morning, and by the aids to navigation panel at three that afternoon many of the rest of the attendees had wandered off to sample the delights of the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, and the Grand Bazaar. They made eye contact as the meeting ended, nodded pleasantly, and left separately.
Four hours later Akil let himself into a room in a nondescript businessman's hotel in a homogenous suburb of the city. He set up the coffee service for two, pulled the one chair into a position in front of the television, and used the remote to channel surf. He found a Baywatch marathon, propped his feet on the bed, and settled in.
He came out of a doze and looked at the time. One a.m. His contact was late. He used the bathroom and made coffee in the pot provided by the hotel. It was lukewarm and tasted of mildewed cardboard. He paced to the window, which had a third-floor view of the parking lot. A taxi came. He drank the second cup of coffee, equally dreadful, and waited. No knock at the door. Another taxi disgorged a load of drunken salesmen and giggling women, who trooped inside a room. Shortly thereafter loud music was heard. Still no knock.
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