‘Yes, may even get you a medal,’ Isaac said.
‘If you make sure that friend of yours pins it on.’
‘I can arrange that. Consider it a done deal. Kill Faisal Aslam.’
***
‘Where’s Mavis?’ Sara asked of her father-in-law, Len. ‘She’s been gone a long time.’
‘She went to put on some make-up. She left her lipstick at the hotel, borrowed yours. She said you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Oh, my God! I have to go and check on her,’ Sara reacted with alarm.
The bathroom door was unlocked but pulled closed. It was a sight that Sara had not wanted to see. Mavis Styles was lying prostrate on the floor, the lipstick still loosely held in her right hand. The pulse was weak, the expression on her face, immobile. The eyes stared out into space, unblinking, saliva dribbling from her mouth.
‘I’m so sorry,’ cried Sara. ‘I didn’t want this to happen. I wish I could change the past, but now it is too late.’
Mavis Styles had been paralysed by the poison from a frog in the Amazon rainforest. Sara had killed the son and now the mother. There was only one more person and then she would experience the relief that she had desired for so long. Picking up the lipstick that had fallen onto the floor, she exited the room, breaking the bathroom door handle on her exit. She would have five minutes, at the most, to complete her task.
***
The Master, Faisal Aslam, was in prayer when Shafi entered the house. Both Khalid and Mustafa were absent. Haji had ensured they would not be present and he had encountered no resistance.
‘Why are you here, Shafi?’ The Master had tears in his eyes.
‘I have been given a task. Why are you crying?’ Shafi was not used to seeing the Master portraying signs of weakness.
‘My daughter is to become a martyr.’
‘Surely that is a time for rejoicing?’ Shafi said.
‘Yes, but I have shown a weakness towards her. She was, is, a lovely person who a father could only be proud of.’
‘Your time is over,’ Shafi said.
‘I know about Haji and Yasser Lahham,’ said the Master. ‘I know that they see me as weak, unworthy of the task ahead. Are you the instrument of death?’
‘Yes, I have been tasked with your martyrdom,’ Shafi replied.
‘It is not martyrdom that I desire, just the opportunity to be near my daughter. I will not resist you.’
The knife that Yasser Lahham had given to Shafi at the apartment was long and thin. It entered Faisal Aslam cleanly on his left side, three ribs down, and penetrated his heart. Shafi stabbed him three more times, twice in the chest, once more in the heart.
He was neither sad nor angry with what he had done. He only regretted that his attempts to distance himself from crime continued unabated. He hoped that either the Prof or Isaac Cook would protect him, regardless of which side won.
***
Clifford Bell was enjoying the reception. It was good to be in the company of people who showed him the necessary respect. Even Anne Argento had excused herself, something to do with a pressing issue in her electorate.
Sara Styles introduced herself to the Prime Minister after he left one group of relatives heading to another. The glass of beer he held in his hand was almost empty and he was looking for another. He was a moderate drinker, but it was a relaxed environment, almost a party, and he had taken two beers. He should not have drunk more, but he thought a third wouldn’t do any harm.
‘I’m Sara Styles. My husband was an officer on the Ambush.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Styles. Would you like another drink?’ the Prime Minister asked.
‘White wine would be fine.’
‘Waiter, a white wine for Mrs Styles and beer for me,’ the Prime Minister asked of the white-coated, white-gloved waiter who hovered to one side. He turned back to Sara. ‘And what have you been doing since the tragic accident?’
‘I spent some time in India.’
‘And what of the future?’ the Prime Minister asked.
‘I have no future. And neither do you?’ Sara had previously decided to say nothing before administering the lethal poison, but at the moment she felt the need to speak.
‘What do you…?’
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Clifford Bell, a good man, one-time lover of his deputy, soon to replace him, had been scratched on the back of his hand by the sharpened end of a mascara brush. The paralysis was almost instantaneous and he collapsed to the ground.
He was followed shortly by Sara Styles, nee Sara Aslam, the daughter of the Master, who had also scratched herself with the same brush and liberally smeared the inside of her mouth with the lipstick that had killed Ray’s mother, Mavis, in the bathroom at Downing Street. All three were to die within the hour.
Three weeks later, Anne Argento, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, met with Isaac Cook at Chequers, the country residence since 1921 of the leader of the country. She had planned to finally seduce him the day she became leader, but there had been a war to declare, a Prime Minister to mourn, and a new and more determined Master, Yasser Lahham, to contend with.
The End
Hostage of Islam
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Chapter 1
Zebediah Johnson looked younger than his sixty-seven years. He was a man of moderate habits, with thinning hair, completely grey, his skin, tanned and leathery after years under the harsh African sun. His life as a missionary, destined from childhood. His death, needlessly violent, God’s will, he would have said.
The same fate would also condemn Mary, his wife, and Duncan Nicholson.
‘Africa is where you should go once you’re ordained,’ his father, Archibald would always reminisce about his time there with Zebediah’s mother.
‘It made me the man I am today,’ he said. ‘Broadens the mind, uplifts the spirit. Makes us realise how lucky we are here in the USA.’ Zebediah’s sustaining memory of his father would be of his love for Africa and the life of a missionary. ‘We came back home to the States for you. If we could have been assured of a safe birth, we would never have left.’
The medical facilities in the Congo were dire and Zebediah’s mother, Matilda had miscarried there a year earlier. Even then, she had to spend three months prior to the birth at the Baptist hospital in Desoto, Mississippi.
‘It’s a boy,’ the doctor proclaimed.
‘We’ll name him Zebediah, after my father,’ Archibald said. His wife would have preferred a more modern name, but she was content with his choice.
Never a healthy baby, he was sickly and weak and subject to bouts of all the illnesses that children are prone. Two weeks off school for his classmates, he would require three.
The doctors all said it was due to his mother’s weakened immune system. After so many years in Africa, they were probably correct. Both she and Archibald had suffered from malaria, and she had had a bout of typhoid. Dysentery had been unavoidable, the effects, debilitating. The privations of Africa had weakened both of Zebediah’s parents, although his mother was to suffer the most. She remained frail for the remainder of her shortened life, susceptible to illness as the slightest provocation.
�
�We would have gone back with you to Africa, but it was not possible,’ his father would say, sometimes sadly. ‘Your mother was severely weakened after she gave birth, and you were far from healthy.’ However, his father was not bitter. He loved them both dearly. ‘By the time you reached eleven, your health improved, but then it was too late. Your schooling took preference.’
‘I hope to go with Mary and continue your work,’ Zebediah said. It was the day of his wedding and he and his father were having a father-to-son chat.
‘You will both love it as much as we did. You are both young. The two of you could make a difference.’ Archibald was correct; they were young. Mary had just turned sixteen and Zebediah barely eighteen. They had grown up together on the same street and had been inseparable since they were toddlers running around the yard.
The wedding ceremony conducted in the Calvary Baptist Chapel in Jackson, Mississippi, with Pastor Archibald Johnson officiating.
‘Wherefore, I now pronounce you husband and wife. And what God has joined together let not man put asunder. You may kiss your bride.’
The Pastor could not resist improvising on the closing part of the pronouncement of wedlock.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly introduce to you, for the first time as man and wife, Mr – and, hopefully soon – Pastor and Mrs Zebediah Johnson.’
It was to be another five years before Archibald’s wish was to come true. Zebediah committed himself to study and Mary to providing the income. He emerged with two Masters Degrees, one in Theological Studies and the other in Divinity from the Houston Baptist University and the South Western Seminary in Fort Worth respectively.
At the age of twenty-three, he became Associate Pastor, to his father’s great delight, at the Chapel that he was proud to call his own, and where he and Mary had been married.
Two years later, Zebediah felt the call to Africa.
Mary only made one condition. ‘If I become pregnant, I’ll return home for the birth. I do not want to suffer as your mother did.
Mary, slim and athletic as a teen had changed more so than Zebediah since their arrival in Africa. She was now a short, portly woman with her grey, waist length hair tightly tied in a bun. Two years younger than her husband, yet she looked the older. The joy of motherhood had passed her by. It had caused her anguish in the early years, even tested her faith on several occasions but with time and the hormonal instincts diminishing, she had accepted it as inevitable. Zebediah said it was God’s will, but he always said that when times were tough. In the matter of childhood, she came to believe that he was right.
Within six months of his decision to embrace a missionary life, they arrived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. To him, it was only logical that their first sojourn should be the country that his parents had left prior to his birth. To him, it felt like a homecoming. Assigned a small mission on the outskirts of Kinshasa, the capital, they quickly adapted to their new life. It was basic, and it was to be their home for the next thirty years. Apart from the occasional trip to the States, sometimes to England, to give lectures on mission work in Africa, they did not travel far.
In their thirty-first year in Africa, they moved to a township to the north of Johannesburg, in South Africa. They were to stay there for a few years before they moved to Liberia, followed by Kenya and, for a short while, Conakry, the hot and humid capital of the Republic of Guinea.
It was while they were in Liberia that they made another visit to the States. It was on that trip that they rescued Duncan Nicholson from a life of despair.
***
The most devoted of the Pastor’s followers, Duncan Nicholson was a broken, homeless, shell of a man when Zebediah discovered him on a cold and wet wintry day in Detroit.
‘Can I help you?’ he enquired of the dissolute character in dirty old clothes, covered in pieces of cardboard in a vain attempt to keep warm and dry from the freezing, driving rain.
An indistinguishable grunt was the only response, the smell of urine, stale alcohol and sweat, overpowering.
A lecture concluded at the Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary in Allen Park, and Zebediah was walking to his motel when he first saw the destitute man. It was part of his current lecture tour, speaking about missionary work, hopefully generating charitable funds. Always sympathetic to a soul in trouble and despair, he could not help but be drawn.
‘I don’t know how long I’ve been here,’ the man said on the third night.
‘What is your name?’ Zebediah asked.
‘Duncan.’
‘I am Zebediah. Would you appreciate a warm meal and some clean clothes?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
Mary was not pleased when he turned up at the motel with Zebediah, but as always, she trusted his decision. After a shower and some clean clothes, Duncan was no longer recognisable as the person he had found under the cardboard.
‘Would you please stay with Duncan while I continue my lecture tour down to Florida?’ Zebediah asked of Mary. Two weeks later, he was back in Detroit. The change in the previously homeless man was staggering.
‘I must thank your wife for my care,’ he said, this time sober, coherent, and surprisingly articulate. ‘Mary has told me of your good work in Africa. I would appreciate the opportunity to join you there.’
Another three weeks and Duncan was in Liberia with the Pastor and his wife. He never came to share their religious zeal, but they regarded him as the son they never had.
In his early thirties, he had served with distinction in Iraq during the Second Gulf War. ‘I was a tank commander, a Sergeant Major, first wave into the country. I believed the propaganda of our government. Their statements of how we were taking democracy to Iraq and the region, the weapons of mass destruction. It was all nonsense. If there were weapons there, we never saw them, and as far as democracy is concerned, it will not work. What I did see was our politicians aligning their business colleagues to take the majority of the oil industry for themselves. They had deceived us. It was not idealistic; it was purely money.
‘I came back despondent to a society that saw me and thousands of others, not as conquering heroes, but as villains. I could not readjust. Eventually, I found comfort in the bottle.’
Dependable and liked by the locals in Africa, he was a rough diamond with a heart of gold. He loved the people and they knew it. They loved him equally.
***
‘Fatty, fatty Campbell.’ It was what they had called her at the school since she had turned thirteen.
Helen Campbell was not what you would have called a beautiful child; that was reserved for her sister. The compliments were always for Theresa when the relatives arrived.
‘You’ll be a model when you grow up,’ they would say, or, ‘You’ll be fighting the young men away from the front door in a few years.’
It was true; Theresa was the more attractive. Helen, two years older was heavy boned with a pleasant appearance and a tendency for chubbiness.
It was soon after she entered her teens when adolescence dawned. Within a few months, the acne appeared and her glands went into overdrive. It was the age of junk food, and her constant craving to eat the wrong type of food exacerbated the fatty glands and added kilos around her waist. She started to waddle.
Never one to have many friends, she now had none at the school she attended, St Julie’s Catholic High School in Woolton, an affluent suburb of Liverpool.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll grow out of it,’ her mother would say. However, for a young woman in her teens, that was not the advice she needed. Her parents were good people, but an adolescent looks to their peers, the other teenagers, for support. Instead, all they gave her was condemnation, bullying and teasing.
‘Fat pig, why don’t you stop eating?’ Sally O’Rourke, the worst of her critics would chant. Attractive and slim, with firm, pronounced breasts and a tight arse, she was by the age of sixteen, highly promiscuous. Popular at thirteen, all the other girls wanted to be her friend; at sixteen, all the bo
ys wanted to be up close and personal. She was an easy lay. Many a young stud lost their virginity on the village green, round the back of the bike shed, or on their parents’ bed when the house was empty, thanks to Sally.
All of the girls in Helen’s class seemed to be putting it about, as the saying went, all except Helen. She was sixteen and as interested in boys as anyone, but no one asked or cared. There was Fred Dagsworth, but he was one year younger, with a gammy leg, and had the worst body odour of anyone in the school. Stinky Dagsworth was definitely out of the question, even if he kept making suggestive comments.
‘What do you say to a screw around the back of the school, I’ll bring a condom?’ She wanted romance, but all he was offering was a five-minute fumble and the need of a bath afterwards. Apart from that, there was no one else.
One week after leaving school, she ran into Sally O’Rourke, her main antagonist at St Julies.
‘Helen, it’s great to see you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see you on our last day. We must catch up for a drink.’ They were under the legal age to purchase alcohol, but Sally could always talk someone into buying it for them.
It was that night that Helen finally lost her virginity.
Sally needed an unattractive friend; she did not want competition down the pub when she was choosing her playmate for the night. A fat friend of a beautiful woman and Sally was certainly beautiful, even if she was vain and vacuous.
‘Meet me outside the Elephant Pub at 8:00 p.m. tonight. We can have a few pints and a few laughs.’
‘Okay, see you then.’ Helen was excited.
At eight o’clock that night, they met outside the pub in Woolton Street, the beautiful girl with the chubby friend. Helen, lacking in confidence and self-worth, was enamoured of the friendship of the one person that she had wanted as a friend at school.
Soon there was a group of local lads in their twenties, all well-oiled after a few pints of Carlsberg. Sally had chosen James Halsworthy, a strapping lad who played for the local football team. The others had also picked her but, as the night wore on, and the pints flowed, and then the shots of rum, they turned their attention to Helen. She was excited and equally drunk, and the more they drank, the more beautiful she became.
Terrorist: Three Book Boxed Set Page 69