Prayers for the assassin

CHAPTER 17

Rakkim used the call to prayer to hurry past the No Admittance sign to the upper level of the House of Martyrs War Museum. The uniformed army sergeant at the top of the stairs was busy with his prayer mat-Rakkim stayed at the edges of the guard’s peripheral vision, silently mirroring the man’s posture as he slipped past. Fedayeen training, shadow warrior training, the closest thing to invisibility. Rakkim could walk through a crowd of devout women, barely grazing their chadors, and if questioned afterward, none of them would remember him, they would merely have a fleeting impression of someone urging them forward, a nagging sense that they were late to mosque. He could trudge along with a flood of coal miners in the Bible Belt, part of the conversation and the weariness, until a grimy peckerwood looked around and the man he had been talking to about the price of hogs would be gone. Shadow warrior training.

“In the name of Allah.” The collective whisper…“In the name of Allah.” From the balcony, Rakkim could see the early-morning visitors lined up on their mats below, beginning their ablutions. The air in the museum was purified; according to the grand mufti, believers were not required to perform ritual cleansing with water. Most still followed the proper forms, rubbing their hands, then mouth, nose, face, ears, forehead, head, and feet in the sanctified atmosphere. Finished, they stood in neat rows, hands raised to the level of the face. Men in front. Women behind them. Modesty and subordination, moderns and moderates and fundamentalists, wheels within wheels before Allah. Rakkim watched, calmed by the rhythmic movements of their devotions. Bowing forward from the waist, hands resting on their knees. Prostrate, hands flat, foreheads grazing the mat. Returning to the upright position, to start the process again and again, to finally end seated on their heels.

Unlike the rote prayers at the Super Bowl, the cycles of the believers here were graceful, hands and feet perfectly positioned. Something about the majesty of the War Museum, the somber minimalism of the interior, the wreckage of the shattered Space Needle visible through the windows, made even the moderns cleave to their faith. He listened to the believers reaffirm the power and protection of Allah, their voices echoing in the great hall-“Glory be to our Lord the Most High.”

Rakkim moved on. Redbeard was here already. Rakkim had spotted his advance team about twenty minutes ago-four men dressed as tourists, gawkers with nametags. He had watched them split up, ambling toward the choke points, the narrow areas of the museum where an ambush would be most effective.

Rakkim had barely slept after seeing Spider last night, but Redbeard had insisted on meeting this morning, eager to discuss Rakkim’s progress. You have made progress, haven’t you, Rakkim?

Of course, I have, Uncle, it just depends on what you mean by progress. Rakkim wandered over to the Devil’s Chamber, stepped aside as a mother quickly led her children out. The little boy was weeping. The chamber seemed five or ten degrees colder than the rest of the museum, a darkened room where a wall screen played an endless loop of Richard Aaron Goldberg’s confession. This year would be the twenty-seventh anniversary of his public confession to the Zionist attack. The newspapers and television would run round-the-clock coverage as they did every year on this date, billboards and cell phones flashing 5-19-2015 NEVER FORGET.

Rakkim watched Goldberg on-screen, the man thin and frightened as he sat facing the cameras. The sound was nearly off, but it didn’t matter. Everyone in the country could repeat his confession verbatim.

My name is Richard Aaron Goldberg. Eleven days ago my team simultaneously detonated three nuclear weapons. One destroyed New York City. Another destroyed Washington, D.C., and the third left the city of Mecca a radioactive death trap. Our intention… Goldberg placed a hand on his shaking knee. The plan was for radical Islamists to be blamed. To drive a wedge between the West and Muslims, and to create chaos within the Muslim world itself. I think…I believe we would have succeeded had it not been for some bad luck. He lifted his chin. My name is Richard Aaron Goldberg. My team and I are part of a secret unit of the Mossad.

Rakkim watched the confession again. Then he walked back into the main hall. Spider might believe the bits and pieces he had pulled off Sarah’s flash-memory. Sarah might even believe what she had written. Rakkim didn’t. For Sarah to be right about the Zionist Betrayal meant that Richard Aaron Goldberg and the other confessed Mossad agents were lying their way to a date with the executioner. It meant Richard Aaron Goldberg and the others, born and raised in Israel, had turned against their country and their religion. Nothing was impossible, but Rakkim had just watched the confession the second time ignoring everything being said. Concentrating instead on Goldberg’s posture, his involuntary muscular movements, the look in his eye…the bastard was telling the truth. Sarah was wrong.

There might still be an Old One, some Arab eager to assume the mantle of Mahdi, some sworn enemy of Redbeard. Fine, get in line, Redbeard had plenty of enemies, but the Israelis were solely responsible for nuking New York and D.C. and Mecca. Sarah’s alternative history was wrong, but it didn’t matter. She was still in danger. If Redbeard was losing influence, though, as Spider said, then his ability to protect Sarah was compromised, and the Old One, or some other enemy, was in ascendance. An ominous power shift. Maybe that was the real reason Redbeard had asked for his help.

Rakkim kept walking.

The War Museum was a modest, understated dome built beside the crumpled Space Needle, the old monument lying on its side, rusting in the weather. The exterior of the museum was surfaced with small tiles made by schoolchildren, each one inscribed with the name of a martyred soldier. The interior was sparsely decorated and dimly lit, the walls lined with blue-veined lapis lazuli. Visitors, even the young, found themselves walking slowly, adding to the somber elegance of the site. At the center of the museum rested a simple, Arabic edition of the Qur’an. No bulletproof plastic or nitrogen-rich bubble was necessary to protect it. The book had been recovered from the ruins of Washington, D.C., found surrounded by broken glass and twisted girders. The Qur’an was untouched by the atomic blast, the cover pristine, its pages shiny and white.

Taking photographs inside the museum was not permitted, nor were reproductions available. This was sacred ground. Open to all, regardless of religion. The Black Robes had long sought to restrict the site to devout Muslims, but by presidential decree, the federal government maintained sole responsibility for the museum, with army personnel in charge of operations, and army imams responsible for prayers.

After the civil war, both sides had claimed Washington, D.C., fighting over the dead streets, hoping to recapture the glory of the former capital. The D.C. Qur’an had been the great prize for the Islamic Republic, while the Bible Belt carted off the statue of Thomas Jefferson from its memorial, installing the scorched marble in their new capital of Atlanta. Rakkim had actually seen the statue, waiting in line for hours to file past, silent, staring at the president’s solemn face through lead glass. New York City had remained largely untouched, its crumpled skyscrapers mute, the dingy Hudson lapping through Manhattan, the waters rising as the ice caps slowly melted.

Rakkim had been to New York only once, part of a recon team of Fedayeen dropped in to search for financial records rumored to be under the Stock Exchange. Three days in full containment gear and he never saw a bird. Or a rat. Or any other living thing. Except cockroaches. The roaches carpeted the basements, shimmering in the flashlight beams, wings aflutter, and he didn’t want to think about what they fed on. Three days…if there was anything under the Stock Exchange it remained safe and secure from the living. He was never so happy to leave a place.

Rakkim strolled toward the wall maps showing the great battles of the war. Chicago, reduced to cinders. Detroit’s auto works gutted by terrorist bombs. Sante Fe. Denver. The St. Louis arch collapsed. Newark, the deepest penetration into the Islamic states by the Christian armies. Newark fought block by block, a city given up to the flames. Newark, where Islamic reinforcements, most still in high school, had finally stopped the Christian advance. Bloody Newark. The photos of the dead went on for fifty yards. Rakkim had visited the museum hundreds of times, and the photos of the war’s leftovers always affected him the most. A single shoe, a black lace-up dress shoe, still so shiny you could see the photographer reflected. A crushed bicycle. An upended mailbox, letters spilling out onto the mud: phone bills and love letters and birthday cards.

The official death toll of the second civil war was 9 million, but Redbeard said the true figure was three or four times higher, much of that from outbreaks of plague and typhus and other dark diseases that had sprung up in the aftermath. The worst were the man-made toxins, lab-grown fever brews that twisted the infected into screaming knots or left them vomiting gouts of blood. Even now, whole cities were still quarantined-Phoenix and Dallas and Pittsburgh, hot zones where no one dared enter.

Rakkim watched a robed pilgrim moving slowly along the far wall, head tilted in prayer. His face was hidden within the folds of a hood, but something about his gait was familiar. Faces could be disguised, height and weight altered, but something as elemental as walking was almost impossible to shift. The pilgrim was Stevens, the pockmarked dandy Redbeard had sent to arrest him that night at the Blue Moon. Rakkim started toward the staircase. He wondered if the agent’s face was still swollen, if he liked the look of his broken nose, flaunting it as an injury in the line of duty.

Redbeard rolled his electric wheelchair through the crowd of schoolchildren visiting the War Museum, their voices hushed, glancing around as though they were in an unfamiliar mosque. He wore opaque glasses, his beard powdered white and extended, hanging over his belly. He rolled silently across the granite floor, his left arm twitching, useless. A single medal was pinned to his voluminous jellaba, a combat infantrymen’s badge. An honest medal, devoid of fame or favor, marking him as a wounded veteran of the war of independence. A businessman approached, bowed, and placed a $20 bill into Redbeard’s lap, joining the other bills that he had been given. Redbeard murmured a blessing, head lolling, and the businessman backed away, thanking him for his service.

Still no sign of Rakkim.

Redbeard liked the museum, particularly at dawn. The House of Martyrs was never closed and never empty. The people honored the dead, those who had paid the greatest price for their faith. He still remembered the old days, before the transition. Graveyards for the nation’s war dead had been overgrown, the graves untended. There had not even been enough buglers to play taps; the army had been forced to use recorded music to honor the martyrs. Military parades had played to empty streets, or worse, the color guard had faced catcalls from those whose freedom to jeer had been paid for with others’ blood. A terrible time for heroes. A world without glory, a people with their eyes on the mud instead of the heavens. No wonder the wisdom of the Prophet, may his name be blessed, had swept across the land like a wildfire, cleansing all before it. After all that had happened since the transition, after all he knew about the Old One, there was never a moment that Redbeard regretted the passing of the former regime.

Another man in a wheelchair glided past, nodding at Redbeard. A young man, wearing an army uniform, his legs removed above the knee.

Along the far wall, a woman in a bright blue chador led a young girl by the hand, led her along by the fingers as though they were on an excursion in the woods to pick wildflowers. The girl was young, five or six perhaps, but it was the woman who drew Redbeard’s attention. She looked like Katherine. Sarah’s mother. His brother’s wife.

Redbeard trailed along after them, heedless of who was in his way. People stepped aside, apologizing, as though they were in the wrong, but he kept his eyes on the woman. It was impossible of course, Katherine wouldn’t dare be here. He wasn’t even sure she was alive. She had fled after his brother’s murder, fled leaving Sarah in the hospital, run for her life. He had thought at the time she was afraid of the Old One. The early reports were that both he and his brother had been assassinated, reports that Redbeard himself had planted, hoping to draw out the conspirators. The ruse had worked. Even though he had been wounded, Redbeard had worked almost nonstop for weeks interrogating those arrested. He had rolled up the Old One’s network, most of them anyway, but the nation had paid a terrible price. James was a charismatic figure, loved and admired by the citizens and the politicians alike. Redbeard was merely feared. A few weeks after Katherine had fled, he realized she had been afraid of him. She had thought he had murdered his own brother. For power…and perhaps, for her. He had searched for her for two years, put all the men and resources he could spare into finding her. He had failed.

The woman in the blue chador and the child were swinging their arms gently as they walked. Redbeard had not seen Sarah smile like that until he’d brought Rakkim home. The street thief who had melted her heart. Melted Angelina’s heart too. Redbeard had been more careful with his emotions, but the boy had finally won him over too. It had taken years, but he had come to love the boy. The urchin with the eyes of a wolf. His only solace was that he had never revealed his feelings. Redbeard was experienced at such deception. He had never revealed his feelings for Katherine either.

Redbeard slowly wheeled across the great hall, getting closer to the woman and the girl. It couldn’t be Katherine. It had been over twenty years…surely she didn’t look the same. It couldn’t be her, yet he couldn’t stop himself from finding out.

The woman turned as he approached. His wheels were silent, but she turned anyway, sensing his presence, and his heart leaped at the connection between them…and just as quickly sank. The woman was beautiful, her mouth tender, but she wasn’t Katherine. The woman bowed to him. Her little girl scurried over, kissed Redbeard’s hand, and retreated. He blessed them and rolled on. Head high, his jaw clamped shut.

Rakkim closed in on Stevens, matching his footsteps to the pockmarked dandy’s. While Stevens hid his form and features within the hood of the burnoose, Rakkim had on a plain, gray suit and thin, knitted skullcap, as befitted the well-dressed modern. He had narrowed his goatee, his beard extending in a thin line from his sideburns down his jawline. His walk was poised, shoulders back, eyes sweeping the room-the best camouflage was to move as though unafraid of being observed, of inviting observation.

A man with a baby carriage cut across his path and Stevens went to cuff him aside, but stopped himself, allowed the man to pass.

Rakkim moved as Stevens moved, closing in. A tug on the man’s right earlobe…yes, that would be the perfect greeting. Turn him around by that clump of cartilage. Lead him like a lamb. Eye to eye. No permanent damage. Just a bruised ego. Keep hate alive.

Rakkim didn’t know why he had taken such an immediate dislike to the man. His preening at the Blue Moon had been part of it, but it was more than that. Their hostility had an instinctive, almost a cellular component, a mutual recognition. Rakkim had shared the last of his water with dying men who had tried to kill him minutes earlier, had held their hand and told them they were going to be fine. Stevens was different.

Rakkim was only two steps behind Stevens now, close enough to smell his aftershave. Stevens had enjoyed using the stun gun on Rakkim. Given the opportunity, Stevens would veer across three lanes of traffic to run him down, and Rakkim would welcome the attempt. Which was, of course, the reason that Redbeard had Stevens accompany him here today. Why Redbeard had sent Stevens to fetch Rakkim at the Blue Moon. Rakkim had thought it was just an accident that first time, but he should have known better-Redbeard didn’t have accidents. He had wanted to stir Rakkim up. To gain a faint advantage then…and now. Rakkim stopped, let Stevens walk on. It was too late though.

“Shall I slice your femoral artery or deball you, boy?”

Rakkim didn’t turn around. He could feel the tip of the knife pressed against his thigh, the tip poking through the fabric of his trousers. “Good morning, Uncle.”

Redbeard slipped the knife back into his sleeve, sat back in his wheelchair.

Rakkim slowly turned. A wheelchair. No gait to give him away. He bowed.

“Don’t just stand there, push me.” Redbeard waved Stevens back, the security agent sullen now, retreating. “You’ve embarrassed him again,” he said, as Rakkim got behind him. “I would have thought you had made enough enemies.”

“You should talk.”

“What have you found out about Sarah?”

“Do you want to talk here?” Rakkim slowly pushed the chair. “There’s a man with a briefcase eyeing the aerial photos of Indianapolis. He’s supposed to be a businessman, but he has faint stains at the corners of his mouth. Betel nut juice. A Black Robe-”

“I’ve got a blocking device in effect. You can say anything you want.”

“You’re certain?”

“It’s Russian. Sonic, subsonic, microwave, and ultrahigh frequencies.” Redbeard shook his head. “I remember when the best gear was made in this country.”

“I don’t.”

“That is your loss.” Redbeard waved to an annex. “What have you learned?”

“I talked to one of her colleagues…one of her friends. A sociology professor named Marian Warriq. They used to have tea, but she hasn’t spoken with Sarah for weeks.”

Rakkim slowed as they passed the D.C. Qur’an. The clicking of prayer beads from a hundred hands echoed off the gently sloping dome.

“I said, is that all you’ve accomplished?” said Redbeard. “I would have thought you had some method of contacting Sarah.” He stood up as they entered the annex, left the wheelchair behind.

“We had a method. I’ve used it. No response.”

“So much for the power of love.” Redbeard stretched, seemed to expand to twice his former size. “You must be disappointed.”

“I’ll find her.”

“We haven’t much time.” Redbeard took Rakkim’s hand, the two of them strolling the perimeter of the museum. “Do you know who Ibn Azziz is? No? He’s the new grand mullah of the Black Robes.”

“So what? He can’t be any worse than Oxley.”

“Don’t be a fool. Oxley was predictable, content to bide his time, gathering power slowly. He would never have gone after Sarah. Ibn Azziz is a zealot, angry and impatient. He’s the one who sent the bounty hunters after Sarah. He acted in secrecy before, fearing Oxley’s displeasure. Now…there is no one to stop him.”

“I’ll stop him.”

“Tempting, but, you’re needed to find Sarah. I’ll take care of Ibn Azziz.”

“I discovered that Sarah didn’t run away from an unwanted engagement. That’s something useful, isn’t it?” Rakkim leaned closer. “Did you say something? Or was that the sound of your story collapsing.” He locked eyes with Redbeard. “She was working on a book. She seemed to think it was dangerous.”

“If this book was dangerous, she should have stayed where I could protect her.”

“Maybe she didn’t think you could protect her.” Rakkim patted Redbeard on the back and he stiffened. “You should have told me the truth, Uncle. You wasted our time, and as you said, we don’t have much of it.” Rakkim gave a perfect bow. “Go with God.”