Prayers for the assassin

CHAPTER 37

“What was that comic book you used to talk about?” Rakkim’s hand ached from Sarah’s gripping him so tightly. He kept talking, anything to keep her mind off where they were. “The man who was half bat. He’d be right at home here.”

“He wasn’t half bat.”

Rakkim felt her stumble in the utter darkness, kept her from falling. She had almost refused when he’d told her they were going to have to enter the tunnel without any kind of light. He had formed a mental map of the path to Spider’s underground lair, a map formed in darkness. Light would only confuse him. Sarah had taken a few steps inside, but when he’d closed the door to the outside, she had clawed at him. He had sat down with her on the stone floor, let her get used to the darkness, the cool air of the tunnels, the sounds. It hadn’t worked. She was still terrified of the dark, just as when she was a kid, but she didn’t let it stop her. “This man-bat, he could see in the dark, though, right?”

“His name was Batman.” Sarah’s voice trembled, her nails digging into him. “And, no, he couldn’t see in the dark. He just wore a costume so he looked like a bat.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could he fly?’

“No, he just had the costume.” Sarah stifled a cry as something skittered away in the distance. “There…there was another one, though. Superman. He could fly.”

Rakkim felt for the wall, found the intersection, and took the right-hand tunnel. “They had a lot of gods in the old regime.”

“They weren’t gods. Not exactly. Movie stars were more like their gods.”

“You want to go back to that?”

“No,” snapped Sarah, voice echoing, and Rakkim was glad that she couldn’t see his smile. “I want to go back to freedom to travel, to study and explore, to share information, to improve on what we have. I want to go back to making mistakes and trying again. Islam has nothing to fear from new ideas.”

“Don’t say that in the Grand Ali Mosque, you might get your tongue cut out.”

“Ayatollah al-Hamrabi is an ass who doesn’t know his Qur’an.”

“Definitely going to get your tongue cut out.”

Sarah laughed, swinging hands as if they were children on a walk in the park. They splashed through a puddle where water had seeped in. “Marian and I…”

“What?”

“Marian and I used to discuss the fact that the nation is coasting on the intellectual capital amassed by the previous regime, and we’re running low on reserves. Islam dominated western intellectual thought for three hundred years, a period when Muslims were most open to the contributions of other faiths. This is the caliphate that should be restored, not some military-political autocracy like the Old One envisions.”

The floor of the tunnel gradually sloped downward. Another 312 paces and they would turn left into another, even more narrow tunnel. Sarah was squeezing his hand again.

“Once the power of the fundamentalists is broken, once the Old One has retreated back to wherever he’s hiding, then maybe we can build a nation that reveres innovation and intellectual inquiry. Faith-driven inquiry, but intellectually rigorous.”

“I’d settle for loud music, cold beer, and coed beaches.”

Sarah’s laugh bounced off the stone walls of the tunnel. “I’ll make sure we include that in the new constitution.”

Rakkim made another turn, pulling her along. “It’s not much further.”

“You sure Spider won’t mind me showing up unannounced?”

“No more than he’s going to mind me showing up unannounced.” Rakkim had tried to give Spider warning. He had gone by the restaurant where Spider’s daughter Carla worked, but the manager said she had called in sick.

“Why have we stopped?”

“I’m feeling for something.” Rakkim ran his hands around the door-frame set into the tunnel, trying to find a latch. There was a click and the door swung open. It was just as dark. He led Sarah into the storage room that served as a transition area. “Spider! It’s Rakkim!” No response. He fumbled along the wall, found a light switch. The two of them blinked in the sudden glare.

“Thank, God,” said Sarah, basking in the light.

Rakkim hugged her. “You did good.”

“I’ve been fighting back a scream the whole way.”

Rakkim washed his hands in the sink, took off his shoes. He waited while she did the same, then opened the door to the main room. “Spi-” He clipped off his greeting, walked inside, looking around.

The room was empty. Worse than empty. It was a mess. Tables were overturned, carpets half-rolled, museum-quality tapestries hanging unevenly, as though someone had thought of taking them and decided at the last minute against it. The bank of computers had been stripped, memory cores removed and the sides hammered in. Cardboard boxes had been filled to overflowing with clothes and then abandoned. Beds had been overturned, drawers hung out of dressers. Toys were scattered about-a stuffed rhinoceros, a baseball, a single chess piece…a black knight. The two refrigerators were wide-open, discarded food lying in a puddle of spilled milk. No blood, though. No blood. Spider and his family had left in haste, but they had gotten away unharmed.

“What happened to him?” said Sarah, right beside Rakkim. She bent down, picked up the stuffed rhinoceros. There’s a…bootprint on this. We took off our shoes. Spider must have followed the same procedure. So who stepped on this?”

Rakkim took the rhino. Without speaking, they both put their shoes back on.

“The assassin wouldn’t have done this, would he?”

“No. This isn’t his style.” Rakkim looked around, not rushing, trying to see something that whoever had trashed the place might have missed.

“All these beds and cribs…how many people lived here?” asked Sarah.

“He had a lot of kids. I saw five or six the time I was here. Heard more. There were others too, older ones. Spider didn’t like to go out, but he liked company.”

Sarah wrapped her arms around herself. It wasn’t cold, but she was probably feeling the weight of earth and concrete around them. Imagining what it would be like to be trapped down here. “What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know.” Rakkim reached under a chair. One of Spider’s antique snow globes lay shattered, New York City’s Twin Towers crumpled among the shards of glass. Souvenir stands all over the capital sold similar versions, only with the towers in flames. This one was pretransition.

“We should go.”

“We will.”

“Are we going to have to use Redbeard to find Safar Abdullah now? Rakkim?”

Rakkim tossed the Twin Towers aside. “No, I’ve got…” He cocked his head, listened. Grabbed Sarah by the arm.

Sarah didn’t resist, didn’t protest. She couldn’t hear them, but she knew Rakkim.

Rakkim led her into what had been the children’s room, eased Sarah under a mattress that had been half pulled off the bed. Had her curl up out of sight. Checked it from several angles to make sure she couldn’t be seen. A brightly colored mural of the periodic table of elements had been painted on the wall facing the beds. Voices echoed from the tunnel outside, loud enough for her to hear. She shrank deeper into the shadows. He bent down, kissed her. “I love you.”

“Now, I know we’re in trouble.”

Rakkim moved away. The voices were louder now as he slipped behind a large, rolled carpet that leaned against a support wall. It wasn’t the perfect hiding place, but he needed to see who was in the room and to put himself between them and Sarah. He needed to be able to move quickly, to spring out in a rush. His knife rested in his hand, and as always, it comforted him.

“Who left the light on?” A voice like sandpaper.

“Don’t blame me.”

Rakkim peered through a crack between the carpet and the wall, saw two beefy men in the doorway, hands on their hips. Two more were already inside the room, checking things out. Black nylon jackets, loose pants, daggers on their belts, neatly trimmed beards. Enforcers for the Black Robes.

The two in the doorway bowed as another man strode into the room, evidently a senior Black Robe. Two other bodyguards followed him. The Black Robe was younger than he expected, his beard scraggly, the skinniest man Rakkim had seen outside of prison. Dead white skin and red-rimmed eyes. He looked like a rabid dog Rakkim had killed in the Carolinas. A hollowed-out mongrel that had bitten two men, torn their legs open, and kept lunging at Rakkim even after he pinned it with a hay rake.

“My stars, this place stinks of Jews,” said the Black Robe, his voice reedy. “Would that they were still here, Tarriq.”

The largest enforcer hung his head.

“How many years have we been searching for this Jew?” said the Black Robe. “How long has this…Spider bedeviled us?”

“In all due respect, Mullah, we don’t know for sure that Spider exists.”

“We won’t get a chance to find out now, will we?” The Black Robe kicked aside a browning head of lettuce, sent it rolling across the floor. “I had hoped to parade this Jew for the cameras. To show the people that we have succeeded where Redbeard had failed. To prove that he has allowed the enemies of Islam to burrow deep within our cities. Now we have nothing.” He glared at the enforcer as they circled the room. “Your informant failed us, Tarriq. All we did was send the vermin scuttling off to another nest.”

“We…we were close, my lord,” rasped the enforcer.

“Ah, close,” said the Black Robe. “That changes everything.” He threw wide his arms, his hands skeletal from the sleeves of his robe. “See? My wrath has dissipated like dew in the glory of dawn.”

Rakkim glanced at the bed, but there was no sign of Sarah. He wondered if the mullah was Ibn Azziz. Redbeard said the new leader of the Black Robes was a zealot, but this man seemed too young to have achieved such power.

“The informant had been watching the waitress for weeks trying to find out where she disappeared to,” said the enforcer. “He didn’t know if she was a Jew or if she just lived in one of the abandoned warehouses. There’s plenty of that. It was his own good instincts that kept him after her, and when he saw her duck into the hidden tunnel, he notified us. He took a chance and he was right, Mullah. We launched our raid an hour after his call, but there was no way to know where she had gone, and she…she must have sensed that she had been observed. By the time we finally found this room, they were gone.”

“What do we owe this informant?” said the Black Robe. “What do we owe this man who allowed himself to be…sensed by a female?”

“Twenty thousand dollars. Standard bounty for valid information. Plus, ten thousand apiece for every Jew we captured, but of course, that doesn’t apply here.”

“Thank you for pointing that out to me.”

“We’ll find them, Mullah. They’re on the run now.”

Rakkim held the knife loosely as they got closer. And closer. Six armed men and the Black Robe. It depended on how they were bunched…and the level of their training. He had the element of surprise, but if he waited until he was spotted to attack, he would lose that advantage. The biggest danger was that Sarah would get involved-there was no way he could use his speed to full effect while defending her.

“Look at this filth,” said the Black Robe. He sounded as if he was on the opposite side of the carpet. “See the scientific devilry these foul Jews use to teach their brood?” He walked right past Rakkim’s hiding spot-were he to have turned his head, he would have seen him-walked right past and stood before the periodic table. He was close enough to where Sarah was hiding to kick her. The Black Robe reared back and spat on the center of the mural, a fat gob sliding down the wall.

The enforcers laughed.

Rakkim was motionless. The Black Robe would die first. Then the others.

The Black Robe turned on his heel, walked past Rakkim. “Pay your informant. Pay him in small bills and shove them down his throat. Fill his gullet. Make him choke on his money. Let him learn the price of failure.”

Their footsteps faded. The lights went out. The door closed. Rakkim found Sarah in the dark.