Prayers for the assassin

CHAPTER 6

Rakkim watched the military jets flying formation over the city as he drove from Redbeard’s villa, the old, but reliable, F-117 Stealths on their regular patrol over the capital’s restricted airspace. The faint thunder of their passage was comforting. He craned his neck for one more look, then headed home, driving east on I-90, taking the roundabout way back to the city in case he was being followed. He wasn’t worried about State Security tracking him-the silent-running Ford that Redbeard had loaned him undoubtedly had a GPS unit somewhere on its chassis, probably two transmitters, one to be easily found, the other built-in at the factory. Redbeard would know where the car was every moment, but Rakkim didn’t care. He wasn’t worried about Redbeard; he was worried about whomever Redbeard was worried about. If the villa was under surveillance, any car coming or going might be a subject of interest.

Most of the vehicles on the road at 3 A.M. were tractor-trailers hauling goods over the mountain passes to eastern Washington, and snow buggies on their way to Snoqualmie Summit. Rakkim held the Ford to just above the speed limit and checked the rearview screen. A green delivery van changed lanes when it didn’t have to.

Rakkim was still stuffed from the postmidnight breakfast Angelina had insisted he eat, blueberry pancakes and eggs and sausage. While she harangued him for being too skinny, he ate and questioned her about Sarah. The pancakes were more satisfying than her answers-it had been a long time since Sarah had confided in her, she had admitted, wiping her eyes.

Rakkim called Mardi’s number at the Blue Moon. “Howdy,” he said when she picked up, his greeting alerting her that the call might be monitored. “I’m taking some time off.”

Mardi hesitated. “Everything okay?”

“Doing a favor for a friend. I’ll see you in a few-”

“I hope it wasn’t anything I said tonight.”

“I’ll survive.” Rakkim broke the connection.

The freeway was potholed, the roadway buckled in places from the storms last fall. He took the off-ramp at Issaquah, one of the region’s high-tech centers, its office parks and underground research centers protected behind layers of biometric trip wires. The green van took the same exit, turned right at the traffic signal, and kept going. Rakkim watched it leave in his rearview screen, driving on, waiting. A mile later, he picked up a second tail, this one a silver sedan. Even on full magnification, he couldn’t see the driver. A family car with full security screen? Right.

A half hour later he was heading back to the city on one of the alternative routes, the traffic thinning out until he was driving in darkness with only his headlights for illumination. The sedan was still a mile or so behind him, its lights only occasionally apparent on the narrow, twisting road. The alternative route was cut through a forest of tall firs and cedars at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, an old road, pretransition, well made and still smooth. A few housing tracts had been built out here ten years ago, but had failed to sell; the commute was too long and the homes were poorly designed and cheaply built. Squatters lived in the crumbling houses now, without power or sewage systems, roofs leaking, floors cracked, the yards gone to weeds and thorny blackberries. The neatly laid out culs-de-sac were barricaded with junked cars, off-limits to strangers, and ignored by the authorities. Rakkim could see bonfires burning through the trees as he raced by.

A light rain was falling now, the wipers seesawing back and forth across the windshield. The silver sedan had fallen back, careful in the treacherous terrain. There were no streetlights, no shoulders, just a sheer drop-off on one side, and deep woods on the other. The car had a programmable steering computer-all he had to do was key in his destination and sit back, take a nap if he wanted, but he didn’t want to input his destination, and the computer didn’t know the way through the badlands. Rakkim knew the road, knew where it dipped and fell, where it was underwater in the rainy season. He used the badlands to ferry people out of the country, Jews and homosexuals and runaway fundamentalists, all of them desperate for the relative safety of Canada, or the Mormon territories. He kept driving.

Rakkim had spent an hour in Sarah’s suite at the villa, Rakkim dizzy with the scent of her. Her favorite stuffed animal still rested on her bed, a wreck of a calico bunny, ears frayed, one eye missing. It had already lost most of its batting by the time he’d first seen it, right after Redbeard had brought him home. Rakkim had looked at the floppy creature that day and all he could think of were the bodies hanging from bridges after martial law was declared. He had hated that stuffed bunny then, he hated it now, but tonight he had straightened it on her pillow. Then he searched her room: her closet, her desk, her collection of classic Muslim Barbies. He saved her dresser for last, her silky things slipping through his fingers.

The car skidded, kicking up gravel, and Rakkim forced himself to slow down. He didn’t know if Redbeard had deliberately lied to him about the timing of Sarah’s departure, but he did know she hadn’t planned to leave Friday morning. Not when she left the villa. He didn’t know what it was, but there had been a trigger for her decision. Something had happened after she’d got to the university, something that had compelled her to leave. The proof was in his breast pocket: a wallet-size photograph.

The photo was Sarah’s most precious possession, kept tucked away in a secret compartment inside her music box. She had shown it to him once, made him promise not to tell, and he had kept the promise. The snapshot was of Sarah and her father. Sarah an infant, sleeping peacefully in his arms while her father looked directly at the camera. There were many official portraits of James Dougan-the first State Security chief was considered one of the nation’s greatest martyrs-but this was the only photo Rakkim had ever seen where he looked truly happy. Rakkim had never asked Sarah why she hid the photo away. Only someone who had not grown up in that house would have wondered-any secret kept from Redbeard was a victory. He patted his pocket for reassurance. If Sarah knew she was leaving that morning, she would never have left it behind.

A clear-cut section of forest gave a brief glimpse of Seattle glittering in the distance, dozens of airships drifting over Queen Ann Hill, guarding the presidential palace. The road curved, the faint lights of the trailing sedan lost to view.

The white-pine desk in Sarah’s bedroom had been stacked with real books and yellow legal pads filled with her small printing. She loved antiques, loved computers with keyboards and ballpoint pens, comic books and DVDs. There wasn’t a single photograph of Sarah’s mother in the room, not now, not ever. Katherine Dougan had disappeared just after her husband’s assassination and was widely regarded as having had a part in the conspiracy that had killed him, an attempt by radical Christians to destabilize the new Muslim regime. Despite Redbeard’s best efforts, she had not been found, and though the active search for her had long since been called off, Redbeard forbade even her name to be mentioned in the house.

Rakkim remembered wandering through the villa after he’d first arrived, room after room, remembered dipping a toe into the swimming pool and telling himself not to get too comfortable here, that it could all end as suddenly as it had begun. He was barely nine, street-smart and wary; Sarah was five, an orphan just like he was, lively and smart, already reading. The first time they met, she looked relieved to see him, as though she had been awaiting his arrival for a long time.

They had grown up together in that great house, swam laps and splashed in the pool, collected bugs in the woods with their bodyguards, and worked on their homework side by side in the study. A confirmed moderate, Redbeard had insisted that Sarah be as well educated as any male, encouraged to ask questions, allowed to play sports and wear contemporary clothing, except on the Sabbath. After her book came out, he probably regretted not being more strict with her.

The back road gave way to an even narrower road. He kept his eyes open for the glint of broken glass or cables stretched from tree to tree-people traveled here at their own risk. Even the army only drove through by convoy. He didn’t mind. In thirty miles the road got even rougher, became a web of winding gravel and dirt roads, abandoned mining paths, railroad rights-of-way, and forest service roads, most of them no longer on any maps.

Maps were only an approximation, that’s what he had learned in the Fedayeen. Trust your instincts, trust your eyes, and trust your brother Fedayeen. Only when all else fails should you trust a map. So what was he to make of the map he had seen in Sarah’s room tonight? A world map hanging over her desk, colored pushpins stuck in various places, all of them evidently related to her studies in recent American history.

Red pushpins marked the Islamic Republic’s early military forays into the Bible Belt: Charleston, Richmond, Knoxville, Abilene, New Orleans. All of their attacks had been rebuffed, the breakaway Christians fighting like rabid dogs, fighting to the death, blowing themselves to pieces rather than being captured. The Bible Belt counterattacks were marked with yellow pushpins…Chicago, Indianapolis, Topeka, Newark. What a meat-grinder Newark had been; over five hundred thousand dead, most of them civilians. After Newark the calls for an armistice had been too loud for either side to ignore. The false peace had lasted ever since.

Gold pins indicated Rakkim’s own Fedayeen operations, the ones Sarah knew about anyway. While the army had been relegated to a strictly defensive role since the treaty, the Fedayeen’s elite units mounted covert operations both at home and abroad. Gold pins were stuck in the Mormon territories of Utah and Colorado, a few more in Idaho and Montana when they had moved against Aryan Identity holdouts, more pins in Brazil and Nigeria. There were no gold pins to mark his last six years of service. No gold pins for his solitary reconnaissance insertions into the Bible Belt itself. No gold pins for Corpus Christi and Nashville, Biloxi or Atlanta. It was just as well.

Rakkim had seen something odd on the map in her bedroom. Squinting. It was only when the angle was right that he could spot the perforation in the center of China. He had moved closer, swept his hand across the map, felt the indentation. There was a pinhole on the Yangtze River. The only hole in the map without a pin to mark it. It wasn’t a mistake or a miss. There were no pins anywhere in China. Just a single pinhole in the middle of nowhere. There had never been a military attack on China by the Islamic Republic. China, the world’s only superpower, had maintained strict neutrality during the turmoil that had followed the Zionist Betrayal. So why had Sarah marked the Yangtze?

Rakkim slowed the car, looking for the spot…the cutoff. He had used it before, but it was hard to see in the rain. It was right after a sharp twist in the road, where his taillights would be hidden from anyone following. He crept along. There. He braked gently, then backed into the brush, branches slapping the sides of the car as he parked perpendicular to the road. Engine purring. Lights out. He rolled down the window slightly, the damp sweetness of the forest filling the interior. Rain dripped off the trees, sizzling on the hot hood of the car, and he thought of Sarah.

He had been eighteen when things had shifted between the two of them. Excited at leaving home for the Fedayeen Military Academy, Rakkim had bent down to kiss her good-bye.

“I’m going to marry you someday,” she had whispered, clinging to his neck. She was only thirteen, thin and gangly, but she spoke with the certainty of a woman.

He tugged at her hair, thinking she was joking.

She clung on to him. “You know it’s true.”

He laughed it off, but as the years passed, he felt the attraction too. Every time he came home on leave, she was more mature, wiser, still able to get inside him with a smirk or a knowing glance. Their feelings were never acted upon, rarely even spoken of, too powerful for words. Under Redbeard’s urging, Sarah had agreed to attend mosque with the son of the Senate majority leader, the two of them going for long walks afterward, chaperoned of course. The courtship lasted four months before she put an end to it. That spring, Rakkim just back from the Bible Belt, they walked into Redbeard’s office and asked for his blessing. Rakkim was twenty-five, freshly promoted and with the offer of a staff posting in the city. Sarah had finished university. They were in love. It was time to marry.

“Out of the question,” Redbeard had rumbled. Rakkim had argued his prospects while Sarah had assured Redbeard of the purity of their love and the propriety of their behavior. Redbeard dismissed their arguments with a wave of his hand. Then he dismissed Rakkim.

Perhaps if Rakkim had stayed Fedayeen he could have obeyed Redbeard’s order not to see Sarah again. Already on the fast track to command, honored for his courage and initiative, he could have married, had children, and continued to serve his country. Instead, after two more lengthy missions into the Bible Belt, Rakkim resigned his commission and moved to the Zone. Every day he thought about contacting Sarah, but she acted first. A year and a half ago, a lightly veiled older woman had bumped into him outside the military museum, pressed a message chip into his hand, and hurried away.

The next day Sarah slid beside him in the back row of a darkened movie theater. “I thought Fedayeen were bold. I kept waiting to hear from you. Were you going to let Redbeard decide your whole life-?”

Rakkim kissed her.

“That’s better.” Sarah stroked his face.

They had met every week or so for the next year, sometimes in the early evening under cover of darkness, sometimes in midmorning when she didn’t have classes, but always carefully-he had conducted military raids with less planning. Their affair was dangerous and doomed to discovery, but sweeter somehow because of it. Once after a policeman recognized Rakkim and shook his hand, they had promised to end the affair. The promise was broken a week later under a crescent moon, a lovers’ smile in the night.

“We should get married,” Rakkim had said afterward, breathless from exertion and the joy of being with her again. “We don’t need Redbeard’s permission.”

“Of course, we do,” said Sarah, always the practical one.

“We should stop then. A woman of your standing…what we’re doing could ruin you.”

“I’m already ruined.” She had laughed. “Don’t worry, Redbeard will change his mind.”

It was raining harder now. He remembered the feel of Sarah’s lips, and the taste of her, and the way she rubbed her feet against him in bed. He hadn’t expected it to last, but the abruptness of the ending still surprised him. He had arrived at the home of a vacationing friend and waited for her. Waited in vain. The next day she had called and said they couldn’t see each other anymore. Said the situation was impossible. The phone was almost too heavy for him to hold. He asked if she was sure. She was. That had been six months ago. She had contacted him three times since then; and three times she had stood him up. Now she had disappeared and-

Rakkim heard the silver sedan’s engine before its headlights flashed through the trees.

Eyes glinted by the side of the road. A bedraggled deer caught in the light.

Rakkim put Redbeard’s silent-running Ford into gear as the sedan slowed to make the turn. Floored it as the sedan passed the cutoff, hitting it broadside and sending it tumbling over the edge of the embankment. He heard it crash through the underbrush and land with a crunch on top of one of the other two wrecked cars down there.

The deer blinked, scampered away.

Rakkim maneuvered the Ford back on the road. No lights behind or ahead. Just rain and him and his memories.