as if stung by one of the horseflies. He pushed back, eyes wide, and his chair banged into another chair. ‘What is this?’
‘A sample,’ the American answered.
‘Complete?’ Al-Hitti asked, his voice rising in pitch.
The American raised his chin. ‘Not yet. Soon.’
Al-Hitti refused to handle the package until he saw his courage was in question and that the American was rapidly losing confidence. It was probably fake, anyway. Anything else would be too much to hope for. He took it. The plastic was beaded with sweat from the American’s hands, but inside, the powder was miraculously fine and light, clinging and dry.
A handful of a hundred thousand miseries.
‘Tell your scientists, or your graduate students at university, to examine it with great care,’ the American instructed. ‘It will behave like a gas, penetrating everywhere if not properly handled. They will tell you that it is pure and that it has been genetically modified, but it is not complete. Not yet. Try it on someone you wish dead. Let your subject breathe a few grains, or swallow it, or touch it to his skin. In time, examined in the dark, his lesions will glow green and then red. These inserted genes are proof that we can do what we say.’
Al-Hitti could not help avoiding the tall American’s gaze. There was something about the blue eye that reminded him of the sky over a desert waste.
Al-Hitti leaned forward. ‘What sort of proof is this, just a package of powder extracted from the soil of Texas, where a steer has died, perhaps? How can we believe the rest of your story?’ Al-Hitti held the package out between two fingers. ‘I hear this is easy to make. That is what I am told.’
‘Believe what fools say,’ the American said, ‘less the fools they.’ He brought forth a small knife, pulled open a blade, and laid it on the table between them. ‘Rub it on your skin like baby powder. Let’s breathe it together.’
Al-Hitti shrugged too quickly, hiding a shudder. ‘We are not here to piss up a wall.’
‘No,’ the American said.
‘When will the final product be ready?’
‘When money is made available. I will conduct my own tests and you will do yours. Then, next year…Jerusalem.’
‘There are very few Jews in Iraq. Saddam no longer protects them, and the clerics…’ He lowered his eyelids. He was getting ahead of himself, like a cart before a horse.
‘Until the gene sockets are filled, as specified, Jews need fear this no more than you or I,’ the American said. ‘And no less.’
‘Who is paying for what you have done so far, a Wahhabi?’ Al-Hitti asked with quiet anger. ‘May he die in the bed of an incontinent pig.’ Al-Hitti did not like Wahhabis. What they had done to maintain their hold on power had killed many of his best men. Now, all Saudi Arabia was in turmoil. Just retribution had finally arrived.
The American noiselessly pushed back his chair. He looked down on Al-Hitti.
‘If I say yes, and arrange for people, and the money is given?’
‘Then we will meet next year,’ the American said.
The cousin’s cousin had had enough, and a crack like a tiny shot sounded in the small coffee house. Al-Hitti turned to look. The proprietor raised a swatter besmirched by horsefly.
When Al-Hitti turned back, the American was at the door, parting the beaded curtain. Another horsefly entered with a looping buzz and the American was gone.
The proprietor returned to the table to remove the glass. He stared at Al-Hitti through his one good eye. ‘Is it that you are taking tea alone today?’ he asked.
No one of any importance in Iraq other than himself could remember seeing a pale blond American with the face of a warrior and eyes of two different colors. But there was always the plastic bag. And what was in it was true. Indeed, very true.
Al-Hitti had the powder examined and then tested. It made five kidnapped Iraqi businessmen and two secretaries of the clerics ill and pitiable. In the dark, their lesions glowed first green and then red, so the doctors reported to people that Al-Hitti knew.
And then they died, all of them.
As the months passed, Al-Hitti came to believe that it would actually happen. His hope reflected how bad things had become for his people. Three years ago, the Dome of the Rock had been blown to pieces by a Jewish terrorist to make way for the rebuilding of their Temple. In response, a few weeks later, on October the fourth—thereafter known as 10-4—another blow had been struck against the financier of all things evil, the United States. Thousands had died. Though he had secretly approved and even gloated, it had made Al-Hitti’s job that much harder.
The Israelis were now assassinating the immediate families of suicide bombers and leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. Muslim youth rushed to destruction and did not seem to care that by so doing they were also condemning their brothers and sisters, their mothers and fathers—and then, their uncles and cousins. Back and forth, the slaughter turned all into monsters.
In the late summer or early fall, he knew, Saudi Arabia would be invaded by tens of thousands of anti-Wahhabists working out of Sudan, Oman, and Iraq. Irony of ironies, it was said Americans were financing a number of the insurgents, including Iraqis, in hopes of replacing the House of Saud with a more stable regime. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. For the time being.
Once again Muslims were engaged in Takfir wa Hijra, condemnation and exile, killing nonbelievers and traitors—Westerners and Muslims alike—to reclaim the holy lands.
The next hot wind would blow from the desert and cleanse the world like a pillar of fire.
CHAPTER THREE Year Zero Arizona
Special Agent Rebecca Rose stared through the window of the FBI Econoline van at the dark desert along the highway. Brian Botnik from the Phoenix Field Office looked sideways at Rose in the front passenger seat. She rubbed her hand nervously over her knee—gray pants, cuff of dark pink cotton blouse protruding half an inch from her coatsleeve, fingers thin and strong, red-enameled nails bitten short and chipped. It was five a.m. and she could almost see the heat of the past day rising slowly into space. That’s what happened at night—the Earth shed its heat like a cooling corpse. The sun hid away, nowhere to be seen; maybe it would never return.
‘Gerber’s a good fellow,’ Botnik said. ‘But he hates being kept in the dark. So tell me—why are we keeping him in the dark?’ Botnik was a big man with a deep voice, a tight stomach, farmer’s hands, and sandy hair—attractive, had she the energy to think about such things. Ten years younger than her, she guessed, but neither inexperienced nor a dummy.
Rose smiled. ‘Because if I tell him why we’re interested, he’ll think we’re idiots.’
‘I’m open to that possibility,’ Botnik said, flashing a grin.
‘Hush,’ Rose said.
Two FBI analysts sat in the middle seat behind them. Both were young, white, clean-cut, and male. Both were respectful and earnest. Little pitchers have big ears. The younger, whiter, and more clean-cut the male agent, the more likely he would talk behind her back.
After the flights and the drive from Tucson, she was bone-tired and on the edge of hallucinations; her science and most of her sense had fled. But she had to stay tactical. This would not be easy. Every cop seemed to regard FBI agents, especially senior agents, as short-timers going down for the third time in a flood of politics. Some felt sorry, others exhibited a parochial gloat. It was getting harder and harder to focus on work even when she wasn’t exhausted.
The headline of the newspaper folded across the divider read:
FBI ‘PATRIOT’ FILES KEPT ON