“Because of Baaqlina.”
“Come.” Márta Lang stood up. “I’m going to introduce you to my team. Four men and women who are here to help you any way they can. Any information you need, they’ll have, or know how to find out. We have dossiers filled with signals-intelligence intercepts, and all the relevant information we could gather in what little time we had. Maps, charts, architectural reconstructions. It’s all at your disposal.”
“Just one thing,” Janson said. “I know the reasons you’re turning to me for help, and I can’t refuse you. But have you considered that those same reasons may be why I’m exactly the wrong person for the job?”
Márta Lang gave him a steely look but did not reply.
The Caliph, attired in brilliantly white robes, walked across the Great Hall, a large atrium on the second floor of the eastern wing of the Stone Palace. All signs of the bloodbath had been rinsed away, or almost all. The intricate geometric pattern on the encaustic tiled floor was disfigured by only a faint rust tinge on the grout where blood had been allowed to rest too long.
Now he took a seat at the head of a thirty-foot-long table, where tea harvested from the province of Kenna had been poured for him. Standing to either side of him were the members of his personal security detail, stalwart and simple men with vigilant eyes who had been with him for years. The Kagama delegates—the seven men who had participated in the negotiations convened by Peter Novak—had already been summoned and would arrive momentarily. All of them had performed their duties well. They had signaled an exhaustion with the struggle, a recognition of “new realities,” and lulled the meddlesome mogul and the government representatives with talk of “concessions” and “compromise.”
Everything had been executed according to plan by the seven plausible Kagama elders, all of whom had the movement credentials to be accepted as spokesmen for the Caliph. Which was why one final act of service would be required of them.
“Sahib, the delegates are here,” said a young courier, keeping his eyes bashfully on the ground as he approached.
“Then you will wish to remain and observe, to tell others what transpired in this beautiful room,” the Caliph replied. It was a command, and would be honored as such.
The wide mahogany doors slid open at the other end of the Great Hall, and the seven men filed in. They were flushed with excitement, buoyant with the expectation of the Caliph’s gratitude.
“I behold the men who negotiated so expertly with the representatives of the Republic of Anura,” the Caliph said, in a loud, clear voice. He rose. “Revered officers of the Kagama Liberation Front.”
The seven men bowed their heads humbly. “It was no more than our duty,” said the eldest, whose hair was graying but whose eyes shined hard and bright. Anticipation made his smile quiver. “It is you who are the architect of our destinies. What we did was only in the majestic fulfillment of your—”
“Silence!” The Caliph cut him off. “Revered members of the Kagama Liberation Front who have betrayed the trust we placed in them.” He glanced at the members of his retinue. “Watch these traitors simper and smirk before me, before all of us, for they have no shame. They would sell our destiny for a mess of pottage! They were never authorized to do what they tried to do. They are lackeys for the republican oppressors, apostates from a cause that is holy in the eyes of Allah. Every moment they breathe on this earth is an insult to the Prophet, salla Allah u alihi wa sallam.”
With the crook of a forefinger, he signaled the members of his guard to proceed as they had been instructed.
The delegates’ startled rejoinders and protests were cut short by a burst of tightly clustered gunfire. Their movements were jerky, spasmodic. On white tunics, blossoms of vibrant red appeared. As the low-signature shots echoed through the hall, with the rat-tat-tat of celebratory firecrackers, a few of the delegates loosed shrieks of terror before they expired and pitched forward, stacked on themselves like so much kindling wood.
The Caliph was disappointed; they sounded like frightened girls. These were good men: why could they not die with dignity? The Caliph tapped one of his retainers on the shoulder. “Mustafa,” he said, “please see that the mess is cleaned up promptly.” They had found out what happened to the grout when blood stayed on it too long, had they not? The Caliph and his deputies were masters of the palace now; they had to see to its upkeep.
“Just as you say,” the young man replied, bowing deeply and fingering his leather pendant. “Without fail.”
The Caliph then turned to the eldest member of his retinue, a man who could always be counted on to keep him informed about matters close at hand. “How fares our ram in the thickets?”
“Sahib?”
“How is the prisoner adjusting to his new accommodations?”
“Not well.”
“Keep him alive!” the Caliph said severely. “Secure and alive.” He set down his teacup. “If he dies prematurely, we won’t be able to behead him come Friday. I should be very displeased.”
“We will take care of him. The ceremony will proceed as you have planned it. In every detail.”
Small things mattered, including the death of small men like the delegates. Did those men understand the service they had just performed in dying? Did they appreciate the love that had propelled the hail of bullets? The Caliph was truly grateful to them and to their sacrifice. And that sacrifice could be postponed no longer, for a KLF communiqué had already been sent denouncing the negotiations as an anti-Kagama plot and those who participated in them as traitors. The delegates had to be shot simply to make the communiqué credible. This was not something he could explain to them beforehand, but he hoped some of them surmised it in the instant before they perished.
It was all of a piece. The execution of Peter Novak, the repudiation of the negotiators, would be guaranteed to strengthen Kagama resolve for complete and unconditional victory. And to give pause to any other outside interlopers—agents of neocolonialism, in whatever humanitarian garb—who might try to appeal to “moderates,” to “pragmatists,” and so undermine the zeal of the righteous. Such half measures, such temporizing compromises, were an insult to the Prophet himself! And an insult to the many thousands of Kagama who had already died in the conflict. No differences would be split—only the heads of traitors.
And the world would learn that the Kagama Liberation Front would have to be taken seriously, its demands honored, its words feared.
Bloodshed. The immolation of a living legend. How else would a deaf world learn to listen?
He knew the message would be relayed to those it needed to reach among the Kagama. The international media was always another matter. For the bored spectators of the West, entertainment was the ultimate value. Well, the struggle for national liberation was not conducted for their entertainment. The Caliph knew how Westerners thought, for he had spent time among them. Most of his followers were poorly educated men who had traded plowshares for swords; they had never been on a plane and knew little of the world except what they heard on the heavily censored Kagama-language radio stations.
The Caliph respected their purity, but his range of experience was far greater, and necessarily so: the master’s tools would be needed to dismantle the master’s house. After attending college at the University of Hyderabad, he had spent two years obtaining a graduate degree in engineering from the University of Maryland, in College Park; he had been, he liked to say, to the heart of darkness. His time in the States taught the Caliph—Ahmad Tabari, as he was then called—how Westerners viewed the rest of the world. It introduced him to men and women who grew up in households of power and privilege, where the main struggle was over the remote control, and the greatest danger they faced was boredom. For them, places such as Anura or Sri Lanka or Lebanon or Kashmir or Myanmar had been flattened into metaphor, mere emblems of the pointless barbarity of non-Western peoples. In each case, the West enjoyed the great gift of obliviousness: obliviousness to its complicity, obliviousness to the fact
that its barbarity dwarfed any other.
Westerners! He knew they remained an abstraction, ghostly and even demonic, to many of his followers. But they were no abstraction for the Caliph; he could see them and feel them, for he had. He knew what they smelled like. There was, for instance, the bored wife of an associate dean he had met during his school days. At a get-together the administration held for foreign students, she drew out of him his tales of hardship, and as he talked he had noticed how her eyes widened and her cheeks flushed. She was in her late thirties, blond and bored; her comfortable existence was a cage to her. What started as a conversation next to a punch bowl was followed, at her insistence, by coffee the very next day, and then by much more. She had been excited by his stories of persecution, by the cigarette burns on his torso; no doubt she was also excited simply by what she perceived as his exoticism, though she owned up only to an attraction to his “intensity.” When he mentioned that electrodes had once been attached to his genitals, she looked both horrified and fascinated. Were there any lasting effects? she had asked solemnly. He had laughed at her ill-disguised interest and said he would happily let her decide for herself. Her husband, with his fecal breath and comical, pigeon-toed walk, would not be home for hours.
That afternoon, Ahmad performed a salat, the ritual prayer, with her juices still on his fingers. A pillowcase served as his prayer mat.
The weeks that followed were a crash course in Western mores that proved as valuable as anything else he learned at Maryland. He took, or was taken by, more lovers, though none knew of the others. They spoke dismissively of their pampered lives, but none of them would ever dream of actually leaving the gilded cage. With half an eye on the bluish glow of the TV screen, the spoiled white bitches would watch the events of the day as they waved their hands to hasten the drying of their nail polish. Nothing ever happened that American television could not reduce to a fifteensecond world-news update: slivers of mayhem between segments on new diet fads and pets in peril and warnings about expensive toys for toddlers that could be hazardous if swallowed. How rich in material things the West was, how poor in spiritual! Was America a beacon unto the nations? If so, it was a beacon leading other vessels into the shoals!
When the twenty-four-year-old graduate student returned to his native land, it was with a sense of even greater urgency. Injustice prolonged was injustice magnified. And—he could not say it enough—the only solution to violence was more violence.
Janson spent the next hour going through the dossiers and listening to brief presentations by Márta Lang’s four associates. Much of the material was familiar; some of the analyses even reflected his own reports from Caligo, submitted more than five years ago. Two nights earlier, the rebels had taken over army bases, surged through checkpoints, and effectively seized control of the province of Kenna. Obviously, it had all been carefully planned in advance, down to the insistence on holding the summit in the province. In its latest communication to its followers, the KLF had officially repudiated the Kagama delegation at the summit, calling them traitors acting without authorization. It was a lie, of course, one of many.
There were a few new details. Ahmad Tabari, the man they called the Caliph, had gained in popular support during the past few years. Some of his food programs, it emerged, had won him sympathizers even among Hindu peasants. They had nicknamed him the Exterminator—not because of his propensity to murder civilians but because of a pest-eradication campaign he had launched. In the areas controlled by the KLF, aggressive measures were invariably taken against the bandicoot rat, an indigenous species of vermin destructive to poultry and grain. In fact, Tabari’s campaign was motivated by an ancient superstition. In Tabari’s clan—the extended family to which his father belonged—the bandicoot rat represented death. It did not matter how many Koran verses Ahmad Tabari had committed to memory: that primal taboo was marked indelibly on his psyche.
But the physical realm, not the psychological one, was what commanded Janson’s full attention. For the next two hours, Janson scrutinized detailed topographical maps, grainy satellite imagery of the multiphase rebel incursion, and old blueprints of what had once been a colonial governor general’s compound and, before that, a fortress—the building on Adam’s Hill known by the Dutch as the Steenpaleis, the Stone Palace.
Again and again he stared at the elevation mappings of Adam’s Hill and of the Stone Palace, moving back and forth between overhead views and structural blueprints. One conclusion was inescapable. If the U.S. government had declined to send in the SEALs, political considerations were only part of the story. The other part was that any exfiltration operation had an extremely remote probability of success.
Lang’s associates knew it. He could see it in their faces: they were asking him to conduct a mission that was essentially doomed from the start. But perhaps nobody was willing to tell Márta Lang. Or she had been told and refused to accede. It was clear that she regarded Peter Novak as somebody worth dying for. She would give her life for him; and people like her were always willing to give the lives of others as well. Yet could he say that she was wrong? American lives had frequently been lost in pursuit of derisory gains—putting up a bridge over the Dak Nghe, for the tenth time, that would be destroyed, for the tenth time, before morning came. Peter Novak was a great man. Many owed their lives to him. And, though he tried to put it out of his mind, Janson knew he was among them.
If people were unwilling to put themselves at risk to save such an apostle of enlightenment, what did it say about the ideals of peace and democracy to which Novak had devoted his own life? Extremists scoffed at Westerners and their lightly held beliefs, yet was extremism in pursuit of moderation not itself a moral contradiction? Wasn’t Janson’s recognition of that fact what had driven him to retire?
Abruptly, Janson sat up straight. There was a way—perhaps.
“We’ll need aircraft, boats, and most of all, the right operatives,” he told Lang. His voice had subtly shifted, from the mode of gathering information to that of issuing orders. He stood and paced silently. The make-or-break factor was going to be the men, not the machinery.
Márta Lang looked at the others expectantly; for the moment, anyway, the look of grim resignation had lifted.
“I’m talking about a crack team of specialists,” he said. “Best of breed in every case. There’s no time for training exercises—it’s going to have to be people who have worked together before, people I’ve worked with and can trust.” He pictured a succession of faces, flashing in his mind like so many file photos, and mentally culled the list according to essential criteria until four remained. Each was someone he had worked with in his past career. Each was someone he felt he could trust with his life; indeed, each was someone who owed him his life, and who, temperamentally, would respect a debt of honor. And none of them, as it happened, were American nationals. The State Department could breathe easy. He gave Lang the list. Four men from four different countries.
Suddenly Janson slapped the bolted table. “Christ!” he half shouted. “What was I thinking? You’re going to have to scratch the last name, Sean Hennessy.”
“He’s dead?”
“Not dead. Behind bars. Her Majesty’s Prison Service. HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Got embroiled on a weapons charge a few months ago. Suspected of being IRA.”
“Was he?”
“As it happens, no. Hadn’t been since he was sixteen, but the military police kept his name in its Provo files all the same. In point of fact, he was doing a job for Sandline Ltd.—keeping the Democratic Republic of Congo safe for coltan extraction.”
“Is he the best person for the job you want him to do?”
“I’d be lying if I told you otherwise.”
Lang punched a series of numbers on what looked like a flat telephone console, and brought the handset to her ear.
“This is Márta Lang,” she said, speaking with clipped precision. “Márta Lang. Please verify.”
Sixty long seconds elapsed. Finally she spoke
again. “Sir Richard, please.” The number dialed was obviously not one that was in general circulation; it was unnecessary to specify to whomever had answered that it was an emergency, for that assumption would be automatic. Verification no doubt involved both voice print analysis and a telephony trace to the ANSI signature unique to every North American telephone line, including those that used a sat-com uplink.
“Sir Richard,” she said, her voice defrosting slightly. “I have the name of an HMP prisoner by the name of Sean, S-E-A-N, Hennessy, double n, double s. Probably an SIB apprehension, approximately three months ago. Status: arraigned, not convicted, awaiting trial.” Her eyes sought out his for confirmation, and Janson nodded.
“We’ll need to have him released at once and on a plane bound for …” She paused, reconsidering. “There’s an LF jet docked at Gatwick. Get him on board immediately. Call me back within forty-five minutes with an estimated arrival time.”
Janson shook his head, marveling. “Sir Richard” had to be Richard Whitehead, the director of Britain’s Special Investigations Branch. But what most impressed him was her coolly instructive tone. Whitehead was to call back to let her know not whether the request could be accommodated but when the request would be accommodated. As Novak’s seniormost deputy, she was obviously well known to political elites around the world. He had been preoccupied with the advantages enjoyed by his Anuran adversaries, but Novak’s people were hardly without resources themselves.
Janson also admired Lang’s instinctive respect for operational security. No final destination was divulged; the Liberty Foundation jet at Gatwick would just need to provide a proximate flight plan. Only once it had crossed into international airspace would its pilot need to know the rendezvous point Janson had determined, in the Nicobar archipelago.
Now Janson started to go over a list of military equipment with one of Lang’s associates, a man named Gerald Hochschild, who served as a de facto logistics officer. To each request, Hochschild responded not with a yes or no, but with a time interval: twelve hours, four hours, twenty hours. The amount of time that would be necessary to locate and ship the equipment to the Nicobar rendezvous.