Until tonight.
What happened tonight had changed everything.
Margaret Rene sat staring at her computer display now, openmouthed. Just minutes ago she had completed her usual log-on to the proxy server and noticed that a ciphertext E-mail had arrived. Instantly her eyes had widened. She had provided only a single person with the digital key code that would allow him to send a message to her via the anonymous account. A facilitator of
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matchless capabilities, with whom both her father and her former husband had dealings.
Her hands shaking with excitement, she’d typed in her decryption key.
The E-mail simply read:
AWAKEN THE SLEEPER.
FEE: 50 MILLION
INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW WITHIN ONE
WEEK
Margaret Rene’s pulse quickened. Perhaps a year before, in a private chat room over an encrypted link, the originator of the current message had posed a question to which she’d replied with complete straightforwardness, although interpreting it as a mere hypothetical.
She could recall their exchange verbatim.
“What would you give to terminate all children with leukodystrophies while they were still in the womb?”
“I would give anything.”
“And if it meant the death of the carrier parents?”
“That would be for the best.”
“And if it meant your own death as well?”
“Better still.”
And that was the end of it. He had cut the virtual link, and Margaret Rene had heard absolutely nothing more from him for a considerable while. But his probing inquiry had kept drifting in and out of her mind. What had been the reason for it? As much as she’d wished for an explanation, she had known better than to ask for one, known he would inform her in his own time.
Months passed before stunning notification of the Sleeper Project had arrived in the form of an Email
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attachment. Reading it with a mixture of eagerness and incredulity, Margaret Rene had at last understood what he had been leading toward in his prior communication.
What he claimed to have achieved had seemed beyond imagining. Beyond yearning.
Margaret Rene was advised to await future word of the specific date and terms of the offering and refrain from any interim contact lest it become void. Somehow, she found the will to comply. And as days turned to weeks without another announcement, she had nearly convinced herself that his assertion of success had been premature. While he had never before failed to deliver to her family, she had wondered if perhaps this time he had overreached.
And then tonight…
Tonight…
Her thin face bathed in the ghostly radiance of the computer screen, her heart thumping in her chest, Margaret Rene felt as if she were poised on the threshold of a dream.
Yes, tonight, everything had finally changed.
AWAKEN THE SLEEPER
FEE: 50 MILLION
INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW WITHIN ONE
WEEK
The Arab mind is prone to express itself in a pragmatic and concrete way, and as Arif al-Ashar, the Sudanese minister of the interior, sat reading the Email attachment on his computer screen, his thoughts immediately took the shape of an unambiguous proverb: “In any vital activity, it is the path that matters.”
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His dilemma was that each of the paths before him gleamed with fabulous inducements, as if paved with sterling silver.
Where, then, to place his forward foot?
For decades his government in Khartoum had been engaged in civil war with rebels in the nation’s south, their opposition fanned by Dinka tribesmen of black African origin who had resisted acceptance of shari’a, the strict Islamic code of law and conduct imposed after the revolution. Instead, the infidels clung to the barbaric spirit worship of their ancestors or the Christianity spread by missionaries in centuries past, calling for partial autonomy or complete separation, it all depended on which of their many factional groups one chose to heed, and when a particular group made its demands-for they seemed to change as often as the rebel leadership.
The situation had been a morass as far back as al- Ashar could remember. There was a period when the Dinkas had formed an alliance with the Nuer, a bordering tribe with whom they shared-and often feuded over-livestock grazing areas and water resources in the riverine plains around the White Nile. Taking strict measures to suppress the guerilla activities, Khartoum had deployed military land and air elements to the region, sealing it off to UN observers and representatives of the so-called humanitarian aid organizations that were plainly tools of the American CIA-Westerners who in their ignorance, presumptuousness, and mongrel weakness would have been quick to condemn a nation for exercising its right to preserve internal security and engage in a cultural cleansing that would bring about a politically unified and devoutly virtuous society.
Indeed, al-Ashar felt his government had shown the
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southerners greater leniency than was warranted by their anarchic conduct. Upon eradication of the villages that gave support to rebel garrisons, women, children, and the elderly were spared execution. Mercifully gathered from their crude thatch huts in what their people chose to term kashas, or roundups, they were sent to relocation camps in which ample attention was given to their welfare. Boys certain to be indoctrinated into rebel bands if left to hear the lies and distortions of family members sympathetic to their cause were transferred to separate facilities-the southern refugees who had fled to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Eritrea chose to call these abductions or kidnaps-where they were given suitable Arabic names, taught the holy ways of Islam, and trained to be loyal members of the national militia upon reaching the age of conscription. Was this not generous? Did it not show commendable restraint?
In spite of Khartoum’s efforts to impose order, the rebels persisted in their defiance, but a political dispute had flared between the Dinka and Nuer commanders and left their Sudan People’s Liberation Army divided and weakened. Old tribal conflicts over land and water rights were revived, and soon the former confederates were firing Kalashnikovs at one another. Government forces capitalized upon this by moving into the breach and seizing enemy base towns where the opposition troops were in disarray. With drought and famine spreading across the countryside to further devitalize the rebellion, Sudan’s lawful ruling establishment-the National Congress Party to which Arif al-Ashar belonged-had been encouraged that it might finally be subdued. Partly to silence international cries of outrage that had resulted from the propagandizing of Dinka refugees to gullible
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1;
representatives of the American and European media, airdrops of water, grain, and medicine had been allowed into the southern part of the country.
There was a second, tactically advantageous reason for the admission of relief shipments, however.
Also struck by drought, the Nuba Mountains in the north had presented a distinct problem for the government. Infiltrating their high notches and passes, SPLA bands had become entrenched in pocket strongholds near remote villages inhabited by Nubians, an indigenous people that had by and large refrained from participation in the civil war, sharing neither the southern tribes’ desire for independence nor the Arabic population’s devotion to Islam. In allowing food and other supplies to reach the plains, the government had gambled that the rebels in the Nuba range, who were low on provisions, would be lured from their hideaways in attempts to replenish their stockpiles. And while the Nubians presented no armed threat in themselves, their refusal to accept shari’a, and their racial kinship with the SPLA, made them an undesirable and potentially destabilizing presence. Khartoum’s hope had been that they, too, would be coaxed from their villages into the relocation camps and government-held towns.
With attack helicopters and army raiding parties lending it impetus, the initiative had produced estimable results.
Then, as Allah would have it, another set of complications arose.
Over the past three years, a series of intertribal councils initiated by Dinka and Nuer elders had led the squabbling rebel factions toward reconciliation. Simultaneously, America and its UN allies had exerted in123
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creasing diplomatic pressure on Khartoum-directly as well as through Arab-African intermediaries-to allow relief drops into the Nubas and arbitrate a peace agreement with the southerners, backing their demands with the ever-present threat of trade sanctions. Sharing a long border with Sudan to the north, its commercial shipping and agricultural health dependent on the Nile waters flowing through both nations, Egypt in particular had no great wish to see the southern Sudan split off into a non- Arab, potentially antagonistic sovereign state-but neither could it risk losing American economic and military support. Thus, it had encouraged a compromise settlement to the extended civil war.
Weary from decades of struggle and natural disaster, facing a resolidified insurgent movement that was liable to keep the fighting at an impasse, torn by rifts between religious conservatives and secular reformers in its own parliament, Khartoum had capitulated to mounting demands and entered into a peace dialogue with the rebels, the stated agenda of which was to grant the southern provinces an as-yet-unspecified level of self- determination.