retrieving a weapon he or a confederate had somewhere managed to stow earlier.
The South Lobby, brilliantly lit from the expansive glazed wall, was vacant. The
giant escalator was empty. He bounded toward the delegates’ lounge. Seated on a
white-leather sofa, two blond women were deep in conversation: from the looks of
them, they were extras from a Scandinavian delegation who found that there was
no room for them in the Assembly Hall. Otherwise, nothing.
Where could he be? Janson’s mind desperately sorted through possibilities.
Ask it differently: where would you be, Janson?
The chapel. A long, narrow space that was almost never used but was always kept
open. It was adjacent to the secretary-general’s suite, just to the other side
of the curved wall that fronted the Assembly Hall. The one room in the building
where one was guaranteed to be unobserved.
Janson put on another burst of speed, and though his rubber-soled shoes made
little sound, his breathing grew heavier.
Now he pushed open the heavy, soundproofed door and saw a man in flowing white
robes bending down behind a large ebonized box. As the door closed behind
Janson, the man whirled around.
The Caliph.
For a moment Janson was so convulsed with hate that he could not breathe. He
composed his face into a look of friendly surprise.
The Caliph spoke first. “Khaif hallak ya akhi.”
Janson remembered his large beard and Arab-style headdress and forced himself to
smile. He knew that the man had addressed him in Arabic; probably it was an
insubstantial pleasantry, but he could only guess. In Janson’s best version of
Oxbridge English—an Arab royal might well have been educated at such an
institution, absorbed its customs—he said, “My dear brother, I hope I wasn’t
intruding. It’s just that I’ve such a migraine, I was hoping to commune with the
Prophet himself.”
The Caliph strode toward him. “Yet we would both be sorry to miss any more of
the proceedings, having come so far. Don’t you agree?” His voice was like the
hiss of a snake.
“You make a good point, my brother,” Janson said.
As the Caliph walked toward him, scrutinizing him closely, Janson’s skin began
to crawl. He came closer and closer, until he was just a foot away. Janson
remembered that social conceptions of permissible physical distance varied among
cultures, that Arabs typically stood closer to each other than Westerners did.
The Caliph placed a hand on Janson’s shoulder.
It was a gentle, friendly, confiding gesture—from the man who had killed his
wife.
Involuntarily, Janson flinched.
His mind filled with a flood of images: a cascade of destruction, the ruined
office building in downtown Caligo, the phone call informing him that his wife
was dead.
The Caliph’s face suddenly closed.
Janson had betrayed himself.
The assassin knew.
The muzzle of a long-barreled revolver was jabbed into Janson’s chest. The
Caliph had made his decision; his suspicious visitor would not be permitted to
escape.
Mathieu Zinsou stared at the packed Assembly Hall, saw row after row of powerful
men and women beginning to grow restive. He had promised that his introductory
remarks would be brief; in fact, they turned out to be uncharacteristically
rambling and prolix. Yet he had no choice but to stall! He saw the American
ambassador to the U.N. exchange glances with his colleague the permanent
representative; how was it that this acclaimed master of diplomatic oratory had
become such a bore?
The secretary-general’s eyes flicked back to the pages on the lectern in front
of him. Four paragraphs of text, which he had already read; he had nothing more
prepared and, in the tension of the moment, very little notion of what might
appropriately be said. One would have had to know him intimately to notice that
the blood had drained from his dark brown face.
“Progress has been made all over the world,” he said, his vowels orotund, his
message embarrassingly banal. “Genuine advances in development and international
comity have been seen in Europe, from Spain to Turkey, from Romania to Germany,
from Switzerland and France and Italy to Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, not to
mention the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and, of course, Poland. Genuine progress
has been made, too, in Latin America—from Peru to Venezuela, from Ecuador to
Paraguay, from Chile to Guyana and French Guyana, from Colombia to Uruguay to
Bolivia, from Argentina to … ” He was drawing a blank: I’ll take South American
nation-states for one hundred, Alex. He scanned the rows of delegations before
him, his eyes darting from one national placard to another. “To, well,
Suriname!” A sense of relief, fleeting as a glowworm’s flash. “The developments
in Suriname have been most heartening, most heartening indeed.” How long could
he draw this out? What was taking Janson so long?
Zinsou cleared his throat. He was a man who seldom perspired; he was perspiring
now. “And, of course, we would be remiss if we did not single out for attention
the progress we have seen among the nations of the Pacific Rim….”
Janson stared at the man who had robbed him of the happiness that had once been
his, the man who had stolen the treasure of his life.
He bowed his legs slightly, keeping his feet spaced out at shoulder level. “I
have offended you,” he said plaintively. Suddenly, he swept his left elbow up
over the Caliph’s right shoulder and grabbed the wrist of his gun arm with both
hands. With a powerful upward wrench, he locked the man’s arm. Then he lashed
out with his left leg, and the two men landed hard on the slate floor. The
Caliph whipped his left hand repeatedly to the side of Janson’s head. Yet a
protective move would enable the Caliph to wriggle free: Janson had no choice
but to try to endure the painful blows. The only viable defense would be an
offense. He forced the Anuran’s wrist into a lock, twisting it palm upward. The
Caliph followed the direction of his pressure, angling the Ruger toward Janson’s
body.
It would take only an instant for his trigger finger to fire a lethal shot.
Now, Janson slammed the Anuran’s gun hand against the slate floor, producing a
spasm that caused him to loosen his grip on the weapon. In a lightning-fast
movement, Janson grabbed it and scrambled to his feet. The Anuran remained limp
on the polished stone floor.
He had the gun now.
Immediately, he triggered the switch that activated his lip mike. “The threat
has been neutralized,” Janson told the U.N. secretary-general.
Then he felt a staggering blow from behind. The cobralike assassin had leaped
from the ground and vised a forearm around Janson’s throat, choking off his air.
Janson bucked violently, twisting and thrashing, hoping to throw off the
younger, lighter man, but the terrorist was all coiled muscle. Janson felt bulky
and slow by comparison, a bear menaced by a panther.
Now, instead of trying to dislodge the Caliph’s grip, he reached around and held
him even tighter. Then he kicked both his legs into the air and hurled himself
to the floor, landing heavily on his back—yet cushioning his impact with the
body of his assailant, who was slammed against the floor as he fell.
He felt an expulsion of breath against the back of his neck and knew that the
Caliph had been dealt a serious body blow.
Winded and aching himself, Janson rolled over and began to rise to his feet. As
he did so, the Caliph rose, with incredible endurance, and threw himself at him,
his hands formed into claws.
If the distance between them was greater, Janson would have ducked or stepped
aside. Neither was possible. He lacked the speed. He lacked the agility.
A bear.
So be it. He held out his arms, as if in an embrace—and, with a surge of
strength, he squeezed the Caliph to his body, locking his arms around the other
man’s chest. Tight. Tighter. Tighter still.
Even as he squeezed, however, the assassin rained powerful blows on the back of
his neck. Janson knew he could not hold out for much longer. In a sudden,
convulsive effort, he dropped his armlock and lifted the Anuran into the air
horizontally, where he thrashed like a powerful eel. In an equally abrupt
movement, Janson fell down into a crouch, his left knee bent to the ground, his
right knee angled upward. At the same time, he slammed the lithe-bodied
assailant down against it.
The Caliph’s back snapped with a horrifying sound, something between a crunch
and a pop, and his mouth contorted into a scream that would not come.
Janson seized him by the shoulders and slammed him against the slate floor. He
did so again. And again. The back of the Caliph’s head no longer made the sound
of hard bone against a hard floor, for the rear cranial bone had been smashed
into fragments, exposing the soft tissues beneath.
The Caliph’s eyes grew unfocused, glazed. The eyes were said to be the windows