had to leave, why he should have done so long before. “What kind of man—” he
started, and then halted, overcome with revulsion. He took a deep breath. “What
kind of man has to kill to feel alive?”
Collins’s gaze seemed to burrow through his flesh. “I guess I’d ask you the same
thing, Janson.”
Now, in Novak’s private jet, Janson pressed the point. “How much do you know
about me?”
“Yes, Mr. Janson, as you supposed, your former employers explained that you had
unfinished business with the Kagama.”
“Was that the phrase they used? ‘Unfinished business’?”
She nodded.
Shreds of clothing, bone fragments, a few severed limbs that had been thrown
clear. They were what remained of his beloved. The rest: “collectivized,” in the
grim words of a U.S. forensic technician. A communion of death and destruction,
the blood and body parts of the victims impalpable and indistinguishable. And
for what?
And for what?
“So be it,” Janson said after a pause. “These aren’t men with poetry in their
souls.”
“And, yes, they also understood that your name wasn’t exactly unknown to us.”
“Because of Baaqlina.”
“Come.” Marta 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?”
Marta 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 ho could
always be counted on to keep him informed about matters lose 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