They had split into two teams and had circuitously approached the target house by using the streets that paralleled the one onto which it faced. Pax and Perry entered, from behind, a damaged building that stood across from what might be Abdullah al-Ghazali’s nest. They took fifteen minutes to ease through the walled and debris-strewn backyard and through the ruined interior to the front door, which had been blown off in an attack seventeen months earlier.
Crouching just inside the doorway, they studied the house across the street from this closer vantage point, wearing night-vision gear, and confirmed what they had seen previously with periscopic cameras and binoculars. The structure was intact except for pockmarks and divots chipped out by bullets, all the windows protected by exterior metal shutters. Instead of mud bricks plastered over with stucco, the house appeared to be more modern, constructed of reinforced concrete, not an uncommon preference in a country where unending sectarian and tribal warfare once fought with rifles had long ago escalated to machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
At 5:11 A.M., the mission-specific satellite phone in Paxton’s jacket pocket vibrated. The caller could be only Perry, who with Gibb had taken up a position on the roof of the building to the east of the target house, with a view of its backyard.
Perry spoke softly. “Faint interior light, leaking around a shutter. Just now.”
This served to confirm that the cigarette smoker on the roof, seen the previous afternoon, had not merely used the house as an observation platform, but had taken shelter there, perhaps with the mass murderer Abdullah al-Ghazali.
Pax and his guys would not move against the house until full daylight, and even then they would wait as long as the situation supported a delay, hoping for some indication that the smoker was not the sole occupant. If the seven terrorists were spread out in, say, three widely separated houses, an attack on one would alert those quartered in the other two, and the element of surprise would be lost. In that event, the odds of nailing al-Ghazali himself were not as good as they ought to be. Regardless, the assault would occur during the coming day; a further delay was too risky.
From somewhere in the waning night came the eerie cry of that desert wild cat called a caracal, and Paxton tensed.
Crazy as it was, with the pierced thumb and the blood and the tiger-eyed blond Amazon, with candle wicks popping and hissing, with salamanders of candlelight chasing their own lithe shadows across the tabletop, with the fragrance of roses rising with ever greater—and somehow funereal—intensity from the next room, and with the threat of unknown enemies gathering in the night to home in on psychic waves that Bibi could in no way detect, she nonetheless found her disbelief suspended. For the moment, Calida Butterfly had a presence, an air of authority, that would make the most committed skeptic doubt his own doubt.
The diviner stirred her right hand through the wood tiles that filled the silver bowl, neither watching to see what letters her fingers plucked from that alphabet soup nor trying to discern them by a Braille-reader’s touch.
“I command the secret knowledge regarding Bibi’s cancer cure,” she said, her husky yet musical voice conveying an intolerance for resistance from whatever occult power she meant to interrogate. “I bleed for answers. I can’t be denied. Attend me. Why was Bibi Blair spared from gliomatosis cerebri?”
She dropped four tiles upon the table, and they clicked like dice, and then two more, and three, and a final two. Some tiles were facedown, and she turned them over. She arranged them from A to V and had this: A, A, E, E, F, I, L, O, S, T, V. She lined them up on the table so that if she turned to her left and Bibi to her right, both could read them.
From eleven letters, even if there were duplicates, many words could be formed. Although Bibi made no move to organize the tiles, she saw LEAVE, LEAF, FAST, FEAST, SOFT, SOLVE, FLOAT, SOLE….
Calida fingered four letters out of the lineup—EVIL—which didn’t improve Bibi’s mood.
“We must use all eleven of them to find the true message,” the diviner explained. First she spelled out A FATE SO EVIL and studied it for a moment, but then said, “No. That’s not an answer. At most, it’s a half-assed threat.”
“Threat? Who’s threatening you? Or is it me being threatened?”
Rather than answer either question, Calida rearranged some of the letters to spell EAST EVIL OAF. “Off to a false start,” she said. “Evil isn’t the key word.”
A quiet but growing urgency in Calida’s manner. A puzzling continued intensification of the fragrance of roses until an odor of floral rot seemed to underlie their perfume…A quickening of the pulse-and-flitter of the many candle flames, so that the table swam with silverfish of light and phantom moths beat their soundless, insubstantial wings against the walls…Bibi began to feel that she was slowly—then more rapidly—succumbing to a fever not born of physical illness, a fever of unreason as dangerous as any infection.
On the table, FOIL A TEASE made no sense, and it left one letter unused.
VIA LEAST FOE was likewise without clear meaning.