Blackmail Earth

Chapter 19





“I’m being held by Al Qaeda on the supertanker the Dick Cheney…”

The wire cutters around Birk’s thumb had produced a delightfully bright-red line of blood that drooled from beneath the blades. But even as Birk sat there trying not to wince and craving a drink the way a vampire craves blood—he knew that this could well be the best performance of his illustrious career. As long as his f*cking thumb remained attached to his hand, he’d be happy to sit there bleeding in front of the teensy computer camera.

“This hijacking has all the earmarks of a well-planned military operation. These men know what they are doing and are well armed. I ask officials of all concerned nations, especially the United States, to listen carefully to their demands…”

Birk let his eyes drift to the wire cutters, knowing that in all likelihood he was focusing the attention of millions of viewers on the crimson sideshow. He glanced at the digital time display on the computer screen and knew that if he could yammer for just about one more minute, he’d go live as the lead story on Nightly News. As it was, he figured that right this second he was being carried by just about every broadcasting outlet in the world. What a great feeling, everything considered. And when the bewitching hour hit for Nightly News, he’d jack up the reporting to a whole new level to try to snag as many minutes of network airtime as possible.

Birk had already noted that every time he made the slightest attempt to pull his thumb away from the wire cutters, Raggedy Ass squeezed a wee bit harder. And voilà! More blood. Birk planned on some serious bleeding as Nightly News came on because, as reporters knew the world over, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

“The men holding me say that they will start releasing thousands of tons of iron oxide into the ocean if at least one of the ten biggest coal-fired power plants in the U.S. isn’t shut down immediately. They’re making this demand so that the U.S. can show good faith in the negotiations.”

And they were making this demand in no small part because Rick Birk had advised the cracker jihadist to raise the ante incrementally. “Show that the U.S. won’t even budge the tiniest bit,” Birk said, knowing that if he could stretch out the negotiations, two important things would happen. It would give the newly arrived U.S. military, whose fighter jets and rocket-equipped helicopters were buzzing high above the tanker, more time to stop this terrorist act; and it would get Rick Birk more airtime. Not necessarily in that order.

With all the lethal hardware in the air and on the water, Raggedy Ass had been surprisingly receptive to Birk’s counsel, leading the correspondent to conclude that most of the jihadist’s planning had gone into the hijacking of the supertanker, and not its actual occupation. Kind of like the U.S. in Iraq, Birk thought. As for Suicide Sam, he had a nervous habit of fiddling mindlessly with the different colored wires protruding from his vest, especially when he was staring at the TV screen on the other side of the wheelhouse. Watching the Shopping Network of all goddamn things.

Ye gods, he’s doing it again.

Birk forced his gaze back to the tiny computer camera, noting that right this second Nightly News was going on the air. He imagined the prissy-boy anchor, Brad Tettle, saying “Good evening” with the far more experienced visage of the great Rick Birk looming over his shoulder.

Timing it as closely as he could from almost fifty years of experience, Birk said “Good evening,” and jerked his hand in the grasp of the wire cutters.

Good God almighty. Raggedy Ass squeezed much harder than Birk had expected. The pain was excruciating and the septuagenarian had to fight to keep his composure. Blood washed down the base of his hand and wrist. Very visible. Very good.

“I should start off by saying, Brad,” Birk said, assuming an intimacy he didn’t have with the young anchor, whom Birk was certain couldn’t find his way out of a shoe box, “that I’m sure that you and our viewers”—Yes, our viewers, not just yours, anchor rot—“have noticed this minor inconvenience.” Birk stared at his thumb. “I’ve been warned that each of my fingers, starting with this one, will be removed,” a nice understated way to allude to the gore, “by these wire cutters if the U.S. doesn’t shut down its coal-fired plants.”

The best part of this performance—by far—was that Brad couldn’t interrupt him with his notoriously insipid questions. For the first time in years, the camera belonged only to the veteran, the one and only Rick Birk.

“But I trust that this painful pressure”—Wry, Birk, keep it wry, he advised himself—“will not in any way cloud the clarity of my reporting, live from the heart of the hostage takeover of the Dick Cheney.”

The whole time Birk talked, he affected an odd and emphatic blinking of his eyes. To any sentient observer, even to brain-fart Brad, it would appear that Birk, in the midst of torture and agony, was coolheaded enough to send coded messages.

That Birk wouldn’t have known Morse code from the expiration date on a bottle of mai tai mix mattered not at all because it would appear to the millions watching that he was risking hellacious dismemberment on live TV to send critical messages to America’s intelligence agencies. And Birk would have bet a bottle of Bombay gin that the CIA, NSC, and military intelligence were, in fact, scrambling with all their computerized code breaking right this minute to try to decipher his “message,” which, as he knew better than anyone, could be reduced to “I’m f*cked and so are you.”

* * *

Since Jenna had arrived more than an hour ago, Higgens had been glaring at the outsize Birk on the huge screen in her luxurious suite and saying very little. Hardly a hint of the outrageous, blustery performance Jenna had witnessed at the White House.

The meteorologist looked at Birk’s thumb again; it was hard not to stare. It looked like shark chum, but she had to admire his coolness under fire; she didn’t think that she’d fare nearly as well if her fingers were about to be nipped on live TV.

The video clarity from the Dick Cheney was surprisingly good, nothing like the crappy Skype experiences that she’d had. But then again, she figured a supertanker had high-end everything. This one sure had high-end drama.

Senator Higgens stirred enough to point to Birk’s bloody appendage. “Should have been his dick,” she said before quaffing a dry martini like it was a Rodeo Daze Coors Light.

“Excuse me?” Jenna said. She’d left the highly agitated Alicia Gant and Special Terrorism Correspondent Chris Randall lamenting the loss of “their” airtime on the Nightly News, only to spend most of her visit watching the senator drink, and then drink some more. Higgens had made one other cryptic remark about Birk—“He’s not that hard to tie up”—that Jenna had declined to dignify with a follow-up question, but “Should have been his dick” was just too bizarre to leave alone.

“Did you say—”

“I sure did,” Higgens interrupted, “and I speak from experience. His thing,” she might have been shooing a fly from the motion of her hand, “would be no great loss to the world.”

“I didn’t realize you knew him.”

The senator’s eyes rotated unsteadily to her guest. “Unfortunately, yes, but I suppose anyone who’s ever met him considers the experience unfortunate. He’s a colleague of yours, right?”

“In a way.”

“Count your blessings. He gave me a disease.”

Jenna didn’t know what to say. Wincing visibly, she offered, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Penicillin did the trick. Long time ago,” Higgens added by way of explanation. “I ran into the old turd in the lobby of the presidential palace the other day. Must have been a few hours before they grabbed him.” The senator snorted. “Look at him, he’s eating it up. He loves this.”

Jenna thought that Higgens might be right. Birk did appear to be enjoying himself. He’d already cracked a smile or two, and he sounded a lot more sober than her host.

“Senator Higgens, I know seeing Birk like this is a bit distracting, but—”

“Distracting? It’s pure pleasure. I just wish they’d get on with it and cut off the damn thing so he’d stop having such a good time.”

“Okay, be that as it may, I wonder if you could tell me how concerned you are about the possible release of all the iron oxide?”

“It’s no big deal. So we’ll put on an extra sweater or two.”

Or three or four. Maybe skin a polar bear while we’re at it. But Jenna confined her comments to another question: “Has USEI considered the liability issues if the iron oxide gets released? The weather impacts alone are likely to—”

“You taking notes, girl?” the senator snapped. Her robust mood on the hotel phone had definitely soured.

“No, not at all.”

“Just so you know, we’re insured against ‘acts of God,’ and the last time I checked, these crazies,” she stabbed a stubby, heavily ringed finger at the TV, “were doing Allah’s bidding.”

Birk now appeared to be reading from a prepared statement, recounting the horrors of five hundred thousand tons of iron oxide spilling into the sea. Then he listed the nations most likely to be inundated in the next one hundred years because of climate change. He finished by mentioning the disappearance of an island in the Bay of Bengal that had been claimed by both India and Bangladesh. New More Island, as it was called by the mostly Hindu Indians—or South Talpatti Island, as it was known to the mostly Muslim Bangladeshis—had vanished into the sea, peacefully resolving a potential hotspot through the miracle of immersion.

Jenna felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, and discreetly checked to find that Dafoe had texted her: “cll. import. N. Korea.”

What’s that about? It was hard to imagine any subject less related to her present concerns than that starving, Stalinist boot camp.

Seconds later Rafan texted, asking if they could meet.

She glanced at Higgens and saw that the senator had fallen asleep. No, she passed out. Jenna was never comfortable in the presence of drunks, and now one lay collapsed on the couch, open-mouthed and snoring, while the other stared unseeing from the screen. To be fair to Birk, he did appear coldly sober.

As Jenna crept toward the door, phone in hand to text Dafoe, one of Higgens’s young aides came racing up. He took one look at his boss and smacked his forehead. “Not again!” He wheeled on Jenna. “You didn’t take any pictures of her, did you?”

“No, of course not.”

“What about that?” He pointed accusingly to her cell phone.

“No! What do I look like?”

“A reporter,” he sniped.

“I didn’t,” she insisted, and walked out, recovering quickly enough to text Dafoe that she missed him, “cows 2,” and would call later. Nothing felt as urgent right now as attending to the fragile emotional state of her old friend, Rafan.

Jenna met him at a tea shop several blocks from the hotel. He sat facing away from the door, hunched over a newspaper. If she hadn’t been looking for Rafan, she wouldn’t have recognized him. That was the idea, she discovered.

“I’m worried about Senada’s brothers. They buried her today. They couldn’t put her in the ground fast enough, like she was an embarrassment to them because she was murdered. Big funerals for men, but for her or for my sister?” Rafan shook his head. “I need to get away.” Rafan’s eyes shifted furtively, taking in the nearby empty tables.

“Can you do that?”

“No, not now. There’s too much work. We’re in the middle of a big pilot project.” He told her about trying to save an important island by building it up with borrowed dirt.

“Robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

“Yes,” he smiled for the first time, “you always used to say that.”

“About how we’re stealing from future generations. That sure hasn’t changed. Is your condo safe?” It wasn’t like he had building security, or even a doorman, as she did in the city.

“I can’t go back there.” He shook his head. “I can’t even go to the mosque to talk to people about Islamists because her brothers are looking for me.”

“Then stay with me at the hotel. I’ll have them bring up a portable bed.” She took his hand. “Come on, you’re staying with me.” She hurried him toward the door, but he pulled back, as if he’d seen someone. Jenna turned to look, but spotted only a passing pedicab, and a massive gathering of thunderheads. The cumulonimbus clouds she’d spotted earlier had turned especially nasty looking. She would have loved to have seen the temperature differentials for those clouds and the surface right above the sea. A powerful thunderstorm on the ocean could turn the water into quite a weapon.

“This way,” Rafan said, drawing her down side streets to an alley behind the Golden Crescent Hotel. The sky rumbled and they saw lightning over the sea. Jenna remembered darting through the rain with Dafoe; like the sky overhead on that day, the dusky sky above Malé looked ready to burst another seam. It was the stormy season.

“Why are we back here?” she asked Rafan. “We’re still going to have to go in the front way.” A swirling gust of wind hit them so hard she staggered, and looked up quickly to see the tops of palm trees shaking like raised, angry fists. “My key won’t work back here,” she added hurriedly. “Why don’t you just come with me?”

“Because there are eyes everywhere. I can’t walk in the front door with you, go to your room, and then spend the night. It would look terrible for you and for me. But there’s a rear door by the pool. You go in the front, then come back through the hotel and open it, and I’ll meet you by the big slide and go in the back way.”

“You’ve done this before?” she said to him.

“With you. Don’t you remember?”

She paused, then smiled and nodded, recalling their romantic rendezvous after she’d returned from doing research on an outer island.

Jenna headed for a well-lit walkway around the building, smelling salty air as she neared the corner of the hotel. As she turned toward the ocean, the wind pounded her so hard her hair flew straight back behind her, and she realized that she’d been standing in the lee of the hotel.

Hunching down, she bulled her way forward. The last time she’d slipped Rafan into the hotel, the twilight had been much calmer, and she’d been so eager to get him up to her room that she’d run through the lobby to the back door.

Tonight felt very different, and it wasn’t just the storm. She had Dafoe in her life, and she felt much more settled, desirous of only him. She’d text him as soon as she got inside.

A wall of rain drenched her.

Startled, Jenna glanced up, horrified to see a waterspout ripping from the shore like a tornado. It tore a path in the sand, ripped smaller palms out by their roots, and headed straight at the hotel—at her!

Get inside! she screeched at herself.

She raced for the entrance, eyes still on the seaborne twister, and plowed into a young Maldivian man jumping from a white van, a look of unbridled panic on his face.

The impact knocked Jenna down. The young, dark-skinned man staggered toward the hotel, oblivious to the fact that his key fob was skittering across the wet concrete. She understood his fear.

A doorman raced over to help her, though Jenna was already on her feet. Together they fled to the lobby; Jenna kept running, anxious to open the rear door and get Rafan to safety. She glanced back to see the fifty-foot-tall spout smash into the hotel. The building shuddered but held; the waterspout had lost power when it moved onto land. The storm was still rocking, though, sending great flashes across the sky.

She sprinted down a hallway, realizing that the young van driver was racing ahead of her. He fled out the rear door. Into the storm?

Seconds later, she threw open the door. Rafan was close by and the guy from the van was barely forty feet away and looking back over his shoulder at her. The storm shook every leaf and palm frond in the area, raising a ruckus.

“Get inside!” she shouted at Rafan.

“What’s with him?” he asked, jerking his head at the other man. “He almost knocked me over.”

“I don’t know,” Jenna said, ushering Rafan past her and closing the door. “We collided in front of the hotel. The wind sent me flying into him as he was getting out of a van. Then a waterspout almost hit us.”

Rafan’s expression was curious and bewildered. “But what’s he doing?” Rafan asked. “Leaving a van by the entrance and running out the back of the hotel—”

Without another word, Rafan raced toward the lobby, with Jenna close behind. She remembered the Times Square bomber, the naturalized U.S. citizen who’d left an SUV loaded with a bomb in the famous district. By the time she reached the entrance, Rafan was running around the front of the white van. He threw open the sliding side door. When Jenna saw the cargo space, her heart pounded so hard she thought it would beat her to death.

* * *

Parvez had moved from the café to a car the two Mohammeds had secured for him. The vest, loaded with C-4, weighed heavily on his shoulders, but his cleric’s garb concealed it well. He’d dreaded the arrival of the van, and once it appeared, he waited for the huge explosion like a man facing his execution. No hope. No appeal. Not even from a higher power, for the higher power had sentenced him to death. He found brief promise in the waterspout and the electrical storm, but it had done nothing to stop or delay the bombing. Nothing. Parvez could have cried.

Now he watched the traitor named Rafan throw open the van door, revealing sacks of fertilizer and containers of fuel.

Yes, save me, Parvez pleaded involuntarily, realizing his only hope lay with the miserable man who stole dirt.

Do something, traitor. Grab the fuse, you infidel.

* * *

Despite the storm, Jenna detected the smell of flammables. She saw a big stack of what looked like feed sacks in the back of the van, and realized in an instant that the whole cargo area was packed with explosives.

“Run, Jenna!” Rafan shouted, though he wasn’t running.

And as much as Jenna wanted to race away, she couldn’t, because she saw a barely visible wisp of smoke whipped by the wind. She stepped closer to the van and spied an inch of fuse burning on the carpet, which was marked by a long, dark, trailing scorch mark. Without hesitation, she reached for the fiercely sparking flame. Rafan tried to grab it, too. They jostled each other. Precious seconds lost.

The fuse shrank to a nub, continuing to burn despite the lashing wind and rain. Jenna lunged, grabbed it, and despite the burning pain, she pulled the fuse away and dropped it on the wet pavement. It sizzled and died while she shook her burned index finger and thumb for several seconds. Then she realized that she was shaking and very, very cold.

Rafan’s eyes grew huge. He stared at the bomb. Jenna knew he was looking for smoke. Her own stomach was gripped by the fear that a single spark had escaped and that the world would explode.

But there was no more smoke. They’d stopped the bomb.

* * *

There would be no one-two punch, Parvez realized. Infidels! Infidels had denied him paradise, for surely a man of his deep insight, understanding, and courage would be welcomed there with open arms by seventy-two virgins. But he could not go through with the next part of the plan now that the first punch had been foiled.

True, he could walk over and set off the C-4 in the vest—and that would trigger the bomb in the van. But that was not the plan; a plan that had been devised by wiser men than he. And who was he, a humble cleric from a poor island nation, to question them? That the plan had failed—surely that was Allah’s will.

Oh, how Parvez rued the loss of his martyrdom as he rushed to slip off the vest. To have been the first martyr of the Maldives. There, it’s off. Ah, but he would have to leave that honor to Adnan.

He almost dropped the vest on the console next to him. Be careful. What do you want to do, kill yourself?

Parvez rested the bomb gently on the passenger seat and drove away quietly, knowing he would live to fight another day. Allah had spared him in the end. Allah the wise. Allah the all-knowing. Why, Allah probably already had His eyes on a poor Paki, a hungry, unclothed boy who needed paradise so much more than Parvez. The cleric, with his deeper spiritual knowledge, could find a way to satisfy himself with so much less here on earth. Parvez’s unselfishness flowed to his very fingertips. Yes, it would be only fair to give such a child the keys to paradise.

* * *

The wheelhouse stopped shaking as the power of the storm lessened. Birk sat like a supplicant on the floor by Raggedy Ass’s smelly f*cking feet. His lordship was perched with his AK-47 in the captain’s chair, while a few feet away the man who should have been in that seat was bound head to toe and lying on the deck.

The chair looked like heaven to Birk, whose hands, shoulders, back, butt, and sliced-up thumb throbbed, but the chair’s occupant, no doubt about it, was the devil incarnate. Raggedy Ass had ended Birk’s broadcast after twenty measly minutes. What’s with that? Birk had wanted the entire half hour. Rare as hen’s teeth to have a whole show’s worth of face time, but it wasn’t every day—hell, it wasn’t even every decade—that you had a talent of Birk’s magnitude reporting from the heart of a Mother Earth smackdown.

“You got diarrhea of the mouth,” Raggedy Ass told him in his thick Southern accent. “I could have said all that in five minutes flat.”—flea-a-a-at—“But no, you got to go on and on. What? You think if you talk-talk-talk it’s going to save those fingers of yours?”

The wire cutters were still attached to Birk’s thumb, the blunt edges of the blades Flex-Cuffed together, like Birk’s hands, behind his back. Christ, those f*cking blades hurt.

“Next time you’re in front of that thing,” Raggedy Ass nodded amiably at the teensy camera, “I’m going to make you hold up your thumb—and it’s not going to be attached to your hand.”

“You’re not going to do it live?” The indignity burst out of Birk before he gave himself time to think. Don’t encourage the bastard. But even after a moment’s reflection, he knew that video of his dismemberment would be f*cking priceless. How could Raggedy Ass even think of doing it off camera? An insult to injury in every possible way. What is wrong with these people?

“That disappoint you?” Raggedy Ass asked.

“No, not at all,” Birk lied. He regained his senses enough to think that maybe he could yak his way out of an on-air amputation. “Look, if you start cutting me apart like a roast chicken, I’m going to be useless to you. I’ll be in so much pain, you might as well throw me to the sharks.”

“Inshallah, I will.”

“But don’t you want me making your case for you? You start cutting through bone, man, I’m done.”

Raggedy Ass stared at him so coldly that Birk could almost feel the sharp blades bearing down.

“I can’t make idle threats,” Raggedy Ass replied matter-of-factly. “I said we’d do it if they didn’t start shutting down the plants immediately. That was hours ago, and all we’re hearing is how they’re not going to shut down a thing, so we have do to it.” He shrugged.

Oh, God. The savage climbed down from the chair, reached around Birk, and grabbed the wire cutters. “Please, I beg of you, don’t do this,” Birk shouted. The pressure only increased. “Give me a drink for God’s sake.”

His last words before he blacked out.

* * *

A doctor finished bandaging Jenna’s thumb and index finger in the emergency room at Malé’s big public hospital. The care had been first rate, the female Indian doctor kind, but Jenna still found herself shaking every time she remembered how close the fuse came to setting off a bomb that would have taken down the entire hotel, according to the fast assessment of a Maldivian police team.

“You will be okay,” the Indian doctor told her. “It is not such a bad burn. But you must keep it clean. You are very lucky.”

“I know.”

“There are some people in the waiting area who want to see you.”

Jenna figured on Nicci, and she was there, but the doctor apparently meant a contingent of U.S. intelligence agents and more Maldivian police. She and Nicci were whisked to a conference room at police headquarters, several blocks away. A Maldivian gentleman in a dark suit told Nicci she would have to wait outside, then asked Jenna if she wanted anything to eat or drink.

“Just coffee,” Jenna said, now that her hands no longer shook. “And some water.”

The police, and two men from the National Defense Force, had her look through more than a hundred photos, mostly mug shots plus a number of surveillance photos. She did not see the young man from the van. She was asked to describe the man in detail to a young female sketch artist. Alas, none of Jenna and the artist’s attempts bore much resemblance to the runaway driver.

Jenna felt herself growing tired, and perhaps the Maldivian in the dark suit noticed, because he had his people step aside so the U.S. intelligence agents could debrief her. That didn’t take long. Then a tight-lipped American in his thirties and an older white man of considerable girth led Jenna and Nicci to an SUV. As they drove back to the hotel, the senior of the two told them the bomb had been made from the same materials that Timothy McVeigh had used to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building.

Members of the Maldives National Defense Force, dressed in camouflage uniforms, now ringed the Golden Crescent, which probably made it the safest place in the city.

After thanking Nicci for sticking around, Jenna rushed to her room, flopped on the bed, and speed-dialed Dafoe.

“What a nightmare,” Jenna said. “This isn’t the country I left ten years ago.” She lay back against a cushiony headboard and told Dafoe what she and Rafan had been through.

“You pulled a fuse out of a bomb that filled the back of a van?”

When Dafoe spoke with such astonishment, it hit Jenna for the first time that what she’d done might have been amazing. She’d been in such a pell-mell mode since the attempted bombing, she hadn’t slowed to think about it much.

“Yeah, I did,” she said, “but Rafan was the one who realized something was up.” She added that her old boyfriend had also been taken for debriefing, but since she was done, she expected him back momentarily. “He’ll be staying the night, just for safety’s sake. I just want you to know that there’s nothing romantic going on,” she added. “I just don’t want him going back to his condo with a mad bomber on the loose, and with Senada’s brothers out to get him. At least there are soldiers all around this place.”

“I appreciate your telling me, but I always try to trust someone until I can’t.”

“Me, too, and sometimes it actually works—if they don’t work in TV.” Jenna laughed. Despite everything that had happened tonight, it felt great to hear Dafoe’s voice. It would have been wonderful to have had him by her side. “So what’s going on with North Korea? That’s the last place I expected to hear about all the way out here.”

Dafoe laid out Sang-mi’s revelation about the North Korean arsenal of rockets loaded with sulfates.

“I’m sorry to say that what Sang-mi told you makes a lot of sense.”

“I take it that that means something to you.”

“You bet it does.” Jenna jumped up and looked through the big glass doors that led to the balcony. Stars blazed in the tropical night like mica chips splashed across the galaxy. “Blowing up sulfates in the stratosphere in a carefully controlled way is one of the main options that the task force was going to look at. That can block just enough sunlight to cool things down. But what Sang-mi’s saying is really scary. Is she sure about what she’s hearing from her father?”

“She seems to be.”

Jenna walked onto the balcony, looking at the inky ocean that eventually wound its way to the shores of North Korea. “The iron oxide in that tanker is dangerous, but we honestly don’t know how dangerous. But there’s no question that blowing up millions of tons of sulfates is a doomsday scenario. Volcanoes have done it, so we know that sulfates definitely bring down temperatures. And they do it fast. Huge quantities, like the amounts Sang-mi is talking about, would create winter conditions for years, and that would cripple food production and probably kill billions of people before the sulfates finally dispersed. You can imagine how countries are going to react if their people are starving to death. There would be wars everywhere.”

“What kind of mind even comes up with this stuff?”

“The Supreme Leader,” Jenna said sardonically, “is a real sicko. But what bothers me most,” she went on, “is that the North Koreans are really good at exploiting the worst kinds of fears. They love to wait until world attention is totally fixed on something, and then they up the ante by doing things like launching test missiles or declaring themselves a nuclear power. Or if they suspect that the U.S. is even thinking of any kind of move against them, they remind everybody that they have thousands of rockets trained on Seoul,” the capital of South Korea, “and that they’ll burn down the city. For an incredibly poor country, they’re incredibly good at stirring things up. And you never know when they’re bluffing.”

“Sang-mi says they’re not bluffing,” Dafoe said,

“If she’s right, and they really do have thousands of rockets packed with sulfates, their timing is perfect because nobody would even want to think about five hundred thousand tons of iron oxide going into the ocean at the same time that millions of tons of sulfates are exploding into the stratosphere. I can say categorically that that would be the end of the world as we know it.”

“Well, if that isn’t bizarre enough, now I have to take you into the land of the really weird,” Dafoe said. “Sang-mi claims that GreenSpirit spoke to her this morning and that she, meaning GreenSpirit, wants you to tell the world about the North Korean rockets.”

“Really? They’ve got the wrong hero, if they think it’s me. I’ll be talking post haste with the vice president’s office about the sulfates, and let the honchos handle this.”

“Sorry to even bring it up, but Forensia begged me to ask you to put the message out there. I’ll tell her no.”

“I think you should.” Then: “What do you think?”

“I think it’s nuts, you going on the air with something like that.”

Whew. “Does Forensia really believe that Sang-mi was talking to GreenSpirit’s … spirit?”

“She sure does,” Dafoe answered.

“She seemed so normal to me.”

“Forensia? Normal? Look, Forensia’s great, and I love her like a sister, but normal? I’d never say that, and she wouldn’t want me to.”

“Point taken. If Sang-mi’s father is getting debriefed by the CIA, then our side already knows about the rockets. If they’re keeping it secret, they might have a good reason.”

“‘Might’ is the operative word,” Dafoe said. “They also might be keeping it secret because they don’t want it to look like the president’s been asleep at the wheel. The election’s in just a few days.”

“Or maybe the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. We saw plenty of that with the FBI and CIA in 2001, and then we had 9/11.”

* * *

Rafan gazed at the headstones and monuments from behind the twin palms on the south side of the cemetery. The starlight revealed very little, but he knew Senada lay in a freshly dug grave not far from his sister; few spaces remained in the cemetery, so the two friends would be almost as close in death as they had been in life.

He could feel Senada’s presence in such a tangible way that he thought perhaps some believers were correct in claiming that the dead guide the living in times of peril. Then he reminded himself that he probably felt that Senada was near because she had stood by these same trees the night she came to say good-bye to Basheera. He ached for both women so acutely that he reached out and touched the air where Senada had stood, willing to accept even a hint of the love that he’d known. But he felt nothing of her. Only the ache. And he would have to enter the cemetery to offer his final farewell without knowing if Senada’s brothers were hiding among the graves.

Don’t do this, he warned himself. This is close enough.

But he had to see her grave, to kneel beside it, to somehow let her know that he would never forget her.

This time he did not pass under the cemetery arch. He moved quietly along the periphery, knowing he would have to scurry in from the shadows on the far side. He had a flashlight, but would use it only if necessary. And he’d brought flowers, which he would lay gently on her grave.

When he stepped from the shadows onto the hallowed ground, he walked slowly, placing his feet as quietly as possible. Row upon row of graves greeted him. He grew numb to their presence, and that, more than anything, explained why Bilal caught him unawares.

“What are you doing here?” Senada’s youngest brother demanded, seizing his arm.

Rafan smelled the must of the graveyard, glimpsed crescents and a single cross engraved in stone, and thought that he would soon join the dead who surrounded him. Bilal was a big man in the prime of his youth; a “bruiser,” Jenna would have said.

“I have come to pay my respects.”

“Don’t you know that coming here could get you killed?” Bilal held Rafan in a powerful grip. “I was looking for you.”

“That’s her grave?” Rafan looked past his accoster at the simple marker with a white crescent.

Bilal nodded. “Yes, and you could—”

“I loved her,” Rafan interrupted. “I loved her dearly.” His words sounded hollow, eternally empty in the graveyard.

“That was your mistake,” Bilal said.

“No, that’s not true,” Rafan said evenly, as a man might when he feels that all is lost. “Her mistake was him.”

They both knew whom Rafan meant: the fisherman who’d beaten Senada, and whose jihadist beliefs had led to her murder.

Bilal began to cry, and he released Rafan. The young man sank to his knees and hung his head. Rafan stared at him before crouching and putting his hand on Bilal’s back.

“She raised me,” Bilal said. “She was like a mother to me. I wanted to kill him so many times. I should have. I should have killed him,” he yelled, jumping to his feet.

Rafan looked around. Only the darkest shadows stared back.

“You were her favorite,” Rafan said, only because it was true. Senada had spoken kindly of Bilal, unlike his older brothers.

“You may pray for her,” Bilal said. “You’re safe with me. I’ll be back in two days to stand guard. You can come again then. And I’m so sorry about Basheera. Senada loved her so much.”

The two men stood together at the grave of a woman they had both loved. Rafan laid his flowers on the freshly turned earth. Both men prayed. And beneath the black night and bright stars, both men wept.