Rawls started slamming the bag anew with his gloves. “I call it a load of shit. A Texas Ranger who thinks she’s Wyatt Earp and an ex-Green Beret with a hair across his ass—they’re your problems.”
“I messed up the Masters thing, for sure. But you should remember it was the Balcones land deal that poked Caitlin Strong like a stick. And, last time I checked, you were front and center on that one.”
“So what would you suggest?”
“Damage control, like I already said. Maybe I didn’t go far enough. Maybe you need to go farther.”
“Against a Texas Ranger and Rambo? Others who’ve gone up against these two haven’t fared so well, from what I’ve been told.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Cray.”
“I’m glad you said that, Sam Bob, because it gives me call to do what I should’ve done five minutes ago.”
“What’s that?”
“This,” Rawls said, and clicked off the call on his Bluetooth device.
57
OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
“Hey, mister, you wanna play?”
Hatim Abd al-Aziz turned in his window seat in the big plane’s rear section to look at the young boy sitting next to him. The boy had set up an old-fashioned checkers game on his tray table. His parents and older siblings were sleeping abreast of one another, across the aisle in the plane’s center seating section.
“I’m not very good,” he told the boy.
“How can you be bad at checkers? And don’t let me win, either,” the boy said, making the first move. “Your turn, mister.”
Hatim Abd al-Aziz forced a smile, and then a move. That wasn’t his real name, and he’d done his best to strike from his mind and memory the one given him at birth, since that person no longer existed. He’d taken the name Hatim because it meant “determined and decisive,” while Abd al-Aziz meant “servant of the powerful.” Especially appropriate, because he lived to serve Allah and nothing else. He did as Allah willed, and always had, ever since the time, as a boy, when he’d loosened the lug nuts on the wheels of his soccer team’s bus and hid behind a tree to watch what came next. He’d been thrown off the team for fighting and figured that if he didn’t get to play, then neither should anyone else. The bus had spun across the road at fifty kilometers per hour, knocking vehicles from its path like the flippers on an old-fashioned pinball machine. Several of his teammates were hurt, but none had been killed.
Which disappointed the young man destined to become Hatim Abd al-Aziz.
“You really are bad,” the boy was saying now. “I don’t think you’re paying attention.”
“I have a lot on my mind.”
“Work?”
“I love what I do.”
The boy cocked his gaze across the aisle, toward the sleeping form of his parents, who were resting against each other under a single blanket. “My dad hates his job.”
“That’s too bad.”
“He makes a lot of money, but he hates it. I hear him talking to my mom sometimes.”
“Probably because he doesn’t believe in what he does.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Al-Aziz began paying more attention to the game of checkers. He found himself losing badly. “A man must believe. It’s where the love of one’s work, one’s duty, comes from.”
He began studying the board, seeking a strategy to seize the advantage from the boy, who’d already jumped five of his pieces and was marching unchecked across al-Aziz’s side.
“I don’t know what that means, either.”
Al-Aziz’s first kill had been when he was just a bit older, a few years after he sabotaged the bus. It was a young woman his own age who refused to wear a veil, calling herself secular. Totally acceptable, as was her promiscuousness, in Western-leaning Turkey, but not to him. So, one night he pretended to give in to her overtures, leaving her in the woods to die after he bashed her skull in with a rock. At that point, it was the greatest moment of al-Aziz’s life.
He’d been fifteen at the time, twenty years ago now, when no one had dared to contemplate the existence of the Islamic State to which he’d dedicated his life—first as a soldier, then quickly rising through the ranks as the group formed its hierarchy and system of succession on the fly. His fluency in several languages made him a great asset, and his penchant for violence fueled his even faster rise. Today, many believed that what the world knew as ISIS was on the run, both its numbers and its influence declining. But members of the cadre, like al-Aziz, knew the group was just biding its time, picking its spots, lying in wait for the right moment to make its impact felt in a way that would secure its legacy and service to Allah forever.
And now, that moment had come.
“King me!” the boy pronounced, as al-Aziz realized that winning the game was impossible.
This game, anyway, he thought, as he kinged the boy. Back in Syria, he trained boys of this age to behead men kneeling at their feet. How to handle the heaviness of the sword and turn its weight in their favor. The angle, the aim, the cut—it was all about technique.