Screwing the cap back on the jar and laying the tweezers atop the lid, Bashar stepped away from the tank and went to his cigar humidor. As if by magic, a lackey appeared and snipped the end off the cigar, lighting up his master, and then vanishing into a side room.
Concentrating on his cigar and still completely failing to acknowledge the presence of the bomb-maker by so much as a single glance in his direction, Bashar issued his last proclamations on the subject of Siamese fighting fish.
"There is a lesson here. An important one. We must always fight and we must always prevail. We must never tire, lest we should lose our balls. For if we should lose our balls, we shall no longer be men, and then we shall inevitably lose our lives as well."
"You are truly wise, Excellency," the bomb-maker had then replied, and after a respectful pause, added, "Have you perchance reviewed the plan I presented?"
Bashar replied that he had, and that it had gained his approval.
"You may proceed," he told Dalkimoni, continuing not to look in his direction. But added, "You have left out the traitor Farouk Al-Kaukji. The Rais himself has asked that something be done about this poisonous little toad."
"Don't worry about Farouk." Dalkimoni now spoke confidently, for he had already made ironclad arrangements to deal harshly with the traitor. "You may assure the Rais that he shall be taken care of quite soon."
"You meant immediately, did you not?" Bashar asked.
"Yes, Excellency. Of course. Immediately. Do not fear. It shall be done. Immediately."
"Good. I had not doubted this."
Bashar had then left the office without uttering another word, leaving the bomb-maker standing by himself just inside the open door inhaling a sour cloud of second-hand cigar smoke.
Dalkimoni now understood that he was dismissed. He too left the building for his villa.
Back in Berlin, Farouk Al-Kaukji had been released by the German cops due to pressure from above. The federal government did not relish the dirt that a trial would dredge up.
Germany's notorious scandal sheets and tabloid television media would have a field day — Der Stern, he'd already learned, was already working on a cover story — and some of the displaced muck would certainly wind up covering a few powerful men in the Bundestag who had strong business and political ties to Tehran. This could not be permitted to happen.
With charges against him dropped, Farouk Al-Kaukji disappeared immediately. He was spirited through various safe houses to Frankfurt, where another air-freight escape was being prepared by a surviving cell of the terrorist underground.
"Go with Allah," Farid Housek — who had been released on bail — bid him, hugging and kissing Al-Kaukji as he eased himself into a shipping container similar to the one in which his leader had fled Germany. "For those among the holy shall be blessed with everlasting grace."
Al-Kaukji kissed and hugged his cousin in return, then checked his oxygen supply and the seals on the pressurized interior lining and made sure that the freight module's interior light worked.
Everything seemed in order. The container might have been cramped, but he had been supplied with all the comforts of home for his journey. There was a pocket-sized edition of the Q'uran, plenty of snack food and canned soda, his iPad full of American porn, even some old Playboys and a bottle in which to take a leak when it became necessary.
There was also a roll of toilet paper, but he didn't see what it would be for, unless for wiping his dick if he got too carried away from watching all the fucking and sucking. Al-Kaukji tried to make himself as comfortable as possible. After all, for the next fifteen hours or so, this crate would be his home.
Two hours later, the crate was being forklift-loaded onto the baggage compartment of Brussels Airlines flight number 787, Frankfurt-Tehran.
At the same time, a passenger named Sadoon Daher, a Cairo college student, bid so-long to his new girlfriend, Ulrike. She'd met him on the Ku'damm and had proven to be an expert in the Teutonic art of playing the blue-veined piccolo.
It had been an unforgettable two weeks of magic flute practice, with memories of Ulrike's flying ass and bouncing boobs enough to last him through many weeks of wanking material. Until he could find another blonde girl with humungous lungs to play the flute with, that is. And Ulrike had given him a new iBippy-capable boom box as a parting token of her affection.
The boom box went into Sadoon's luggage, and was placed only a few feet from where Al-Kaukji's freight container was located, with Al-Kaukji inside flipping through the Playboy as he ate sparingly, crumbs falling on the naked crotches of the blonde twins that the caption said were from the American town of Modesto, California, home of locally produced wines of international distinction.
The Brussels Airlines flight 787 was a direct flight whose route swung it steadily southward. The jet airliner's flight plan called most of the journey to be made over water, crossing first the Adriatic and then the Mediterranean seas before transiting land again, hours later, as it passed over the littoral coast of Lebanon. The Alpine regions of Switzerland would mark the plane's last overflight of land for another five hours of travel time.
The flight passed over the Arlberg valleys at eight in the morning at twenty-five thousand feet. It had reached its cruising altitude forty-five minutes before the lovely Ulrike's present did what the MISIRI action cell in Berlin that used her as a convenient gofer and frequent pump had programmed it to do.
A combination of flight time and altitude — this bomb had a dual timer/barometric blast initiator mechanism — triggered the ice-cube fuse of the bomb which had been secreted in a sheet metal-sided cargo hamper in forward baggage compartment 14L, located just aft of the pilot's cabin and below the "B" in the Brussels Airlines logo.
Farouk Al-Kaukji was arguably the first casualty of the explosion, feeling the blast effects a third of a second before anyone else on the plane was incinerated. Altogether, it was a strange way to die.
Melting, shattering, exploding — all three at once. Without warning or preamble. Without absolution or transition. Dying in the flash of a moment, dead even as the realization of what was happening was making its way along nerve channels leading to the brain.
After that, he was nothing. No Allah, no Islamic paradise of Behesht Zahra, no ageless harlots to warm eternity awaited him. Unlike Sadoon Daher, Al-Kaukji didn't even have the most fleeting memory of Ulrike's winsome smile and nubile ass to speed him on his one-way trip to nowhere. The overtaxed and overstimulated neurons of Al-Kaukji's cerebral wetware were far too busy registering the panic at the death of his body for anything as complicated as that.
Far below, twenty-eight thousand feet below, to be exact, it was ski season in the picturesque valleys, mountain passes and high meadows of the Glarner Alpen. On the snow-covered slopes around the trendy Swiss Alpine village of Chur, colorfully dressed skiers were startled by the sudden fireball in the skies and the thunder of multiple explosions that quickly followed the sighting.
For most the experience would begin and end there. For less fortunate others, it would have lasting consequences or be the cause of sudden death amid the festive atmosphere of a carefree ski holiday. As the plane broke apart in midair, jagged fragments of fuselage, gouts of flaming fuel and falling debris of every kind subjected the ski slopes to an unexpected aerial bombardment.
At least one skier had his limbs torn off by flying chunks of razor-edged steel, and several more had their brains bashed in by miscellaneous objects, including the decapitated head of one of the flight attendants, which crashed into the hapless skier it chanced to strike like a cannonball made of meat and bone.