In her own room—she was entitled to her own room now that she was a full houri—Petra kept the letters she received from Besma. All of them spoke of how much the Moslem girl missed her sister and friend. None of them asked about Petra's life. Petra had been very clear in the first letter she'd been able to send, "Please, please, please never ask me what I do here." The letters had to go through Ishmael because Besma's father would have gone ballistic if she'd been caught receiving mail from or sending it to a famous brothel.
She reread the letters, sometimes. One in particular, she reread often.
"Fudail is dead. I could not take his manhood, but I did scratch out his eyes when he tried to do to me what he did to you. And, perhaps because I am small, he thought he didn't need his friends to help. I scratched out his eyes and then stabbed the pig through the heart.
"His mother, the lying bitch, said that her son did no such thing. My father, shortly before divorcing her, swore that it could only have been self defense. It was my word against al Khalifa's, with my father's testimony weighing heavily in the balance. The judges let me go.
"Al Khalifa, so I understand, has taken residence in the brothel here in Kitznen. Father won't discuss it, but Ishmael says it is so.
"Of course, you know I would never plan on doing such a thing to my poor, demented stepbrother."
It was that last line, coupled with the letter Besma had left in her great-grandmother's journal, that convinced Petra that Fudail had never tried to commit any crime against Besma, but that she had ruthlessly blinded and murdered him.
"Good for you, Besma," Petra said every time she reread the letter.
Petra thought upon that very letter, even as the grotesquely fat customer behind her ground his passion into her anus and squeezed the flesh over her hips hard enough to bruise. It helped . . . a little.
The fat man straining her anus was a frequent customer. She knew his name and preferences and shouted out in feigned passion, and in English, "Fuck me, Claude, fuck me!" while slamming herself backwards against him. He stank, but then they all stank. What matter; slaves had no right to object to stench. They could, however, at least think, Fuck you, you clod, fuck you.
When the customer was finished, while the filthy drool from his slack mouth dripped onto her back, Petra stayed still, remaining on all fours, his penis inside her upraised rear end. Eventually the customer pulled out, wiping his penis off on the cheeks of her ass. He stood, adjusted his robe and began to walk to the shower. Apparently rethinking it, he turned back and patted her posterior gently. "Good girl," he said, before leaving the bedroom. "Nice fuck." On his waddling way, he dropped two silver dirhem in a plate on a small table by the bathroom door.
Sex was cheap in the Caliphate, as cheap as female Nazrani slaves.
OSI Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, 17 June, 2112
"All rested up, John?"
Hamilton just snarled. Eight days, including travel time, did not amount to much of a rest.
The meeting was small, just Caruthers, Hamilton, and an unfamiliar woman who, despite wearing more or less fashionable female business garb, had something of the medical look about her, somehow. Caruthers didn't introduce her and she didn't introduce herself except as "Mary."
Hamilton was reasonably sure her name was neither "Mary" nor anything close to it. Mary was older, perhaps forty, tall, blond and . . .
Stop it! She's not Laurie and she doesn't even look much like Laurie.
Caruthers snapped his fingers in front of Hamilton's face. "Knock it off, John. Pay attention. This is important."
"Oh. Sorry."
Mary touched a button and three holographic images appeared above the table in front of Hamilton. Each was a more or less natural photo, not mug shots, of three men in white jackets of the type Hamilton associated with science and research.
Mary's right index finger pointed at the leftmost of the men Hamilton was already thinking of as "scientists."
"This is Dr. Claude Oliver Meara," she said. "Ph.D., Microbiology. He disappeared from his home near Atlanta about six months ago. He was under suspicion of committing statutory rape when he fled. A search of his house after his disappearance indicates a strong predilection for pederasty."
"We tracked him to Montreal, actually, before losing him," Caruthers added, raising a single eyebrow. You thought your little group of Frenchie separatists was so innocent and harmless, his mocking glance seemed to say.
Mary's finger moved to the next photo. That one was tall and slender, but bald, and almost unbelievably ugly. "Dr. Guillaume Sands. Ph.D. Biochemistry. Also disappeared. Also from Atlanta."
"Also via Montreal," Caruthers added, "which he was from, as a matter of fact. Just goes to show we still can't trust the Frogs."
Her finger lingered over the last picture for a moment, an especially nerdy looking character, before she said, "Dr. John Johnston IV. Epidemiology. Same story. I actually know this one, personally. Rude, arrogant bastard."
"Microbiology, biochemistry, and epidemiology? Why don't I like the sound of that?"
"Nobody likes the sound of that, John," Caruthers said.
"Okay . . . they disappeared. Where to?"
It was Caruthers' turn to show a picture, this one a high-definition satellite photo. "Here, we think." The three scientists disappeared to be replaced by a much larger view of two mountain-girt, snow- covered castles. One of these had a prominent, golden dome apparently grafted on as an afterthought. Certainly it didn't fit the architecture of the whole.
"The Caliphate? You want me to go inside the Caliphate? That's suicidal."
"For you or for them? Oh, never mind, we'll get to 'suicidal' later. Let me assure you, though, that the move has not been suicidal for them; quite the opposite."
"Let me understand;" Hamilton said, "we are talking about some kind of biological warfare agent being developed by the Caliphate to attack us?"
"More to counterattack us, we think," offered Mary.
Hamilton cocked his head to one side, quizzically. "Counter- attack?"
"It should be obvious to you, John," Caruthers said, "that we've pretty much cleaned up our Moslem problems around the periphery. There are effectively none openly left in North or South America. The last of the Pacific islands that are of interest to us were cleared in the campaign you participated in, in the Philippines. Africa south of the Sahara has few that are not enslaved and none that are not oppressed. Japan and China—Australia, too—exterminated or drove out theirs long ago. Except for infiltrators coming across from the European Caliphate, and the odd group of raiders from the other Caliphate, those left in the Russian Empire are illiterate serfs, bound to the land. The traditional Moslem lands . . . the grandly named Caliphate of Islam, Triumphant, is a virtual wasteland. And Israel finally learned the lessons Himmler and Eichmann sought to teach, as well.
"All that's left is Europe. It's only a matter of time before we undertake Reconquista there, too."
Hamilton gestured with a hand, palm up, and a one-shouldered shrug. "Yes, all that's obvious enough. Tell me something new."