Andrea turned away without a word. She didn’t like being refused, so she now had twice the incentive to fool the guard.
Slipping into one of the hatchways on her right, she entered the main area of the ship. She would have to hurry before they took Kayn below. She could attempt to climb down to the lower deck, but there would surely be another guard posted there. She tried the handles on a few doors, until she found one that was not locked. It was some sort of recreation lounge with a sofa and a dilapidated ping-pong table. At the end was a large open porthole with a view of the stern.
Et voilà.
Andrea put one of her small feet on the corner of the table and the other on the sofa. She put her arms through the porthole, then her head, and slid her body through to the other side. Less than ten feet away, a sailor wearing an orange vest and protective headphones was signalling to the pilot of the BA-609 as the wheels of the aircraft hit the deck with a squeal. Andrea’s hair blew about in the wind from the rotor blades. She crouched down instinctively, even though she had sworn countless times that if she ever found herself under a helicopter she wouldn’t imitate the characters in films who ducked their heads even though the blades were almost five feet above them.
Of course, it was one thing imagining a situation and another being in it…
The door of the BA-609 started to open.
Andrea sensed movement behind her. She was about to turn around when she was thrown to the ground and pinned against the deck. She felt the heat of the metal against her cheek as someone sat on her back. She twisted with all her strength but couldn’t free herself. Although she was finding it difficult to breathe, she managed to peer at the aircraft and saw a tanned, handsome young man wearing sunglasses and a sports jacket exit the plane. Behind him came a bull of a man weighing about 220 pounds, or so it seemed to Andrea from the deck. When the brute looked at her she registered no expression in his brown eyes. An ugly scar ran from his left eyebrow to his cheek. Finally there followed a thin, smallish man, dressed completely in white. The pressure on her head increased and she could barely distinguish this last passenger as he crossed her limited field of vision – all she could see were the shadows of the slowing rotor blades on the deck.
‘Let me go, OK? The fucking crazy paranoid is already in his cabin, so get up off my back, damn it.’
‘Mr Kayn is neither crazy nor paranoid. I’m afraid he suffers from agoraphobia,’ her captor replied in Spanish.
His voice was not that of a sailor. Andrea remembered well that educated, serious tone, so measured and aloof, that had always reminded her of Ed Harris. When the pressure on her back eased, she jumped to her feet.
‘You?’
Standing before her was Father Anthony Fowler.
12
225 SOMERSET AVENUE,
WASHINGTON, DC
Tuesday, 11 July 2006. 11:29 a.m.
The taller of the two men was also the younger, so he was always the one who fetched the coffee and the food, as a sign of respect. His name was Nazim and he was nineteen years old. He had been in Kharouf’s group for fifteen months and he was happy, for finally his life had found meaning, a path.
Nazim idolised Kharouf. They had met at the mosque in Clive Cove, New Jersey. It was a place full of ‘westerniseds’ as Kharouf called them. Nazim enjoyed playing basketball near the mosque, which was where he had got to know his new friend, who was twenty years older than him. Nazim had been flattered that someone so mature, and a college graduate besides, would speak to him.
Now he opened the car door and struggled into the passenger seat, which is not easy when you are six foot two inches tall.
‘I only found a burger bar. I got salads and hamburgers.’ He gave the bag to Kharouf, who smiled.
‘Thanks, Nazim. But I must tell you something, and I don’t want you to become angry.’
‘What?’
Kharouf took the hamburgers out of their boxes and threw them out of the window.
‘Those burger bars add lecithin to their hamburgers and there’s a chance they could contain pork. That’s not halal,’ he said, referring to the Islamic restriction on pork. ‘I’m sorry. But the salads are fine.’
Nazim was disappointed but at the same time he felt reassured. Kharouf was his mentor. Whenever Nazim made a mistake, Kharouf corrected him respectfully and with a smile, which was the complete opposite to the way Nazim’s parents had treated him over the past few months, constantly yelling at him ever since he’d met Kharouf and started attending another mosque that was smaller and more ‘committed’.
In the new mosque the imam not only read from the sacred Koran in Arabic, but also preached in that tongue. Despite the fact that Nazim had been born in New Jersey, he read and wrote the prophet’s language perfectly. His family was from Egypt. Through the hypnotic preaching of the imam, Nazim began to see the light. He broke away from the life he had been leading. He got good grades and could have begun studying engineering that year, but instead Kharouf found him a job in an accounting firm run by a believer.
His parents disagreed with his decision. They also didn’t understand why he locked himself in the bathroom to pray. But as painful as these changes were, they slowly accepted them. Until the incident with Hana.
Nazim’s remarks were becoming increasingly aggressive. One evening his sister Hana, who was two years older than him, came in at two in the morning after having drinks with her friends. Nazim was waiting for her and scolded her about the way she was dressed and for being a little drunk. The insults went back and forth. Finally their father stepped in and Nazim pointed his finger at him.
‘You’re weak. You don’t know how to control your women. You let your daughter work. You let her drive and you don’t insist that she wear a veil. Her place is in the home until she has a husband.’
Hana started to protest and Nazim slapped her. That was the last straw.
‘I may be weak, but at least I am master of this house. Get out! I don’t know you. Leave!’
Nazim went to Kharouf’s with only the clothes on his back. That night he cried a little, but the tears didn’t last. Now he had a new family. Kharouf was both his father and his older brother. Nazim admired him a great deal because Kharouf, who was thirty-nine, was a real jihadist and had been in training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He shared his knowledge with only a handful of young men who, like Nazim, had suffered countless insults. In school, even on the street, people mistrusted him the instant they saw his olive skin and hooked nose and realized he was an Arab. Kharouf told him it was because they feared him, because Christians knew that the Islamic faithful were stronger and more numerous. Nazim liked that. It was time that he commanded proper respect.
Kharouf raised the window on the driver’s side.
‘Six minutes and then we’ll go.’
Nazim gave him a worried look. His friend noticed that something wasn’t right.
‘What’s the matter, Nazim?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s never nothing. Come on, you can tell me.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Is it fear? Are you afraid?’
‘No. I’m a soldier of Allah!’
‘Soldiers of Allah are allowed to be afraid, Nazim.’
‘Well, I’m not.’
‘Is it firing the gun?’
‘No!’
‘Come on, you’ve had forty hours of practice at my cousin’s slaughterhouse. You must have shot more than a thousand cows.’