Delilah followed the protesters and watched them reestablish themselves in Parliament Square. Her earlier estimate was low, she saw, and she revised it to about three hundred overall. Still, not much of a turnout, especially given the weather. The Pakistanis and Arabs were generally middle-aged and conservatively dressed; the whites were younger and favored bandanas, facial hair, and piercings. The Pakistanis held up placards declaring DRONES CAN’T CARE and STOP KILLING CHILDREN and ARREST THE WAR CRIMINALS. The white kids seemed more to favor performance art, lying down on the street while their comrades chalked crime-scene outlines of their bodies. A reporter and cameraman moved among them all, interviewing anyone inclined to talk. The police gave them plenty of space, as though such a motley bunch was barely worth taking seriously. The whole thing felt pointless. Would the British prime minister and the American defense secretary even notice something like this, much less give a damn? It was a wonder these people even tried, and that more of them didn’t become terrorists themselves.
She took a few pictures — routine behavior for any self-respecting professional photographer. For a while, there was chanting—“This Is What Democracy Looks Like” and “Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect”; some earnest speeches; attempts to engage the few reporters who had bothered to show. The size of the crowd gradually increased, and by the end of an hour Delilah estimated well over a thousand people. The atmosphere was different now, too — tenser, more expectant, somehow determined.
And then she saw why. A woman, her full black hair cascading to her shoulders and contrasting perfectly with a stunning aquamarine Camilla Olson calf-length dress, was moving to the front of the crowd. It was Fatima, of course, and she had arrived, whether by accident or design, at just the right moment for the crowd to be maximally receptive to her presence.
She walked confidently and unhurriedly, exchanging a few words here, a pair of cheek kisses there, and a kind of electricity seemed to ripple through the crowd in the wake of her passage. Someone handed her a bullhorn and a crate was placed upside down on the ground. She stood on the crate and faced the crowd, which began cheering and applauding. She waited, offering a smile that was both dazzling and yet somehow also incongruously sad, and the applause and cheering doubled in intensity. In addition to her beauty, which was unmistakable even from a distance, she obviously knew how to work a crowd, reflecting its passions and, in so doing, enhancing them.
Delilah raised the Nikon, extended the lens, and focused. In close-up, Fatima was even more striking, with full, sensual lips; perfect, amber-hued skin; and eyes so dark they matched her hair. A strong jaw not only failed to detract from her overall femininity, but even enhanced it. Physically, she looked younger than the thirty claimed in her file, but an abundance of poise and style, which Delilah tended to associate with a bit more life experience, balanced her otherwise youthful appearance. The only flaw was a pair of dark circles under her eyes. Overall, she wore her makeup expertly, and if the circles were visible despite the presence of a quality under-eye concealer, they must have been fairly significant. Evidence of a coffee habit? Insomnia? A troubled conscience?
Delilah had to admit, the woman didn’t look like a terrorist. But she also understood that “what a terrorist should look like” was a silly and dangerous concept. Remember, she’d been told in the classes on terrorist psychology, they’re not monsters. They’re people. You can’t be fooled by their outward appearance anymore than you can be by the smooth veneer of a serial killer. Eichmann, after all, was a balding, bespectacled accountant.
After a few moments, Fatima raised the bullhorn to her lips. The audience immediately grew quiet.
“Dear Mister Secretary,” she began, the bullhorn carrying the words all the way to the back of the crowd, “when an American drone missile kills a child in a tribal society, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. It has nothing to do with al Qaeda.”
Even with the distortion of amplification, Delilah could hear that the voice was feminine, the tone confident, and the accent international school British, poised incongruously between British precision and American flatness.
“You are creating your own enemies with these cruel, cowardly weapons, enemies who are driven not by ideology but rather by a universally human sense of revenge and despair. And when you bomb funerals and rescuers, you multiply the hatred a thousandfold. Among the dead might be militants, yes, but inevitably the deaths of so many innocents produces a new generation of leaders, who spontaneously emerge in furious retaliation for these savage attacks on their territories, their tribes, their families. You are fighting fire with gasoline, and, in so doing, causing a conflagration that rages hotter and burns more broadly with every strike you launch.”
The rhetoric was perhaps a bit florid, but in general Delilah didn’t disagree with the sentiments. She had no illusions about how many of her country’s problems, and those of the West generally, were self-made. But she wasn’t a politician. Her role was to try to keep the blaze from getting further out of control, no matter how much the politicians did to stoke it. It was a dismal job, thankless, and possibly, in the end, futile. But what else could she do — shrug off the possibility that one of the people Fatima described, no matter how righteous his outrage, might unleash aerosolized sarin on a subway platform, or in a shopping mall, or in a school? In many ways, the politicians presented people like Delilah with a never-ending series of faits accomplis. Maybe she was enabling them. Maybe if she and people like her told them all to fuck off, went on strike, refused to continue to put out the fires the politicians were continually feeding, it would shock them out of their idiocy. But in the meantime, more people, many more, would certainly die.
She sighed. If only Rain could understand that, maybe he could understand why she couldn’t get out of the life. Not yet, anyway. Because how could she live with carnage and catastrophe, no matter what its ultimate cause, knowing she might have stopped it, and instead stood aside?
Fatima spoke for twenty minutes, focusing her appeal both on America’s values and on its self-interest, her remarks frequently interrupted by applause. Delilah watched through the lens, periodically getting a picture. She liked the distance the camera created for her. Sometimes she needed it.
Fatima concluded by saying, “One of your own greatest Americans, Martin Luther King, understood this well. King said, ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hatred cannot drive out hatred: only love can do that.’ Please, Mister Secretary. Learn this lesson. Turn away from darkness. Turn away from hate. Before they consume us all.”
She stepped down from the crate, surrounded by thunderous cheering and applause. The TV reporter hurried over, microphone in hand, followed by her cameraman. Delilah was struck that not once had Fatima mentioned her dead brothers. The crowd knew already, certainly, so perhaps she surmised that her real audience, the hard men, the ones who hated not passionately but coldly, patiently, would respect her reticence, and feel in it a bond based on shared but unspoken pain, a bond that would draw them to her, and from there to her brother, the means by which their hatred could at last find ecstatic expression. For was it not true that when the student is ready, the teacher appears?
Delilah began slipping through the crowd. She was aware of Fatima as the enemy, yes. But that awareness was walled off from her overall consciousness, buried deep in her mind along with the details of her true identity and affiliations, a deep code with no current attachment or relevance to the running of the external program. She was a photographer, here on assignment. Fatima was an intriguing subject for a story. She hoped things would go well — the magazine would be happy.