Mark said, “Do you have anyone in mind for the job yet, Anson?”
“Yes. Yes, I do. My son Frank.”
That was something Anson hadn’t shared with anyone, not even Frank, until this moment. The uproar was instant and vehement. They all were talking at once right away, yelling, gesticulating. In the midst of the sudden chaos Anson saw Cindy, sitting bolt upright, as rigid and gaunt and grim-faced as the mummy of some ancient Pharaoh, staring at him with a look of such wholehearted truculent violence in her intense and glittering eyes that it struck him with an almost tangible force.
“No,” she said, a deep icy contralto that sliced through the din like a scimitar. “Not Frank. Don’t even think of sending Frank, Anson.”
The room fell silent, and stayed that way until Anson could find his voice.
“You see some problem with that, Cindy?” he asked, finally. “Five years ago you sent your only brother down there to die. Now you want to send your son? Don’t tell me that you have three more in reserve, either. No, Anson, no, we aren’t going to let you risk Frank’s life on this thing.”
Anson pressed his lips into a thin, tight line. “Frank won’t be at risk. We know what mistakes we made the last time. We aren’t going to repeat them.”
“Can you be sure of that?”
“We’re going to take every precaution. Don’t you think I’ll do everything in my power to see to it that Frank gets safely through the mission? But this is a war, Cindy. Risk is inevitable. So is sacrifice.”
But she was inexorable. “Tony was your sacrifice. You aren’t required to make a second one. What kind of crazy demonstration of macho toughness is this, anyway? Do you think we don’t know what you’ve already given, and how much it cost you? Frank’s the hope of the future, Anson. He’s the next generation of leadership here. You know that: everyone does. He mustn’t be wasted. Even if there’s only one chance in ten that he wouldn’t come back, that’s too much of a chance.—Besides, there’s someone else at the ranch who’s far better fitted for the job than Frank is.”
“Who’s that?” Anson demanded harshly. “You? Me? Or do you mean Andy, maybe?”
“Talk to Khalid,” Cindy said. “He’s got someone who can do this job just fine.”
Anson was mystified. “Who? Tell me. Who?”
“Talk to Khalid,” she said.
“I would want certain safeguards for him,” Khalid said. “He is my eldest son. His life is sacred to me.”
He stood before them straight as a soldier on patrol, as cool and self-possessed as though he and not Anson were in charge of this meeting. Only in the moment of entering the chart room had Khalid betrayed a touch of uneasiness, seeing so many family members gathered there, like a court in session with Anson as the high judge; but that had very quickly passed and his normal aura of preternatural calm had reasserted itself.
Khalid was an unfamiliar figure here. He was never present at any of the chart room meetings; he had amply let it be known years ago that the Resistance was no concern of his. Indeed he very rarely had been in the main house at all in recent years. Khalid spent most of his time in and about his little cabin on the far side of the vegetable patch, with the equally reclusive Jill and their multitude of strange, lovely-looking children. There he carved his little statuettes and the occasional larger work, and raised crops for his family, and sat in the wonderful California sunlight reading and rereading the Word of God. Sometimes he went roving along the back reaches of the mountain, hunting the wild animals that had come to flourish there in these days of diminished human population, the deer and boars and such. His son Rasheed occasionally went with him; more usually he went alone. He lived a private, inward life, needing very little beyond the company of his wife and children, and often content to hold himself apart even from them.
Anson said, “What safeguards do you mean, specifically?”
“I mean I will not let you send him to his death. He must not perish the way Tony perished.”
“Specifically, I said.”
“Very well. He will not go on this mission unless you prepare the way fully for him. What I mean by that is that you must be altogether sure that you are sending him to the right place, and when he gets there, the doors of it must be open to him. He must know the passwords that will admit him. I understand about these passwords. He must be able to walk into the place of Prime in complete safety.”
“We have Andy working on extracting the location of Prime and the password protocols right this minute. We won’t be sending Rasheed until we have them, I assure you.”
“Assurance is not enough. This is a sacred promise?”
“A sacred promise, yes,” Anson said.
“There is more,” said Khalid. “You will see to it that he comes safely back. There will be cars waiting, several cars, and care will be taken that confusion is created so that the police do not know which car he is in, and so he can be returned to the ranch.”
“Agreed.”
“You agree very quickly, Anson. But I must be convinced that you are sincere, or otherwise I will see to it that he does not go. I know how to make a tool, but I know how to blunt its edge, too.”
“I lost my brother to this project,” Anson said. “I haven’t forgotten what that felt like. I don’t intend to lose your son.”
“Very good. See to that, Anson.”
Anson made no immediate reply. He wished there were some way that he could transmit telepathically to Khalid his absolute conviction that this time the thing would be done right, that Andy would find in Borgmann’s archive every scrap of information that they would need in order to send Rasheed to the true location of Prime and to open all the hidden doors for him, so that Rasheed could carry out the assassination and make good his escape. But there was no way for Anson to do that. He could only ask for Khalid’s help, and hope for the best.
Khalid was watching him calmly.
That cool gaze of Khalid was unnerving. He was so alien, was Khalid. That was how he had seemed to the sixteen-year-old Anson on that day, decades ago, when he had turned up here out of the blue, traveling with Cindy; and after all this time, he was alien still. Even though he had lived among them for so many years, had married into their family, had shared in the splendor and isolation of their mountaintop existence as though he were a born Carmichael himself. He still remained, Anson thought, something mysterious, something other. It wasn’t so much that he was of foreign birth, or that he had that strange, almost unearthly physical beauty, or that he worshipped a god named Allah and lived by the book of Mohammed, who had been a desert prince in some unimaginably alien land thousands of years ago. That was part of it, but only part. Those things couldn’t account for Khalid’s formidable inner discipline, that granite-hard calm of his, the lofty detachment of his spirit. No, no, the explanation of his mystery must lie somewhere in Khalid’s childhood, in the very shaping of him, born as he had been in the earliest and harshest years of the Conquest and raised in a town infested by Entities, under hardships and tensions whose nature Anson could scarcely begin to guess at. It was those hardships and tensions that must have led to his becoming what he was. But Khalid never would speak of his early years.
“There’s one thing I’d like to know,” Anson said. “If you have so little desire to place Rasheed at risk, why did you give him the same assassin training you gave Tony? I remember very clearly the time you told me that you didn’t give a damn about killing Prime, that the whole project was simply no concern of yours. So surely it wasn’t your intention to set up Rasheed as someone to be put into play if Tony failed.”