“Believe me, I will. It’s the least I can do for the soldiers you killed today.”
He could almost sense the mocking laughter behind the veil. “You know I could have killed you, back at the museum.”
Kismet felt a chilly whisper of déjà vu. When he spoke, he felt he was reciting the words from a script burned in his memory. “Why didn’t you?”
He knew exactly what the assassin was going to say, or at least the substance, but his expectations were proven wrong. Instead of speaking, the assassin remained silent for several seconds, then abruptly flashed into motion.
Kismet squeezed the trigger reflexively, snapping off a shot that pierced the air where an instant before the assassin’s laughing eyes had been. He missed by a hair’s breadth and immediately began tracking the movement with the barrel of the pistol, but the assassin remained a moment ahead of his impulse to fire. The Glock barked several times in succession, but the bullets zipped ineffectually past their target. He stopped firing when his foe ducked around an enormous stack of unused masonry blocks, and resumed the foot chase with the gun still locked in his right hand.
As he approached the corner around which his quarry had disappeared, he was able to distinguish a strident cry in Arabic. The words were simple enough for him to translate.It was a cry for help. While the tone was several octaves above the low voice the assassin had used, Kismet had no doubt that the same person was now summoning help, perhaps from the workers on the site. Underneath the shouted words however, there was a strange humming noise, like a building electrical current.
Ready for anything, Kismet raised the Glock and rounded the corner.
A sea of faces gazed back at him. Hundreds, possibly thousands of men, young and old, armed with crude signs demanding that the United States leave their country, as well as sticks, stones and at least a few AK-47 assault rifles, stood their ground directly ahead of Kismet. To a man, they were barefoot. The assassin had already vanished into the throng, blending chameleon-like into the surroundings, which left him alone to face the wrath of the mob.
It dawned on Kismet right then that the construction site in which he now stood was not a stadium or high-rise office complex, but rather the Al-Rahman mosque, which upon completion would be the second largest in the country and certainly one of the largest houses of worship on the planet. Not only was his presence an affront to the collective political will of the group before him, he was also insulting their faith by standing on holy ground.
No one moved for a long, eternal moment. Then, from somewhere in the back of the crowd, a shout went up, demanding that the blood of the infidel be shed. The tide turned and the outraged sea roared toward him like a tsunami.
Six
At nine o’clock that morning, roughly fifteen minutes before Kismet and Chiron had set out with their escort to interview Mr. Aziz at the Baghdad Museum, a very different sort of meeting was taking place not far from the route chosen by Colonel Buttrick. The assemblage was open to any male resident of the city, but implicit in the invitation was the message that those who chose to attend ought to have a deep belief that there was no God but God — Allah in the local parlance — and an abiding faith in the guidance of the imams, the spiritual heirs to the Prophet Mohammed. The meeting — a protest rally — was for, of, and by the Shiite citizens of the city, which accounted for roughly half its population. Baghdad was a melting pot where many members of that majority sect, displaced by the pogroms of Saddam Hussein during his twenty-six years in power, had ultimately relocated, living and working alongside the more secularly minded Sunnis.
There were a few among the crowd who were not Arabs, nor even citizens of Iraq, but were in fact Persian agitators, bent on stirring the sleeping giant that was the Shiite majority in Iraq to forcibly oust the United States’ occupying forces and establish a theocracy. Their simple message resonated with a people too long oppressed, who looked upon the foreigners in their midst as merely the latest form of subjugation.
Nearly three thousand men had gathered in front of the Parliament building, not far from the Sujud palace and the military parade grounds, outwardly carrying signs, American flags and effigies, the latter items to be consigned to flames when the watchful eye of the news media turned their way. But under their robes, they carried weapons. For the most part, these consisted of knives and cudgels. A few however had laid their hands on Russian-made assault rifles and sidearms abandoned by the defeated Iraqi military forces. While there was no particular plan to make use of these articles of destruction, the rabble were ready for the call to arms; ready and willing.
Shortly after the four Humvees had passed by unsuspectingly, the crowd had commenced a march to the Al Rahman mosque, a distance of just over two kilometers. The raw skeleton of the massive Islamic temple had become a powerful symbol to these people. Because it was incomplete, not yet bedecked with gaudiness like the extravagant Umm al-Ma’arik or “Mother of All Battles” mosque which stood more as a testament to the former president than to God, it represented the potential of the Shia to shape their own destiny, albeit with a gentle nudge from their fellow believers to the east.
The center of the mosque site was an open circle, more than one hundred meters across, where no work had yet been done. In fact, very little would be done in this area at least until the construction reached the final stages, following the erection of a glorious gilt dome. For now however, the area served as an impromptu amphitheater where a number of honored speakers whipped the already fervid crowds into a religious frenzy.
It was no coincidence that brought the assassin to this place. The rally was an ideal place to blend in and escape the searching eyes of the US military. Had Kismet realized that his foe had intentionally led him to this place, he would have greeted the notion with a degree of irony. There was a very good reason why the crowd spread out across the mosque site was exclusively male. The Quran did not permit members of the fairer sex to attend such a gathering.
Therein lay the one piece of information concerning Aziz’s murderer about which Kismet had no doubts. It was the secret he had, for no rational reason, held back in his discussion with Buttrick. In the initial moments of the chase, when they had grappled at the museum, he had felt breasts. The cold-blooded, highly trained assassin was a woman.
At just that instant however, the assassin’s gender, or for that matter, the inequality of the local religious teachings was the last thing on Nick Kismet’s mind.
He instinctively brought his gun to bear, waving it in a broad arc before him in hopes of intimidating the crowd. It was a foolish effort, he realized. In the zeal of the moment, a collective sense of invulnerability had come over the protestors. To be sure, each man had applied the simple logic of the odds — there were far more of them than bullets in his gun. However, the charge was deflected somewhat. The human surge seemed to run into an invisible barrier three meters from where he stood, wrapping around him to either side while maintaining that minimum safe distance. In the space of a heartbeat, he was surrounded.
Realizing his mistake too late, Kismet turned to flee. Although they had outflanked him, the mob was at its weakest point where they had filled in at his rear. The human wall was a thin line no more than two men deep. He swung his pistol in their direction and fired.
The shot was intentionally high. The last thing he wanted to do was compound an already dire situation by killing someone. If he crossed that line, the crowd would settle for nothing less than dismembering him. As it was, the sound of the discharge fanned the flames of wrath, but for those directly in the line of fire, the warning shots had the desired effect. The men dropped in a panic, weakening the line as he charged.