Terrorist

"As I understand it, they used to rig up explosives inside the Cong's spider holes and seal them in and detonate them with these. Woodchucking, they used to call it. It wasn't pretty. But, then, there wasn't much pretty about the whole business. Except the women. But I heard you couldn't trust even them. They were Cong, too."

Ahmad, his head buzzing, tries to state his position clearly: "Sir, if you make any move to break the wires or interfere with my driving, I will set off four tons of explosives. The yellow is a safety switch, and I'm turning it off now." He moves it to the right-snap-and both men wait to see what will happen. Ahmad thinks, If something happens we will not know it. Nothing happens, but the switch is now off. It remains only for him to sink his thumb down into the little well whose bottom is the red detonation button, and to wait the microseconds for the ignition of the blasting powder to ripple up through the enhancing pentrite and racing fuel into the tons of nitrate. He feels the smooth red button at the tip of his thumb, without taking his eyes from the jammed highway. If this flabby Jew moves to deflect him he will brush him aside like a piece of paper, like a tuft of carded wool.

"I have no such intentions," Mr. Levy tells him, in the falsely relaxed voice with which he advises failing students, defiant students, students who have given up on themselves. "I just want to tell you a few things that might interest you."

"What things? Tell me, and I'll let you out when we get closer to my destination."

"Well, I guess the main thing is, Charlie's dead."

"Dead?"

"Beheaded, in fact. Gruesome, huh? He'd been tortured before they did it. The body was found yesterday morning, dumped in the Meadows, by the canal south of Giants Stadium. They wanted it found. There was a note attached to it, in Arabic. Evidently Charlie was CIA undercover and the other side finally figured it out."

There had been a father who vanished before his memory could take a picture of him, and then Charlie had been friendly and shown him the roads, and now this tired Jew in clothes as if he dressed in the dark has taken their place, the empty space beside him. "What did the note say, exactly?"

"Oh, I don't know. Same old same old, to the effect that he who breaks his oatii punishes himself. God will not deny him his recompense."

"It sounds like the Qur'an, the forty-eighth sura."

"It sounds like the Torah, too. Whatever you say. There's a lot I don't know. I'm coming in late."

"May I ask, how do you know what you do know?"

"My wife's sister. She works in Washington for Homeland Security. She called me yesterday; my wife had mentioned my interest in you, and they wondered if there was a co

"Why should I believe any of what you say?"

"Don't, then. Believe it only if it fits with what you know. My guess is it does. Where is Charlie now, if I'm lying? His wife says he's vanished. She swears he was just in the furniture business."

"What of the other Chehabs, and the men to whom they supplied money?"

Ahmad is being tailgated by a midnight-blue Mercedes driven by an impatient man too young to have earned a Mercedes, unless it was in stock manipulation at the expense of the less fortunate. Such men live expensively in the so-called bedroom towns of New Jersey and jumped from the towers when God brought them down. Ahmad feels superior to this Mercedes driver, and indifferent to his tooting and swerving back and forth as he seeks to dramatize his wish that the white truck were moving less sedately in the middle lane.

Mr. Levy answers, "Gone underground and scattered, I suppose. They caught two men trying to fly to Paris out of Newark, and Charlie's father is in the hospital with what's supposed to be a stroke."

"He suffers from diabetes, truly."

"Whatever. He says he loves this country, and so did his son, and now his son has died for this country. There's one theory that he's the one who fingered his son. The uncle in Florida, the feds have had an eye on him for some time. These agencies are overwhelmed, and don't communicate with one another, but they don't miss every trick. The uncle will talk, or somebody will. It's hard to believe one brother had no idea what the other was up to. These Arabs all pressure each other with Islam: how can you say no to the will of Allah?"

"I don't know. I have been denied," Ahmad says stiffly, "the blessing of a brother."

"Small blessing, to go by what I see at school. In jackals, I read somewhere, the pups fight to the death as soon as they're born."

Less stiffly, remembering with a smile, Ahmad tells Mr. Levy, "Charlie was very eloquent for the jihad."

"That was one of his acts, apparently. I never met the guy. He sounds like a loose ca

"He watched a great deal of television. He wanted some day to direct commercials."

"My point is, Ahmad, you don't need to do this. It's all over. Charlie never meant for you to go through with it. He was using you to flush out the others."

Ahmad reviews the unfolding, slithering fabric of what he has heard and concludes, "It would be a glorious victory for Islam."

"Islam? How so?"

"It would slay and inconvenience many unbelievers."

"You've got to be kidding," Mr. Levy says, as Ahmad deftly maneuvers the transition from 80 East to 95 South, seizing the inside lane and not allowing the Mercedes to pass him on the right as the bulk of the traffic continues east toward the George Washington Bridge. On the left, the Overpeck River crinkles in the breeze as it flows toward the Hackensack. The truck is on the New Jersey Turnpike, above swampland being exploited in every scrap that can be drained. The Turnpike branches; the leftward branch leads to the Lincoln Tu

"Think of your mother." The conversational ease has gone from Mr. Levy's voice; a touch of stridency has entered. "She'll not only lose you but she'll become known as the mother of a monster. A madman."

Ahmad is begi

Mr. Levy says, "I'm sure she'd rather have you than a pension."

"How are you sure, may I ask, sir? How well do you know her?"

Gulls, at first a few in his vision through the windshield, then dozens coming into focus, and the dozens becoming hundreds, wheel above a waste site. Beyond their greedy gathering of wings, beyond the sullen Hudson, stands the stone-colored silhouette, notched like an immense key, of the great city, Satan's heart. Lit from the east, its towers loom in shadow from the west, a dust of haze radiant between them. Mr. Levy's silence foretells a new attack on Ahmad's convictions, but for now driver and passenger share without comment their glimpse of one of the world's wonders, suddenly snatched from view as the traffic hurtles onward and is replaced by relatively empty expanses on either side of 95-marsh grass shot through with blue flashes of sky reflected by the watery cha