Prepared For Rage

"And no one will know? No one will know it was me?"

"No one," Akil said, with such certainty that the other was appeased, at least until he was out of Akil's reassuring presence.

"Will I see you again before the day?"

"You will not," Akil said gently, allowing a moment for that fact to sink in. When the other man left this room he would be truly alone, until the day. AMI smiled. "But check your email. I will write. You will not be entirely abandoned, brother."

The other man looked alarmed. "Everyone's email is filtered through intelligence. It may be seen by eyes other than my own."

"Almost certainly," AMI said. "I will be discreet. But when I write, you will know it is me."

They embraced and kissed, embraced again, and AMI felt the other man's shoulders shudder. "Be brave, brother. You will not fail me." He allowed his voice to rise just a little, as if he were taking an oath. As if he were prophesying. "We will triumph. Our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our families and our friends will look on what we have done and be proud, and in the end, Islam and the will of God will triumph over the West."

He shook the man's shoulders once, gently.

"Inshallah."

"coast guard," the immigration agent said in acknowledgment and approval at JFK.

"Semper Paratus," AMI said.

The agent smiled.

This identity was the best so far. Everyone loved the Coast Guard.

"Where have you been?"

" Turkey. Istanbul." As if the agent couldn't see that from the visa on the passport.

She was heavy and black, a middle-aged woman in a well-fitting and well-cared-for uniform, her badge and her shoes both shiny. Her expression was friendly and her voice a pleasant surprise, a low contralto. So many Americans found it necessary to shout, as if to make sure no one overlooked their presence. "Business or pleasure?"

The question was rote and the agent's interest appeared casual so he allowed himself a small joke. "In Istanbul? Always pleasure," he said. "But business got me there. A conference. IMO."

"IMO?"

"International Maritime Organization. The Coast Guard is the U.S. 's representative to the IMO."

"Ah." The agent handed back his passport and sketched a salute. He smiled and returned it with a crisp, military gesture.

He maintained that military posture all the way through the airport. Taking a series of cabs and trains, doubling back once just in case, because he was always more aware of the shape of his features and of the color of his skin in the United States, he ended at Grand Central Station, where he went into the men's room a Coast Guard officer and came out a civilian dressed in Dockers and a Gap T-shirt under a sports jacket, no tie, and deck shoes, no socks. The uniform, stripped of any identifying marks and stuffed into a plastic bag, was dropped in an alley, where, if the lurking shadows at the end of it were any indication, it would be on sale on Canal Street within the hour.

He stayed the night in a Holiday I

At the Fifth Avenue branch of his Bahamian bank, he transferred funds to two already existing accounts, one in Florida and one in Haiti. He ate a late breakfast at the Carnegie Deli-he was not at all reluctant to admit that one of the things the Americans did better than anyone, along with beds and showers, was breakfast-and walked down Seventh Avenue to a cybercafé, where he paid for an hour's time on a computer with Internet access. He created a Yahoo! email account-he had used Hotmail in Istanbul and Earthlink in York, he liked to spread his Internet presence around-and sent a dozen messages. There were two immediate replies, one from Yussuf. All members of the cell, traveling separately as ordered, had arrived safely at the camp. Yussuf reported no undue interest in any of them or in the camp.

He had expected nothing less but it was still good to know. Leaving the cafe he took a bus to Ground Zero to pay his respects. The hole in the ground was filled with heavy equipment moving mounds of dirt. There were barriers shielding some of the work from view. He'd read somewhere that the construction workers had found more remains recently. Good for another headline, he supposed, and therefore useful in continuing to make the existence of their enemies felt.

He blended easily into the crowds of people, many with tear-stained faces, moving slowly past the wall of photographs, reading the epitaphs of the victims pictured there.

He had other faces in his mind, of course, faces that were not represented here. Not victims, never victims. Soldiers, they were. Soldiers in a glorious army, an army of virtue and right, or so his leader would say. He smiled a little, intercepted an incredulous look, and remade his expression into something appropriately mournful.

Afterward he did some shopping, enough to fill the carry-on suitcase he also bought, because nowadays people who traveled without luggage were automatically suspect, especially in America, and that evening paid a scalper $750 for a seventh-row center seat to Jersey Boys, which he enjoyed immensely.

The next morning he took the Air Train to Newark International, where he boarded a flight for Chicago, where he changed airlines and flew to Seattle, where he changed airlines again and flew to Mexico City.

From Mexico City he flew to Port-au-Prince.

11

WASHINGTON, D.C., DECEMBER 2007

The phone rang. It was Hugh Rincon. "Isa's in the U.S. "

Patrick straightened in his chair so fast he propelled himself away from his desk and bounced off the windowsill. "How do you know?"

"He was spotted by an immigration agent in JFK."

"He was spotted by Immigration in JFK?" Chisum said, his voice rising. "And I'm hearing about this from you instead of our own people, why?"

"You came to me," Rincon said, and left it at that. To his credit he didn't sound one bit smug.

"Wait a minute, you said they spotted him. They didn't grab him up?"

"The agent told her supervisor she thought this guy was worth a look. The supervisor disagreed."

Patrick digested this. At last he said, without much hope, "Did they at least follow him? Find out where he was headed?"

Rincon's silence was answer enough.

Chisum rubbed a hand over a suddenly aching head. "Anything else?"

"He entered the country under the name of Adam Bayzani. He was wearing a U.S. Coast Guard officer's uniform. The agent asked him where he'd been and he said Istanbul for a conference." Rincon took a deep breath. "There is more. Patrick, Sara just got back from an IMO conference on marine safety in Istanbul. You're not going to believe this, but she thinks she rode down in the elevator with this guy."

"What?"

Rincon repeated himself.

Patrick's first instinct was to scoff. Outside of Dickens this much coincidence was highly suspect. On second thought, he knew enough about Sara Lange to know that she was nobody's fool. Neither was Hugh Rincon. "All right," he said cautiously. "How'd he feel to her?"

"Bent," Rincon said bluntly. "The first information Coasties exchange after names is duty stations. She said this Bayzani said he was posted to District Seventeen, and then when she said she was from Alaska he shut down completely. For the rest of the conference whenever she saw him he was going in the opposite direction at flank speed. Her words."