Prepared For Rage

"Are there any of those gorgeous snickerdoodles left?" Doreen said, leaning forward and smiling at the XO.

Into this awkward silence Lieutenant Noyes opened the door of the wardroom. He looked around until he found Nick. Target acquired, he smiled. He was a friendly soul, well-liked by the crew, something that could be said of only a very few aviators. The aviator-sailor relationship was competitive and all too often antagonistic, but Noyes was one of the good guys. "Mr. Munro," Noyes said now, "would you like a walk-around of the helo before you turn in? Give you an advance look at what you're letting yourself in for when you go flying with us." He gri

"Love to, Lieutenant, but please, call me Nick."

The lieutenant smiled at Doreen. "It's a nice night, Mrs. Munro, beautiful view of the Miami skyline."

Not wholly impervious to his charm, Doreen shook her head. "Thank you, Lieutenant, but it was a long flight. I'm going to turn in."

Later, when the wardroom's other mess cook, one Seaman Crane, had been summoned to escort Doreen to the junior officers' stateroom that had been vacated for the Munros, the XO looked at Cal.

"Don't," Cal said.

"You're dating an astronaut?"

"Shut up," Cal said.

"You're dating an astronaut."

"I mean it, XO, put a lid on it, right now."

"I've always dreamed I could fly," the XO said, hand pressed to his heart.

"Good night, XO."

"Good night, Captain, and very sweet dreams."

Cal flipped him off over his shoulder, and heard Taffy laugh as he headed up to his stateroom.

19

MIAMI

Mrs. Mansour's face was drawn with grief, but her voice was steady and she spoke with clarity and determination. She identified Adam Bayzani's doctored passport photo as that of Daoud Sadat, the man who had rented her spare room for the last six months, although she didn't think much of the likeness, saying the individual features seemed exaggerated.

"Exaggerated how?" Patrick said. "It would help if you could be a bit more specific. Take your time."

She did, studying the likeness of a man who she believed had murdered her only child. After a bit she said, "His forehead might be a little too broad in the photograph. His was more narrow, I think. The ears and nose are too long, too, and the mouth a little too wide. It's almost-"

"What?" Patrick said when she hesitated. "Almost what?"

"It's as if someone smeared the photograph when it was still wet." She raised a hand in a helpless gesture. "That's all."

"It's a lot, Mrs. Mansour, believe me."

"Will it help you find him?"

"Yes, Mrs. Mansour," he said. "It will help us find him."

"And he will be punished?"

He held her fierce gaze, his own steady and unflinching, even though he knew he was making promises he might very well be unable to keep. "He will. I give you my word."

She detailed as much of Sadat's activities as she knew, sitting at the utilitarian metal table in one of two metal folding chairs, in the bare, grubby little room with the single overhead light, loaned to Patrick for the occasion by the Miami Dade Police Department. Sadat, she said, left the house for work every morning Monday through Friday, and returned each evening just after six. Work where? Lockheed, he had told her.

Patrick dispatched a team to Lockheed.

It was odd, she said, that all of Sadat's clothes had been new when he arrived at her house.

"How could you tell?" Patrick said.

She looked at him. "I work at a dry cleaner's," she said. "They were new."

"All right," he said.

"It seemed odd," she said again, "but it wasn't until later that I realized it might be because he was putting on a new identity with the new clothes."

Sadat, she said, appeared to have little or no social life. Outside of work hours, he spent little time out, at least at first-her lips tightened-and no friends had visited him at her home. He declared the intention of visiting various local sights: the Everglades, Miami Beach, a carnival, the zoo. He had invited the two of them to accompany him to some of these, as a way, he said, of repaying them for their kindness.

She couldn't be sure then, but now she was certain that Zahirah had begun meeting Sadat outside the home. Mrs. Mansour didn't drive so she hadn't been able to follow him anywhere even if she'd wanted to, although she had become increasingly uneasy when she saw how close her daughter and Mr. Sadat were getting.

"Was it," Patrick said delicately, not wanting to offend her, "a romantic relationship?"

For the first time her eyes teared up. "I believe my daughter thought it was."

"And Mr. Sadat?"

She had to think about that for a while, so long that Patrick had to give her a nudge. "Mrs. Mansour?"

She came back from wherever she'd gone and refocused on his face. "I think," she said very carefully indeed, "that Mr. Sadat cared more than he knew."

"Why would you say that?"

"Because he killed her," she said, her voice hard. "He could have just left her, walked away and never contacted her again. Instead, he killed her."

There was a brief, fraught silence. "I'm sorry," Patrick said in a gentle voice, "I don't quite-"

"He killed her so that there would be no temptation for him to return," she said, still in that hard voice, her eyes bright but not with tears. "I'm not a fool, Mr. Chisum. You are a federal agent. You would not be here if you did not have good cause to suspect Mr. Sadat of wrongdoing. And when you arrive with as much help as I saw in the lobby, I don't imagine you're looking for him because he's been forging checks or bilking widows out of their pensions."

She raised an eyebrow.

"No," he said.

"No," she said, agreeing with him. "You suspect him of being a terrorist. He must be very good at what he does or you would have apprehended him by now."

"Yes," Patrick said. At this point he saw no reason to lie to her.

"If he cared for my daughter, it would be a great temptation to him to return here for her after he accomplishes whatever horror he is pla

He looked at her with respect. She'd have made a good profiler. "Tell me, Mrs. Mansour, how did you know he wasn't Egyptian?"

"His accent was Paki," she said. "He insisted on speaking English, he said the better for all of us to practice so we fit in to our new country. I think it was so he wouldn't give his true nationality away while speaking in Arabic. But he did slip on occasion. We all do. He was Pakistani, not Egyptian. I'm sure of it."

LATER, IN HIS HOTEL ROOM, PATRICK SHOWERED AND WRAPPED HIMSELF in the terry-cloth robe he found hanging in the closet. He turned on the television and flicked through the cha

In Paris there had been a race riot involving Muslim expatriates; in Kuwait, Iran, and Qatar there were demonstrations for women's suffrage; and in Indonesia a plane had crashed into the Indian Ocean, killing all 102 people on board.

He clicked around a while longer, stopping at something called NTV. It took him a few moments to realize that this stood for NASA TV, replaying direct feeds from the space station and reru