times. Then, completely ignoring McGarvey, who watched from beneath the overhang above the pool, they knelt down on their vests, faced southwest toward Mecca and began the first of their five daily prayers.
At this moment McGarvey knew that he could pull out his gun and kill them all. They were as vulnerable now as a mother was during the act of giving birth; their conscious thoughts were turned inward to the task at hand; to Allah and to the belief that some day Paradise would be theirs. A Muslim believed that life on earth was nothing more than a reflection, a mirror image, of their real lives in heaven, so whatever they did here was holy.
McGarvey sat down cross-legged in the sand and watched the three men pray. Sarah had gone off by herself because Muslim men and women did not pray together, it was forbidden by the Qoran. But as he watched he wondered where and how it had all gone terribly wrong for so many of them. Why the jihads and fatwahs, the acts of terrorism, the senseless killings, the endless wars, the in tolerance that led a man like bin Laden to contemplate using a nuclear weapon against innocent men, women and children? He didn’t know if even Islam’s most religious leaders could answer that simple question, and yet it was probably the most important question they’d ever been faced with. One that he had come here to ask bin Laden.
Stop the killing, there was no need for it. A strange thought, he had to admit to himself, for an assassin to entertain. But he could not ignore reality.
He got up and went deeper under the overhang where the three mujahedeen by the pool could not see him, and untaped his pistol and spare magazine from his thigh. He pocketed the magazine and stuffed the gun beneath his bush jacket in his belt at the small of his back.
When he came out again Sarah was returning from upstream, and the three men were putting on their boots. Mohammed watched her pick her way down the rocky path, and then looked up at McGarvey, his face screwing up in an expression of deep hatred.
Sarah was refreshed, as if the march and hard climb this morning had been nothing to her. When she and the others came up to the campsite she smiled wistfully. “It’s too bad you don’t know what you are missing, Mr. McGarvey.”
“I’m happy for you that you have your faith,” McGarvey said.
“I think it’s not very different for you.” She was serious now, her round face radiant, her dark eyes wide and earnest, filled with a deep, almost sensuous expression. “First came Abraham and Moses, then Isah and finally Mohammed. All on the same path to Allah. We’re all traveling together.”
“Or should be,” McGarvey said.
Hash and Farid had gathered some wood and they were starting a campfire. They looked up curiously.
“Insha’Allah,” Sarah replied softly.
“Yes, God willing.”
Mohammed, who had been standing a little apart, watching and listening, said something sharp in Persian.
“Don’t blaspheme,” Sarah told him reasonably, and she waited for an argument. When it didn’t come she nodded in satisfaction. “We’ll have something to eat now, and then get some rest. Maybe we’ll catch some fish this afternoon for our dinner.”
Their breakfast was nothing more than some very strong black tea and the flat bread called nan. It was quite good and filling, but not satisfying. Mohammed took his meal down to a flat rock beneath the branches of a small tree at the water’s edge, and turned his back to them. McGarvey thought about trying to talk to him, but he didn’t think it would do any good. The man was like a volcano, or a time bomb, ready to explode at the slightest provocation. There was nothing McGarvey could say to him that would make the slightest difference. They could have come from different planets. They had no real common language, the very meanings of the words they used were completely different for each of them. Mohammed was a man like many others McGarvey had met in his career, filled with an unreasoning hate through which nothing could penetrate.
Even Farid and Hash sat slightly apart from Sarah, and while she was eating they avoided looking directly at her as much as possible. There were other subtle things going on between them as well; in the way they spoke to her, deferentially, but with a slightly irritating delay every time they answered a question or followed an order. When they did speak to her, they would look at each other first for support. Sarah was bin Laden’s daughter, and therefore she was a very important personage in their world. But she was a woman, and their strong Islamic upbringing made it almost impossible for them to deal with her on an equal, let alone superior, basis.
Still another subtle layer to the situation was the very fact that bin Laden had sent his daughter to help fetch McGarvey. It was a clear message that he was a modern man after all, whereas the Western media portrayed him as a rabid Islamic fundamentalist whose only mission in life was to kill the infidels.
McGarvey looked inward for a brief moment and he could see Trumble’s face. Alien had protested being pulled out of Riyadh and brought back to Langley, and yet McGarvey had read a measure of relief in the man’s eyes. Something had been going on in his life that he hoped coming home would help. Sending families over there was a double-edged sword for the CIA. On the one hand a wife and children provided a stabilizing influence on the field agent, even lent them a sense of legitimacy. On the other it was usually the agent’s families who cried uncle first. When that happened families came apart, and the agent’s effectiveness was diminished. There was a high rate of divorce in the Company, and a disturbingly high rate of suicide.
“Tell me please about Disney World and EPCOT,” Sarah said, bringing him out of his thoughts. “Have you been there?”
McGarvey looked at her, trying to gauge what she really wanted to know; if she’d brought this up now to tell him that she knew about the killings of Trumble and his family. But all he saw was a naivete; a genuine interest, even eagerness. No cunning.
“Not for a long time,” he said. “But how about you? There’s one just outside of Paris.” “I’ve never been to France,” she said. She exchanged a glance with Farid.
“Well, your English is good, you didn’t learn it in Yemen or the Sudan, did you?”
“I had tutors.”
“Haven’t you ever been out of the Middle East?”
She smiled wistfully. “I was allowed to attend school in Switzerland for just one year when I was quite young. But then my father wanted me to come home, and my mother agreed that it would be for the best.”
“Then you know at least a little about the West,” McGarvey said.
“I was watched very closely,” she said. “And I was never allowed to go off campus with the other girls.”
McGarvey knew what it must have been like for her. She’d been a rich man’s daughter, with bodyguards watching her every movement. It was a wonder that bin Laden had allowed her even that much freedom.
“My daughter went to school in Switzerland,” he said.
Sarah’s eyes lit up. “Tell me about her, please. Does she watch
MTV?”
“I don’t know, but I suppose she does,” McGarvey said laughing. “Have you seen it?”
“In Switzerland, but there are no televisions here.” A look of frustration crossed her pretty features. “Does she wear pretty clothes?”
“Sometimes.”
“Dresses.”
McGarvey nodded.
“Makeup?”
Again McGarvey nodded.
“She doesn’t listen to her father then,” Hash said sadly.
“How old is she?” Sarah, still enthused, asked.
“Twenty-three.” “Does she have a job? Does she earn her own money?”
For some reason McGarvey thought about Alien Trumble’s daughter, wondering what she would have grown up to do. Follow in her father’s footsteps like Liz was following in his; like Sarah following in her father’s? “She works translating Russian into English, and she’s become pretty good with computers.”
“She is like a Sabra woman then,” Sarah said as a statement of fact. “The Americans, like the Israelis, have at least that much right. Their women are allowed to be mujahedeen.” She looked again at Farid and Hash, who averted their eyes. “That is not possible here. Yet.”
“Or ever will be,” Mohammed said darkly at the entrance to the overhang. He was seething with rage. If he
