let it be known years ago that the Resistance was no concern of his. Indeed he very rarely had been in the main house at all in recent years. Khalid spent most of his time in and about his little cabin on the far side of the vegetable patch, with the equally reclusive Jill and their multitude of strange, lovely-looking children. There he carved his little statuettes and the occasional larger work, and raised crops for his family, and sat in the wonderful California sunlight reading and rereading the Word of God. Sometimes he went roving along the back reaches of the mountain, hunting the wild animals that had come to flourish there in these days of diminished human population, the deer and boars and such. His son Rasheed occasionally went with him; more usually he went alone. He lived a private, inward life, needing very little beyond the company of his wife and children, and often content to hold himself apart even from them.
Anson said, “What safeguards do you mean, specifically?”
“I mean I will not let you send him to his death. He must not perish the way Tony perished.”
“Specifically, I said.”
“Very well. He will not go on this mission unless you prepare the way fully for him. What I mean by that is that you must be altogether sure that you are sending him to the right place, and when he gets there, the doors of it must be open to him. He must know the passwords that will admit him. I understand about these passwords. He must be able to walk into the place of Prime in complete safety.”
“We have Andy working on extracting the location of Prime and the password protocols right this minute. We won’t be sending Rasheed until we have them, I assure you.”
“Assurance is not enough. This is a sacred promise?”
“A sacred promise, yes,” Anson said.
“There is more,” said Khalid. “You will see to it that he comes safely back. There will be cars waiting, several cars, and care will be taken that confusion is created so that the police do not know which car he is in, and so he can be returned to the ranch.”
“Agreed.”
“You agree very quickly, Anson. But I must be convinced that you are sincere, or otherwise I will see to it that he does not go. I know how to make a tool, but I know how to blunt its edge, too.”
“I lost my brother to this project,” Anson said. “I haven’t forgotten what that felt like. I don’t intend to lose your son.”
“Very good. See to that, Anson.”
Anson made no immediate reply. He wished there were some way that he could transmit telepathically to Khalid his absolute conviction that this time the thing would be done right, that Andy would find in Borgmann’s archive every scrap of information that they would need in order to send Rasheed to the true location of Prime and to open all the hidden doors for him, so that Rasheed could carry out the assassination and make good his escape. But there was no way for Anson to do that. He could only ask for Khalid’s help, and hope for the best.
Khalid was watching him calmly.
That cool gaze of Khalid was unnerving. He was so alien, was Khalid. That was how he had seemed to the sixteen-year-old Anson on that day, decades ago, when he had turned up here out of the blue, traveling with Cindy; and after all this time, he was alien still. Even though he had lived among them for so many years, had married into their family, had shared in the splendor and isolation of their mountaintop existence as though he were a born Carmichael himself. He still remained, Anson thought, something mysterious, something other. It wasn’t so much that he was of foreign birth, or that he had that strange, almost unearthly physical beauty, or that he worshipped a god named Allah and lived by the book of Mohammed, who had been a desert prince in some unimaginably alien land thousands of years ago. That was part of it, but only part. Those things couldn’t account for Khalid’s formidable inner discipline, that granite-hard calm of his, the lofty detachment of his spirit. No, no, the explanation of his mystery must lie somewhere in Khalid’s childhood, in the very shaping of him, born as he had been in the earliest and harshest years of the Conquest and raised in a town infested by Entities, under hardships and tensions whose nature Anson could scarcely begin to guess at. It was those hardships and tensions that must have led to his becoming what he was. But Khalid never would speak of his early years.
“There’s one thing I’d like to know,” Anson said. “If you have so little desire to place Rasheed at risk, why did you give him the same assassin training you gave Tony? I remember very clearly the time you told me that you didn’t give a damn about killing Prime, that the whole project was simply no concern of yours. So surely it wasn’t your intention to set up Rasheed as someone to be put into play if Tony failed.”
“No. That was not my intention at all. I was training Tony to be your assassin. I was training Rasheed to be Rasheed. The training happened to be the same; the goals were different. Tony became a perfect machine. Rasheed became perfect too, but he is much more than a machine. He is a work of art.”
“Which you now are willing to place at our service for a very dangerous mission, knowing that we’re going to do everything we can to protect him, but there’s going to be some element of risk nevertheless. Why? We would never have known what Rasheed was, if you hadn’t happened to say to Cindy that you felt he could handle the job. What made you tell her that?”
“Because I have found a life here among you,” said Khalid unhesitatingly. “I was no one, a man without a home, a family, an existence, even. All that had been stripped from me when I was a child. I was merely a prisoner; but Cindy found me, and brought me here, and everything changed for me after that. I owe you something back. I give you Rasheed; but I want you to use him wisely or else not at all. Those are the terms, Anson. You will protect him, or you will not have him.”
“He’ll be protected,” Anson said. “We aren’t going to repeat the Tony event. I swear it, Khalid.”
“Are you getting anywhere?” Frank asked, as Andy looked wearily up from the screen.
“Depends how you define ‘anywhere.’ I’m discovering new things all the time. Some of them are actually useful.—Would you mind getting me another beer, Frank? And have one for yourself.”
“Right.” Frank moved hesitantly toward the door.
“Don’t worry,” Andy said. “I’m not going to jump through that window and run away the moment you leave the room.”
“I know that. But I’m supposed to be guarding you, you know.”
“You think I’m going to try to escape? When I’m this close to breaking through into the most secret Entity code?”
“I’m supposed to be guarding you,” Frank said again, patiently. “Not thinking about what you might or might not do. My father would roast me alive if I let you get away.”
“I would work much better if I weren’t so thirsty, Frank. Get me a beer. I’m not going anywhere. Trust me.” Andy smiled slyly. “Don’t you think I’m a trustworthy person, Frank?”
“If you do go anywhere, and I don’t get roasted alive because you do, I’ll personally hunt you down and roast you myself,” Frank said. “I swear that by the Colonel’s bones, Andy.”
He went down the hall. When he returned, about a minute and a half later, Andy was bent over the computer screen again.
“Well, I escaped,” Andy said. “Then I thought of a new approach I wanted to try, and I decided to come back. Give me the goddamned beer.”
“Andy—” Frank said, handing the bottle over.
“Yes?”
“Look, there’s something I’ve been intending to tell you. I want to apologize for all that shotgun stuff, the day you arrived. It wasn’t very pretty. But I knew what my father and Steve would say if they found out you had been here and I had let you go away again. I couldn’t take the chance that you would.”
“Forget it, Frank. Don’t you think I understand why you pushed that gun in my face? I’m not holding any grudge.”
“I’d like to believe that.”
“You might just as well, then.”
“Just why did you come back here?” Frank asked him.
“That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a good answer. Part of it was just a wild impulse, I guess. But also—well—look, Frank, I’ll kill you if you say anything about this to anybody else. But there was something else going on in my mind too. I did some shitty things while I was wandering around the country. And when I headed north out of Los Angeles I found myself thinking that maybe I just ought to stop off here and make myself of some
