The Fourth Assassin

isn’t true.”

You just don’t want it to be true, Omar Yussef thought. I’m starting to think I’d believe this boy capable of any horror.

Nizar’s lips stretched in a tight grin. “It’s true, all the same. I intended to tell you at Coney Island.”

“That was the flaw in your plan-that the police might suspect Rania. Why didn’t you think of that before you killed her father?”

“I made a mistake. Like I said, I was only pretending to be the Mahdi. I’m not really divine.”

“Now Islamic Jihad will be on your trail again.”

“It was me or Rania. I had to sacrifice myself for her sake.” Nizar pulled at a shred of crab between his front teeth. “I only wanted to talk to you, ustaz. I didn’t expect the gunfire. I really don’t know who shot at us.”

“Maybe it was the true Mahdi?” Omar Yussef sneered.

Nizar extracted the crab and rubbed it into his napkin.

“The Prophet Muhammad came to bestow mercy,” Omar Yussef said, “but the Mahdi is a bringer of vengeance.”

“You think the shooting at Coney Island was supposed to be vengeance for killing Rashid?” Nizar’s eyes became disturbed and small. “Forget about the Mahdi stuff. It was just my joke.”

“Who was Rashid intending to assassinate?”

“Our president.” Nizar announced the title with jocular pomposity, like the identity of a lottery winner. “Rashid intended to kill him this week when he speaks at your UN conference. Islamic Jihad wants him dead because he’s been arresting our boys back in Palestine. The secret police SWAT teams making the arrests were trained by the CIA. Killing him in the U.S. was supposed to deliver a message to Washington to keep out of Palestinian affairs.”

Omar Yussef sipped his water and grimaced as it chilled his gums.

“I knew that if Rashid went ahead with the hit, it’d bring down the full force of the police and the Feds right on my head,” Nizar said. “I’d either go to jail for life or be on the run forever. I’d never be with Rania.”

“May Allah forbid it,” Rania said.

Nizar’s good humor dissolved into morose despair. He emptied his glass and brought it down fast, chipping the stem against his plate. “Nothing’s more important to me than her. Nothing.”

Rania took Nizar’s hand. His long fingers quivered with adrenaline as she kissed them.

“My boy, you have to give yourself up,” Omar Yussef said.

Nizar squeezed Rania’s fingers and shook his head.

“Whatever one might say about your methods, you prevented the assassination of the Palestinian president,” Omar Yussef said. “Perhaps you can give the police other leads, too, about the drug ring. About Islamic Jihad’s activities in America. If you help them, they might forget what you’ve done. What’s more important to them-two dead Arabs in Brooklyn, or an entire terrorist network?”

Nizar crooked his lip sarcastically. “They’ll give me a new identity with a season ticket to commute from this station to my beautiful wife and delightful American family in Pleasantville?”

“Where? Stop kidding me. This is serious.”

“It’s a real place. Can you believe it?” Nizar jerked his chin toward the Departures board. “It’s on the Harlem Line.”

“At the very least let me talk to Abu Adel. Maybe he can secure you a deal.”

“Who?” Nizar’s face became stony.

“Brigadier Khamis Zeydan. He’s the president’s security adviser in the consultations with the Americans and at the UN.”

Nizar stared distantly into his champagne.

“He’s a friend of mine. If you tell him everything, I’m sure he’d be willing to help do a deal with the Americans so that you wouldn’t be prosecuted for what you’ve done.”

“A deal?” Nizar glanced at Rania.

“We can go to my hotel now and I’ll get in touch with him,” Omar Yussef said.

Nizar tapped his thumbnail against the edge of his plate. It sounded loud until Omar Yussef realized he was hearing the bell of a departing train beyond the main concourse. Nizar held Rania’s eyes in his somber gaze. “Where’s your hotel, ustaz?” he said. “Let’s see about that ticket to Pleasantville.”

Chapter 25

Nizar lit one of Khamis Zeydan’s cigarettes and exhaled toward the open window of the hotel room, while Omar Yussef shivered. The police chief watched the young man with the hard confidence of an experienced interrogator. Nizar took that stare, rolled it around in the black depths of his eyes, and let it drift back toward Khamis Zeydan like the smoke on his breath. Omar Yussef wondered if it was only the freezing air that made him shudder.

He shoved the window until it was almost closed. “This room is getting as cold as your blood,” he said.

The two men shifted their jaws slowly and kept their stares firm.

“I don’t believe a word of this,” Khamis Zeydan whispered.

Nizar blew smoke out of his nostrils.

“It’s three in the morning,” Omar Yussef said. “He’s explained his story to you three, no, four times already.”

“The president’s speech is tomorrow at nine A.M. That gives us thirty hours.” Khamis Zeydan rolled his thumb slowly across the wheel of his lighter, watching it spark. “Plenty of time to confirm the truth before I have to panic.”

“I brought Nizar here so you could help him get immunity.” Omar Yussef slapped his thigh. “You’ve heard his story. You know he killed Rashid to prevent the assassination of the president. We have to talk to Sergeant Abayat to get Police Department protection for Nizar.”

“You mean Islamic Jihad will be sitting around now thinking, ‘Well, Nizar’s end of things was a bust. Let’s just forget about assassinating the president.’” Khamis Zeydan opened his eyes wide like a simpleton. “No, I want to hear the backup plan.”

“How could Nizar know? He’s not the assassin. The assassin is dead.”

“By your ancestors, will you shut up and let me talk to him?”

“You weren’t talking to him. You were having a staring contest.”

Nizar’s laugh was warm and smoky. He stubbed out his cigarette. “Is this some kind of comical third-degree? You two old fellows bitch at each other until I get worried one of you’ll die of a heart attack-then I confess to everything, just to calm you down?” He sniggered and lit another smoke.

Omar Yussef scratched his mustache in embarrassment. Khamis Zeydan stared at his prosthetic hand.

“Let me attempt to convince you another way, Abu Adel,” Nizar said.

“Try me.” Khamis Zeydan poured himself a whisky.

Nizar stroked his long hair. “In Palestine, everyone knows what it means to be from Bethlehem. Here, I tell people where I’m from, and they look at me with incomprehension. I explain that I come from the town where Jesus was born, and that’s about all the detail they can handle. Even then they sometimes get confused, because I’m an Arab, and Jesus wasn’t an Arab, was he?”

The boy stared beyond the two older men, as though he were tallying the lighted windows in the UN building at the end of the street.

“At first, I responded to this ignorance by turning my back on Americans,” he said. “I became more religious than I had ever been before. I couldn’t have been more of an Arab if I’d gone on the Hajj to Mecca, shaved my head, and thrown seven pebbles at the Pillar of Aqaba. But I couldn’t keep that up.” He clapped his hands and gestured like a magician who has conjured an object into thin air. “You know the oath from surat al- Waqi’ah? ‘I swear by the shelter of the stars that this is a glorious Koran.’ Well, I could never see the stars in Brooklyn. At night, the sky was illuminated with the orange glow of the city, blotting out the heavens.”