D-165, Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
Rain came down in a steady drizzle, filling the low points in the streets and soaking everyone in a cold, wet misery. From the left, headlights dimmed by the thin, half-frozen deluge, an automobile came. Ignoring pedestrians, the car passed through a muddy puddle, casting up the filth therein onto sidewalk and foot traveler alike. Overhead, icicles were beginning to form on the trees that lined the broad green strip that divided the street.
'God, this weather is shitty,' said one of the party, a black man, tall and thin but with refined, almost Arab, features.
'Shitty it is, Gheddi' agreed an older man, likewise black, 'but at least it isn't California.'
'What's the matter with California, Labaan?'
'Californians,' the older man, Labaan, replied. Though he often, even usually, wore a smile, Labaan lost it everytime the subject of California or Californians came up. And he would never say why.
The car reached them, splashing filthy water from the street onto their coats and trousers.
'Sharmutaada ayaa ku dhashay was!' Gheddi shouted. He shook his fist as he swore at the splashing car. Fuck the whore that bore you. When the car ignored him, continuing on its way without a backward glance, he began to reach under his coat.
'Easy, Gheddi,' said Labaan. It was said gently but was an iron-bound order nonetheless. The older man placed a hand on Gheddi's wrist, advising, 'We have other business this evening. And we don't need trouble from the local authorities.'
Gheddi seemed inclined to argue the point, at first. At least his hand continued to attempt to move under his long woolen coat. After a few moments of vain struggle, he gave it up, returning his hand to his pocket for warmth. 'You're right, of course, Cousin,' Gheddi admitted. 'God will have to avenge me on the ill-mannered pig.'
'God will do as He will do,' answered the cousin, Labaan, leader of the little family group and the only really fluent English speaker among them. Gray-haired, desert-and war-worn, Labaan spoke calmly. He alone knew this city, having studied here as a young man. Indeed, Labaan had studied at the same school as the group's target. That, however, had been many years and several wars in the past. Now, studies abandoned as useless in the violent, anarchic world he inhabited, Labaan led a small team in the service of his clan. And why not? It wasn't as if he had a country anymore.
No, all I've got left is blood. The whole nation thing turned out to be a lie, and the whole international thing turned out to be worse than a lie. In the end, only blood matters, only blood counts, only blood lasts. Everything else is illusion. Everything but blood is a fraud.
Labaan's was not a high-tech team. They had Bluetooth equipped cell phones, recently purchased at a Wal- Mart. They had pistols; this was what Gheddi had been reaching for, of course. They had a rental van, currently idling a few blocks away on Gardner Street under the control of the fifth member of the group, Asad, the lion. The van was GPS equipped, and there was also a hand-held device, which would be used to find the ship that would take them home. They also had tape to secure their target, the tape likewise courtesy of Wal-Mart. Lastly, for the delicate time between confronting their target and getting him on the ship, they had two surplus atropine injectors, the atropine having been removed and replaced with a cocktail of various drugs that the clan's chief chemist-Come to think of it, Tahir the pharmacist studied here, too. Wonderful city, Boston! Well . . . except for the weather-had assured them would render the boy half insensate but calm and cooperative in a brief instant.
'He should be coming out soon,' Labaan said. 'Abdi, you and I are the only ones who can identify the boy. You and Delmar go past the entrance to his apartment building. Wait. If you take the boy, I'll call for Asad. If he turns toward us, you call.'
'Haa, Labaan,' Abdi agreed. Like his cousins, he was tall and slender, with cafe au lait skin, and delicate of feature. He and Delmar walked briskly to the public transportation stop, a partially Plexiglas enclosed and fully covered shelter from Boston's execrable weather. In theory, the thing had radiant heaters. In practice, these helped little if at all. The two men shivered in a night far colder and infinitely wetter than the worst their barren country had had to offer since sometime around the last ice age. The shelter reeked of piss despite the cold.
'And Gheddi? You get that hostile look off your face. Now.'
The air shimmered around the closing door, the result of the overheated air of the apartment meeting the frigid air of the second floor landing. Adam Khalid Hodan, twenty years of age and son and designated successor to his father, Khalid, chief of the clan of Marehan and leader of the Federation of Sharia Courts, shivered in his coat as he locked the door behind him.
Khalid was approximately as religious as Richard Dawkins, but he knew how to mouth the right phrases. Adam, the son, was considerably more religious, though he wanted nothing whatsoever to do with some of the more extreme elements in his father's domain. For that matter, he avoided the big mosque on Prospect Street precisely because it seemed to him to be dominated by the nuts.
And besides, as the boy often thought, there's no requirement to have any man interpose himself between oneself and God.
The apartment was on the second floor, of five, in the converted townhome. Whatever heat there might have been outside of the twenty small apartments of the building had risen to the upper floors.
'God,' whispered Adam, 'grant that spring come soon to this frozen place.'
Physically, Adam, too, was a near match for the men outside who sought him. Perhaps he was a bit darker, as coming from a more southerly province. About them, of their existence or their mission, he had not a valid clue. His father had sent him here-ordered him, really, and much against his will-to further his education for the day he would lead the clan. If his father had thought there was any danger to the boy, he'd neglected to mention it.
Steeling himself against the coming wet and cold, Adam turned toward the door and began to walk the tiled landing to the steps that led down and out. His father could be very touchy about allowances if grades were not maintained. Adam had business at his school's library, across the river.
'Warya, Adam,' someone called out before Adam's feet touched the glistening street. He looked and saw someone he'd met, very briefly, in the restaurant down in Roxbury, a countryman, though of a different clan. Odd it was, how clan lines blurred in this foreign place.
'We define ourselves by what we are not,' one of Adam's professors had said once, in lecture. He'd found that true, once he'd thought on it. For that matter, what passed for a girlfriend here, Maryam, was not even of his own country, but of a neighbor. Though she'd hardly lived at all in the Dark Continent, she, too, defined herself as 'not American, but African,' and so she, too, seemed close kin here in Boston.
Pretty and to spare, Maryam was pleasant to be around, except of course when she started speaking politics. Some of what she said, what she had learned from her UN father and his progressive friends, Adam agreed with. But she was depressed, so often, by things beyond her control, and let that depression bleed over to things that were, that the boy wasn't sure their relationship was going anywhere.
Who, after all, wants to live with a steady diet of 'brain drain,' 'rule of law,' 'reparations,' 'colonialism,' 'aid,' or 'Bob Geldof?'
'Warya . . . Labaan,' Adam returned, raising a hand in polite greeting. He'd had to search his mind for the name, which had, at least, taken his mind off Maryam's obsessions.
Abdi saw that the target had turned toward Labaan. He immediately pushed the dial button on the cell phone hidden in his pocket.
'I hear you,' Asad answered, from the rental van idling not far away.
'Come,' Abdi said. 'Labaan has the target close at hand. We are moving in.'
'Two minutes,' Asad answered.
Adam consulted his watch. Sighing, as if with sincere regret, he told Labaan, 'I've a girl waiting for me, friend, at the library. I really must be going.'
Maryam was not waiting, however. She had nothing to do with his desire to leave the area. Instead, it was the look in the eyes of the one accompanying Labaan, the one introduced as 'Gheddi.' He looked hostile, however
