He didn’t know if he should trust this, or her motives. It didn’t matter. He instantly felt himself stirring.
“I don’t want to be alone right now,” she said, then reached a hand under the back of her T-shirt and unfastened her bra, dropping it to the floor. Her breasts shifted, reacting instantly to the brush of the fabric.
He didn’t look away this time. “Neither do I.”
“I want to forget for a while, Jack. Can you help me do that?”
“You have no idea how much I’d like to try.”
He hadn’t bothered to take off his clothes before lying on top of the bed, and she came to him, reaching for his belt and unbuckling it. She unfastened his pants and pulled them away, freeing him, then took him in her hand, gently kneading him as she leaned forward and kissed his lips.
Then she pulled away, whispering softly against his cheek. “Make me forget, Jack. Please make me forget.”
As he drew her nearer and removed her T-shirt and panties, she began to moan deeply and loudly. Loudly and deeply. In the midst of their heat, such a state of abandon was reached that the normally voyeuristic Jack, who liked to watch himself make love, actually fell from the bed onto the hot radiator. But, like the Indian fakirs who can be on a bed of nails without later showing puncture marks, Jack did not scorch or burn, nothing visible remaining except a small soreness days later.
Once he was inside her, she began to cry and shudder in a series of small convulsions. He had never been with a woman who reacted like this and was both surprised and excited by her abandon.
Her cries became veritable screams as she moaned, and her eyes became glassy with passion. As Jack continued to bring Sara to an increasingly greater state of tension and release, tension-a violent begging for release and then the convulsive wave-her screaming became threatening.
He tried to quiet her by putting his hand over her mouth while continuing to stroke with his loins and lips.
“Quiet, quiet,” he tried to command hoarsely. “Faisal will hear you.”
He reached for her T-shirt and couldn’t believe himself as he pressed it over her mouth, holding it down hard against her lips by pressing it against the sheets, one hand on each side of her face.
Their hips were in perfect synchrony and she continued her cries and screams, now muffled beneath the shirt, as Jack made love to her as he had never made love before. Sara bucked and arched and was in a world he could never see.
Then it was over and they collapsed onto the bed, sweating, chests heaving. Sara rolled toward him and snaked a hand across his chest as she nuzzled his neck.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
“You don’t know how long I’ve been wanting to do that.”
She smiled, kissed his neck. “It couldn’t have been that long. We barely know each other.”
“This’ll sound crazy,” he said. “But I think I’ve wanted you most of my life. Even before I knew who you were.”
“Well, I’m here now,” she said, then moved atop him, reaching a hand down to take hold of him again. He put his arms around her, running his own hand along her spine, brushing his fingertips across her flawless skin — until he felt something there and suddenly stopped: the long thin puckered flesh of a scar, just above her right hip. He hadn’t seen or felt it before, had somehow missed it in the darkness and the heat of the moment.
“What’s this?” he said, before he realized the words were out of his mouth.
She stiffened against him now and he knew he’d made a mistake. She rolled away from him and stared at the dark ceiling, as all of his efforts to make her forget vanished in that instant.
She seemed to go away for a while, lost in a memory, then said, “You asked what happened to me. What made me join Brendan and the others.”
“I’m sorry, Sara. Really. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
She turned toward him and ran her hand along the side of his face. “I do want to tell you. I want you to know everything there is to know about me.”
He studied her. “I’m listening.”
It took her a moment to gather herself. “When I was a young girl in Yemen, I was just like Abdal al-Fida. A true believer. I think that’s why it was so easy for me to convince him that we were kindred spirits. I knew that fervor, that hatred. It was a hatred that had been nurtured in me by my own father.” She paused. “But I was female, and sickly, and when my brother Kafir was born all of my father’s hopes for a great soldier of Allah landed on him.
“But Kafir was an unusual child. Intelligent, very wise for his age. And he was a disappointment to my father because he didn’t share our passion. He was always questioning us. Why did we believe the things we did, when a careful reading of the Koran showed that it clearly preached peace?”
Tears filled her eyes now. “My father beat him, but Kafir never gave in. Never compromised his own beliefs. And I found myself coming to admire him for it.
“When I turned seventeen,” she continued, “I got very sick. One of my kidneys failed and the other required regular dialysis, and it was clear to the doctors that I needed a transplant. Neither my father nor my mother were a match, and the thought of going to a thirteen-year-old boy seemed wrong somehow. But Kafir volunteeredinsisted on taking the test-and when the results came back it turned out that he was the perfect donor.
“Two weeks later I had this scar, this gift from my brother. Without him, I wouldn’t be here.”
She paused again, as she wiped her tears with her forearm. “A year went by and both of us had grown strong again, bound together not just by blood, but by flesh as well. Then, on a warm afternoon, Kafir left school early one day. Call it fate or coincidence or simply bad luck, but as he walked past a synagogue a car parked in front of it exploded, taking half the building and my brother along with it.”
“My God,” Jack said.
“No,” Sara told him. “Not God. Not Allah. This was simply the work of men, men like my father whose hatred was so strong that it took the life of an innocent young boy. A boy who had more potential, more nobility, in his small body than any of them would ever understand.”
Jack held her as she sobbed. Her tears were warm and dear against his chest. As much as their lovemaking, that gift of trust was precious.
“Did they find the bombers?” he asked.
Sara collected herself. “No. And that is the sickness of it. It could have been anyone. Rogue Muslims of the same branch or a different branch… Not knowing who had attacked him made me realize that their hatred was my hatred. It didn’t matter who held it. It was wrong.”
“That was a pretty big thought for a teenager to grasp.”
“It wasn’t just a ‘thought,’ Jack. It was a vision — from Allah. What you Christians call an epiphany. I could not shake it.
“My mother had a breakdown and had to be hospitalized. My father was inconsolable, and within the year I knew I had to get away from there.” She paused. “So I moved to London and vowed that I would do whatever I could to keep another Kafir from being lost to the world.”
She was silent then. Jack could feel the emotion draining away, her shoulders relaxing. He wanted to respond, to find the perfect words to soothe her.
But before he could speak, they heard a loud, steady beep coming from the living room.
Faisal’s laptop.
They had to scramble to get dressed before the beeping woke Faisal. They just made it to the living room when he stumbled in and plopped in front of his laptop, punching a key to cut the notifier and examine the results.
It didn’t look as though their lovemaking had bothered him. Jack and Sara shared a secret smile.
That felt good, too.
“There’s another level of encryption,” Faisal said. He was still half asleep and yawning, staring at the computer screen with bleary eyes. “Whoever sent these e-mails didn’t want people like us getting nosy.”
“So Alain was right,” Sara said to Jack. “This could be significant information.”
There were five open e-mails stacked on the screen, each sent to tdl@alliedharborassoc. net, and each with
