There was silence. Even though it was the camp’s common tongue, most of the ethnic Africans did not understand Arabic, or at best were far from fluent. But then suddenly one person held up his hand and yelled, “God is great!” and a giant roar of approval went up from the crowd.
21
Thera watched as Ferguson walked with Rostislawitch out of the station, toward a restaurant Ferguson had chosen because it had good acoustics for their bugs. The scientist looked dazed, still unsure of what was going on.
Ferguson looked like a paranoid street person.
Thera began following them. She’d bought a cheap shawl and covered her face and head and the top of her torso so she looked like a devout Muslim. With her face covered and Rostislawitch preoccupied, it was a simple but effective disguise, and she was able to get within a few yards without worrying about being recognized.
Because of the screening at the airport, Thera had left her weapons in Bologna, so she’d borrowed Ferguson’s hideaway, a tiny CZ-92 Pocket Automatic barely five inches long. The gun felt almost like a toy in her pocket.
A car veered around the corner, heading toward the side street Ferguson and Rostislawitch had just turned down. The window began to open.
“Get down! Get down!” Thera yelled, throwing off her shawl. She pulled the CZ from her pocket and fired in the direction of the car, just as a submachine gun appeared in the window and began shooting,
ACT V
He whom you seek am I; by tempests tossed,
And saved from shipwreck on your Libyan coast;
Presenting, gracious queen, before your throne,
A prince that owes his life to you alone.
1
An infinitesimal moment of time passed, the space of a spark passing across an electrode. This shell of a moment contained a universe of action and thought, all possibilities to follow. Standing at its rim, Bob Ferguson saw them all — himself, the car, the submachine gun, Rostislawitch.
Ferguson’s impulse was to push Rostislawitch down, to take cover. But that would have been a mistake; that would have been what the shooter wanted. Instead, Ferguson chose the unexpected.
How much of this was actual thought and how much reflex would have been impossible to say. But in the half second that followed, Ferguson twisted around and grabbed Rostislawitch by the arm, hooking his shoulder and arm into his. Then he threw himself not forward or to the ground but upward, in the direction of the passing car.
He landed on the trunk, dragging Rostislawitch with him. Ferguson threw his hand out, gripping the far side of the car as it sped down the road.
As strong as he was, Ferguson could not hold himself on the trunk of the moving vehicle, let alone support the added weight of Rostislawitch. They slid off the car after a few yards, rolling across the street into the gutter. Ferguson pushed Rostislawitch with him, forward, trying to move in the direction the vehicle had been going. He got another three or four yards before an explosion rent the air behind him.
Fire pitched upward from the side of the street where they’d been walking. Ferguson looked back and saw a sheet of red covering the block.
He had only one thought: where was Thera?
Rostislawitch, head spinning, felt himself being dragged back to his feet. He’d closed his eyes when the shooting started, clamped them closed as he flew through the air. Now he struggled to reopen them. He was pulled back, dragged toward heat.
“What are we doing?” he screamed in Russian.
His eyes sprang open and his vision returned; the bum whom he’d met in the station had him over his shoulder, carrying him into the fire.
“No!” he yelled, struggling to break free.
“We have to save someone,” answered Ferguson. “Come on. It’s Thera.
Rostislawitch stopped fighting, but he was even more deeply confused. He felt as if he were in a dream, the world spinning so bizarrely that everything he knew was mashed together into the same physical place: Thera; his wife, Olga; Atha; and this bum; the streets of Moscow when he was a young man; Chechnya the inferno; Naples.
The flames receded, funneling back into a basement near where they’d been walking when the car came by. Ferguson pulled Rostislawitch with him.
“Thera!” Ferguson called. “Thera, where are you? Thera!”
The explosion had broken a water main below the street. Water hissed upward, a cloud of vapor rising from the grate next to the building like a geyser. Black smoke from several boxes of garbage and a nearby car that had caught fire curled across the narrow roadway, clawing at the buildings on either side.
Thera Majed rose from behind the car where she’d crouched. She hadn’t realized what was going on until she saw Ferguson throwing himself into space. When the flames erupted she threw herself down, thinking it was too late, not for her but for him. She was sure she’d never see Ferg again, except in pieces, broken on the pavement.
And there he was, coming through the fire, carrying Rostislawitch with him, calling for her. She threw herself at him and he caught her, and for a long moment neither one thought of anything but the other: they wrapped their arms around each other; they held their hearts close against each other’s chest. Then, like all moments, it disintegrated; they were back in the world.
“Are you all right?” Thera asked.
“I’m good.”
“Your sat phone is ringing.”
Ferguson hadn’t realized it. He pulled it from his pocket. Corrigan had called, leaving a message. The sat phone was notifying him of it.
“Kiska Babev is on her way to Naples,” said Corrigan. “She may be there already.”
Thanks, thought Ferguson, sliding the antenna back down. He turned to Rostislawitch, standing only a foot away, not sure whether to believe Thera was really there. “Come on,” Ferguson told the Russian scientist. “We’ll find a place where it’s safe, and explain.”
