Jihad

“Of course not. It’s your house.” Rubens tried to smile, but even to him his voice sounded awkward and not particularly consoling. He wasn’t good at this sort of thing, but he felt as if he had to do something, had to offer some consolation. He owed George Hadash so much, he had to do something, even if it was inept.

Irena got up and went to the counter, grabbing her pocketbook and struggling with a Bic lighter before getting the cigarette to catch. “I’m out of practice.”

“What were you saying about the president?”

“He said — he told me he thought…”

The phone rang. Irena jerked around to grab it, but then hesitated.

“Do you want me to screen your calls?” Rubens asked.

“Maybe. Yes. Please.” Rubens got up and took the phone off the hook on the third ring.

“Ms. Irena Hadash’s residence,” he said.

“Who the hell are you?” demanded a male voice.

“This is William Rubens. I’m a friend of the family. What can I do for you?”

“Tell Irena her daughter’s father wants to know when he can drop her off.”

Rubens cleared his throat. “There’s been a death in the family.”

“Yeah. Put her on.”

Rubens cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. “Your ex, I believe.”

Irena nodded, took a long puff of the cigarette, then got up again and took the phone, walking with it to the far end of the kitchen before talking. He pretended not to hear her discussing whether or not the kindergartener could stay for a few days; the ex was clearly giving her a hard time. Well, there was no mystery there why she got divorced; the only question was how she could be so even tempered with the jerk.

When she finally hung up, Irena stubbed her cigarette out in the sink and got another.

“I can help arrange for a sitter,” said Rubens, though in actual fact he had no idea how this was done.

“No. John will take her. He just wants to make it as miserable an experience as possible, on the theory that I’ll be less likely to ask in the future.” She smiled faintly. “It’s standard operating procedure. Do you want something? A drink?”

Rubens shook his head. “You started to tell me about the president.”

“He suggested a state funeral. In the Capitol Rotunda. I — he said it was up to me.”

“You don’t want him to have one?” Rubens couldn’t hide his surprise. “It’s an honor due your father.”

“I know. But he was such a private — he didn’t like the pomp and circumstance. You know that, Bill. He…” Her voice faded, but a smile came to her lips. “He didn’t live his life in quotes.”

She made quotes in the air — just as her father might have.

“Yes,” agreed Rubens.

“I remember one time, he’d just come from a meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I think, and he had two big stains on his tie.” Irena laughed again, this time much more deeply. “And the tie — I swear I gave it to him for Father’s Day when I was twelve, so it had to be fifteen years old. At least. That was my father.”

“He also wrote the definitive book on Asian-American relations in the 1990s,” said Rubens. He stopped himself, cutting off what could have been a long list of Hadash’s achievements.

The thing was, his daughter was right. George Hadash wouldn’t have wanted a state funeral.

They sat silently for a moment, neither one knowing what to say.

“He does deserve to be honored,” said Irena finally. She reached her hand toward Rubens. “You’ll help figure this out?”

“Of course.”

“I remember the first time I met you — Daddy was so careful. Call him Bill, not Billy. Not Billy. But you don’t seem like a Billy. More a William, I think.”

“I’m used to Bill.”

Irena nodded. The truth was, she could call him anything she wanted and he wouldn’t have minded.

CHAPTER 34

“Fa-Shone!” Karr spread his arms wide as he approached the short man standing in front of the bubble-front helicopter. “Nice cap you got there, dude. Met fan, huh? You got a hangover, right?”

The pilot — his real name was Ray Fashona, though Karr pronounced it right perhaps one time out of ten — grunted and finished his walk around of the helicopter. A rather old though serviceable Bell 47, it had a towline at the rear with a banner advertising “Turkey No. I Tours” in Turkish and English.

“This part doesn’t say, ‘Hey, look at us, we’re spies,’ does it?” Karr asked, pointing at the banner as he followed Fashona around the rear of the aircraft.

“Wasn’t my idea,” said Fashona.

“Got a hangover, huh?” said Karr. “You drank that raki stuff, right? What is that, like licorice-flavored white lightning?”

“Make sure your seatbelt’s tight. If you fall out, I’m not picking you up.”

A pair of laptops were lashed to the dashboard in front of Karr’s seat on the right-hand side of the chopper. He opened the top unit and turned it on; ninety seconds later he was greeted by the opening screen of the program controlling a boost unit for the eavesdropping device implanted in Asad’s skull. The unit, mounted in the helicopter’s boom tail, was considerably more powerful than the ones they had left on the roof yesterday; even so, its range was only about five miles.

“Good to go,” Karr told Fashona, pulling on his headset.

“Yeah,” said the pilot, cranking his engine to life.

They took a pass about two miles from Asad’s house, confirming that the unit was working and allowing the Art Room to run a full set of diagnostics with the master receiving unit, which was a specially equipped 707 flying at forty-five thousand feet over the Sea of Marmara, ostensibly on a NATO training mission.

“Everything looks good, Tommy,” said Rockman, who’d just come back on duty in the Art Room. “Unit B is going off duty. You guys are it.”

“The A Team is ready,” Karr said, his voice booming over the engines.

“It sounds like Red Lion is getting ready to go for a ride. Remind Fashona he doesn’t have to get too close. We have plenty of tracking units scattered around the city now.”

“Okey-doke.”

“Asad has just woken up. We’ll keep you up to date.”

Karr zoomed the map showing the location of the sending unit.

“Where are we going today, Red Lion?” he said, overlaying a satellite photo on the grid. “What sights will we see?”

* * *

Asad listened as Katib recounted what had happened at the hospital. It took considerable discipline for Asad not to interrupt; he didn’t want to prejudice his chief bodyguard’s report by asking questions that might lead Katib to shade what he said.

“The Turks must have set up an ambush,” said Katib. “They were waiting in the room. Most likely they had moved the driver already.”

The official police theory — obtained through a third party Katib knew — was that this was the product of a feud between two dueling smuggling groups, possibly Syrian, who had connections to the Russian mafiya. What the Turks were really up to, however, was difficult to fathom. Their government was not sympathetic to the true cause of Islam, and while the intelligence service was preoccupied with the Kurds in the east, they were not to be taken very lightly. Asad had no doubt that that they had arranged an ambush at the hospital; the question was what the driver, Yorsi al-Haznawi, would have told them.

He didn’t know much, not even the location of this safehouse. Still, as a matter of prudence he would have to change locations.

To be truly safe, he would have to leave Istanbul completely. But he couldn’t do that; only he could initiate