Ode To Defiance Chapter 9

4

Enough is Enough

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries - for heavy ones they cannot.

—Niccolò Machiavelli

Khalid stood in the comforting warmth of the shower, soaping up after examining the corpses of the newest batch of dead mice. He didn’t touch the mice, of course—they were sealed in the biosafety cabinet—but working with them always made him feel a need to get clean.

He dropped the soap. “No,” he whispered as another waking nightmare found him.

He stood with his wife Anjum in the shower, gently rubbing her distended belly with soap. “I can feel our daughter kicking,” he whispered in her ear.

Anjum kissed him. “I’ll just bet you can. I’m sure that’s the only reason you’re taking so long. My tummy is now the cleanest thing in all of Palestine.”

Khalid had escaped from Daesh not long after the Americans started taking out the leadership with precision-guided munitions from drones in the sky. As chaos descended on the organization, he undertook three tasks. First, he started laying aside large piles of cash that he believed he could use for worthier purposes than genocide. Second, he tracked down the two men who had opened fire on his mother. This took a lot of time; his memory of their faces was crisp, but he had neither names nor paper trails that might give him a clue as to their whereabouts.

He was not exactly sure what he was going to do when he found them. He was not a murderer. Far from it. While he had learned far more about weaponry than Daesh realized while going through a little basic combat training, he remained uncomfortable with guns.

The issue turned out to be moot. He found the men together in a pile of bodies taken from a cavalcade of trucks hammered by Hellfire missiles.

Before he left Daesh, he had to figure out where to go.

Khalid had made a friend, Sabaah el-Vaziri. They’d spent a lot of time together. Almost all their time, actually, because the leadership had assigned Sabaah as Khalid’s keeper to make sure Khalid didn’t forget his enforced loyalty. One reason they’d picked Sabaah for this duty was, he too was mathematically gifted, and while not an off-the-scales genius like Khalid, the leadership figured he had a better chance of noticing any accounting irregularities if Khalid got naughty.

Sabaah had come from Palestine to join the cause—to help build the Islamic State predicted by the Koran and to participate in the prophesied great battle in Dabiq where the Muslims would route the Christians, thus marking the beginning of the end of times.

But as Predators roamed freely across the skies, blotting out targets with careless certainty, Sabaah had grown increasingly despondent. It became clear that the leader of Daesh was not, in fact, the Mahdi, that American firepower could not be overcome with prayer and dedication, and that the battle in Dabiq would have to take place in a more distant future when the Muslims would stand a fucking chance.

Khalid had encouraged Sabaah’s despondency. Eventually, Sabaah had suggested they escape together. Khalid had agreed reluctantly to the plan for which he’d carefully laid out all the pieces for Sabaah to assemble.

So, after faking their own deaths at a level of detail so glorious even Khalid was convinced they’d been martyred, he’d wound up in Palestine, introduced to Sabaah’s community as a brave and true fighter for Muslim justice and supremacy.

With his many millions in funds quietly lifted from Daesh coffers, Khalid for the first time had the opportunity to think about what he wanted to do with his life. When an outbreak of cholera struck Bani Suheila, he went to help. He learned many things. One thing he learned was that medicine was clearly his calling; he loved saving people in that way. Another thing he learned was that, in at least some plagues, death was the result of stupidity. In the face of cholera, a simple pallet of Gatorade could keep a family alive until they recovered.

One such family he’d helped had a daughter, Anjum, who worshiped the ground he walked on for saving their lives. One thing led to another. While he started planning to go to med school, she started planning the wedding. One thing led to another. He postponed his education for a while longer, until after the baby would be born.

So they were in the shower together when an American-made Israeli F15 roared overhead, shaking the windows. He wrapped his arms around his wife, gripping her tightly in a desperate effort to protect her.

As he later learned, the Israelis had identified the location where a number of high-profile Hamas leaders were planning a terrorist attack. They had swooped in and launched an American Joint Direct Attack Munition guided bomb. These bombs were precision weapons like the Hellfires launched by Predators, but on this particular bomb, one of the guidance fins locked up and the pilot lost control. It spun down too far from Hamas to damage the target, but close enough to Khalid to destroy everything.

Khalid still didn’t understand why he had survived. The blast had lifted both him and Anjum off their feet, spun them apart like toys, and dropped multiple walls upon them. One wall crushed Anjum. Two walls crashed into each other above Khalid, leaving him in a triangular hollow from which a team led by Sabaah rescued him unscathed.

Sabaah took him home, fed him, and tried to make him feel better. “It is a gift from Allah,” he explained. “You are here for a purpose. You are destined to do great things.”

While lying trapped in helpless darkness under the building, Khalid had moved beyond rage. His mind had turned cold and clear, and his extraordinary analytical powers pursued new solutions to problems he’d never before acknowledged in their entirety.

So when Sabaah’d told him he had a destiny, he had responded with quiet determination, “Enough is enough. They all must go.” He took a sip of the Faygo root beer Sabaah had supplied. “Intolerant Shias, intolerant Sunnis, the Jews, the Christians, and above all the Americans—all the corrupt leaderships of all the world. The entirety of modern evil civilization. All must burn.” He’d closed his eyes for a moment. “I have a plan.”

“Allahu akbar,” Sabaah responded reverently.

Khalid had watched uncomfortably as Sabaah silently mouthed the word, “Mahdi.”

Of one thing Khalid was sure: he was not the Mahdi, the foretold spiritual and temporal leader who would rule before the end of the world and restore religion and justice. He might be the herald of the Mahdi, he supposed, but he honestly had no real use for such labels anymore, if he had ever had.

Well, actually, he

did

have a use for such labels. His plan required becoming well enough known to establish an elite core of true believers. So he did not correct his oldest—nay, his only—friend. The Mahdi they wanted him to be? Herald of the Mahdi he would become.

Back on the Kentucky Derby deck of the

Mt. Parnassus

, Ping stepped into a small conference room and plunked herself down in a chair next to Ciara. Through the door of the room, they could see a chunk of a public open area where the Kentucky Derby racetrack was rendered on the wall. The horses stirred in their starting positions, then, as they sprang forth, a huge cloud of dust churned upward, covering the track in a light-brown cloud.

Ping offered the people in the room a sickly smile. “I’m really sorry.”

Ciara’s eyes glowed with unholy green fire. “Do I remember you? Are you the one who said, ‘Oh, Benin abandoned this place decades ago? Nobody’s going to fight with us over it, trust me?’ That was you, right?”

Ping winced.

Oziegbe, on the other side of the table, offered some perspective. “She wasn’t lying, you know. Benin really

did

abandon the place for decades.” He wilted as Ciara turned her stare upon him. “But, uh, as we’ve now learned, they got interested in it again when it became the waystation for reaching the Prometheus archipelago. There was apparently enough money to be made for, uh, people to reconsider its value.”

Ping threw her hands in the air. “How could I have known that jerk was the brother of Benin’s Beloved Chief Advisor for Life?”

Ciara put her hands out in front of her as if she were trying to strangle someone. “You could have asked him before you blew him away. Did you consider that?”

Ping blew out a breath. “Yeah, OK, but honestly, I don’t think it would have made a difference. The guy was nuts. It’s a miracle nobody got killed.” As Ciara opened her mouth to object, Ping continued, “Nobody anyone would care about, anyway.”

Ciara pounded her fist on the table and jumped up to start pacing. “’Nobody anyone would care about?’ Except for Benin’s top dictator!”

Oziegbe interrupted again. “Ping really did have to stop him. He was defacing her sign.”

Ciara turned away. A sound like the tortured hybrid of a snort and a gurgled laugh came from her. Nonetheless, by the time she turned back, she had regained her stern visage. “Do we have a plan? Other than watching the entire Benin army descend on Djergbe?”

Ping looked at her feet. “Could we offer to make reparations? I could go meet him in Porto Novo, see if we could maybe cut a deal.”

Ciara blinked. “Reparations? Money? Would that work? It’s his brother we’re talking about here.”

Oziegbe nodded vigorously. “It could certainly work. For the Beloved Advisor, gold is thicker than blood.” He winced. “It might take a lot of gold, though.”

Ciara winced. “How much?”

Oziegbe winced again, gave her a guess, and winced a third time as he watched Ciara wince again.

Ping threw her hands up. “At the end of the day, it’s not

that

much. Maybe I can get him to agree to stop his Navy from pirating everybody, while we’re at it.”

Ciara slashed with her hand, striking that idea aside. “His pirates we can handle. Actually, I think we already own his entire Navy at this point, after Abshir’s little scuffle.” She pursed her lips. “But it would be good if you could get a deal for a better price. Don’t lead with our final offer, OK?”

Ping gave her a rather fine facsimile of a salute. “I’ll negotiate a better price. You can count on me.”

The CEO for CalPERS answered her phone, “Marlene Beane speaking.”

“Marlene, good to hear your voice. This is the Attorney General speaking.”

Marlene rolled her eyes. What did this nitwit want? “Yes?”

The AG’s voice was ebullient. “I have a great new investment opportunity for you guys. We have a new bond issue.”

Marlene had feared the possibility of getting this phone call ever since California had passed the referendum allowing the government to officially go into debt. “No. I’m not going to tie the retirement funds of all the state’s employees to the success of the government’s policies. It would be a legal nightmare, for one thing.”

The AG turned on as much charm as he could muster. “Don’t worry, Marlene. I have it on good authority there’s no problem.”

Marlene pulled out her tablet. “Who told you this?”

A long pause ensued, as if the AG were reluctant to tell her. “Keenan Stull on the GS

Prime

.”

Marlene turned away from the phone and screamed into her fist.

The AG continued, “I’m sending you the details now. Take a look. If I understand it correctly, it’s a sweet deal. Should help you with your underfunding problem.”

Marlene started reading the terms of the deal. Unlike the politicians, she was hobbled by a deep understanding of mathematics. She shouted, “Send the money back now! Cancel this deal! Please, Attorney General.”

The AG turned stubborn. “We’re already spending the money. Couldn’t pass up a deal like this.” His voice became strident. “And you’re by God going to support us by buying some of these bonds.” He named a number.

Sweat broke out on Marlene’s brow.

“Do it,” the AG commanded, and hung up.

Marlene stared at her tablet. She could refuse; technically and on paper, CalPERS was an independent entity. But in reality, the relationship between CalPERS and the California state government was more complicated than that. At the end of the day, she knew, the AG and the Governor had the juice.

If she quit, they’d just get someone else, someone incompetent enough to think this was a good deal. She could raise a media stink, but what good would that do? Everybody loved the Governor these days.

In the end, she called Keenan Stull. Here she found someone she could actually talk to intelligently, even if he was nominally her enemy in this matter.

By the time she got off the phone, Keenan had her personally well positioned in the derivatives trades associated with the California bond issue. The government might go to hell in a handbasket, but if it did, she at least would do quite well by it.

Khalid set the test tubes into the centrifuge and watched them spin. The smooth, nearly invisible motion mesmerized him. “

Allah yil'an ibleesik/il-shaytan!

” he exclaimed in fury at himself. He knew never to watch the centrifuge spin, but he had been working day and night to prepare the first nation-scale experiment. His concentration had slipped.

He tried to lift his eyes to look at something else, the CRISPIER perhaps, but it was too late. The spinning centrifuge led to the waking nightmare.

From Palestine, Khalid had gone to Lebanon—to the American University in Beirut, a well-known and excellent medical school. As he had planned before his wife’s murder, he went into medicine to study virology and become the world’s foremost expert in the field. It was all the same, and yet so different. His final goal was now a nearly perfect mirror reversal of the goal that had driven him when he’d first learned how to deal with cholera epidemics.

Khalid was blowing through the curriculum at a pace never before seen by the medical professors. He was nominally a sophomore, but such terminology no longer applied; he was also taking senior and graduate-level courses simultaneously. Had he taken an exam to become a certified doctor, he would have passed easily.

At the moment when the whole building shook and the windows broke, he was watching his test tubes in the centrifuge spin.

Beirut had once been a tolerant, cosmopolitan marvel. Sunnis, Shias, Druze, diverse Christians…in total, eighteen different government-recognized religious sects lived in harmony. They had gotten along quite well for years on end.

Then things changed, for reasons much debated. Hezbollah, a Shiite organization, developed a combat power comparable to that of the official Army with the help of weapons and training from Iran. Most people didn’t fear them too much—most of the time—because Hezbollah viewed the Israelis as their main enemies—most of the time.

While Khalid watched the centrifuge, an elite Hezbollah action team in a building down the street planned a hit on an Israeli elementary school. The Israelis learned of it, and flagrantly violated Lebanon’s sovereign airspace with a pair of American F35s that poured American Maverick missiles into the place. The precision-guided missiles struck true, but the overkill the Israelis had felt necessary to ensure everyone involved was eliminated caused considerable collateral damage.

While Khalid knew nothing of the Hezbollah planning, he suspected the missile strike might afford an opportunity he had awaited. He grabbed the medical bag he occasionally used when traveling to poorer sections of the nation to practice his skills and raced to the scene of destruction.

He performed triage and fixed people with minor injuries until he came to a tall fellow with a smashed face. The injury was terrible, making identification difficult, but despite that, Khalid recognized the victim as one of several university students he had been watching for recruitment.

A shadow blocked the sun overhead. “Sabaah, help me get him out of here.”

Sabaah looked at the unconscious man doubtfully. “You know he’s almost certainly a Shiite heretic.”

Khalid closed his eyes and counted to three. “And that makes a difference how?”

Sabaah reached down and grabbed the man’s shoulders. “You grab the legs,” he recommended. “Where are we going with him?”

Khalid took this as an acknowledgment that being a Shiite made no difference. “Almost anywhere away from here for now. If they pick him up and take him to the hospital, he’ll almost certainly be interrogated for involvement in some Hezbollah plot or another, and they’ll probably figure out that he is indeed a Hezbollah operative.”

As they carried the man away, Sabaah raised an eyebrow. “And you know that how?”

Khalid shifted his arms to rebalance the load. “Trust me.” He added just a little bit more, “His name is Uwais.”

So they carried the giant into one of the medical buildings that had sufficient equipment for Khalid to operate on him.

Uwais stirred on the cot in the classroom where Khalid had hung a sign saying, “Fumigation in progress. Please move all classes outside.”

Khalid checked his pupils. “Can you hear me?”

Uwais nodded slightly.

“You’re in a place where no one will find you, so don’t worry about the cops.” Khalid licked his lips. “I’ve worked on your face. After a couple more surgeries, I’m confident you’ll have no visible scars, but I was unable to repair all the damage to the underlying muscles. I’m terribly sorry.”

Uwais gave him a hint of a shrug.

Khalid dove into his sales pitch. He knew it was premature, but he felt a certain impatience to be moving forward on additional parts of his plan. “Uwais, I know several things about you. I know you are studying aeronautical engineering with a focus on rocketry. I know you’re a combat-trained member of Hezbollah.”

At this moment, Sabaah appeared on the other side of the cot. “But there are several things we don’t know as well.”

Khalid frowned at Sabaah. “Would you be interested in striking a serious blow for Islam? I don’t mean more stupid raids on the Israelis, I mean a vast, shattering blow that would prepare the way for the Mahdi?”

Uwais gave another barely recognizable nod, but his eyes opened wide at last and gleamed.

Sabaah insisted on getting his question into the mix. “Even if it means working with Sunnis? Khalid here and I are both Sunnis, you know.”

Uwais shifted to look Sabaah up and down. Another small nod followed.

Ping strolled through the Darby O’Gill Deck of the

Parnassus

in search of the small park where Shura hung out. Leprechauns lurched through the fields rendered on the passage walls, hauling cauldrons of gold. A double rainbow arched away just off to Ping’s left, almost within touching distance. As she walked, the rainbow slid along beside her, and when she jumped at it, the rainbow jumped away as well, forever just beyond reach.

Ping gave up trying to touch the rainbow after three tries, and Ciara sidled up to her. “She’s off the charts, you know.”

They turned a corner and saw a statue of a white-furred pooka, mostly in the shape of a unicorn, just inside the park. A small child straddled the pooka’s back, delighted to be seeing all the land from so high up.

Ping raised an eyebrow. “Shura’s off the charts? Intelligence?”

Ciara nodded.

“So, how off the charts is she? As much as Dash?”

Ciara barked a rueful laugh. “I have no idea. Dash absolutely refuses to let us test her.” She frowned. “Not even when we tell her it’s for science. She just goes off on a meticulous explanation of how, when J.P. Guilford did a factor analysis of intelligence, he found over one hundred different kinds of intelligence, of which I.Q. only measures eight.” Ciara shrugged. “She’s right, of course. And though we do a lot better than the old I.Q. tests, our protocol still leaves a lot to be desired. We undoubtedly reject people who would be great BrainTrusters if the testing were better, but for the sake of the survival of the archipelago, we have to be conservative.”

Ping shook a finger at Ciara. “Ha! You and your scientific pretensions. You can’t fool Dash.”

Ciara shrugged. “She seems so nice, so quiet, so accommodating. But there’s this hard core that won’t budge.”

Ping pumped a fist in triumph. “Yes! Jam and I have taught her something after all.” She grudgingly continued after a moment, “Although she might have been like that before. Hard to tell.”

They came upon Shura. The girl was sitting at a picnic table, bent over her tablet, tapping it furiously with her stylus. Sounds murmured from the device as she achieved various educational goals. Eventually a particularly conclusive note sounded. Shura sat up, stretching her back. She blinked at her visitors, slowly focusing her eyes. “Hi.”

Ping smiled. “I just came to see how you were doing. Pretty well, it looks like.” She nodded at the gripper on one arm, a mechanical contraption sufficiently complex that Ping could not deduce its operation, not even when Shura flicked it to shut off the tablet.

Shura gave them an excited thirteen-year-old smile. “This is great! I love it all, though I especially love the biology. Especially molecular biology. I have a bunch of ideas.” She looked sharply at Ciara. “Do we have a CRISPIER on board? I’ve heard we do, but I haven’t found it yet.”

Ciara laughed, glancing at Ping with a “See what I mean?” look. “We do, as it happens, but the documentation is pretty rudimentary.”

Shura shrugged. “I can probably figure it out.” She turned to Ping. “What’s up?”

“I know you spent some time in Porto Novo. Surprisingly few of our people have been there. I was wondering, if it wasn’t too upsetting, if you could tell me a little bit about it.”

Shura smiled. “Thank you for asking. I hear you’re going to visit the Beloved Advisor.” Her eyes grew haunted. “You’re going to give him money?”

Ping thought about asking her how the hell she’d found that out, but decided she didn’t want to know. “Yeah, but I’m under strict orders to negotiate a good deal.”

Shura’s eyes grew darker. “I told you his men did this.”

Ping nodded. Prior to his ascension to Advisorhood, the Advisor had been the leader of the Islamic State Benin Province, an offshoot of Boko Haram, one of the most brutal terrorist organizations in the world. While the West was fixated on ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Boko Haram cut a far bloodier swath through Africa. The reason ISIS upset Westerners more was marketing: when ISIS performed an atrocity, they posted the video on YouTube. Boko Haram preferred a less public style.

In any event, when Benin found itself caught between rising seas to the south and declining rainfall and drought to the north, the soon-to-be Beloved Advisor saw his opportunity and brought his men to Benin.

The first buildings of the new capital had hardly gone up when Islamic State Benin Province declared itself the government. In a hard-fought but swift campaign against the demoralized Benin Army, the ISBP reminded the world that one could sometimes compensate for poor equipment and worse discipline by being sufficiently brutal and bloodthirsty.

Once in office, ISBP raised their standard of excellence in fomenting terror to new heights, prominently featuring a campaign of hand amputations.

Shura continued in a near-whisper, “I went to Porto Novo to see if I could figure out how to kill him. And the others.” She stared wide-eyed into the distance. “All the ones who were there when they killed my mother. I shall never forget their faces.”

Looking into her eyes, Ping could see them moving from one soldier to the next as she relived the scene. Ping shivered.

Ciara coughed. “I understand your desire, but, much as I hate it, we have to make a deal with him. Perhaps you could help with the layout of the capitol and the soldiers, and anything you learned about the Advisor while studying him that would give Ping a better chance of getting in and out of a meeting with the Advisor without being, uh—”

Shura completed the sentence. “Without being tortured and murdered.”

Ping nodded. “Yes, I’d like that. Quite a bit, actually.”

Shura smiled sunnily again. “I can help you with that. You must certainly not just call his secretary to set up a meeting. That would be very risky. Since you killed his brother, he might very well take whatever money you offer him, then kill you.” She looked away. Her eyes turned dreamy. “You have to make sure that part of the deal is ongoing, so he has an incentive to leave you alive.”

Ciara murmured, “Iterative cooperative game theory. I can’t wait until you get to that module.”

Shura’s eyes went from dreamy to hard in a blink. “I am happy to help you, but I have a condition.”

It was Ping’s turn to blink. “What would you like?”

Shura’s expression turned pouty; for a moment, she was an ordinary thirteen-year-old. “You have to take me with you,” she blurted. “I want to look him in the eyes.” Her expression flickered between sly and shy. “I will be your conscience.”

Ciara snorted. “Ping’s conscience is quite healthy, actually.”

But one of the consequences of Ping’s version of a conscience was that she felt guilty about cutting a deal with the man who had done this to Shura. She figured the least Shura deserved was a chance to see the man at the epicenter of her rage if that was what she wanted. “Deal.”