A Pakistani businessman visited him each week. He was a genuine businessman, with genuine interests in New York and very real financial interests and holdings. But everything about the man was, in fact, a cover. Despite the man’s own high ideals about his role in Al Qaeda, and his limited understanding of the true ramifications of the agenda his associates were pursuing, he was really no more than a donkey, ferrying information and money to Shahim for the length of his stay in the US.

His choice of targets was simple and unimaginative, and in truth, he suspected that his superiors were really shopping for another miracle. They were still unclear on how he had managed to successfully complete his mission in Islamabad, and they were trying to see if the man was just lucky.

With various attacks on New York’s financial and commercial centers on the terrorists’ Christmas list, he had found that he had cause to spend lots of time walking around the city, which his tortured machine-bound personality found surprisingly relaxing.

The curse of a machine memory was the ability to recall, at any time, in perfect color, even the most painful of events. And he had found himself reliving the death of the prime minister’s sobbing family many times over the months since it had happened.

He was not sleeping. True, he did not need to, his machine brain did not need to rest or recuperate. But the effect on his psyche of being awake for weeks at a time was disorienting. He noted the passage of time not in days but in the weeks between visits from the businessman that was his only ‘friend.’

A week ago a stranger had called him a ‘rag-head’ when he was getting off the subway at his stop in Queens.

In a microsecond his arm had flashed out with all his might, flaring toward the man’s face. At the last moment he had relented, withdrawing the bulk of his might from the blow and stopping it from crushing the man’s face into the back of his skull. The softened punch still connected though, snapping the man’s nose and sending him reeling backward into a wall.

He had stepped up to him and pinned him to the wall with a single vice-like hand and whispered, “If you ever say that to one of my brethren again, I will find you, and I will rip your very soul from your stinking guts. Then I will find everyone you know, everyone you love, and they will all die slowly at my hands. Do you understand me, you disgusting piece of shit?”

The man had nodded frantically, tears streaming down his face. As soon as his neck had been released, he had fled. It had been a phenomenally foolish thing to do, and Shahim had erased the twenty seconds from his reports to the hub satellites, stopping it from being transmitted to his colleagues.