She would tell them. It was all a mistake. They had taken the daughter of the President. They were going to be in big trouble.

Of course, they knew that already. That was the whole point of this. The weight of knowledge landed on her with a nearly audible thud. This wasn’t a mistake. It was a kidnapping, and had been planned long before.

Rita. Rita had done this to her.

Where was she now? Was she in on it?

It was cold out, and she felt them crossing a gap, an empty space, a threshold of some kind. Then she was sprawled on a padded seat, and her face was uncovered.

They were moving once again. She looked out and saw that they were on a boat, the boat racing, bounding, no lights on, across vast and open water.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

May 8

3:15 a.m. Arabian Standard Time (2:15 a.m. Central European Summer Time; 8:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, May 7)

Al-Fallujah

45 miles west of Baghdad

Iraq

The street where they met was wrecked.

The Americans had taken the city in brutal house-to-house fighting six months before. All this time later, nothing had been rebuilt. Buildings were mere rubble, or were pockmarked with bullet holes. Scrap metal littered the streets and alleyways. Fresh water was brought in on trucks. The sewage system was destroyed. Half the city still had no electricity.

The locals called it punishment. The Americans called it justice.

The man called himself Abu the Martyr. He was forty-three years old and long ago had started turning gray. His beard was shot through with gray and white. His vision, once so acute, was beginning to fail. When reading the Holy Quran in the evenings, he was forced to hold it as far from his face as his arms would allow. Soon, someone would have to hold it up for him from across the room.

He had been trying to martyr himself for more than twenty years. He was willing, but Allah had chosen not to take him.

“His will, not mine, be done,” the Martyr whispered.

He quietly smoked a cigarette and stood in the doorway of an abandoned building. The front façade of the building was intact. The rear of the building was open air and a pile of shattered bricks. A missile or rocket had hit this place, a very typical residential building in what had once been a poor, crowded, but very typical residential neighborhood.

Up the street, a car appeared, its headlights off. It rolled slowly through the ripped up asphalt that littered the road. It descended into a shallow missile crater, then came up the other side.