Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West (3 page)

“Oh, I kind of assumed…”

“But I’m learning,” she said defensively, and
regretted this right away.

“Going to classes?”

Classes
where
exactly? Taught by
which
Arabic speakers? Hatefully, he was contriving to make
her feel, or seem, guilty of something. How many people felt, when
they saw a cop, that they were guilty of some indefinable
crime?

“Audio CD and book,” she told him.

The ICEman’s cold eyes appraised.

How did this badge-carrying intruder see her?
Snub nose with a bridge of faint freckles, though could he see her
skin flushing? Tumbly goldilocks hair that was
natural;
no
doubt he’d mark this as her best feature. Eyes levelled and
vanitied with greeny multi-focal contact lenses over pupils that
were rather more grey, a strong chin but no obvious lipstick; it
was
subtle
. Reasonably slim. And thank god for modest-sized
boobs; she despised breast-fixated men, at least Terry wasn’t one
of those, and she despised still more those women who deliberately
dysfunctioned themselves to appease this fixation. Was Turner’s
appraisal the ordinary male kind, or was he looking for signs of
guilt, or at least of non-compliance?

“Just how did you…?” she began. Ah, but of
course. High-speed computers were constantly scanning websites,
e-mails, everything on-line, searching for key words or phrases,
supposedly defending the USA in a war, ‘the war against terror’.
She tried a likely guess. “
Eagle Teacher
is a code-name for
some terrorist plot, is that it?”

“You reckon so, Dr Leclaire? Supposing so,
why would you choose it?”

“I certainly
didn’t
choose it.”

“Why would
one
choose it?”

“Teach the bald eagle a lesson? Meaning the
government?”

“Specifically? Assassination maybe?”

“How would I know!”

“Or maybe an attack on American money? Some
way to make the dollar sick?”

“I thought most money already had cocaine on
it.”

He bulled onward. “
Eagle Teacher
might
signify that you teach the eagle, or that the eagle does the
teaching. In which case, who or what might the eagle be? What does
this bit of verse suggest to you, historically you know?”

She shrugged. “It’s only a fragment.”

“Come on, you’re the expert.”

“If it’s a literal translation from Arabic
into Provençal, perhaps the teacher is a religious figure. The
phrase ‘from high’ may mean at or near the top of the hierarchy,
somebody like an Imam maybe. I don’t see how this has any
connection with anything of interest to you nowadays. I mean, if
somebody is using
Eagle Teacher
as, as…”

“A code-name for a plan, just for instance?”
he supplied, as if taunting her.

“Well, obviously they didn’t take it from
this.”

“There wasn’t any more than those seven
lines, preceded by ‘death’?”

“Nothing recoverable. I’d have published it
if so!”

“I bet you would. If anything more does occur
to you, we’d appreciate…” He held out a card bearing only his name
and a phone number. Hastily she tucked the card under a book
entitled
The Forgotten Queens of Islam
.

“It’s highly unlikely anything will occur to
me, Mr Turner.”

She half expected him to say,
We never had
this conversation
. Since he didn’t, maybe he hoped she’d call
someone at the mosque, just for instance, which in turn might cause
them to do something out of profile… Paranoia! For that, they’d
have to tap her phone. Anyhow, she wasn’t even going to phone Terry
to tell him.

As soon as the door closed on the ICEman, she
googled
www.ice.gov
. Jesus, it was the men
from ICE who’d nailed the founder of the Islamic Society of Boston.
ICE’s Mission: “to protect against terrorist attacks.” Set up in
2003 as the
largest
investigative branch of Homeland
Security! Mention of a Cyber Crime Center.

She clicked links. Joint Terrorism Task
Force… Uhuh, and the US Secret Service were buddies under the
banner of Homeland Security, although not the FBI nor the CIA,
thanks for small mercies. And the Secret Service was founded first
of all to protect American money, only adding the protection of
presidents to their job description later on…

Eagle
, she thought to herself.
Islamist eagle, terrorist eagle? It seemed blindingly obvious that
there couldn’t be any connection with the early Middle Ages. On
impulse she typed
eagle
teacher
into Google, and got
millions of hits. Ah, but ICE must have gone for an exact phrase
search. This produced 12000 hits, still far too many! A quick scan
revealed that most hits were about schoolteachers associated with
‘eagle’ awards or courses or somesuch, so she added
-school
to remove these. Much less, but still a few thousand.

She’d been visited
in person
. ICE must
have put something extra into their search. What, what? Abigail
re-read the fragment of poem. Struck by an awful inspiration, she
typed
+death
as an extra search term.

Only 79 hits. Right at the top of the first
page, staring coldly at her from the screen, was her contribution
to the
American Annals of Medieval History
. There she was at
number one. She sat back, shocked and shaking.

Back Bay, Boston,
Massachusetts: April

She’d needed to get out of her office, out of Harvard
itself, see fresh faces. Inside Tealuxe, sunshine highlighted the
faces of Boston’s chattering connoisseurs of the beverage: old
ladies in scarves, trendy students with lip-rings or shemaghs or
brightly coloured beanie caps, a chap in a long black coat with a
dove-grey scarf reading Newsweek. It was still chilly outside, and
the warm haven was crowded.

Abigail sipped at her Lady Grey, pushing away
uncomfortable thoughts about Terry; to no avail, he always crept
back.

Perhaps they’d both gotten the wrong
impression of each other from the get-go. From her perspective at
least, she saw now that
she
certainly had. She’d always been
a sucker for charm, and Terry’s winning smile, smooth courtesy and
lavish attention soon crashed through her flimsy defences. Yet his
easy charm turned out to be just a mask, behind which lived an
insecure and home-loving boy, who wouldn’t commit to anything that
would force him to take responsibility and grow up.

And what had
he
seen in her? She
didn’t know, but at the moment he probably saw an obsessive and
argumentative woman, who pushed him where he didn’t always want to
go. A woman who was never going to stay in Boston forever, no
matter that it was a lovely place to live. This made her seem
cruel, which in turn made her feel bad, yet it had all started so
well.

After the stipendiary at Radcliffe came up,
she arrived a couple of months early to settle in, only to find
herself desperately lonely. Boston had a small town mentality; it
seemed surprisingly hard to break in. She asked Terry about the
city when he served her a drink. He expounded. Soon he was taking
her on whirlwind tours. He knew every inch of the place,
introducing her to head waiters and chefs and barmen in all the
fanciest venues; an instant circle of local and useful friends. He
bought her meals and delightful little gifts. The intense shared
experience had rolled heedlessly into romance.

She should have known from the first
encounter that Terry’s roots went deep, like the roots of Boston
itself, despite new structures built above. He’d even said then,
almost with an odd kind of pride, that he’d never spent more than a
fortnight away from home. Abruptly, it came to her that he would
never
leave Boston. Therefore they should end this now,
before a worse ending was forced upon them. She felt nauseous,
abandoned some tea undrunk, and headed out into crisp air and the
hope offered by a bright blue sky.

She turned down Clarendon Street and paused
where it crossed St. James Avenue, to take in a view that always
fascinated her; Trinity Church reflected in the mirror-glass wall
of the Hancock Tower. The old reflected in the new.

Jack Turner’s odd questions returned to prick
her. Could the words of the old poem by Safiyya bint Yusuf
al-Ballisiyya be reflected in some new and destructive purpose?
Hijacked by terrorists to serve their violent ends? Or had someone
dug down to find an
old
purpose, then built anew upon
it?

The whole thing seemed ridiculous. Safiyya
al-Ballisiyya had penned her words more than five hundred years
ago. Apart from the fact that it was unsettling to receive personal
interest from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jack Turner’s
bizarre visit heightened an unresolved problem which had been
niggling her for quite a while. The fragment by Safiyya was
obscure, to say the least. Abigail simply didn’t know what it was
really about. With only a single other work by the same writer, and
that one romantic in nature, there was very little context to work
with.

It seemed overwhelming likely that ICE were
clutching at any Islamic straw to support some flimsy case.
Nevertheless, she had to get ahead of them on this poem, if only to
fend off any further unwarranted government intrusion. She headed
down St. James and towards the public library, determining to make
Safiyya al-Ballisiyya and her curious verse a priority, even above
introducing reality to Terry.

Later, when she emerged from the library into
its courtyard of Italianate columns, that same guy who’d been in
Tealuxe was leaning against one, still intent on
Newsweek
.
Coincidence?

Cairo, the Fatimid
Caliphate: 1145

Hakim, the Arabic name for doctor, was the name he
now determined to use as his own. This gave no information about
either his lineage or his birthplace, shearing him of all
associations but the high purpose he was about to dedicate his
whole life to.

As a medical student freshly arrived in
Cairo, bursaried by the charity of the Nizari Ismaili community in
Syria, Hakim was determined to fit in. He didn’t want the fate of
the pious fellow student named Sadiq. Poor Sadiq was tolerated,
just, yet was socially excluded and, though that young man surely
had a very similar background to himself, Hakim made no overtures
to Sadiq for many months. That wasn’t the way to advance.

Before long, the popular Abdul and his crony
Naguib sidled up to Hakim to ask, “Would you care to put some milk
into a cow tonight, along with us?”

Cow was what you called a whore. So-called
milk cows gave you sex outdoors; free cows went to the rooms of
their clients; wild cows used their own rooms; and then there were
the farm cows who worked in brothels.

“Of course,” and Abdul had winked, “we
examine the cows carefully first of all, to make sure they’re
clean.”

Down by the wax candle market, beside the
mosque of Aqmar, Hakim had seen whores clad in red leather trousers
coughing suggestively to draw the attention of prospective clients.
He forced himself to joke: “I certainly wouldn’t want
my
candle dipped in dung.”

This caused Naguib to snigger. Abdul grinned.
“Buggery costs a bit extra,” he remarked.

“That isn’t for me,” Hakim said. “I need to
watch my purse.”

“Surely you can afford thirty dirhams for
admittance to the gateway of joy? How do you expect to instruct a
nurse to examine a woman, whose body you aren’t allowed to see, if
you don’t already know the female body by experience, eh?”

Hakim detected a mischievous trap. “When did
I say that I have never lain with a woman?”

Abdul smirked. “An easy riddle to solve. As a
baby with your mother! How can you fill humanity with purpose, if
you can’t even cause ecstasy in a woman?”

Ah, so they’d noted some sense of purpose in
him, beyond merely the ambition to become a healer.

“Whores pretend their ecstasy,” Hakim
remarked, as if he knew.

“Not at the house we go to, I assure you.
It’s as if the women have worms in their vaginas, making them itchy
to be fucked.”

“Thirty dirhams,” repeated Hakim, thinking of
the money generously gifted him for his education, raised by tithes
and donations.

“Yes, dirhams. I didn’t say gold dinars! Or
are you a prude, like poor Sadiq?”

“No, I’ll come with you,” agreed Hakim.

“But not,” quipped Naguib mischievously,
“into the same cow. We withdraw to private little rooms after some
dancing during which we make our choice.”

Withdraw. Private. Almost every word seemed
weighted with smutty significance.

So that same evening, as a half-moon shone
upon the splendours and squalors of Cairo, mirroring itself like a
bright silver sail upon the Nile, Hakim went with his two fellow
students of anatomy to a certain house with lattice windows.

Silks hung around the walls of a large room,
covering doorways. The three students shared a sprawl of tasselled
cushions with another patron, a burly man. They all paid an old
woman five dirhams for cool sherbet, an extra cost which Abdul had
neglected to mention. Gleaming brass oil-lamps seemed to invite a
caress, which might magically cause the flame to leap up and become
a fiery enchantress.

The enchantresses, four of them, faces
rouged, eyelids shadowed with kohl, shimmied through the silks from
separate doorways. They too were scantily clad in silk; their
private parts were concealed, though barely so. Bangles on their
wrists and ankles jangled, slippers with up-curving toes glittered
on their feet. Two were plump and two were slim. One had skin of
coffee with milk, another was almost white, a third was African
ebony, Nubian undoubtedly, and the fourth was cinnamon. Lewdly,
languidly, they began to dance while the old woman clapped her
hands rhythmically.