Michael Walsh - Early Warning

She gave him her best fake smile, the kind of smile she’d been delivering on cue for years. “Yes, thank you,” she replied. “I guess I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

That was an opening she hadn’t meant to give him, but luckily his manners were good and his training impeccable, although his eyes registered receipt of a message that, even if it were true, would never be acted on. And she acknowledged his courtesy back. So it went in the endless dance between the sexes, another thing that was lost on the American sisterhood, to their eternal loss, in Maryam’s opinion.

The wheels touched down. Maryam looked out the window and saw nothing but the flat plain. No wonder they called this Burgenland-Fortress land. The only protection here was man-made, not nature-provided. Here you had to fend for yourself; at the interstices of not just cultures but civilizations and religions, it was every woman for herself. The Austro-Hungarian border had once been eradicated by royal fiat, but the Great War had ended that fiction and now it was back, a line on a map but always a line in the hearts of the people, and a line in the sand.

Her car rolled toward the border, crossed it, left the West, and entered the East.

New York City

Arash Kohanloo had spent a great deal of time in New York, especially for an Iranian national. Under some circumstances, his passport might have proven a bit of a bother, but the Tyler Administration had been determined to turn its back on the old ways. The fact that he was attached, however tangentially, to his country’s U.N. mission facilitated matters greatly and, even if all else failed, he had multiple passports from multiple countries, including a Swiss passport that was tantamount to an international laissez-passer. It was amazing what the combination of money and power and fear could win you.

The hotel, of course, was in lockdown. The New York authorities were smart; they had learned from the Mumbai massacre, and knew that the fancy hotels were natural targets for gunmen with grudges. The elevators were all switched off, except for a couple of service elevators being guarded by private security. You could order room service to eat, but you had to stay in the hotel, and preferably in your room, until the “incident” was over.

All of which was fine with Kohanloo. In fact, that was just the way he wanted it. Fewer people milling about suited him just fine, and as long as the cell phone service worked he could stay in touch with everyone with whom he needed to stay in touch, and then events would unfold as they unfolded.

At the first news of the attack he had informed his people back home. He had also made certain that a specific sum of money had been wired to several bank accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and one of the Channel Islands between Britain and France. One could no longer rely solely on the discretion of the Swiss. In the crackdown on international money transfers that followed in the wake of 9/11, including the so-called Swift program that enabled the government to trace “terrorist” financing and thus disrupt the usual remittance channels and other mechanisms of Shari’a-compliant finance, the damned Americans had interfered with everything. This had necessitated a change in the networks that funneled money between the Muslim lands and their bankers in London and Brussels, and for a time the stream was partly dammed. But money is like water and soon enough it finds its way to its inevitable destination.

He didn’t have to come here, and it was not part of his arrangement with Skorzeny that he do so. But the opportunity to strike a blow at the heart of a politically correct America and to supervise the operation right under their noses and in the heart of the greatest city as an honored guest was too good to resist. Skorzeny had warned him against taking personal charge, but Skorzeny was a bitter old man, with too many weaknesses, and whatever game he was playing was known only to him.

Kohanloo looked at the array of cell phones on the table in front of him. They were all local, off-the-shelf, no-contract communication devices-“plain vanilla,” as the Americans said. To anyone tracking cell phone use-and even the Americans were not so stupid as to not be doing that-they would appear to be completely innocuous. What a pleasure it was to use the enemy’s technology against him, to take the things his infidel culture had created and to turn even the simplest things into weapons. Whether the Brothers had used box cutters or knives on 9/11 was immaterial; the real weapons they wielded on that glorious day was the institutional cowardice of the Americans, especially the men. They had turned that weakness into the powerful flying bombs that, Allah be praised, had taken down the Twin Towers and nearly the Pentagon itself.

For what sort of men were these, who would not fight back? Who would not defend their women and children? Who would go so willingly to their deaths, Christian lambs to the slaughter? For all its sexuality, its braggadocio, its exaggerated cartoons of men and women, Western culture was at root exhausted, played out, expired. This was one thing that he and Skorzeny had agreed upon from the start: that what they were doing was not murder but euthanasia, the merciful thing to do when a living organism was in its terminal stages.

The idea behind the operation was simplicity itself. Either America would fight back or she wouldn’t. The Holy Martyrs who had struck the Great Satan on 9/11 had succeeded beyond the Sheikh’s wildest dreams, but in a larger sense they had failed. They had not precipitated the final war between the dar al-Islam and the dar al-Harb, nor had they set the Americans to each other’s throats in a civil war over their precious national freedoms.

But this was different. This was a direct attack, man to man, on the streets of the Great Satan’s financial capital and its greatest city. This was a challenge so direct that not even the New York Times could rationalize it away. This was the event that would finally force the cowardly Americans to choose sides and then, once they had, it would be the work of a lifetime or two to hunt the infidel dogs down-with the assistance of the collaborators, of course-and destroy them. In the end, all would be well, and all would accept the Call or die.

But there was another, larger, and vastly more important reason behind the martyrdom operation. The arrival of the Twelfth Imam, pbuh, could only be hastened by blood; he would not come, with Jesus at his side, until the Great Conflict was well and truly under way. All was in readiness in the Holy City of Qom, where the path had been made straight and the centuries of the false Mahdis would soon come to an end. What better way to encourage Mohammed ibn Hasan al-Mahdi al-Muntazar to finally reappear than to set the dar al-Harb aflame?

Arash Kohanloo glanced over at the television set, another typical product of Western decadence. Who had need of such a monstrosity, when a simple black-and-white set would do? This was the problem with America: need had nothing to do with its desires, and the word “want” had transferred its meaning from the former to the latter. He was from a far older culture, an infinitely greater culture whose art and poetry before the Conquest had been unsurpassed, and while some sacrifices had had to be made in order to accommodate Revelation, the memory of the Persian Empire was imprinted on every Iranian’s soul. Even the name of the country-its new name, not the old one-signified its glorious antiquity and pride of place in the human community: Aryan.

He had lost a few of the warriors yesterday, but the rest had gone to ground as per instructions, while they waited. This, too, was part of the plan. Warriors were only martyrs who had not entered heaven yet, and his job was to supply the afterlife with fresh souls.