Robert Ferrigno - Heart of the Assassin

Two lower-ranking Black Robes watched the crowd pass from a side street-they bowed to Jenkins but made no move to join the throng. Black Robes patrolled the city day and night, alert for signs of sin: a careless profanity or the sound of singing from inside a home, a woman with an improperly fitted burqa, or children playing too enthusiastically. So many sins to keep track of, so many punishments to mete out.

Rakkim heard sirens in the distance, fire trucks approaching from the opposite direction. Two trucks…one about ten blocks ahead of the other, driving faster, the engine misfiring. He could smell the fire now, burning wood and plaster and many coats of paint. An old building. They burned hot and fast. No one around him reacted, oblivious, their senses dull in comparison with his.

Put Rakkim in a small, dark room, not a speck of light, put him there alone in the dark except for four scorpions scattered about, four pale yellow scorpions from the North African desert. Androctonus australis, highly aggressive and deadly as a cobra. Put Rakkim in that room and tell him to find the scorpions before they found him. You had to know how to listen to survive in that room. You had to know exactly where you were in space without any reference points. Most of all, you had to be patient, to wait for the scorpions to move. Without patience you'd never get out alive. Rakkim was in that room eleven hours before he killed all four of them. He was already a Fedayeen when he walked into the room, first in his class…he was a shadow warrior when he walked out.

Fedayeen were the elite warriors of the Islamic Republic, genetically altered to be stronger and faster, go days without sleep and recover from injuries that would kill a normal man. Only one in a thousand qualified for Fedayeen, and only one in a thousand Fedayeen qualified to be a shadow warrior, men able to blend into any social environment, from the Bible Belt to the Mormon territories, to a Black Robe stronghold like New Fallujah. Hard work to stay invisible. The wrong accent, the wrong shoes or simply holding a fork in an improper manner could draw attention, and attention could bring death.

Wind whipped through the narrow streets, howling like a wounded ghost, the smell of smoke stronger now. The city always had lousy weather, but the storms were getting worse, part of a global climate change. The monsoons had shifted, China was in the tenth year of drought and Europe had the worst flash floods in history. If the wind was right, there were days when the West Coast from L.A. to Seattle was cloaked in smog from the firestorms burning up Australia. Sarah said New Orleans sinking was a warning of things to come, then got mad at him when he shrugged and said he'd buy her a boat.

The crowd trudged on, past boarded-up storefronts and apartment buildings where the residents peeked out from behind closed curtains. Most of the men around Rakkim were tech workers from nearby factories, sullen men in plain overalls and cheap, down-filled jackets. They worked twelve-hour shifts churning out cheap parts for Chinese nanocomputers, dangerous work, the fumes toxic but a steady source of hard currency. Rakkim made his way near the front of the moving throng, close enough to see the age spots on the back of Jenkins's bald head. The women from the mosque lumbered behind, slowed by their voluminous black burqas, barely able to see out of the eye slits.

Rakkim remembered Jenkins's sermon an hour ago, haranguing the believers to remain morally ruthless. A woman who does not fear her husband is already a harlot in her dreams, her husband already a pimp by his weakness! Jenkins had shouted, voice echoing off the dome of the mosque. Kneeling on their prayer rugs, the men nodded in agreement. From the other side of the mosque, half hidden behind a decorative grate, many of the women had nodded too.

He hated New Fallujah. Christians in the Belt were all over each other, skin to skin, sweating and cursing so easily it was part of the environment, like the humidity and gardenia blooms perfuming the air. He came back from a mission in the Belt, all he wanted to do was make love with Sarah, rest his cheek against the heat of her belly afterward, then make love some more. When he came back from New Fallujah…he was just going to play with Michael, listen to his three-year-old son giggle and try to forget all the ugly things fundamentalists did to each other in the name of God.

Rats skittered underfoot, darting among the crowd, but Rakkim seemed to be the only one who noticed.

Rakkim lived in Seattle, the capital of the Republic, a bastion of moderate Islam, where even Catholics could get an education. You heard music in Seattle, saw women in public with their heads bare and couples holding hands. New Fallujah was a city without bright colors or laughter, just the tightening vise of piety squeezing the life out of people.

Ibn-Azziz, Grand Mullah of the Black Robes, considered Seattle a non-Islamic cesspool. There were Black Robe senators in the congress, and what they lacked in numbers they made up for in intensity. President Brandt had been in office barely a year and already ibn-Azziz was demanding Shar'ia law be extended throughout the nation. His demand had been rejected…for now. The president thought the matter was settled, but he was naive. The Fedayeen commander, General Kidd, knew better. That's why he had sent Rakkim into New Fallujah.

Rakkim saw the fire now-the Ayman al-Zawahiri madrassa, a girls' boarding school housed in the former St. Regis Hotel, was ablaze. Flames shot fifty feet into the air, gray smoke boiling up into the night, driven higher and higher by the wind roaring off the bay. He heard the whoosh of burning lumber, paint bubbling off the outside of the building and the screams. Fire engines idled nearby, but the water pressure in the aging underground pipes was weak, the firefighters' trucks ineffectually shooting water onto the flames. The spray drifted across the yellow streetlights…gleaming in the moonlight.

Worshipers from the mosque joined the onlookers, neighbors and family of the children inside the school pressing against the police cordon that surrounded the burning madrassa. Women watched from behind their eye slits, flames reflected in their steady gaze. Firefighters dashed into the building, retreated as the wind kicked the blaze higher, then charged up the stairs again. Voices muffled, the girls' mothers wailed, the sound seeming to float in the air, while the police stood silently, blue uniforms covered in ash.

Cheers erupted, mothers ululating with joy as two firefighters ran out of the madrassa, each carrying a couple of small girls over their shoulders. Mothers rushed the firemen, grabbed their children, sobbing, the children coughing into their mothers' necks.

Jenkins pushed past the police, pulled a long, flexible flail from under his robes and began whipping the women, the girls screaming as their mothers turned, taking the lashing on their backs.

"Return them to where they came!" demanded Jenkins.

The women clutched their children.

"Would you consign your daughters to the darkest pit of hell?" Jenkins shouted, veins bulging in his scrawny neck. "Would you prefer a child steeped in wickedness or a child raised among the blessed in Paradise?"

"Save their honor," said one of the fathers, eyes downcast. "I…I have other daughters, imam."

"No, save them !" A woman broke from the crowd, confronted Jenkins, her voice booming through the burqa. "Let Allah decide who is virtuous and who is wicked-"

Jenkins cuffed the woman to the ground. "The world has enough whores."

"Allahu Akbar!" called other voices in the crowd, other women, other parents kicking at the woman, shouting their agreement. "Allahu Akbar!"

The upper windows of the madrassa blew out, glass shimmering as it fell through the air. Five girls clustered on the outer balcony, far above the street, raising their arms to the sky, howling, their white night clothes billowing up past their knees. Rakkim felt sick. Jenkins had decided it was better that the girls burn than be exposed in their underclothes. Better to burn than be seen by men not of their family, their reputation destroyed and along with it, the good name of their relatives.