Robert Ferrigno - Prayers for the assassin

Sarah looked out the window.

“I know you want to believe the Zionist Betrayal was some monstrous historical fraud, but I think you’re wrong.”

“Then why is this assassin following us?”

“For the same reasons the Black Robes sent the bounty hunters after you. Redbeard has enemies and you’re a bargaining chip. The Old One is just another player.”

“You may be right.” Sarah stared straight ahead. “I just need to read through the journals. I’m only partway through the relevant volumes. With your help-”

“I could get us to Canada.” Rakkim watched the road. “We can switch cars and shake the assassin. Four or five days, depending on the weather and the patrols-”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Rakkim glanced over at her, then back at the road. “You haven’t changed from the first day I met you. Five years old and you were already a troublemaker.”

Sarah laid her hand on his leg. “Let’s go get the journals. You know I like to read in bed.”

Rakkim gasped at the boldness of her touch. He checked the rearview mirror again to cover his arousal. “First things first.” Brave words from Sarah, but he could see her face by the dashboard lights, the strain showing as she stared out into the rain. She had never been out here before. Most city people hadn’t. Even the police avoided the badlands.

It had only been six months since Rakkim had seen her, but she looked older. It wasn’t just fatigue circling her eyes, it was recognition of the monsters that lurked out beyond the lights of home. For someone like Sarah, who prided herself on her logic and intellectual toughness, it had to be a shock to find out how insulated and privileged her previous life had been. Finding a friend murdered did that to you. Killing a man, and knowing you would do it again and it would be easier that second time…that was the ultimate wake-up. Sarah was learning. If they survived, she would be the better for it.

“Why are you slowing down?” Sarah asked.

Rakkim turned off the lights, but kept the car idling in the middle of the road. “If we’re not going to Canada, we’ll have to kill the assassin.”

A small mound of concrete was all that remained of a sign that had once announced Green Briar Estates, one of many outlying subdivisions built to house workers for Seattle. Affordable Muslim living in an unspoiled Muslim place. It hadn’t worked out at Green Briar, or any of the other remote housing developments. The moderns had fled the long commute, frightened by the surrounding forests and the growing lawlessness. The subdivisions had gone to rot and ruin, picture windows broken, chimneys crumbling, moss so thick on the walls you could stuff a pillow. Squatters had moved in, not caring that the power had been turned off. In fact, they would have cut the power lines and dynamited the water mains had they been working. The access road into the subdivision was blocked by dozens of felled trees. Green Briar existed now only in blueprints long since filed away.

“I don’t like this place,” said Sarah.

Rakkim flashed his headlights twice. Waited. Flashed them once again.

“We should go.” Sarah looked around. “The assassin…he’s going to catch up.”

“No, he stopped when we did. He doesn’t want to catch up. He doesn’t want us to know he’s back there. He wants to stay right where he is, lurking in the background. He enjoys being close, but choosing to stay back, holding our lives in his hand. It’s intoxicating for him. Better than sex. Our stopping here doesn’t make him think we’re onto him-he thinks we’re just exercising caution. He respects that. He’d become suspicious if we acted too trusting. It’s going to make killing us later all the sweeter for him.”

“You talk like you’re inside his head.”

Rakkim stroked her shoulder, felt her fear under the thin sweater. He didn’t blame her. The assassin’s head was filled with broken glass and tortured animals. Rakkim watched the woods on either side of the road. “That was him in the guard shack when we left. I was hoping to get a look at him, but he-”

“I talked to the guard. He didn’t seem-”

“The guard you talked to is dead. The assassin waved me through when I drove up, his face behind a newspaper. I was in a hurry…I didn’t think anything of it, but when you told me the car had picked up a bug at Marian’s, I knew it had to be him at the gate. I would have rammed the guard shack on the way out, but it had a concrete barrier.”

“Why would the assassin kill the guard? What would be the point?”

Rakkim smiled. After all that had happened to her in the last week, she still didn’t understand what they were up against. “I’ll be right back.” He opened his door, but remained in darkness. He had unscrewed the interior lightbulb. “They’re here.”

“Who?” Sarah saw them now. Three men had appeared out of the rain, stepped out of the night like ghosts. Phantoms in soggy wool clothes, their hair and beards long and matted. Phantoms armed with axes and machetes.

Rakkim showed the men his hands and got out of the car.

“I should be going with you,” said Redbeard.

“I need you here, Thomas,” said his brother. James tucked the latest progress reports into his gym bag, trying not to hurry. “I need you to look after Katherine and Sarah.”

“The best way to protect them is to keep you safe,” protested Redbeard, wanting to shake him, to make him understand. “Chicago is dangerous-”

“Every place is dangerous.” James added a wireless handheld, allergy pills, and his well-worn copy of the Holy Qur’an. The sun was bright through the bulletproof windows of Redbeard’s second-floor study, the villa’s undulating expanse of lawn impossibly green. James zipped the gym bag.

In the blue, nylon athletic suit, James looked just as he had at the Beijing Olympics, the gold medal around his neck as he declared his new faith to the cameras. One of the first of the high-profile converts, James’s hair was a mane of reddish blond, his goatee still downy as a youth’s. He was so handsome Redbeard had a hard time believing they were brothers. Redbeard was bulkier and more heavily muscled, a college wrestler, his full beard coarse. An ugly duckling, but James had never treated him that way, and Redbeard loved him all the more for it.

Redbeard stood with one hand in his pocket, fingering his prayer beads, the clicking of the amber beads muted. There was something he needed to remember, something nagging at him. He fingered the beads faster, trying to recall what it was.

“Don’t look so sad, little brother,” said James. “It makes you look like one of the pinch-faces in the Bible Belt.” James smiled. “You haven’t gotten that old-time religion, have you, Thomas?”

Redbeard grimaced. He didn’t have his brother’s sense of humor. Or his charm either. Few did. James Dougan was director of State Security, but he was as much of a politician as an intelligence chief, a moderate Muslim, devout, yet practical. In the chaos following the Zionist attacks, James had been the new Islamic president’s choice to head the agency. The fundamentalists had been opposed, but James had disarmed them with his wit, his popularity, and his adroit handling of the media. When those failed, Redbeard, his second-in-command, had been eager to step in. Redbeard had an eye for detail, the ferocity of a Kodiak bear, and was willing to lie to God himself if necessary.

Now, two years after the cease-fire that had ended the civil war, they should have been celebrating their success. State Security had stymied major terrorist attacks and forced the remnants of the Christian underground to flee to the Bible Belt. Civil liberties had been curtailed, but after the chaos that had marked the transition from the former regime, complaints were few. Except from the fundamentalists. The right-wing clerics had called for James’s ouster for his refusal to stone unbelievers, denouncing the brothers as converts in name only, soft on doctrine, soft on sin.