May 3
9822 Watchung Road
Essex County
Short Hills, New Jersey
5:07 P.M. EDT
Her eyes were open now, fully. When consciousness had first crept back, Tavah Duhahi had possessed sufficient wit to open them only to slits, to await the mental mists to dissipate, to remember who she was, where she was, and why.
To ponder dully why she still was, in fact. She knew that she was not dead, given the post-concussion nausea that she fought back, instinctively though with difficulty.
She allowed her head to loll forward, chin dropping to her chest.
Her hands had been bound with clear plastic tape; obviously, she was a captive. The figures who bustled past in the room—including one who watched her closely, though carefully outside a lunging-attack radius even had she been able—were familiar only in a generalized way: Arabs, confirmed when her hearing and mind finally cooperated sufficiently to discern their speech as words.
She tasted blood, and through the fringe of her eyelashes saw that her blouse was drenched in it. Tavah debated whether it was hers and decided not: Given the volume, had it been hers she would be dead.
That triggered an image, a remembered struggle, which in turn helped spin her mind to near-clarity.
A few moments more, and she painfully raised her head and allowed her guard to see her eyes flutter open.
“Jew bitch,” he spat at her, turned, and left.
It was no more than ten seconds later, during a particularly wrenching spasm of her stomach that again closed her eyelids, that Tavah sensed a presence standing before her and instinctively knew its identity.
“Greetings, Ahmad,” she said in Arabic, and raised her head to look him in the face.
“Greetings to you, Najaah,” Ahmad Abu Khaled said. “I have greatly anticipated our reunion. Or should I address you by some other name now, my wife?”
“Call me whatever you wish. But not ‘wife.’ That role repulsed me even when I spoke the words of binding. ‘Najaah’ was a role I played to fool a foolish man. I cast it away as I cast you away, Ahmad: without a care, with delight at the thought of your death. It was I who placed the bomb in your house, you must know.”
“I do know that, and in the ensuing years have learned much besides. That you were never Muslim, that you were a Jew, a lying Israeli betrayer who sought only to spy on her husband, finally to murder him. I also know that when you left, you carried a child away with you. My child, Najaah. My son, to whom I watched you give birth.”
“Truly, that is so.” Tavah’s smile was venomous. “He was swaddled in the blanket on which you had so carefully inked the script of his name. I cast away both the blanket and the boy with equal joy. I left him on a dirty street, abandoned like a bundle of garbage. He sickened me, Ahmad, as did you. Perhaps he died, as unwanted by others as he was by me. If the boy still lives, wherever he may be, I hope it is as an ignorant goatherd wallowing in filth.”
Ahmad studied her in silence, as carefully as if she were a specimen pinned to a board.
“So do call me ‘Najaah,’ Ahmad,” Tavah taunted. “In this language, does it not mean ‘success’? The fate of your son is truly my success.”
“He lives, woman,” Ahmad Abu Khaled said, pride competing with triumph in his voice. “He lives, and he follows the teachings of the Prophet. He is nine years of age, and already his hatred of your vile people is as great as mine. He will be a leader in our quest to exterminate your foul breed in our homeland. I have already taken steps to see to this, and will rejoice as he fulfils that role. That is my ‘najaah,’ woman. Take that to the everlasting fires of hell.”
He called to the guard.
“Bring her,” he ordered. “She will be the first. It is fitting that she dies at my hand.”