Who would have dreamed it? Raza Jabarti—a heartless murdering terrorist with more blood on her hands than any hundred men in the movement—was smitten with a foul-mouthed American comic-satirist and had moved heaven and earth to bring McMahon to Pakistan so she could be with him.
Raza sat in the big police chopper, alone with her thoughts. No one was saying much. They all had a lot on their minds. She was piloting them toward the UN’s imposing, flat-roofed skyscraper—its Secretariat Building. It would make an excellent bomb site. At that height, the blast and fire damage would be much greater than it would be at ground level. The New United Islamist Front physicists had calculated that the explosion would easily obliterate the entire UN complex.
“Let those UN assholes try to confiscate our offshore trillions after we nuke them off the face of the earth.” Ambassador Waheed had laughed when she’d first told him of her plan.
Her mind wandered. She could not stop thinking of Danny McMahon. She’d told him about growing up as a Saudi girl, then a young woman, and how miserable her existence had been. She’d joined the jihad for the simple reason that two of her group’s stronger men, Fahad and Kamal, had thought that if women fought and died like men, they should have the same rights and privileges as men. Fahad and Kamal had looked out for her, protected her from the clerics and fanatics. She’d known freedom for the first time in her life.
Still she’d hungered after more. Given her high position in the movement, she’d had access to Western books and DVDs. Fahad and Kamal believed in Sun Tzu’s dictum, “Know your enemy,” and so they’d encouraged her to learn the ways of the West.
She would never forget the evening she stumbled on McMahon’s DVD documentary on the insanity of organized religion. Entitled Relig-Idiots it reduced all faiths, most notably Islam, to sheer, babbling lunacy. She’d watched it hundreds of times, could recite every line of it and was haunted by it even to this day.
She began reading his books, watching his monologues and TV shows assiduously, recording copies of every one of them. In plain fact, she’d become obsessed with him. He had truly liberated her, lifted the scales from her eyes and shown her the Light.
All religions—Islam most of all—were pure fucking madness.
So she’d organized McMahon’s kidnapping. She’d argued they should abduct him, because he was the biggest, high-value, anti-Islamist critic on earth. By capturing and transporting him from New York to Pakistan, they would prove for once and for all that no one in the world was beyond their reach—not even America’s superstar entertainers.
She’d argued the publicity value was incalculable, the ransom money astronomical and furthermore it would be … fun. For the rest of their lives, they would laugh their asses off over his kidnapping and the excruciating tortures which they would inflict on him.
But in truth, his kidnapping had merely been a very complicated way of getting to meet and know her idol.
Who would have dreamed it? Raza Jabarti—a heartless murdering terrorist with more blood on her hands than any hundred men in the movement—was smitten with a foul-mouthed American comic-satirist and had moved heaven and earth to bring McMahon to Pakistan so she could be with him.
She wondered what he thought of her. She’d terrified, beaten and tortured him halfway to death. She had also given him the wildest fuck of his entire life. Even more amazing and more unbelievable, while she’d had sex with legions of lovers, she’d never come close to experiencing an orgasm with any of them—not ever. She hated men—and life, for that matter—so obsessively she feared that her fury had robbed her of some simple essential erotic … feeling. In fact, she had been so indifferent to her lovers’ myriad ministrations that she’d wondered if she would ever come.
Well McMahon had cured her of that problem once and for all. He’d rocked her world like Ragnarok, Götterdämmerung and Armageddon. All she had to do was think of him, and she was detonating with desire.
But what did he think of her?
Whatever he thought, he thought wrong.
Raza would prove him wrong.
Do not understand me too quickly, Danny McMahon, she’d told him. Think not I am the thing I seem.