71

SOMEWHERE IN YEMEN

Abu Nakba watched the press conference with great interest.

His men cheered when the American president announced he was transferring the funds. They cheered again when Ruzami confirmed that the entire sum of $150 million was now in their accounts and ready to be withdrawn.

“It’s time,” the Kairos founder said.

Badr Hassan al-Ruzami nodded and ordered that the women be brought to the courtyard as he and a bodyguard helped the old man down the stairs.

When they arrived, Abu Nakba saw the three Americans for the first time. They weren’t simply bound and gagged and dripping with perspiration in the sweltering Yemeni heat. They were bloodied, bruised, and trembling. The old man felt no pity for them. They were Americans and Christians and therefore infidels of the most heinous kind.

They were also the best fundraising tools he’d ever seen.

For the Libyan, this operation had never been about money, though that was a serendipity. It was about humiliating the American people and their leaders in Washington. It was too bad Andrew Clarke was out of the picture. Abu Nakba had designed this mission with Clarke in mind. But Hernandez, the Cuban, would suffice. By transferring the funds, Hernandez had already demonstrated how weak he really was, no matter his accomplishments in the Navy. Who knew what other compromises he could now be compelled to make?

✭

The cameras were in place.

Wearing a traditional white robe, brown vest, turquoise horn-handled knife, and black- and white-checkered turban that covered his face, revealing only his eyes, Ruzami said nothing as he leered at the women. It was a pity they had to be eliminated, he thought to himself as he took the last drag on his cigarette. He’d given his men permission to beat the virgins but not to defile them. Now he wished he’d defiled them himself. The blonde, anyway. He didn’t recall her name. Nor did he care. But there was something about her figure that at once inflamed and revolted him.

Since his three wives had been killed in a Saudi air strike six months earlier, he had not been with a woman. It was time. He was barely fifty. Still young. Still virile.

No, he suddenly remonstrated himself. Such were the lies of the devil. How cruel Satan was. And how crafty. He could turn himself into shapes so pleasing, so alluring as to be almost irresistible.

Such was the trap of fleshly temptation, Ruzami scolded himself. But this was no time to be distracted. They were at war, and he had a strict timetable to follow.

Drawing a .45-caliber pistol from his belt, he strode toward his prey. They were weeping now, but he refused to look at their faces. Rather, he walked behind them and thrust the barrel in the back of the head of the first girl. Ordering all three cameramen to begin rolling, he shouted praise to Allah and pulled the trigger. The girl’s body slumped into the dirt.

He moved to the next girl. She was sobbing, begging for her life. He again raised his pistol but this time shouted, “Death to Israel! Death to America!” Then he fired a second time.

The third girl, the blonde, fainted. This would not do. She had to be awake. Viewers had to see the fear in her eyes. How else were the American people going to be shaken, shown there was no place they could hide, no amount of money that could ever protect them? They were criminals, all of them, destined for the fires of hell, and the sooner the better.

One of Ruzami’s men—his face also covered—rushed over with a bucket of ice-cold water. The shock brought the stricken girl back to consciousness. Though gagged, it was obvious that she, too, was pleading for her life, and he let her continue for several moments. It was good television. The panic in her eyes. The tears streaming down her face. Her friends’ blood and brain matter all over her.

Ruzami raised his pistol and pressed it into the back of her skull. But just then a thought came to him. Abu Nakba had never specified the precise manner in which the girls were to be executed. Grabbing this one by her filthy blonde ponytail, Ruzami dragged her kicking and screaming across the courtyard until he reached the metal flagpole at its center. There, he called for a rope. Someone rushed one to him. Together they tied the girl’s chest, waist, and legs to the pole.

As they did, Ruzami shouted something to yet another man, who quickly grabbed a beat-up wicker chair off the back porch and brought it over to them, tilting it against the pole. Then he gathered up all manner of sticks, garbage, plus the bodies of the other two girls, positioning them at the base of the pole.

At Ruzami’s direction, someone went into the garage and brought back a can of petrol. Ruzami poured the contents all over the whimpering aid worker, over the chair and the bodies and the garbage and the kindling. Then he looked directly into the camera, which was still running. This time, he did not shout. Rather, he walked straight up to the lens and said in heavily accented English, “We are coming for you—all of you—every enemy of Allah shall burn. You have been warned.”

Then he turned, walked back to the flagpole, stared one more time into that beautiful face—now pale as a ghost—and tossed his cigarette onto the bodies of her colleagues. As the flames began to spread and lick at her feet, Ruzami pulled the dagger from its sheath.

“Goodbye,” he whispered, cutting away the scarf that had been gagging her.

Walking to the porch, Ruzami took his place beside Abu Nakba.

One of the cameramen circled around the flagpole to capture Abu Nakba’s reaction and prove that he was really there. The old man watched in delight as the flames quickly engulfed the girl. Then he looked up into the heavens, closed his eyes, and smiled as he drank in her cries of terror and pain, knowing they would be heard in the citadels of earthly power all over the globe and particularly in the White House itself.