Chaos Theory (27 page)

‘I don’t know.’

‘You can trust me, Mr Al-Hadi, I assure you. Like I trust you. You don’t think I would have told you anything about Nakasu, if I didn’t? You eliminated Adeola Davis, which has saved us a great deal of complicated planning and expense. You have just the right combination of fervour and gall and sheer bloody-minded stupidity, if you don’t mind my saying so. Believe me – we can use a man like you.’

 

P
rofessor Halflight drove a half-mile up Nichols Canyon, and then turned into a down-sloping driveway. He parked in front of a two-storey cedar-wood house that looked as if it had been architect-designed in the late 1960s, with a flat roof and a deck that ran around three sides of it, and huge picture windows with slatted blinds.

As they climbed out of the professor’s big silver Mercedes, Abdel Al-Hadi looked up and saw that somebody was sitting out on the deck, staring down at them – a very white-faced woman, with a dark brown headscarf. But Professor Halflight didn’t acknowledge her. He heaved himself up the wooden steps and opened the front door and led the way inside.

The house was gloomy because all of the blinds were three-quarters closed, and there was a stale smell of last night’s dinner. The walls were painted a dull magnolia, and were covered in dozens of Arabic prints and documents, all of them framed in dark brown wood.

Professor Halflight ushered Abdel Al-Hadi into a wide open-plan living room, with a dark polished floor and faded Persian rugs. All of the furniture was Middle Eastern, too: a green velvet ottoman with its stuffing hanging out like a disembowelled horse; and several leather armchairs with frayed fringes.

Abdel Al-Hadi heard the sharp flip-flap of slippers, and a diminutive Mexican woman appeared, wearing a black dress and a brown apron. If she was happy to see Professor Halflight back home, she didn’t show it.

‘Ah, Berta. I could use some breakfast. Coffee, and juice, and
huevos rancheros
. What about you, Mr Al-Hadi? Maybe some tea?’

‘Hot water for me only, please. Maybe a squeeze of lemon.’

‘OK. Hot water it is. And have Miguel bring my cases out of the car, would you?’

Berta said nothing, but flip-flapped away again. Professor Halflight took off his coat and pulled off his bright lavender necktie and tossed them both on the ottoman. Abdel Al-Hadi could see himself in the large, mottled mirror on the other side of the room. Although the air conditioning was rattling away furiously, the living room was stifling, and he was growing increasingly uneasy about his black hair dye.

‘My partner will be down shortly,’ said Professor Halflight. ‘I’m sure she’ll be delighted to meet the man who rid the world of Adeola Davis.’

‘That was your partner, on the deck, when we arrived?’

‘Fariah is housebound, I’m afraid. She was seriously injured, not very long after we met.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘Well, yes, but her misfortune only made the both of us more determined. She shares my belief in the critical necessity for the human race to be in constant turmoil. In fact, she is probably even more fervent about it than I am. I met her when I was studying ancient history in Tel Aviv. She was young, strong, beautiful. What I possessed in intellect, she possessed in political conviction and total –
total
– fearlessness.

‘She took me to Jordan and together we joined the freedom fighters, Fatah, and they gave us guns and explosives. But we didn’t just attack Israelis, she and I. We had our own agenda. Ha! We were like Bonnie and Clyde! We shot at buses. We blew up civilians. We made a point of attacking any local politician who was trying to make peace between the Israelis and the Jordanians, no matter who they were. That was when we were contacted by Nakasu.’

‘Nakasu, they came looking for you?’

Professor Halflight nodded. ‘In the same way that I would have come looking for
you
. Hitmen, you see, are two a penny, but assassins are not so easy to find – true assassins, anyhow. Assassins have to be
driven
. They have to be obsessed. They have to have a special madness, yet a terrible single-mindedness, too.’

‘So you join Nakasu?’

‘Of course. Nakasu was everything that Fariah and I had been waiting for, without realizing it. We had
heard
about them, of course, because of our studies of ancient Babylon. But we hadn’t realized that after all these centuries they were still so active, and we had never guessed how widespread they were, in every country and every culture.’

Professor Halflight limped to the window, and angled the blind so that the sunlight shone into the living room in vertical bars.

‘Fariah and I, we felt as if the scales had fallen from our eyes, and that it had been revealed to us why we were born. We had been born to save mankind from itself, from its own paralyzing sloth. We had been born for no less a purpose than the saving of human civilization.

‘However, there was a personal price we had to pay. In August 1966, we blew up a house in Moshav Givat Yeshayahu, a few miles south of Beit Shemesh. The bomb went off prematurely. I lost my left kneecap, and most of my calf muscle. My dear partner lost both legs below the knee, and one arm, and also her face.’

As if Professor Halflight’s partner had been listening to this conversation, and waiting for her cue, there was a whining noise as an elevator came down, and a door at the far end of the living room juddered open. Abdel Al-Hadi turned around, and there she was, sitting in a wheelchair, in semi-darkness, although her face had an eerie shine to it.

There was a higher-pitched whinny, as she steered her wheelchair out of the elevator and made her way towards them. She was wrapped, what there was of her, in a dark brown shawl with beige flower patterns on it. Her single hand, resting on top of the wheelchair control knob, had only three fingers. Her face was covered by an expressionless mask made of glossy cream celluloid. Behind the mask, her eyes shifted restlessly, like two blowflies busily laying eggs in her eye sockets.

‘Fariah,’ said Professor Halflight, ‘this is Mr Abdel Al-Hadi.’

Abdel Al-Hadi bowed his head. ‘I am honoured to meet you, madam.’

‘Julius showed me your video,’ Fariah croaked. ‘You did well, to kill Adeola Davis. You should be proud.’

‘It was unfortunate that she had to die, madam. But nobody would listen to our demands.’

‘She was a
peacemaker
,’ said Fariah, as if that was the most disgusting imprecation she could think of. ‘Cursed are the peacemakers, for they shall condemn the human race to eternal compromise.’ She let out a guttural laugh, which almost immediately degenerated into a bout of coughing.

‘
Berta!
’ called Professor Halflight. ‘Berta! Bring water! Quick!’

Berta came flip-flapping into the living room carrying a plastic flask of water with a drinking straw attached. Professor Halflight poked the end of the straw into Fariah’s mouth slit, and she sucked, and coughed, and made cackling catarrhal noises, and sucked again.

Eventually, she said, ‘I’m all right now. Thank you, my love. Thank you.’

Abdel Al-Hadi hesitated for a moment, in case she started coughing again, but then he said, ‘Tell me about Nakasu, Professor. You say there are many of them, in many different countries?’

‘All over the world. In government agencies, in security forces, in universities, in business. You can hardly call them an organization, any more than you could call al-Qaeda an organization. But just like al-Qaeda they are utterly determined and they are prepared to sacrifice everything for what they believe in, and they will never be discovered and rooted out.

‘Fariah and I have been associated with Nakasu for over forty years now. We have become connected with men and women of a hundred different nationalities and a thousand different political persuasions. But they all have shared our belief in chaos. Now, we are Nakasu’s spiritual and cultural leaders, she and I. If somebody has to die, it is
our
decision.’

Abdel Al-Hadi said, ‘Then the two of you – you rule the world – more than if you are king or queen or president?’

‘I don’t think it’s entirely an exaggeration, to say that. In a way, we
do
rule the world. Nakasu has ruled the world for two-and-a-half thousand years. It’s all a question of eliminating the right people at the right time.’

Fariah began to cough again, and Professor Halflight reinserted the drinking straw into her mask. More sucking noises, almost enough to turn Abdel Al-Hadi’s stomach. He wished he hadn’t chewed on that garlic clove after breakfast, but Mitchell had recommended it to give him ‘authentic Palestinian breath’.

‘A disguise is so much more than a stick-on beard and a false nose,’ Mitchell had told him. ‘You have to
smell
like the person you’re pretending to be, too. Or, in your case, stink.’

Professor Halflight kept on feeding Fariah with noisy sips of water. Without taking his eyes off her, he said to Abdel Al-Hadi, ‘You asked me earlier to give you some names.’

Abdel Al-Hadi shrugged, as if to say, Well, you can if you like, but if you don’t want to—

‘When I tell you,’ said Professor Halflight, ‘you will understand how influential Nakasu has been in changing the course of human history. In 2003, for example, there was the Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, who was stabbed in a department store in Stockholm, and died later of her wounds.’

‘Yes. I remember this.’

‘Ms Lindh, you see, was a tireless campaigner for international peace. Almost single-handedly she prevented a civil war between Kosovo and Macedonia, and she was still working on a new understanding between the Palestinians and the Israelis when Fariah and I decided that it was time for her to stop interfering in the natural order of things.

‘A very successful operation, that one. We used a poor mad fellow called Mikailoviç, who didn’t know what day of the week it was.

‘Then there was Zoran Djindjiç, the prime minister of Serbia, also in 2003. And Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, in 1995, I think it was. And Olof Palme, the prime minister of Sweden, in 1986, and Indira Gandhi, in 1984.

‘I won’t pretend that Nakasu can take the credit for every single assassination over the past two-and-a-half thousand years. For instance, we had nothing to do with the killing of Earl Mountbatten, when his boat was blown up off the coast of Ireland. That was the IRA. But John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, yes. And King Faisal of Iraq in 1958 . . . what wonderfully chaotic consequences
that
assassination has eventually brought us!

‘And perhaps the jewel of all assassinations . . . the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, in 1914, which directly led to World War One, and the loss of thirty-seven million lives. But think how the world has advanced since then!’

Abdel Al-Hadi was silent for a very long time – so long that Professor Halflight leaned forward on his cane, cocked his head sideways and said, ‘You want more names? There are dozens more. King Umberto I of Italy, in 1900. President James A. Garfield, in 1881.’

‘You are right,’ said Abdel Al-Hadi. ‘You
have
changed history.’

‘Yes, Mr Al-Hadi. But we have done something much more important than that. We have made sure that mankind moves forward.
Emu ki ilani
, as you rightly translated what it says on the medallion: to rise up, to move forward; to develop, to mature; to become like the gods.’

‘So? I could join you? I could become a member of Nakasu? I could change history, too? I could become like the gods?’

‘Let me show you something,’ said Professor Halflight. He opened the top drawer of his desk and produced another medallion, exactly similar to the one that Abdel Al-Hadi was holding. He passed it over so that Abdel Al-Hadi could examine it.

On the reverse, the letters P A U L were engraved.

Abdel Al-Hadi handed the medallion back. ‘Who is Paul?’

Professor Halflight didn’t answer, but took a glossy colour photograph out of his drawer. It showed a catastrophic auto-mobile wreck, someplace at night, in a tunnel. Firemen had cut the entire roof off a smashed-up black sedan, so that paramedics could attend to a woman who was sitting on the rear seat.

Her face was covered with an oxygen mask, but there was no mistaking the bright blonde hair.

Abdel Al-Hadi looked up in disbelief. ‘This, also, was Nakasu?’

Professor Halflight took the drinking straw out of Fariah’s mask slit, and it was still attached to a long spider’s web of saliva.

‘It was the landmines, that’s why she had to go.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘My dear Mr Al-Hadi, the wonderful thing about landmines is that wherever you plant them they create a constant atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. In spite of that, they require absolutely no maintenance and they’re outstandingly good value for money. Every month, all around the world, two thousand people are killed or injured by landmines. Yet your average landmine will cost you not much more than a Happy Meal – maybe three to ten dollars.’

He paused, before he added, ‘We couldn’t allow anybody to interfere in such a highly cost-effective way of causing chaos as
that
, now could we? Especially somebody with such a high public profile as
her
.’

 

E
arly the following afternoon, Hong Gildong pushed open the door that led to the subterranean parking garage and walked towards his SUV, jingling his keys in his hand.

The far end of the garage was open to the backyard of his apartment block, and Hong Gildong could see several of the residents sitting around the small rectangular pool, sunning themselves. As he approached his SUV, however, he could also make out the silhouettes of two men standing on either side of it, one of them leaning back against the hood as if he owned it.