Reprisal (3 page)

Zehra snapped. She jammed her finger into his face. “Listen you jerk, I’d be happy to never talk to you again. And don’t tell me about the law of Allah. I know it better than you do.” She stopped for a moment. “Have you ever read the Qur’an yourself or do you let others interpret it for you?” Her shouts bounced off the close walls.

“A woman cannot understand the words from the Prophet like a man.”

Zehra felt her face flush hot with anger. Sweat stood out on her forehead. She knew better than to argue with him, but she hated all that he said. She stood but didn’t trust her legs to support her. “Get out of my way,” she yelled at him.

“No woman talks to me like that.” He reached for the chair, gripped the edges, and started to lift it.

The silence in the room crackled with tension. Zehra heard the lights above humming. Thick air dulled any outside sounds. The chair scraped across the floor.

Zehra watched his eyes. Knew it was time and slammed the red panic button with her fist.

El-Amin had the chair off the ground. He twisted his shoulders to get better leverage. She could hear him grunt as he strained to swing it toward her.

Zehra backed into the corner. The block walls felt surprisingly cool. She had her arms up. Clanking sounds echoed around the room. El-Amin swore something in Arabic.

Two deputies burst through the door and clamped their arms over El-Amin’s shoulders. The chair clattered to the floor. One deputy seemed to enjoy the opportunity and twisted El-Amin’s arm behind him until Zehra heard something crunch. El-Amin screamed and dropped to the floor. He stomped on El-Amin’s back.

Another deputy arrived and helped the first two drag her client outside the interview room. “You okay, Zehra?” he asked her. “Sorry… we didn’t see anything until you hit the button. I … I’m so sorry.”

She waved her hand at him. “Don’t worry, Jack. I gotta get out of here.” She stumbled back to the elevator and rode up to civilization above. Her blouse was drenched, and Zehra longed to get out of the sticky clothing.

She burst through the doors outside and felt the comforting smell of fresh air. Closing her eyes, she let the sun’s warmth penetrate her wet face. Tangled thoughts flew through her brain. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before.

Even though El-Amin said he was guilty, her reading of the file told her there was a good chance he was innocent. Why would he want a trial? Zehra shook out her damp hair as if to shake off the creepy feeling he left with her.

That’s not to mention the way guys like El-Amin had hijacked Islam in a perverted way to serve their violent ends. That infuriated her.

She took a deep breath and watched as a sparrow lifted off a nearby tree. It paddled upwards along the stones on the side of the old City Hall where Peregrine falcons sometimes swooped down from the ramparts to snatch prey like the sparrow.

Zehra started toward the cool of her office, plotting how she was going to dump the case.

Two

The fact that Americans weren’t immune to the disease, had been the key to everything. Mustafa Ammar closed his leather bound copy of the Qur’an. He rose from his knees, completed his prayers, and removed the old, tan cotton robe. Underneath, he wore a blue Hugo Boss suit with a white shirt open at the collar.

Several years earlier, as part of his planning, he had successfully embedded himself in the Minnesota company called Health Technologies. He worked there as Michael Ammar, a genetic scientist—a perfect cover for his real work. After his prayers, he prepared to leave for the office and the labs.

Today, his immediate problem was a lack of information. With the launch date set for less than two weeks from now, Mustafa worried about the last minute details. Years of planning and struggle and setting up a network of believers, would finally pay-off. Could he control things until the release?

As he had intended, El-Amin had been accused of killing the Somali boy. Mustafa was certain he wouldn’t reveal anything, but Mustafa still worried. He needed information about law enforcement. What were they doing on El-Amin’s case? Would they uncover anything?

The scream of boiling water in the teapot startled him. He moved to the kitchen and poured hot water over loose tea leaves. Smelled the comforting aroma. Sitting in the hard chair beside the window, Mustafa thought back over years of work leading up to this point.

The key triggering everything was the fact that the deadly disease of smallpox had been eradicated from the world in the late 1970s. Drug companies stopped making vaccines. The Western infidels continued blissfully shopping, eating, and getting fat, confident that smallpox was a mass killer of the past. And even though people no longer had an immunity to it, that was okay since the disease didn’t exist.

Except for two places.

He’d learned there remained two repositories of the virus. One, located in the Maximum Containment Laboratory at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, was under the heaviest security. The other was located in Vector, an old city in Russia. During what the infidels called the “Cold War,” both the United States and Russia agreed to maintain the virus in safe deep freeze, so that in the case of an unexpected break-out, vaccines could be developed from the saved virus.

Mustafa sipped the tea and enjoyed the floral fragrance. He and his brotherhood saw this as an opportunity to strike at the West in a fashion more devastating than anything ever done before. Let others set off bombs in subways. What did that do? Kill a few people. And a week later, everyone forgot about it.

The Al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center first gave Mustafa a hint of what could be done. Not the destruction itself, but the ensuing panic. What if he could do something even worse, more widespread, and unstoppable that would lead to panic and death on a nation-wide scale?

He’d be blessed by Allah and revered the world over for his courage and vision.

The security at Vector was a joke and was bought-off cheaply. He’d already taken one shipment from them for testing on the Somali boys. The second one would be coming. He’d meet it himself. Once here, the delivery systems to spread the plague were also simple. The virus attached itself to the moist membranes of human mouths, noses, and throats. Like a greedy parasite, it exploded in uncontrolled growth. Unlike a parasite, the virus spread easily and killed quickly.

Finishing his tea, he cleaned up the few dishes in the kitchen and left for work. He pampered himself here in America. He justified it as part of his cover. Leaving the house, he climbed into the new BMW and started for Health Tech.

The company had also given him the place for the launch: the school where he volunteered as a science teacher to high school children. In two weeks the school-wide science fair would occur. He had volunteered to help prepare the projects—giving him access to all areas of the school. The fair would bring the students with hundreds of their parents. Like sacrificial lambs for Allah, they’d be cut down mercilessly.

Mustafa weaved his way skillfully through heavy traffic to the company. All around him, drivers strained to go faster. Most of them talking on cell phones. Probably about banal subjects like shopping or the insatiable need for Americans to watch sports. Not that many of them participated. Most sat on couches and drank beer. Mustafa worked hard to maintain his body and the fighting skills he’d learned from the brotherhood.

How far he’d come in his life, he marveled.

Born in Egypt, his parents fled from the British oppressors to the Netherlands where Mustafa had earned his undergraduate degree. Then they moved to Dearborn, Michigan which was the “Ellis Island,” for most Middle Eastern people entering the U.S. There, he’d earned his doctorate in molecular biology and had been confronted by the new groups at the mosque he attended.

It was ironic he thought. Before his commitment, he’d been lackadaisical about his faith like most Americans. The group at the mosque had befriended the lonely young man he was and convinced him to commit his life to ending the West’s oppression and attacks on Islam.

The memory of his grandparents’ deaths made that easy.

In Egypt, under the harsh rule of the British, they’d joined in an uprising. As carelessly as brushing off the sand from their shoes, the British soldiers massacred hundreds, including Mustafa’s grandparents. His parents fled with him. Although their hearts remained in Egypt, they were too afraid to return. Now, they’d fallen for many of the temptations of Western society and become soft, unfaithful Muslims.

Mustafa pulled into the employee’s parking lot at Health Technologies. He walked through the warming air to his office, nodded at the stupid secretary that he shared with three other people, and walked into his office.

As usual, his desk was immaculately clean. The walls were bare of any personal mementos or photos.

Mustafa set his briefcase on the credenza under the window. He looked outside. In the middle of a sinfully huge expanse of grassy lawn, a fountain shot water high into the air. In the morning sun, it looked like thousands of sparkling diamonds falling into the pool below. It reminded him of the pictures he’d seen of his dead grandparents. Thousands of pieces of glass shone on the ground next to their bodies where plate glass windows had shattered under the hail of bullets. Their blood, his blood, stained the gray dust beneath them.

He could never forgive.

Mustafa turned abruptly when he heard a loud knock on the door frame. He spun around.

Another scientist, John Posten, officed next to him. He grinned at Mustafa. “Hey, Michael, you stud. How many women’d you score this weekend?” Posten waited and when Mustafa didn’t respond, he went on, “You’re so buff and good looking. That your secret?”

“Lots of exercise. Good food. You know.”

Posten looked down at the tub around his waist. “Yeah … gotta work on that myself. Get your prayers in this morning?”

Mustafa felt a red hot surge of blood shoot into his face. The rage always started with the shaking in his legs. Why didn’t Allah strike these kafirs dead? These stupid fools. He hoped the one standing before him would be the first to die. Mustafa fought to appear calm. “Of course. Five times a day. You should try it yourself.”

Posten’s mouth curled down. “Yeah … s’pose it wouldn’t hurt.” He started to turn. “Hey, got time for a muffin in the cafeteria?”

“No thanks. Too much work. I’m leaving for Egypt in a few days.”

“Again? How come you get the cool assignments? What’re you doing this time?”

“Well, since I speak Arabic and the company wants to expand our contacts in the Middle East, I guess they pick me. I’m presenting another paper. It’s called, ‘Use of the IL-4 Gene to Produce Interleukin-4.’”

“Cool stuff. You know it better than anyone. Yo, bro.” Posten started to walk away. He stopped. “Hey, you’re going to the company party aren’t you?”

“Of course.” Mustafa watched him waddle out the door.

Sitting at his desk, he checked his corporate email. Amongst the usual worthless dung, he sawone from another employee, Joseph Hassan. Mustafa vaguely remembered him. Older man, Muslim. Hassan wanted to meet for lunch. Mustafa paused. Hassan … wasn’t that the name of El-Amin’s lawyer?

He twisted around to his briefcase and grabbed the morning edition of the
Star Tribune
, the local paper. There it was: El-Amin’s new lawyer was a woman named Zehra Hassan. Could she be related to Joseph? In America, the name Hassan was unusual. It just might be possible, he thought.

This could be the key to getting the information he wanted about the El-Amin case. He knew his good looks attracted women. She’d be easy to fool. And if necessary in order to control her, there were other measures he could take in the meantime.

He banged his desk with a closed fist in triumph. Allah always provided. Mustafa tapped a quick response on his computer to Joseph and agreed to meet.

Three

It constituted one of the biggest pleasures of his life, but Paul Schmidt was afraid to tell anyone about it.

In his two-bedroom home in St. Louis Park, a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis, he kept everything locked in the basement. In this densely urban setting, people didn’t do his kind of hobby. People owned guns but few treasured or collected weapons the way he did.

He’d grown up on the outskirts of St. Cloud, a town on the edge of the pine forests of northern Minnesota.

He missed the woods but realized there wasn’t much work for people with his skills in St. Cloud. The town had been named after an Indian chief and that lineage carried down to him from his grandmother, a one-half Ojibwa Indian.

Paul was proud of the heritage and knew it showed in him. The dark skin, dark straight hair, tall lanky body, and a quiet personality. From his father, he’d inherited the German sense of order, competence, and duty to country.

Tonight, he walked through the living room where he’d hung the heads of the big game he’d successfully hunted. They’d become like friends visiting and occasionally, he even talked to them. Paul stepped down the narrow wooden stairs to his basement in anticipation. A closed, faintly musty smell met him.