Alisha, the young nurse, was everything he had hoped for-shy at first, honored and embarrassed by his attraction to her, but the Old One was, if nothing else, experienced. Wise in the ways of the flesh, he drew her out, quieted her fears until she moistened under his caresses, her pleasure sweet as honey, her nipples stiffening to bursting as he kissed her. Awakening the tiger. And what a wild creature she was once roused, wrapping her hot thighs around him, gasping as he drove himself deeper into her, biting his shoulders, urging him on, wild-eyed, wanton, and free as life itself. She was no virgin, but the Old One had long since tired of virgins. The Quran’s promise of seventy virgins in Paradise might induce goatherds and students to martyrdom, but not the Old One.
He rolled her over and took her from behind, pulling back on her shoulders, her skin slick with sweat as he hammered into her, riding her hard. She bucked against him, and the sound of her rapid breathing took him back to his youth, hands wrapped in the mane of a fast horse, clinging to the beast as they raced across the hard earth, hooves pounding out sparks. He groaned with memory, released his past inside her as she pressed back against him, the two of them lost in a molten flood. He sank down beside her, his bones turned to porridge, closed his eyes, his heart so loud it drowned out everything else. She curled against him, already dozing in his great, soft bed, peaceful as a child, her small brown breasts riding high as he breathed against the back of her neck. Ah, youth…
When he regained himself, the Old One gently disengaged from her, slipped on a robe, and knotted it loosely around his waist. He glanced back at the bed, then walked to the window and looked through the one-way glass onto the main ballroom below.
A black-and-white promenade twisted and turned, touching at their outstretched fingertips, dressed in only those two colors, interlocked, shifting with every step, dizzying from this perspective. The Old One didn’t turn away, lost in the sight…he might as well have been looking through a telescope or a microscope for all the emotional impact it had on him. Today meant nothing; there was only yesterday and tomorrow.
Ibrahim, his son, his aide-de-camp, had counseled a change in strategy after they were forced to flee Las Vegas. Your caliphate need not be centered in America, Father. They are weak Muslims at best, their lands and treasure nibbled away by heathens. Better we start in Western Europe or the holy cities of the Middle East, even Nigeria would be preferable.
The Old One placed his palms on the thick glass, towering above the moving black-and-white jigsaw below, invisible as a promise. Ibrahim was wrong, of course, his suggestion as shortsighted as the rest of humanity. The Old One knew better. America was the key, not the perverse satraps of the Middle East and Western Europe: their false Islam was as contemptible as the God of Israel. America was still young and flexible, easily driven toward the truth if the hand holding the whip was strong enough, diligent enough in its application. President Kingsley’s limp leadership, his moderation, had wasted an opportunity to create a new caliphate, settling instead for a tepid theocracy. The Old One would rouse them from their lethargy soon enough. First the Islamic Republic would fall to his perfect Islam, then the Belt would hear the trumpet, see the sword raised high-convert or die, that was the only choice he offered. The Americans had been the most dynamic people in the world once; they would be so again, even greater than before, under the harsh guidance of the Old One. The rest of the world would follow.
The dancers bowed to each other, slowly returned to the edges of the ballroom, catching their breath as the Star of the Seas plowed ever closer to the Old One’s destination. He walked to the window overlooking the ocean, bored with the dancers and their petty movements, mechanical and ignorant as cicadas.
Alisha stirred, and he turned, watched her burrow deeper under the coolness of the satin sheets, lips parted, her hair spread out across the pillow, somehow even more wanton in her innocence. The temptations of this world were as vast as the delights of Paradise.
He turned back to the window, the hood of his robe framing his long, angular face. The ocean always gave him strength, its enormity and ever-changing aspect reminding him of the infinite power of Allah, his nature only glimpsed through his handiwork. There had been times in his youth when the Old One doubted that he had been chosen among all others to carry on God’s grand design, when he questioned whether his visions were arrogance or madness. He no longer had doubts. No more doubts about his role in Allah’s plan…but there were still times when he wondered if he would be able to achieve that which God had chosen him for. It wouldn’t be God’s failing, it would be the Old One’s. He watched the dark clouds along the horizon.
Sun streamed through a sudden break in the clouds, gleamed on a speck in the distance, a glistening, massive chunk of blue-white ice broken off an Antarctic glacier. He squinted…could barely make out a fleet of tugboats around the ice, probably towing it to Malaysia or Australia. Or Chile, perhaps. The world was thirsty and fresh water scarce. Glacier harvesting and desalinization plants could barely keep up with demand as it was, and someday soon water would become more precious than oil. Then wouldn’t those Saudi apostates, those languid Arab petro-ticks scream in their palaces by the sea? Pleased at the thought, the Old One watched the massive iceberg until it moved out of sight and he was forced to think of other things.
He looked down at the thin blue veins running along the backs of his hands. The deep creases in his palms. Allah used time to grow the Old One, to train him, to harden him for the struggle, but so much time had passed. Even he grew weary. Not now…not after his treatment, his blood cleansed, his cells rejuvenated. A glance back to the bed, Alisha’s hip a soft mound under the sheets, and the Old One felt himself stirred again. No…best not to waste his reborn vitality, there were other, more pressing needs. His body felt no weariness now, but there were other signs, indications of a fatigue that no amount of medical procedures could cure. His priorities were clear.
The plan, the game, the Old One’s grand design, encompassed hundreds of men across the globe, thousands even, men in all walks of life, commoners and kings, men who did his bidding without even knowing they were in his employ, or, rarest of all, men like Rakkim Epps, surprising adversaries whose challenge to him only furthered the Old One’s ambitions. An intricate skein of men and money spread out across time and space, decades of planning, minute shifts in the political landscape, everything designed for a single moment when it would all fall into place.
The Old One saw his reflection in the window, thought of all the faces that had passed before him, the mighty and the seemingly insignificant, all useful tools in proper hands. Sowing seeds, the Old One called it, thousands of seeds spread across the globe, quietly sprouting in the cracks and gutters, waiting to be harvested. A West Point graduate with an ailing sister, a liberal Muslim whose daughter was engaged to an air-traffic controller, a low-level accountant in the Brazilian Budget Office who needed an excuse for his lack of success, a Russian television executive with a taste for young boys…weeds and flowers blowing in the wind of time.
He stared into his own eyes and remembered the droopy right eyelid and coarse black hair of Kamal Hakimov, a Tajik tailor he had met just once sixty-five years ago, saw him lying in a medical tent outside Quetta, half his beard burned away from the blast of a Russian mortar. Through his spies, the Old One helped Kamal immigrate to Hamburg, loaned him the money to open a shop. Years later, Kamal befriended Mohamed Atta, an acolyte of Osama bin Laden’s, taking him into his home and his mosque. Atta was an idiot, and bin Laden a pampered Saudi dilettante-it had been the Old One who fine-tuned bin Laden’s clumsy plan, intercepting the Saudi’s communiqués, using Kamal as his go-between. When Atta asked Kamal to make a martyrdom garment, the Old One flew to his house outside Paris and waited-after shorting the American stock market through his proxies. By the afternoon of 9/11, the U.S. economy was staggering, bin Laden was scurrying for cover, and the Old One had made approximately $23 billion. The invasion of Iraq two years later was a bonus.