“When you first started the club, I was curious to see what would happen when the local goons showed up.” Spider twisted his neck from side to side. “The Hammer Trio were the first to call…and the last. Vicious bastards. Those three left a trail of cripples all over the Zone. Not anymore though, right?” His smile jerked. “Two former army special forces and a retired Fedayeen-”
“He wasn’t Fedayeen. He washed out the first month.”
“Really? Everyone said…” Spider nodded. “Not that it matters anymore. The three of them came around…and then they were gone.” He blinked at Rakkim. “Is it true you left their hammers on the bar for a week afterwards? Three ball-peen hammers?” Rakkim shrugged. “I deplore violence, but no one tried to collect from you again, did they?”
A couple of Spider’s children, twin girls about eight years old, burst through the curtains, giggling. They pointed at Rakkim, whispered to each other, laughing now.
Rakkim waited until the children had darted away. “How many kids do you have?”
“Not enough,” said Spider, completely serious.
“What am I doing here, Spider?”
“Yes. Of course.” Spider blinked. “The core from the university computer had nothing of interest on it, but the one from Sarah’s home unit contained a very ingenious security system.” He folded his arms around himself. “I’d love to know where she got it.”
“I’ll ask her when I find her.”
Spider’s fingers twitched. “There was a dual memory on her personal core. One was readable to anyone able to crack her access code, which was no great difficulty, but behind that primary memory was a second, a ghost memory much more difficult to penetrate. Even more interesting, the ghost memory had an autodestruct timer. If a code word wasn’t typed in every seventy-two hours, a virus would tear through the files, but leave the primary memory intact. So, someone examining the core would find it filled with nothing but the usual academic clutter. No one would even know that there had been anything to delete. Impressive. I have no idea who created it, but it’s not Russian, or Chinese, or Swiss. None of the usual suspects for top-flight code. It was an individual. An individual using backwater code…but with a very high-level intelligence. Just like me.” His fingers fluttered. “Maybe that’s why I was able to crack it.”
“You cracked the ghost memory?”
Spider’s smile jerked.
“Could you tell if anyone else had read the files?”
“Like Redbeard?” Spider snorted. “No, I was the first to pop them.” He pulled at his lip, flashed nubs of white teeth. “If you had been able to get the core to me sooner, I could tell you a lot more. The virus wiped out most of the files, but there was enough left for me to reconstruct certain parts. I saved the prologue of a book she was working on. It must have been one of the last things she entered. First in, first wiped, that’s the way the virus worked.” A tic started under his right eye, lifting his cheek several times before subsiding. He leaned forward, stared at Rakkim as he recited:
“‘The Zionist Betrayal was the pivot point of modern history, the axis on which the world shifted. The story is taught to every schoolchild, marked by a moment of silence at noon on the anniversary of the attack. We all know that on that terrible day, renegade elements of the Israeli government struck targets in the United States, and the holy city of Mecca, attempting to blame the actions on radical jihadis and discredit all of Islam. We all know that their plan was discovered, Israel itself overrun, while the forces of Islam spread their beneficence across the globe. And yet…what if all that we know of these attacks was wrong? What if the Zionists were not behind the Zionist Betrayal?’”
Rakkim shrugged. “I’ve heard dozens of conspiracy theories about the Zionist attack. Did she have any evidence?”
“The book’s unfinished, and I was just able to retrieve bits of it, but her conclusion is obvious. The Zionist Betrayal was another blood libel against the Jews. The worst yet.”
“Obvious to you. No evidence, but the Jews are innocent. How convenient.” Rakkim saw he had hurt the man’s feelings. “Who did Sarah think was really behind the attacks?”
“Her r-r-research,” Spider stuttered, “her research wasn’t definitive. She mentions an unnamed Saudi or a Yemeni…maybe a Pakistani. He’s referred to usually as the Old One. She doesn’t even know if he’s still alive. He was evidently in his sixties at the time of the attack, which would make him in his nineties today, but-”
“The terrorists confessed. They were born and raised and trained in Israel, and they confessed on live TV. You’ve seen it. The whole world has seen it.”
“The man works on an incredibly long-range time frame. He must have spent twenty or thirty years putting the operation into place.” Spider’s hands flapped from the sleeves of his pajamas. “According to Sarah, he seeded his operatives into Israel as Jewish immigrants. It was the children of these deep sleepers, raised and educated in Israel, who rose within the political and military establishment-”
“The terrorists were executed. You think their parents raised them, loved them, knowing the whole time they were going to be sacrificed? And the children agreed?”
“I know, I know, but the Old One occupied some sort of cultural and religious sweet spot. The devotion he inspired…” Spider’s fingers wriggled. “He’s taken on the mantle of a Muslim figure of antiquity, the old man of the mountains, an eleventh-century mystic-”
“Yeah, Hassan-i-Sabah. I’ve read the story. He supposedly inspired such loyalty that his followers willingly threw themselves off cliffs if he merely beckoned.”
“The stories are true. Hassan-i-Sabah believed that God had anointed him to unite all Muslims, and he acted on that belief. His acolytes assassinated dozens of Muslim monarchs in his day, including the caliph of Baghdad.”
Rakkim remained skeptical. “So the Jews are blamed for the attacks, and Damon Kingsley becomes president-for-life of the new Islamic Republic. You think he was part of the deception? Sorry, but Kingsley is no extremist.”
“Yes, Kingsley is a moderate, a grave sin to a true believer. In fact, if the Old One is anything like the original old man of the mountains, he’s as hostile to other Muslims as he is to Jews. Kingsley’s election means that the Old One didn’t completely achieve his goal.” Spider twitched. “But that doesn’t mean the plan isn’t still going forward, whether or not the Old One is still alive.”
“Why didn’t Sarah tell Redbeard about this?”
“Maybe she didn’t trust him to help her…or maybe she knew he didn’t have the power to do anything about it.” Spider blinked. “I cracked the congressional budget code eight years ago. Follow the money, and you’ll find the truth.” He blinked faster. “In the last three years, Redbeard’s budget has been cut forty percent. Recruitment and training have been crippled. The money is going to the army and the religious authorities…Fedayeen, of course. No one outside the Select Committee knows. I thought it was the Black Robes outmaneuvering him with Congress. Now I wonder.”
“You see a lot from bits and pieces.”
“That’s what I do. That’s what you do too, Fedayeen.” Spider watched Rakkim trying to process the new information. “Hard work to reimagine the world, isn’t it? It’s kept me busy too.” He handed Rakkim a flash-memory wafer. “This is everything I pulled off the core so far.”
Rakkim slid the wafer into the port of his watch. “Who contacted Sarah at the Mecca Café? Did you find out who she’s working with?”
Spider shook his head. “It was sent through a feed in Las Vegas, but that doesn’t help. Vegas is a hub. There are so many satellite uplinks over that city that the sender could be anywhere in the world.” A baby was crying again. “So many of us killed. Homes burned. Businesses looted. Civil war…and it was all a lie.” His tics were like mild electric shocks. “You were lucky, Rakkim. Being an orphan allows for certain…opportunities.”