“I said not yet.”

“I was remembering when we first met, Maurice,” said Redbeard. “You were adjutant to General Sinclair. I saw this tall African with the bearing of a king and wondered if you’d last a year with all the officers arrayed against you. The things they said behind your back…”

“It couldn’t have been worse than the things they said to my face,” said General Kidd.

Redbeard had shown up unbidden and unannounced at the small conservative mosque, the only white face among the Somali worshipers. He and General Kidd now sat cross-legged on rugs spread under a wisteria tree, eating dates and sipping strong, sweetened coffee that Kidd’s youngest wife brought them. No bodyguards in sight. None needed.

“We’ve seen a lot of history.” Redbeard spat out a date seed. “You and I sailed some dangerous waters together, yet I feel the worst of our voyage still lies ahead.”

“The nation has gone off course, Thomas.” Kidd blew across his cup. “We were to be a light upon the world. Now, we might as well be kaffirs, the way the young people behave. They are soft and given to indolence and idolatry.”

“The young should be given time to find the way.”

“The young should be instructed in the way.”

Redbeard slurped his coffee. “Would you want Ibn Azziz to do the instructing?”

Kidd popped a fat date into his mouth, chewed slowly. “I heard you had a death in the family. The men responsible…they are dead?”

“The men who stole her from outside her mosque are dead. Killed by the man who sent them before I could find them. As if I needed to question them to know who was responsible.” Redbeard tore at his beard. “Allah has given you a choice. You can keep your oath and stand beside your president, or you can become the sword of a mullah who abducts and murders devout women. A mullah who takes refuge in the Grand Mosque with a hundred bodyguards. Is the protection of Allah not enough for him?”

Kidd’s face was a mask, but his eyes betrayed his turmoil. “I love President Kingsley as my own father, but he is old. He is dying.”

“We’re all dying, Maurice.”

“Did you come to tell me that, old friend?”

Redbeard reached into the basket of sweets, smiled. “I came for the dates.”

Rakkim had just finished checking the street again when Jeri Lynn came back. She was carrying a small, red enamel box.

“God bless you,” said Sarah.

“Don’t get excited yet.” Jeri Lynn sat down beside Sarah, opened the box. “Fancy said her daddy give this to her when he came back from China that last time.” Jeri Lynn took it out of the box, dangled it by the black woven-fiber cord, the beaten-copper amulet decorated with Chinese ideograms. The amulet slowly turned as she held it up. “Fancy said she didn’t take it off for years, called it her good-luck charm, but then I guess her luck turned. She was older then and it made the skin underneath flake off, and things went downhill from there. She said she thought it was a judgment from Allah, because of the way she was living, so she put it away for safekeeping. I used to see her wearing it sometimes, looking in the mirror and smiling.” Jeri Lynn tucked it back in the box. “It’s not much to look at, but Fancy loved this necklace.”

Sarah made no move to take the box.

Jeri Lynn replaced the lid. She looked at Rakkim. “Cameron told me some things about you. He said he saw you kill a man with your bare hands. Said he never seen anything like it. I want your promise. I want you to promise that if I give you this medallion, you’re going to find this Darwin. You’re going to find him and you’re going to kill him.”

“It could take a while,” said Rakkim.

“Just promise that you’ll do it. I’m not asking for a schedule.”

“I promise.”

Jeri Lynn turned to Sarah beside her. “Can I trust him to keep his word? Fancy never had much luck with men, and I had even less.”

Sarah stared at Rakkim. She was thinking about what he had told her about the assassin. That he had no chance against him. “I trust him.”

Jeri Lynn handed her the case. “I hope this does what you think it will.”

Sarah tucked the box away.

“I don’t know if it makes a difference to you, but I would have killed Darwin anyway,” Rakkim said to Jeri Lynn. “I would have killed him for Fancy and a few others he’s butchered. I made up my mind about that a long time ago.”

Cameron wandered out from the back of the house. His hair was combed. He was wearing clean pants and a frayed L.A. Ramadan 2035 T-shirt. He sat in Jeri Lynn’s lap and didn’t even look embarrassed. “You sure I can stay?”

“Long as you want, baby.” Jeri Lynn put her arms around him, but kept her eyes on Rakkim. “You keep your promise, and if you can make this Darwin suffer, that’s all the better. Make it hurt. Make him howl so loud the demons in hell will know he’s on the way.”

CHAPTER 56

“You said we were to meet tomorrow,” said Professor Wu. He looked from Sarah to Rakkim, unsettled by the lack of harmony a broken engagement engendered. “We were to meet at the King Street Café, not here. Not at my home. We were to have dim sum, Sarah, and-”

“Could we come in, Professor?” said Rakkim. “I’d rather not stand out in the cold.”

Wu glanced at Sarah, disappointed, although she wasn’t sure if he was annoyed at their unannounced arrival or at Rakkim’s interruption of him. Wu backed away, waved them inside. “Please.” He led them into a small, sparsely furnished living room, moving slowly. The bare spot at the back of his head had expanded in the years since she had last seen him and now encompassed most of his liver-spotted skull. He waited for them to sit on the clean but threadbare sofa, then excused himself, said he had to retrieve the photos of the medallion that they had onlined him.

Rakkim and Sarah had driven straight through from Southern California, keeping to the main roads, lost in the traffic. According to a jeweler in Long Beach, Fancy’s medallion was slightly radioactive. Not enough to pose a danger, but still more proof of its connection to the planting of the fourth nuke. The trip had been uneventful, except for a multicar accident in the Bay Area that threatened to detour them into San Francisco, a rabid fundamentalist stronghold. Terrible place, the old Golden Gate Bridge renamed for an Afghan warlord and decorated with the skulls of homosexuals purged after the transition. A section of the bridge had collapsed two weeks ago. Zionists or witches blamed. Any cars entering the city would be searched. Cells with picture capability or Web access would be confiscated, women dressed immodestly beaten. If Rakkim and Sarah’s forged marriage papers had been questioned, they would have been arrested for suspicion of fornication, and worse.

It had been raining in Seattle for the last five days, a cold, steady downpour that drove people off the streets and sent cars sliding into ditches. Sarah missed the heat and freedom of Southern California, but it was still good to be home. Or what passed for home. A warehouse in the industrial section south of the Sheik Ali Mosque. Another one of Rakkim’s hiding spots. Three days ago she had sent photos of the medallion to Wu, a Chinese scholar dismissed a few years ago during a bout of campus politics.

Wu shuffled back into the living room, slowly lowered himself into a reading chair. His fingers curled against the leather arms of the chair. His neck was so thin it could barely support his head. “Tuesday is the best day for dim sum at the King Street Café,” he said, Adam’s apple bobbling. “Madam Chen is only able to work one day a week, but her spring rolls with black mushroom are still the best in the city.”