Spider smiled. Way too many teeth. “It was impossible to track the call she made to Sarah at the Mecca Café, but I did some backtracking. I pulled the accounts of every business in the vicinity of the café, spreading out in concentric rings. It took a while, but I got a pattern of contacts between them going back over a year. I did some logarithmic analysis…” He looked pained. “I’ll try to keep it simple. The signals were bouncing all over the globe, but they all started at a certain satellite. Except there was no satellite at the point of origin. What I finally realized is that the satellite used for the original uplink was an old regime satellite in a highly degraded orbit. No one uses that satellite anymore. Once I figured that out…well, it was just a matter of research and triangulation.”

“You did all this while you were escaping from the Black Robes?”

“I intimidate you, don’t I?” said Spider.

“A little.”

“Shall I make you feel worse?” Spider shifted his eyes, checked his screens. Rakkim barely noticed anymore. “Elroy is smarter than I am. I can barely keep up with him. I’ve got a seven-year-old daughter…in a few years, she’s going to put Elroy in his place.”

“Benjamin?”

“Yes, Katherine,” said Spider.

Rakkim stared at Spider. He had never heard the man’s given name used before.

“Show them, please,” said Katherine.

Spider touched a key on the laptop. They huddled around him.

On-screen there was a flicker of gray, then the image of a man sitting in a chair. “My name is Richard Aaron Goldberg.” One of the most recognized faces in the world, the Zionist team leader who had planted the nuclear bomb that had devastated New York City. His digital confession familiar to every schoolchild, a digital played endlessly on the anniversary of the attack. “Eleven days ago, my team-”

“No, no, no. Your body language is wrong. How many times must we go over this? You have to maintain a back arch. And jiggle your leg slightly. You’re under duress, remember? Try it again.”

“That voice…is that Macmillan?” said Rakkim.

“My name is Richard Aaron Goldberg. Eleven days ago-”

“You’re not maintaining pupil consistency. It doesn’t matter if they’re slightly dilated or not, what matters is consistency. It’s the change in size that denotes a lie.” A spindly man with thick glasses stepped into the frame, placed a hand on Goldberg’s diaphragm. “Use the breathing techniques I taught you.” He backed out of view.

“Oh my God,” said Sarah.

Goldberg cleared his throat. “My name is Richard Aaron Goldberg. Eleven days ago my team simultaneously detonated three nuclear weapons. One destroyed New York City. Another destroyed Washington, D.C., and the third left the city of Mecca a radioactive death trap. Our intention…” He placed a hand on his shaking knee. “The plan was for radical Islamists to be blamed. To drive a wedge between the West and Muslims, and to create chaos within the Muslim world itself.” A trickle of sweat rolled down the side of his face. “I think…I believe we would have succeeded had it not been for some bad luck.” He lifted his chin slightly. “My name is Richard Aaron Goldberg. My team and I are part of a secret unit of the Mossad.”

The sound of clapping. “Better. I particularly liked the sweat bead. Now, do it again.”

The screen went gray. No one spoke for a long time. The storefront above them creaked and groaned.

“Was what we just saw…was it real?” Rakkim asked finally.

“It’s real,” said Katherine. “My husband gave it to me the night before he was murdered. The download was hidden in a strand of prayer beads.”

“Things like that can be faked,” said Rakkim.

“Anything can be faked, but that was the FBI’s master interrogator walking Goldberg through the confession,” said Spider. “Lorne Macmillan, one of your glorious heroes of the new Islamic Republic.”

Sarah stared at the blank laptop screen. “It’s like…it’s like seeing Jack Ruby standing around with Oswald, the two of them rehearsing their encounter in the Dallas garage.” She shook her head. “‘I’ll step out of the crowd of photographers, Lee, and you’ll stop and act surprised-’”

“Who’s Jack Ruby?” said Rakkim.

Spider moved closer to the surveillance unit. “Don’t like that white car.” He waited. “No…never mind, it turned off onto Madison.” He kept watch.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Sarah demanded.

“I…I couldn’t,” said Katherine, coloring. “I was afraid something might happen to you and-”

“You didn’t trust me,” said Sarah.

“Your father always said it was best not to let the right hand know what the left hand is doing,” said Katherine. “He didn’t even tell Redbeard.”

“You didn’t trust me,” repeated Sarah.

“You can hate me later,” snapped Katherine. “Right now, we need to show Redbeard a copy of this. How did you put it, Benjamin?”

“Speed and distribution,” said Spider. “We got to get the message to as many people as possible, as fast as possible. Otherwise the official disinformation will drown us out. I thought about hacking some of the major net sites like whatdoido-imam.com or faithful-jobsearch.com, but I can’t do it on my own. Redbeard can help us bypass some of the crash triggers, and I’m not even sure those are the best places for us. We really need to go international with this.”

“I don’t know if I could ask Redbeard to do that,” said Sarah, unsteady and still angry. She had been prepared intellectually for the truth about the Zionist Betrayal, but to actually see it…Perhaps she was a littler raw from meeting her mother after all these years. “He knows what could happen if this…grotesque bit of history got out.”

“I’m not asking you to do it, dear.” Katherine was all hard edges and determination. “I’ll ask Thomas.”

CHAPTER 59

“The prodigal returns,” said Stevens, the pockmarked dandy who had fetched Rakkim from the Blue Moon after the Super Bowl. It seemed years ago. Stevens’s hair was glossy and sleek, his suit perfectly tailored. His shoes gave him another two inches of height. His eyes had the glimmer of a man with secrets. “You don’t look so happy to see me, Fedayeen.”

“Just surprised.”

Stevens wanded him, rapping him sharply between the legs. “Sorry. Have to make sure you’re not carrying something dangerous in your privates. I guess there’s nothing there.”

The guards who had brought Rakkim to Stevens laughed, then went back to watching Sarah and Katherine being checked by a female security officer. Katherine was cloaked in a black burka, only her eyes visible through the eye slits.

Rakkim kept quiet as Stevens continued his rough patdown. Security at the villa had always been layered, but this was hermetic. They had already gone through two security screenings-testing for biologicals, electronic devices, and explosives. The download of Richard Aaron Goldberg’s confession rehearsal was inert and set off no alarms.

“It’s good you’re back,” Stevens said. “Redbeard has enough on his shoulders.”

“Since when does Redbeard confide in you?” said Rakkim, still aching from the wand.

An alarm went off, the guard checking Sarah stepping back.

Rakkim stared at the blinking bioscanner and silently cursed himself for his lapse in judgment. The Old One hadn’t implanted a tracking device in him, he had implanted one in Sarah while she slept, a biochip undetectable by her wrist alarm or the first two layers of the villa’s security system. No wonder they had been allowed to escape from Las Vegas. Floating above the desert like a soap bubble…a pinprick away from a hard landing.

While a technician neutralized the pinhead-size chip from behind her ear, Rakkim called Spider, warned him and Elroy to stay away from the barbershop. Then he called Peter and Jeri Lynn and Professor Wu. Peter answered from the casino. Said he appreciated the call and quickly hung up. Jeri Lynn said she had wanted to warn them, but she had no way of getting in touch. Said Darwin had awakened her from a sound sleep, sitting on her bed, bouncing her youngest daughter on his hip. Jeri Lynn’s voice quavered, wondering how he could have known this was her favorite child. She had told Darwin everything she knew, and he had left as suddenly as he’d appeared. No answer from Professor Wu.