on pronunciation along the way and grumbling at the size of their tips—at least Americans understood about tipping, while most Europeans did not.
Ibrahim Salih al-Adel was fully acclimated. His French was sufficiently perfect that Parisians had trouble fixing his accent, and he walked about like any other local, not gawping about like a monkey in the zoo. It was, oddly, the women who most offended him. So proudly they pranced about in their fashionable clothes, often with lovely and expensive leather bags dangling from their hands but usually with comfortable walking shoes, because people walked here more often than they rode. The better to parade their pride, he thought.
He’d had a routine day at work, mostly selling movie videos and DVDs, mainly of American films dubbed in French or with subtitles—which allowed his business clients to try out the English skills they’d learned in school. (Much as the French disdained America, a movie was a movie, and the French loved the cinema more than most nationalities.)
So tomorrow he would begin assembling the team and begin actual mission planning, something more easily discussed over a dinner table than actually accomplished. But he’d considered that, albeit in the private confines of his flat and not actually in the field. Some of that could be done here, over the Internet, but only in broad terms. The particulars of their target could be assessed only once they were on the ground, but homework here would save them precious time in the future. Some of the logistical pieces were already in place, and so far their informant at the facility had proven steady and reliable.
What did he need for the mission? A few people. Believers, all. Four. No more than that. One needed expertise with explosives. Untraceable automobiles—no problem there, of course. Good language skills. They had to look the part, which wouldn’t be hard, given the target’s location; few people could discern the subtleties of skin color, and he spoke English without much accent, so that wouldn’t present a problem, either.
Most of all, though, each member of his team had to be a true believer. Willing to die. Willing to kill. It was easy for outsiders to think that the former was more important than the latter, but while there were many willing to throw their lives away, it was far more useful to discard your life only for something to advance the cause. They thought of themselves as Holy Warriors and sought after their seventy-two virgins but were in fact young people with few prospects, to whom religion was the path to greatness they would otherwise never achieve. It was remarkable that they were too stupid even to see that. But that was why he was the leader and they the followers.
12
EVEN IF SHE HAD not been to the motel before, she would have had little trouble finding it, sitting beside what the town of Beatty optimistically called Main Street, which was in truth nothing more than a half-mile gap of thirty-mile-per-hour road between highways 95 and 374.
The hotel itself—the Motel 6 of Death Valley—had, despite its outward appearance, relatively clean rooms that smelled of disinfectant soap. Not only had she seen worse, but she had applied her . . . special skills in worse places. And with worse men, for much less money. If anything, the name of the motel bothered her most of all.
A Keräşen Tatar by birth, Allison—her real name was Aysılu, which in Turkik meant Beauty as Moon—had inherited from her mother and father and ancestors a healthy respect for omens, both subtle and overt, and the name Motel 6 of Death Valley certainly qualified as the latter, she believed.
No matter. Omens were mercurial, and meaning was always open to interpretation. In this case the motel’s name was unlikely to apply to her; her subject was too entranced by her to be of any threat, either directly or indirectly. And what she’d come here to do required little thinking on her part, so well had she been trained. And it helped that men were simple, predictable creatures, driven by the basest of needs. “Men are clay,” her first instructor, a woman named Olga, had once told her, and even at the tender age of eleven she’d known the truth of it, having seen it in the lingering gazes of the boys in her village, and even in the always watching eyes of some of the men.
Even before she’d started going through her changes and her body had begun to