to see the rest of the great house or told where she was, though when she listened to al-Bayan on the ancient transistor radio they gave her, the signal was without interference. All other radio was forbidden, lest she be exposed to un-Islamic ideas or, heaven forbid, music. The absence of music was harder to bear than she imagined. She longed to hear a few notes of a melody, a child sawing away at a major scale, even the thud of hip-hop from a passing car. Her rooms became a prison. The camp at Palmyra seemed a paradise in comparison. Even Raqqa was better, for at least in Raqqa she had been allowed to roam the streets. Never mind the severed heads and the men on crosses, at least there was some semblance of life. The caliphate, she thought grimly, had a way of reducing one’s expectations.
And all the while she watched an imaginary clock in her head and turned the pages of an imaginary calendar. She was scheduled to fly from Athens to Paris on Sunday evening, and to return to work at the clinic in Aubervilliers Monday morning. But first, she had to get from the caliphate to Turkey and from Turkey to Santorini. For all their talk of an important role in an upcoming operation, she wondered whether Saladin and Abu Ahmed had other plans for her. Saladin would require constant medical care for months. And who better to care for him than the woman who had saved his life?
He referred to her as Maimonides and she, having no other name for him, called him Saladin. They did not become friends or confidants, far from it, but a bond was forged between them. She played the same game she had played with Abu Ahmed, the game of guessing what he had been before the American invasion upended Iraq. He was obviously of high intelligence and a student of history. During one of their conversations, he told her that he had been to Paris many times—for what reason he did not say—and he spoke French badly but with great enthusiasm. He spoke English, too, much better than he spoke French. Perhaps, thought Natalie, he had attended an English preparatory school or military academy. She tried to imagine him without his wild hair and beard. She dressed him in a Western suit and tie, but he didn’t wear it well. Then she clothed him in olive drab, and the fit was better. When she added a thick mustache of the sort worn by Saddam loyalists, the picture was complete. Saladin, she decided, was a secret policeman or a spy. For that reason she was always fearful in his presence.
He was no fire-breathing jihadist, Saladin. His Islam was political rather than spiritual, a tool by which he intended to redraw the map of the Middle East. It would be dominated by a massive Sunni state that would stretch from Baghdad to the Arabian Peninsula and across the Levant and North Africa. He did not rant or spew venom or recite Koranic verses or the sayings of the Prophet. He was entirely reasonable, which made him all the more terrifying. The liberation of Jerusalem, he said, was high on his agenda. It was his wish to pray in the Noble Sanctuary at least once before his death.
“You’ve been, Maimonides?”
“To Jerusalem? No, never.”
“Yes, I know. Abu Ahmed told me that.”
“Who?”
Eventually, he told her he had been raised in a small, poor village in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, though he pointedly did not say the village’s name. He had joined the Iraqi army, hardly surprising in a land of mass conscription, and had fought in the long war against Iranians, though he referred to them always as Persians and rafida. The years between the war with Iran and the first Gulf War were a blank; he mentioned something about government work but did not elaborate. But when he spoke of the second war with the Americans, the war that destroyed Iraq as he knew it, his eyes flashed with anger. When the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army and removed all Baath Party members from their government posts, he was put on the streets along with thousands of other mainly Sunni Iraqi men. He joined the secular resistance and, later, al-Qaeda in Iraq, where he met and befriended Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Unlike Zarqawi, who relished his Bin Laden–like role as a terror superstar, Saladin preferred to keep a lower profile. It was Saladin,