see diamond island.”
* * *
Not its real name—what the Maldivians called the richest resort island. Adnan’s mother took a boat there every weekday to make sure that the rooms were cleaned and that every toilet was scrubbed till it shined. Then, on Saturdays, a small supply ship picked her up on its way back from Malé. She usually added a big bag of locally grown limes to the hold, already heavy with cases of champagne, caviar, chocolates, and the other everyday luxuries of diamond island. Her job, though she wasn’t paid for the crossing, was to watch the seamen for pilferage. Not a lime, not a single dark chocolate truffle could be missing when they docked. Bags and cases had to be sealed tighter than a hatch in a storm.
His mother had been astonished the first time that she’d seen the resort. The “bungalows” were larger than any house she’d ever known, almost as big as the presidential palace, but roofed with ornamental thatch to look native. Each was lavishly appointed with silver, gold plate, marble, and exotic hardwoods, and came with a staff of three, a private pool, and a yacht for $10,000 a night. More than his mother earned in four years of hard work on diamond island.
“Your mother could put the dead to rest,” Parvez said in the quiet that had fallen.
“No.” Adnan shook his head. “You said I would do this. I would put the dead to rest.”
“So you will. But your mother can do what you cannot: She can go to the heart of diamond island and stop their sins forever. Every hour of every day they slap Allah in the face.”
Liquor, sex, drugs, parties with unmarried girls. Muslim girls corrupted by the West. Muslim men corrupted by the West. And she worries about their truffles and toilets. That thought—and Parvez’s words about Allah—stung more sharply than the memory of his mother’s hand when he was nine years old. All his young life he’d waited for his father to come home. “Mother,” he’d said one afternoon when he realized that the sandy path to their house had never borne any footprints but their own, “he’s not coming home.”
She’d slapped him. Just the once. Told him that his father was a jihadist fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. “Maybe a martyr, and you say such things.”
But then she’d wrapped him in her arms, weeping as she wiped away his tears.
It is so much worse for Allah to witness the sins of diamond island, Adnan thought, than for a boy to feel even his mother’s deepest grief.
“You can bury the gift of paradise in a bag of limes,” Parvez said. “She’ll carry it to them. She’ll never know. We can time the arrival.”
“But this is what they did in Malé. They made a bomb.” And you said it was wrong.
“No, they killed many brother and sister Muslims in Malé. Out there,” Parvez turned his gaze seaward again, “the dead still wait for their rest.”
“But what about me? The vest?” So much more willing to take his own life than his mother’s.
“The vest will still be filled, and when the time is right and Allah speaks, you will wear it. You will see your mother in paradise. Someday, you will see me, too.”
Parvez turned away, leaving Adnan trembling in the sultry tropical night.
CHAPTER 5
President Victor Reynolds gripped Jenna’s hand in both of his, looked directly into her bright blue eyes, and thanked her profusely: “Your president and your nation deeply appreciate your service.”
She was impressed. He was the president, after all, even if he was afflicted with that annoying, self-important tic of referring to himself in the third person. Indeed, his warm welcome might have overwhelmed Jenna, if she hadn’t already heard him repeat the very same words to nine other members of the newly assembled task force. And there were still a half dozen in line behind her.
Little matter, she was proud to shake the chief executive’s hand and enter the Oval Office. They’d been herded here by Vice President Andrew Percy, who was well positioned to succeed his boss in four years. The press corps had dubbed him “Hair Apparent,” hardly a unique sobriquet, but aptly applied to Percy with his wavy black locks; at sixty-three, they remained suspiciously unstreaked by gray, à la Reagan, and rose like a crown above his handsomely weathered face. It was as if every hair were straining to reach the nation’s highest office, openly betraying the man’s scantily clad ambition.
For Jenna,