out of nowhere, brandishing curved knives similar to the one Bourne had taken off the man whose neck he'd broken.
Bourne had been expecting them. No campsite would be left unguarded. He sat very still atop the panting, snorting gray while the Amhara drew Zaim down. When they saw who it was, one of them ran into a tent at the center of the campsite. He returned within minutes with an Amhara who was quite obviously the tribal chieftain, the nagus.
"Zaim," he said, "what happened to you?"
"He saved my life," Zaim muttered.
"And he, mine." Bourne slid off the horse. "We were attacked on our way here."
If the nagus was surprised that Bourne spoke Amharic, he gave no outward sign of it. "Like all Westerners, you brought your enemies with you."
Bourne shivered. "You're only half right. We were attacked by three Amhara soldiers."
"You know who is paying them," Zaim said weakly.
The nagus nodded. "Take them both inside to my hut, where it is warm. We will build up the fire slowly."
Abbud ibn Aziz stood squinting up at the noxious sky that swirled around Ras Dejen's north face, listening for the sound of rotors slicing the thin air.
Where was Fadi? His helicopter was late. Abbud ibn Aziz had been monitoring the weather all morning. With the front moving in, he knew the pilot had an extremely narrow window in which to make his landing.
In truth, though, he knew it wasn't the cold or the thin air he silently railed against. It was the fact that he and Fadi were here in the first place. The plan. He knew who was behind it. Only one man could have dreamed up such a high-risk, volatile scheme: Fadi's brother, Karim al-Jamil. Fadi might be the firebrand face of Dujja, but Abbud ibn Aziz, alone of all of Fadi's many followers, knew that Karim al-Jamil was the heart of the cadre. He was the chess master, the patient spider spinning multiple webs into the future. Even thinking about what Karim al-Jamil might be planning sent Abbud ibn Aziz's head spinning. Like Fadi and Karim al-Jamil, he had been educated in the West. He knew the history, politics, and economics of the non-Arab world-a prerequisite, so far as Fadi and Karim al-Jamil were concerned, in stepping up the ladder of command.
The problem for Abbud ibn Aziz was that he didn't altogether trust Karim al-Jamil. For one thing, he was reclusive. For another, so far as he knew Karim al-Jamil spoke only to Fadi. That this might not be the case at all-that he knew less than he suspected about Karim al-Jamil-made him all the more uneasy.
This was his bias against Karim al-Jamil: that he, Fadi's second in command, his most intimate comrade, was shut out from the inner workings of Dujja. This seemed to him eminently unjust, and though he was utterly loyal to Fadi, still he chafed to be kept on the outside. Of course, he understood that blood was thicker than water-who among the desert tribesmen wouldn't? But Fadi and Karim al-Jamil were only half Arab. Their mother was English. Both had been born in London after their father had moved his company base there from Saudi Arabia.
Abbud ibn Aziz was haunted by several questions that part of him did not want answered. Why had Abu Sarif Hamid ibn Ashef al-Wahhib left Saudi Arabia? Why had he taken up with an infidel? Why had he compounded his error by marrying her? Abbud ibn Aziz could find no earthly reason why a Saudi would do such a thing. In truth, neither Fadi nor Karim al-Jamil was of the desert, as he was. They had grown up in the West, been schooled in the ceaselessly throbbing metropolis of London. What did they know of the profound silence, the severe beauty, the clean scents of the desert? The desert, where the grace and wisdom of Allah could be seen in all things.
Fadi, as befit an older brother, was protective of Karim al-Jamil. This, at least, was something Abbud ibn Aziz could understand. He himself felt the same way about his younger brothers. But in the case of Karim al-Jamil, he had been asking himself for some time into what dark waters he was leading Dujja. Was it a place that Abbud ibn Aziz wanted to go? He had come this far without raising his voice because he was loyal to Fadi. It was Fadi who had indoctrinated him into the terror war they had been forced into by the