rebelliousness had been her way of expressing that hatred. But it had taken Jamil to make her brain understand what her emotions had been telling her. The clothes she wore here-expensive designer fashions-were part of her cover. Inside them, her skin itched as if she were covered in fire ants. At night, she threw them off as quickly as she could, never looked at them again until she donned them in the morning.
With these thoughts boiling in her head, she got back into the car. Karim al-Jamil slid in beside her. Without hesitation, she pulled out onto Massachusetts Avenue.
"Where to?" she asked.
"You ought to go back to CI," Karim al-Jamil said.
"So should you," she pointed out. Then she looked him in the eye. "Jamil, when you recruited me I was no starry-eyed idealist, wanting to wage war on inequality and injustice. That's what you thought of me at first, I know. I doubt you realized then that I had a brain that could think for itself. Now I hope you know better."
"You have doubts."
"Jamil, orthodox Islam works against women. Men like you are brought up believing that woman should cover their heads, their faces. That they shouldn't be educated, shouldn't think for themselves, and Allah help them if they begin to think of themselves as independent."
"I wasn't brought up that way."
"Thank your mother, Jamil. I mean it. It was she who saved you from believing that it was all right to stone a woman to death for imagined sins."
"The sin of adultery is not imagined."
"It is for men."
He was silent, and she laughed softly. But it was a sad laugh, tinged with disappointments and disillusionment dredged up from the core of her. "There is more than a continent that separates us, Jamil. Is it any wonder I'm terrified when the two of us are apart?"
Karim al-Jamil eyed her judiciously. For some reason he found it impossible to be angry with her. "This is not the first time we've had this discussion."
"And it won't be the last."
"Yet you say you love me."
"I do love you."
"Despite what you see as my sins."
"Not sins, Jamil. We all have our blind spots, even you."
"You're dangerous," he said, meaning it.
Anne shrugged. "I'm not any different from your Islamic women, except I recognize the strength inside me."
"This is precisely what makes you dangerous."
"Only to the status quo."
There was silence for a moment. She had pushed him farther than anyone else would dare. But that was all right. She'd never fed him bullshit like most of the others circling him to gain a measure of his influence and power. It was times like these that she wished she could crawl inside his mind, because he'd never willingly tell her what he was thinking, even by his expression or body language. He was something of an enigma, which in part was why she had been drawn to him in the first place. Men were usually so transparent. Not Jamil.
At length, she put a hand lightly over his. "You see how much like a marriage this is? For better or for worse, we're in it together. All the way to the end."
He contemplated her for a moment. "Drive east by southeast. Eighth Street, Northeast, between L and West Virginia Avenue."
Fadi would have been happy to put a bullet through Lieutenant Kove's head, but that would have led to all manner of complications he couldn't afford. Instead he contented himself with playing his part to the hilt.
This was hardly difficult; he was a born actor. His mother, recognizing his talent with a mother's unerring instinct, had enrolled him in the Royal Theatrical Academy when he was seven. By nine, he was an accomplished performer, which stood him in good stead when he became radicalized. Gathering followers-winning the hearts and minds of the poor, the downtrodden, the marginalized, the desperate-was, at bedrock, a matter of charisma. Fadi understood the essential nature of being a successful leader: It didn't matter what your philosophy was; all you needed to concern yourself with was how well you sold it. That was not to say Fadi was a cynic-no radical worth his salt could be. It simply meant he had learned the crucial lesson of market manipulation.
These thoughts brought the ghost of a smile to his full lips as he followed the bobbing police searchlights.
"These catacombs are two thousand kilometers long," Lieutenant Kove said, trying to be helpful. "A honeycomb all the way to the village of Nerubaiskoye, half an hour's drive from here."