Devil's Light, The by North Patterson Richard

Author:North Patterson, Richard [Patterson, Richard North]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2011-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

“What happened then?” Terri asked.

Pausing, Brooke drained his wineglass. “If you don’t mind,” he answered, “I don’t feel like discussing Khalid tonight.”

At the other end of the couch, Terri nodded her understanding. “What became of his son?”

Brooke gave her a smile that was no smile at all. “He’s in medical school, at Columbia. The least I could do.”

SIX

Helping Terri prepare dinner, Brooke sipped wine as he turned honey, soy, Chinese mustard, chopped garlic, and basil into a glaze for the salmon. But the drumbeat of cable news from Terri’s television peeled the veneer of normality. A half-hour show labeled “Countdown to Terror” reported the state of the country two weeks before September 11, 2011: another dive in the stock market; a run on supplies in major cities; congestion at ports on the East Coast and in Long Beach caused by searches for the bomb; the preemptive arrests of suspected al Qaeda sympathizers in Chicago and Detroit; an increasing flow of migration from Los Angeles, Washington, and New York to less populated areas. A right-wing congresswoman from Minnesota was calling for a suspension of the right to counsel for those “suspected of association with groups opposed to American values.” More pressing, a joint committee of Congress had scheduled immediate hearings—some closed to the press and public—in order to grill the secretary of defense and the heads of the National Security Council, FBI, and CIA. There was no mention of Israel or Lebanon.

Terri sliced vegetables. “My parents called today,” she said, “asking me to spend the next month with them in Bloomington. The next year, if necessary.”

Brooke envisioned Terri’s parents, two college professors, anxiously imagining their daughter’s incineration. “What did you say?”

“What could I say? That as a committed environmental activist, I’m too concerned about nuclear groundwater contamination to leave my post?”

“So you’ve never told them what you do?”

“No. They’d think I was wasting my gifts. And I didn’t want to make them lie to their friends.” Terri began slicing a red onion. “I told them I had confidence in our government. You can imagine how well that went over.”

Brooke thought of his mother. “Actually, I can. And if I’m right, our terrorist mastermind—whoever he is—anticipated the panic he’s created. I keep wondering if he ever studied here.”

“About Al Zaroor, you’re not the first one. On the assumption he’s a Saudi, we have a list of fifty or so exchange students who are either deceased or impossible to locate. But no one knows if it’s a dead end. The man seems to have evanesced.” She turned to him. “So finish the case for Lebanon.”

Brooke stirred his preparation. “All right. To the average American, Hezbollah and al Qaeda are the same—they despise Israel, they’ve got a brutal history that includes killing Americans, and they’ve cultivated ‘martyrdom’ as a weapon of war. But they’re actually very different animals.”

“To me,” Terri put in, “a fundamental difference is that Hezbollah represents a people—the Shias. As a result they have a territory within a country, Lebanon, where they’re seeking more political power.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.