Pandemic

"Do you want to see your father die?" Eleish asked.

Fadi grinned malevolently. "If it means protecting the Jihad, I would see my whole family die." He glanced at his father with an expression of sheer contempt.

The old man's face flushed with shame and his chin dropped to his chest.

Eleish knew there was nothing more he would learn from either of them.

* * *

After leaving the mosque, Achmed Eleish sat in his car and smoked five cigarettes in a row, trying to quell the tremor in his hands. For a moment, he considered continuing his solo pursuit of Kabaal all the way to Somalia, but he dismissed the idea as foolhardy.

In a cloud of smoke, Eleish weighed his next step carefully. In the end, he knew to whom he had to turn. Even though the captain of the Cairo Police detectives was only in his early sixties, the little man had seemed old to Eleish for all twenty years he had known him. Captain Riyad Wazir was a throwback. Never seen in anything but a neatly pressed uniform with spit-polished shoes, Wazir always toed the official line and his preoccupation with procedure and bureaucracy bordered on obsessive. But Eleish would have gladly trusted his life in Wazir's hands, because the captain's ethics were as meticulous as his paperwork.

Once the thump in his chest had settled, Eleish reached for his cell phone. He dialed the direct line to the captain's office, but after five rings he was transferred back to the main switchboard. Eleish glanced at his watch, which read 7:00 P.M., meaning that Wazir must have left for the day. He asked the operator to transfer him to the detectives' desk, knowing there would be at least one detective on duty.

"Cairo Police," the disinterested voice said on the other end of the line.

Eleish was dismayed to hear the voice of his least favorite colleague, Constable Qasim Ramsi. For a moment, he considered hanging up on the crooked officer. "Listen, Qasim, it's me, Eleish," he said. "Do you know the Al-Futuh Mosque?"

"Of course."

"If you send officers there you will find Sheikh Hassan and his son Fadi handcuffed to a toilet in the bathroom of the madrasa behind the mosque," Eleish said.

Ramsi whistled into Eleish's earpiece. "Holy Mohammed! Have you lost your mind? You handcuffed the Sheikh to a toilet?" His voice squeaked at the end. "You will be destroyed," he said almost jovially.

"I cannot explain over the phone," Eleish said. "The Sheikh and his son are involved in a terrorist conspiracy to destabilize the government. And more. Just make sure they are picked up!"

Eleish hung up before Ramsi had a chance to reply. Satisfied that his hands were still enough to drive, he started his car and pulled out of the spot.

He had intended to drive directly to the office, but as his home was on the way he decided to stop in to shower and change before going into headquarters to file his report. He tuned the radio to an Egyptian pop station. He tapped his steering wheel to the beat of the music as his hyper-vigilance gave way to a pleasantly contented mood.

Eleish parked in front of his twenty-seven-story apartment building. Alone, he rode the elevator to the nineteenth floor. He unlocked both deadbolts — knowing how bad property crime was in Egypt, he had insisted on the second deadbolt — and walked into his living room. He dropped his keys, phone, and gun on the kitchen countertop.

The apartment felt empty without the women, but after his visit to the Al-Futuh Mosque, he was confident that they would only be parted for a matter of days or weeks. However long it took to find Kabaal.

Abiding by his wife's strict edict not to smoke in the apartment, he slid open the sliding door and stepped outside onto his balcony in the warm Cairo dusk before lighting up another cigarette. This time he only allowed himself one smoke as he stared out on his beloved city of a thousand minarets, which was never more beautiful than at dusk.

Returning to the living room, he left the door open to circulate the air through his apartment. He walked out of the living room and into his bedroom where he sat down at the desk across from the bed. He booted up the desktop computer (an unexpectedly generous present from his daughters on his fiftieth birthday last year) and waited. Once the main screen appeared, he clicked on the icon to initiate his e-mail program. He knew how long it would take the modem to establish a connection on the overburdened server, so he rose from the desk and headed for the shower.

He enjoyed a long hot shower, trying to scrub away the memories of the conversation in the mosque and the Sheikh's assertions that Islam was at imminent risk. Such hateful fear-mongering stoked the growing flames of Islamism and drove the people who followed the Hazzir Kabaals of the world, but Eleish couldn't help wonder whether a kernel of truth existed in the argument.