She grinned at the ground. America really was the land of opportunity, after all. The irony in this amused her.
The old man smiled as he came close. He walked right up and embraced Tariq, kissing him on each cheek. Then he shook Hala’s hand warmly but respectfully.
“It is good to meet our famous warriors from Washington, DC,” he said in a thick Najdi accent. “The Family owes you a tremendous debt of gratitude for what you’ve accomplished.”
“Thank you for the opportunity,” Hala said. She’d learned not to appear too proud. “And thank you for saving us. It was more than we deserved.”
“Psh!” The man waved a hand in the air. “You were clever to make that phone call. A risky move, yes? But here we are. It is good.”
He was even more ingratiating than Uncle had been, Hala thought. The fact that he addressed her more than Tariq said quite a bit about what he must already know.
“Excuse me,” she said, “but if I may ask — who are you, sir?”
“I would have thought someone as clever as you might have guessed,” he answered. “In any case, it is not important who I am. In this country, we are all just nameless, faceless monsters. Isn’t that so?”
Hala allowed herself to laugh. And before the man spoke again, she realized all at once who he was.
“You may call me Jiddo if you like,” he said.
Jiddo. It was the first word of Arabic any of these strangers had spoken to them, and exactly what she’d expected to hear.
It meant Grandfather.
“I LOVE THE ocean,” Jiddo said. “As close to a view of home as we have here, yes?”
Hala and Tariq stood with him at the edge of the beach, looking toward the water. The air was cold, but the sky was a brilliant blue with just a few wisps of cloud floating near the horizon. Seagulls rode the breeze over their heads.
“I’ve never seen the Atlantic before,” she said.
“Ah. Well, now you have,” he said, in a way that told Hala the topic was about to turn back to business. Tariq took hold of her hand and stayed quiet. It was unusual for him to take the lead, but that’s what he did now, signaling for her not to talk anymore.
“Our Washington operations are over,” the old man said. “Rather, I should say they’ve been suspended for the time being.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Hala said honestly. “We would have liked to have gone much deeper.”
“Don’t be sorry. You are invaluable, an impressive soldier. We trained you quite well, it seems.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“The jihad is not over. America is only just beginning to kneel. While they lick their wounds on one side, we will attack them from another. It will be like that until they are defeated.”
Hala smiled again. It excited her to hear him speak this way. “I hope there will be a role for us,” she said.
“Of course,” he said right away. “In fact it begins right here.”
Hala turned to see the younger man pulling a familiar case from the trunk of Jiddo’s Mercedes. It was the laptop computer she and Tariq had brought from Saudi Arabia. The one she’d been forced to leave behind at the Four Seasons.
She stared. “How did you —”
“Psh!” Jiddo said again. “Please don’t be surprised. That would disappoint me.”
The assistant carried the computer over and opened it on the hood of the car.
“We created a very secure system for ourselves,” Jiddo told them. “Perhaps too secure. With the man you know as Uncle out of circulation, our access to certain information has been … somewhat restricted.”
Hala understood immediately. “You need for me to open my files,” she said, to an approving smile. She stepped over to the laptop, where a flashing cursor waited on the blank screen. It took only a moment to still her racing mind. Then the sixteen characters she needed flowed out of her fingers as if by muscle memory: 23EE4XYQ9R21WV0W.
The screen blinked once, then repopulated itself with a familiar series of icons. Hala scanned through them quickly, making sure everything was as she’d left it — target names, home addresses, public schedules, maps, security contacts.