Heart of the Assassin Read Online Free

seemed to be the only one who noticed.
    Rakkim lived in Seattle, the capital of the Republic, a bastion of moderate Islam, where even Catholics could get an education. You heard music in Seattle, saw women in public with their heads bare and couples holding hands. New Fallujah was a city without bright colors or laughter, just the tightening vise of piety squeezing the life out of people.
    Ibn-Azziz, Grand Mullah of the Black Robes, considered Seattle a non-Islamic cesspool. There were Black Robe senators in the congress, and what they lacked in numbers they made up for in intensity. President Brandt had been in office barely a year and already ibn-Azziz was demanding Shar'ia law be extended throughout the nation. His demand had been rejected...for now. The president thought the matter was settled, but he was naive. The Fedayeen commander, General Kidd, knew better. That's why he had sent Rakkim into New Fallujah.
    Rakkim saw the fire now--the Ayman al-Zawahiri madrassa, a girls' boarding school housed in the former St. Regis Hotel, was ablaze. Flames shot fifty feet into the air, gray smoke boiling up into the night, driven higher and higher by the wind roaring off the bay. He heard the whoosh of burning lumber, paint bubbling off the outside of the building and the screams. Fire engines idled nearby, but the water pressure in the aging underground pipes was weak, the firefighters' trucks ineffectually shooting water onto the flames. The spray drifted across the yellow streetlights...gleaming in the moonlight.
    Worshipers from the mosque joined the onlookers, neighbors and family of the children inside the school pressing against the police cordon that surrounded the burning madrassa. Women watched from behind their eye slits, flames reflected in their steady gaze. Firefighters dashed into the building, retreated as the wind kicked the blaze higher, then charged up the stairs again. Voices muffled, the girls' mothers wailed, the sound seeming to float in the air, while the police stood silently, blue uniforms covered in ash.
    Cheers erupted, mothers ululating with joy as two firefighters ran out of the madrassa, each carrying a couple of small girls over their shoulders. Mothers rushed the firemen, grabbed their children, sobbing, the children coughing into their mothers' necks.
    Jenkins pushed past the police, pulled a long, flexible flail from under his robes and began whipping the women, the girls screaming as their mothers turned, taking the lashing on their backs.
    "Return them to where they came!" demanded Jenkins.
    The women clutched their children.
    "Would you consign your daughters to the darkest pit of hell?" Jenkins shouted, veins bulging in his scrawny neck. "Would you prefer a child steeped in wickedness or a child raised among the blessed in Paradise?"
    "Save their honor," said one of the fathers, eyes downcast. "I...I have other daughters, imam."
    "No, save them !" A woman broke from the crowd, confronted Jenkins, her voice booming through the burqa. "Let Allah decide who is virtuous and who is wicked--"
    Jenkins cuffed the woman to the ground. "The world has enough whores."
    "Allahu Akbar!" called other voices in the crowd, other women, other parents kicking at the woman, shouting their agreement. "Allahu Akbar!"
    The upper windows of the madrassa blew out, glass shimmering as it fell through the air. Five girls clustered on the outer balcony, far above the street, raising their arms to the sky, howling, their white night clothes billowing up past their knees. Rakkim felt sick. Jenkins had decided it was better that the girls burn than be exposed in their underclothes. Better to burn than be seen by men not of their family, their reputation destroyed and along with it, the good name of their relatives.
    Rats scurried from the burning building, their tails on fire.
    Three teenagers leaped through a ground-floor window, sprawled on the ground for a moment, bleeding, then ran toward their parents. Jenkins