Jihadi Read Online Free

always been regarded as unusual.
    Now regarded as a captured terrorist and a major operative within Liddell’s network in the Islamic Republic. Bitch.
    Through my window, I note a family of Brazilians congregating by the swimming pool for what appears to be some sort of musical reunion. Barking orders between verses, feigning unawareness of the late hour, their drunken, overbearing paterfamilias sings badly and too loud, and spouts occasional English profanities. Makes passes at the help. Points to where his daughter must sit.
    It is ever thus.
    Abominable.
    Wait until I get him back. Fucking control freak.

4 In Which Victory Is Defined
    Thelonius was trying to decide whether he wanted Becky’s insights on that rattling milk container, a persistent blur of colour and a wash of sound that was increasing in volume and raising the stakes of his morning, when he saw the word CHANGE writing itself in milk in midair. The word collapsed into a puddle on the dining-room floor. He put down his coffee cup and covered his mouth with his palm.
    Whenever something is vibrating, you’re supposed to stop and look at it, according to the weirdo back in the Republic: ‘Vibration is change.’
    ix. the weirdo
    Another member of Liddell’s cadre. Entered in the prison records as one Abd’al Dayem, ‘slave of the eternal’. Codename Raisin. Died December 2005, of lung cancer.
    The Plum, for instance, is change.
    Complicating everything that follows (the guilty dead guy telling this story acknowledges) is the deepening illness of Thelonius’s wife.
    Becky has a grey tumour, larger than a plum by now, surely, that the Directorate’s physicians isolated. They reported a clear pattern of accelerating growth. This type of tumour mimics schizophrenia with increasing accuracy. It culminates in blindness and, some unknown number of weeks later, death. It is located alarmingly near the centre of Becky’s brain. No one can get at the Plum. It has been expanding with dark purpose, they guess, for about five years.
    Doctors caught the Plum during an MRI for a nerve problem Becky inherited from her mother, Prudence. This was an entirely separate problem that also required periodic monitoring. As it broadens, that Plum, Becky’s behavioural and mood swings become more pronounced. A change.
    What to write next.
    The guilty dead guy telling this story decides he doesn’t feel like writing anything else on this page. He plans to start fresh with a new sheet tomorrow.
    x.
    Dad opted to make Becky’s final years count. Thelonius went along. He justified this silence by thinking, ‘We decided not to tell her.’ But whenever Thelonius thought ‘we’ about that kind of thing, he meant Dad.
    Thelonius called Becky’s father Dad. He could’ve pushed Dad on certain secrets, could’ve objected earlier and harder. But Dad always had the final word on secrets.
    xi. the final word on secrets
    Diagram here of the human heart, wounded.
    The dead guy telling this story notes that Dad is dead now. Another change.
    ‘Everything changes,’ the Raisin said, ‘except the face of God.’

    ‘Whenever something changes, the first moral and legal imperative is to consider the new development closely; simply look at it without preconception,’ Fatima typed in a message box on the website IslamIsPeace.com.
    ‘We must stop and look in order to determine whether that which is new is halal or haram. Not everything new is haram. Not everything familiar is halal.’
    xii. halal, haram
    One means illegal, the other legal. I forget now.
    Ever with the patient and blah, blah, blah. All on your own now, though, aren’t you, bitch?
    The discussion thread in which she posted was called SORRY, SISTERS. A man had started that discussion thread. Fatima was defendingher right, as a Muslim woman, to use the internet to organize public protests, a right some members of the group had questioned.
    Fatima reminded herself that Allah was ever with the patient and struck the Enter