The Aisha Prophecy Read Online Free

but did not.
    Muslim girls at this school? Not so. They were gone. The Nasreens took them elsewhere more than three months ago. Why? Because someone had murdered the two Nasreens who ran it. Slashed one’s neck with a knife, stopped the blood to her brain. And abducted the other who was found miles away. The other had been smothered to death.
    Murdered by whom, though? Abducted by whom? Clearly not by anyone sent by the sheik. By other hunters, perhaps, who came from other countries? Looking for runaway women of their own? The Iranians, maybe. Or some other Shiite country. The sheik would not have known because they would not have told him. The Shiites, after all, are heretics themselves and therefore have no love for the Hasheem. Especially for those who they’ve caught inside their borders. Either dead now or rotting in their prisons.
    Nor did this happen on the grounds of this school. It happened elsewhere on the island at the house of a woman who often came here to teach tennis. That woman was lucky to have been somewhere else or she, too, would have been killed or taken. Mulazim learned these bits and pieces by asking other students. He pretended to be greatly saddened and shocked, all the better to conceal his disappointment.
    The police had nothing. No suspects, only theories. A burglary that had gone badly, perhaps. No one was supposed to be home. The American woman who owned this house was believed to have plenty of money. Whatever had happened, the police had concluded that it wasn’t related to their being Nasreens or even to their being Muslims. Why? Who knows what their reasoning was? If it wasn’t a car bomb it can’t involve Muslims? Or maybe they were sweeping this under a rug lest it be labeled a terrorist attack and the rich might then go elsewhere for their golf. On the other hand, they could just as well have been right. The killings could have been a coincidence.
    All the same, this was most inconvenient. He’d spent a day and a half on the grounds of this tennis school. He had asked several students where the Muslim girls had gone. He pretended that he had grown to know some of them, but had been back in Greece these past months.
    He’d been friendly, he said, with one in particular. He showed several a photo that he said she had given him. In this photo, the princess wore an abaya. Only her face and half her forehead could be seen. He had hoped to get one in which she was bareheaded, but this was the best that her father could provide. Most of those he asked shook their heads; they didn’t know her, but at last he found two girls who did.
    One said to the other, “Isn’t that little Rasha?”
    The other looked more closely. She said, “Oh, sure. She was one of the new ones. Nice kid.”
    Mulazim blinked in surprise. Here she used her real name? She must have felt very safe indeed.
    The first asked Mulazim, “But what’s with the abaya? None of them dressed Muslim while they were here.”
    “Old photo,” he told her. “She had nothing more recent.”
    The other said to the first, “She still covered up. She’d only play tennis in a full warm-up suit. She wasn’t ready for a T-shirt and shorts. Girls don’t show much skin where they came from.”
    “But she was into it. She worked at it,” added the second. “Only a beginner, but she could be good. Especially if Elizabeth’s still teaching her.”
    “Still?”asked Mulazim.
    “She took Rasha with her.”
    Elizabeth must be the American woman. “These cowardly murders took place in her house?”
    “I guess that’s why she didn’t want to stay there,” said one. “She and Aisha came and got Rasha.”
    “Aisha, too?” asked Mulazim, as if he had met her.
    “Oh, sure,” said the girl. “Elizabeth wouldn’t go without Aisha.”
    Another Aisha, thought Mulazim. There’s already one too many. So much effort being wasted on that stupid prophecy. Good luck finding a particular young woman named Aisha. There must be millions of