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over them toward the outer rim of the pool and then lapped back. Megan loved irony. She saw it as the ultimate cosmic hypocrisy, the final revenge of the gods of fate against humans who were too vain to know they were vain. It was therefore a matter of the most supreme irony to Megan that after ten years of tramping around Europe, caring for nothing except seducing rich men, accepting with thinly veiled disdain their gifts of cash and jewelry while letting them know that she was in charge of her own life and of theirs, she had succumbed to something outside of herself.
     
    On September 11, 2001, she had been in bed with one of these men, a beautiful twenty-four-year-old graduate student in linguistics at the Sorbonne, whose father owned some fifteen high-brow jewelry stores throughout France. She had returned from the bathroom after their afternoon lovemaking to find Alain at the edge of the bed, glued to the television screen in their room at the Ritz, his eyes agog. A Noam Chomsky conspiratorialist, he was later to declare with confidence, his veneer of bored sophistication back in place, that it was the Jews who flew the planes into the buildings in New York and Washington. But that afternoon his face was unguarded as his child’s brain absorbed the events transpiring across the Atlantic—several thousand Americans dead, the president and the Congress scurrying for safety, America in shock as it watched the repeated clips of the twin towers being hit and then collapsing. On that face Megan saw satisfaction and delight. And to her amazement she was angry. The smugness on the femininely beautiful face of America-hater Alain Tillinac had struck Megan Nolan dumb. To this day she summoned up that face, that look, with revulsion.
     
    She sent Alain home and spent the rest of September 11 herself glued to the television. The next day she went to Paris’s huge Bibliothèque Publique where she read all of the national and international papers. Then she saw a free computer, went to it, and typed al-Qaeda into its search engine. That click of her mouse had since led her down many paths in Europe and the Middle East. The latest had taken her to Morocco, where she was researching a story not about the blind family in Zagora but about its one sighted member, the eldest son, whom she had reason to believe was a member of an obscure terrorist group called the Al Haramain Brigade. And now there was another irony. There was a new rich man in her life, the first man, period, since the effete Alain Tillinac. This man had already been helpful. He had driven her in his Mercedes limousine from the train station to the Sultana, where he arranged for her to get a quite beautiful room overlooking the courtyard with its lovely fountain. He had also promised to find a competent and trustworthy driver/translator to take her to Zagora, a rugged drive across the Middle Atlas Mountains, nearly to the edge of the great Sahara. And he was a sophisticated Muslim, a Saudi who could perhaps help her gain insight into Wahabism, the most extreme form of Islamo-fascism, a “religion” that called for the murder of all infidels, including not only Christians and Jews, but all non-Wahabi Muslims as well. The ultimate in ethnic cleansing.
     
    Abdel al-Lahani was handsome and sexy and exuded power, and she hadn’t been with a man in over a year. He saw her, she was certain, as the next in a long line of sexual conquests. Perhaps she could pick his brain and his wallet and disabuse him of such thoughts all in one fell swoop. Smiling to herself, she turned and went into her room, where she would soak in her bath and reintroduce herself to the old Megan Nolan.
     

~5~
     
    PARIS, JANUARY 3, 2004
     
    Catherine Laurence had called Pat Nolan on her cell phone from the lobby of his hotel. Afterward she crossed the street and found an empty park bench from which she could watch Le Tourville’s elegant front entrance. She wore a suit similar to the one she had