Read London Twist: A Delilah Novella for Free Online

smooth veneer of a serial killer. Eichmann, after all, was a balding, bespectacled accountant.
    After a few moments, Fatima raised the bullhorn to her lips. The audience immediately grew quiet.
    “Dear Mister Secretary,” she began, the bullhorn carrying the words all the way to the back of the crowd, “when an American drone missile kills a child in a tribal society, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. It has nothing to do with al Qaeda.”
    Even with the distortion of amplification, Delilah could hear that the voice was feminine, the tone confident, and the accent international school British, poised incongruously between British precision and American flatness.
    “You are creating your own enemies with these cruel, cowardly weapons, enemies who are driven not by ideology but rather by a universally human sense of revenge and despair. And when you bomb funerals and rescuers, you multiply the hatred a thousandfold. Among the dead might be militants, yes, but inevitably the deaths of so many innocents produces a new generation of leaders, who spontaneously emerge in furious retaliation for these savage attacks on their territories, their tribes, their families. You are fighting fire with gasoline, and, in so doing, causing a conflagration that rages hotter and burns more broadly with every strike you launch.”
    The rhetoric was perhaps a bit florid, but in general Delilah didn’t disagree with the sentiments. She had no illusions about how many of her country’s problems, and those of the West generally, were self-made. But she wasn’t a politician. Her role was to try to keep the blaze from getting further out of control, no matter how much the politicians did to stoke it. It was a dismal job, thankless, and possibly, in the end, futile. But what else could she do—shrug off the possibility that one of the people Fatima described, no matter how righteous his outrage, might unleash aerosolized sarin on a subway platform, or in a shopping mall, or in a school? In many ways, the politicians presented people like Delilah with a never-ending series of faits accomplis. Maybe she was enabling them. Maybe if she and people like her told them all to fuck off, went on strike, refused to continue to put out the fires the politicians were continually feeding, it would shock them out of their idiocy. But in the meantime, more people, many more, would certainly die.
    She sighed. If only Rain could understand that, maybe he could understand why she couldn’t get out of the life. Not yet, anyway. Because how could she live with carnage and catastrophe, no matter what its ultimate cause, knowing she might have stopped it, and instead stood aside?
    Fatima spoke for twenty minutes, focusing her appeal both on America’s values and on its self-interest, her remarks frequently interrupted by applause. Delilah watched through the lens, periodically getting a picture. She liked the distance the camera created for her. Sometimes she needed it.
    Fatima concluded by saying, “One of your own greatest Americans, Martin Luther King, understood this well. King said, ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hatred cannot drive out hatred: only love can do that.’ Please, Mister Secretary. Learn this lesson. Turn away from darkness. Turn away from hate. Before they consume us all.”
    She stepped down from the crate, surrounded by thunderous cheering and applause. The TV reporter hurried over, microphone in hand, followed by her cameraman. Delilah was struck that not once had Fatima mentioned her dead brothers. The crowd knew already, certainly, so perhaps she surmised that her real audience, the hard men, the ones who hated not passionately but coldly, patiently, would respect her reticence, and feel in it a bond based on shared but unspoken pain, a bond that would draw them to her, and from there to her brother, the means by which their hatred could at last find ecstatic expression. For was it not true that