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be in touch.”
    “You have to know that this isn’t over. It can’t be. Nothing’s that simple.”
    “I appreciate your cooperation today, Mr. Ledger.”
    With that he stood and offered me his hand. I looked at it and then at him for maybe ten full seconds during which neither his hand nor his eyes wavered. Then I stood and shook his hand. As he left Buckethead and the others came for me and drove me back to my car. They didn’t say a word, though on the drive back each of them cut me wary glances every now and then.
    As they drove off I memorized the license number. Then I got into my SUV and sat for maybe twenty minutes, staring through the window at the beach and the happy people playing in the sun. A second wave of the shakes hit me and I had to clamp my jaws shut to keep my teeth from chattering. It was like the way I felt after 9/11. The world had changed again. Just as “terror” had become a far more common word to us all then, terror was a much scarier word to me now.
    What would I do if Church called me back?
     

 
     

Chapter Seven
     
    Sebastian Gault / Helmand Province, Afghanistan / Six days ago
     
    HIS NAME WAS El Mujahid, and it meant “fighter of the way of Allah.” Farm life had made him strong; his devotion to the Koran had given him focus. His love for the woman Amirah had given him purpose and very probably driven him mad, though from the profiles he’d paid to have done on this man, Sebastian Gault thought that the Fighter was already a bit twitchy before Amirah screwed his brains out.
    That made Gault smile. More kingdoms have risen and collapsed, more causes fought and died for over sex—or its teasing promise—than for all the political ideologies and religious hatred that ever existed. And as far as Amirah went, Gault could certainly sympathize with the brutish El Mujahid. Amirah was a ball-twisting vixen of truly historic dimensions, a true Guinevere—she could inspire great heroics, could stand by and support the rise of well-intentioned kingdoms, but at the same time she drove kings and champions to mad deeds.
    Gault poured himself a glass of water and settled into his chair. It was a battered plastic folding chair by a rust-eaten card table set inside a canvas tent that smelled of camel dung, gasoline, and gunpowder. Add the coppery stink of blood and you’d have the perfume of fanaticism, which Gault had smelled in a hundred places over the last twenty-five years. In the end it always smelled like money to him. And money, he knew, was the only force in the universe more powerful than sex.
    Gault leaned back and sipped his water and observed El Mujahid through the open tent flap. The Fighter stood right outside and was growling orders to his men. Even those who were bigger and more physically powerful than the Fighter seemed shrunken in his presence, their wattage dialed down as his shone like the sun. Once he sent them out to do whatever bit of nastiness he assigned them, they would swell like giants and through them El Mujahid’s fist would reach out and strike with godlike force across borders and around the world.
    Gault thought the man was very well named; a name that could have been a code, a disguise, but wasn’t. It was as if the man’s peasant parents—a couple of nearly illiterate dust farmers from some godforsaken corner of Yemen—had known that their only child was destined to become a warrior. Not merely a soldier for Allah, but a general. It was a powerful name for a child, and as the boy grew into a man he had embraced the potential of his name. Unlike so many of his peers he was not recruited by groups of militant fundamentalists— he sought them out.
    By the time El Mujahid was thirty he was on the wanted lists of over forty nations, and on the top ten most wanted list of the United States. He had ties to Al Qaeda and a dozen other extremist groups. He was single-minded, relentless, smart—though not particularly wise—and when he spoke, others