Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West Read Online Free PDF Page B

into a
doorway. Sudden fire flashed over Abigail’s cheeks as cold wrapped
her spine. Had that ICEman prick set a watch on her? Her logic
dismissed the idea as ludicrous, but her anger was alight and not
so easily doused. The young man didn’t reappear.
     
    Centre for
Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts: April
    The reception was boring. Abigail usually found them
so. This one was a CMES do, the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies
at Harvard, thrown to welcome a new associate to its heart. A free
buffet though, inclusive of plonk.
    The beaming professor being honoured was
taking over a regular seminar series, Islam in the West . So,
when the ring of eager admirers thinned, she hoped to make contact.
He’d astutely combined the CMES event with a PR push for his book, Guilt, Manipulation and Misunderstanding: the Hand of The West
in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict .
    Pending access to the worthy professor, she
sauntered about like a thief spotting for opportunities, wielding
her smile like a crow-bar to break into the most promising of other
people’s conversations. Sadly, a great deal of schmoozing was
necessary to remain afloat in the treacherous ocean of academia.
Conscious of staying sharp and with a busy afternoon ahead too, she
sipped her wine slowly. She spotted that reporter guy from the Boston Globe , Paul Summers, talking into his phone, though
not with the usual animation people have when chatting to someone
else, so he was probably just confiding audio notes. She had no
wish to hobnob with him right now and hoped he wouldn’t recognize
her. Crazily, he was wearing a long white kaftan over blue jeans,
as if out of solidarity with the occasion. Or maybe not so crazily.
CMES boasted a healthy ethnic range of participants: Mediterranean
and North African, Arab and Turkic and Anglo-Saxon and more,
dressed in Western suits and brightly coloured robes, T-shirts and
hijabs and silk scarves and baseball caps.
    Of a sudden there leapt out at her an urgent
hiss; eagle-teacher . She whirled in a desperate attempt to
discover who’d said that, and her wine flew in a wide arc, her
glass smashing spectacularly on the floor. Most conversation
ceased. Abigail felt terribly exposed under the glare of lights and
the glare of those nearby, although Paul Summers was grinning
sympathetically at her across the room; maybe he was a connoisseur
of social gaffes. A postgrad she’d seen around before, a South-East
Asian who sported a puckered old scar just like a supplementary
eyebrow, looked shocked and angry; maybe the wine had splashed him.
A handsome, well-groomed, middle-aged Arab gentleman next to him
smiled quizzically; he probably thought Abi was drunk. She lamely
explained to the room in general that she’d lost her footing, then
said sorry a lot as one of the catering staff came to clear up the
mess. Did Jack Turner have someone snooping around here, asking the
same improbable questions of other targets within CMES? A sense of
unreality gripped her, a feeling of being adrift on an unknown
sea.
    Get some perspective, girl.
    Her gentle history tutor back home in
Montreal had said she should never reprove herself like that. Girl revealed disbelief in her own maturity. She circled as
discretely as she could, hoping to hear the phrase again; but in
vain. After making such an exhibition of herself, she decided this
mightn’t be the best time to approach that professor.
     
    Tehran, Iran:
June 1987
    Jafar had hurried to the observation booth as soon as
he was told that at last the prisoner was showing the first signs
of plague.
    Subject Number Two, was also a subject of
that impostor who called himself the Aga Khan and who weighed
himself in diamonds, so-called Commander-in-Chief of the so-called
Nizari Ismailis, whose great great grandfather long ago hijacked a
lineage and a true faith that had persisted in secret for
centuries. How appropriate that the first experimental prisoner to
show the desired signs should be