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By Root 475 0

to read the guy's e-mails, but they didn't reveal very much. He'd evidently gone native in his habits, didn't even drink beer. He was evidently popular with his Saudi friends-one thing about Islam was that if you obeyed the rules and prayed the correct way, they didn't much care what you looked like. It would have been admirable except for the fact that most of the world's terrorists prayed to Mecca. But that, Jack reminded himself, wasn't the fault of Islam. The night he himself had been born, people had tried to kill him while he was still in his mother's womb-and they'd identified themselves as Catholics. Fanatics were fanatics, the world around. The idea that people had tried to murder his mother was enough to make him want to pick his Beretta.40. His father, well, his dad was able to look after himself, but messing with women constituted a big step over the line, and that was a line you could cross only once and in one direction. There was no coming back.

He didn't remember any of it, of course. The ULA terrorists had all gone off to meet their God-courtesy of the State of Maryland-before he'd entered first grade, and his parents had never talked about it. His sister Sally had, though. She still had dreams about it. He wondered if Mom and Dad had them, too. Did events like that go away eventually? He'd seen things on the History Channel to suggest that World War II veterans still had images of combat return to them at night, and that had been over sixty years ago. Such memories had to be a curse.

"Tony?"

"Yeah, Junior?"

"This guy Otto Weber, what's the big deal? He's about as exciting as vanilla ice cream."

"If you're a bad guy, do you suppose you wear a neon sign on your back, or do you think you try to hide down in the grass?"

"With the snakes," Junior completed the thought. "I know-we're looking for little things."

"Like I told you. You can do fourth-grade arithmetic. Attach a nose to it. And, yes, you're looking for things that are supposed to be damned near invisible, okay? That's why this job is so much fun. And innocent little things are mostly innocent little things. If he downloads kiddie porn off the 'Net, it's not because he's a terrorist. It's because he's a pervert. That's not a capital offense in most countries."

"I bet it is in Saudi."

"Probably, but they don't chase after it, I bet."

"I thought they were all puritans."

"Over there, a man keeps his libido to himself. But if you do something with a real live kid, you're in big trouble. Saudi Arabia is a good place to abide by the law. You can park your Mercedes and leave the keys in the ignition and the car'll be there when you get back. You can't even do that in Salt Lake City."

"Been there?" Jack asked.

"Four times. The people are friendly as long as you treat them properly, and if you make a real friend over there, he's a friend for life. But their rules are different, and the price for breaking them can be pretty steep."

"So, Otto Weber plays by the rules?"

Wills nodded. "Correct. He's bought all the way into the system, religion and all. They like him for that. Religion is the center of their culture. When a guy converts and lives by Islamic rules, it validates their world, and they like that, just like anybody would. I don't think Otto's a player, though. The people we're looking for are sociopaths. They can happen anywhere. Some cultures catch them early and change them-or kill them. Some cultures don't. We're not as good at that as we ought to be, and I suspect the Saudis probably are. But the really good ones can skate in any culture, and some of them use the disguise of religion. Islam is not a belief system for psychopaths, but it can be perverted to the use of such people, just like Christianity can. Ever take psych courses?"

"No, wish I had," Ryan admitted.

"So, buy some books. Read them. Find people who know about that stuff and ask questions. Listen to the answers." Wills turned back to his computer screen.

Shit, Junior thought. This job just kept getting worse. How long, he wondered, before they expected him to turn up