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ISBN: 1-4116-3038-6

A novel of terrorism and international intrigue that opens: 
Hani Hashem walked unhurriedly into the Seminary, knowing he’d been on enough campuses in England and in Cairo so his gait, his abstracted look, his battered leather briefcase that appeared laden with books, would make him unremarkable. The Seminary was built like a fortress, a huge, red-brick Georgian square with a single tower rising high above it. It looked like a mosque, and for one crazy instant, Hani thought he heard the muezzin calling him to prayer. The entranceway was an arch, shaped like those Hani knew his ancestors had left in Cordoba and Granada more than five hundred years ago before the Christians had finally swept them out of Spain back into Africa.

At the same time as they had driven out the Jews, those same hypocritical, turn-the-other-cheek Christians who were always accusing Arabs of being anti-Jewish. The people they drove out of Spain the Christians liked to call Moors or Saracens, as though they couldn’t bear to recognize that they were Arabs and Muslims. The Jews had also managed to forget it was those selfsame Moors who under their rule allowed them to live in Spain for hundreds of years of peace and prosperity in what Jews themselves called their “golden age”.

“Well, times change, and five hundred years is a long time ago,” Hani told himself, as he entered the building and, avoiding the elevators, began the climb to the Seminary library. He felt the muscles in his thighs and in his calves knot so tightly, as they had when he was training in the Libyan desert, and he barely kept himself from stopping to massage them. No one questioned him, or asked for identification, perhaps because he was bearded, like so many of them, and had one of their little black skullcaps on. Why that should make him more nervous, he wasn’t sure, although perhaps it was because he could so easily be taken for a Jew. He looked like them, the same dark eyes and swarthy skin, the same prominent beaked nose and black hair. A Semite after all.

When he entered the library reading room, a few heads were raised from their books, but did not seem to see him. It was as if, recognizing one of their own, they looked right through him back into their books. Like Arabs, the Jews, too, were People of the Book. A few nodded, whether at what they were reading or at him Hani wasn’t certain, so he nodded silently, gravely, making believe he too was unseeing, but on tip-toe alert, seeing everything and everyone around him.

Following a short stocky man into the stacks, he veered away, only to to encounter a nervous thin woman with thick eye-glasses and had to avoid her too. Finally, he found a secluded part of the stacks where there was no sound except, at some distance, the hum of an air-conditioning unit. Hani stepped up on one of the library ladders and laid his briefcase on the second shelf from the top. Up there, he could see all around him. No one was nearby; no one was aware of him. Slowly, he undid the clasps on his briefcase and carefully slid out the explosive device, the timer, the roll of tape.

When he finished taping the bomb behind the volumes on the top shelves, where it was least likely to be discovered, Hani noticed that those books were copies of the Jews’ Torah, some newly rebound, others worn and tattered as if they had been fingered by generations. Hani was taken aback, then recalled the Koran’s curse on the Jews as unworthy of being true Sons of Abraham. Those to whom the burden of carrying the Torah was entrusted, yet refused to bear it, are like a donkey with books. Hani laughed aloud, then glanced around to see if anyone had heard him. Cautiously, he set the timer, checked it twice against his wristwatch, then closed the clasps on his briefcase and stepped down. 

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