America

The following press release was sent to all the major international news media corporations around 8:00PM GMT, this document was released by the Muđahedin al-Qiyāmah, the public relations division of Hataf, this document was broadcast and distributed worldwide in a flurry of a media news storm. The original language was English, but it was also printed in Arabic, French, Urdu, Pashto, Farsi, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Chinese. No individual author was named, but the Muđahedin al-Qiyāmah, and copies landed on the desks of every intelligence agent, law enforcement agent, and military officer with any interest whatsoever in the activities of Hataf within one hour of its publication.

Ḥizbulṭālibulintifāḍat
Commonly known as HATAF
The Party of Students of the Uprising

Press Release

Muđahedin al-Qiyāmah

For Immediate Release

In the Name of Allah, all praise is due to Allah. Prayers and peace be upon on the Messenger of Allah, and on his family, companions and allies. Muslim brothers and sisters everywhere: Peace be upon you and the mercy of Allah and His blessings.

A Muslim sister and daughter of God, and one of our faithful leaders, Tahira Ali Almontaser, has been captured by the Satanic forces of United States of America, clearly instruments of Shaitan working against the coming of the End of Time.

We the faithful categorically condemn the deplorable actions of the Americans. You are only engaging in desperate attempts to counter the inevitable coming of the End of Time, trapped in a desperate battle of Good and Evil, knowing you are on the side of Evil. You claim to be the voice of Democracy, Freedom, and Equality, but you oppress the faithful and mock the faithful, but your blasphemies will not be overlooked on Judgment Day. You will stand before Allah, and you will be cast for all time into hellfire for your blasphemy against the Most High.

Without reservation or condition, we demand the immediate release of Tahira Ali Almontaser from your unlawful detention, so that we the faithful may continue our work in the hopes of the blessed coming of the End of Time. We know that the End of Time is not far, but we the faithful yearn for the Day of Judgment, and for the day when Allah will be made known to the faithful and the infidel alike. If you do not release Tahira Ali Almontaser, we the faithful shall only hasten toward the coming of the End of Time.

It has been prophesied that the End of Time will come as the Earth is devoured by light and fire, silent but for the scerams of the unfaithful, and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The End of Time will come about when evil has all but overtaken this already dark world, and its inhabitants will perish. We the faithful know where we are going when the End of Time comes. We have been promised Paradise in Allah's Qur'an. But be warned, you unfaithful: there is yet hope that you may be redeemed, that you may see the light and embrace Islam...

The faithful everywhere are called to raise arms against all who would oppress the True Teachings and deny the Revelations of Allah.... Our father Anoushiravan spoke Truth in a world infested with lies, and these truths are self-evident: the End of Time is fast approaching, and all whose souls are unprepared are called to seek within themselves the foreknowledge granted them, to surrender unequivocally to Allah and His will, and to join the faithful in our struggle to bring about the End of Time, so that we the faithful may receive our reward in Paradise with our Creator.

And our final prayer is that all praise is due to Allah, Lord of the Worlds. May Allah send prayers and peace on our Master Muhammad and his family and Companions.

A foolish man may be known by six things: Anger without cause, speech without profit, change without progress, inquiry without object, putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends.

- An Arab Proverb

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When the final days come, you will know them by great trials and tribulations. Death will come over proud empires, and destruction will visit haughty cities. You will know they are the last days, for the Lord God will send evil spirits to afflict those who have denied Him. No one will escape the wrath of the Almighty One.

These days are upon us. Look around you – disease ravages the shores of the prideful, war devastates the land of the poor and oppressed, the hypocrites and blasphemers have seized power in the seats of government, and yet none have come together to stand testament to the glory of God during these most wonderful hours. For even so, there is time before the End of Days; there is time to repent and to honor God.

I beseech you, dear brothers, kind sisters, not to look lightly at the predicaments which riddle the evil world. For there is no power or change, no transformation or happening, but through the everlasting power of God. For we have been given a solemn, holy charge, to defend the Truth, to stand for what is right even when the world has fallen to the temptations of the Evil One. The six signs of the pious shall be these: they shall devote the entirety of their existence to God; they shall fast and pray; they shall give alms to the poor and live self-sacrificially; they shall teach humility and piety; they shall live with integrity and virtue; and they shall wage war against those who hinder the faithful.

I implore you, my brethren, my countrymen, you who believe, to unite in common cause: the service of the Almighty. We shall be a terror to the infidel in the night, a waking lamp to keep vigil til the coming of the Lord, for when the end comes, only the righteous will escape eternal damnation. The End of Days is fast approaching. Do not abandon your soul to the wrong side of heaven when it comes!

All the earth and its hollow riches will be destroyed in a cataclysm of light and thunderous silence, all life rendered dust before dust. For the earth was formless and empty in the void, and thus it shall be again. Temporal things are ever transitory, but the Truth of God is an eternal beacon of hope to those who see it. Store up your riches in heaven; leave your sins and old life behind.

Thus said Anoushiravan Kutchemeshgi, the father of the woman who both loved me and hated me. He was not like other men. Anoushiravan was gifted with beautiful speech and fatherly qualities, and lived always in community with those he called his family. In his lifetime, he never once raised his voice or hand against those he loved, yet to all the world, he is known as a terrorist and a fanatic. Anoushiravan was the Creator, and we called him the Father.

I have been told that to those who do not know me, I seem much like him. But I am terrified to be with others, and I am guilty of sinning against those I love. My family has forgotten my name already. If I am evil, a despicable terrorist, then what does that make the people I once called brother and sister? If there is a god, and a judgment day is coming, then I am surely damned.

Tahira Ali

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A fan whirred slowly, large, black flies hovering about the room, the occasional hand swatting them away. The humidity was oppressive, exacerbated by temperatures exceeding forty degrees as the heat swelled over the city, the sun merciless wherever it shone. Even the posters on the walls slowly peeled away from the mulberry-colored paint, paper curling at the corners. The red line in the thermometer flirted with the forty degree mark. It hadn’t been this hot here in years, and all over, half-functional air conditioners hummed to life, citizens and visitors alike chattering about Munich’s heat wave in hushed tones, tremulous fingers pointed toward the heavens.

White knuckles gripped the pencil as the woman at the table sketched a rough diagram of the parade route, calculating distances and heights in the margins, with neatly arranged rows of numerals, dashing arrows and slashes across the page, as eyes traveled back and forth, others standing over her shoulder, peering at the words as she scrawled notes around the diagram. Perched precariously on an unfinished wooden stool, legs dangling over the floor, all eyes were on her. Brow furrowed, lip jutted in concentration, black hair sticking to her face with the humidity, the woman at the table might have been a stellar student sharing her calculations with selfish classmates.

To all appearances, she looked like the child of South Asian immigrants, dressed in a somewhat faded, plum-colored shalwar kameez, the traditional dress of Afghanistan and the Hindustan, her hands and feet barely poking out of the folds of her clothing, her complexion dark, most of her uncovered hair pulled back in a limp braid. But if anyone had a chance to glimpse inside the guest house, the abnormality of the scene would have been immediately apparent, in the woman’s face, in the subtle nods exchanged among the observers, and in the product of her pencil lying on the table.

The sound of graphite scratching against paper was paramount. No words were spoken, no feet shuffled, until finally, she broke the silence. “If we mount the attack here,” she said, indicating the appropriate spot with her pencil, “we maximize casualties. The dignitaries will die before they realize what has happened, along with their bodyguards and families.”

“But why there?” Someone else spoke up, a bearded man with round glasses stepping forward from the shadows, arms crossed as he leaned over the woman’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t well-placed snipers be more effective? And that way, we wouldn’t kill any of the children, just the targets.”

“The angles are all wrong.” The woman at the table leaned over the paper, hurriedly performing several calculations, angles, lines, before looking up again. “Snipers would be difficult to position, and easy targets for police. The bomb remains. Those children are not innocent. Their parents will indoctrinate them in evil, and they will age into persecution of the faithful. By killing them now, it is a mercy on their souls, that God might yet have mercy. This way, we do not compromise our location, and we maximize our rate of survival.”

“But if we die, we go to God,” the man interjected.

“If we die, it is God’s will. But who is to say we will die now or at another time? If we can, we live longer, to continue the work of God.” The woman at the table laid her pencil down on the paper, offering her companion a grim smile.

“Then when?”

“Tomorrow. At eleven in the morning.”



The Ambassador looked out the window of the car, watching two crows circling overhead, black wings unfolding like a heavy winter cloak, whipping against the overcast sky. Down the street, a young man with a camera tilted his chin skyward, snapping a photo of the crows, their black wings stark against what appeared to be a sea of white behind them.

It might have been any day in Munich, any parade proceeding through the streets in dignified fashion, children craning their necks between adults’ arms and legs, to catch a glimpse of the foreign dignitaries in their German-made cars, ambling without any particular sense of urgency towards the Presidential mansion, smiling and waving at the citizens and tourists on the sides of the streets.

“What a beautiful day,” one mother exclaimed to her child, looking down at the solemn-faced boy squinting through tortoiseshell glasses at the Ambassador’s Mercedes-Benz, head bobbing back and forth as he peered at the car’s underside. “Don’t you think so, hon?”

For several moments, the boy didn’t respond, only tilted his head to stare at the car in silence before he finally spoke. “Mother, there’s at least eighty pounds of explosives rigged to that Mercedes-Benz,” the boy said, his voice oddly pedantic as he leaned slightly forward, stretching as if to get a better look at the vehicle.

“Shush, don’t joke like that,” the mother hissed, glaring angrily down at her son. “You know better than to scare p – ”

BOOM.

The windows of four cars blew out simultaneously, sending shards of glass into the crowd to a backdrop of screams, shrapnel flying everywhere as onlookers ducked for cover, scattering in a mezcla of colored scarves and coats, away from the explosions. The cars burned. The Ambassador’s arm hung limply through the blown out window, his khaki jacket sleeve charred, fingers blackened with soot. A moment later, his head slumped over his arm, jutting through the frame. Skin had peeled back to reveal bone, an acrid stench rising from the haze.

In the distance, sirens wailed.

A diminutive woman dressed in a plum-colored shalwar kameez strode calmly down the street, at the edge of the bedlam, almost unnoticed in the crowd. She stopped in front of a fallen lamppost, stooping to kneel beside a young boy with cuts on his face, a pair of tortoiseshell glasses lying a few feet away. She brushed her hand gently against his cheek, and then rose, hurrying away from the chaos but not before the boy’s eyes opened, with a flickering of recognition as the woman disappeared down the street.

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The past was full of obligations, superstitions, and presuppositions. There were always debts to be paid – for instance, debts to one’s parents, or debts to one’s landlord, or debts to a friend for years of lost contact – and these debts often became fulsome burdens laden on the shoulders of the everyman, despite his best efforts to cast them off. Superstitions, too, were plentiful. They dotted history like flowers along the bank of a river, and were more often than not the cause of mass hysteria and that wretched beast, organized religion.

Presuppositions, on the other hand, were prone to clouding one’s future decisions – and not merely the present alone. The past was riddled with them, and they, unlike debts and superstitions, were certain to affect future decisions and future consequences, oftentimes for far more people than anyone would have ever intended.

Sunlight peeped in through the venetian blinds, drawn shut for security reasons, where a collection of men and women sat around a low table. Some were clad in Western style suits; others were dressed in ethnic clothing – a few men in white Arabian dishdashas, two or three women in brightly colored Kenyan kanga dresses, a man in a sand-colored shalwar kameez, and a woman in an Iranian chador.

A high-definition television, mounted on the far wall, displayed a muted video, still being drafted and refined by a few techies and a particularly skilled video editor. Two faces from the room were mirrored on the screen, speaking silently as they offered up a follow-up to the written press release that had been mailed out the day before. Hataf’s senior council was loathe to leave a written missive unaccompanied by further media, hence the video recording currently under review.

“She needs to be eliminated,” one of the men said, turning to eye the women on either side of him. “She turned traitor.”

“I thought she disappeared,” one of the women interjected, leaning back in her seat with a harrumph as she rearranged the folds of her sleeves, tucking them out from under her arms.

“Personally, I thought she was dead, Maria,” the woman next to the first added, arching her eyebrows. “In her line of work, disappearing for too long without contact can only mean one thing.”

“It doesn’t matter what you thought, Graciela,” the man spoke up again, gaze burning at Graciela. “What matters is that someone told her about Rahah Almarfud, and she’s talking. To the Americans. The goddamned Americans.”

“Jamil! Language!” Maria admonished, jabbing her finger into the man’s arm. Jamil hardly glanced in her direction, though he quieted somewhat.

“I’ve had one of our covert operatives sent to kill her,” Jamil continued, not acknowledging Maria’s interruption. He drummed his fingers on the table, looking around as he spoke. “Unfortunately, we can’t let the Americans know that we know of Ali’s treachery.”

“I was about to ask,” one of the other men muttered darkly, casting a questioning glance in Jamil’s direction from further down the table, his English pleasantly accented. “You do these things without informing the Council of your intentions, and we are left in the dark. I do not think Rabiya would approve.”

“She would not approve of your using her name, Ehud,” Maria responded, shifting her gaze to the Israeli who had just spoken.

“Everything I do is for the glory of the cause,” Jamil said, letting his fingers fall silent. “The film goes out this morning.”

The clock read eight hundred hours, Egypt time.

The video was streamed directly via Muđahedin al-Qiyāmah’s website, where Hataf published all of its media related materials, anything that was released publicly. The archives dated back to material uploaded from the time of Hataf’s founding in 1965, though it was regularly updated for written missives and video messages, such as the one uploaded then.

Jamil appeared with Graciela on screen. “In the name of God, the most merciful, the most beneficent. The End of Time will come, as the Father prophesied. The unbelievers will be swept away into eternal hellfire, and the faithful will be rewarded with Paradise. We struggle, but not in vain, for even if we die, we go to the arms of God, whereas the unbelievers fall from self-constructed idolatry…”

The message continued for nearly ten minutes. In the dining room, all was silent, until finally, Ehud spoke again, drawing everyone’s attention from the video. “But what has she been doing all these years, if she has not been with us?”

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Halfway across the world, Moses Kent sat down the hall from Ali’s cell, leaning over a too-small desk, his fingers closed around a pen as he finished up paperwork left over from the rather strange incident yesterday with the all-too-hasty-to-leave detective. Redfield something, Moses mused. He kept one eye on the forms – damn bureaucracy seemed obsessed with the things; there was one for nearly everything imaginable – and the other on the prisoner.

The time for ishaa had passed without prayer, as had the time for fajr in the wee hours of morning. If Ali was supposed to be a devout Muslim woman, she had a hell of a way of showing it. She hadn’t prayed once, hadn’t even cracked the pages of the Qur’an the prison officials had left in her cell. And during intake, when asked to declare a religious affiliation, Ali had stared blankly and offered no answer.

Moses didn’t know much about Islam, but his neighbor was Pakistani and quite religious, and he knew that Muslims were supposed to be praying five times a day. And even though Salman didn’t speak fluent English, he knew what his religion was, and Moses did too. Nice family, he thought. Two kids, play soccer and violin, get straight As. And it didn’t hurt that Salman’s kids always watched the house when Moses went away. The kind of neighbors most Americans appreciate.

Down the hall, Ali was finishing her breakfast, some not particular appetizing meals cooked in the prison kitchen to be served en masse to America’s least desirable citizens and aliens. She chewed thoughtfully, swallowing with great deliberation, and when she was done, she laid her spoon down on the tray as if with special reverence, before sliding it on the floor to rest next to the door, waiting for the appropriate officer to come by to collect the tray through the ‘bean slot’ in the cell door.

She hadn’t spoken a word since the interrogation session of the day before, except to answer routine questions when asked. Moses had noted her avoidance of eye contact, the way her gaze always drifted sideways or downward, with something not unlike curiosity, though he hadn’t quite asked. He figured it wouldn’t be appropriate to speak so candidly with a prisoner, particularly not one on everyone’s most wanted lists. Today, he knew from a meeting with his supervisor, there would likely be several officers or agents from various agencies demanding time with Ali. He wondered wryly whether she was aware of this, and concluded, amusedly, that she must be.

His radio beeped. Someone was at the gate.

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Natalie Schultz hadn’t returned to the office from the prison. Instead, she took the scenic route home, avoiding going even in the general direction of FBI Headquarters, evading the Beltway altogether as she drove from Jacksonville to home, not too far from DC, but just outside of city lines.

Once home, she bounded up the steps to the house, depressing the doorbell three times with one second intervals between each depression. The clock read two past midnight. She opened the door, stepping inside to silence. All was as it should be.

She hung her coat in the closet, unclipping her FBI ID from the lapel, slipping it into her pants pocket as she made her way through the house, catching light peeping from under the kitchen door. Natalie pushed it open to see Sofia perched on one of the kitchen chairs, studiously copying notes from a textbook, her pen dashing across the page as she made quick notations and marks on diagrams in her notebook.

Sofia’s eyes traveled upward and her pen slowed to a stop. “Mom?”

Natalie nodded. “Go to bed,” she said, and headed upstairs without another word, head down as she walked, her posture somewhat odd – lilting to the side, arms jutting slightly outward, her pen in hand as she moved.

In the morning, her routine would begin anew.

Routine was expected. Unchanged. And this brought some degree of comfort, a means of calming the anxiety that wracked her mind. There was no freedom from it, but routine was a haven, and she sought it like a sailor might a harbor.

Special Agent Natalie Schultz. The door sign was the same. The day would bring new and exciting challenges. For Natalie, it would be another experiment in life. After all, what is life but a chance that never happens again?

:)