"Soak it in something."
"Wait!"
But the door slammed in his face and his unhappy "Oh, shit."
On the tenth floor, Tamayo Tanaka walked as if she were wrapped in a starched straitjacket. That was how it felt, but if it worked she was back in the game.
And nothing was going to knock her out of the game again.
Yassir Nossair had
It was not a little problem. It was a very big problem.
Hiring the aircraft to fly over Manhattan was not the problem. This was easily done for the right amount of money. Many journalists were hiring aircraft, so it was not unusual to do this.
The problem was crashing the aircraft into the hotel room of the hypocrite Abeer Ghula.
It had been leaked, the floor. Counting up from the first floor was easy. Yassir Nossair used his Zeiss field glasses. He had the floor pinpointed exactly.
It was the correct side of the hotel. The correct room would have been better, but this was impossible. Obtaining the correct side ensured success. Once the aircraft smashed into the appropriate side of the hotel, the explosion would totally rip that wall of her building apart, ripping Abeer Ghula's heretical bones apart with them.
"Want to circle again?" asked the pilot.
"Yes, I am thinking."
Would it be the side facing Mecca? he ruminated. No, it would not be the side facing Mecca. Abeer Ghula was too contrary.
Perhaps it was the side opposite, facing away from Mecca. Would that not make sense?
At last, after careful thought because he possessed only one plane and one life, Yassir Nossair decided it would be the side opposite Mecca.
"It is time," he announced.
"You're done?" the pilot asked.
"Nearly so. I must ask you now to fly closer to the hotel."
"How close?"
"Point it at the hotel and fly toward it."
"Sure."
The Piper Cherokee banked and came in on a level line.
"Lower, slightly," said Yassir Nossair, looking through the windscreen with his field glasses. Quickly he counted up.
"Yes, remain on this level."
"Aren't you going to take a picture?"
"Yes, yes. How stupid of me."
And from the gym bag at his feet, Yassir Nossair took up a 9 mm pistol and placed it against the pilot's unsuspecting temple.
He fired once. The pilot's eyes were dragged from their sockets to smear like burst grapes against the suddenly-shattered side window.
Yassir Nossair took the control wheel from him and held the plane steady as he shouted,God is Great!"
approximately ten doors on each of the four sides of the tenth floor of the Marriot Marquis. The sun was high in the sky now, and the autumn light streaming down through the skylights made eerie golden shafts in the cathedral interior.
Tamayo walked the wide, rectangular corridors as softly as possible, so that she could catch any sound that came from behind the doors.
At each door where she heard a noise, she knelt beneath the glass eye of the peephole and laid an ear to the panel.
She heard TVs, afternoon lovemaking, but nothing that suggested Abeer Ghula's strident voice.
At one door, she heard a TV set tuned to CNN, a network she loathed because their anchors might as well be working in a factory as a broadcast studio for all the publicity their careers got. Not one of them had ever been asked to appear on Leno, never mind Let- terman.
About to rise, she heard a squeaky voice say, "See who is lurking at the door, Remo."
The voice sounded familiar, but before Tamayo could think it through, the door swung inward and she spilled inside, yelping like a cat with a trampled tail.
Her big bag was taken from her, and a hand reached down and grabbed her by the collar. She was hoisted up as if weightless.
When hex face came level with her molester, she recognized the deep-set eyes and high cheekbones, not to mention the T-shirt and chinos.
"What are you doing here?" asked the man she knew only as Remo.
"None of your business," Tamayo retorted.
"That's not the answer I want to hear."
"Look, give me ten minutes with Abeer Ghula, a worldwide exclusive, and I won't tell anybody she's in this room."
"No deal." "Fine. But think of the inconvenience when I go on the air with this."
"You're not going on the air with anything."
And Tamayo Tanaka found herself being led over to a queen-size bed where a raven-haired woman lay under the royal blue covers.
"Is she dead?" she gasped, seeing her story take a dark turn into a brief, third-segment obituary.
"Just sleeping one off."
"Muslims don't drink alcohol."