"Sure," Kreutzer said, scratching vigorously at his unkempt hair. "It makes sense. She's an A-rab, right? They actually want to become martyrs. It's a good deal for them - one quick death and then you're in fucking paradise with your seventy-two virgins." He considered that for a second. "Or maybe she gets to be one of somebody else's virgins. Face it, blowing themselves up is what they do best."

I glared at him. "That's the most asinine thing I've ever heard." I waved my hands in the air. "She's a teenager, that's all. She doesn't understand what dying really means but she knows for a fact that life sucks. She's got all these hormones and energy and weird bad culturally created bullshit, fucked up sexuality projected into glamorous ideas of death as transcendence - "

"She's a soldier." Jack peeled apart a blade of unmowed grass and put it to his lips. He blew hard and it made a reedy sound, like a mournful bassoon starting a dirge.

"She's a child." I said. But of course, she was much more than that. Jack understood her better than I did right then. She was a soldier. Which meant that she could submerge her own self into a larger idea, a context of community that had to be served - her national identity as a Somali, her place as a kumayo warrior fighting for Mama Halima. The good of all humanity.

It was a distinctly un-American sentiment but I had felt it myself. When we returned from the ill-fated raid on the hospital, dragging what was left of Ifiyah behind us, I had felt it. My own needs and wants and shortcoming no longer applied. When we got back to the boat and Osman started making wisecracks I had felt so disconnected from him and his selfish cowardice.

It takes us years to learn that surrender to what is larger than ourselves. Jack had spent much of his life having it drilled into him. Parents were supposed to get it instinctually but some never really learned to put their families ahead of themselves.

Ayaan had figured it out in grade school. It was insulting, not to mention pointless, to deny her the belief she held closest to her very soul.

The girl herself must have heard us - I hardly kept my voice down after Kreutzer started spouting off - but she was busy and didn't feel the need to break in to the conversation. She was preparing herself, you see. Preparing herself to be eaten alive.

Of all the fucked up things I have seen since the dead came back to life and the world ended in grasping, hungering horror the very worst was a sixteen year-old girl touching her forehead to green grass on a sunny day and communing with her god. I could understand her motivation for throwing away her life - I could even go along with it, if I had to, by gritting my teeth - but I knew it would haunt me forever.

This was it, though. All I could ever hope to achieve. I would get my drugs and I would go back to Africa and I would see Sarah, I would hold her in my arms and pray she never had to make decisions like this, never had to watch people annihilate themselves for the sake of corrupt politicians half the world away again. We would build some kind of life and I would make myself forget what had happened. For Sarah's sake.

"Dekalb," Jack said. "You're forgetting something."

Oh, no I wasn't. I knew perfectly well that Marisol and the others were still being held as a food supply in Gary's castle. I knew that I had a personal responsibility to kill Gary.

I also knew that Ayaan had just gotten me off the hook. She had made those things unimportant. Ignorable. I could finish my mission and barely have to lift a finger. It just meant writing off a couple of hundred human lives.

"I've got some ideas but I need every man I can get in on this one. I need you, Dekalb." He stared at me even as I steadfastly refused to meet his gaze.

Eventually I followed him into the trailer without a word and sank down into one of the comfortable chairs there. Kreutzer lingered in the background, all but rubbing his hands together in nervousness while Jack studied high-res images of Central Park and the things Gary had built there.

"We have to start with a couple of assumptions," he said, finally, that final word sounding like something with too many legs that had just flown into his mouth. This was a man who thought that hard data was a necessity in buying an electric toothbrush. Staging a suicidal rescue attempt would require notarized affidavits from signal intelligence operatives and a signed letter from the Joint Chiefs of Staff describing in perfect detail exactly what his mission was. He didn't have that luxury now, of course. "We start by assuming that this is possible. Then we assume that we have the gear and the personnel to pull it off."

I nodded but still refused to look at his screen.

"We have to assume that he's still human enough to share some of our limitations. That he can only concentrate on one thing at a time."

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "You want to use Ayaan's sacrifice as a diversion." It made sense, of course. Gary wanted one thing very badly, and that was revenge. If he was handed it on a silver platter why would he notice us sneaking up behind him with a chainsaw to cut his head off?

I could think of a bunch of reasons why he would notice that. He wasn't stupid. We had underestimated him before and it had cost us so much. Jack was thinking in the realm of possibilities, though, not in terms of what might happen but what could happen. Even I knew that was dangerous territory.

"We have to assume one other thing. That he didn't know this was here when he built his fortifications."

That made me look up. Something Gary had overlooked? Something that would solve all of our problems? Jack was tapping the screen, indicating a featureless rectangular shape just inside the boundaries of the Park. It sat immediately downtown from the 79th Street transverse, formerly a well-paved road and now a ribbon of muddy water. I had no idea what it was.

When Jack told me I had to seriously think about what we were going to do. About how we were going to sneak inside Gary's fortress and somehow make it back out alive with a couple of hundred living people in tow. It couldn't be done.

We were going to do it. "How do we start?" I asked.