Terrorist Read online

  “Please, Mr. Levy,” he says. “It is mine to do. The meaning changes from a victory to a defeat, if you do it.”

  “My God, you should be a lawyer. O.K., stop squeezing my hand. I was just kidding.”

  The girl in the back of the station wagon has seen the brief struggle, and her interest has woken up her brother. Their four bright black eyes stare. In the side of Ahmad’s vision, Mr. Levy is rubbing his fist with the other hand. He tells Ahmad, perhaps to soften him with flattery, “You’ve gotten strong this summer. After our interview you gave me a handshake so limp it was insulting.”

  “Yes, I am no longer afraid of Tylenol.”

  “Tylenol?”

  “Another graduate of Central High. A dull-witted bully who has taken possession of a girl I liked. And who liked me, odd as I must have seemed to her. So not only you have romantic difficulties. It is one of the pagan West’s grave errors, according to Islamic theorists, to make an idol of an animal function.”

  “Tell me about the virgins. The seventy-two virgins who will minister to you on the other side.”

  “The Holy Qur’an does not specify that number of ryyt. It says only that they are numerous, and dark-eyed, and have modest glances, and have never been touched by men or djinn.”

  “Djinn, yet! Oh, my.”

  “You mock, without knowing the language.” Ahmad feels a hated blush steal over his face as he tells his mocker, “Shaikh Rashid explained the djinn and houris as symbols of God’s love for us, which is everywhere and ever renewed and cannot be directly comprehended by ordinary mortals.”

  “O.K., if that’s how you see it. I’m not arguing. You can’t argue with an explosion.”

  “What you call an explosion is to me a pinprick, a little opening that admits God’s power into the world.”

  Though it has seemed the moment might never arrive in the balky flow of the traffic, a subtle flattening and slight upward tilt of the tunnel floor tells Ahmad that the low point has been reached, and the curve of the tiled wall ahead, fitfully visible through the tall procession of truck bodies, marks the weak spot where the fanatically tidy and snugly cinched square of plastic barrels should be detonated. His right hand detaches from the steering wheel and hovers over the military-drab metal box, with its little well where his thumb will fit. When he pushes it, he will join God. God will be less terribly alone. He will greet you as His son.

  “Do it,” Jack Levy urges. “I’m going to just relax. Jesus, I’ve been tired lately.”

  “For you there will be no pain.”

  “No, but there will be for plenty of others,” the older man responds, slumping way down. But he cannot stop talking. “This isn’t the way I pictured it.”

  “Pictured what?” The echo comes on its own in Ahmad’s cleansed and hollowed state.

  “Dying. I always thought I’d die in bed. Maybe that’s why I don’t like being in it. Bed.”

  He wants to die, Ahmad thinks. He taunts me to do the deed for him. In the fifty-sixth sura, the Prophet speaks of the moment when the soul of a dying man shall come up into his throat. That moment is here. The journey, the miraj. Buraq is ready, his shining white wings rustling, unfolding. Yet in the same sura, “The Event,” God asks, We created you: will you not credit us? Behold the semen you discharge: did you create it, or We? God does not want to destroy: it was He who made the world.

  The pattern of the wall tiles and of the exhaust-darkened tiles of the ceiling—countless receding repetitions of squares like giant graph paper rolled into a third dimension—explodes outward in Ahmad’s mind’s eye in the gigantic fiat of Creation, one concentric wave after another, each pushing the other farther and farther out from the initial point of nothingness, God having willed the great transition from non-being to being. This was the will of the Beneficent, the Merciful, ar-Ramn and ar-Ram, the Living, the Patient, the Generous, the Perfect, the Light, the Guide. He does not want us to desecrate His creation by willing death. He wills life.

  Ahmad returns his right hand to the steering wheel. The two children in the vehicle ahead, lovingly dressed and groomed by their parents, bathed and soothed every night, gaze toward him solemnly, having sensed the something erratic in his focus, the something unnatural in the expression of his face, mixed with the glaze of his windshield. Reassuringly he lifts the fingers of his right hand from the steering wheel and waves them, like the legs of a beetle on its back. Recognized at last, the children smile, and Ahmad cannot but smile back. He glances at his watch: nine-eighteen. The moment for maximum damage has slipped by; the bend in the tunnel is slowly being pulled into a widening rectangle of daylight.

  “Yeah?” Levy asks, as if he has not quite heard Ahmad’s response to his last remark. He sits up from his slouched position.

  The black children, similarly sensing rescue, make faces through the back window of the Volvo, pulling down the corners of their eyes with their fingers and wagging their protruding tongues. Ahmad tries to smile again and repeats his friendly gesture of finger-waving but weakly; he feels spent. The tunnel’s bright mouth grows to swallow him and his truck and its ghosts; together all emerge into the dull but brightening light of another Monday in Manhattan. Whatever was making the traffic in the tunnel so balky, so maddeningly sticky, has dispersed at last, dissolved on an open paved space among apartment buildings of modest height and billboards and brick row houses and, several blocks distant, fragile-looking glass skyscrapers. It could be a nameless spot in northern New Jersey; only the silhouette, dead ahead, of the Empire State Building, once again the tallest building in New York City, signifies otherwise. The bronze station wagon speeds to the right, south. The children are distracted by metropolitan sights, their heads swivelling this way and that, and they do not give Ahmad a farewell wave. He feels snubbed, after the sacrifice he made for them.

  Beside him Mr. Levy says “Man!” in stupid imitation of a high-school student. “I’m drenched. You had me convinced.” He senses that he has not assumed the right tone and adds, softer, “Well done, my friend. Welcome to the Big Apple.”

  Ahmad has slowed and then stopped, not quite in the middle of the great wide space. Cars and trucks pushing into freedom behind the halted white truck swerve and blast their horns; side windows slide down and insulting gestures spit out. Ahmad spots the accelerating midnight-blue Mercedes and smiles to think that for all its angry attempts to pass it had been still behind him, with its presumptuous and unworthy investment thief of a driver.

  Jack Levy realizes that he is in charge now. “So,” he says. “The question becomes, What do we do now? Let’s get this truck back to Jersey. They’ll be happy to see it. And happy to see you, I regret to say. But you committed no crime, I’ll be the first to point out, except drive a load of hazmat out of state on a Class C CDL. They’ll probably lift your license, but that’s O.K. Delivering furniture wasn’t your future anyway.”

  Ahmad eases the truck forward, less in the way of traffic, waiting for an instruction. “Straight ahead, and left when you can,” he is told. “I don’t want to go back into any tunnel with you and this thing, thanks. We’ll take the George Washington Bridge. Could we put the safety catch back on, do you think?”

  Ahmad reaches down, fearful now of disturbing the carefully rigged mechanism. The little yellow lever says snap; the ponderous payload remains quiet. Mr. Levy in his relief at still being alive keeps talking. “Turn left at the light up there, that should be Tenth Avenue, I think. I’m trying to remember if the West Side Highway takes trucks. We may have to get on Riverside Drive, or just work up to Broadway and stay on it all the way up to the bridge.”

  Ahmad lets himself be guided, taking the left turn. The path is straight. “You’re driving like a pro,” Mr. Levy tells him. “Feel O.K.?” Ahmad nods. “I know you’re in shock. Me, too. But there’s really no place to park this crate. Once you get to the bridge we’re almost home. It turns into 80. We’ll go right to police headquarters, behind City Hall. We won’t let the bastards intimidat
e us. Your turning this truck back in one piece makes them look good, and if they have half a brain they know it. It could have been a disaster. Anybody tries to bully you, remind them you were set up by a CIA operative, in a sting operation of very dubious legality. You’re a victim, Ahmad—a fall guy. I can’t imagine the Department of Homeland Security wants the details out in the media, or hashed over in some courtroom.”

  Mr. Levy is silent for a block or two, waiting for Ahmad to say something, then says, “I know this may sound premature, but I wasn’t kidding about you making a good lawyer. You’re cool under pressure. You talk well. In the years to come, Arab-Americans are going to need plenty of lawyers. Uh-oh. I guess we’re on Eighth Avenue, I thought I had us on Tenth. Keep going—this’ll take us onto Broadway at Columbus Circle. I think they still call it that, though the poor wop isn’t p.c. any more. The Port Authority Bus Terminal on your left—I’m sure you’ve been there once or twice. Then we’re going to cross Forty-second Street. I remember when it was real raunchy, but the Disney Corporation has cleaned it up, I guess.”

  Ahmad wants to focus, amid the yellow taxis and the traffic lights and the pedestrians clustered at every corner, on this novel world around him, but Mr. Levy keeps having thoughts. He says, “It’ll be interesting to me to find out if that damn stuff was really connected, or if our side had managed a double cross and it wasn’t. That was my hole card, but I was just as happy not to have it played. Thank God you chickened out.” This sounds crass in his own ears. “Or relented, let’s say. Saw the light.”

  All around them, up Eighth Avenue to Broadway, the great city crawls with people, some smartly dressed, many of them shabby, a few beautiful but most not, all reduced by the towering structures around them to the size of insects, but scuttling, hurrying, intent in the milky morning sun upon some plan or scheme or hope they are hugging to themselves, their reason for living another day, each one of them impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and self-preservation. That, and only that. These devils, Ahmad thinks, have taken away my God.

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  Praise for Terrorist

  “Terrorist leaves the reader ripping through the book to its finale, desperate to find out what happens…. Updike’s mostadventurous and accessible novel in decades.”

  —USA Today

  “The richest [novel] Updike has produced in some time.”

  —WILLIAM PRITCHARD, Chicago Tribune

  “Updike’s ability to get inside the mind of his Ahmad—to deliver the young man’s devotion as well as his fear, uncertainty, and malleable innocence—is what renders the novel credible and sometimes wrenching in its authenticity.”

  —GAIL CALDWELL, The Boston Globe

  “The most satisfactory elements in Terrorist are those that remind us that no amount of special pleading can set us free of history, no matter how oblivious and unresponsive to it we may be. And that history, in disposing of empires, admits of no innocents and spares no one.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Terrorist’s pages are scattered with dozens of stylistic gems…. What’s most welcome is the page-turning pace the book sets right from the start…. We go along for this ride with a keen taste of what it takes to become the driver.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Terrorist burrows beneath the surfaces of American popular culture, which Updike traverses so well, to truths worth remembering.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Ripped from the headlines doesn’t begin to describe Updike’s latest, a…novelization of the last five years’ news reports on the dangers of home-grown terror that packs a gut punch…. So smooth is Updike in putting his grotesques through their paces—effortlessly putting them in each other’s orbits—that his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Swift, sinewy, and stylish…In the hands of a lesser writer, such a risky topic and premise easily could have come across as presumptuous…. This marvelous novel can be accurately labeled as a 9/11 novel, but it deserves also the label of masterpiece for its carefully nuanced building up of the psychology of those who traffic in terrorism. Timely and topical, poised and passionate, it is a high mark in Updike’s career.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Intriguing…Updike continues to entice, provoke and astonish.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Marvelous writing and philosophical cogency.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “There are blinking signs to hold a thriller-fan’s attention and echoes of his other books for readers whose tastes run more uphill than to resolutions…. This is a historical novel of the present moment, the epoch after 9/11, and the life and death issues of the thriller’s plot entail our lives, too.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Terrorist is a wonderfully sharp work. Part extreme coming-of-age story, part thriller, it is carefully plotted, articulate, and fortified with good writing. But it also has an old-fashioned willingness to make the great problems of the day personal, human-scale, and funny, and it is for this reason that Terrorist is a book to admire and be entertained by at once.”

  —Esquire

  “Terrorist…is rich in scenes…of arresting brilliance, and sucks the reader into a gripping and suspenseful story.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “Terrorist…is vivid and compelling. It shows what fiction can do with a subject that seems talked out. Through its access to the interior life and its ability to create empathy, Terrorist takes us inside its subjects, enabling us to see Islamic fundamentalism and American decay in personal, immediate ways…. A novelist, ultimately, is superfluous if he cannot tell us something about our current and changing world, and in Terrorist Updike does just that.”

  —The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)

  “[Terrorist] is the best late novel from this American master, opening up a whole new intellectual territory for Updike to explore.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “This is a work of considerable distinction. Updike remains one of contemporary literature’s most enviable stylists, the lucid economy of his prose often disguising, but never betraying, the remarkable complexity of his thought.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  Also by John Updike

  POEMS

  The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) • Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993) • Americana (2001)

  NOVELS

  The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004)

  SHORT STORIES

  The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems and Other Stories (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003)

  ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005)

  PLAY

  Buchanan Dying (1974)

  MEMOIRS

  Self-Consciousness (1989)

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS />
  The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2007 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2006 by John Updike

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2006.

  The author thanks Shady Nasser for his invaluable guidance and expertise concerning Arabic and the Koran, and Emily and Gregory Harvey for, once again, supplying Philadelphia details, and Paul Bogaards for his New Jersey knowledge. Charlie Chehab’s version of the Revolutionary War in New Jersey owes much to Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer.

  English quotations of the Koran are taken from translations by J. M. Rodwell in 1861 and N. J. Dawood in 1956.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Updike, John.

  Terrorist / John Updike.

  p. cm.

  1. Egyptian Americans—Fiction. 2. Terrorism—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3571.P4T44 2006

  813'.54—dc22 2005057985

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-50053-3

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