He had accepted his death. He had passed along his strength to her with the bag and the assignment. She was, as she had never seen herself before, a sacred messenger.

Sacred, yet still scared.

The cab turned right onto one of the larger east-west thoroughfares, then left on Madison Avenue for the run up to the park. She had given the driver the Metropolitan Museum of Art as her destination. The museum was a short walk from the fenced hundred-acre pond officially known as the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir.

Aminah glanced at the red LED digits of the clock on the cab’s meter, then her eyes fell to the driver’s ID placard below. Aaqib bin Mohammed. “Follower Son of Mohammed.”

In the mirror, she saw the eyes of a fiftyish man whose face had seen sorrow and grief. His eyes flicked up into the mirror and noticed hers staring at him. She wondered what he saw in his passenger. One of those typical New York white women slipping uncomfortably into middle age. Unaware of the simple privileges of birth and geography.

“Can I help you, miss?” he asked. “You are crying?”

Aminah had not been aware of this. She swept away the tears rolling down her cheeks. “No . . . I’m fine. Really.” She played at looking out the window. So many people, so many buildings and doors. So much life. “Maybe . . . maybe you can help me. You are a Muslim?”

He glanced at her again, this time with suspicion. “I am, miss. As much as I can be, which is not much these days. It is worse now that everyone mistrusts us. But I . . . I have lost my faith in the heat of its violence.”

Aminah felt cold. “The world is violent,” Aminah said, reciting one of the most primitive truths. “Is it not?”

“It is. But I remember a time when religion brought us peace without violence. It is so much easier not to believe now. Easier and saner. So I close these windows and I drive.” He laughed, a tired smoker’s hack all too familiar to Aminah from her nursing days.

“You should have your lungs checked,” she told him.

“Yes.” He honked twice at a slow passenger vehicle in front of him. “Yes, I know.” He glanced back at her again. “You would be surprised how many people cry in taxis. Very surprised. But no one worries about my cough, until you. No one cares.”

“Then, may I ask you one more question?” She struggled to get this out. “If you have lost your faith, as you say, then have you also lost God?”

“I have not lost God, miss. What I have lost is the idea that I can ever know what God is. That is why religion has become a curse on the earth. Nobody can know. But everybody presumes. Many are willing to kill without knowing. Without even thinking.”

She felt sickened by his blasphemy, because it touched the doubts crowding her mind. She went deeper into herself for strength.

Prayer was like a fence, expanding outward. Protecting her faith.

Obviously, this taxi driver was a test sent by God at her moment of truth. She rejoiced that Allah would strengthen her resolve in this way. So important was her mission.

“The museum,” said the driver, crossing both lanes of Fifth Avenue from East Eighty-sixth, pulling up at the curb in front of the massive temple to art.

Aminah reached into her skirt pocket. She carried no identification, only cash, as instructed. She handed a twenty over the seat. The fare was twelve dollars. “Six back,” she said to the infidel, a knowing lilt to her voice.

He nodded, perhaps aware of how abruptly she had ended their conversation. He made change, retaining his two-dollar tip. “Thank you, miss.”

She looked at him one more time via the rearview mirror, imagining she saw some evidence of the hidden God in his eyes. She nodded to him, charged by the exchange, feeling a surge of gratitude for God’s greatness. Aminah slid across the seat to the curb side of the car, the messenger bag still in her lap. She opened the door—but then hesitated, tapping on the Plexiglas that partially divided the front seat from the back.

In English, she said to the driver, “Peace be upon you.”

She exited and watched the yellow vehicle join the others, fading into the flow of traffic. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the museum, she felt her senses reawaken, following their momentary banishment by fear.

It was a beautiful evening, historic, holy. The sidewalk was full of people whose general good cheer was unmistakable. Conversations ricocheted off the stone bluff of the blocklong building as they passed her. The air was scented with the steamy hot dog and pretzel aromas from the vendors’ carts on the sidewalk—flavors of her youth. She saw God in the face of every person around her.

Aminah lifted the messenger bag onto her right shoulder like a handbag, turned right up Fifth Avenue, and started toward the entrance to Central Park just a few hundred feet away.

Chapter 48

Gersten buzzed the third-floor apartment from the stoop. It was early evening in the city’s old Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Midtown West. She was just around the corner from the firehouse at Forty-eighth and Eighth, which, of all the fire stations in New York City, had lost the most personnel on 9/11.

She had two patrolmen with her. She motioned to them to stay tight against the prewar building, so as not to be viewed from above. There was no camera in the lobby.

“Yes?” came the male voice.

“Mr. Pierrepont?” said Gersten.

“Yes. Are you from Scandinavian Airlines?”

She said, “We spoke a little while ago?”

“Yes. Come on up.”

The locked door buzzed and Gersten pulled it open, the cops following her inside. She skipped the elevator—the wait in these old buildings could be an eternity—and instead used the carpeted staircase, climbing to the third floor.

The twentysomething man waiting at the door wore a cardigan sweater over a T-shirt and dress pants, and had a brown mustache. His smile faltered when he saw the uniformed police officers coming up the stairs behind her.

“Is there a problem, miss . . .?”

“Gersten,” she said, showing him her Intel shield. “Krina Gersten. Mr. Pierrepont, the truth is, I’m not with Scandinavian Air, but the New York Police Department.” The two cops caught up with her. “Mind if we step inside, out of the hallway?”

After a moment of held breath, he backed inside, allowing them to enter.

The one-bedroom apartment was a little jewel, with built-in bookcases, a rehearsal corner under a skylight with a sheet music holder set upon a small, round Oriental rug, and framed New York Philharmonic posters on the walls.

“I don’t understand what this is about,” he said, short of breath, pale.

“Are you alone, Mr. Pierrepont?”

“I am, yes.”

One of the cops poked his head in the doorway to the bedroom and around the corner into the kitchen, making sure. “You were a passenger on Flight 903, the airliner that was almost hijacked on Thursday?”

“Indeed I was,” he said. “You called and said you had a gift for me, for my inconvenience.”

“I actually have some questions for you about your seatmate on the flight.”

Pierrepont was slow to react, thinking it through. He shook his head, too casually. “I think I’ve answered every question about the flight already.”

“This is about Mr. Alain Nouvian. He was seated to your immediate left. He was one of the five passengers who intervened to stop the hijacker.”

Pierrepont swallowed. “Yes?” he said.

Gersten motioned to his rehearsal space. “I see you are a violinist yourself?”

“A violist. I play the viola. Bigger than a violin, smaller than a cello.”

“You play professionally?”

“Yes and no. I do, but not full time. I want to play full time.”

Gersten nodded. “And is Mr. Nouvian assisting you in that respect?”

Pierrepont began to answer, then stopped himself. “I’m not clear on what rights I have.”