“I can't believe it's actually happening,” Sita said from the sofa.
Miriam let the curtain fall back in place and turned around. Sita sat like a small doll dressed in lace and pink. At weddings, all the women, from bride to servants, shed their black
abaayas
and veils for colorful dresses. Her eyes were round and darkâso very insecure. Miriam and Sultana had rescued Sita from a flock of aunts busying her for the final ceremony and brought her here, to this room they'd dubbed the piano room for the white grand piano sitting to their right. The carpet, a thick Persian weave with a lion embroidered at the center, swallowed their feet. Evidently the designer Salman hired liked big cats; the walls of the room formed a virtual zoo of cat paintings.
Sita's lips trembled. “I'm frightened.”
Sultana, the third in the inseparable trio, ran her hand over the younger girl's hair. “
Sh, sh
. It won't be the end of the world. At least he's wealthy. Better to marry into palaces than into the gutter.”
“He's old enough to be my grandfather.”
“He's younger than my sister's husband,” Miriam said. “Sara's husband was sixty-two when he took her. I understand that Hatam is no older than fifty-five.”
“And I'm
fifteen
!
”
Sita said.
“And Sara was fifteen too,” Miriam said. “And what about my new mother, Haya?”
That got silence from both of them. A year earlier, Miriam's father had taken Haya as a bride when Miriam's biological mother died. Haya was only thirteen at the time. As was customary, the girl took over the duties of the wife in their household, even though she was younger than those under her charge. Miriam had been nineteen then.
At first Miriam resented the child. But one look at Haya's nervous eyes after the wedding changed her heart. Haya slipped into her role of submissive wife with surprising grace.
But Sita was not Haya.
Miriam looked at her friend's frightened face. Sita was still a child too. A small part of Miriam wanted to cry. But she could never cry, especially not now, just minutes before the ceremony.
Sultana looked out the window. Of the three, she was perhaps the boldest. She was twenty-three and barren. But she was married to a good man who treated her well and turned a blind eye when she spoke out against the marriage of young girls. Sultana's frequent trips to Europe had given her a somewhat Western perspective on that particular practice.
“Haya was two years younger than you,” Miriam said.
“I saw him,” Sita said softly.
Miriam glanced up. It was unusual for anyone to see her betrothed before the actual wedding.
“You saw the groom?” Sultana asked. “You saw Hatam?”
Sita nodded.
“How?” Miriam asked. “What's he like?”
“Two weeks ago, at the souk.” She looked up and her eyes flashed. “He's very large. He'll kill me.”
Miriam knew she should say something, but words escaped her. Though she'd made inquiries, she'd been able to learn only that Hatam was a wealthy oil mogul from Dammam on the Persian Gulf.
Sita sniffed and wiped her nose with a frail, shaky hand. She spoke quietly. “I make a vow,” she said. “I make a vow today to refuse my husband. He will not touch me while I am alive.”
Miriam reached out a hand. “Please, Sita, he'll be kind. Today you'll find your life enriched beyond words, you'll see.”
Sita rose to her feet, red in the face. “I'm not ready to marry!” She trembled, a child about to have a tantrum. Miriam felt her stomach turn.
“I swear it,” Sita said, and Miriam did not doubt her. “You're almost twenty-one and you're still not married. And you have this secret love with Samir. I
hate
you for it!” She turned away.
“You don't hate me, Sita. You better not hate me, because you're like a sister to me, and I love you dearly.”
Twenty and not married. Rumor had it that dozens of suitors had approached Father for Miriam's hand, and he'd turned them all away. His denial was a sore subject for her.
Sultana placed a silencing hand on Miriam's shoulder. “You can't know how she feels. Salman protects you.”
Heat flashed across Miriam's cheeks.
“Both Haya and Sara were marriedâ”
The door flew open and they turned as one. “Sita!” Sita's mother stood in the doorway, white as the desert sand. “Where have you been? They are ready!”
Then she saw Sita's tears and she hurried in, her face softening. “Please, don't cry, child. I know you are frightened, but we all grow up, don't we?” She smoothed Sita's hair and looked at her lovingly.
“I'm afraid, Mother,” Sita said.
“Of course. But you must think beyond the uncertainty that you feel and consider the wonderful privileges that await you as the wife of a powerful man.” She kissed her daughter's forehead. “He's a wealthy man, Sita. He will give you a good life, and you'll bear him many children. What else could a woman ask?”
“I don't want to bear his children.”
“Don't be silly! It will be a great honor to bear his children. You'll see.” She paused and studied her daughter tenderly. “God knows how much I love you, Sita. I am so proud of you. Just yesterday you were still a child, playing with your dolls. Now look, you've grown into a beautiful young woman.” She kissed her again. “Now, come along. The drummers are waiting.”
She slipped Sita's veil over her face. And with that Sita's fears were hidden.
Miriam joined a thousand women in the great hall and watched as the drums announced the groom's arrival. The only men present were the bride's father, the groom (whose father was dead of old age), and the religious man who would perform the marriage.
Hatam walked out alone, and Miriam nearly gasped aloud. Blubber sat like a bloated tube around his stomach, sloshing with each step under a tent of a tunic. The fat under his chin hung like a reservoir of water. To say the man was large would be a horrible miscalculation. He was an obese mountain.
Beside Miriam, Sultana groaned softly. Several women glanced at her, but she ignored them.
The drums beat again. Sita's mother and her aunt led the bride out. Hatam smiled and lifted her veil. Sita stared at him, and in her cloaked defiance, she looked more beautiful than Miriam could remember.
The ceremony lasted only a few minutes. The actual marriage had been performed hours earlier, first with the bride and then with the groom, separately, signing documents that affirmed the agreed upon dowry and terms of marriage.
Now the religious man looked at Sita's father and spoke the token words that confirmed the union. After a nod, he glanced at the groom, who replied that he accepted Sita as his bride. A thousand women broke the silence with joyful ululating. Today the noise sent chills down Miriam's arms. Hatam walked past his new bride, tossing coins to the women. Sita hesitated, then followed.
Hatam led Sita from the room, and Miriam saw that her friend walked like a newborn lamb still searching for its legs.
The women began to move outside, where food, music, and festivity awaited. They would celebrate for another two days after the groom departed with his new bride.
But Miriam wasn't sure she could participate. Not with Sita's oath ringing in her ears. She quietly begged her friend to come to her senses so that she could enter her new life with joy.
i
t was three o'clock in the afternoon and Seth Border, although arguably the most popular man on campus, was lonely. Popular, because he possessed both the sharpest mind the university had seen since its inception and the kind of all-American face the media loved. Lonely, because he felt oddly disconnected from that popularity.
If he'd learned anything at Berkeley, it was that when academia put you on a pedestal, it expected you to perform as advertised. If it wanted you to grow green skin, you'd better paint your skin green, because if you came out onstage with blue skin, it would resent you. Ironic, considering the freedom preached by those in this neck of the woods.
Seth stared out the small windows that ran along the high wall of the lecture hall, thinking he was a blue person in a green person's world. Blue, like the sky outsideâanother cloudless California day. He ran a hand through his shaggy blond mop and released a barely audible sigh. He glanced at the complex equation on the whiteboard behind the professor, solved it before he finished reading it, and let his mind drift again.
He was twenty-six, and his whole life had felt like a long string of abandonments. Sitting here listening to graduate lectures on quantum physics by Dr. Gregory Baaron with forty other students only seemed to reinforce the feeling. He should be doing something to lift himself out of this valley. Something like surfing.
Surfing had always been his one escape from a world gone mad, but the last time he'd seen the really good side of a wave was three years ago, back at Point Loma in San Diego, during a freak storm that deposited fifteen-foot swells along the coast from Malibu to Tijuana. There was nothing quite like catching the right wave and riding in its belly until it decided to dump you off.
Seth first experienced the freedom of surfing when he was six, when his mom bought him a board and took him to the beachâher way of helping them both escape his father's abuse.
Paul loved three things in life and, as far as Seth saw, three things only: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Baseball. Himself. In no particular order. The fact that he'd married a woman named Rachel and had a kid they'd named Seth barely mattered to him.
His mom, on the other hand, did love her son. They had, in fact, saved each other's lives on more than one occasion, most memorably when his dad confused their bodies for baseballs.
It was during the worst of those times when Seth asked his mom if she would take him to the library. She took him the very next day in the Rust Bucket, as she called their Vega. From age six on, Seth's life comprised a strange brew of surfing, reading, and being kicked around the house by his dad.
“You're special, Seth,” his mom used to say. “Don't let anyone ever tell you any different, you hear? You ignore what your father says.”
Her words filled him with more warmth than the California sun. “I love you, Mom.”
She would always swallow, pull him close, and wipe at the tears in her eyes when he said that.
As it turned out, Seth was
more
than special. He was a genius.
In any other setting his unique gift would have been discovered and nurtured from the time he was two or three. Unfortunately âor fortunately, depending on your point of viewâno one really understood what an exceptional young boy Seth was until he was older.
His mother was a hairdresser, not a schoolteacher, and although she made sure all the other beauticians knew about her boy's quick wit, she wasn't equipped to recognize genius. And because Rachel would just as soon take him to the beach or the library as to the school, his reputation as a student languished.
He was nine before anyone in the academic world even noticed Seth's brilliance. A surfer named Mark Nobel who attended the small Nazarene university on Point Loma had watched him surf and insisted Seth give his surfboard a spin. By the time Seth washed back to shore, the student had left for class. Seth wandered onto the campus looking for Mark.
Half an hour later Seth found him in the math department, wading through a calculus equation with twenty other students and a professor who seemed to be having difficulty showing them just how simple this particular equation really was.
Seeing Seth at the door, the professor jokingly suggested that he come forward and show this band of half-wits how simple math could be. He did.
Then he solved another, more complex equation that the professor scribbled on the board. And another. He left the stunned students twenty minutes later, not quite sure how he knew what he knew. The equations just came together in his mind like simple puzzles.
The teachers at his grade school learned of his little adventure the next day, and their attitude toward him brightened considerably. He agreed to some tests. They said that less than 1 percent of humans had an IQ greater than 135 and that Einstein's was estimated to be 163. Seth's IQ was 193. They told him he couldn't dare waste such an exceptional mind.
But Seth still had to find a way to cope with reality at home, which meant losing himself in books and riding waves off the point. School simply wasn't a meaningful part of his world.
Life improved when his dad left for good after discovering just how effectively an angry thirteen-year-old boy could fight back. But by then Seth had lost his taste for formal education altogether. It wasn't until he was twenty that he began responding to pressure that he pursue a real education.
He'd selected Berkeley in part for its proximity. It wasn't in his backyard, where he was the local curiosity who could count by primes in his sleep; it wasn't two thousand miles away either. He thought he'd be a blue guy in a green world at Harvard or Yale or any of the other half-dozen universities that begged him to attend. Berkeley seemed like a good compromise.
The three years that followed failed to challenge him. As much as Seth hated to admit it, he was bored. Bored with academia, bored with his own mind.
The only real challenge to this boredom came from an unlikely source: a recruiter from the NSA named Clive Masters.
Berkeley's dean of students had summoned a gathering of drooling recruiters exclusively for Seth during his freshman year. They came from IBM, NASA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and a bunch of Japanese companies. Sony Pictures sent a repâevidently movie magic took brains. But Clive was the only recruiter who captured Seth's attention.
“You have a gift, Seth,” he'd said. “I've been watching you for ten years because it's in my job description to watch people like you. Your disinterest in education just might be a crime. And I've given my life to fighting crime, first with the FBI and now with the NSA.”