Rise of the Beast: A Novel (The Patmos Conspiracy Book 1) by M.K. Gilroy

unemployment comes unrest and the growth of a radicalism that wasalready rooted in the nation’s psyche. Yemen was a fascinating mix of progressive and conservative Islamic thought. It was one of the reasons that Jordan had been eliminated from consideration for the Mariama beta. That country was just too moderate—the radicals they needed to mobilize would probably applaud anything that happened to King Abdullah and his country.
    The fact that Yemen bordered Saudi Arabia made it strategically essential to disrupting the wealthy but sleepy peninsula.
    Claire argued for releasing a kiss from Mariama in the Al Saleh Mosque in Sana’a. It was Yemen’s largest and most modern mosque. Forty-five thousand men could gather in the 220 thousand square foot hall, with room for almost 2,000 women in the upstairs gallery—another proof of their moderate nature, in this case, for how they treated women. Claire snorted. Dedicated in 2008, Al Saleh was located in the southern outskirts of a city with more than one hundred mosques. It was named for the nation’s first elected president. The Yemen government—or more accurately governments—ostensibly tolerated no religiously motivated violence, but it was well known that the Al Saleh Mosque, despite being a major tourist attraction, despite being in the center of a country where even Sunnis worked hard to curtail Sunni and Shia radicalism, was a center for Al-Qaeda recruiting, training, and planning.
    That made it too big and too obvious for the beta test.
    That wasn’t her opinion. But she lost the argument. Her face burned at the thought of the man who had recruited her speaking to her as if she was a child.
    “Just trust those of us with a little more experience in the Middle East than you,” Dr. Rodger Patton said to assuage her hurt feelings. His condescension had the opposite effect.
    Just trust you? Not likely.
    Patton was a paternalistic prick … even if he was right in this instance. The group consensus was the mosque was too young to be beloved and too radical to be perceived as innocent. The goal of the beta test, shewas pointedly reminded, wasn’t the amount of immediate carnage but achieving something noticeable enough to gauge efficacy—and just as importantly to measure the response generated. It was hoped what they were doing would induce a strong response, a violent response.
    They still don’t believe Mariama will accomplish more than their guns and bombs. Let’s see if they feel that way when she is introduced in Beijing and Moscow and Mexico City and Buenos Aires. She’ll make traditional mass warfare a quaint obsolescence.
    So Claire had gone back to the drawing board and presented the Great Mosque in the Old City, home of the oldest extant copies of the Quran. The ancient mosque was built in 634 A.D. by most accounts. Some claimed it was planned and ordered by the Prophet himself. Some claimed it was pre-Islamic and built by the Byzantines, first as a pagan Roman temple and then a Catholic cathedral. Some claimed it was largely a work from the 8 th Century Abbasid period. What no one disputed was that it was the center of religious life in Yemen, characterized as devout but not radical. Not radical being relative, of course.
    Like the city itself, the mosque was burned into the consciousness and identity of Muslims in all forms and locations.
    The group was right.
    I get it. I agree. Just don’t talk to me like I’m a child.
    That made the Great Mosque the perfect choice. The response to the beta would ostensibly be much more powerful than the provocation itself. That was if the others were underestimating Mariama’s raw efficacy to kill.
    I believe they are.
    Dr. Claire Stevens shivered as the night breeze ruffled and lifted the edges of her nightdress. She slid the door behind her as she went inside her apartment. She wondered if Nicky was well or even alive. The man wore the souvenirs of his work on his body.
    She hoped everyone else was doing