Terrorist by John Updike Page A

Christian upbringing. When the heaven splits asunder in the east and reddens like a rose or stained leather —the insertion into this clause from the Koran the non-Koranic "in the east" may or may not, coupled with various rambling and extravagant "confessions" of captured operatives, justify the elevation of the level of police and military watchfulness accorded certain Eastern financial institutions of the spectacular, skyscraping sort attractive to the enemy's superstitious mentality. The enemy is obsessed with holy sites, and as convinced as the old Communist archenemies had been that capitalism has a headquarters, a head that may be cut off, leaving flocks of the faithful to be gratefully herded into an ascetic and dogmatic tyranny.
    The enemy cannot believe that democracy and consumerism are fevers in the blood of Everyman, an outgrowth of each individual's instinctive optimism and desire for freedom. Even for a stout churchgoer like the Secretary, a will-of-God fatalism and a heavy bet on the next world have been left behind in the Dark Ages. Those who still hold to the bet have one thing going for them: they are eager to die. The unbelievers love this fleeting life too well: that was another verse that kept coming up in the Internet chatter.
    "I'll be knocked for this," the Secretary gloomily confides to his so-called undersecretary. "If nothing happens, I'm a scaremonger. If it does, I'm a lazy leech on the public payroll who allowed the death of thousands."
    "No one would say such things," Hermione reassures him, her sallow spinster skin reddening with sympathetic feeling. "Everyone, even the Democrats, knows you are doing an impossible job that nevertheless must be done, for the sake of our national survival."
    "That about says it, I guess," the object of her admiration admits, his mouth pinched even smaller by a conscious wry-ness. The elevator smoothly returns them, with two armed security guards (one male, one female) and a trio of gray-suited staffers, to the level of the White House basement. Outside, church bells are ringing in sunshine blended of Virginia and Maryland rays. The Secretary muses aloud, "Those people out there . . . Why do they want to do these horrible things? Why do they hate us? What's to hate?"
    "They hate the light," Hermione tells him loyally. "Like cockroaches. Like bats. The light shone in darkness," she quotes, knowing that Pennsylvania piety is a way to his heart, "and the darkness comprehended it not. "
    II
    THE SOOT-STAINED ironstone church beside the lake of rubble is filled inside with pastel cotton dresses and sharp-shouldered polyester suits. Ahmad's eyes are dazzled, and find no balm in the stained-glass windows, depicting men in parodies of Middle Eastern dress enacting incidents in their supposed Lord's progress through his brief and inglorious life. To worship a God known to have died— the very idea affects Ahmad like an elusive stench, a stoppage in the plumbing, a dead rodent in the walls. Yet the congregants, a few of whom are even paler than he in his crisp white shirt, bask in the clean-scrubbed happiness of tbeir Sunday-morning assembly. The receding rows of seated and sexually mixed people, and the stagy confused area at the front with its built-in knobbed furniture and high, grimy triple window showing a pigeon about to alight on the head of a white-bearded man, and the giddy murmur of greetings and the crackle of heavy rumps shifting on the wooden pews, all seem to Ahmad more like a movie theatre before the movie starts than a holy mosque, with its thick muffling rugs and empty tiled mihrab and the liquid chants, la ildha ilia Allah, emitted by men fragrant of their menial Friday labors and, in their rhythmic unison of obeisance, crammed together as closely as the segments of a worm. The mosque was a domain of men; here, women in their spring shimmer, their expansive soft flesh, dominate.
    He had hoped by arriving just as the ten-o'clock bells were ringing to slip