With a tap on the touchpad, a photo slide show opens on the laptop screen. Neetu sees a black boy of seven or eight, based on his frame, his prepubescent genitals. His belly isn’t distended, his limbs are full. Neetu searches his face. Narrow, intent eyes. Dark opalescence floats on clean whiteness and thus there is no yellow haze, no hint of the despair or nihilism she’d seen in so many little boys. Lost boys. Yet those eyes carry not one glint of brightness. They stare into her core. Just the way Mifares looks at her.

  “He’d be eighteen now,” Father Kolsch adds.

  The actual MRI images are now scrolling across the laptop screen. Neetu gasps again. The ileum, half of the transverse colon, most of the stomach—displaced or gone. And what are those nodes, those ducts paralleling the ascending and descending aorta, branching to the wrists and feet, entwining the carotid artery to the brain?

  Mifares lectures as if consulting on routine appendicitis. “The organ you see there, taking up the entire the abdominal cavity from his diaphragm to a rudimentary bladder, is the liver. We hadn’t time to identify or biopsy the other structures. The ducts appeared to be the source of the bleeding in the extremities.”

  The Valium’s taking effect. Yet Neetu’s trained mind churns. “A liver that … huge … may be an adaptation to malnutrition, efficiency in processing and metabolizing food.”

  Mifares nods. “Say you have organisms stressed beyond endurance. Defenseless. To stave off extinction, how long would it take for a mutation like that to appear, giving rise to the adaptation?”

  Her head’s heavy as if stuffed with cotton, but Neetu replies succinctly: “Maybe ten generations in higher mammals just for the mutation. Another hundred, at least, to manifest an adaptation. So you did genetic testing before he supposedly fried your equipment?”

  “Yes. We found abnormalities on the seventh and twenty-fourth alleles.”

  “Twenty-fourth? He has an extra chromosome?”

  Kolsch speaks up, and his voice sounds tinny to Neetu. “He has five extra chromosomes, Doctor.”

  “B-but that’s—”

  “A miracle,” Kolsch states with a shrug. “Or an abomination. It is relative.”

  Neetu knocks over her bottle of orange soda. Wobbling, soon she feels Mifares’s arms on her body. The room’s spinning. Voices garble as in the bedroom earlier, but not before Neetu hears that of Omar El-Fuud saying to Mifares, “Make sure she tells you who the Ghanaian’s contacts are.”

  Quickly, Neetu’s back in the bedroom with Chra Mifares. The door shuts. It is very hot and dark in there. Blue eyes suck her in once more. Bluest blue—until they shade a murky purple. And then Neetu screams … .

  “Allah-u Akbar …” The man is kneeling on the baked earth and wails in a weird melange of defiance and terror. “There is no god but God!” He won’t look up at the young man’s face, for it’s painted blue, and blue is a demon’s color. But the sight at ground level is equally horrific. Dusty sandals, purplish wrinkled toes, the hiss of rags sopping with red blood.

  The Sweeper’s broad nostrils flare. Three days and nights walking to Al Ubayyid have sucked his body drier than the Kurdofan district’s farmland, once verdant and now dead brown. He thirsts, he hungers. He must recharge.

  Above, the brutal sun and blown topsoil glaze the sky in a sick orange glow. A fig orchard beyond the tiny whitewashed cinderblock house this poor kneeling man calls home has withered to sticks. His family—an old woman, two tall boys barely younger than the Sweeper—cower on a clapboard porch. There is a little girl with them. She doesn’t cower. She searches the Sweeper with big eyes, mouth agape in wonderment, curiosity. The Sweeper ventures something he hadn’t attempted in a long time. He smiles at her. She smiles back. He doesn’t look like a demon to her. He looks like a clown at the village festival, all painted and ready to juggle dishes and oranges!

  “Get up,” the Sweeper grunts to her father. “Your trees are dead but do you have any figs … tinned or in jars?”

  The man rocks to his feet, jerks a nod. He whimpers a little when he sees this queer acacia broom suddenly give a violent shake. The Sweeper clutches it with two fists to quell his own muscle tremors. The man’s eyes open wide as his hen’s eggs when white sparks crackle across the Sweeper’s bandaged hands. The Sweeper hasn’t eaten in a month. A month, from new moon to new moon, is all he can bear. If he doesn’t recharge, his body will spark, consume itself, burn. And that’s the only pain he’s ever felt since he was a boy. When he was lost, so long ago.

  “Y-You are the scourge of Allah … ,” the man titters.

  The homespun turban and robe pop with static electricity as the Sweeper shakes his head, and he remembers lessons from when he was a boy in a place populated with white faces. “I’m not here to make the crooked places straight, to make rough places smooth. That is … for another …” More muscle tremors, more static charges—and now he “who feels no pain” is wincing, gasping for air. “That is … for one to be born to my family … among the Fur and Masalit far west of here … born in the most wretched and hated places. I protect …” He coughs.

  The man falls to his knees again. “I am just a farmer … please spare my children!”

  The Sweeper hooks the man’s arm and lifts him to eye level. This farmer can feel every hair on his own body tingle erect. The Sweeper whispers and the man’s sobbing ceases. “Figs … now. Open a tin for me. Bring me a spoon.” The Sweeper licks his thick lips. “And vinegar—you have some?” The farmer nods. “Fill a jug … half with vinegar, half with clean water … bring me that, too. And ointment … I have … wounds.” The Sweeper’s grip loosens. “I’ll work for this.”

  From inside the house the farmer’s family watches the Sweeper meet his promise. He sweeps the clapboard porch in the rhythm of women. To and fro in spurts, to jar loose the weevils, the dead leaves, the scorpions husks. Then broad strokes, to push the dust away. A slow arc, then repeat. This activity dulls the sparks, quiets his twitching, firing muscles … .

  The farmer’s graying mother arrives with a tray containing a open can of figs, a wooden spoon, a blue-glass finger bowl of what smells like palm ointment. Behind her shuffles the little smiling girl, carrying a clay jug. Having an old woman and a child tend a visitor is custom. Besides, the farmer is too frightened to come back outside.

  The Sweeper laps up the canned fruit, swills the vinegar and water. The old woman tries to usher the child inside but the little girl balks. The Sweeper raises his head and bids the girl to stay. Swaying sweetly and clutching her print shift at the hem she asks, “They say you hurt people. Why do you?”

  There was a fight near a mosque in Al-Ubayyid. He just wanted to sit and pray. He did not pray to Allah but Allah’s house was as good as any. He wants to pray in the great mosque at Khartoum, then Cairo, then Jerusalem and Damascus, Mecca, Istanbul, and then all the cathedrals the white faces told him about when he was a boy, and then all the temples and shrines. He wants to pray until he sees the Lord who spoke to him when he roamed the dry plains, lost. It was Lord Vishnu who told him of others named Shiva and Brahma, and their minion, Kalki. Lord Vishnu has commanded Kalki to send a new avatar to end the time of ignorance, death and misery. Ignorance, death and misery were as constant to the Sweeper as old friends. His only family, until the Lord called him to heed Kalki, to protect. To die, if necessary, as the hope grows in the belly of a starving Masalit girl. He just wanted to pray. But then the soldiers and police came.

  “I only hurt people who want to hurt me … and them whom I protect.”

  “You hurt only bad people? The Janjaweed are not bad. Teacher says they protect us from rebels and Crusaders … .”

  “If a good person does what bad people order, is that person still good?”

  Swaying ceases and the girl’s lips quiver. Eyes water. “But I’m good … would you hurt me, too?”

  The Sweeper clenches his eyelids tight. But never cries. “Someone very, very bad hurts us all. And someone who helped me may be in trouble, too, and I don’t want the bad person to hurt her, either.”

  “Is she your friend, like I have my best friend in school, Ismailia?”

  He nods. “She and another. I spoke to them when they dreamed, but they didn’t know it was me. Now the other is on the Mother River—safe for now, with my family. But my other friend … she is in the big city. And she’s very scared.”

  “You go to al-Hartoum?”

  He touches the girl’s sniffling nose and she jumps from the playful, tickling shock. She giggles, but her face quickly goes blank, then solemn as the Sweeper says, “If soldiers ask you where I’m going, yes, you tell them I go to Khartoum … .”

  Kolsch’s mind is now swimming backwards in time, and he sees refugees, prey, other wretches. But these people have blond or brunette hair and cloak themselves in tattered rags that were once department store couture. And he is one of them—a child, too small even for his miniature lederhosen. All of his family’s possessions fit in his dead sister’s baby carriage, and his mother wheels it past the ruins of their house. For three years it withstood Allied bombing raids, just to be obliterated by Soviet mortars. Their soldiers rape many girls, just as the girls of the Janub Darfur and the South Sudan have been violated. With their bayonets they disembowel any girl who resists or any mother who protects, just as in the Janub Darfur and the South Sudan. Fair enough, given what the Communists say his father had done to their own women, to their homes and to countless Jews, gypsies, faggots and dykes. Herr Oberst Klaus Maria Kolsch, Lebenstarte-Panzer Grenadier Division, Waffen SS. Former altar boy and devout Catholic who worshipped the swastika. The symbol is a thousand times older than the Third Reich—stolen from the land of Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. Rotated, appropriated, perverted. And Father Gerd Kolsch knows that when the cross is broken so, the old stone gods rise up. The twilight of the gods had descended upon Germany and it would happen again, even as he hears El-Fuud nestling on the sofa across from him, cracking open a pack of cigarettes.

  “Germans like you and your Pope—you killed a lot of Zionists, eh?” The Colonel lights one of his unfiltered smokes. “For centuries we Muslims knew no hatred of Jews until you pale Europeans taught us how.” When the priest declines the proffered pack El-Fuud asks, “So how long have you known Chra Mifares?”

  “Long enough,” the priest says, detached. “She is much older than she looks.”

  “Well she looks damn good! She was with you in Africa before?”

  She was with him when the twilight descended yet again, yes. He’s thinking about 1994, and he’s been dispatched to Kigali, Rwanda, amid rumors that Hutu priests and nuns of his own order—all who pledged themselves to Christ’s teachings—have led thugs onto church grounds to hack thousands of defenseless women and children to death. Victims sought sanctuary. The rumors are substantiated, nauseatingly so. In blind loyalty to his faith, Kolsch counsels the Vatican to keep it quiet. And so Rome does. That’s when he meets Dr. Mifares, who has already filed a report to the UN that the genocide is exaggerated by Tutsi rebels. Peacekeeping troops disagree. Peacekeeping troops are ordered to leave based on Mifares’s report.

  El-Fuud adds a mini-bottle of vodka to some orange soda. Kolsch blithely watches him suck it down. “This ‘Adam’ of yours is a CIA mercenary,” El-Fuud proclaims after a belch. He fingers his cigarette. He hears another scream from the bedroom, takes another puff as if nothing is happening. “Trained from boyhood. Only the CIA would take some refugee scum as black as my wife’s Dinka housegirl, or that one in there’s nigger husband, and paint him in the blue of legend to scare country bumpkins and the ignorant buffoons among the Janjaweed … .”

  Kolsch jumps from his chair. “Think, Colonel. Your aircraft, the vehicles. The wounds on the Janjaweed, their horses … the MRI at El Geneima years ago …”

  “What—you agree with this absurdity? That this so-called Sweeper is some sort of electric eel? That … abomination—a liver that is a battery generating a high intensity electro-magnetic field? Ha! The Chinese ambassador must be sending you more bootleg X-Men DVDs than he provides my sons, Father!” Then the Colonel crushes his cigarette and shrugs. “Yes, yes—the MRI event was troubling. But not exotic. Residual contamination of the boy from a test, you see, on a weapon. The Americans have been experimenting with the military applications of EMP—electromagnetic pulse—since the time this Sweeper was a boy. We believe they and the Zionists have perfected a small, portable version. Not only can the wave pulse disable all electronic devices … it may also disrupt neural paths in the brain and muscles. I don’t have to be a doctor like Mifares to understand that, priest.”

  Gritted teeth scatter Kolsch’s low voice, as if he doesn’t wish anyone in another room to hear. “Nein … er ist nicht Wahrheit. The Indian doctor, the African paratrooper … they are prophets, Colonel, and linked to this boy’s spirit … .”

  “No! They are CIA or MI-6 or Mossad. And this Sweeper is no more than a commando, recruited during the war in the South, and sent to destabilize Islam. If we capture him alive, we can study this EMP weapon. Such technology could liberate our brothers in Palestine and bring Jihad to the steps of the White House for the sake of freedom and in the name of Allah, Most Munificent and Merciful and who lives inside all things. Inside all things, Father—save for this black sociopath to whom you’ve imbued with ‘superhero’ powers!”

  Kolsch knows El-Fuud is a fool. His world is about to end, yet he still thinks like a boneheaded policeman. Another scream from the bedroom punctuates the priest’s thoughts, and quickly Dr. Chra Mifares lopes into the suite’s sitting room, plops onto the sofa and kicks off her high-heeled strappy sandals. Wiggling her painted toes, she snatches an orange soda from a pail of melting ice and holds the cold bottle to her forehead. The condensation melts her makeup into tracks of what looks like beige tears.

  El-Fuud shrugs and says, “Well?”

  “She doesn’t know where Adam is now. That’s good enough for me.”

  Nonplussed, the Colonel replies, “You are losing your touch.”

  Mifares laughs wearily. “But I know where this refugee family and the Ghanaian are going.” That revelation brings Kolsch close to her side, almost diving at her airing feet, and El-Fuud grimaces at the sight. “They’re indeed headed up the Nile by ferry to Wadi Halfa, and then on to Cairo once they cross the Egyptian border. From Cairo … to the United States.”

  “She told you all that?” El-Fuud says, arms folding and head cocked.

  “Her mind did.”

  “I always wondered what a psychiatrist was doing in the WHO,” the Colonel snipes. “And they go to America. This proves my theory … .”

  Mifares answers him with her icy blue glare. “There is a pregnant girl among them. She and her kin must never leave Sudan alive.” Mifares then looks to the priest, who’s still glued to her side. “Call Barrett Epstein’s lawyer in Washington.”

  And with that statement El-Fuud jumps from nonplussed to furious. “What—the rich Jew in America? Of what concern of his is this? This is our national security! I want the Sweeper, I want the foreign agents who aid him!” El-Fuud makes a charge toward the bedroom door. “Now I will conduct a proper interrogation!”

  Mifares leaps to her naked feet and in an instant she’s in the Colonel’s path. Kolsch shudders, peels off the sofa and shrinks to the far wall. He seems to know what must follow, as an unseen weight smashes the breath from El-Fuud’s lungs. The room morphs to a dark tunnel, and on the other end of this tunnel El-Fuud sees a pair of the blue eyes. Not the clear blue set in Mifares’s face. These are a deep, milky blue, as in ancient glaciers now dying at opposite ends of the planet. They are sucking El-Fuud closer no matter how hard he digs his boots into the dingy carpet. He feels cold fingers on his throat. They penetrate, they squeeze, they tear. And he cannot scream. His bowels empty. He urinates on himself. These are the last acts of any frightened animal in the face of horror. His mind cannot pray as a terrible light sears him …

  … and then it goes black as there is knocking on the suite door. Calls in Arabic: “Colonel, sir … coded message from the Ministry of Defense … police and our troops engaged ‘the Sweeper’ in the Kurdofan, outside Al-Ubayyid. The locals say he’s headed here!”

  El-Fuud collapses on the floor, the smell of his effluvium saturating the air. But he’s sentient enough to hear someone using his own voice, commanding the men in the hall with contingencies only an Army Intelligence colonel would know. The president must declare martial law, even in the foreign enclaves of Al Urogan. Airports and train terminals shall be closed. All ferries shall be boarded and searched. Anyone who transgresses the dragnet shall be shot. “Now fetch my car, Captain … .”

  Kolsch is clutching the wall, shivering. “Mein Gott, war has found us.”

  So luscious is the prospect of war—especially jihads, crusades, pogroms and inquisitions—that Mifares would lick her lips until they glistened like wet rubies. But now her lips are dry. For the first time in her life, she is frightened.

  She looks to the bedroom door and mutters, “We have a hostage … and bait. Help me dress her, Kolsch … .”

  The priest nods fretfully. “I-I am your servant, my archangel … Seraph. And I will obey … .”

  A crooked broom swings and plants with each step along the hot asphalt roadway. Feet and hands bleed, and yet the Sweeper feels no pain. He has walked and battled from the Janub Darfur, some eight hundred kilometers. Those already escaping the drought leap from lorries and abandon their cars when they see him. Wise soldiers flee. Their rifles are scattered on the ground and the Sweeper wishes he could sweep them up so no little orphaned boys can come upon them and repeat the misery. He sees a sign at the junction ahead. Khartoum is a hundred kilometers away. Faces he cannot remember taught him about miles, too. That’s about sixty miles. Sounds so much closer in miles.