When they reached their car Abdulaziz said a few words in praise of God, adding, with some attempt at panache, “So, let us begin our ‘architectural studies.’”

  Muhammad Atta felt his body give an involuntary jolt. “Who told you?” he said.

  “Ziad.”

  They loaded up and then bent themselves into the front seats.

  Abdulaziz wasn’t supposed to know about that—about the target code. “Law” was the Capitol. “Politics” was the White House. In the discussions with the Sheikh there had been firm concurrence about “architecture” (the World Trade Center) and “arts” (the Pentagon); but they had disagreed about an altogether different kind of target, namely “electrical engineering.” This was the nuclear power plant that Muhammad Atta had seen on one of his training flights near New York. Puzzlingly, the Sheikh withheld his blessing—despite the presumably attractive possibility of turning large swathes of the Eastern Seaboard into a plutonium cemetery for the next seventy millennia (that is, until the year 72001). The Sheikh gave his reasons (restricted airspace, no “symbolic value”). But Muhammad Atta sensed a moral qualm, a silent suggestion that such a move could be considered exorbitant. It was the first and only indication that, in their cosmic war against God’s enemies, there was any kind of upper limit. Muhammad Atta often asked himself: Was the Sheikh prepared to die? In the course of their conversations it had emerged that, while plainly reconciled to eventual martyrdom (he would have it no other way, and so on), the Sheikh felt little personal attraction to death; and he would soon be additionally famous, Muhammad Atta prophesied, for the strenuousness with which he eluded it.

  These meetings and discussions—with the Sheikh and, later, with his Yemeni emissary, Ramzi bin al-Shibh—now lost weight and value in Muhammad Atta’s mind, tarnished by Ziad’s indiscipline, by Ziad’s promiscuity (and if Abdulaziz knew, then all the Saudis knew). He thought back to his historic conversation with Ramzi, on the telephone, in the third week of August.

  “Our friend is anxious to know when your course will begin.”

  “It will be more interesting to study ‘law’ when Congress has convened.”

  “But we shouldn’t delay. With so many of our students in the U.S….”

  “All right. Two branches, an oblique stroke, and a lollipop.”

  Ramzi called him back and said,

  “To be clear. The eleventh of the ninth?”

  “Yes,” confirmed Muhammad Atta. And he was the first person on earth to say it—to say in that way: “Nine eleven. September the eleventh.”

  He had cherished the secret until September 9. Now of course everyone knew: the day itself had come. He was impatient for his talk on the phone with Ziad, scheduled for 7 a.m. at Logan. Ziad was still claiming that he hadn’t yet decided between “law” and “politics.” It looked like “law.” As a target, the President’s house had lost much of its appeal when they established, insofar as they could, that the President wouldn’t be in it.

  At that moment the President was readying himself for an early-morning run in Sarasota, Florida, where Muhammad Atta had been taught how to fly, at Jones Aviation, in September 2000.

  It was during the drive to Portland International Jetport that the headache began. In recent months he had become something of a connoisseur of headaches. And yet those earlier headaches, it now seemed, were barely worth the name: this was what a headache was. At first he attributed its virulence to his misadventure in the shower stall; but then the pain pushed forward over his crown and established itself, like an electric eel, from ear to ear, then from eye to eye—and then both. He had two headaches, not one; and they were apparently at war. The automobile, a Nissan Altima, was brand-new, factory-fresh, and this had seemed like a mild bonus on September 10; but now its vacuum-packed breath tasted of seasickness and the smell of ships below the waterline. Suddenly his vision became pixelated with little swarms of blind spots. So it was then asked of him to pull over and tell an astonished Abdulaziz to take the wheel.

  There seemed to be a completely unreasonable weight of traffic. Americans, already about their business…Tormenting his passenger with regular glances of concern, Abdulaziz otherwise drove with his usual superstitious watchfulness, beset by small fears, on this day. Muhammad Atta tried not to writhe around in his seat; on his way to the car park, ten minutes earlier, he had tried not to run; in the elevator, ten minutes earlier still, he had tried not to groan or scream. He was always trying not to do something.

  It was 5:35 a.m. And at this point he began to belabor himself for the diversion to Portland: a puerile undertaking, as he now saw it. His group was competitive not only in piety but also in nihilistic élan, in nihilistic insouciance; and he had thought it would be conclusively stylish to stroll from one end of Logan to the other with less than an hour to go. Then, too, there was the promise, itchier to the heart than ever, of his conversation with Ziad. But his reason for coming to Portland had been fundamentally unserious. He wouldn’t have done it if the Internet, on September 10, had not assured him so repeatedly that it was going to be a flawless morning on September 11.

  And he didn’t solace himself with the thought that this was, after all, September 11: you could still get to airports without much time to spare.

  “Did you pack these bags yourself?”

  Muhammad Atta’s hand crept toward his brow. “Yes,” he said.

  “Have they been with you at all times?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did anyone ask you to carry anything for them?”

  “No. Is the flight on time?”

  “You should make your connection.”

  “And the bags will go straight through.”

  “No, sir. You’ll need to recheck them at Logan.”

  “You mean I’ll have to go through all this again?”

  Whatever else terrorism had achieved in the past few decades, it had certainly brought about a net increase in world boredom. It didn’t take very long to ask and answer those three questions—about fifteen seconds. But those dead-time questions and answers were repeated, without any variation whatever, hundreds of thousands of times a day. If the Planes Operation went ahead as planned, Muhammad Atta would bequeath more, perhaps much more, dead time, planet-wide. It was appropriate, perhaps, and not paradoxical, that terror should also sharply promote its most obvious opposite. Boredom.

  As it happened, Muhammad Atta was a selectee of the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS). All it meant was that his checked bag would not be stowed until he himself had boarded the aircraft. This was at Portland. At Logan, a “Category X” airport like Newark International and Washington Dulles, and supposedly more secure, three of his muscle Saudis would be selected by CAPPS, with the same irrelevant consequences.

  Muhammad Atta and Abdulaziz submitted to the checkpoint screening. Their bags were not searched; they were not frisked, or blessed by the hand wand. Abdulaziz’s childish rucksack, containing the box cutters and the Mace, passed through the tunnel of love. Just before boarding, another gust of nausea gathered about Muhammad Atta, like a host of tiny myrmidons. He waited for them to move on, but they did not do so, and, instead, coagulated in his craw. Muhammad Atta went to the men’s room and released a fathom of bilious green. He was still wiping his foul mouth as he walked out on to the tarmac and climbed the trembling metal steps.

  Coglan 5930 was not only late: it was also an openpropeller nineteen-seater, and it was full. Excruciatingly, he had to wedge himself in next to a fat blonde with a scalp disease and, moreover, a baby, whose incredulous weeping (its ears) she attempted and failed to slake with repeated applications of the breast. Between heartbeats, when he was briefly capable of consecutive thought, he imagined that the blonde was the doomed stewardess.

  The plane leapt eagerly into the air, with none of the technological toil that would characterize the ascent of American 11.

  He had gone to Portland, Maine, for his quid pro quo with the imam.

  The hospital, where he lay dying, was a blistered medium-rise downtown: one more business among all the other businesses. Inside, too, Muhammad Atta had no sense of entering an atmosphere of vocational care—just the American matter-of-factness, with no softening of the voice, the tread, no softening of the receptionists’ minimal smiles…Directed to the hospice unit, he moved through the moist warmth of half-eaten or untouched dinners and the heavier undersmell of drugs. The imam was asleep in his bed, recessed into it, as if an imam-sized channel had been let into the mattress. His lips, Muhammad Atta noticed, were dark gray, like the lips of dogs. Dead time passed. Then the imam awoke to Muhammad Atta’s unsmiling stare. He sighed, without restraint. The two of them went back a way: to the mosque in Falls Church, Virginia.

  “You have a citation for me?” asked the imam, unexpectedly alert.

  “It’s from the traditions. The Prophet said: ‘Whoever kills himself with a blade will be tormented with that blade in the fires of Hell…He who throws himself off a mountain and kills himself will throw himself downward into the fires of Hell forever and ever…Whoever kills himself in any way in this world will be tormented in that way in Hell.’”

  “Always there are exceptions. Remember we are in the lands of unbelief,” said the imam, and went on to list the crimes of the Americans.

  These were familiar to his visitor, who regarded the grievances as real. Depending on how you tallied it, America was responsible for this or that many million deaths. But Muhammad Atta was not persuaded of a moral equivalence. Certain weapons systems claimed to be precise; power was not precise. Power was always a monster. And there had never been a monster the size of America. Every time it turned over in its sleep it entrained disasters that would need to roll through villages. There were blunderings and perversities and calculated cruelties; and there was no self-knowledge—none. Still, America did not expend ingenuity in its efforts to kill the innocent.

  “Is it an enemy installation?” the imam was sharply asking.

  Muhammad Atta gave no reply. He just said, “Do you have it?”

  “Yes. And you will need it.”

  The imam’s hand, to Muhammad Atta’s far from sympathetic gaze, looked and sounded like the foreclaw of a lobster as it rattled up against the laminate of his bedside table. Its cupboard opened, drawbridge-wise. The thing within exactly resembled a half-empty eight-ounce bottle of Volvic.

  “Take it, not on waking, but when you feel your trial is near. Now. You were kind enough to say you would describe your induction.”

  Here was the quid pro quo: he wanted to be told about the Sheikh. Just then the imam abruptly turned on to his side, facing Muhammad Atta; and for a moment his posture repulsively recalled that of a child starting to warm to a bedtime story. But this lurch was only part of a larger maneuver of the imam’s. He edged himself backward and upward, so that a few stray hairs, at least, rested on the pillow.

  Muhammad Atta had unthinkingly assumed, earlier on, that he would give the imam a reassuring, even an idealized portrait of the Sheikh—the long-fingered visionary on the mountaintop who yet, in his humility and asceticism, remained a simple warrior of God. Now he recomposed himself. Never in his life had he spoken his mind. The smell of drugs was particularly strong near the yellow sink, half a yard from his nose.

  “I had several meetings with him,” he said, “at al-Faruq in Kandahar. And at Tarnak Farms. He casts the spell of success on you—that’s what he does. When he talks about the defeat of the Russians…To hear him tell it, it wasn’t the West that won the Cold War. It was the Sheikh. But we badly need that spell, don’t we? The spell of success.”

  “But the successes are real. And this is only the beginning.”

  “His hopes of victory depend,” said Muhammad Atta, “on the active participation of the superpower.”

  “What superpower?”

  “God. Hence the present crisis.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It comes from religious hurt, don’t you think? For centuries God has forsaken the believers, and rewarded the infidels. How do you explain his indifference?”

  Or his enmity, he thought, as he left the bedside and the ward. He considered, too, that it could go like this, subconsciously, of course: if prayer and piety had failed, had so clearly failed, then it might seem time to change allegiance, and summon up the other powers.

  At Logan, he and Abdulaziz were the only passengers at the carousel supposedly serving the commuter flight from Portland. And the carousel was silent and motionless. Staring at a carousel with actual baggage going round on it suddenly seemed a fairly stimulating thing to do. Meanwhile, the eels or stingrays in his head were now having a fight to the death in the area just behind his ears. Sometimes for moments on end he could step back from the pain and just listen to it. This was music in its next evolutionary phase, beyond the atonal. And he realized why he had always hated music; all of it, even the most emollient melody, had entered his mind as pain. Using every reserve, he continued to stare at the changeless slats of black rubber for another thirty seconds, another minute; then he turned on his heel, and Abdulaziz followed.

  “Did you pack these bags yourself?”

  “What bags? As I took the trouble to explain—”

  “Sir, your bags will be on our next flight. I still need to ask the security questions, sir.”

  Americans—the way they called you “sir.” They might as well be calling you “Mac.”

  “Did you pack these bags yourself?”

  “What bags?”

  Oh, the misery of recurrence, like the hotel elevator doing its ancient kneebend on every floor, like the alien hair on the soap changing its shape through a succession of different alphabets, like the (necessarily) monotonous gonging inside his head. It had occurred to him before that his condition, if you could call it that, was merely the condition of boredom, unbounded boredom, where all time was dead time. As if his whole life consisted of answering those same three questions, saying “Yes” and “Yes” and “No.”

  “And did anyone ask you to carry anything for them?”

  “Yes,” said Muhammad Atta. “Last night, at the Lebanese restaurant, a waiter asked us to take a heavy clock radio to his cousin in Los Angeles.”

  Her smile was flat and brief. “That’s funny,” she said.

  They made their way to Gate 32 and then retreated from it, into the mall. With a flip of the hand he told Abdulaziz to go and look for his countrymen. Muhammad Atta took a seat outside a dormant coffee shop and readied himself for the call to Ziad. Ziad: the Beiruti beach boy and disco ghost, the tippler and debauchee, now with his exaltations and prostrations, his chanting and wailing, his rocking and swaying…To discountenance Ziad, to send him to his death with a heart full of doubt: this was the reason for the journey to Maine.

  Back in Germany, once, Ziad had said that the brides in the Garden would be “made of light.” In bold contrast, then, to the darkness and heaviness of their terrestrial sisters, in particular the heaviness and darkness of Aysel Senguen—Ziad’s German Turk, or Turkish German. Muhammad Atta had seen Aysel only once (bare legs, bare arms, bare hair), in the medical bookstore in Hamburg, and he had not forgotten her face. Ziad and Aysel were his control experiment for the life lived by sexual love; and for many months the two of them had peopled his insomnias. He knew that Aysel had come to Florida in January (and had scandalously accompanied Ziad to the flight school); he was also obscurely moved by the fact that a letter to her comprised Ziad’s will and testament. And he kept wondering how their bodies conjoined, how she must open herself up to him, with all her heaviness and darkness…Muhammad Atta had decided that romantic and religious ardor came from contiguous parts of the human being: the parts he didn’t have. Yet Ziad, as the obliterator of “law” (and the obliterator of United 93), was duly poised for mass murder. Only roughly contiguous, then: Ziad could say he was doing it for God, and many would believe him, but he couldn’t say he was doing it for love. He wasn’t doing it for love, or for God. He was doing it for the core reason, just like Muhammad Atta.

  “All is well at Newark International?”

  “All is well. We’re in the sterile area. Did you see your precious imam?”

  “I did. And he gave me the water.”

  “The water? What water?”

  “The holy water,” said Muhammad Atta, with delectation, “from the Oasis.”

  There was a silence. “What does it do?” said Ziad.

  “It absolves you of what the imam called the ‘enormity,’ the atrocious crime, Ziad, of the self-felony.”

  There was another silence. But that was no longer true. Muhammad Atta thought he might be getting more out of this conversation if there hadn’t been a mechanized floorsweeper, resembling a hovercraft, with an old man on it, beeping and sniveling around his chair.

  “I’m preparing to drink the holy water even as I speak.”

  “Does it come in a special bottle?”

  “A crystal vial. God said, ‘All those who hate me love and court death.’ You see, Ziad, you are the trustee of your body, not its owner. God is its owner.”

  “And the water?”

  “The water is within you and preserves you for God. It’s a new technique—it began in Palestine. Your hell, Ziad, will burn with jet fuel for eternity. And eternity never ends—it never even begins. So there may be some delay before you get those brides of light. Perhaps you should have settled for your German nudist. Goodbye, Ziad.”

  He hung up, redialed, and had a more or less identical conversation with Marwan, minus the theme of Aysel. In the case of Marwan (the other half of “architecture,” and just across the way, now, at United), different considerations obtained. The emphasis of their rivalry was not jihadi ardor so much as nihilistic insouciance. So the two of them exchanged yawning boasts, in code, about how low down, and at what angle, they would strike, and casually agreed that, if there were F-16s over New York, they would crash their planes into the streets…Finally, dutifully, he called Hani (“arts”), the only Saudi pilot, with whom he shared no history, and not much hatred. Muhammad Atta hoped that he hadn’t decisively undermined Ziad, who, after all, was a Saudi short (or two Saudis short, if you discounted the punk-like Ahmed). No. He believed that he could safely rely, at this point, on the fierce physics of the peer group.