Executive Power by Vince Flynn Page B

to do with her. He knew he should have never untied her. He should have simply shot Hamza in the back of the head, dispatched the two bodyguards and left. If he’d stuck with his original plan he’d be long gone by now; miles of safe distance between himself and the crime. The maid would show up in the morning and find the young girl, and she would be taken to a hospital. Everything would have turned out just fine for her.
    As much as he wanted to believe it, though, he knew that was far from what would really happen. The maid would have called the police, who would very quickly discover they had a dead Iraqi general on their hands. The media would find out shortly after that, and this little innocent girl would get swept up in the maelstrom that would follow. The police and reporters would talk to her parents and the entire neighborhood would find out that the young girl had been sexually assaulted. Through no fault of her own she would be shunned and treated as a pariah for the rest of her years.
    David wasn’t about to let that happen. When he’d started down this dangerous path years before, he’d made a promise to himself. David hadn’t grown up in the camps, but his mother had been sure to bring him along whenever she visited the various clinics. She wanted him to see firsthand the squalor that Palestinian people were forced to live in. His mother, unique in more ways than he could ever count, used the long car rides to and from the camps to enlighten her only son on the politics of the most contested region in the history of mankind.
    The camps were a breeding ground for discontent, corruption and anti-Semitism. The Jews were blamed for everything, both real and imagined, consequential and inconsequential. They were the evil greedy Zionists who had stolen the land away from the Palestinian people. The propaganda was insidious but his mother had been very careful to teach David about the complicated history of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews. In her mind there was more than enough blame to go around.
    For a brief period in 1948 the Palestinians actually had a state, but instead of taking what the United Nations had legally mandated, they decided to attack the fledgling country of Israel with the help of five Arab armies. The decision proved disastrous. Israel trounced the Arab armies, seized the land that had been set aside for the Palestinian state, and deported most of the Palestinians who hadn’t already left.
    David’s mother liked to point out that it was a little disingenuous of their people to cry that Israel had stolen their land. She was fond of asking him, “If we had won the war back in forty-eight, do you think we would have allowed the Jews to keep their land?” She never waited for him to answer. The reply was always a resounding, “No. The Arab armies would have killed every last Jew.”
    â€œThe Jews are racists,” she used to tell him, “but the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Iraqis and the Saudis are all worse. The Jews hate us because we’ve given them no reason to like us, but what excuse do our Arab brothers have? They have none. We are beneath them, that is the way they feel. They have kept our people in these camps and stoked the flames of hatred toward the Jews to serve their own corrupt governments. We are servants to them. A useful tool in their campaign to keep their subjects’ anger focused not on them, but on the evil Jews.”
    His mother’s teachings had made David wary of all propaganda. He refused to allow hatred to drive his ambition. He would never allow himself to turn a blind eye to the truth. He would never allow himself to become just another cold-blooded killer. That was why he didn’t just shoot Hamza and leave the poor girl to be discovered in the morning. David truly was a unique man. He was a pragmatist with a heart. The girl would be brought with him now, and an