Cronos Rising

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Half an hour before what would come to be referred to by the European and American intelligence services as the incident, the man known in certain quarters as the Ferryman sat in a glass-walled cafe overlooking Terminal 1 of Frankfurt Airport and thought about the afterlife.

The Ferryman was an atheist, but if any of the various visions of the afterlife held the remotest appeal for him, it was the Muslim variety. The carnality of it all, with its harem of waiting virgins, grounded it in psychological realism, far more than the anodyne Christian nightmare of string-accompanied bliss, which suggested to the Ferryman, who was also a teetotaller, a state of Huxleyite druggedness.

At least those who immolated themselves in anticipation of an eternity of sensual debauchery could be said to be normal, in a certain sense.

Adnan Hanahneh and Umair Jat were two of the most devout Muslims the Ferryman had ever met. Hanahneh, the Jordanian, was demonstrative in his faith, speaking of his devotion with an excitability that bordered on the unstable. Jat, from Pakistan, was more of a closed book, a quiet man slow to anger, courteous and measured in his speech and his actions. But his commitment to his cause was beyond doubt. The Ferryman had been assured of this, and while he was loath to believe anybody else’s assessment of a man, his own impression of Jat, and of Hanahneh, was that they were as dependable as could be hoped for.

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