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taking many notes this day, or thinking about her letter.
Talith did not return to the seminar after its intermission, but hurried to her apartment near
park on South Sixteenth. It was typical of Fat'ah to disguise even the envelope, and as she loc
her doors she was giddy with anticipa-tion. She drew the massive zip-code book from a shelf
started to scribble numbers next to the towns listed.
Grand Rapids, North Dakota did not matter except that it provided its five-digit number: 58
Virgin, Utah and Maryville, Missouri were equally insignificant. The numbers were all that counte
Leah Talith felt hunger pangs before she had all two hundred and thirty numbers. It was a
message, the longest she had ever received. Her instructions in July, before the Phoenix attempt,
been much more succinct. She ig-nored the growl in her belly and, from her tam-pon cassette,
the one-time pad.
The one-time pad is not the only unbreakable code system, but it is easily the simplest to
Talith's pad was written in washable ink on the backs of postage stamps in a stamp roll, and ha
be kept absolutely dry. Each stamp carried twenty of the five-digit numbers, and somewhere on
Hakim Arif's Fat'ah men had an identical grouping of numbers. The groupings they coded and
were not precisely the same; indeed, the difference between a given zip-code and the next num
on Talith's one-time pad varied between one and twenty-six. The twenty-six variations made le
in English, the language used because it employed many terms that ill-suited Arabic. Despite
bril-liance of cryptanalysis techniques, they fail before the one-time pad. In the message to Ta
the vowel e occurred seventeen times. It oc-curred as seventeen different five-digit numbers, so
a frequency count was not possible or, at any event, nonproductive. The one-time pad was no
sophisticated as indeterminate qua-dratics. It did not have to be. Talith licked twelve stamps
evening, erasing the sequences after their one-time use. Then, for the first time, she read the mes
for its content.
The message left her little room for improvisa-tion; it even specified the model numbers of
necessary equipment to be purchased. But that would be Rashid's problem, since he controlled
funds. She could improvise in site selection, at least, before signaling readiness of their Fat'ah
for its distinguished visitor. She felt certain that the Pueblo telephone number was that of a pu
telephone booth. She would either call at the proper time or not at all.
Trained by Fat'ah lieutenants after her re-cruitment from Neturay Karta, she had never seen Ha
Arif, had seen only half of his other followers. But Talith knew that the demands of Fat'a
communication skills were refractory, as Hakim was refractory. If Hakim was sending an aid
prepare for his coming, the contact number would be no private one.
Hakim Arif's man would arrive on Saturday, 25 October, expecting videotapes of the day's n
as well as a cell meeting. Rashid would be glad to abandon his studies in California State Unive
at Northridge, several hundred ki-lometers away. She could only guess at the willingness of
motorcycle mechanic, Bernal Guerrero; but while he occasionally questioned an order, he w
complete professional. She was not so sure about Chaim.
Talith frowned as she sought the address near the village of Felton where Chaim Mardor migh
might not, be found. He had always been mercurial, a temperamental link in Fat'ah's be-hav
chain-mail. After she had driven him bleeding and frenzied from the center of Pheonix on
disastrous day in August, he had become more reclusive. Talith told herself she would cover for
cell member with emotional lapses, and knew that she lied. Chaim would have been eliminated
now, were it not for her. Chaim was a problem that must be faced; but Chaim was also, with Ta
Neturay Karta. She would give him time to recover, to realize his full potential.
As a weaver among counterculture people in California's Santa Cruz mountain communes, Ch
was accepted. His gentle fingers teased lovely portraits from yarn, driftwood and feathers;
occasionally they squeezed a trigger. He lived with a brace of young women who found in his q
intensity a strangeness enough for two. Chaim found himself a capable respondent because, a
from their camouflage value, their combined significance was zero. Talith had begun to suspect
he was impotent with her because she was significant. This, she felt, was a great pity: one of
pleasant articles of her new Fat'ah faith was its demands on her body.
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