“Then?” my wife coaxed.

He lowered his voice. “Then revenge on Germany and all those who betrayed us.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“You’ll see. Next time we will win. Next time we will have all of France with us. And then all of Europe. And then, the world.”

My jaw must have dropped open. It was all going to happen anyway. The French would rearm. Led by a ruthless, fanatical de Gaulle, they would plunge Europe into a second world war. All my efforts were for nothing. The world that we had left would continue to exist—or be even worse.

He turned his reptilian eyes to my lovely wife. Although many of the German women were blond, she was far more beautiful than any of them.

“You are Aryan?” he asked, his tone suddenly menacing.

She was nonplussed. “Aryan? I don’t understand.”

“Yes you do,” he said, almost hissing the words. “Next time it will go hard on the Aryans. You’ll see.”

I sank my head in my hands and wept openly.

REMEMBER, CAESAR

One little phrase, “What if. . . ?” has been the beginning of many a science-fiction story.

Wars are started by old men (and sometimes old women) who sit at home and direct their troops. They are fought by young men (and sometimes young women) who do the bleeding and the dying.

But what if the dangers, the risks, the terror of battle could be brought home to the leaders who can sit out a war in a bombproof bunker, far from the fighting front?

And what if modern technology could produce a suit that makes its wearer invisible?

A “cloak of invisibility” is not terribly far from our current technological capabilities. Could that second “What if. . . ?” be used to answer the first one?

We have never renounced the use of terror.

—VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN

She was alone and she was scared.

Apara Jaheen held her breath as the two plainclothes security guards walked past her. They both held ugly, deadly black machine pistols casually in their hands as they made their rounds along the corridor.

They can’t see you, Apara told herself. You’re invisible.

Still, she held her breath.

She knew that her stealth suit shimmered ever so slightly in the glareless light from the fluorescents that lined the ceiling of the corridor. You had to be looking for that delicate little ripple in the air, actively seeking it, to detect it at all. And even then you would think it was merely a trick your eyes played on you, a flicker that was gone before it even registered consciously in your mind.

And yet Apara froze, motionless, not daring to breathe, until the two men—smelling of cigarettes and after-shave lotion—passed her and were well down the corridor. They were talking about the war, betting that it would be launched before the week was out.

Her stealth suit’s surface was honeycombed with microscopic fiber-optic vidcams and pixels that were only a couple of molecules thick. The suit hugged Apara’s lithe body like a famished lover. Directed by the computer built into her helmet, the vidcams scanned her surroundings and projected the imagery onto the pixels.

It was the closest thing to true invisibility that the Cabal’s technology had been able to come up with. So close that, except for the slight unavoidable glitter when the sequin like pixels caught some stray light, Apara literally disappeared into the background.

Covering her from head to toe, the suit’s thermal absorption layer kept her infrared profile vanishingly low and its insulation subs king held back the minuscule electromagnetic fields it generated. The only way they could detect her would be if she stepped into a scanning beam, but the wide spectrum goggles she wore should reveal them to her in plenty of time to avoid them.

She hoped.

Getting into the president’s mansion had been ridiculously easy. As instructed, she had waited until dark before leaving the Cabal’s safe house in the miserable slums of the city. Her teammates drove her as close to the presidential mansion as they dared in a dilapidated, nondescript faded blue sedan that would draw no attention. They wished her success as she slipped out of the car, invisible in her stealth suit.

“For the Cause,” Ahmed said, almost fiercely, to the empty air where he thought she was.

“For the Cause,” Apara repeated, knowing that she might never see him again.

Tingling with apprehension, Apara hurried across the park that fronted the mansion, unseen by the evening strollers and beggars, then climbed onto the trunk of one of the endless stream of limousines that entered the grounds. She passed the perimeter guard posts unnoticed.

She rode on the limo all the way to the mansion’s main entrance. While a pair of bemedaled generals got out of the limousine and walked crisply past the saluting uniformed guards, Apara melted back into the shadows, away from the lights of the entrance, and took stock of the situation.

The guards at the big, open double doors wore splendid uniforms and shouldered assault rifles. And were accompanied by dogs: two big German shepherds who sat on their haunches, tongues lolling, ears laid back.

Will they smell me if I try to go through the doors? Apara asked herself. Muldoon and his technicians claimed that the insulated stealth suit protected her even from giving off a scent. They were telling the truth, as they knew it, of course. But were they right?

If she were caught, she knew her life would be over. She would simply disappear, a prisoner of their security apparatus. They would use drugs to drain her of every scrap of information she possessed. They would not have to kill her afterward; her mind would be gone by then.

Standing in the shadows, invisible yet frightened, she tongued the cyanide capsule lodged between her upper-right wisdom tooth and cheek. This is a volunteer mission, Muldoon had told her. You’ve got to be willing to give your life for the Cause.

Apara was willing, yet the fear still rose in her throat, hot and burning.

Born in the slums of Beirut to a mother who abandoned her and a father she never knew, she had understood from childhood that her life was worthless. Even the name they had given her, Apara, meant literally “born to die.”

It was during her teen years, when she had traded her body for life itself, for food and protection against the marauding street gangs who raped and murdered for the thrill of it, that she began to realize that life was pointless, existence was pain, the sooner death took her the sooner she would be safe from all fear.

Then Ahmed entered her life and showed her that there was more to living than waiting for death. Strike back! he told her. If you must give up your life, give it for something worthwhile. Even we who are lost and miserable can accomplish something with our lives. We can change the world!

Ahmed introduced her to the Cabal, and the Cabal became her family, her teacher, her purpose for breathing.

For the first time in her short life, Apara felt worthwhile. The Cabal flew her across the ocean, to the United States of America, where she met the pink-faced Irishman who called himself Muldoon and was entrusted with her mission to the White House. And decked in the stealth suit, a cloak of invisibility, just like the magic of old Baghdad in the time of Scheherazade and the Thousand and One Nights.