Escape from Baghdad! (5 page)

Dagr wrenched himself up on one knee. The street was empty, silent once more. Hamid lay curled nearby, cradling a mangled hand, his fingers blown off by a soft revolver shell. The Lion of Akkad was gone.

A pall hung over their makeshift command center, crowded now with the scents of the triage and the gloom of their co-conspirators.

“Do you believe me now?” Amal was aggrieved.

“You've failed,” a nondescript shopkeeper cried. “And now the Lion of Akkad will start killing children again.”

“We have to run!” A truck driver said. “To Shulla! I'm getting my truck.”

“It did not go as planned,” Dagr said. His body was a mass of cuts and bruises.

“You did nothing, you fool,” Hamid snapped. “He shot my fingers off.”

“The man is strong,” Kinza said.

“And fast,” Dagr said. “He kind of just appeared in front of me before I could clear my weapon.”

“You've made everything worse,” Amal said. A dozen men rumbled in agreement. “He will become more brutal now. Our lives are worth shit.”

“He's human,” Kinza said. “He bleeds. I shot him in the leg. The blood on the street is not ours only.”

“So we have some time,” Dagr said, thinking again, furiously. “He won't come out wounded. Not when he knows he's being hunted.”

“You boys should just leave,” Amal said. “I curse the day I stopped you.”

“Yes,” Hamid hissed into Dagr's face, so close that he could smell the sweet rot of his wounds. “Why the fuck are we wasting time with these yokels? You're supposed to take me to Mo…”

“We're going nowhere,” Kinza said. “I said I'd kill this man, and so I will.”

“He will become cautious now,” Dagr said. He glanced at the watchers. “And I doubt the grid will catch him out again. Even if he doesn't figure out how we tracked him, he'll take steps to counter us. We must devise a new method.”

“Oh, what's the use if you
do
catch him?” Amal asked. “He nearly killed the three of you.”

Kinza stared him down. “Do you think I can't take a hit? I never walk away from a fight.”

“I'm just saying.”

“Look,” Dagr said. “We won't catch him on the streets again. We have to find out where he hides. We have to attack him in his lair, while he's still wounded.”

“There's a reason he works these particular streets,” Kinza said. “He moves on foot. He must live within this zone.”

“We could send the watchers to canvass the neighborhood,” Dagr said. “Look for something suspicious, blood stains perhaps?”

“Get real. You are in Ghazaliya,” Amal said. “Which door doesn't have blood on it?” He seemed almost proud of it.

“We need to narrow the area down,” Kinza said.

“Two things struck me,” Dagr said slowly. “When he was beating the crap out of me, I felt a backpack under his coat. He was carrying something heavy. And he smelled funny. I can't describe it.”

“That would be Hoj's candlesticks,” Amal said. “Pure silver. He was saving them for his grandsons.”

“You said he's a serial killer.”

“He does whatever he damn well pleases,” Amal said.

“What difference does it make? Often he takes random things,” the shopkeeper shrugged. “He has to eat, I guess.”

“It might make a big difference, Amal,” Dagr sat up straight, weariness disappearing. “A huge difference! Quick, what else has he taken?”

“He took a gilded statue from Ibrahim,” the truck driver said. “And he took my iPod.”

“Look at the map,” Dagr said. “I need exact times and locations for each of his strikes for as far back as possible. And most importantly, I need to know what he took each time.”

Amal looked bewildered.

“It's simple mathematics,” Dagr began scribbling formulas on the map, cursing how rusty he was. “We know he's on foot, he only hunts in this area, and he works only at night. We calculate his route each
night for as far back as we can, data given by his victims. Now we have his average speed. Even if he constantly varies his schedule, we'll find him hitting an average number of victims per night. Given his starting and ending hits, we might be able correlate where he lives. But every time he takes something extra, there will be a deviation. There are a finite amount of candlesticks he can carry, after all. I predict every time he takes something heavy, there will be an unexplained lag. In effect,
he will go home to put away his loot
before moving onto the next house.”

Dagr beamed at them. They stared back slack jawed.

“I didn't understand a word of that,” Amal said.

4: BLACKBOARD RAGE

D
AGR HAD APPROPRIATED THE OFFICE ENTIRELY NOW, RUNNING
data, fine tuning his equation. The computer was old, the software almost obsolete. It had taken Dagr half the day to jerry-rig it into doing what he wanted. Amal had fixed a blackboard on the wall, unearthed pieces of orange chalk. It helped him think, the board covered in symbols, calmed him into something like functionality. Men and women were dropping by all day, feeding him bits of data, suspicious until they saw him, his head and arms bandaged, chalk dust on his clothes, something fey in his eyes. They treated him like an idiot savant, talking to him slowly, old women pressing bits of fruit into his hands, taking on faith entirely that he was doing something useful.

The chalk brought him intensely happy memories. The lull of an empty classroom, Dagr perched on his desk, making furious equations all over the board; a grad student walking by, stopping to watch him with gold flecked eyes, a smile crooking her mouth, lighting up a face so achingly earnest. The thin perfume alerted him, and he swiveled, almost falling, falling. She took the chalk and corrected his mistakes, still smiling, at some point getting on the desk, edging him aside, until she arrived at a point she could not reach on tiptoes, and Dagr grabbed her shirt, and they nearly fell over laughing.

That much and no more and he stood bereft, staring, sliding slowly into dismay, awaiting the inevitable reconstruction of reality with its soul-killing loneliness. Blackboard, chair, table, computer, doorframe. Autistic fumbling, as his brain tried to fit them into something palatable and failed repeatedly, and the grayness seeped in. They slipped into his day, these moments, in the most unreasonable of times, pieces from some elusive mirror world, a past that he was unsure had ever
existed at all. Surely that classroom stood somewhere, still, chalk dust and laughter.

He saw Kinza approaching, eyes averted, reality tethering him back in.

“Coffee,” he said, offering a cup. Neutral.

“I'm alright,” Dagr said, “just light-headed.”

“Any luck?”

“It's working,” Dagr said. “Slowly. I have some patterns. Too many assumptions to be sure.” He knew there was an impatient crowd outside, held in check by Kinza's face alone.

“I got word from Shulla,” Kinza said. “They are looking for Hamid. We cannot stay here long.”

“We can be ready tonight, perhaps,” Dagr hesitated. “I have an area narrowed down. An abandoned building, I guess.” He pointed to the board, “This equation approximates his speed on foot. The map is plotted with all his stops on any given night. The program catches any big gaps in his schedule and posits where he could have gone during that time. Data from a large period of time narrow these options. Taking into account first and last stops in each night, along with times, and we get a picture.”

“Your arm is bleeding,” Kinza said. “You don't need to come tonight. Hamid and I will be sufficient.”

“No,” Dagr said, fighting back a temptation to agree. “No, you can't trust Hamid. We should stick together.”

“I am not afraid of Hamid,” Kinza said.

“He could shoot you in the back,” Dagr said. “There's a look in his eyes, something like religious fervor, except he is certainly not a man of God. Sometimes I think he's completely insane.”

“Even madmen know fear.”

“Kinza, do you think there really is any gold in Mosul?”

“Probably not.”

“What will we do there, then? Provided we get there at all, of course.”

“If there's no gold, at least we can sell Hamid,” Kinza said.

“I'm sure our good captain has something in mind for us.”

“Hamid will betray us somehow,” Kinza said, amused. “Then I will dismember him, and you'll probably try to find some reason to keep him alive.”

“No happy endings for us I suppose.”

“Look around. No happy endings for anyone. Not for a long time. Not ever again, perhaps.”

“What makes us go on like this, I wonder?” Dagr said. “Day after day, this whole damned mess.”

“Rage. Vengeance.”

“God should permit us mass suicide,” Dagr said. “Then we could end it once and for all. Leave a clean slate for whoever comes after. No more fathers and brothers to avenge. No more mosques to burn. No more checkpoints. No more rifle butts and blindfolds in the night.”

“I doubt God cares either way.”

“Kinza, what would you do if we really did find some treasure in that bunker?”

“Die of shock.”

“I meant how would you spend your share?”

“I'd get the hell out of here,” Kinza said. “Go to Greenland or something. Some place empty and cold. I don't want to see another person for a hundred miles.”

“Sounds good. Maybe I'll join you.”

Into the night once again, and this time they were better armed. In his breast pocket Dagr had his map, with a city block circled in red, which he had finally narrowed down. He was convinced, and they gained something from his confidence, although no one quite understood how he had derived his results.

Physically they were poorer, although the same was undoubtedly true for their quarry. Hamid had lost two fingers from his left hand and
was walking hunched over and clumsy, barely able to fumble his gun from his holster. Kinza, too, had taken damage, one entire side glazed black where the Lion of Akkad had thrown him. There was in his face a barely repressed violence, a reckless fire that spoke his intent. Dagr had seen something alike in previous times, when Kinza had placed them in extreme danger, seemingly for the hell of it. There would be a killing tonight.

Their numbers had been bolstered, moreover, by two young men from the streets, armed with old pistols, neighborhood toughs with gelled hair who had dreamed their own grandiose mafia rackets before the Akkadian had shown a most cavalier disregard for their posturing. They came along boastfully, taking oaths and fingering their weapons until Kinza silenced them with a stare.

“We need to check for abandoned buildings,” Dagr said. He took out his map.

“There are a couple of Mahdi safehouses there. Old apartment buildings,” Yakin said. He was the talkative local. His companion was mostly silent, possibly much more intelligent. It was difficult to tell. “Abandoned mostly now, filled with squatters.”

“He could be holed up there somewhere,” Dagr said.