Jihadi (33 page)

Motorola was loud and unclear.

There was no internet connection out here anymore. Someone had bombed something. That left Fatima in the kitchen, slicing potatoes. The day off. Time to relax. But Motorola, a small American handheld radio – the only electronic communication of which Baba ever approved – was not relaxing her. Motorola had been a member of the family for years. It crackled an update about the huge demonstration at the American embassy. The static that she loathed, but had come to accept, cut in and out.

God Defended
. Peaceful so far. Unprecedented gathering. A slander upon the nation. A quarter of a million people at least. Those following this New Imam. His location unknown. Rumours of a return tomorrow midday. Crowd growing. His clear instructions. A national day of justice. Of reckoning. That murderer and desecrator of the Koran. Intensified. Rage in our hearts. Intensified. A man at the front of the crowd, very near the gate. Some shouts to encourage him.

And so forth.

Fatima put down the knife, washed her hands, ran them wet through her long, black hair, recalled that Baba did that with fingers spread in the same way, missed Baba again.

A national day of justice? Of reckoning? For whom? ‘That
murderer and desecrator of the Koran’. A fiction, a composite she knew to be two human beings. Did the nation deserve this demagogue who created such paper villains, who made up the religion as he went along? Had it come to that?

A shriek from upstairs – nothing unusual.

It was a familiar academic shriek. It culminated in a shouted NO. Fatima switched off Motorola.

Noura, unlike Fatima, had always been home-schooled due to socialization issues. Lately, Mother could not get her to focus on her assignments for more than a few minutes at a time. These shrieks had been standard operating procedure for months, but they had become more brash and more common since Noura had smelled the mysterious ripping thing, that invisible, approaching wave of metal and gasoline.

‘I want to help with the potatoes! I don’t
want
Galileo! I already
know
about Galileo!’

Fatima called upstairs: ‘Let her help, Mother.’

Noura padded downstairs, her smile too wide.

‘Think you’re so clever,’ Fatima said.

Noura tornadoed in and stole a hug, which Fatima returned, then eased out of when it became, as most of Noura’s hugs did these days, too tight for too long.

‘Get to work,’ said Fatima, drying her hands on a towel.

Noura took up the knife with glee, set to work upon a helpless peeled potato.

‘What do you know about Galileo, then?’

Cornered, Noura grimaced. ‘He’s boring. I know
that
.’

‘Back upstairs, then?’

‘No.’ Lips tight, eyes set on her moving knife.

‘Actually, he’s one of the least boring people ever. In the whole history of the world. Oh I do mean it, though. Because. Listen. Because. Galileo found people telling a big lie: The sun goes around the earth. Now, it
looks
like that’s what happens. But it’s not what happens. Actually the earth goes around the sun. And he proved
that with math and telescopes. People thought he was crazy. They were used to the lie. He had to hold on to the truth. No other way out.’

Inspired, Fatima seized a small and a large potato from the bowl, orbited the small one around the large one. Noura stared, rapt.

‘Sun. Earth. Got that?’

Noura nodded.

‘So. Did he win a prize? For telling the truth? What’s the matter? Well, did he?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No. They threatened to torture him. They made him stand up in front of everyone and say the sun went round the earth, made him say the earth didn’t move at all. But under his breath he still said, “It moves.” Now move the earth.’

‘Crazy.’

‘Who?’

‘Somebody,’ Noura said, watching the two potatoes hold still. ‘I don’t know. All of them. You. Who cares? What was the point?’

Fatima furrowed her brow. ‘Earth moves around the sun. Fool. Is the point. No matter what. Whether we’re crazy or not. Earth moves. Will you move the earth, please?’

Noura moved the earth around the sun. Fatima ran her hands through her long hair again and stared out the window at nothing.

‘That’s enough. I’ll do the rest. Go get the oil and the pan and an onion. We’ll make dinner together.’

Noura spun off. Fatima unplugged Motorola, took it off the shelf and placed it in the little cupboard beneath the sink.

The lights were all out again, except for his computer screen.

Indelible settled into the same chair in front of the same monitor, connected to the same keyboard, using the same internet connection,
with his wife asleep in the same bed. He drank Darjeeling tea from the same cup.

Back on the night the Islamic City dogs took him into custody, Indelible had received two unexpected messages from two unfamiliar email addresses. Tonight, Indelible knew both of those people were Sullivan Hand.

Indelible, whose hacking skills far surpassed those of his new American friend, knew Sullivan Hand’s full name. Indelible knew that Sullivan Hand was working in Langley, Virginia, and he knew how long Sullivan Hand had been working for the Directorate, and he knew Sullivan Hand’s social security number – all without Sullivan Hand sharing so much as a word about any of that.

In pursuit of a blessed goal – blowing himself up along with as much of the U.S. embassy as possible – Indelible was about to start his very first real-time, voice-to-voice conversation with Sullivan Hand. He took a tiny sip of Darjeeling, thought of a certain typhus patient who had passed in the night, and logged on.

Sullivan Hand had determined, to his own satisfaction at least, that Indelible was the real thing. He said as much in his report, which was well received by everyone except the dead guy writing this book.

He’d convinced his superior that he was pretty damn good at pretending to be multiple people online, pretty good at figuring out who was who, pretty good at flushing people out of their hidey-holes, pretty good at covering his tracks, pretty good at saving the Directorate money, and so forth.

He was the future. If you didn’t believe him, you could ask him.

He was building his fast-track career path in the Directorate, working all hours. All of twenty-three years old, skinny, underpaid, he was eager to continue an affair with an assertive older woman who was reading all his reports, an affair he supposed would keep him on the fast track and keep him sane. Sullivan Hand liked assertive women.

The dead guy telling this story knows more than he ever wanted to about Sullivan Hand’s career. He turned up everything that Sullivan ever submitted to the Directorate, the FBI and local law enforcement. All the sound files, all the memos and the one massive transcript illuminating the process by which fabricated evidence was produced for use in the prosecution and conviction of the Oldburgh Jihadi Ensemble. Three simpletons, it will be recalled, were supposed to have coordinated a complex, scary plot to shoot up a shopping mall and bomb a synagogue, in obedience to the hypnotic death-chants of the Koran.

In reality, the three improvised a scene, two minutes and nine seconds in duration, about three Al Qaeda stooges who spend most of their waking hours smoking pot.

During this impromptu sketch, Al Qaeda Stoner A mentions to Al Qaeda Stoners B and C that he, Stoner A, took the bus out to Watertown’s Northway Mall aiming to shoot up the place … but forgot his machine gun. Having arrived at the mall unarmed, he changed his mission, headed to a nearby balcony, and dropped stolen loaves of Panera bread on unsuspecting passers-by. Then, on his way home, he encountered a rasta-obsessed Jamaican rabbi eager to confirm Bob Marley’s status as the literal reincarnation of Moses. Having scored from this person an ounce of a particularly potent strain of weed, nicknamed Matzoh-Ball Missile Boy, Stoner A explains how to reach the synagogue in question by public transport.

‘Far out, Abdul,’ croaks Stoner B, handing an invisible roach to the companion to his immediate right.

‘Far out, may Allah accept,’ hisses Stoner C on an inhale, taking a long toke from the proffered roach and forwarding it to Stoner A.

‘Far out,’ say all three Al Qaeda stoners in slow unison, on a communal inverted hiss, to avoid the premature release of precious molecules of THC.

At this point in the recording, Sullivan Hand laughs. Another voice asks: ‘Should we record it, Brother Daoud?’

(As a freelance informant for the FBI, Sullivan Hand called himself Daoud Hand for the benefit of his targets. He liked such subterfuge, saw his role as Daoud as evidence of his capacity for upward mobility into the exciting world of espionage. His only mobility, as it turned out, was downward. He ended up tied to a filthy bed, naked, attempting to explain himself to local law enforcement.)

(It might be asked why the dead guy writing this story came to learn so much about Sullivan Hand. The answer is a simple one. He was under orders to find out. Enter Adelia.)

Adelia would not look at Glass, ever, but she led him to it, and she expected him to follow. She said ‘Dad will see you now’ while she walked, but only as a formality. If she escorted people to Glass, that already meant Dad would see them.

She was stepping fast, as usual, well ahead of Thelonius on the familiar walkway of grey stone that snaked behind the main house and led to Glass.

The nominal maid (and actual Dad-concubine) whom Thelonius followed wore her ebony hair pulled back in a tight bun, obscuring the tiny kinked ringlets Dad was said to favour. Aloofness was a friend of hers. Adelia knew, like her predecessors knew, not to make lingering eye contact with anyone summoned to Glass. Her unseen face, being unseeable now, in the Beige Motel, must, alas, be recalled as a composite. Adelia had the same tawny skin, the same aerodynamically sound facial features, the same light glance, the same avoidance of even the possibility of physical contact with strangers, as those who had come before her. Ryan Firestone had sought and found these traits in a now-uncountable succession of employed mistresses, Adelia the latest of these. The reigning monarch of the Cloisters, she appeared to have at least a few years to go as the representative of her graceful, well-compensated dynasty.

This dynasty’s origins were best not probed, but it preceded the attack on Ryan Firestone’s wife Prudence by several years.

Glass, the structure to which Adelia led Thelonius, was a private space. Like its occupants, it was not for civilian inspection.

‘You’ve spoken to him today?’ Thelonius asked, still well behind her.

The back of Adelia’s head nodded.

‘You know what this is about?’

The back of Adelia’s head shook.

‘Any advice?’

Even walking behind her, he sensed the chuckle she suppressed.

‘Tell him the truth.’

‘I knew that.’

‘They all say they know it, then they lie to him.’

‘Not me.’

‘Up to you, I suppose.’

‘Is he better?’

‘No.’

They reached Glass.

She stepped aside as he opened the door. She did not look at it. The door closed and she was gone, as the outer world was gone and the time of day was gone. The air was hot and close and things hissed.

Dad preferred this greenhouse for private meetings. Thelonius had suspected for some time this was due to the constant whisper, the vapour and the humid embrace of the perpetual watering system. One emerged damp and changed. Dad seemed to believe that he had created an environment with a plausible liberty from listening devices.

Glass was square and contained eight plant-lined corridors, the central two of which were separated by an empty row. Dad was in a wheelchair directly in the centre of Glass, in a clearing about which philodendrons and wisteria and maidenhair hovered and crawled at a speed undetectable to anyone but Dad. His careworn, ravaged face told all who cared to ask that he was dying.

‘Hello, Dad.’

‘Yes, you made it back,’ Dad said, raw-voiced but casual, as though Thelonius’s presence had been a remark in an ongoing conversation. He held up the African violet he’d been inspecting, put it down. ‘I am glad for that, and so, so sorry for the trouble we got you into, T. How about a drink to celebrate your homecoming?’

The only feature recognizable from the portrait of Dad that hung in the living room were the warm eyes, eyes that still spoke of possibility, alliance, connection, innovation, shared benefit. They spoke of past excess and present secrets, those quiet old eyes. They were watered, as ever, with liquor.

Thelonius shook his head.

‘No? The rumours are true?’

Thelonius nodded.

‘Well, with your permission, I will.’ Dewar’s and a glass and ice from a wooden compartment in the stone, to which he reached down.

The whisky and ice and glass assembled, Dad gestured for Thelonius to sit on the stone bench, which he did.

Dad watched him.

‘Hrothgar toasts you,’ Dad said, and grimaced as he swallowed, but kept watching. A classicist. Always.

‘I’m not Beowulf, Dad. What’s this about?’ Thelonius asked, trying to sound patient.

‘High D as always, just like me. Yes, so we’ll get to the point. You’re thinking about quitting.’

Always a step ahead of you, Dad was.

‘I am. I want out, Dad. I need to do something else with my life. This isn’t home for me anymore.’

The warm eyes, saggy and bloated now, behind their grey walls of sunken flesh, said:
Please wait.
Out of respect, Thelonius stood by for the next move.

‘Have you ever heard of a fellow named Sullivan Hand?’

‘No.’

‘T,’ Ryan said, sipping his Scotch and placing it on the stone table
near his right armrest, ‘the lucidity problem has ramped up faster than either of us imagined. She’s been cooking up trouble with the FBI. Operating a little sub-unit entirely on her own. Becky has to be brought out of the Directorate.’

Thelonius breathed in a lungful of wet, warm, settling air, took in the green. ‘Yes. Of course. That makes sense.’

‘And in order to bring her out well and carefully, we have to know what kind of damage she may have caused already.’

Always well and carefully. Not just to do something. To do something well and carefully. And that subtle transition to ‘we’.

‘Dad. I’m tired. I feel like I’m in jail still. I’ve felt like that for a while. I wouldn’t be much use to you.’

‘Oh, that’s where you’re wrong.’ And his patented silence.

‘Waiting.’

‘The erratic behaviour. The instability in her sleep patterns. The patchiness in her ability to concentrate. You’re quite familiar with all that. You know what it leads her to, how she thinks. The various professional networks she’s created. You’re familiar with those, too.’

‘Yes. So are you.’

‘You’re the one with an axe to grind, though. You’re the jilted husband. Ex-husband, I mean. You’ve got a
reason
to go digging. In the event things ever come into the light.’

‘Don’t
you
have a reason to go digging?’

‘No, T. I don’t. I’m above it all.’ Dad smiled a weak smile. ‘Why you’re here: We need you to give us a damage assessment before you quit. Before I let her go. Letting her go will likely be ugly. We need to know what’s gone wrong, if anything, and where wrong, and how badly wrong. Over the past year. Just as thorough as you can make it, please. Delivered personally. Not committed to text. Memory, boy. Or if you do keep written notes, keep them in code. You will appear to report to Unferth, who is to know nothing of this. I need all you can get me on what she’s got this Hand person doing. Along the way, you may be able to solve that other riddle that’s been on your mind.’

Dad smiled.

Thelonius’s chest tightened with the pain of not quite being in control, a sensation peculiar to conversations with Dad. Another deep breath.

‘What riddle would that be, Dad?’