Jihadi (34 page)

‘I said, what riddle is that, Dad?’

‘Well, for one thing, whether it’s Dick Unferth’s baby growing in that dark place – or somebody else’s. Do let me know what you figure out on that front. A man has a right to be curious about who’s fathering his grandchildren.’

The bastard had bugged their house. More chest constriction. Breathe again. Look at the plants.

Dad lifted a frail hand to his eyebrow. The little shadow of his movement drew Thelonius’s angry stare away from a long row of African violets.

The weathered hand descended, shook. The old man’s eyes were still pleading for help, still begging, like someone who had been stranded somewhere, waiting a long time for family to come. But the sandpaper-rough words that came out of his mouth were as firm, as purposeful as ever.

‘And actually, T, there’s another riddle for us to solve.’

‘Is there?’

‘I’m afraid so. It’s about your most recent trip. I have come to suspect she knows more about what happened to you in the Republic, and why, than we initially thought. You and I need to find out how
much
more. Well and quickly. Before she’s decommissioned, you see. To protect all the other soldiers out there. So I do thank you for not quitting just yet. We’ll get you out of all this soon enough.’

He poured himself a refill. He took another sip, set down his ice-laden glass. A second or so later, the stacked ice shook and fell.

‘Bobbler!’ Mike Mazzoni shouted again, so loud his lungs hurt, pointing at the gate. His brother spotted the bleeding lunatic who’d elbowed his way right through the razorwire. Bobbler looked back for an order. Theoretically, no live shots were to be fired until there was an actual perimeter breach. And theoretically, rounds of tear gas were supposed to prevent any bleeding lunatic from getting as high as this one had, as fast as he had.

So much for theory.

A stone sailed over the gate from some anonymous asshole deep within the Freak Show. The climber Mike Mazzoni had spotted was still moving fast, nearing the top.

Mike Mazzoni nodded.

Bobbler, up on the helicopter landing pad, nodded back and took aim.

‘Just wing him,’ shouted Mike Mazzoni, though the crowd noise was louder now, and his brother could not hear.

The raghead’s face exploded. He pulsed, then sagged like crucified Jesus. He hung there on the razorwire.

Shit
.

The crowd howled as one.

There were actually two notes to the big howl it gave out. The ragheads in the very front were all screaming the high note. The larger, deeper crowd was moaning the low note.

Three more white-robed ragheads started clambering up the fucking gate.

Bobbler looked again to Mike Mazzoni with eyes that said
What do I do?

Mike Mazzoni nodded again, then masked up and called for twenty rounds of tear gas. By the time the smoke cleared, four white-clad bodies, each streaked with red, hung from the razorwire. The crowd tore at itself, and the high note raged over the low note.

‘Brother!’

Well after sunset in the village of D––. Night in her darkened bedroom. Daylight on her computer screen.

One of the videos which bedded, blanketed Fatima now scrolled through on her laptop showed the two and a half chaotic minutes leading up to that afternoon’s massacre at the embassy. Shaky and washed out, the images and sounds came from the concealed camera of a BII plant. Ra’id had couriered a thumb drive with a dozen such scenes to her. He had asked her to review them all and call him in the morning. Ra’id was unavailable now, in meetings with his father and his father’s circle.

‘Brother!’

Rewind.

The video Fatima watched panned across a limitless horizon of shoulders within the uncountable throng that had gathered around the American embassy compound that afternoon. The horizon rocked and churned and shook for its initial ninety-one seconds, gathering its seemingly infinite crowd into itself, very nearly making the close observer nauseous with the constant jostling and shifting of people’s white backs. After that roller-coaster ride, the lens settled on the front gate, and the unknown videographer’s movement ceased, more or less, for the remaining forty-seven seconds. The audio was intact and clearer than one might have expected.

The shout that rose over the murmurs and prayers trailing through her white earbuds made the hair on the back of Fatima’s neck stand up.

Its voice was sharp. High. Male. Angry.

‘Brother! Brother!’ The rest only half clear, thanks to the crowd noise. Islam? We must what? He is not what?

She clicked the rewind icon again.

She hit play. Increased the volume. Settled her earbuds in.

‘Brother! Brother! My dear brother in Islam! We must plan such things! He is not even
in
the embassy!’

Replay.

The same thing. No doubt about any word. Someone had said that.

Once again. Rewind. Play. Watch for moving lips to match.

There.

She had found the face of a small man in the upper right-hand corner of her screen. His face twisted and glared. He called upward to the first man, the one climbing the fence in front of the compound:

‘Brother! Brother! My dear brother in Islam! We must plan such things! He is not even
in
the embassy!’

Ra’id needed to know of this remark’s existence. She thought of calling him despite his instructions, but concluded that the phones were no longer trustworthy. She would have to go into the city again. Tomorrow. Early.

Time caves in again, for old time’s sake. The dead guy collecting and concealing these stacks of scribbled paper warns her, across time and space, not to call her driver. Oblivious, she calls him anyway.

A city may be wounded and stagger about in shock, just as a human being may do, without quite realizing its status as a wounded thing. Indelible braved a return to the embassy. It was time to evaluate the patient, acquaint him with his circumstance, speak words of recovery if such could be found. Words of encouragement.

He found his way back toward the scene of the massacre he had, through the Grace of Almighty God, witnessed and survived. It was night, and the curfew would be enforced in less than a quarter of an hour. The streets were almost deserted. The soldiers paired off on the street corners of the major intersections, a reminder that the city now operated under martial law. It was past dawn in the United States, where people roamed as they wished and followed their vain desires.

The square outside the embassy was empty. Two helicopters cast spotlights on a few litter-strewn squares of blood-stained pavement. Indelible found himself in the double beam of that twin spotlight. He meant to keep walking until he was out of it, but it followed him.

Kafirs in uniform, kafirs with submachine guns, had reasserted control of the streets surrounding the embassy. Not all kafirs were Americans: A kafir used his own language now to bark out an order,
Move on, go home, curfew in nine minutes
. In the United States, people were no doubt gathering in orderly fashion for the working day. They had subways there. And huge highways. They worshipped Jesus, peace be upon him, there. God forgive us. They filled their
tanks with gasoline and rode the subways and sat in their offices or their shops. They constantly listened to music. Shaitan pissed in their ears.

‘Move on!’

Just as the kafir speaking the native tongue put his hand to his gun, Indelible nodded and walked away from the embassy.

Five men had died here. Six at least had been gravely injured. People had fled from the kafirs as they fired. Indelible looked up as he walked. The bodies of the four martyrs who had climbed, without orders, onto the razorwire still hung there on the gate, trophies for the Americans. Lights from the helicopters passed across the men’s bodies from time to time.

Another man, a man with only one leg, had died in the tear-gas-driven stampede away from the embassy. Indelible had seen feet crush this man’s face and chest as he writhed on the pavement. Indelible had found a safe nook, an angled part of the embassy gate near a dumpster, and watched the crowd’s shameful, leaderless, lethally chaotic retreat. He had watched that man die under the feet of his countrymen. His body must have been collected since the attack.

Chaos. The city dying.

In America, people paid to not have such experiences in their cities, and to not know of them when they occurred elsewhere. In America, Indelible thought, people would speak of those outside the gate throwing stones and rubbish, not of the uniformed men firing into the crowd. Or not speak of this at all.

And all for nothing. The desecrator of the Holy Koran had not even been in the embassy.

No one to encourage here. No one in need of encouragement. Only the martyrs, already victorious. He walked faster, and though it was cool tonight, a sweat broke out on his forehead.

There was no compromising with kafirs. Kafirs meant to obliterate everything. A new strategy was in order.

Not out yet, still working for Dad, dammit. Thelonius kept his mouth shut, signed the auto rental agreement, left the little, grey-carpeted room, warmed himself in the sun and felt stronger somehow, holding the car key beneath the open morning sky.

Having opted not to fly from DC to Salem, having cancelled his ticket in person, he guided the sleek new-smelling rental out of the airport parking lot and threaded his way toward 95. He headed north, but kept an eye out for detours. He wanted to see how long he could make this trip last.

Creative, reckless truckers sped past. They had all defaced the safety-first signs embedded on the backs of their vehicles by contractors and/or employers. Countless variations on the signs, countless variations on the defacements.
HOW IS MY DRIVING? CALL 1–800–9
, and the rest of the plastic burst away in shivers.
WE ARE PROUD OF OUR PROFESSIONAL FLEET OF DRIVERS – TO COMPLIMENT THEM, CALL US AT
– what?

On some signs, the number was entirely obscured with black paint or ink. On others, only certain carefully chosen numbers were transformed: from a 3 to an 8, or a 4 to a 9, or what might have been an 8 to a black void. On one such sign there was no text at all, only grey paint where the message should have been. Men – he had yet to see a female trucker – who were unwilling to be traced, men unwilling to be held accountable. All those numbers had been rendered useless for the identification of excess. Whenever they settled into their vehicles, these men reserved to right to conduct their journeys according to their own guidelines. They hurtled around him, as though he were one of them, but slow to catch on.

He stopped whenever the leg said to stop.

At a gas station, he avoided looking at the skin magazines and lottery tickets and cans of beer, none of which would be missed, and bought a compass and a dense comb-bound road atlas. These came in handy: he took many byroads that branched off 95.

From Baltimore onward, he aimed to reach the oddest real town names he could find listed on that map. He made a point of buying gas and praying in places with strange names, names he never would have come up with.

Double Trouble. Fearnot. Little Heaven. Disappointment. Burnt Chimney Corner. Othello. Fair Play. Hot Coffee.

Once he had visited, bought gas from, prayed at and written down the name of one of these places, Thelonius pulled out the atlas, consulted it, put it back, gunned the engine of his rented Accord and found 95 again. He obeyed the speed limit. It was good driving in the right lane, under the speed limit, good to be passed, all the restless truckers well ahead of him or well behind him.

Big, disarming, half-plausible road signs for what claimed to be genuine tourist attractions swam past him. Marketing. The signs appeared every twenty miles or so, fleeting hallucinations beckoning him in gaudy colours. Thelonius started recording them too. Bates’s House of Turkey. America’s Largest Humidor. The World’s Largest Chair. Turtle Built from 2,000 Tire Rims. Motel in the Shape of a Giant Elephant. Everything Elvis Ate. Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail. And so forth. He never stopped at any of these places.

After a while, he was able to laugh out loud at each one he passed. So much bullshit.

Each of these places did in fact exist. But just because they existed didn’t mean he should go visit them.

The sun blanketed a far hillside with bright golds and greens that seemed to have nothing to do with the surrounding buildings. The perfect colours coexisted with a warm feeling in the centre of Thelonius’s chest. He’d been chanting
ALLAHU AKBAR
. Much of the last day had been about chanting. He was fine until he had to stop chanting.