Jihadi (41 page)

The eyes had not been cool.

It wasn’t like in the movies, where dead equals closed eyes.

But not thinking about that anymore.

Mike Mazzoni drove someplace else, he didn’t much care where, and he listened to a name circling in his head instead of music, which he didn’t feel like turning on. The name circling in his head was ‘Kelly Deane’. His mom’s maiden name.

The house screamed smoke and ragged flames behind him. He saw the flames in the rear-view mirror and drove straight until it disappeared.

He said his mother’s first name, ‘Kelly’, out loud, so he could hear what it sounded like. It sounded okay.

The tank said he had four hours of fuel. Plenty of time. Eager to get that burning out of his mirror, he pulled a left, and then another, and then went for several miles on a road that admitted no turns.

After a time he took a left anyway, found himself upon a broad stretch of desert, which worked well enough, hit the gas, grabbed the bottle of Cuervo and took a pull from it. The Cuervo was for survival. You couldn’t survive out here the way you survived in other places.

He took a long pull on the bottle and started wondering what this was all coming to. Maybe the house would just burn everything to a crisp and that would be the end of it. Or maybe not.

Hadn’t counted on the mother being there. That would complicate it. Mothers always complicate it.

Mike Mazzoni pulled another hard left turn into nothing, hit some kind of sandrut, felt the gravity angling on him, saw the sharp
and sudden arc of the moon spin by on his left and wasn’t anywhere at all.

The Islamic City police reported that after her rape, the lower part of Noura A––’s body, from her navel down to her feet, had been set on fire. The flames eventually spread to a carpet that bordered the kitchen where she had been attacked, and the smoke and flame issuing from the kitchen window alerted neighbours to inspect the scene. One neighbour, an elderly woman, recalled: ‘That poor girl. I was close to her family. They brought me food. She was beautiful before this. To leave her there, with her one leg stretched too far and the other bent away, to expose her. Shameful.’

Firefighters arrived, drew a crowd, doused the inferno, and made their way inside. They removed the bodies. After approximately three hours, personnel from a nearby U.S. checkpoint arrived to secure the location.

The captain – Mike Mazzoni’s captain, as it happened – made a statement to the restless locals who had gathered. He insisted that Islamic extremists had perpetrated the tragic events that had taken place there, the arson, murder, rape and so forth.

With a bullhorn, a paid translator relayed his words, but they were not well received. The captain waited in vain for the crowd to disperse.

To the contrary, people accumulated.

In the middle of the night, the captain called in heavy equipment. He planned to use it to flatten the remaining structure, which he deemed a safety hazard. Carrying out his orders proved difficult, however. Thirty or so of the locals, all men, most wearing white, linked arms and somehow got in front of the Caterpillar D8 in time to keep it from razing the house. The yellow monster rumbled and groaned and spat exhaust and did not retreat.

A standoff.

A tense half-hour passed. There were now something like fifty men with linked arms. One of the men in the middle of the link blocking the Caterpillar D8 shouted, ‘Barricade! Takbir!’

His fellows responded, ‘Allahu Akbar!’

Fatima watched all of this from her tree.

The last page of the young imam’s letter read:

I close by noting a disturbing trend of which I must assume you are unaware, the heretical tendency of certain of your followers to perform the prayer directly before your photograph. This practice violates every known ruling on the matter within the past fourteen centuries of Sunni jurisprudence. A public rebuke is in order, and may I assume you will deliver this in your next communiqué?

Yours very truly,

And here the youngish imam signed his name. Behind him, an intruder advanced.

The intruder, a beefy zombie, followed Abu Islam’s orders verbatim, approaching the imam from behind and slitting his throat from ear to ear with a box-cutter.

A moment later, the zombie encountered the youngish imam’s wife or daughter. He wasn’t sure which it was. She entered the room on soft, quiet feet. He looked her in the face, and, unmoved by the horror there, spun her around, following to the letter these instructions, too. He opened her throat without looking her in the eye.

Fatima had climbed her tree on instinct’s orders, which she’d chosen not to disobey, after seeing smoke issue from her house. Just a few seconds later, the grey shadow of a U.S. soldier had flashed past what had once been her living-room window.

There is a way certain people walk, a loose-limbed disregard for the prerogatives of others, that radiates danger. The arms flip about,
the elbows flail, the arrogant hips command each other in turn, the feet stray into paths not designed for them. This had been the physical signature of the man who had walked from her burning house.

It was the man who had pissed on the Koran. No mistaking that walk.

From her tree, through the window, Fatima had seen the corpses of her mother and sister.

She had trained the pistol on the man’s skull.

Yet even though she had had the target in her sights, Fatima could not bring herself to pull the trigger.

Certainty: the enemy of justice.

By law, she needed a second witness. And she needed a name.

She had lowered the gun and watched him disappear into his vehicle, an ugly thing, and saw it spin a U-turn that was as arrogant as the man’s walk had been. She had heard it roar away, smelled his scent receding, saw the flames extending from the house.

Fatima wanted now only to become part of the tree, to be its steady, strong limbs. She prayed to stay there, but instinct told her what to do next.

At a Starbucks similar in ambience to the one he had frequented those queasy few days after he learned of his wife’s infidelity, Thelonius nursed a latte. He set it down. He plugged the thumb drive into his computer. He settled himself into his earbuds.

He hit play.

The following dialogue, between a near voice and a distant voice, coursed through his head.

(Near.) – What a surprise. Sit down, Becky.

(Distant.) – No, I don’t believe I will, Dad.

– Flair for the ugly now? No need to make things ugly.

– Already beyond ugly, Dad. Once you set my husband to spying on me, it spun right past ugly.

– Is this what you flew up for? Well. No time for drama. Sorry. Look,
I do have to make my way back to the main house and get my medication. Then I have some calls to make. I wish you had phoned.

– I’m sure you do.

– I understand you’re expecting. I’ve always dreamt of a grandchild. Boy or girl, do you think?

– If you had the vaguest flicker of strategic insight, you’d be asking my forgiveness right now. Our forgiveness.

– Asking you what? I’m sorry? You know, sometimes I feel the best thing to say to you is nothing at all. That’s the right thing to say more often than not, I’ve found.

(A pause of over four minutes, during which time Thelonius made out the intermittent hissing of mist within the greenhouse.)

– You would, wouldn’t you?

– Would what, dear?

– You would just sit there. Do nothing. Nothing. You would. Just watch them. Watch it as it all falls apart. Watch the Muslims and the secularists and the mulattoes destroy our civilization. Issue press releases about regret. To win favour with them.

(Another pause, eighty-four seconds.)

– Say something.

– Well, you see, it is precisely this kind of puerile, ideologically driven fantasia that … ah. Ah.

– That’s what? That’s led you to what? End my career? Sabotage me? Cut my throat, take my hat off? As you wanted to take Mother’s hat off? This was how you were going to finish the sentence?

– Ah. Becky, dear Beckystone, stand aside and let me out of here. I’m past due for a pill. I really can’t miss my timings. Ah.

– You’ve already missed your timings. Dad. You would sit in this hothouse and WATCH as Sharia law wrapped its filthy hands around the throat of this nation? You would DO that? You would hand over our PRIVATE research materials on the OJE case to JUSTICE? And make us feel SHAME? We have dug beneath you, you know. We have dug beneath you, dug beneath both you and T at two hundred feet, and blown you into the sky. He went away out of control, you see, and I made damn
sure he could only come back in one of two ways, Daddy: in a box, or as a hero. And the thing about heroes, once they’re done being heroes, they have to do as they’re told.

– Rebecca.

– You can’t take our hats off. Can’t possibly take our hats off now.

– We are not going to continue this discussion. Stand aside. Ah.

– Did you think I wouldn’t know your medication schedule? Or Brown Sugar’s sleeping schedule? Hm? Did you think I wouldn’t use due diligence, when I chose where to engage with you? The one place in all of the Beltway, with no possible inbound or outbound communication? The one place you haven’t bugged? And wasn’t this where you betrayed her? With your first niggerwoman, I mean? After she took care of you? Oh, you made our blood just burn.

– Now, Rebecca. If you don’t step aside and open that door for me, this wretched twitching I am feeling just now will expand to a heart attack. I am past the timing for my medication. I was due when you walked in, you. You see. You. Rebecca. Ah.

– Yes, due when I walked in, Daddy, past due, really, half an hour late, as usual. Perusing your African violets. Monitoring their growth. Jotting the figures on your little clipboard. Distracted. Collecting more data. Verifying it. While the time passes. While the country suffers. I was monitoring YOU, Daddy. You see, sometimes you just have to step beyond the data, Daddy, and follow your GUT.

(A full nine minutes and twenty seconds of silence, punctuated at intervals by hissing and the sound of a man gasping. Then the sound of a woman walking away, the sound of a door opening, the sound of a door closing.)

The audio ended.

Unsafe in his little rearmost booth at Starbucks, Thelonius stared at the computer. He lost himself in it, unaware what time zone he was occupying, what day it was, what country he was in. There was only the media player’s dialogue box on the screen.

Playing the audio exchange again seemed impossible. Closing the window seemed impossible, too.

Everything seemed impossible. He did not dare drink his latte.

Then a new dialogue box popped into existence, right over the media player that had hypnotized him, paralyzed him:

Fatima A–– has asked to be added to your list of Skype contacts
.