Jihadi (44 page)

Fatima made her ablution with clean dust, permissible when no water is readily available. In the warehouse, she made her Sunnah prayer, then she made her obligatory prayer, then she made the prayer one makes when one is about to embark upon a major undertaking and one asks God to remove the commitment from one’s path if it does not bring benefit in the afterlife.

Indelible, surrounded by an overcoat, stayed within two or three blocks of the American embassy compound, walking a crazy zigzag path that assured him he was not being followed. He never got too far from the target. If for some reason the situation required acceleration, he was prepared to accelerate.

The leaping dog had a distance of just under six feet to cover before its maw reached Mike Mazzoni’s proud, exposed neck.

From the left, there came a pop and a whizzing sound. A bullet from the rifle of a marine caught the black dog in midair with a wet thud.

The dog dropped to the grass at Mike Mazzoni’s feet.

A hand grabbed him by the back of his shirt-collar, and a voice – he did not know whose – called him a dumb motherfucker, berated him for risking somebody else’s life besides his own, told him they all had to fall back now. They were heading back to the base. Drones were on their way in.

He was in another Starbucks, waiting for another call. When the computer screen announced her, there was fear in each chime. It chimed once, then twice. Then a third time. The fear got worse each time.

Just Get Started.

He clicked on the stylized green image of the phone receiver. She appeared in her headscarf again, without her veil.

There was the same little pause, which he found now that he enjoyed. But staying on too long put her in danger. So he said, out loud:

‘You were right. It was him. The name is Mazzoni. M-A-Z-Z-ON-I. A sergeant. First name Michael.’

She wrote on something off screen.

‘I’m so sorry you met me,’ Thelonius said.

She looked upward, smiled. Shook her head, ‘No.’

‘The mole you are looking for,’ she said, ‘has been codenamed Indelible by BII. Here comes a video of him. In the video, he’s the man shouting at the fellow climbing the fence. I hope it helps someone. I hope it helps you. I hope it helps the country.’

He nodded as the file transferred, looked into her eyes once more, tried to make out the colour for the last time, but the lighting was unfavourable. He saw bits of gold, nothing else, before she said, ‘Assalamu alaykum.’

The window was dark. He emailed the file to Dick Unferth, who opened it, then deleted it.

There was a dispute among the eleven elders who had taken a stand behind the wall. One of them suggested that they refer the matter to the New Imam.

When the representative of the elders finally reached the New Imam on the phone, it was two o’clock in the morning. The New Imam listened patiently, and without apparent prejudice, to both sides of the disagreement.

One party was of the opinion that that those fathers and heads of households who wished to stay at the location should be permitted to remain through the entirety of the inevitable American drone assault.

The contrary party held that men with wives and children should be excused, whether they wished to leave or not, because of the market for human flesh that existed in the poorer quarters of the city. Such martyrdoms, martyrdoms that left women and children without protectors and supporters, were to be avoided, they argued, because of the possibility of defeat.

Which view should prevail?

‘Defeat?’ the New Imam asked. ‘You believe you face defeat?’

He pronounced in favour of the first group. He instructed the emissary to inform those in the second group that their position flirted with apostasy.

They obeyed. An hour later, a distant propeller, not unlike the buzz of a bee, was heard. Presently they were all dead, all the men with wives and children and all the men without, and the house Wafa had meant to be a mother in was reduced to chunks of smouldering rubble.

Take a look at this sketch. You see from it that there is a restroom on the first floor of the American embassy, near the metal detector at the front entrance of the building. This room is reserved exclusively for the diplomatic corps and, by extension, for the spies pretending to be them or work for them.

Sullivan Hand, who had recently arrived in the Republic by means of the same discreet runway Thelonius Liddell’s plane had once used, had regarded his admission to this sacred space, and his use of it, to be a confirmation of his own inevitability within the Directorate. He was planning a party that evening, even though there was no one out here he knew by name yet. That was no obstacle. He would damn well meet some people and introduce them and toast the day. He had a right to toast the day. He was, officially, not a desk jockey anymore. He was in intelligence. He was working in the field, about to meet, in mere minutes, an asset he himself had cultivated. Face to face.

Right after he finished dealing with the problem of his own stool.

The stool, which was somewhat smaller in size than usual and tapered distinctively, and which had struck its issuer as structurally impeccable when subjected to a cursory visual inspection, was proving problematic. Owing either to its unique, aerodynamically evocative shape, or to the design of the commode’s bowl, or to some complex interplay of the two factors, a single flush had been powerless to make it vanish. So had a second flush. And a third. And a fourth. Having watched the fifth flush fail, too, Sullivan Hand studied the stool’s compact, insolent, implausibly resilient form, floating in the bowl, mocking him. It was as though his own faeces had begun speaking to him, proclaiming that it had found its place and was unwilling to yield it to anyone.

Sullivan Hand regarded the bowl philosophically. Leaving a turd suspended for other members of the embassy staff to discover seemed like a poor career choice for a prominent new arrival. He wondered why no one had thought to place a toilet brush in the supposedly elite stall he now occupied. He might be able to break the thing up with a toilet brush. Perhaps there was one in an adjacent stall.

Before he could resolve this problem, however, there occurred, more or less simultaneously, a hoarse ripping sound and a flash of light.

That afternoon, when Mike Mazzoni reached the point where he refused to communicate, they walked him, saucer-eyed, ramrodstraight and sleep-deprived, into the infirmary.

The doctor, who was not at his best either, took only five minutes to examine him and hand over the prescription. Like the rest of the base, he was on edge with the news from the embassy.

This physician, a jittery premature grey-hair who suspected, correctly, that he was about to be ordered to work triage, had been up for a while. He had worked the previous night’s shift, then been told
not to sleep. He was to prepare to get on the helicopter that would take him to the city. The carnage at the embassy was said to be epic. He wasn’t looking forward to classifying it.

He had no remaining reserves of patience or ingenuity for what seemed like a garden-variety PTSD onset. He watched Mike Mazzoni swallow both tablets, roughly sufficient in narcotic capacity to take down a horse.

Premature Grey confirmed to his own satisfaction that he had done his job well enough, then confined the sergeant to quarters, where he was to be left undisturbed until morning.

Mike Mazzoni, however, would not be confined to his quarters. After his escort left, he made his way over to the Wreck Room, where he pulled out the last hidden bottle of Jack.