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Jeremiah had rebalanced himself, a young man’s natural caution, had pulled the knife back another inch and scootched himself forward on the bed. Not a well-trained move.

Also good.

‘Right,’ Rebecca said.

‘Where’d the other one go?’ the girl asked. ‘We saw two of you check in.’

‘He left,’ Rebecca said. ‘He went back.’

‘Back where?’

‘To Seattle. I’m off-duty.’

The girl awkwardly gripped the 9mm in both hands. She didn’t seem to know how to use it. Her eyes were dark brown and with her thin face and sallow skin she wasn’t very pretty. Rebecca saw, through the long dress, that the girl was at least six months pregnant. She looked more worried than angry but the slap had stung. And her finger was making little jerks on the trigger.

‘How long before you’re due?’ Rebecca asked, and then cringed inwardly. No need to remind her of her condition or her lost husband.

‘You
slut
,’ the girl said. ‘We were all doing God’s work.’

‘Shut up,’ Jeremiah said. ‘Let’s just cut her and get the hell out of here. We’ll wait in the other room.’

Again the knife touched Rebecca’s throat and drew blood. She could feel the young man’s arm tighten. She looked up at the window. Bright flickering yellow warmed the rectangle of inner curtains.

‘Something’s on fire,’ she said.

William heaped four rolls of toilet paper on the railing with tails dragging on the deck. He then squirted them all with streamers of orange-smelling fluid from the bottle of Goo-Gone he had found in the cleaning tray on the cart. Unwinding more toilet paper around the bottom of the railing, he made sure to leave a space in front of the door. He did not want them to shrink back into the room. He wanted them to open the door, look at the fire, and then try to escape—without hurting Rebecca.

‘What the hell are you up to?’ a man called from the parking lot. William took a book of motel matches—some people still rented smoking rooms, thank God—and lit the soaked, citrus-scented bundles. The result was immediate—a wall of brilliant flame right in front of the window to Rebecca’s room.

He reached around and pounded on the door. ‘Fire!’ he shouted. ‘Everyone out NOW!’

For an agonizing few seconds, he hung back flat to the wall. He shot a glance out to the street through the flames and then to the left, at people milling in the parking lot. They were staring up, mouths gaping. He did not dare shout for them to leave. No sign of patrol cars or fire trucks or any other assistance. The smoke billowed black under the roof. What a stupid ass thing to do. What if the whole place burned down?

How long until the manager or someone came running with an extinguisher and stood in his line of fire?

He heard shrill, childish cries and a hoarse shout inside the room and then the door opened. William stayed flat
against the wall. A hand clutching a steel blade poked out and then withdrew. He heard scuffling then a metallic pop—not a gunshot—and a mist of water puffed through the door. The room’s sprinkler system had gone off.

‘Fire!’ William shouted. ‘The roof’s collapsing! Get out now!’

A young man with blond hair lurched out, wiping water from his eyes, waving the knife as if fanning away the flames. William swung a quarter turn with gun in both hands, crouched, barrel pointing right at the center of the blond man’s torso.

‘FBI, drop the knife and get your hands up!’ William shouted. ‘Do it now!’ The flame ebbed but thick smoke blew onto both of them.

‘Jesus!’ the boy shouted. He did not drop the knife. He couldn’t see William or his gun. The smoke had finished the job the water had started. William began a pull, let it off. The boy stumbled blindly away from the door, blade wavering, pointing straight out, then down.

‘Drop the knife NOW!’

The young man shuddered and opened his hand. The knife handle hit the deck and bounced. Inside the room William heard a girl scream then a gunshot. The window blew out over the young man and he collapsed to his knees, covered with shards of glass. ‘Jesus, Jesus,’ he mewed.

Rebecca lurched out with a twist of blond hair in her fist. Her blouse had been ripped and pulled down around her shoulders. She tugged the girl in the gingham dress out onto the deck and flung her at the iron rail and the burning stacks of toilet paper. The girl bounced off, knocking flaming, smoking rolls down to the cars and asphalt. Rebecca and the girl were now between William and the crouching young man. Rebecca saw this through strings of wet hair and swung about with a dancer’s precision, pushing the girl at William. William caught her, twisted one of her arms around, and
had her face-down on the deck. He kneeled on top of her. Both of the girl’s hands were empty but clutching, scratching at his pants. He pressed a knee in her back hard enough to make the vertebrae pop. The girl oofed and got quiet.

‘Where’s the gun?’ William shouted.

Smoke rolled away.

The boy looked sideways, eyes wide and red. He reached out. Rebecca kicked the knife under the rail and over the parking lot. Then she kicked the young man in the side, hard, which put him once more on his back, and stomped him right in the groin with a bare bleeding foot. He curled up like a pillbug, alternately moaning and screaming. She flipped him over in the glass and pulled back both of his arms.

The manager came up from the other side, spraying foam over everything. ‘Fuck this!’ he was shouting. ‘You trying to burn me out?’

‘FBI,’ William said, wiping his eyes.

‘I’ve called the cops, you fuckwad, I’ve called the fire department—’

‘Got your cuffs?’ Rebecca called out. The young man jerked and struggled and she smacked him hard across the back of the head, then forced his face into the glass. William tossed her the cuffs from his belt. She caught them through a swinging arc of foam.

Rebecca’s broad, well-defined shoulders, smudged with soot, glistened as she bound the young man. With dripping hair askew, black brassiere revealed, slacks halfway down her hips—showing the top stretch of pink panties—she looked absolutely amazing. The young man gasped as she lifted her knee off his lower spine. The manager’s foam finally ran out and he flung the tank against the stucco. It bounced and rolled. They were all covered with hissing, dripping retardant.

‘Careful with the girl, she’s pregnant,’ Rebecca warned William.

She
had
humped up strangely. He eased her over on her side. The girl moaned between quick bursts of prayer.

Gun.
He leaned far enough to see a pistol on the floor of Rebecca’s room, far out of anyone’s reach.

‘Room’s clear,’ Rebecca said.

Below, tenants were backing out their cars and leaving. The manager shouted over the railing: they hadn’t paid their bills.

Chest heaving, Rebecca toed a blackened, sodden roll of toilet paper. ‘What the hell was that?’ she asked William.

‘Advanced tactics,’ William said.

She sucked in her breath, pulled up the shoulders of her blouse, and gave him the sweetest smile. ‘You bastard,’ she said.

The Superhawk hit a wall of air over the endless wrinkled blanket of the Zagros mountains. It shuddered like a stunned ox and fell for a few hundred feet until the blades growled, bit air again, and whanga-whanged like a Jamaican steel band. Fouad had never heard a sound like that and it made him go pale. He clutched at the belt over his slung seat.

Across from him, Special Agent Orrin Fergus signed a thumbs up and then tapped his nose. Fergus shouted, ‘The shit is mostly over. We’re coming into Diyala. That’s an Iraqi
muhafazah
. Province or whatever.’

‘Governorate,’ said the master sergeant on Fouad’s left. He was a compact, well-muscled man about Fouad’s age, fully tricked out in flak plate and desert camouflage, helmet overlaid with headphone and gogs and a rucksack full of folded plastic maps. His dedicated satlink kept him fully informed about activity in the area—what little activity there was. He was a connected kind of guy and looked like a robot samurai.

The crew chief moved to the rear. ‘Down in thirty. Use the green bucket if you are so moved. Captain Jeffries does not like a slippery deck.’ He looked hard at Fouad. ‘First time?’

Fouad nodded.

The crew chief used his boot to shift the bucket next to Fouad.

‘I will be fine,’ Fouad said, looking up with wide black eyes.

The crew chief grinned and walked back to his position on fire control.

‘They call Kifri UXO Central,’ Master Sergeant said. ‘Decades of back and forth between the Kurds and the Sunnis. The national animal is the Gambian rat. They use ’em to sniff out mines and ordnance. Happy little beasts, work like sonsabitches. Last time we were through here an Iraqi film company was making an epic about Arabs stomping Persians fourteen hundred years ago. Pretty big deal. Then the director stepped on a Coalition bomblet and blew off his leg. Took out a cameraman, too. Shit. They were feeling pretty low that day.’

‘Do they mind that we are here?’ Fouad asked.

‘The folks in Baghdad mostly don’t give a fuck,’ Master Sergeant said with a grin. ‘They’re supposed to be our allies, so we turn a blind eye when they kick Kurdish butt.’

Orrin Fergus moved over to Fouad’s side and shouted into his ear. ‘We’re going to meet up with Tim Harris’s team in Kifri. You’ll conduct the interrogation for us. Harris’s accent just makes ’em blink. How’s your skill at the local dialect?’

‘I don’t know,’ Fouad said, feeling unsure of himself, and for reasons other than his stomach. ‘Here they may speak Arabic, but also Kurdish, Turkish, or even Aramaic or Assyrian. If they are Yazidis—’

‘This year, they mostly speak Arabic,’ said Master Sergeant. ‘At least that’s what we’ve been told. I love surprises, don’t you? We’ll find out when we get there.’

‘If we find bodies, I’ll be busy,’ Fergus said. ‘So keep your eyes and ears open. Talk to the locals, if any, but keep your cards close. I hear there’s a fellow named Tabrizi or something like that waiting in town. They don’t need to know anything from us. Since we haven’t been issued MOPP gear, just filter masks and BAMs, anything requiring major decon will delay our start by ten minutes while the crew seals the cabin. We’ll have to wait for decon until we get back to
Incirlik. And if we’re dirty or acting weird—well, I hear Kifri is outstanding this time of year.’

Fergus specialized in bioweapons and had been qualified as a medical examiner before joining the FBI. Fouad muttered the acronyms under his breath: MOPP was Mission Oriented Protective Posture, BAM was Biological Agent Monitor.

The Superhawk circled the town.

‘Drop in five,’ the captain announced. ‘Master Sergeant is your god. We drop and then we go park and we will pickup, and you will be there on his command.’

Fouad nodded compliance, though the pilot could not see him.

Most of Kifri looked like a collection of shoeboxes kicked open by unruly children. Shattered brown domes and hollowed-out two-story houses clustered around the skeleton of a bazaar. Only a few of the houses and buildings were still standing. Six years of civil war and Kurdish cleansing and decades of tyranny before that—including phosphorus bombs from Saddam—had sucked most of the life out of the town. The Superhawk flew south over a ruined military installation, an antique, war-stamped moonscape.

These were the leftovers from when Americans had briefly dreamed they could save the world from terrorism, one miserable tyranny at a time. Now, a few Yanks still flew in, around, and about, and the Iraqis did very little if anything to stop them—everybody knew they were just buzzing, like flies.

Kifri was a poster child for the cancer of history and hatred and nation-building. Nations don’t get built—they grow like mold. Iraq was a whimpering mess, abandoned on the sidelines of a new war. Iran was the center of action now. Defiantly nuclear, it was being taken on—diplomatically, so far, but with many threats covert and otherwise—by the
UN, Europe, Russia, and even China. The Americans had opted in as junior partners, allowing that its allies had a bigger stake because they were within range of Iran’s missiles.

Americans no longer had much heart for direct fighting in Iraq, so they flew support and reconnaissance and pounded the ground in a few areas, hunting up intelligence.

Fouad tried to keep from shivering. Fergus and Master Sergeant shared a smoke. The sun through the windows swept brilliant squares over their chests as the Superhawk circled, and then they slowed and dropped. Master Sergeant unstrapped, found his balance, and motioned for the crew chief to throw open the door. The mid-morning glare blinded Fouad. Then he saw pale brown houses, broad unpaved streets, dry potholes, craters, broken windows under shattered wooden awnings, a two-story government building, Iraqi guards sitting and standing around the brick steps, smoking cigarettes and watching—and a Humvee flying a blue and yellow flag from its high antenna.

Fergus grabbed Fouad’s arm. ‘Let’s go.’

They jumped to the dirt street and ran from under the shadowy wind of the blades. A man in a khaki shirt and pale green cargo pants with lots of pockets, a camera around his neck, a big red head of hair and no hat matched speed and pumped Fouad’s hand and then swung about and waved to the Superhawk pilots. Fergus introduced him. This was Special Agent Tim Harris, Diplomatic Security, liaison in Iraq between the FBI and the CIA and definitely part of BuDark.

The pilot lifted the chopper away. Fouad looked over his shoulder.

‘Welcome to Kifri, home of the stupid and the brave,’ Harris said. ‘The weather today is dry and slightly uncool, sporadic pissing contests with the police guard, but no sign of a storm. We now proudly fly the blue and yellow flag of official Baghdad approval because they want to know who’s using
anthrax to kill Kurdish Jews in a town where there should not any longer be Kurds, much less Jews.’

The Master Sergeant opened the Humvee’s door and sat shotgun. He carried a machine pistol with an assault clip like a flattened ram’s horn. Harris had two Glocks, one in a shoulder holster, the second under his left cuff, above his boot. The Humvee had a ROAG—Remotely Operated Autotargeting Gun—a rapid-fire twenty millimeter mounted over the roof like a small steel sewage pipe.

Inside, with the engine running, the Humvee cooled quickly. They were surrounded by two inches of punch-suck armor, just barely enough to stop an old RPG, not enough to worry the nose-heavy, slag-splat anti-tank shell currently in fashion in these parts. Three UAVs—automated aerial drones—relayed data from hundreds of meters in the sky. Screens in the dashboard popped up as Harris spun the vehicle about. Sensors started pinging like sonar in a submarine, scoping out potential targets. Echoes from around corners attracted particular attention. Sound trackers on the roof could zero in on weapons action and coordinate return fire through UAVs and their only other air support, the Superhawk.

The vehicle had a Combat Guidance unit—it could drive itself to a rendezvous if its drive train and wheels were intact but humans inside were incapacitated. Fouad could not help but believe that it had eyes and ears and a will of its own. Machines had evolved faster than men in the fog of war.

The large white house on the outskirts of Kifri might once have been comfortable: a cement-walled single-story square surrounded a courtyard, the square itself fenced in by battered black iron and what might have once been a cactus garden. For blocks around, all the other houses were rubble.

The Humvee rumbled over a toppled gate and stopped. An older man in a worn dirty business suit with a white kerchief
wrapped round his head stood up from the porch and lifted his arm. Fergus stepped out first. Master Sergeant was more cautious. He moved slowly, surveying everything with critical eyes.

‘Superhawk is parking, gents,’ he announced, tapping his headphones. ‘We have forty-five minutes and you know I will pull y’all out before that.’

Harris opened his door last, throat bobbing.

Fouad followed Fergus and they stood by the Humvee.

The older man in the white kerchief approached Fouad with a suspicious glance at the others and cautiously extended his right hand. ‘
As-salaamu aleikum
,’ he greeted. Then he hugged Fouad and sniffed his cheeks. ‘I am glad you are here. It is not proper, what happened. We must be careful. This still is a house of death.’

All heads turned. An engine roared far off down a deserted street. A small rust-pocked Subaru Forester drove up to the gate in a cloud of dust. A tanned hairy arm stuck out and waved. Master Sergeant tapped his headphones as if to knock out what he was hearing. His lip curled.

‘Gents, home office says we have a mandatory guest.’

‘Hell, Kifri is the last place I’d expect to find Saddam’s hidden stockpiles,’ the large, barrel-chested man said as he approached the group through the gate. ‘My name is Edmond Beatty. Friends call me Beatty. To whom am I addressing my concerns?’ He held out his hand and raised a bushy eyebrow.

Master Sergeant introduced the group but the older Iraqi held back in the shadows, glaring resentfully.

Harris said, ‘Beatty and I know each other already.’

‘Pleasure’s mutual,’ Beatty said.

Fouad shook hands but felt he was missing something crucial—history. ‘And why are you here, Mr. Beatty?’ he asked. Boldness seemed called for—Harris did not like the man and
neither did Fergus. Master Sergeant seemed irritated but also amused.

‘I’m a retired colonel,’ Beatty said. ‘I served in Iraq in GW 2. Don’t ever call it the Coalition War to my face. Right, friends?’

‘Colonel Beatty is something more than local color,’ Fergus said. ‘He was given a State Department assignment, at the behest of six senators, to continue the search for Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons. That assignment has not been revoked, unfortunately.’

‘I heard about your plague house on the weed vine,’ Beatty said. ‘I wish you gentleman had called me. I could have scurried up here and gotten the facts and that would have saved the U.S. taxpayers some real money. Superhawks are expensive pieces of machinery. Bright and shiny. I am well acquainted with Dr. Mirza Al-Tabrizi. He represents the Shiites in Kifri, kind of a pooh-bah for the oppressed majority. The Kurds seem to like him, too. That does not make him an objective source, in my book.’

Al-Tabrizi folded his arms and leaned against the closed door.

‘We’d appreciate your standing second fiddle on this one, sir,’ Master Sergeant advised in a low tone.

‘That’s
play
second fiddle, not stand. I’ve been here, continuously, longer than any other American soldier,’ Beatty said. ‘A true gentleman never gives up on a good cause.’ He turned to Fouad. ‘Sir, like Fergus, you are Special Agent, FBI, am I correct? And connected somehow with this Bureau of Ultimate Darkness, or whatever the hell it’s called now?’

Fouad was about to speak when Beatty moved in, towering over him. ‘They drag you in here to interpret?’

‘His identity is not important to you, Beatty,’ Harris growled. ‘Bad enough you know who we are.’

Beatty swung around and looked them all in the face in
sequence. ‘I speak Kurdish, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, and Arabic,’ he said. ‘Six or seven dialects.’

‘All with a Tennessee accent,’ Harris added.

‘True, but I am understood wherever I go in this country. And who are we interviewing? Any live people, this time?’

‘Sir,’ Master Sergeant said, more forcefully. ‘You are subordinate to our mission. Whatever help you can render will be appreciated but you are not in charge here.’

‘Well, who in hell
is
in charge? On the ground, I mean.’

‘That would be me,’ said Harris.

‘Lead on,’ Beatty exclaimed with a broad smile. He clapped Harris on the back. ‘I will call you sir, and mean it. Just explain to me what in hell anthrax is doing this far north.’

Inside the house the stench of death was strong, but carried on wafts of cool moist air, the smell seemed somehow unnatural and frustrated. Fouad watched the men move through the empty trash-filled rooms with detachment. He did not like this strange sense of calm. There was a perversity in him that his mother would not have appreciated but that his father might have understood too well, and it had been exaggerated by his training at Quantico.
To see the awful things is to see life as it really is. It makes you sharper, stronger, superior. You can stand it when others cannot.

That is why young men go off to war.

The house had looked better from the outside. Most of the rooms were open to the air, with gaping shell holes in the roof. The courtyard was filled with broken and burned sticks of furniture. Someone had tried to stay warm in the winter.

Al-Tabrizi took Fouad by the shoulder. ‘Be at ease with me,’ he said in Arabic. ‘I take solace that Muslims at least sometimes speak with these men and temper them. The bull, Beatty, is not respected around here. He has made too many deals, spoken from both sides of his mouth to gain information.’

‘I heard that, you old bastard,’ Beatty called out.

Al-Tabrizi ignored him.

‘Then tell me, what brings you here?’ Fouad asked the old man.