The General and the Elephant Clock of Al-Jazari (13 page)

“Sir? General Mitchel?” He looked over at Sam. Fields had turned around, was watching him from the front seat. “We’re here.”

The Regency was blue and white, marble and ocean and sky, and it looked as opulent as a palace. He could see the Mediterranean out past the white marble columns and the swimming pool that was as bright and shiny as a jewel. The place looked deserted.

The driver came around, opened his door. “Thank you,” John said.

The man had the curly dark hair common in Tunisia, pale, pockmarked cheeks, and he gave John a little bow. “If you need anything, sir, a driver or a tour guide, I would be very pleased to assist you.” He spoke English beautifully, with a faint touch of Oxford. He offered a card, and John took it, looked down.
Youssef Shakir, Tours in French, English, and Arabic,
followed by a cell number.

“Mr. Shakir, do you speak these languages yourself?”

“Yes, I do.”

John switched to Arabic. “Then perhaps I could ask your indulgence to assist me in reacquainting myself with your beautiful language?”

“I would be most honored, sir,” he said, in the same language. “I am at your service.”

“Fields, do we have anything scheduled? Or can I ask Mr. Shakir to come tomorrow for an hour?”

Fields shrugged. “If you want. We won’t be done by tomorrow, that’s for sure. Himself’s daughter is waiting inside. Said she wanted to tell you herself what she’d done.”

“Who, Jen? Jennifer Painter?”

Fields’s mouth turned down. “Yeah.”

“Sam, go on in and see her if you want.”

“That’s okay, sir. You can go first.” Youssef handed him a card as well, and Sam tucked it into his portfolio. “I’m General Mitchel’s aide,” he said, and the Tunisian gave another small bow.

“I will bring your luggage into the hotel.”

They had several porters and hotel desk staff helping them walk the ten steps into the hotel and vying for the job of carrying their few bags. John left Sam to handle all their checking in duties. Fields pushed through the doors to the outdoor patio and took a seat by the pool. His back was to John and the rest of the staff in the lobby, and John wondered about the attitude. If the man had been holding a big sign that shouted, “Leave me out of this!” he couldn’t have been clearer. Youssef was waiting next to his car, watching them.

“Sam.” Brightman left the desk and walked over to him. “Make sure our driver was paid. I didn’t see Fields give him any money.”

“Yes, sir.”

Brightman was carefully ignoring the girl who was waiting in one of the big lobby chairs, her feet propped up and a tablet computer gone to sleep in her lap. She had her head back, a faint snore coming from her partially open mouth. Even discounting the fact she was caught napping, John had to admit the child was not an attractive girl. She had a pug nose and ginger freckles spattered across her cheeks. Her hair was curly ginger brown, pulled back into an untidy ponytail. She couldn’t have been much over five feet tall. Was this humble little bean of a girl the one Sam was waiting for? Why, for God’s sake? The boy was as handsome as a Viking. He nudged her foot, and she frowned in her sleep, wiped across her nose with the back of her hand, then blinked wide hazel eyes up at him.

Sharp, he thought, one of those girls who always thought she knew best. Isn’t that what Sam had said? The girl sat up, scanned the lobby until she spotted Sam, then she stood up and held out her hand. She was wearing a shapeless brown dress nearly down to her ankles, with a scarf over the shoulders that could be pulled up over her hair. “General Mitchel? I’m Jennifer Painter.”

John shook her hand. “Hello, Jennifer. Do you have some critical information, or can you wait for Sam and give both of us a briefing?”

She blinked in surprise. “I can update Sam, but I thought I better tell you. You’ve come to get the guys out, right? I know where they are.” She hesitated. “And why they were taken.”

“Then let’s wait for Sam. He’s my aide on this op and will have operational decision making in my absence.”

“Operational decision making? Do I know what that means? Is that army-speak?”

John smiled down at her grumpy face. “I think you know what it means and have been around lots of army-speak in your life. But just to clarify, that means if I’m not around, you take your orders from him.”

“I don’t take orders from anyone in my father’s company.”

John thought about what Fields had said, something about Jen waiting to tell him what she had done. “Unless you being in Tunisia had nothing whatsoever to do with two Americans being dragged off to prison, then I might suggest you check the attitude and consider the benefits of teamwork.”

She huffed a little, crossed her arms over the chest of the baggy dress, but she was still until Sam finished checking them in and led the way upstairs to their suite.

Sam put the computers on the large desk, unpacked them and plugged them in, and when that was done, he turned to Jen and gave her an awkward hug. She had sat down in one of the chairs in the suite and watched him, her eyes narrowed. John suspected she was thinking up what she would say to him, the first time he assumed operational command over her.

The suite had two bedrooms, each with a bathroom, and the living room between them was bigger than his living room at home. And like his living room at home, he was sorry to see, the room was furnished with a white leather couch curved into a U and an ottoman shaped like a leather polka dot. Oh, not white,
cream
. Where the hell were all the brown sofas?

He put his ditty bag on the bathroom sink and hung up the suit bag, but he didn’t unpack any further. They needed to be ready to move out quickly, if need be, and he did not want to settle in. He went back into the living room, looked at Sam and Jen. Both of them had their arms crossed now and were looking off in opposite directions. “Okay,” he said. “What happened?”

“Amira Shakir is a pro-democracy blogger,” Jen said, sitting up. “She’s been reporting on what’s happening in Tunisia since the revolution, and she has been critical of the efforts to form a new government and the rising power of the Salafists. There is a feeling that they are going to try and impose stricter traditional Islamic guidelines for behavior and dress on the women here, and they don’t want that, not after having years of freedom to get educated and work. She was being harassed online, and then the threats became dangerous and personal. I smuggled her out of the country, over the border into Algeria, and pointed her toward Europe with money and papers. The Salafists found out who had helped her, I don’t know how. My name is still associated with my father’s business, though I am not a part of it. When those Rangers came into Carthage to go sightseeing, they got picked up.”

“Are you sure this is part of it, what you’re doing with the women?”

“No, I’m not sure. That guy from the Ministry, Ali Bahktar, he picked me up for questioning and asked me about her. How long she had been working for my father’s company. How much was she paid to spy on the government and spread Western lies? When had the CIA recruited her? I think he would have put me in jail but he was afraid to. Then less than a week later, these guys are in Carthage and they get picked up. Everybody heard about it, because it happened down at the site, you know, the UNESCO site. I got the feeling what he did, throwing them in jail, had not exactly been sanctioned by the Ministry of Justice, and if he took me in, too, he couldn’t keep it under the radar.”

“Where did he question you? In his office?”

Jen shook her head. “The first time at the Ministry, and then at the prison. I went down there to demand their release. He bragged about where he had them taken.” She hesitated. “9 Avril Prison. It’s a shit hole, one of the worst. It’s where they used to throw the political prisoners, the Islamic clergy under the old regime. And the thing is, I gave her my papers. My passport and ID so she could cross the border safely. I haven’t been to the embassy yet. I wanted her to get as far as she could. So I’m sort of stuck here. I might be in trouble if anyone demands to see my passport.”

“Agreed. And now you’re on Ali Bahktar’s radar,” John said.

“He’s a fuckhead of the first order,” Jen said. “But he’s dangerous.”

“Absolutely right.”

“I thought maybe I could get some information that would be useful. I knew my father would send someone. But Bahktar wouldn’t tell me anything when I demanded an explanation, just sneered and gave me some Salafist prop about women.”

“You went down to that prison without any identification? Without your passport? Jen, what were you thinking? You could have disappeared, and nobody would have been able to find you. I mean, what the fuck?” It was the first time Sam had spoken.

Jen looked furious. “Yes, I did, and thank you for pointing out that mistake, Sam. But I didn’t know what else to do, and I was afraid for them! Bahktar, he said they beat the guys up, and two days had passed and nothing happened, and I had to do something! I didn’t know when you were coming, General, or who he was going to send, but I couldn’t just let it go. Why did you wait so long to come? It’s been days.”

Sam turned to John. “Sir, she’s not safe out on the streets now.”

“Agreed,” John said. He watched Jen gathering herself up, ready to argue. “I’m tired, and I don’t want to argue. What’s the local time, Jen?”

They had set their watches on the plane, but John wanted to head off any drama. He had the feeling this pair of kids, with their big hearts and misplaced bravery, had the rest of their long lives to act out their particular theater and he was very sure he didn’t want to be in the audience. What was with the kids these days, they didn’t know what a closed door was for? Kim had to climb into Abdullah’s lap right at the kitchen table? He and Gabriel had spent their lives waiting for a small room and a closed door to have any sort of private conversation, and John thought now the discipline of having to wait to speak was probably a good one.

“Okay, we need food; I also want you to gather up a care package for the boys. Maybe I can leave some things with them when we go into the prison to try and see them. Some bottles of water, some small packages of sealed food, and the little first aid supplies. We might not need a care package but I want to have one ready just in case.”

“Yes, sir.”

John turned back to the computers. “Jennifer, can you get the Wi-Fi access code and get us online please, these two laptops and my tablet. I’ll be back in a moment.”

John took the elevator back down to the lobby, found Fields drinking a beer and staring moodily out over the pool. The white sandy beach and the ocean beyond were turning the smudgy purple of dusk. “Fields.”

“Sir? You want a beer?”

“Yeah, thanks. Whatever you’re having is good.”

They waited a moment, and a waiter brought him a beer, tried to unfold a white linen napkin in his lap. The beer was icy cold in his throat. It wasn’t tequila but it was pretty damn good.

“Fields, so what’s happening in Carthage?”

“I feel like a damn babysitter!” He lifted the beer to his mouth, and John thought he was probably trying to shut himself up before he said something that got him in trouble. “Himself told me to watch the girl but not to let her know or interfere. Sir, that’s like watching a tornado that’s heading right toward you, and all you can do is run like hell when it gets close. She made me the second day. I let her know pretty damn fast I didn’t want to get in the middle of whatever fit she was throwing to try and punish her father but she just blew me off.”

“You think what she’s doing here for Amnesty International is trying to punish her father?”

“She’s not with Amnesty International anymore. They moved on a couple of months ago. No, she’s decided to protect the pro-democracy movement, specifically the female bloggers. They are being targeted, no question about that, but I’m not sure she isn’t making things worse by calling attention to herself and them. The girl has not learned when to shut up!”

“Wait, how many female pro-democracy bloggers are running around Tunisia?”

“Hundreds,” Fields said, his face gloomy. He studied his beer bottle but it was empty.

John smiled at the picture in his mind of hundreds of female pro-democracy bloggers, holding back the tides of repression. “Does it seem to you she’s actually having an effect?”

Fields shrugged. “I’m not sure. When these women are identified by the media, when they give interviews, for instance, they may get more day-to-day hate mail or get hassled on the streets, but they seem safer for having been publically identified. Once they’ve been interviewed by the BBC, for instance, I think the Ministry is hesitant to make them disappear. Not that safety matters to any of them. They just want to get their message out into the world.”

“One more question. Our driver, where did you find him?”

“She brought him. He drove her here. He’s the father of one of these girls. I don’t know which one.”

“Okay.”

“Now you’re here, I’m going to ask Himself if I can get back to work.”

John gave him a look. “Really? When you have a view of the Mediterranean from a five star luxury hotel and all the beer you can drink?”

“I’d rather go sit in the desert with a bunch of roughnecks who haven’t had a proper shower in a month than tail around behind that girl.”

“Before you flee from a young woman who weighs less than a hundred pounds, and correct me if I’m wrong, Fields, you were asked to watch over a girl who was engaged in protecting other women from torture and death at the risk of her own safety, women who were trying to bring about a democratic change to this country against terrible odds, am I missing anything…?”

Fields stared at the white marble beneath his feet, didn’t say anything.

“Can I just clarify? You watched her get picked up by a group of Salafists for questioning? You let her walk into 9 Avril Prison, alone, to demand that Forsyth and Green be released? Have you seen Forsyth and Green? Have you ascertained their physical condition? What are they being charged with?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

John stood up and set the beer bottle down. “Enjoy the roughnecks, Fields.”