The Sleeper (6 page)

If you know you're dead, you know you can do anything. The doctor's voice wanted a little candle of hope burning inside of me. As long as it did, I'd be careful. But I knew I was a dead man. My faith in that fact was stronger than anything he could tell me. And I only had one idea about Heaven: I wanted to hold that shotgun in my hands and pull the trigger. Maybe there wasn't another shell in it. Maybe that's why they left it lying there on top of the fucking pistachios somewhere in the dark. Maybe it wasn't there at all. Maybe they moved it when I was passed out. Maybe I couldn't remember just where the hell it was. Who the fuck knew? Who cared? If I failed, I was already as fucked as I could be. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. And the doctor's voice had made me as free as I was ever going to be.

A moan came from the back room. The moan of a woman. I shivered. Whatever she was doing, I hoped she kept at it.

My face and shoulder slid across the floor as I pushed with my right leg toward the gun I thought would be somewhere to my left. Too slow. I rolled over so the tire was in the small of my back. Flashes of light, pure pain, shot behind my eyeballs. But I was moving. In a wild flailing back-kick, I was moving faster. Faster! My head hit a burlap bag and suddenly I was breathing some kind of spice like powdery fire. Gagging. Coughing. But on my knees. Felt the front of another bag with my face. Another choking powder. Then the rocks of incense. My face felt the cool of blued steel.

The main lights of the room went on. She was coming from the back. Let her. Let her get close, real close. Falling as I stood, I twisted on top of the bag. The tire around my gut sank into the loose contents of the sacks. I hadn't expected that—but it was everything. Now I had some leverage. The gun was underneath me, pointing somewhere into the room. I angled over it, burying the tire deeper into the soft bags so I could get a better grip. There, the trigger. The gun jumped to life; the heat of the barrel touched my leg; the noise rang in my ears. I wrenched myself upright and turned, ready to be beaten to death, but, now, to stand and see it coming.

She was on the ground. The blast, like the bite of some enormous shark, had taken a huge piece of her side and stripped most of the flesh from her right arm. Blood and pieces were sprayed across the white bags of couscous on the far wall. Her long white legs were bare beneath the shredded smock. Her back arched impossibly, inhumanly. She quivered and jerked for a couple of seconds, the circuits in her body out of control, and then she was dead as she could be. Her veil, still pinned beneath her throat, soaked up the blood seeping from her mouth and nose.

I limped to the counter and used it slowly to pry the tire off me, my hands and arms shaking, my whole body shaking now beyond my power to control. In the back room near the neatly folded jeans she'd left on a chair, I found her purse and spilled out the contents. Her identity card, Maria Pilar Seco de Shami, showed a brunette, and gave her home address. Stumbling, I gathered up my own pants from the floor and took them into the back to wash them as best as I could, and as fast as I could, in the sink. I wore them wet into the heat of the Granada night.

 

The police who came to the hospital didn't believe me when I told them I was just a backpacker who'd been mugged. But this was a tourist town. If the victim didn't want to push it, the cops weren't going to press the question. They didn't ask me anything about Pilar. I don't think they found her until days later, when the stink of the corpse overpowered the smell of the spices.

I went to her apartment the afternoon after she died. I had the keys from her purse. From across the street, I watched the place for about two hours before I made my move. It was in a block that was square and modern but already run-down. There were not many people around in the early afternoon, a few women, fewer men. None had a limp, none could show me the doctor's face that, I realized now, I'd only imagined.

The inside of the apartment was almost sterile. The computer was in a little bedroom just off the front hall. The hard drive was gone. There were no floppies, no CDs anywhere. All cleared out.

I started rooting through the closets, the cabinets, under the beds. But this was a strange kind of home. There were no wedding pictures, no albums. There had never been any children here, I thought.

On the wall in the living room was an embroidered plaque with the Arabic script for “Allah.” I looked behind it. Nothing.

Nothing.

A television with a box of cheap videos next to it, mostly kung-fu movies I'd never heard of.

I checked the answering machine. No messages. I looked in the trash cans for some scrap of paper, some receipt, anything to give me a clue. But they were clean and empty.

 

The shred of paper from my pocket, the one Pilar gave me, seemed to puzzle the taxi driver. “Albaicín?” he said. I nodded. He looked closely at me, like he was trying to read the bruises on my face. We drove up a hill into tiny, winding streets. At the entrance to an alley he couldn't enter, he stopped and declared, “Aljibe del Gato. Is not long. You find number four.”

There was no number four.

I looked around the corners to see if there was a tourist shop, or any kind of shop right there that might sell souvenir letter openers. I checked the street signs again. Calle Aljibe del Gato. At one end was Calle María de la Miel. At the other was Calle Pilar Seco. Less than nothing.

 

“Jump Start Restaurant, best burgers in Kansas, what can we do for you?”

“Hey, Sugar.”

“Hey, Stranger.”

“How's everybody?”

“ ‘Everybody,' is fine. My little girl's not so good.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she misses her daddy.”

“He misses her. He misses her so much you can't believe it. And her mommy, too.”

There was a long silence.

“You get a package?”

“I picked up a package yesterday.”

“Good. Good. But, you know, some folks might stop paying their bills.”

“What's that supposed to mean? What are you talking about?”

“I mean—I mean, that was a good package, wasn't it?” It was twenty-five thousand dollars.

“Very good, but I don't understand what's going on. What are you talking about? Quit playing this damn game.”

“Yeah.”

“I don't care about the damn money. I want you back here.”

“Yeah.”

“Don't you think the President and the army and the whole U.S. government can do this without you?”

“No. I—I can't have this conversation right now. I have to go, Sugar.”

“Coward,” she said. “You fucking coward.”

All I wanted to do was sleep, and for an hour or two I did, but the painkillers were wearing off and the aches in my legs, my shoulders, and along my ribs were excruciating. I popped 800 milligrams of ibuprofen. “Ranger candy,” we used to call it. Short of morphine, it was the best you could do. Next door there was another American, so drunk that he knocked from one side of the hall to the other every time he went to the bathroom to get sick, which was a lot. Once he leaned in my door and I thought he was going to heave right there. I turned on the light and got ready for a fight. All he had on were his jockey shorts. He stared at me with glassy blue pupils that jumped out of red nests of veins. I don't think he really even saw me. Then he managed to choke back the puke and stagger away.

The room in the hostel was like a cell. The air was still and hot. There was nothing to stop my mind from spinning, and when I was completely awake in the dark, thinking of Betsy, I felt my heart turn to dust.

I could not give up, I thought—and I thought I could not go on. Could anything be more important than going back to Kansas? If I don't go home, I might lose everyone I am trying to protect. But how can I protect them from my past? And when the second wave of terror comes, what then? I hoped Griffin and the Agency and even the fucking Feds were doing a better job than I was. I hoped to hell they were. Maybe it was time to pray, I thought, and then hated myself for thinking it.

After Bosnia, and after the terror that I almost unleashed, I realized men were better off not asking God for help, because the answers they thought they heard were too horrible. I stared at the ceiling. Yes. About that much I was right. It was better to look for God than to find Him. I had searched, and while I was searching I was as good a man as I could be. It was when I thought I'd found Him that I was the worst.

What you need right now, Kurt, is not prayers, it's reasoning. There are explanations for what you've seen. Al-Shami may be many things—doctor, terrorist, torturer—but he is also a businessman. Import-Export. He trades in spices and foods. Where does he get them? I couldn't begin to think. But I could begin to work.

The drunk was heaving his guts out down the hall. I looked in the open door of his room. His passport had fallen on the floor beside the bed.

 

The little hole-in-the-wall cybercafé near the center of Granada was still open and I could hear the sounds of gunfire, explosions, and the groans of death even out on the street. A bunch of teenage boys were on half the terminals playing Quake III or Counter-Strike, interactive shoot-outs in dark passages among mystical enemies and imaginary terrorists. The noise distracted me, rattled me. A couple of other kids were playing interactive American football and every so often I found myself staring blankly at their screens. I felt like a player running downfield waiting for a long pass: I was way out in front of everybody else, but I didn't know the pattern, didn't have any blockers, didn't even know what the quarterback looked like.

Concentrate. Read. It's just over two weeks since the attacks on New York and Washington and there is a tremendous amount of information available from public sources: newspaper articles, court documents, endless opinions by instant analysts. At home, Americans are still mourning, still sifting through what they thought they knew about the men in the suicide planes. And it isn't just the death and destruction that makes them grieve, and it isn't just revenge that they want. There is a question at the center of their sadness and anger that only Americans would ask: “How did it happen that those nineteen men lived and worked and ate and drank and laughed among us, right here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and they didn't learn to love us?”

Overseas, President Bush is focusing everyone's attention on Afghanistan: Osama, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and all those “evil doers” in Kabul and Kandahar. Meanwhile the Europeans are rounding up the usual suspects—people they've been watching for years. But there is a big problem, and you can see it just from reading the papers. The teams that hijacked flights AA077, AA011, UA175, and UA093 didn't operate out of Afghanistan. They operated out of Europe. And America. And they never were the usual suspects. Now their operation is over. Their lives are over. Their trail is a dead end.

A lot of the information that was coming out as news was really years old and a lot came from an Algerian caught at the Canadian border in late 1999 with a bomb he was going to use to blow up L.A. International Airport. He turned state's evidence and testified in court about Osama's operations. He said the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan were organized by nationality. He said he'd seen Swedes and Germans there. He said he'd seen dogs killed with cyanide gas, and had been told you could use gas like that near the air intakes of big buildings to kill hundreds of people. He also talked about the gatekeeper, a man who received the holy war's volunteers when they came, and told them where to go when they went out. Abu Zubayr. The recruits were sent to him in Pakistan, where he looked them over with his one good eye.

Abu Zubayr was the man who finally separated the minnows from the sharks. But in 1999 Abu Zubayr dropped out of sight. Nobody seemed to know what happened to him. Maybe he was in Afghanistan. Maybe he was in some Pakistani dungeon. Or maybe he disappeared because he was the one man who knew every fish in the sea, and he had a new assignment: to prepare the second wave.

What interested me most was Abu Zubayr's cover. He was a honey merchant. In Abu Seif's address book there were addresses for several different import and export companies. To the extent that I could cross-check what they traded, they all seemed to have one product in common whether they were in New York, Granada, Aden, Peshawar, or Nairobi, whether they were called Shami Goods and Services or Asl Sweets. They all sold honey.