Jihadi (12 page)

Fastened by his wrists and ankles with transparent plastic cord to a pair of large, crossed planks, a human X on a low, grey slab, Thelonius found himself pinned, a butterfly on an examining-board. His cat had not yet been poisoned by antifreeze. He had not yet become a trophy to be displayed at the Freedom Banquet. He did not yet have a limp. Back in the Republic now, back in that close, stinking, windowless basement, under interrogation and naked (which explained, he reminded himself, the translator’s refusal to meet his eye), he didn’t yet know the girl’s name was Fatima. He didn’t know anything about her.

Thelonius must have been quite a catch for the intelligence arm of the Islamic Republic. From the stuff they found in his backpack, they probably deduced two things right away. First, that he was someone involved at a high level in the exciting world of American espionage. Second, that he was taking photographs of military facilities the Americans weren’t supposed to see close up.

Thelonius took those pictures because people in Washington wanted to be sure no one in the Islamic Republic was building a nuclear weapon or giving nuclear materials to terrorists. They weren’t. Perhaps they are now.

The plump, dark-eyed little man standing in front of him gabbled something to the girl. He scowled at Thelonius.

‘Who are you?’ the girl translated. There was something odd about her voice.

‘I pass,’ Thelonius said. ‘The embassy will lodge a protest, you know. I’m an employee. You have no right to hold me here.’

The girl translated. The dark-eyed man chuckled, then said something in a high-pitched, contemptuous tone that rose to a peak at the end. ‘That is a debatable point,’ the girl pronounced carefully.

Now Thelonius knew what had struck him as strange about her
cadence and inflections. They were American: a miraculously clear, upper-tier, New England-accented tongue, set off with only the vaguest hint of the Republic. She appeared to be eighteen or nineteen. She was still staring at the ceiling.

‘I am a contractor who works on air-conditioning projects for the U.S. embassy here,’ Thelonius said. ‘And I want my passport back.’ That part was true.

The plump little dark-eyed man nodded to someone almost out of Thelonius’s field of vision, a uniform standing in an obscure corner of that large, dank, concrete-and-vomit-scented room. Thelonius heard the uniform retrieve something from a rack of some kind, heard him carry it across the room using brisk steps. He looked at the little man, who was staring back at him as one would stare at a trapped animal. Thelonius’s eyes returned to the dark, gold-framed face of the teenage girl transfixed by a point somewhere near the dead ceiling fan above him.

A wall of water slammed into his face, roared at him. An instant later, someone’s fist in his solar plexus. Then an exquisitely targeted, rapid blow to his right knee, no seeing it coming or going. It might have been a crowbar or a baseball bat. The girl gasped.

Despite his training, Thelonius had been distracted. Caught unawares, seized deep in the throat and nose by a burning, tentacled wave of pain now working its way through his sinuses, assaulted by simultaneous missiles howling through his abdomen and the angle of his newly dead right leg, he still did not regret looking at her face.

He hadn’t protected anything. He spent a few long moments reassembling himself, hacking, coughing up blood and water and straining with his bound hands, in vain, for his howling knee. She was staring upward again, or still, at any rate staring away from him.

The little man, who wore a gold ring, jabbered for some time. He had a high-pitched voice, much higher than the girl’s, and he seemed to speak too rapidly for any language.

‘Oddly,’ the olive-skinned girl continued impassively, ‘the senior representatives of the State Department disagree with you. I might add that they also disagree with your passport, which, of course, the State Department issued. They are apparently under the impression that you are a diplomat. Yet your passport makes no mention of this.’

The tiny dark-eyed man paused, then posed, in that unique, irritating upper-register intonation of his, what must have been another question. ‘It is a bizarre discontinuity,’ the girl pronounced flatly, ‘your having no prior knowledge that you are a State Department official rather than an air-conditioning repairman. Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Tell him I want my passport back,’ Thelonius said, staring straight at the girl, who would not look at him. He coughed and spat water and snot, then laughed. ‘Tell him I’ll fix the air conditioning in this place if he does.’

The little man bleated something in reply, but Thelonius understood only his own cover name, Davis Raymonds.

‘Shall we go for another swim, Davis Raymonds?’

She didn’t mean it. Her voice still soft, incongruous. Her eyes still inaccessible, trained upward. His leg still shrieking and throbbing.

Thelonius’s real name was Thelonius Liddell, of course, but he
wasn’t supposed to tell that to anyone. Davis Raymonds: He wasn’t sure why the handlers always chose such implausibly normal-sounding names as false identities for the people doing covert operations. The generic names sounded instantly fake to anyone with American connections and only made life more difficult. (By the time he got to the Beige Motel, the dead guy recalls, he didn’t have a name anymore.)

‘Tell him my name,’ Thelonius said, ‘is Chad Reese.’

This was another lie. Chad Reese was an old friend of Thelonius’s from high school. He was a drama geek with long, dirty-blond hair, who had tried in vain to get Thelonius to smoke marijuana in his dank basement, which, as it happened, vaguely resembled this basement. Thelonius, who had refused any and every mind-altering substance offered to him since The Accident, had insisted that Chad not smoke pot around him because of the danger of a contact high.

The little fat man barked. ‘Spell it,’ the girl instructed, in a calm voice, on the little fat man’s behalf.

‘C-H-A-D space R-E-E-S-E.’

The interrogator shook his head warily. Something about the way Thelonius had spelled the name did not appear to agree with him. He chattered at length.

‘You find yourself in a deeper difficulty still,’ the girl translated over the chattering. ‘You do not lie well. And I have been trained in the detection of lies. Which makes me a good liar, too. A good liar spots a poor liar every time. Odd for a man in your position to be a poor liar. It will not go easily for you here. Recall. You have murdered two people on a city street. One of them a small girl. There are dozens of witnesses.’

There were, too. That had been the problem. Witnesses studying
him closely when he was supposed to be gone. A van sent out to pick up Thelonius showed up two blocks too far south and found itself unable to navigate through the crowd. The van’s driver had gotten out of the vehicle, obtained a visual on Thelonius from perhaps nine hundred feet away, re-entered the van, and attempted to create an alternate route by utilizing a one-way street in unorthodox fashion. That improvisation failed: A stray motorcyclist struck the speeding van, incapacitating it and leaving Thelonius to deal with local law enforcement. So many failures. Someone, somewhere, would analyze all the flaws in the process and correct them in due course. Becky, perhaps.

‘You are lying and you are guilty,’ she said, emotionless, as the chattering stopped. ‘You will face Islamic law.’

Afterwards, in the father’s briefcase, nothing but a Koran.

‘Tell him he has no right to hold me here,’ Thelonius said, ‘because I work for the American embassy. Tell him I have places I have to be. People I have to see. And while you’re at it, remind him your religion forbids the mistreatment of suspects, even sceptics. Tell him I have my rights. Tell him Allah has all prior knowledge, and even though Allah has seen fit to make me a sceptic of Islam, I respect His will in the matter.’

For the first time, she met his gaze. Her eyes flashed.

It was not anger, exactly, or even disappointment. It was the expression of one who is no longer avoiding a situation, but choosing it and present to it. When she resumed her task, she translated Thelonius’s words while staring straight into his eyes.

No fear.

When she was done she looked back up at the ceiling.

The little man paused, then gabbled again. What he said appeared to disorient the girl, who shook her gold head briskly after he was done speaking, as if to disentangle herself from what she had heard. There was a silence, followed by a single sharp, incomprehensible word from the little dark-eyed man with the moustache.

The girl drew in a deep breath, held it for a beat, and shouted
something at the little uniformed man, who looked at her with disgust, stepped toward her, and struck her sharply across the face with the back of his hand.

She swayed with the impact, regained equilibrium, did not flinch. Her eyes narrowed and glowed. A long, red welt began to form across her cheek and onto the bridge of her nose, a thin trail of blood at its edge.

The interrogator resumed his position, gabbled once again, pronouncing the name ‘Davis Raymonds’ as though it were a beloved obscenity. Then he shouted his final word. He looked back at the girl.

‘The religion per se is not at issue here,’ the girl said, her voice devoid of all emotion. ‘If the religion were our subject, I should not have permitted Fatima to accompany me into interrogation today, so that she might have the pleasure of inspecting you, Davis Raymonds.’

The little man glared at her again. He shouted, in English, the word ‘prick’. Apparently he knew just enough English to confirm the absence of the word he was waiting for.

The girl set her mouth into a grimace, breathed deep, fixed her attention on the ceiling, and spoke: ‘So that she might have the pleasure of inspecting your prick, Davis Raymonds.’ Dark blood flowed now from her right nostril. She was weeping, but she made no sound.

‘I am so, so sorry,’ Thelonius whispered to her.

She closed her soft wet eyes.

Indelible was sometimes mistaken for a child.

Tiny, bug-eyed, barely five feet of him, with spidery little limbs: not the best profile, perhaps, for a doctor who treats adults, but serviceable, and even an advantage, for one whose aspiration is to heal children. His physique and his face sent a silent message of compassion: ‘I understand what it is to look overmatched.’

Indelible was logging onto his computer, having satisfied himself that his wife and son were asleep. He checked his email and saw this message:
Leave Islamic City immediately and take your family
.

Indelible sniffed twice, took a long sip of Darjeeling tea. After he had swallowed, he said, ‘Allahu Akbar.’

He checked his next email, which came from an account whose address he did not recognize, and he noted the heading, in English:
Who are you?

He put down his tea, clicked on the message, and saw that the body was empty.

He clicked ‘reply’ and wrote, in English,
Who cares?

Before Indelible could hit ‘send’, his front door collapsed, and armed men in black surrounded him, their faces all curved black Plexiglas. He counted seven of them, each pointing a black assault rifle toward him.

‘I surrender,’ said Indelible.