Jihadi (2 page)

He tried not to write this book, but, as a dead guy, felt he had an obligation to do so. He owed her that.

He counts as a dead guy, even though his heart beats, his blood flows, and his mind races, six out of every seven days, within a ten-metre-by-ten-metre cell in the containment unit he calls The Beige Motel. He used to live in a place called Salem, Massachusetts. Now he lives here.

They pride themselves on consistency at The Beige Motel. They see to it that your fluorescent lights never go out. They make certain the brittle, E-flat hum of the place never varies. They follow a strict time scheme, confirmed daily by whether or not you have just been served scrambled eggs on Styrofoam. The plate of scrambled eggs is set on a tray that they place in a creaking, rotating compartment built right into your locked door. Scrambled eggs mean morning. Anything else means later.

He supposes they could switch things up and serve him scrambled eggs at dinnertime to mess with his sense of time. If they wanted, they could. They do mess with his sense of time. So far they have never done that, though.

He misses his wife.

Every seventh day he hears the door groan: Sunday. It opens, and
someone leads him away. He inspects a soundproofed enclosure of linoleum and echoes called the Yard. In the Yard, he discusses world affairs with the other guests and reconfirms that morning remains morning by staring at a rectangular sheet of glass set so high into one wall that the place feels, to him, ever so slightly like a church. The glass is probably bulletproof. Only sky is visible through it.

He has concluded that this sheet of glass in the Yard’s wall happens to have exactly the same length-to-width ratio as the nineteen leaves of blank paper AbdulKarim smuggles to him each week. Sometimes, when he is writing, he imagines he can see the gold of early dawn through the window in the Yard. He imagines this sheet, on which he now writes, as that impossibly high-mounted window. He imagines it has just lowered itself and opened for him. He imagines golden light, imagines flying toward it.

Whatever he actually sees through that big, inaccessible, rectangular window in the Yard – sleet or clouds or, lately, swirling dust – means a new week has begun. Ten hours into that week, his day has vanished, and he makes his way, escorted, back to his own little corner of the Beige Motel. There are two beds there, but no one lives in the tiny compartment with him. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t live in it, either. He died months ago, or might as well have.

Somehow, he got on the bad side of a network of unjust institutions. These institutions interrogate people and make them disappear.

He just wrote, ‘somehow’. But he knows how he got on their bad side, why he was interrogated when he arrived, why he will be interrogated again. It was because he spoke justice. When you do that, they say you are gone. When they say you are gone, you are gone; you’re simply waiting around for a muscle in the middle of your chest to stop sending spurts of freshly oxygenated blood through your arteries. You are a dead guy in an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a room, patiently waiting for scrambled eggs, strolling one day out of seven among other patient dead guys in orange jumpsuits, who are also sitting in a room waiting for scrambled eggs. All of you are dead.

The dead guy telling this story remembers Fatima, in a gold headscarf, her weeping eyes wide, begging him to tell the truth.

It isn’t so much that he started writing this book in order to keep himself from going crazy, which is what AbdulKarim, who smuggles him paper in the Yard, always says. Everybody goes crazy somewhere down the line. Writing a book won’t stop that. Writing a book can repay a debt, though. Writing a book can confirm one’s guilt.

The dead guy telling this story remembers two human bodies of contrasting sizes, face down on busy Malaika Street. A spreading
pool of mingled blood. The sound of an approaching siren. A gun in Thelonius’s hand.

Thelonius made a promise, not to Fatima, but to himself. To cut through the bullshit. To plead guilty. The book does that. ‘Hi, Becky,’ he writes now.

The dead guy telling this story remembers redflowinghaired Becky recruiting him into the Directorate in 1992. Smiling green eyes from behind the barrier of her desk. His certainty that she would soon touch him. That she would take good care of him. That there was no shame in that. That there could be honour in being taken care of, a home in that. Becky came from a long line of caretakers. Her mother, Prudence, had been a caretaker. Prudence’s husband had needed taking care of, too, having been raised by alcoholics.

Becky’s caring, green eyes smiling at Thelonius. Making everything okay. He only killed people when specifically instructed to do so by the United States of America.

See how the small white milk carton on that breakfast tray is vibrating?

During the first hour of September 9, 2005, he showered, dressed, ate his breakfast in the middle of the night, gathered his things, stared out the window to make sure his limousine was there, and, after a suitable delay, climbed into the back. He enjoyed making the limousine wait, then making it hurry. He told the driver he preferred to do at least eighty on these predawn jaunts to Logan.

When his plane touched down in the Islamic Republic, nineteen hours later, Wafa A––, a twenty-one-year-old pregnant mother-to-be, had not yet begun her breakfast. Wafa happened to live in a disputed region of the Islamic Republic. She did not have an appetite. She was thinking about her sister Fatima.

Wafa reminded herself that she must call Fatima and congratulate her for being hired as a translator for the Bureau of Islamic Investigation. Wafa sat on a plastic lawn chair in an overgrown green area, at a bone-white plastic table she shared with her husband and mother-in-law, drinking tea with them in the sun, thinking this thought of reaching out to her sister Fatima, of warning her again about the dangers of working with men, when hundreds of tiny metal darts, their points tight and sharp as needles, tore into her flesh and the flesh of her unborn baby.

According to Wafa’s husband, the tea drinkers heard a strange collapsing sound. Almost an inhalation.

PLOOF.

Followed by screams. He turned in his chair, intending to see whatever it was that had made the odd noise, but never had the chance. He only heard the sound of metal projectiles finding their way, at high speed, into his body, leaving him in a state of shock.

THWOCK.

There were not enough darts embedded in Wafa’s husband’s flesh
to kill him. Nor was Wafa’s mother-in-law hit by enough darts, in the necessary points, to lead to major organ damage or blood loss. Wafa, however, facing that wave head-on, strafed by that barrage of tiny darts, saw herself and her unborn, unnamed daughter shredded.

The miniature metal darts were called flechettes. Flechettes are less than an inch in length, about the size of a finishing nail. Pointed at the front, they carry four fins in the rear, designed to accelerate their speed. To the casual observer, they resemble small sporting darts.

On that warm, pleasant morning in the village of D—, seven thousand five hundred flechettes had been packed into a shell which was fired from a tank rolling behind a stand of trees near Wafa’s home. The shell disintegrated in midair with that PLOOF sound, the sound of air sucking into itself.

The shell scattered its darts in a conical pattern over an area about nine hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide. Only about four feet of that three-hundred-foot-wide arc had disrupted the tea drinkers.

Flechettes are designed to maim and kill concealed enemy soldiers: soldiers hiding in dense vegetation, for instance. Flechettes will pierce a pine plank or a thin sheet of steel. Once they reach high velocity, they curve and hook into every available surface, including human flesh. When flechettes reach maximum speed, they travel with such force that sometimes only the fins at the back are left sticking out from walls.

At the moment Wafa and her unborn child were being peppered with flechettes, Thelonius Liddell was not yet ready to deplane. His aircraft was coasting to a stop on a runway no one was supposed to know about. He was reading, scribbling in the margins of a long briefing about his mission in the Islamic Republic. Thelonius, uncertain about this mission and preoccupied with it, read his brief for the third time. He found something in it unpersuasive, and suspected it contained factual errors.

A few miles away, Wafa and her daughter were preoccupied with dying.

As Wafa died, another shell from another tank penetrated the
room where laughing Hassan D., aged two and a half, sat with his taciturn eight-year-old brother, whose given name will not be repeated here.

Their father, Atta D., an attentive man, had spotted two American soldiers on a hillside, gathered up both boys, and escorted them inside for safety’s sake. When Thelonius Liddell’s unnumbered plane touched down on its unnamed runway in support of its classified mission, Atta’s boys were preoccupied with learning a new board game. Atta was teaching this game to them when he noticed a large hole in the side of his home.

The shell that made that hole in Atta’s home disintegrated and released its own thousands of flechettes, hooking into the toddler, his brother, and his father.

KA-THOK.

Little Hassan, who resembled his late mother, was the closest person to the brand-new hole in the wall. Despite being the smallest one in the room, he accumulated the largest number of flechettes. Hassan, who was Atta’s favourite, was preoccupied with dying, too.

Of the three, Atta, the father, took the fewest hooks. None of his flechettes was fatal.

Much later, investigators from the United Nations examined the bloody wall near which Hassan was killed. They noted that it was studded with flechettes, but that there were some blank spots. Some of the investigators conjectured that these blank spots on the wall corresponded to the positions of the two boys as they had crouched on the floor.

The game they had been playing there was called
Sorry!

Sorry!
is an American board game adapted from something Muslims invented and started playing in about the year 1400.
Sorry!
was first sold in 1940 by Parker Brothers, a company based in Salem, Massachusetts.

At the moment Thelonius’s plane landed, sixteen-year-old Islam D., Atta’s third son, was walking home from a friend’s house. Islam knew the road well and was staring into space, not attending to where he was going. He was preoccupied. Focused as he was on the physical beauty of the female human form, he did not hear the PLOOF or notice any of the nearby tanks.

Islam happened to be standing at the very furthest edge of a vast wave of incoming metal projectiles. At the moment he was struck by his flechette, he was thinking of a pretty girl he liked. That girl was Fatima A—, Wafa’s sister, the one who had just gotten that job at the Bureau of Islamic Investigation. She had visited yesterday. Islam had seen her. He had never spoken to her.

Fatima was out of Islam’s league and he knew it, but he liked thinking about her just the same. He’d been thinking about her a great deal lately. The very last thought he had before getting hit by his flechette took the form of a question mark and an exclamation point about Fatima.

Islam had posed a question to himself, and answered it for himself, in less than a hundredth of a second. The question concerned the quality and placement of Fatima’s hair. Because she wore a headscarf, usually gold, Islam had never seen it. That was the question mark.

Islam imagined Fatima’s hair as fine and silky, straight black and very long, extending down to the precise midpoint of her back. He imagined a small mole on the small of Fatima’s back, just below the point where her hair stopped. That was the exclamation point. He happened to be right about all of that, which was remarkable.

In Islam’s case, there was only one wound. A single flechette struck a vulnerable spot in his neck. He began the process of bleeding out from a tear in his jugular vein, which takes less time than you might think. Within just a couple of minutes, Islam was preoccupied with dying, too.

There was something different about this mission. Something wrong with it. Thelonius couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was. He got off his plane.