Authors: Yusuf Toropov
Jihadi (25 page)
‘“Without just cause”,’ Sergeant USA muttered, his voice low. ‘“Repentance. Worship”. What bullshit. They don’t cremate, you know. Worth a call to Langley. The bodies might need to be retrieved and burned, is all I’m saying. We should check on that.’
Thelonius closed his eyes.
‘The family of the father and daughter you shot have agreed to
such an arrangement, and so has the family of the civilian who was struck by the van trying to pick you up. The total amount in question is 1.8 million dollars. The State Department has arranged to make the payment from a special discretionary fund. Both families are adamant, however, on the point of true personal repentance.’
‘The hell with that,’ Sergeant USA shouted. Fatima made no reply.
‘So the man on the motorcycle died?’ Thelonius said, wrenching his eyes shut tighter.
‘Yes. In any event, none of this can happen unless you draft letters of remorse.’ Fatima’s voice was calm beneath her veil.
‘Open your
eyes
,’ Sergeant USA shouted. ‘This is
Western civilization
we’re fighting for, T! “Remorse”! Tell her where to go!’
Thelonius opened his eyes. ‘I’m working here, Sarge,’ he said, his voice curt.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Sorry. You were saying something about remorse.’
‘Yes. Two letters at least. You must write to each of the families and explain to them the depth of your regret for your sin.’
‘My…?’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ in a Humvee. “
Sin
”?’ Sergeant USA raised his gloved hands and leaped upward, did a barrel roll in midair, and perched himself, with perfect balance, on the rotating ceiling fan. He stared down at Fatima, withdrew his Expand-A-Shield, and tensed himself as though he intended to breach the Plexiglas barrier in the very next panel. Thelonius gestured for him to cool it.
‘What are you looking at?’ Her eyes said:
Strike one
.
‘Forget it. Do I have to use the word “sin”?’
She looked upward. Then down again.
‘Use whatever words you want. I will return for these letters at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, Godwilling. Give them to the guard before our visit. The key principle here is repentance, Thelonius.’
‘Like we’re, what, like we’re in
detention
?’ Sergeant USA shouted from the spinning fan. ‘In the
Principal’s
office or something? What
the hell are we even
doing
here, sister? And by the way, who put you on a first-name basis with us?’
Thelonius said: ‘Are we done?’
‘No. You may wish to address in either letter, or in both, other topics of relevance. For instance, any desecration or genocide you may have ordered or countenanced or committed recently.’
She stared at him. Sergeant USA levelled an icy glance her way every time he spun past.
Amazed as any man struck by an unexpected bullet, Thelonius said: ‘Desecration or genocide?’
‘Yes. The desecration of the Koran. That’s what all the shouting’s about out there. In case you didn’t know. They’re saying you did that.’
‘My God.’
‘And that attack in which … in which my sister died. The attack on the village of D—. If you had anything whatsoever to do with either of those events. I think–’ Her voice caught a rough note. She took a deep breath. ‘I think you’d better write about them as well. Agreed?’
Sergeant USA was a whirling blur now.
Her eyes – an even colder blue – flashed again:
Here we are
.
The fan kept spinning, kept reverberating into his chest somehow. Like bees buzzing in there. She wouldn’t look away.
There was a little pop from above, as though someone had thrown an unseen switch. As Thelonius looked up, the ceiling fan stopped spinning. Sergeant USA reached one arm back and removed a revolver from his backpack.
‘She’s an android. Cut her head off after I take her down. You’ll see.’
‘No!’
She glared at him. The eyes seemed to say:
Strike two
.
‘I swear to you,’ Fatima A–– said, ‘it is the only way out of here.’
‘T,’ said the unseen voice, sharp as the crack of a pistol. ‘Don’t
do
it, T. Don’t take this deal.’
There was a rustling of cloth. A whistling sound. He looked around. Sergeant USA had vanished.
‘I’m waiting, Thelonius.’
Answer her, at least.
‘Look. I can’t write those letters.’
Strike three.
She stood, turned, and made for the door. Morale Specialist began to follow her out. The buzzing in Thelonius’s chest broadened and deepened. She would be gone if she made that door.
‘I don’t mean I can’t as in I
won’t
,’ he shouted. He was standing. ‘I mean I
can’t
. I mean I need help. I mean I want to do it. I should do it. I know that. I just … I don’t know how. I can’t do it on my own. I’m not good at talking about things like this. I guess I need some help.’
She kept her back to him.
‘You will tell me the truth.’
‘Sure. I mean yes. Yes, if we can meet in private. With the mike off. I will tell you the truth.’
A glance backward. Evaluating him. His hands began to shake.
‘I’ll arrange it.’
She was gone.
That night, in his cot, Thelonius had a nightmare from which he couldn’t awaken. A grey, foreign city. Its streets empty and sunless. Forced to wander them forever, in search of a brother he didn’t have.
As was her right under contract, Fatima spent no more time in the BII compound than absolutely necessary.
After the interview with Thelonius, she sped homeward again in the same unmarked car, but instructed her taciturn driver to take a different, longer route back. She wanted to monitor new streets and wanted time to update Ra’id via her mobile.
Ra’id took the call right away, a rarity.
Having no idea of the heavyset woman’s name, Fatima contented herself with outlining her rhetoric in broad strokes for Ra’id. She admitted having seen her before, but said nothing about the still-unidentified man she had seen urinating on the Koran. Fortunately, Ra’id did not ask.
I understand the Fabs here to echo Churchill’s remark that the era of talk, delay and compromise has passed, and yielded to the era of action and consequences. The decision having been made to bring justice to the evildoers, there could be no more natural course than to act with all deliberate speed to separate them from the common run of conventional military adversaries. The Geneva Conventions were written in and for another century. Some of my adversaries dispute this. These cowards can never bring themselves to complete this sentence: ‘If Khalid Sheikh were in my custody, I would …’
Midnight. Which makes it August 8. Clive texts for the third time in five minutes, begs an audience. I assent.
The call complete, Fatima watched the city pass. Almost every corner featured a group of three or four men in white. It seemed the females had all been banished from the movement and from all public gatherings, the heavyset woman and her megaphone notwithstanding. These white-clad thousands who gathered in the street daily now, all of them men, men who screamed for justice until
hoarse: What had finally united them? Certainty. Not the ally of justice. The enemy of justice.
‘Abu Islam would let his own yellow stream flow onto the Koran if he knew it would help to draw a bigger crowd,’ she muttered.
The driver examined her once again in the rear-view mirror. Fatima only noticed now that he had a mismatched eye that looked out at a strange angle. He seemed to turn his attention back to the road and pursue it with a dark scowl, but she was not entirely certain he had stopped looking at her.
They all prayed, and dawn came, and Father left, and the boy found his new caretaker in the masjid.
Sitting in the prescribed fashion, knees folded and tucked beneath him, facing Mecca, Skullface withdrew a gold container from his vest. He opened it, extracted a white pill, crushed it in his mouth as though it were a piece of candy and swallowed. Then he replaced the container and lay down on his side in the prayer area of the masjid, cushioning his head with both of his hands.
‘That is for my heart,’ he said, concerned that the boy might misunderstand. ‘We have prayed and we should sleep if we are tired, yes?’
The boy nodded.
‘It was in this fashion,’ Skullface said, ‘that the Prophet used to sleep, sleep being a kind of death. You should sleep too.’
But the boy (who knew as well as Skullface the proper way to sleep) did not lie down. Soon, Skullface was snoring.
As usual, the Fabs have the last word in the discussion. Let those who doubt the necessity of my mission, of my life’s work, explain the presence of this particular line, in this precise spot, so clearly evocative of tracks ten and eleven! Clive knocking at my door. Is he prepared to sit in silence while I work? He is. I let him in.
Half the day in the mosque. The dhuhr prayer complete. Skullface had to post some letters.
The sun was too bright for the boy at first. The stench of garbage nearby. Gnats everywhere, men in white everywhere. Skullface took his hand, led him through the crowd.
A youthful-looking man followed them, but Skullface did not notice.
They took a sharp turn at a fruit stand. The boy looked back. The man took the turn, too and maintained half a block’s distance. Then, right after Skullface had posted his letter, the man caught them up and acted as though he had been talking the whole time. He said:
‘Who is your second witness?’
No witness was required during my interrogation of T, despite the whinging of my detractors. Following the 9/11 attacks, a long-overdue sense of pragmatism carried the day. This led to a comprehensive review of certain archaic legal standards governing the interrogation of prisoners, and to breakthroughs in research. Reverse engineering, initiated through the SERE programme, revealed to us precisely how the Chinese and the North Koreans extracted so much valuable intelligence from our own servicemen in the fifties and sixties. Thus track eleven, McCartney’s lovely ballad serenading Blackbyrd Systems – the private consulting firm that all but single-handedly unlocked the SERE riddle and developed a comprehensive American psychological interrogation model – marks the turning point of the album. And, I might add, of our Directorate’s history. Clive, following instructions, has made me a cup of tea, and now waits to be questioned.
Skullface swept a gnat away and turned.
‘I interviewed that megaphone woman, you know. I found her unpersuasive. There is another witness, a young woman, but their testimony did not cohere. You cannot put a man to death on such evidence. If you don’t have another witness, you must stop the woman with the megaphone from calling for this man’s death. Unless you produce a second witness.’
They regarded one another, Skullface and the man who had followed them, two birds twisting the sky, circling each other above a plain.
I still recall Liddell twisting like a flame, suspended from the ceiling, as I tucked chunks of pork between his lips and forced them, with a kind of wooden dowel, through his gullet. There was some choking. This from his second and final period of interrogation. The song to which the
White Album
draws attention here, track twelve, is Harrison’s. Some traitors do need whacking. This choking incident, important enough to be foretold explicitly by the
White Album
in our defence, is referenced within the song at 1:39–1:41.
The interrogation technique referenced here is known within the Directorate as the Graner Maneuver: standard operating procedure, though of course I added my own refinements. Time to interrogate patient Clive. The question with Clive, as with all men, is whether he can be taught a lesson about respect. This remains to be seen.
‘You have raised an excellent point. I shall mention it to Abu Islam. Perhaps the two of you should discuss the matter. Where can he reach you?’