Jihadi (30 page)

Thelonius saw it from the third floor.

During the city-block-clogging protests that followed the flechette attack on D—, Thelonius noticed a serviceman, in the embassy’s courtyard, pissing on something. Thelonius looked more closely, realized
what
the serviceman was pissing on, considered the sight lines and dashed downstairs. By the time he reached the doorway, the deed was done. Fly refastened, grinning, the idiot met him at the doorway, saluted smartly, and stood at attention.

‘Morning, sir. And isn’t it a beautiful morning, sir?’

The sergeant’s nameplate read: MAZZONI M.

From behind, Thelonius heard a sudden peal of insane laughter, looked around and spotted another marine, blond, shorter and slimmer than the man who had been pissing. A private.

The private kept up the laughing, more than a little too loud, even considering the crowd. He waved a wad of bills in the air and shook his head in awe.

‘Here, you crazy beast. Four hundred bucks. I seriously didn’t think you’d have the balls.’

Mazzoni, safely in the compound, grabbed the wad of bills and counted out the twenty dirty twenties, nodded in brisk approval to his companion, then turned to Thelonius.

‘Will there be anything else, sir?’

‘I should get you both locked up for endangering the security of this embassy.’

A chasm in the exchange, though only the private was intimidated by it. Mazzoni M. was apparently more practised at faking remorse.

Thelonius, who had been in the country for only a day, had a mission to prepare for and no particular inclination to invest precious time filing a report. The crowd outside the embassy gates churned
and sputtered, just as before; no one seemed to have noticed the stunt.

A disaster averted. He opted to disengage.

‘Witty boys. Witty dumbasses. Keep an eye on each other. Stop covering for each other. You’re going to get someone killed.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mazzoni M.

The private, a blond marine who bore the nametag MAZZONI D, said nothing.

‘I respect your decision. More important than the name is your intention. Now. The girl and her father, the two who died in the street. What happened on that morning, please?’

Fatima turned the page on her pad, all business. And stared him down.
Here we are
.

The thing was, Thelonius was
supposed
to shoot the man and his daughter. He had been specifically instructed to kill these people. The government of the United States had told him to do that. Dick Unferth had signed the memo.

Thelonius sighted them on Malaika Street. The father held, as promised, a briefcase, in which, according to intelligence assumed to be reliable, was a dirty bomb meant to be transmitted to the United States and activated in Times Square.

That girl, though, was too young to shoot. Her little fist around the man’s fingers.

The briefing Thelonius received led him to believe that the father would be accompanied by a teenaged hacker of some kind. This girl, thin and coughing, could have been no more than nine. She clutched her father’s hand.

Too young, damn it.

Even on that busy street, the father sensed a hostile foreign presence. He looked over his shoulder, saw Thelonius and widened his eyes.

The father’s head snapped forward again. He said a word to his daughter in the native tongue. Probably he was telling her to run.

No time. Shoot the father, let the girl go.

No, kid. No. Orders say take them both out.

The father pulled his hand away and said the word again, whatever it was, louder.

Kid. Take them both out. What if he’s telling her to detonate something? A suicide vest? On a crowded street? Follow the orders.

She’s too small. Shoot the father, let the girl go.

But the girl refused to run. She coughed and grabbed her father’s hand again, turned to look back at Thelonius.

And when she looked over his shoulder, the damnedest thing happened.

Thelonius saw, thought he saw, swore he saw the rat-eyed glare of Dick Unferth.

Sergeant USA said:
Machine. I told you
.

That girl – was she, by some impossible combination of betrayals and infidelities, Dick Unferth’s misbegotten love child? She coughed again and covered her mouth and reached up with her other hand. Seeking to be lifted, seeking to be held. Looking back yet again at Thelonius. With Dick Unferth’s trademark rodent scowl.

What the hell …?

Unferth’s eyes flashed again in the girl’s head.

Machine. Machine. Machine.

‘Sarge. I can’t.’

Follow the orders. Take them both out. Look at those eyes.

The volcano rumbled.

I’m assuming command of this mission, T.

Sergeant USA shot the girl in the head three times. PLOOF. THWOCK. KA-THOK.

The girl fell. That froze the father in his tracks. Then Sergeant USA shot the father in the head three times, too. PLOOF. THWOCK. KA-THOK.

‘When I got to them,’ Thelonius said to Fatima, ‘the girl on the ground didn’t look at all like the person I thought. She was just a dead girl. She didn’t have a suicide vest on. The briefcase only had…’

He carried his palms up to his forehead and closed his eyes. He swayed slightly, said to Fatima: ‘Someone, somewhere planted bad intel for us. Set a trap. Wanted us chasing our own tails. No dirty bomb in that suitcase. Nothing but a book. A Koran. I don’t want to go to hell for that.’ He kept rocking back and forth in his chair for some time.

The facial veil made her a stranger at first, which complicated matters, but she decided to retain it during the hearing, as she had promised Thelonius.

She introduced herself to the youngish imam. He told her, in the native tongue, that he remembered her. He addressed her with respect and concern.

As she had hoped, he chose not to question her again about any of the events she had witnessed at the American embassy, made no mention whatsoever of the event. When she introduced Thelonius, the imam greeted him with exquisite politeness, but shook no one’s hand.

He took his seat and said, in uneasy but well-paced English, ‘The case is important.’

The two of them sat across from him, on the other side of the card table. Fatima removed her gold pen from its box and prepared her legal pad. Morale Specialist stood and watched from a distance.

The youngish imam listened as Fatima read through her notes of the case. Then he reviewed the signed letters that had been distributed to, and countersigned by, the three families.

‘The same notary witnessed all three of the fathers as they signed this?’

‘Yes,’ Fatima said.

‘Is the notary here?’

‘Yes. Upstairs.’

Fatima stood and prepared to fetch him. The youngish imam motioned for her to remain seated. He gestured for Morale Specialist to leave the room, and he did.

The imam looked across the table and sized up the defendant, as though Thelonius were an automobile being returned to a rental agency.

Having recalled a conversation with a typhus patient he knew to be moribund, Indelible returned home at midday to pray alone. On his computer was an email message from Murad Murad: ‘Where have you been?’

He typed back: ‘Surveilling various localities. Countryside riddled with insurgents.’

The youngish imam asked Thelonius: ‘Were you physically mistreated during your confinement here?’ Thelonius peered across the table toward Fatima, who nodded that he should answer.

‘Are my remarks confidential?’

‘Yes.’

‘They beat me. They hurt my leg. It’s still giving me trouble. But they’ve stopped.’

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

‘No.’

The imam looked at Fatima, who shrugged:
I tried
. He turned back to Thelonius.

‘Do you regret your actions on Malaika Street?’

‘Yes. I would give anything not to have done it.’

The youngish imam studied him, wrote something on an index card with a pencil.

‘You were raised as a Christian, I assume.’

‘My grandparents thought so.’

Morale Specialist returned, a little man in a suit in tow behind him. The imam verified that the little man had personally
countersigned the letters in question. Morale Specialist led the little man away.

‘You seek the forgiveness of your Creator, and seek that the hellfire should be forbidden to you, and the Paradise should be assured to you?’

‘I do.’

‘You wish to become a Muslim?’

In the end, Bobbler refused to take the goddamned picture. He just walked back to the vehicle. Mike Mazzoni swore and screamed at him, but that didn’t change anything, so he made one of the others come out and take it. It took several shots for the star to show up as big as it was supposed to.

Mike Mazzoni settled back into the driver’s seat, grabbed the comlink, and advised HQ that his patrol had been attacked. He called in the location of the body, fired the engine and hit the street.

The rest of the patrol passed without a word.

In the photo, the dead insurgent’s eyes were closed. Mike Mazzoni’s pupils caught the flash the wrong way, so it looked like he was a demon or something. Mike Mazzoni thought that was cool. Also cool: him thrusting his too-bright left hand, complete with black star, forward into the face of the viewer. Like an ad or something. Thrusting it forward in such a way that the back of his hand occupied about twenty-five percent of the entire image area of the photo. Neither of the dead insurgent’s hands were visible. They weren’t cut off or anything, the hands were just out of the frame. The only parts of the dead insurgent that were visible were the shoulders and the head – notable for a large missing chunk that obliterated most of the hairline and looked like it was filled with reddish curdled milk.

The dead insurgent’s face had an expression on it that looked almost like a smile. Mike Mazzoni didn’t like that smile too much, and he also didn’t like the idea of somebody tracing the kid back to that whole mess about the dogfights, so he blurred the face, but he made
sure the kid’s open skull and the black star from the back of his own left hand still showed. He won Hero of the Week with that photo.

The same week Mike Mazzoni brought down that insurgent, the ragheads took to gathering spontaneous freak shows in front of the U.S. embassy.

These occurred daily. They really were spontaneous, in the sense that no one appeared to know when they would begin or end. People in white – men, mostly – assembled in their hundreds and then, without warning, in their thousands. They swarmed like insects, acting on some telepathic cue from an unseen queen, once it became ‘known’ that the ‘desecrator of the Koran’ was being held (‘protected’ was the verb of choice employed by the newspaper
God Defended
) within the American embassy itself.

The Americans, the Defenders of God maintained, had taken over the Islamic Republic. Mike Mazzoni didn’t think it looked like the Americans had taken over anything.

Mike Mazzoni resolved to add a new star for every kill. He felt less afraid with each new tattoo he added.