Jihadi (35 page)

The cell phone rang.

Thelonius did not want to talk as he drove. That was unsafe and (in Delaware, anyway) illegal. He pulled into a rest stop and answered the phone without saying a word.

‘Hello, Thelonius,’ the voice said anyway.

Sawdust and sucrose. Advice about to be shared if one wasn’t careful. A sceptical vibrato. It was Dick Unferth.

‘Let’s have lunch. Hey, where the hell are you, anyway?’

Stress breath. Not her, using his phone. But him. Him. Stress breath.

‘I’m still somewhere in Delaware,’ Thelonius said. ‘I left Maryland yesterday. I’ve been taking a lot of back roads.’

‘Yeah. Okay. Maryland. Okay. I’m from Baltimore. Did I tell you that? Hey. Watch out for the Maryland State Police out there. Turn on your radar detector, okay? Well. Welcome back from that long strange trip. You’re the man of the hour around here, did you know that? You should see the party we have planned. Anyway, I got an email from Adelia. Did you see that? Maybe not. I guess we’ll be working together.’

On his left, a truck hurtled by the place where Thelonius had parked.

‘So. We’ll have lunch and sort stuff out, Thelonius. Crazy, crazy trip you just wrapped up, huh? Crazy. Maybe lunch tomorrow? Everyone will be happy. Okay. Hey. I heard you guys were going
through a rough patch. If you need a place to stay, let me know. Okay?’

A bad pause. Thelonius heard himself filling it with that ridiculous Unferth word ‘okay’. Which he did not mean.

‘Okay,’ said Dick Unferth. ‘You take care of yourself, okay?’

There was the sound of someone who had been listening for a while hanging up.

Thelonius drove out of the rest stop, the grey concrete of which had set his teeth on edge. A valley appeared along the driver’s side window. Sunlight streaked through it and made it buttery. The valley conceded its place to a shopping mall, abandoned and boarded over. The dead shopping mall was buttery, too. A few cars had parked inexplicably in its vast, otherwise empty lot, which vanished and yielded to the harsh, rhythmic, man-made thrum of a long sequence of paved edges. Bordered by some Jersey barriers on his right, Thelonius kept his eyes ahead.

Dad had asked him to figure out whether Unferth was the father.

Which meant there was someone else.

Which wasn’t supposed to matter now.

But who then?

He still had the phone in his hand. It reminded him of Unferth, so he put it down. He kept on driving north. The sun gilded another hill. He started saying
ALLAHU AKBAR
, but half an hour later, he had still not quite dug himself out of the hole, and he wanted to call someone. It had been some time since he’d wanted to call someone.

Thelonius pulled over, called Carl Arnette, his best friend and fellow hostage at the Directorate, and asked if he could stay with him for a while.

‘Yes, sure, T. Of course.’

Carl didn’t say anything else, which was nice. Thelonius thanked him several times to fill the blank spot in the conversation and tried hard, as hard as he had ever tried to do anything, not to say something he didn’t mean. He wanted to describe what he liked about the
trees in the distance as the sun set. Nothing came out of his mouth. But at least he hadn’t said anything he didn’t mean.

He thanked Carl again and, after Carl said he was welcome, hung up.

Then before he knew it, he was driving again and it was maybe half an hour before dark. You could combine the prayers when travelling, the man at the mosque had said. Uncertain what to call home, Thelonius assumed he was a traveller. He passed a sign for a storefront called ‘Women Women Women A Gentleman’s Club’. More marketing bullshit.

A mile or so down the line, he saw a sign for yet another town with a weird name – Shortly – and found a gas station. He made his ablution there and prayed, using the chapter of the Koran he had learned, the one that had the line about ‘whoever honours her flourishes, and whoever defiles her fails’.

And felt better when he hit the road. Like there was something glowing in him again.

Able to drive whenever he felt like it, or stop if he felt like it, he felt ready for whatever was waiting for him. The road he chose went through a rural area with no billboards, and his headlights cut right through the night. He was wide open with possibility, like the night and the straight, open road. The road seemed to say:
Soon enough. Soon enough
. It was straight and full of dark trees but very beautiful, utterly free of bullshit.

He smiled.

‘Your last session closed unexpectedly. Press OK to restart.’

Mike Mazzoni’s computer kept saying that, on the table next to the cribbage board, but it wouldn’t restart, so a lot of the time he might otherwise have spent online looking at calming pornography was spent looking at that stupid message. If you turned it off and turned it on it said the same thing. You couldn’t press OK. Bobbler kept saying he could fix the thing, but Bobbler had not taken Freak Show Out of Bounds well. He would tighten up his face a lot and then pretend he hadn’t.

‘What was the first time you killed someone out here?’ Bobbler asked, when he should have been playing a card.

‘I said Go. Count is twenty-six, in case you forgot.’

Bobbler just winced.

‘I didn’t want to see that picture, you know.’

Mike Mazzoni had snapped a photo of that jawless idiot who’d first tried to climb the fence. He was too far up, though. You couldn’t stand next to him.

‘There must have been a first time you did it, Mike.’

‘Yeah. I killed a guy for spacing out during a cribbage game. No, wait. That’s five minutes from now.’

Nothing. Staring at the cards like they would tell him what to do next. It was like he didn’t want to relax.

‘I just think maybe Mom would want us to look out for each other out here, Mike.’

‘Yeah? What if I’m sick to death of looking after you? What if I’ve already got a job out here?’

They stayed quiet until Bobbler put down all the cards.

‘Maybe we ought to talk about what happened is all I’m saying.’

‘All right. You shot a guy in the face is what happened. I’m not going to second-guess you. I didn’t say you fucked up. Pick up the cards and play one, for Christ’s sake. Count is twenty-six.’

Bobbler stood up and moved the sides of his face around like he had eaten something with his ears and he was trying to get rid of it. He shook his head. ‘My head hurts, Mike.’ he said. ‘I can’t seem to sleep right lately. This weird thing in my jaw making noise. I’m going for a walk. I don’t feel like cribbage.’

‘Play out the hand.’

‘I
hear
something. Like in my jaw. I don’t know what it is. Something cracking.’ And he left the tent, holding his head in his hands.

‘You still haven’t fixed my
computer
, bro.’

He heard that. He just didn’t call back.

Two days of R&R, and he had been like this the whole time. Only one day left. Things were getting kind of crowded on the back of Mike Mazzoni’s hand. Tonight he would ask Bobbler to work his way up the forearm. One for each raghead on the razorwire. Once he calmed down.

Mike Mazzoni lit up a Marlboro and glared at the computer that now topped the long list of Things That Pissed Him Off. He stood, got a running start, and kicked the tabletop hard. The computer fell over onto the ground and clanged around a little, but the screen still said the same damn thing.

Once the ever-well-dressed Ra’id stepped inside the car, which smelled of some new dousing of pine air freshener, Fatima knew that what she had to speak of now should not be spoken of in front of the grey, cockeyed figure who seemed bolted into the driver’s seat. No smile, or at least none affecting the driver’s eyes, greeted them from the rear-view mirror.

In the back seat beside her, Ra’id reached forward and patted the sour man’s shoulder. Some kind of signal: The car’s idle engine stopped. Ra’id leaned back again and smiled a familial smile out toward the driver.

‘You can relax, Fatima. If anyone is with us, my uncle is. What have you found?’

Ignoring such a direct request seemed reckless. She opened her laptop, passed it over. Ra’id hit play. He watched the clip.

‘
What
did he say?’

Fatima, who had anticipated this question, handed him a sheet of handwritten paper. Her tiny, neat handwriting spelled out the words: ‘Brother! Brother! My dear brother in Islam! We must plan such things! He is not even
in
the embassy!’ The word ‘in’ was underlined with precision.

Ra’id’s face darkened. He hit play again and watched the clip a second time.

‘Forgive my asking. Is there any chance you shared the prisoner’s location with anyone? Even inadvertently?’

Fatima shook her head, no.

‘You’re quite certain.’

‘Yes.’

Ra’id played it again. He looked more closely at the screen. The video concluded.

‘It’s fortunate you didn’t email me about this,’ he said. ‘There was an attack on our email system last night. I’m not sure we’ve repaired it.’ He pursed his lips as he played the video a third time. When he was through, he closed the laptop.

‘If you ever have difficulty reaching me, Fatima, please call Nada, my assistant. She can be reached at any time of the day or night. You have her number? Yes. What you’ve found presents a number of problems. The first is the security breach itself, quite a serious one. Another is its cast of characters. I recognize this man. He is one of Murad’s informants. High in value. Or so we were led to believe. We call him Indelible.’

‘Indelible.’

‘Indelible. His own chosen codename.’

The driver’s eyes met Fatima’s in the mirror, monitored her for a moment, then glanced away.

‘Important that we plug the leak,’ Ra’id said. ‘Where he got this information, I cannot tell yet. Murad, for all I know. He may have gotten it from the Americans. There is a special etiquette for dealing with triple agents, you know, Fatima. One kills them.’

The grey driver caught Fatima’s eye in the rear-view mirror once again. He did this with the more penetrating of his two wandering eyes. A newer, darker malevolence in his wrinkled stare told Fatima it was time for her to get out of the vehicle.

Don’t be ridiculous. His uncle, after all. Grow up. You’ve seen grey skin on people. He’s a smoker. That’s all it means.

But he would not look away.

‘Where do I take the young lady today?’ the cockeyed driver asked, too loud, as though speaking to Ra’id, as though no awkward moment had passed between them, as though he were not still staring at her.

This question changed the nature of the vehicle, caused it to darken and shrink.

A sensation of not being present passed through Fatima, and the adrenaline rose in her veins. She thought of Noura, and she found within her own sudden, shortened breath an intense unwillingness to leave Noura and Ummi to fend for themselves.

Fatima tried to attract Ra’id’s attention, but he was reading something. She returned to the grey man’s oblong eye reflection. The interior of the back seat of the car shrank again, became still darker, grew into a conspirator, an entity aware of her thoughts and dangerous to her.

There emerged a deep necessity of movement.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

She let no more time pass, but announced, louder than the driver had spoken, that she had urgent business in the city for which she was overdue already. Before even receiving Ra’id’s approving nod, she opened the passenger door and stepped out.

The instant her foot hit the gravel of the police station parking lot where they had stopped, she heard an electric mechanism grasping from deep within the car’s grey door. She heard the mechanism failing to catch, as though someone had attempted, too late, to lock all the doors at once.

She slammed the door and walked away – somewhat faster, it was possible, than she meant to.

She heard the car start. Heard it speed away. Chose not to look back.

Something – instinct – told her to speak with no one, interact with no one on the way out of the city.

It took her three and a half hours to reach Wafa’s house, her house, on foot. Long miles. She entered, saw Ummi reading to Noura, gave her salaams, found Motorola, put Motorola on the kitchen table, plugged it in, switched it on, listened and gasped.

Skullface sat in the darkest, noisiest corner of the restaurant, gesturing toward the lit screen of an open laptop.

Indelible studied the PowerPoint presentation that had secured the New Imam’s approval. He asked for permission to take written notes, but this permission was denied.

Under the cover of the restaurant crowd’s animated discussions, Indelible repeated certain important event sequences and dates in a low voice until both he and Skullface were convinced they had been memorized. Then Skullface reformatted the hard drive and scheduled the next rendezvous.

‘Now, full disclosure,’ Dick Unferth said as they made their way, ahead of the waiter, to what looked like his customary table in the nice restaurant he had chosen for their you’re-working-for-me-now discussion, ‘I took Becky to this very place once, while you were stuck in the slammer over there. Two red wines, please. Give us a minute, thanks. Once. Took her here once. Because she begged me to. Nothing happened. Scout’s honour. So. You’re the hero now, eh? Have a seat.’

Wary, Thelonius settled into the dark, stately, wooden chair.

‘To be perfectly honest with you, she was a little over the top that night. She may have had a few too many.’

He stared at Thelonius, as though Thelonius were the one who was supposed to explain himself.

‘Possible,’ said Thelonius. ‘She’s been in her cups. Out of curiosity, did she happen to mention anything to you about the source of the intel on my mission?’

‘What? No. Oh, no. That wasn’t her lane. Even drunk. No. The records are bad on that, I’m afraid. But no.’

Too insistent on that point, Dick was, and too willing to stop talking having made it. Ride the silence out. Make him talk next.

But he didn’t, not until the waiter came with the wine, at which point Dick Unferth ordered the baby lamb chops and asked Thelonius what he wanted. Thelonius didn’t feel much like eating, but ordered a salad and sent back the wine just to establish that he was there, in a restaurant, with Dick Unferth. Who buttered a piece of bread. ‘I am working on that, you know, T. Obviously a major malfunction.’

Thelonius put the bread down on the plate. ‘And when, if I may ask, did you last sleep with her?’

The rat-eyes had eyebrows, and they arched upward.

‘Dial it down, T,’ Dick Unferth said, without missing a beat, his focus narrowed on his prey. ‘Dial it down.’

‘More than a month ago?’

‘What? Why?’

‘Why do you think, Dick?’

A look of genuine surprise played across his features: a rare crack in the facade. She hadn’t told him.

The waiter rematerialized, bearing a platter with two big glasses of iced water. He set them down carefully and Dick stared at his, as though doing so would make deciding what facial expression to display next a little easier.

The waiter left. Dick continued to commune with his water glass. Thelonius checked his watch and said, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t stay.’

Dick raised his hand, as though he were expecting Thelonius to count the fingers.

‘You know, T, sometimes women come at you like a ton of bricks, and if that happens when your guard is down, they see you like a deer in the headlights and you get knocked out of the park.’ He reexamined his water glass.

‘Mm,’ said Thelonius, drinking from his.

‘But, for the record, well more than two months ago.’

‘For the record.’

‘Yes, and I tell you that because you know what, with some time on the clock under our belts, under our rug, under the bridge, I mean, and working together, now, at this particular juncture, you and I can make some impactful things happen if we want to. We don’t have to like each other, but we do have to respect each other if we are going to get any truly impactful work done. Which is why we’re here. To get impactful work done. And I do respect you, T. Now, you know and I know we respect each other.’

‘Am I supposed to say something now? Agree with that, I mean?’

Unferth sipped some wine, his rat-eyes fixing Thelonius.

‘So, fine. We’ve got a history. Let’s just not make a federal production out of any of this, is all. Let’s get over this little speed bump, all right, because if we both behave ourselves and dial it down and play for the team and keep the conversation focused on business, you will shine here. Okay? I swear that to you. Now the principle you and I have to bear in mind here is a pretty simple one, T. The last team standing wins the game. Keep the team standing and you will shine here, that’s my promise. Deal?’

He hadn’t known she was pregnant. Important, then, if any more data of consequence were to emerge from this discussion, that it appear to Dick that Thelonius’s aim was to shine. Important not to be seen as having had an affair with Dad’s daughter. And in exchange for that:
You will shine here.

‘Deal,’ Thelonius said. ‘So what am I working on?’