Jihadi (43 page)

‘This is to be a transaction,’ Fatima’s screen image said. She wiped her eyes. ‘Men and women must come to terms. I have information I am willing to share with you in return for this confirmation. There is a mole, quite dangerous, working both with your people and with the BII. A zombie. Your superiors would reward you for identifying and imprisoning this man.’

A long silence passed. Thelonius, lost as a compass without a pointer, said: ‘There are American channels for prosecuting …’

She waved her hand again in dismissal. Again, she did not have to say it:
Please
.

His chest strained again.

‘I knew you were in danger. I knew it.’

Her eyes flashed.

‘Not a good time to fall in love, I don’t think, fool,’ she said. ‘Time to speak. Yes or no?’

Thelonius tried to form a word, but nothing came out.

‘You knew I was in danger? Should I stop thinking because you knew that? Fool. Say yes or no.’

‘This is treason.’

‘So? Yes or no?’

There was an awful stillness as she stared at him. He felt naked.

‘It will pass, that fear. Speak. And it will pass. In this world, no condition is eternal. No danger. No safety. We are in God’s hands. If the condition is painful, pray for patience, because it will change. If the condition is pleasurable, pray for staying unattached, because it will change. And in either case speak justice.’

‘You want me to say something when I don’t know what to say.’

‘No. Speak
justice
. Every moment. Every condition. That’s the only permanent place, the only way we can live. In our speaking. Our only nation now. That’s home. Sura Six, verse one fifty-two: If you speak, speak justice.’

‘And I’m supposed to know what’s just?’

She moved her hand.
Please
. And then the screen was dark and she was gone.

He put his hand to his mouth, then lowered it again and typed out a message: ‘Call me tomorrow, same time. Please.’

Thelonius’s latest cell phone, which should have received texts from no one, buzzed with a raw droning sound. This sound sent a wave of adrenaline through his veins. He pulled the phone from his pocket. The text was from Becky:

Why did you kill Dad?

He shut it off.

A day’s delay, then. Fatima’s plan now was to step over the border once again and find a place to sleep that was free of the city. A warehouse she remembered passing seemed promising. A large open window there. She replaced her facial veil, paid her fee for the use of the computer and stood. Her scalp still ached, and it hurt to stand again.

Her legs bone-weary, she exited the internet café. The street was busy, busier than it should have been after midnight. A television set in a shop window was tuned to a station broadcasting a bulletin about Wafa’s ruined, blackened, barricaded house. The burned-out structure was pictured from the queasy viewpoint of a helicopter.

Fatima felt heat rushing through her body.

She saw the single word ‘standoff’ in the headline, saw the crowd gathered around the glow of the television, so easily hypnotized by it. Men. All men.

As she walked north toward the city limit sign, a wave of rage against the people standing in front of the shop passed along her insides and would not recede. So much lost. Everything gone. All because of them. Because of men.

A tightness as she walked. Her fists clenched. The blood was up now, but it would pass, it would pass, it had passed yesterday, once she thought of Baba and made ablution, and a person’s breathing could –

‘Out late at night, sister. Against the Sunnah.’

She spun around, locked eyes with a white-clad zombie.

‘My father was in an accident. Family emergency.’ Both statements true.

‘We must keep the city safe,’ the zombie said. ‘Men may have cause to wander at night, but not women – unless they are selling something. State your destination, sister?’

Zombie eyes glared at her, and she fought down the urge to glare back at them, to reply to the insult with an insult of her own, or with a blow, or with something worse.

‘Your destination?’

The clear difference between instinct and rage. No justice in rage. She was armed now, with Murad Murad’s pistol, and with her own machete, each hidden away in the loose folds of her garment. She would no longer navigate the streets of the city without both weapons. But this was a case of stupidity, nothing more. Not a case of justice.

‘Home,’ Fatima said. ‘Home, brother.’ And nodded from behind her veil in solemn thanks for his attention.

And turned. And kept walking. No idea where that was now, though. Home.

‘Khilafah!’ the man shouted to her turned back. A test. As though no prostitute would dare utter the word.

‘Khilafah, brother!’ she shouted back, without looking at him, careful to mirror his tone and cadence. And raised her right hand with the index finger pointing upward.

And he applauded. Left her to walk alone toward a home that no longer existed, his loud clapping echoing through the alley. She followed it through to another, better-lit street, a street that led out of the city.

With the arrival of the real possibility of revolution in the Islamic Republic, she had heard it claimed by such loud men as these, that those leading the movement to overthrow the prime minister were comparable in character and motive to the companions of the Prophet of Islam, peace and blessings be upon him.

They dared to call themselves scholars. Loudmouths, rapists and sycophants. Imagining themselves entitled to every adolescent girl they could kidnap.

These loud men aimed to eliminate from the ranks of both leadership and followership anyone actually willing to think. ‘Islam as a system of knowledge is already complete,’ one of them had intoned during a sermon she heard echoing, amplified, through the morning streets today. ‘No addition to it or subtraction from it, from science or any other source, is possible.’ He was defending the use of textbooks whose lessons had not changed in four hundred years.

Fatima had long thought of stupidity as a violent contagion in her country, a threat to both political and moral well-being, and a crime against a faith whose Prophet had instructed his followers that the seeking of knowledge was obligatory upon every Muslim, male or female. She realized now, and with some alarm, that stupidity had already had its triumph here. The contest was over. Stupidity had assumed a deep centrality in the travesty of Islam that ruled the city. This stupidity had brought out the worst in non-Muslim and Muslims alike. Stupidity had taken both Ummi and Noura. Stupidity was now obligatory.

Despite the Prophet’s specific, categorical objection to it, stupidity had become both required and fashionable in most nominally ‘religious’ circles since the grand marches had begun. Influential gatherings were not in the least shy about promoting distrust of anyone seeking knowledge that was not already categorized. Faith in stupidity was a way of life, a sign of honour in the new regime.

She wrote such thoughts in a small gold journal she carried everywhere, an indefensible folly. Yet she was afraid she, too, would begin to see practical advantages in stupidity if she failed to write such things down. Would lose her way. Would never make it home.

Why did you kill Dad?

The text meant he was a wanted man, a man wanted by the Directorate. It meant Becky had been tracing Adelia’s calls. It meant the Patriot Act had come into play.

He had chosen to remain in motion. In the rented Siena, he maintained a careful, steady northeasterly course, always a few miles below the posted speed limit. He threaded his way through an underground tunnel too brightly lit with fluorescents for his tastes. Above him the Atlantic Ocean. Below him concrete, and then more Atlantic Ocean. Around him, circular patterns of harsh lighting that made unpleasant blinking patterns as he drove, as if they meant to shake the foundations of the continent.

The tunnel, which had been humming for quite some time, felt like something he was falling through endlessly. Eventually, it was supposed to release his rented green Siena near the Eastern Shore of Maryland, an iconoclastic, rural-feeling corner of the state that might, if he switched on his phone, signal multiple intentions on his part. For instance: a desire to proceed north on 95 toward Boston; a desire to check back in at Langley and submit to questioning; a desire to return to Washington, where the Freedom Banquet would be held, and where he was still listed as the keynote speaker.

Even, perhaps, a desire to flee the country. Rock Hall, Maryland, was a functioning harbour.

Forward, forward, forward. The tunnel kept on humming. In a long stretch like this, one felt almost stationary. Was he driving too slow now? He checked the speedometer. No. Fifty-eight. Just fine.

Should he give her Mazzoni’s name?

Uncertain whether he would, or should, take any action at all on her behalf, whether there was any point to any of this, the dead guy who now called himself Ali Liddell felt, for the first and last time, deep anger toward Fatima. It came on him quickly. A kind of heat passed through his body, made him want to stomp down on the accelerator.

On the seat beside him rested the Raisin’s Koran. He put his hand on it. Things slowed down again. Waiting for him inside it was the verse from the Surah of the Sun he had now memorized:

Qad aflaha man zakkaha / Waqad khaba man dassaha

Whoever purifies her flourishes / Whoever defiles her fails

He kept heading northeast. Thelonius passed out of the artificial light of the tunnel and found himself dazzled by the break of midmorning daylight.

‘Damn fine work,’ said Captain X, inspecting the wall at close range. A stand of portable lights from behind him illuminated it. ‘Not an edge of it out of place. Flat, almost. Even close up. Straight edge meeting straight edge. Crates. Doors. Tyres. Shopping cart up there. Look. But one more or less even surface, all the way around. How many people dragged stuff out here for this party, do you think?’

Mike Mazzoni, eyes wide, occupying a point far beyond sleep, said, ‘A few hundred, at least. Caravan. See the cars? All from the city. The neighbours brought crap from their basements.’

‘Mm,
mm
. What happened to that opening they had?’

‘Closed up. Bunch of milk crates stuffed with some kind of grey metallic shit, steel wool, looks like.’

‘It’s not a U anymore,’ Captain X said. ‘It’s an O now.’

‘Yeah, don’t think they’re planning on coming out.’

‘We’ll see about that. Tear gas.’

‘Still don’t fucking think they’re planning on coming out.’

The captain, not used to being contradicted in such terms, pursed his lips and scanned Mike Mazzoni’s face.

‘You are tore up from the floor up, son. Been a rough week for you, I know. Almost done here. We are going to clear this area. Then we are going to get you home. Don’t you worry. I have friends in the Directorate. They’ve been covering for us here. Making sure we take down this particular safety hazard.’

Mike Mazzoni sniffed twice, cocked his eye toward the wall, and chose not to tell his commanding officer he wasn’t going home.

Captain X stepped back a few paces, into a clearing beneath a tree, saw a tiny wet patch of red on the grass.

‘What the hell …’

He kneeled down to inspect it.

A shot rang out from somewhere within the wall.

The captain’s head flew backward with the impact. Mazzoni saw him gazing solemnly upward, into the air, as though he were reading it.

‘Man down!’ Mike Mazzoni shouted, although his commanding officer was not down at all, was still perched on one knee.

His own arms spread wide, Mike Mazzoni, who had dropped his weapon, was not down either.

Everyone else hit the dirt. He walked toward the wall.

In the warehouse, Fatima had a dream that she was on a sidewalk that was crumbling beneath her, and that only by moving forward, in a straight line, toward what appeared to be a kind of sun, could she secure her footing.

Indelible recorded the video message he planned to send Sullivan Hand. He knew it was quite possible Sullivan Hand would survive, and even in the event that he did not, Sullivan Hand’s superiors certainly would, and could be expected to examine the email correspondence closely.

In the video, Indelible explained to Sullivan Hand that he did not want any money or cars, that he had given away all his money. He expected to secure forgiveness for all of his sins as a result of his actions today.

Indelible edited the video to remove some dull spots at the beginning and end, saved it, then timed its delivery so that it would reach the Directorate’s servers at a certain predetermined point in time. When he had finished, he used duct tape to apply explosives to his
body, with the help of his wife. That done, his wife dressed him, handed him his Thermos of Darjeeling tea, and turned away.

He could only come back in one of two ways, Daddy: in a box, or as a hero. And the thing about heroes, once they’re done being heroes, they have to do as they’re told.

As he recalled these words, Ali’s chest was doing strange things.

He pulled over, picked up the phone, and speed-dialled Carl Arnette. He had a favour to ask. Some research he was unable to conduct properly while on the road.

Mike Mazzoni took long, direct strides toward the wall, intending to dare its occupants to shoot him.

As he approached it, a black mongrel, so large it almost seemed a parody of a dog, leapt toward him, hurling itself like a missile from the barricade it had scaled.

Growling, snarling, seething with what appeared to be rabies, it landed on its back with a yelp, then found its feet and surveilled its former owner.

The beast paced, a deep-howling, red-eyed, lunatic guard on watch before a mountain of repurposed rubbish.

Mike recognized the dog, his last champion. Abandoned by a grey road. No name. He must have been adopted and snuck in by one of those goddamned cowards inside the wall.

The moment they made eye contact, establishing some unspeakable common purpose, the insane dog stopped pacing, settled into its hind legs, and sprang forward.