Terrorist (34 page)

cleansed, go in unto them as God hath ordained for you. Verily God loveth those who turn to Him, and loveth those who seek to be clean.

As Ahmad walks along, swift and scissoring in black and white, yet with a native trace of the American lope, he sees shabbiness in the streets, the fast-food trash and broken plastic toys, the unpainted steps and porches still dark from the morning's dampness, the windows cracked and not repaired. The curbs are lined with American cars from the last century, bigger than they ever needed to be and now falling apart, cracked taillights and no hubcaps and tires flat in the gutters. Women's voices rise from back rooms in merciless complaint against children who were born uninvited and now collect, neglected, around the only friendly voices in their hearing, those from the television set. The
zanj
from the Caribbean or Cape Verdeans plant flowers and paint porches and take hope and energy from being in America, but those born here for generation after generation embrace dirt and laziness as a protest, a protest of slaves that now persists as a lust for degradation, defying that injunction of all religions to keep clean. Ahmad is clean. His cold shower this morning lives as a glowing second skin beneath his clothes, a foretaste of the great cleansing he is hurrying toward. His watch says ten of eight.

He moves swiftly, without running. He must not attract attention, he must slip through the city unseen. Later would come the headlines, the CNN reports filling the Middle East with jubilation, making the tyrants in their opulent Washington offices tremble. For now the tremble, the mission are still his, his secret, his task. He remembers himself running, crouching and shaking out his naked arms for looseness, waiting for the starter's pistol to go off and the

knot of boys to unravel forward with an angry hail of thumping feet on Central High's antiquated cinder track, and until his body took over and his brain dissolved itself in adrenaline he was more nervous then than he is now, because what he does now occurs within the palm of God's hand, His vast encompassing will. Ahmad's best official time for the mile had been 4:48.6, on a springy composition track, green with embedded red lane lines, over at a regional high school in Belleville. He had come in third, and his lungs afterwards felt scorched in the fire of his finishing kick over the last hundred yards; he had passed two boys, but two more stayed out of reach of his legs, mirages ahead that kept receding.

After five blocks Sixteenth Street comes into West Main. Elderly Muslims stand around like soft statues in their dark suits and the occasional dirty gallabiya. Ahmad finds the Pep Boys and the Al-Aqsa True Value storefronts, and then the alley behind tiiem that he and Charlie had walked along to what had been Costello's Machine Shop. He makes sure there is no one watching as he draws near to the small side door of quilted metal painted a vomitous tan. No Charlie stands outside. There is no sound within. The sun has burned through, and Ahmad feels his shoulders and back sweating; his white shirt is no longer pristine. The Monday is astir a half-block distant on West Main. There is some traffic, cars and pedestrians, in the alley. He tries the new brass knob on the door, but it doesn't turn. He keeps twisting it, in exasperation. How can little unthinking bits of metal balk the will of
as-Samad,
the Perfect?

Fighting panic, Ahmad tries the big door, the sliding door. It has a handle down low that when turned makes two rods release a pair of side latches. The handle turns; the door shocks him by sliding up with a counterweighted ease that

feels like flight, a curved moment of flight before it settles rattlingly into its rails above, in the gloom near the ceiling.

Ahmad has let light into a cave. Charlie is not inside the grimy space, nor are the two operatives, the technician and his younger support. The workbenches and pegboards are just as Ahmad remembers them. The litter and drifts of discarded parts in the corners seem less than before. The garage has been cleaned up, tidied toward some finality. There is a hush as of a tomb that has been robbed the last time. The traffic in the alley throws into the cave dangerous flickers of reflected light; passersby idly glance in. No one is here but the truck is here, die boxy GMC 3500 unprofes-sionally hand-lettered Window Shades Systems.

Ahmad opens the driver's door gingerly and sees that the military-drab box still sits there between the two seats, duct-taped to the milk crate. The ignition key dangles from the dashboard, inviting an intruder to turn it. Two thick insulated wires still trail from the detonator into the truck body. The access door, no higher than a crouching man, slides open only six inches before the wires threaded through it begin to pull tight. Through the six-inch opening Ahmad smells the mixture of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer and nitro-methane racing fuel; he sees the ghostly-pale plastic drums, each as high as his waist and each holding one hundred sixty kilograms of die explosive mixture. The glossy white plastic of the containers glimmers like a species of flesh. Spliced yellow wires loop from the blasting caps, enhanced by aluminum powder and pentrite, which are embedded in the bottom of each drum. The twenty-five containers, he can make out in the shadows, have been arranged in a five-by-five square, neatly roped together with doubled clothesline and secured against sliding by taut attachments to the cleats

and side bars within the truck body. The whole constitutes a work of modern art, assiduous and opaque. Ahmad remembers the squat technician, the dainty smooth gestures of his oil-tipped hands, and imagines him smiling, gap-toothed, with a workman's innocent pride. They are all, all in this scheme, parts of a beautiful machine, fitted one against another. The others have vanished but Ahmad remains, to put the final piece into its place.

Gently he slides back the little wooden door, restoring the array of loaded plastic drums to their fragrant darkness. They have been entrusted to him. Like him, they are soldiers. He is surrounded by fellow-soldiers even though they have gone silent, leaving no instruction behind. The door at the back of the truck has been padlocked. The big hasp has been swung over and its slot closed over the thick protruding staple and a heavy combination padlock snapped shut there. Ahmad has not been told the combination. He understands the message: he must have faith in his brothers, just as they have faith in him, in their unexplained absence, to proceed with the plan. He has become the surviving lone instrument of the All-Merciful, the Perfect. He has been provided with a truck the twin of one he habitually drives, to make his path straight and smooth. Tentatively, he sits in the driver's seat. The old imitation black leather feels warm, as if just vacated.

An explosion, he remembers from his physics class at Central High, is simply a solid or liquid being rapidly turned into a gas, expanding in less than a second into hundreds of times its former volume. That is all it is. As if from the rim of such an impassive chemical event he sees himself, small and precise, climb into the unaccustomed truck, start the engine, rev it gently, and back it out into the alley.

One small thing nags. Getting out to lower the rattling garage door behind them—him, the truck, and the invisible company of his collaborators—Ahmad feels the juice of the breakfast orange and a suppressed nervous excitement press upon his bladder. He had best lighten himself for the journey ahead. He parks the truck, with its motor idling, on one side of the alley, raises the garage door again, and finds the machine shop's toilet behind a smirched unmarked door in a corner beside the workbench and the pegboard. There is a string that turns on the naked bulb, and a bright porcelain receptacle with an oval eye of dubious water to be flushed when he is done adding the little stream out of himself. He washes his hands scrupulously, using the dispenser of grease-cutting detergent in readiness on the sink. He returns outside and pulls down the rattling door on its knotted cord and realizes with an inner lurch how foolish and dangerous it had been to abandon the truck, its motor running, even for a minute or two. He is not thinking normally, in this exalted yet thin atmosphere of last things. He must keep his head level by conceiving of himself as God's instrument, cool and hard and definite and thoughtless, as an instrument must be.

He consults his Timex: it says eight-oh-nine. Four more minutes lost. He rolls the truck forward, trying to avoid potholes and sudden starts and stops. He is behind the schedule that he and Charlie set, but by less than twenty minutes. Calmer now that the truck is moving, part of the flow of the daily traffic of the world, he turns right out of the alley and then left on West Main, passing again the Pep Boys, with its disturbing cartoon image of three men, Manny, Moe, and Jack, conjoined in one three-headed dwarf body.

The fully awakened city twinkles and swerves around him. He imagines his truck as an encircled rectangle in a heli-

copter view of a car chase, threading through the streets, stopping at lights. This truck handles differently from Excellency, which had an easy sway to it, as if the driver were sitting on the neck of an elephant. Driving Window Shades Systems, he feels no organic sympathy. The steering wheel doesn't fit his hands. Every irregularity in the road surface jars the whole frame. The front wheels persistently tug to the left, as if some accident left the frame bent. The weight— twice what McVeigh had, greater and denser than any load of furniture—pushes him from behind when he brakes at a red light and holds him back when he pulls out on green.

To avoid the center of the town—the high school, the City Hall, the church, the lake of rubble, the stubby glass skyscrapers supplied as sops by the government—Ahmad turns on Washington Street, called that because, Charlie had once told him, in the other direction it goes by a mansion the great general used as one of his New Jersey headquarters. The jihad and the Revolution waged the same kind of war, Charlie explained—the desperate and vicious war of the underdog, the imperial overdog claiming fouls by the rules he has devised for his own benefit.

Ahmad punches on the dashboard radio; it is tuned in to an obnoxious rap station, spouting unintelligible lewdness. He finds WCBS-AM on the dial and is breathlessly told that traffic on the helix into the Lincoln Tunnel is a logjam as usual, stop-and-go, ho-ho-ho. Rapid chatter from a helicopter and rackety pop music follow. He punches the radio off again. In this devilish society there is nothing fit for a man in his last hour to hear. Silence is better. Silence is God's music. Ahmad must be clean, to meet God. An icy trickle high in his abdomen reaches his bowels at the thought of meeting the other self, as close as a vein in his

neck, that he has always felt beside him, a brother, a father, but one he could never turn to confront directly in His perfect radiance. Now he, the fatherless, the brotJierless, carries forward God's inexorable will; Ahmad hastens to deliver Hutama, the Crushing Fire. More precisely, Shaikh Rashid once explained, Hutama means
that which breaks to pieces.

There is only one New Prospect interchange off Route 80. Ahmad steers the truck southeast on Washington until Washington meets Tilden Avenue, which feeds directly into 80 in its thunderous plunge, this time of day, toward New York City. Three blocks north of the interchange, at a broad corner where a Getty service station faces a Mobil that includes a Shop-a-Sec, Ahmad sees a somewhat familiar figure hanging on the curb waving, not waving like a man absurdly hoping for a taxi—which don't range free in New Prospect and must be summoned by phone—but waving directly at
him.
Indeed, he points to Ahmad through the windshield; he holds up his hands as if stopping sometJiing physically. It's Mr. Levy, wearing a brown suit coat that doesn't match his gray pants. He's dressed for school on this Monday but instead is standing outdoors a mile south of Central High.

The unexpected sight stymies Ahmad. He fights to clear his racing mind. Perhaps Mr. Levy has a message from Charlie, though he didn't think they knew each other; tlie guidance counselor had never liked his getting the CDL and driving a truck. Or an urgent message from his mother, who for a while this summer would mention Mr. Levy a little too often, in that tone of voice that meant she was embarrassing herself again. Ahmad will not stop, no more than he would

for one of those writhing, importuning monsters, made from plastic tubes and blowing air, that bewitch consumers into turning off a thoroughfare.

However, the light at the corner changes and the traffic slows and the truck has to halt. Mr. Levy, moving faster tiian Ahmad knew he could, dodges through the lanes of stopped traffic and reaches up and raps commandingly on the passenger's window. Confused, conditioned not to show a teacher disrespect, Ahmad reaches over and pushes the unlock button. Better have him inside next to him, the boy hastily reasons, tJian outside where he can raise an alarm. Mr. Levy yanks open the passenger door and just as the traffic has to move again hoists himself up and flops into the cracked black seat. He slams the door shut. He is panting. "Thanks," he says. "I was getting afraid I'd missed you."

"How did you know I'd be here?"

"There's only one way to get to 80."

"But this isn't my truck."

"I knew it wouldn't be."

"How?"

"It's a long story. All I have are bits and pieces. Window Shades Systems—that's funny. Let in the light. Who says these guys don't have a sense of humor?" He is still panting. Glancing at his profile, where Charlie used to sit, Ahmad is struck by how old the guidance teacher is, removed from the youthful commotion of the high school. Weariness has accumulated under his eyes. His lips look loose, the lid skin below his eyebrows sags. Ahmad wonders how it feels, to be sliding day by day toward a natural death. He himself will never know. Perhaps after being alive as long as Mr. Levy, you don't feel it. Still short of breath, the man sits up, pleased at having achieved his purpose of getting into