W
HEN THE LAST
few pieces of the puzzle showed up on Cobb Slaughter’s screen and meshed perfectly, his hands on the keyboard shook. His breathing turned quick and shallow. He could feel a jazz skip and then a lurch in the beat of his heart and then syncopation. Stop. Suspension. For what seemed like an age, he heard no heartbeat at all, and then he heard racing arpeggios.
Hugo
was the odd word that came to him, involuntarily, and he found that he had not only said it aloud but that the spelling was visible in front of him, floating in the room like a thread of alphabet cloud. He examined the letters curiously, and with some alarm, before they faded. Perhaps they were an after-image of a too-bright word on his screen. Hugo? Then he realized—and was fascinated by the intricacy of his neural retrieval system—that the apparent non sequitur was a
bodily
memory, intense and visceral. What he felt as the last jigsaw piece fell into place was weirdly similar to the quiver of pressure—on skin and eardrums and heart—that comes just before a hurricane makes landfall. Cobb’s body remembered this: the euphoric sense of
rush
, the awareness of exceptional danger, the eerie calm before exhilaration and risk collide head-on. He had been in junior high when Hugo battered the Carolinas. The hurricane had blown into Charleston on the
autumnal equinox with a twenty-foot storm surge on top of abnormally high tides. Wind speed topped 150 miles per hour. Charleston was flattened and drowned. McClellanville and the barrier islands were washed away. Promised Land, thirty miles inland and therefore marginally better off, had clung to survival on the tips of its nerves. Cobb’s body itself retained the imprint of the storm’s Category 4 imprecations.
Hugo’s message was this: Significant Death or Transfiguration.
Monitoring the incoming data on Jamil Haddad and Sleiman Abboud and Marwan Rahal Abukir and Michael Bartok, Cobb felt that Hugo-like
frisson
against his skin. He had joined up the dots. They mapped transfiguration. The blood-pumping muscle behind his rib cage raced and skipped beats and raced again. He experienced sharp pain—too much sudden oxygen—in his lungs. He had to rest his head in his trembling hands.
He had, in effect, defused a ticking bomb.
He would prevent havoc that was already planned.
He would be vindicated.
He imagined the shocked face of Leela Moore:
I’ve been sleeping with the enemy.
Would she, at last, taste fear? Would she be anxious?
Leela-May Magnolia Moore, you are hereby charged with giving aid and succor to an alien and to terrorist organizations.
Would she have bad dreams?
He imagined also how the look in Benedict Boykin’s eyes would change. There was Benedict’s former look, which haunted and goaded Cobb, and there was the way that Benedict would look at Cobb in future. Cobb saw the old look everywhere, on faces in the street, on grunts in the army, in dreams, the look that infuriated him, the one that was lowered
and guarded and falsely modest but which nevertheless issued a challenge. The look said this:
My moral credentials are impeccable; yours are slimy. My great-grandfather was a slave; yours owned slaves. Anything you do, regardless of courage or principle, is tainted by the dirty fact of your past; anything I do is hallowed by mine.
The memory of his last encounter with Sergeant First Class Boykin—his last face-to-face encounter—still filled Cobb with turbulence.
You wanted to see me, Sergeant Boykin?
Yes, sir.
At ease, sergeant. What did you want to see me about?
Interrogation procedures, sir.
You did your duty in that regard, sergeant, in reporting to me. And I did mine. Objective achieved. I passed the photographs on to my superior officer, and interrogations have been taken out of our hands. They are the task of local militia. We are not involved.
Yes, sir. That is the problem, sir. There is evidence of torture. Some detainees that we handed over are dead.
That is very unfortunate, sergeant, but we are at war and local militia are not under my control.
They are operating on our premises, sir. They are doing it here.
Strictly speaking, sergeant, these premises are theirs. We are guests and advisors.
Some of our men took photographs afterwards, sir. In the cells. Of mutilated bodies. If those photographs get out…
I see. Yes, that is indeed a problem, sergeant. We will make taking photographs a punishable offence. Do you have any copies?
Some, sir. The ones I confiscated. They’re in this envelope.
Thank you, sergeant. I’ll keep these, and I’ll issue orders accordingly.
Yes, sir.
And then, since Sergeant First Class Boykin continued to stand there, continued to refuse to lower his eyes:
You are dismissed, sergeant.
Sir, we are ghosting them. We bring them in and hand them over. We keep no records. With respect, sir, it seems to me that this does not absolve us of responsibility. It only means that our abdication of responsibility is not on record.
Thank you, sergeant. Your opinion will be taken under advisement. You are dismissed.
Yes, sir.
But Sergeant First Class Boykin remained for one beat, two beats longer, and his eyes accused:
What will you do about it, sir?
Cobb’s voice had been steely:
You are dismissed, sergeant
.
Yes, sir.
The salute, Cobb thought, had a challenging edge and it rankled. Moral superiority is cheap, he wanted to say to Benedict Boykin, when it doesn’t cost anything. There is the issue of military protocol. There is the delicate issue of diplomatic relations. There is the prickly matter of the autonomy of local troops.
There is the issue of borderline insubordination.
He slid the photographs out of the envelope and fanned through them.
“
Jesus God!
” he whispered.
He resealed the envelope and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk. He locked the drawer. He felt a compulsion to wash his hands. He could see stains on the pads of his fingers and on his palms, and there was a burning sensation on his skin. Something toxic must have been on the prints. His hands were smeared.
An orderly came in and said “Sir?” The orderly sounded nervous.
“What is it?” Cobb glanced up from the sink. He was scrubbing at his hands with a brush.
“You’re not answering your intercom, sir. I’ve been buzzing on and off for ten minutes. Your hands are bleeding, sir.”
Cobb stared at his hands. “Contamination problem,” he said. “It’s been attended to.”
He dated the onset of bad dreams from that day.
He did not send the photographs on. When he left the army, he took the sealed envelope with him. The photographs remained like toxic sludge at the bottom of a box in his safe.
W
HAT SURPRISED EVEN
Cobb himself—or almost surprised him—was the way he had so accurately intuited the facts about Michael Bartok before he had proof, before he had any hard evidence at all.
He had read a magazine article once about identical twins, Korean twins, who had been separated at birth. Both had been adopted in the late 1950s, in the wake of the war, by American families, though those families were radically different. Twin A, adopted through an international agency by anthropologists—Jewish New Yorkers whose collaborative field work was based in far-east and south-east Asia—had grown up in Chennai (which Twin A’s grade school certificate still called Madras), and was fluent in English, Hindi and Tamil. He had been accepted at the London School of Economics and was passionate about his life’s cause: viable systems of third world development.
Twin B was adopted by a former GI who had fathered a child in Korea but whose sweetheart and baby had been lost to a bombing raid. The father was Southern Baptist and full of guilt. By way of atonement, he and his American Baptist wife—to whom he had confessed his wartime fornication—adopted Twin B and brought him home to Alabama. Twin B grew up in a blue-collar suburb of Birmingham that was full of conventional, law-abiding, church-going, Republican voters. To
the mixed pride and consternation of his god-fearing parents, Twin B gave his time to inner-city Baptist mission work: the rescue of drug addicts, the homeless, all the lost for whom Jesus had died. Thus it was that his local congregation raised the money to send Twin B to an international evangelical conference entitled “Rescue the Perishing.”
Neither set of adoptive parents knew that the baby they brought home in infancy had a twin, yet both adoptees, it transpired, had always fantasized a shadow half. The twins met, by chance, in the transit lounge at Heathrow airport in London. They found themselves standing side by side in the men’s bathroom, pissing simultaneously, identically dressed in beige pants and blue shirts and beige linen jackets. Each subsequently reported a sense of absolute inevitability in the meeting: a small shock of surprise, an adrenalin rush, and then déjà vu: a meeting that had already happened over and over in dreams and fantasy, a docking with the mother ship, the smooth interlock with a missing part.
This was how Cobb Slaughter felt as the data he always sensed he would find appeared on his screen. The dossier on Michael Bartok/Mikael Abukir was by no means the first manifestation of Cobb’s gift. He had a sixth sense. Before the first wire tap, he felt vibrations. He had never been wrong.
Hugo. Switch-flow. Ferment. An excess of white heat was rampaging through the highways and byways of his blood. He felt intoxicated. Every time, it was like this. He had never been wrong.
To celebrate, there was a particular kind of bar he would go to, whatever city or country he was in. Every city had this kind of watering hole. The bar would be dark. There would be young women in sequins and gauze whose services went beyond serving drinks, young women who flowed and swayed like
exotic fish through the dimly lit murk. The young women held aloft trays of drinks and the drinks were bedecked with cherries and paper parasols and tiny flags. When customers touched the young women, or stroked them, or introduced certain kinds of provocation between their legs—cell phones, perhaps; hundred-dollar bills; cubes of ice—the girls giggled fetchingly and suggestively and leaned toward the customer with their trays. They accepted payment for drinks in original and unconventional ways.
Cobb would sit in a corner and sip his whisky and watch other men make asses of themselves. Observing loss of control in others—reading the predictable stages—was his specialty. He himself would take an old round tin for loose-leaf tobacco from his pocket. Under cover of his bistro table, he would open the tin and stroke the sand dollar inside. The glittering young women would come and go. They would sit at his table and offer him a drink on the house, or they would ask if he would buy them a drink. He would be courteous but non-responsive. He would be detached—and therefore increasingly desirable—until a woman with the right kind of eyes came along. The woman would meet his gaze evenly, or perhaps with a certain air of challenge, but not lasciviously, not with blatant sexual invitation. He preferred that the woman be black.
The woman would sit at his table and order drinks.
“Something is making you sad,” she might say. She often said that.
“On the contrary,” Cobb would reply, meeting her eyes. “This is a private celebration.”
“Ah. Then perhaps I can help you privately celebrate.”
“Perhaps you can.”
There were always back stairs in such bars. There was always an upper floor with shuttered windows and red-shaded
lights. Always, he would place the tobacco tin under the pillow. That was essential. The sex would be acrobatic and slightly violent and would last for hours.
“You are one wild man,” the woman would say.
When Cobb left, he would request something personal, a little kinky, a little odd. If granted, he would promise, the bit of theater would result in a doubling of the fee. The role-playing involved a chair, a sheet, and the ceiling fan. Part of the task belonged to Cobb. He would twist the sheet into a rope and sling it over a blade of the fan. He would knot the rope around the woman’s neck. She was then required to stand on the chair. “I’ll leave the money on the bed,” he would say. He was generous. “Best if you don’t move,” he would say, “until someone comes. I’ll send the manager up.” He would exit the room and leave the woman standing naked on the chair.
On the night the last jigsaw piece on Mishka Bartok fell into place, he left the dive that was on the waterfront in Charlestown and took the subway to Harvard Square. He walked through Harvard Yard and up Oxford Street and along the street where Leela’s apartment was. He stood opposite, in shadows, and watched the light in her gable window for some time, and then he walked on up Massachusetts Avenue to his own apartment near Porter Square.
I
N HIS APARTMENT
in Porter Square, Cobb unlocked his fireproof portable safe and took out his files. He did not take out the file marked
Baghdad/Photographs/Boykin
. He never opened this file. He never touched it.
The folder he removed was labeled
Calhoun Slaughter 1968
, a date some years before Cobb was born. The folder was thick with photographs, and the photographs were eight by ten inch in size, some black and white, some in color. They were newspaper and magazine reprints, all taken by the lone journalist who happened to be in Ambush Alley on the Tay Ninh-Dau Tieng Road when Calhoun Slaughter’s M113 armored personnel carrier blew up.
Two of the photographs had moved like a lit fuse around the wire services of the world: the explosion of the lightweight armored vehicle; and the one of Calhoun Slaughter apparently firing at point-blank range into the back of the head of a prostrate body.
Other photographs—the crew before, the crew after, Calhoun Slaughter kicking corpses—had appeared in assorted Sunday supplements and magazines. Context meant nothing to newspaper editors; visual drama was all. Cobb, on the other hand, kept the images in chronological sequence and always examined them in order.
The first photograph was from Before, and showed the four-man crew atop Mr. Blue, the vehicle’s nickname scrawled in fat brushstrokes across its flank. There were the commander, the driver, the two side gunners. Cobb’s father had been a side gunner. He had taken off his helmet and was mopping at the sweat on his face with his sleeve. He was also laughing, as was his driver, Sergeant Leroy Watson, another Southerner, a black giant of a man from Alabama. They had just shared a joke. The four-man team was close-knit, though the other side gunner was a Yankee, and the commander was a Midwestern college boy who’d failed a year at agricultural college and lost his student deferment and been drafted. Leroy and Calhoun, the Southerners, had a non-stop bantering routine. “That Leroy,” Cobb’s father used to say when drink and reverie claimed him, “he could crack me up in a skinny minute. Leroy could’ve made Westmoreland himself crack up.”
If it were not for the nature of the vehicle, the rice paddy on one side, the wall of dense tropical forest on the other, the red dust blowing up from the road, if it were not for these props, one might have thought the men were at a tailgating party and that a football game was getting underway.
Cobb loved this picture of his father: young, handsome, full of bravado and courage, straight man to Leroy’s comic line. He had had a photographic studio crop this image and frame it. It was one of three photographs he kept on his night table or beside his bunk at assorted bases around the world. There was also a snapshot of his parents’ wedding (his father in uniform; his mother fresh as Confederate jasmine in a street-length dress with a gardenia in her hair). The third photograph was of Cobb Slaughter with Leela-May Moore, first- and second-place winners in the high school Math Prize.
Cobb studied the face of his father atop Mr. Blue. Suppose nothing had happened to erase the laugh? Suppose what happened in the next few minutes had never happened?
Ambush was what happened.
The Reuters photographer caught the moment of impact. The hail of sniper fire hitting the flank of the APC was visible on the second image as tracer arcs, manifest as a disturbance on the lens like vapor trails in the wake of a plane. Laughter had been erased from the faces. It had been blown from the frame. Cobb thought the vapor trails must contain the dispersed atoms of mirth. The eyes of the crew were wide and shocked, the mouths tight in grimace. The white blur was the hand of Calhoun Slaughter as he reached for his helmet. Holes were visible in the APC’s flank.
The third photograph showed the APC veering toward the clump of jungle, guns blasting. A covey of men was caught running from the trees like quail flushed out of cover by a dog.
In the fourth frame, there were seven bodies on the road and four men on top of the APC, still standing, their rifles trained on the bodies, watching.
Frame five: three of the crew had relaxed their stance. Side Gunner Slaughter was in the act of dropping to the road.
Frame six: explosion. The entire APC was an inferno, a core of fire in a cloud of red dust. No figures were visible.
“Those M113s,” Calhoun Slaughter would explain—he would expound on this
ad infinitum
, to his son or to strangers in bars, in rambling and interminable lectures, especially when the whisky wound him up—“those M113s were fucking death traps. Tinfoil hulls!” He would crush a beer can in his hand to demonstrate. “Lightweight, so that aircraft could bring them in.” He would draw diagrams with his finger in spilled beer. “Caseless ammo to cut down the
weight. Might as well have sent us out in a tinfoil powder keg with a burning fuse.”
Frame seven: the still-burning tank filled the upper third of the image; the bodies, face down, filled the foreground. Calhoun Slaughter, blackened, scorched, uniform in ribbons, face and legs darkened with blood, one arm dragging like dead meat, was between the two, crawling toward the camera and the bodies.
“Half a second before this photograph, I saw that fucking corpse—this one here”—jabbing with his finger—“lift his head and lob something at the APC. I heard it whistle over my head. ‘You’re done for, buddy,’ I screamed. ‘You’re meat, you’re Vietcong stew.’ Then my eardrums burst and Leroy…Leroy was the man in the sun.”
Frame eight: this shot was the one seen round the world. An American GI, with his booted foot on a body, firing at the back of its head. A series of further images showed a systematic kicking of the bodies. “I wasn’t taking any more damn chances,” Calhoun said. “Every one of those fuckers, for all I knew, was playing dead.”
There was, of course, no image of the dead photographer. “A sniper got him, and I got the sniper. They were still out there, in that frigging pocket-handkerchief of jungle, watching us, the bastards. I fired off my whole belt’s worth into those trees. Would I have called the fucking base if I’d shot the journo? Would I have handed over his fucking camera?”
There was no court martial. A military inquiry ascertained that none was warranted. There was no trial, except in the media and the court of public opinion. Cobb’s father should have been awarded a purple heart, but the award was withheld to avoid stirring up further negative attention, and Calhoun Slaughter came home to averted eyes and silence. He had only partial use of one arm. He had a pulpy hole in his cheek. He
lived on his disability pension from the VA and sat on his front porch and drank. He screamed and shouted in his sleep. Awake, he was unpredictable. When drunk, he ranted; but there were other times, there were other times…
“Don’t peek,” his father said. That was probably what his father had said, though the memory was in fact made up of sensations, not words. Cobb could smell tobacco and the damp wool of his father’s sweater. He could smell the funky leathery stink of his father’s boots. He could feel rough skin on the hands pressed over his eyes. He was three years old and this was his earliest memory. It was Christmas morning. He remembered how his father’s fingers scraped his cheeks like sandpaper as his father’s hands slid away to let him see the surprise. He remembered the tricycle, gleaming red, and the smile on his mother’s face. He could never see his mother’s face distinctly. He could see only radiance, as though his mother’s face were the source of light. He remembered feeling nothing but joy.
“Meant to have it done for your third birthday,” his father had told him over and over, years later, in the maudlin hours of each anniversary of Cobb’s birth. “Didn’t quite make it. But I did have it done for Christmas.”
“I remember that Christmas,” Cobb would say. “It’s my earliest memory. I loved that tricycle, Dad.”
“Found it at the dump, did I tell you? Rusted all to hell, mangled front wheel, no seat.”
“You fixed it up good.”
“Sanded it, painted it. Your mother made a little padded seat. We called it the Red Racer and we could hardly get you off of that thing. You would have taken it to bed if your mother had let you.”
One year his father had told him, “Night before your third birthday, I went on a bender.”
Cobb made a non-committal sound. His father always went on a bender on his birthdays.
“Accidentally ran over the damn tricycle,” his father said.
“Your mother cried so much, I was ready to run over her too. Kinda scared me, so I took off for a couple of days. Had to start from scratch to fix the damn thing up. Got it good as new in the end.”
“It was beautiful, Dad.”
“You used to ride that Red Racer as if you were king of the world.”
Cobb still had the Red Racer. He kept it wrapped in a mover’s quilt in the loft of his father’s garage. He would climb up there on every trip home and look at it and dust it off. He planned to give it to his son if he ever had one.
There were other images, their sequence random, which he ran like videotapes, fast forward, rewind, fast forward again, a blur of sensation: his little legs pedaling, pedaling, red dust rising, his compass set for the porch where his parents leaned on the railing, watching; his parents as lighthouses, giving off safety and warmth; his head on the pillow through which came a night noise, a creak-creak-creaking, and he was padding barefoot, the hallway floor cool to his feet, to where he could see them: his mother and father floating on the porch swing, his father’s fingers stroking his mother’s face.
Cobb thought of his addiction to the past as akin to his father’s benders. After the hangover, he returned to the right ordering of now.
Fact: In the blown-up train on the Red Line, identifiable body parts had been found: a head and two legs, no torso, sure
sign of a suicide bomber. The head was that of Jamil Haddad, graduate student in engineering at Harvard, registered auditor of a seminar in Persian Music, frequenter of the mosque in Central Square.
Fact: Various members of the mosque in Central Square had expressed sympathy with radical jihad. Their intemperate statements were part of the public record.
Fact: There was a history of association between Jamil Haddad and the Australian music student whose passport bore the name Michael Bartok. They both frequented Café Marrakesh in Central Square and they both frequented the mosque.
Fact: In visits to aforesaid Middle Eastern bar and to the mosque, Michael Bartok assumed a different name, that of Mikael Abukir.
Fact: A search of the apartment of Jamil Haddad, following his death, had revealed computer files with lists of contacts and names. This list included a cluster bracketed together: Mikael Abukir, Marwan Rahal Abukir, Fadi Rahal Abukir, Sleiman Abboud.
Fact: Intercepted email communication between Marwan Rahal Abukir and Sleiman Abboud indicated that the former believed Mikael Abukir to be his son.
Fact: Marwan Rahal Abukir had been on extended training stints at jihadist camps in Afghanistan, but had recently returned to Beirut. Intercepted emails and cell phone calls between Marwan Abukir and Sleiman Abboud indicated that Abukir was actively recruiting young Muslims with American citizenship or with Green Cards and student visas.
Fact: In the four days since the explosion on the Red Line and since Cobb’s interrogation of Leela Moore, Michael Bartok had not returned to the apartment he had been sharing with his lover, but was registered at an airport hotel.
Fact: Air France had a reservation in the name of Michael Bartok for a round-trip ticket via Paris to Beirut.
Fact: Cobb was dedicated to forestalling acts of mayhem; Cobb was also dedicated to making Leela understand the gross errors in the choices she had made.
So: the musician would be permitted to fly the coop. He was bait: the little fish who would hook the whale. The Abukir phone line in Beirut would be tapped. After contact was made, the meeting would be under surveillance and a rendezvous of a different sort would be arranged.
Cobb passed on his intelligence to several relevant bodies, military and federal. He listed options. The father would of course be apprehended. He could be held for interrogation on substantive grounds. The son could be allowed to return and then arrested by Immigration at the port of attempted re-entry in Boston. He could be charged: he had met with known terrorists. This method would be the least troublesome, politically speaking, and entirely legal.
But suppose Bartok/Abukir made no attempt to return?
Suppose his father were recruiting him for deployment elsewhere, for a bombing in Australia, perhaps?
It was clear to Cobb that kidnapping and detention of both men in Beirut, on the grounds of forestalling major threats, was the only safe option. There was a risk that the Australian government would lodge a protest—international protocol frowned on the kidnapping of citizens by a foreign power, especially since Lebanon was not a combat zone—and this was why it was essential that no official unit, encumbered with national identity and sanction, be involved.
The action could be officially disowned.
It would be due to rogue elements.
Cobb, in his outsourced element, would arrange the containment incident. He would transfer his pigeons to Baghdad. There, Marwan Rahal Abukir, hub of a lethal network, would be transferred direct to U.S. Military Intelligence. The son, whose role was as yet unclear, would be held until Cobb Slaughter arrived.
Cobb wanted to sift the truth of this one for himself.