‘A pious man spoke out of turn for the sake of his closeness to God. Some of my people went at his behest to this house and found the Kurds, these Jews, dead. Ice was brought by police. Had they been Muslims we would have buried them…’ He shrugged. ‘It is possible the Sunnis have been doing experiments with our poor Jews. I do not know. They have no respect for life.’
‘Amen,’ Beatty said.
Walking around the courtyard, they approached the back of the house—the kitchen. A pump handle stood in one corner before a small stone and mortar cistern.
Fergus slipped on rubber gloves. He removed from his rucksack more gloves and fine-filter masks with little rubber bellows and a jar of nose cream and handed them around. ‘Slip these on and fasten them tight.’
‘Nobody else has fallen ill,’ Al-Tabrizi said, this time in English.
Past the kitchen, stepping over broken glass and empty cans, they came to what might have once been a workshop or a storage room. In the center of the room, blocks of ice had been arranged in a flat igloo and shaved ice had been sprinkled over a tarp that partially covered the blocks. Naked feet stuck out from under the tarp, heels soaking in puddles of filthy water.
Master Sergeant put his gloved hand over his mask. Harris stood with hands on his hips staring critically at the wrinkled and discolored feet.
Al-Tabrizi handed Fouad an old and battered compact flash memory card. ‘We took many pictures before the ice arrived, donated by a hotel and a hospital. The people who did this left Kifri two days ago in a truck. We have pictures of them
as well. If we have disturbed the truth of what is here, I apologize, but you understand…There was urgency.’
‘All right,’ Fergus said. ‘Gentlemen, lend a hand. Let’s pull one of them out.’
‘Then they haven’t been here more than a few days,’ Beatty said. His voice had dropped by half in the smelly chill of the back workshop.
Fouad moved to help Harris and Fergus tug a corpse from beneath the nearest igloo of ice. It was an older woman, naked but for a single undergarment. Her face was a mask. Her mouth fell open in a dead scream. Her tongue was swollen and black.
‘They are not from Kifri,’ Al-Tabrizi said. ‘They were brought here from farther north by men in trucks. Workers who were paid to clean this room and prepare have told me the men who delivered these poor souls were bragging they had something that would kill only Jews, and that the planet would soon be cleansed.’
‘Jesus,’ Beatty said.
Fergus checked the woman’s skin. Her legs, torso, and one arm were covered with wide black scabs. He removed a microlume, a small plastic plate, from his belt pack, pulled out a red tab, turned her head, and rubbed the tip over her tongue, then examined the read-out. He did the same on an eschar—one of the flaking black lesions on her chest.
‘It’s anthrax, both pulmonary and cutaneous,’ he said. He pointed to black marks and splotches on her stomach and around her ribs. ‘GI as well. They must have made her eat some of it.’ He examined the card’s display from a few inches, scowling. ‘I see protective antigen, edema factor, and lethal factor—PA, EF, LF—but I’m also getting something unfamiliar. Could be a new plasmid.’ He looked up at Al-Tabrizi. ‘I have to take internal samples. It would be better if you left the room. I will do my best to be respectful.’
‘I will stay,’ Al-Tabrizi said. ‘It is my duty, and the necessity is clear.’
‘Sir, we’re talking about the likely release of bacilli made even more virulent by vegetative mutation inside a victim,’ Fergus said. ‘Please leave.’
Al-Tabrizi glanced at Fouad. ‘He is a good doctor,’ Fouad told the Shiite.
They stood outside and made sure their masks were tight.
‘Is that even possible?’ Beatty asked. ‘Can they target something like this to Jews? And how in hell would Saddam hide something this big for so long?’
‘We’re pretty sure it wasn’t Saddam,’ Harris said.
‘He made tons and tons of the shit. If not him, who the hell is it? Goddammit, boys, this could be what we’ve all been looking for. My senators—’
‘Sir, you are not to speak of this to anybody,’ Master Sergeant cautioned. ‘Not even your senators.’
‘Well, how in hell—I’m not in your line of command, son.’
Master Sergeant lifted his H&K. ‘Sir, I have been instructed to tolerate your presence, so as to access whatever information you may provide, and so as not to create another partisan mess in Washington. But I am authorized by the Commander in Chief to prevent this information from being leaked by anyone, including you. Do I have your word as a patriot and a military officer that you will keep absolutely silent about everything you see and hear today?’
Beatty’s face stiffened. He raised his gloved hand, keeping it well away from his face and body. ‘When you put it that way,’ he said, ‘on my mother’s grave, I so swear.’
Al-Tabrizi stood in an outer doorway, gasping and trying not to be sick. As Fergus came out of the death room, Fouad approached him and quietly asked, ‘Can these people now be properly buried?’
‘They should be burned,’ Fergus said.
‘That is not the custom,’ Al-Tabrizi protested.
‘If dogs get ’em it could spread all over town.’
Master Sergeant intervened. ‘Sir, we won’t be able to return for the next day or so and we certainly can’t take them with us. We do not want to violate local customs. That might attract even more attention.’
Harris nodded to Al-Tabrizi. ‘Tell the burial detail to wear masks and hospital gloves and to bury them deep, where no dogs will find them,’ he suggested. He removed a glove, reached into his jacket, took out a thousand-dollar bill, and gave it to Al-Tabrizi. ‘For expenses, headstones, whatever.’
Al-Tabrizi took the money but refused to look at anybody now. He had tears on his cheeks, tears of anger and shame.
Beatty returned to his vehicle, walking beside Fouad, Harris, and Fergus for a few yards. ‘Doesn’t matter what we do now, what we give or what we try,’ Beatty said. ‘They needed twenty years to learn democracy. We gave them five. When the Baathists rose up again and the Shiites allied with Iran, we supported the Sunnis with money and weapons, bless our pointy little heads. That cranked up the old death machine all over again. When we pulled out, we left the whole country twisting on a short rope. God have mercy on us all.’
Master Sergeant followed them, walking backward, face to the battered white house. Beatty gave them a brief wave, climbed into his Subaru, and put it in gear, spinning up a rooster tail of dirt.
The Superhawk roared overhead and made its dusty landing.
‘I hate dust,’ Fergus said. ‘Could be spores everywhere.’ He pulled a canvas-wrapped plastic box from the wall of the helicopter and showed them syringes pre-loaded with Gamma Lysin. ‘We’ll all carry these, just in case.’
SAC John Keller joined William in Griff’s hospital room late in the evening. Keller turned a metal hospital chair around and sat on it with his long legs jutting out like a crane fly’s. In his late fifties, thin, with sculpted Appalachian features and large gray eyes, he looked like a particularly conservative accountant or an undertaker and more likely to be William Griffin’s father than the man in the hospital bed, behind the plastic curtains, even in his better days.
They said very little for the first few minutes of Keller’s visit. Griff hadn’t moved except for the rise and jerky fall of his chest. ‘They’re going to transfer him to Swedish in a week, I hear,’ Keller said.
‘That’s what they tell me, sir.’
‘He’s going to make it. He’s tough. I’ve worked with a lot of fine agents and I have never known anyone tougher. We cannot afford to lose agents like Erwin Griffin.’
Keller was thinking out loud. Agents had come in and out, observing Griff in his bed and all of them without exception had begun to think out loud as if at confession.
Keller glanced over his shoulder at William. ‘I hear you spend an hour here each day.’
‘I’m waiting for OPR to return me to duty,’ William said.
‘Right.’ Keller smiled. ‘Rose gave you one hell of a spirited defense. Told me she’d be dead if you hadn’t turned arsonist.’
‘I’m not allowed to speak about the matter, sir.’
‘It was certainly unorthodox.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Keller pushed to his feet and brushed off his midnightblue pants. William stepped aside in the small space as Keller strode for the door. Keller paused, turned, and held out his hand. ‘Thanks.’
‘Sir?’ William shook with him.
‘We need fine agents. Hate to lose any.’ Reaching into his jacket, smiling like a bandit, Keller pulled out a length of white toilet paper, about a yard’s worth, hung it around William’s neck, and made a quick sign of the cross. ‘May this wipe away your sins.’
Pleased with himself, Keller closed the door behind him.
William sat in the metal hospital chair the same way Keller had and leaned his chin on the back like a puppy.
Griff’s face, in the shadow of a steel cage studded with screws, was a map of sutures held together by shining glue and plastic strips. His nose and cheek bones had been pulled back into place from where the bomb suit’s face-plate had squashed them. Shims of sterile cartilage interlaced with stem cells from his own marrow had been inserted between the bones. They made little bumps under the sutures. Nose cartilage had been removed so Griff’s face was still flat, and he would need more reconstructive surgery later. His mouth was full of so much plastic tubing that he couldn’t speak even had he been conscious.
‘Come on, Griff,’ William said. ‘I need some advice right about now.’
Griff opened his eyes. The eyes surveyed the ceiling, but did not turn either left or right. They closed.
Still no Griff. Just the body fighting along as best it could, waiting for its owner to return. Waiting for the commanding presence it had been used to for so many years.
Like William himself.
An hour later Rebecca arrived with two coffees in a cardboard carry box. William jerked out of a stiff slumber on the metal chair.
‘It’s four a.m.,’ she said, staring through the plastic at Griff. Her eyes glinted like onyx in the penumbra of the room’s small night light. ‘They’re holding the wife and son at Seatac. Since we bagged them, News has arranged for us to interrogate them before anyone else. But we have to get in and out before eight. Drink this, then come with me,’ she said.
‘I’m on probation,’ William said.
‘Did Keller avoid you like a pile of dogshit?’ Rebecca asked.
‘No.’ William pulled the toilet paper from his pocket and let it unfold. ‘He put this around my neck.’
Rebecca’s smile transformed her. Again those dimples that could only be improved with cat’s whiskers. She pressed the quilted paper between her fingers, lifted it for a sniff, and stroked it as if it were velvet. ‘Order of the lilac garter. Welcome back to duty.’
The only place Sam could now be at shallow peace with himself, with his plans, was the open road—driving the old Dodge, dragging the horse trailer over long, flat miles between scattered rocky plateaus, past odd grassy humps rising from gravel-bedded alkali flats, desert towns whose gutters flowed with olive-colored water after a heavy rain—all of them cut through by endless ribbons of cracked and eroding asphalt—and at the end of each day, each great segment stricken from his map, spartan rooms with worn carpets in little strip motels.
He tried not to think about the past—everything his father and grandfather had worked to build being squandered, a country turning inward, distracted by fear and greed. He could not help but see these rough untended roads as the truest, deepest sign of an America once too fat and happy to stand up to the plate and bat a really smart game, and then, after 9-11, too lost in its own paranoia and bitterness to realize that it was being taken for a nasty ride.
It was not so odd that around that same time, in the forests and towns of the northwest, land of both outlandish, Godless liberals and the most rough-hewn pseudo-Christian bigots, he had picked up both the skills and the psychology necessary to play the quintessential anti-Semite.
At first, it had been a performance…Going to the world’s hardest places, learning the languages, putting on the garb and assuming the customs—mortifying his white man’s flesh
—a spectacular series of patriot tricks, with himself the ultimate magician. But after 9-11, grimmer and emptier, having burrowed deep into America’s spiritual rectum, having trusted his leaders and committed so many crimes—and having signed on for a mission that even he could not carry out—the smell had finally tainted him.
And then had come 10-4.
And the madness.
On the third day of his journey, Sam turned on the truck’s radio. Keeping an eye on the long straight road, he set the scan button and popped through the spectrum of on-air broadcast stations. Lately, satellite radio had been eating their lunch, but there was still a high-power, hearty breed of broadcaster hiding in small brick buildings beyond the endless cornfields, relaying the ruminations and rants that still drew, last time Sam had checked, over twenty million listeners in the U.S. of A.
Sam finally found the station he was looking for—pay for pray radio.
A preacher was speaking in a steady bass drone. ‘It is now once again a crime to slaughter an innocent and unborn child, but how much greater a crime to mislead a soul into damnation? How much greater a crime to put the ring of sin through a man’s nose and pull him onto the pathway of deception and misery that runs straight to eternal hell, to pain beyond imagination and fire that never ceases to burn? How much greater a crime and a sin to lead to damnation that which is immortal, a man’s soul, by sharing sinful thoughts, by spreading the awful secular hatred of those educated at big city northern universities, or those who speak day in and day out on television and on the Web, in books and movies, passing along their evil delusions? How much greater a crime is that, and why is it not illegal, I say, and punishable by death? We have the power still! We have the
center and the heartland! Yea shall these bellwethers, these evil curly-horned and slit-eyed rams of the devil that so mislead our flocks, shall they all be—must they be!—judged by more than the soft hand of Jesus, but by the hard stern hands of God’s sworn and devoted servants, and put to the sword of holy truth…’
Sam wiped his eyes. The heat was enormous. So much searing pain, memory, grief, stoked and banked coals fired by those who spoke for God but refused to listen to Him. Murderers and sinners all.
Sam knew how to deliver vengeance and medicine all at once.
Sam had recharged.