Seven Days From Sunday (MP-5 CIA #1) (8 page)

“He was supposed to see me get on the bus? But he’s a simple man. Very sweet. I told him to drop me off, and I would take a taxi to bus station. He was late. He had to give the head to the boys, then he very much wanted to see his wife. They have a small child. In Baghdad. I told him, if he didn’t go to the bus station, he’d have time to see his family.”

“So he agreed.” Gonz nodded.

“Yes. But instead of getting in a taxi, I watched the boys. They were scared. So I stepped in and took the head.”

“But why didn’t he have one of his men with you? Go with you to Basra?” McKay inquired. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Ghaniyah appeared baffled herself. “I don’t know...”

“Don’t lie!” Gonz suddenly thundered, frightening both women.

“I don’t,” Ghaniyah insisted. “He told me to go. See our aunt and call to let him know if she’s okay. She’s old now. I thought someone would drive me, yes? But he said, no. He needed his men with him. He told me to go by myself.”

“And what? He hopes you’ll come back? I don’t think so,” Gonz fumed, rising from the chair. He paced the small room, deep in thought. He was angry that he hadn’t seen through Ghaniyah’s lies before now. Thank God McKay had caught it.

“I am telling the truth,” their captive persisted looking at Gonz who paced with his eyes glued to the floor. She looked at McKay. “I am.”

McKay averted the woman’s eyes by sipping on her coffee. She glanced at Gonz and could tell he was angry. She looked at Ghaniyah and said, “Tell us exactly what was planned for your trip to Basra. Everything.”

Gonz stopped pacing and looked at Ghaniyah. “Every detail. Everything al Mudtaji told you to do.”

Another shrug. “I was to go see my aunt.”

“At the hospital?” Gonz inquired.

“Yes.”

“Where were you to stay?”

“A small hotel. Near the hospital.”

“For how long?”

“Three days.” Suddenly Ghaniyah’s face changed.

Gonz caught it, demanding, “What? What is it?”

“I am supposed to bring back her... how you say? Her chest.”

“Chest?” Gonz repeated, puzzled. “What do you mean, chest?”

“For clothes, yes?”

“Chest of drawers?” McKay asked. “Dresser?”

“Yes, yes!” Ghaniyah said excitedly. “Yes!”

“The dresser is at her house?” McKay continued.

Ghaniyah nodded. “Yes. I was to bring it back.”

Gonz glanced at McKay again. “How? How were you supposed to bring it back?”

“I was to call...” her voice trailed off.

“Answer me!” Gonz bellowed. “How were you to bring it back?”

“I was to call my father,” she answered, clearly upset by the prospect. “He would arrange a car or truck.”

“What’s in the chest?” McKay asked.

“I don’t know.” She looked to Gonz who glowered at her. “I swear! I don’t know! I don’t.”

“What else?” Gonz charged. “What else are you to do in Basra?”

Frustrated, she said, “That is all. Visit my aunt in hospital. Call my father. He would get a car for me. I would come back with the chest.”

McKay looked at Gonz. “It fits. She’d be back in Baghdad on Sunday. With whatever’s inside the chest.”

Gonz nodded. He turned to Ghaniyah. “We need to get you to Basra.”

“Langley’s still trying to figure out the target. Thinking it might be one of our forward operating bases,” the lab technician told Gonz as both men studied the block letters on the monitor. The note found inside Quizby’s mouth had been analyzed for fingerprints, DNA, glue and any other details the CIA lab could possibly discover. Hours earlier, the text had been downloaded into a computer and sent to Langley.

With the note now blown up on the monitor, Gonz saw the text in great detail. He studied it again.
Islam is the only true religion. Now you have an American who speaks the truth of Islam. Before now, he and all other Americans never spoke the truth of Islam. He had to have his head removed. Now he can speak the truth. Understand. This is the first of many American heads that will come to speak the truth Sunday
.

Gonz sighed. “Confirms the attack is on Sunday.” He was referring to the fact that there had been much discussion as to what exactly al Mudtaji had meant in saying the previous Sunday that the attack would come “seven days from Sunday.” Logically, it meant this coming Sunday. The note now confirmed it.

“We’ll do a handwriting analysis,” the lab tech told him. “Maybe get something useful.”

“Not exactly handwriting,” Gonz said looking at the block text.

“You’d be surprised. For one thing, I’ll lay you odds the writer had a secondary education somewhere in the West.” When Gonz raised an eyebrow, he explained, “Look at the ‘Before.’ It’s a little off. I think the writer first made it a small b, then realized it was a new sentence and capitalized it. He’s very exact. Like the ‘had to have.’ He’s well educated. Knows English quite well.”

Gonz stepped closer to the monitor. Sure enough, he could see that the lower part of the letter looked darker. Retraced. “He?”

“Probably,” the tech said. “Most women won’t write like this for very long. They slip. Make it more cursive. Plus they don’t print as hard. This was written with force.”

“You checked the woman we brought in?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s been checked three times.” He laughed. “It’s not her. I even had her write a small ‘b’ and then asked her to capitalize it. She didn’t write this.”

“She says she didn’t even know there was a note. Swears by it.”

“Probably just the messenger,” the technician agreed. “For the record, we’ve never had any kind of note before.”

“I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“I dunno, but I talked to one of our analysts. He wasn’t surprised by the message. Said that line of thinking dates way back in Islam. Hundreds and hundreds of years. If someone doesn’t speak the truth, off with his head.”

Gonz nodded. “What else you get?”

“Okay, the writer is most likely male, educated in the West. No DNA, no fingerprints. Not too surprising. But the paper is what’s the most revealing.” He clicked on the mouse and the same faint letterhead Gonz had seen before appeared. One more click and it was clear as day. Written in Arabic.

“Here’s the translation,” the tech said. The screen changed. Now it read “
Thamer’s Sidali’ia.
”

“The word ‘
sidali’ia
’ means pharmacy.” Another click of the mouse and the words ‘
Thamer’s Pharmacy’
appeared. “Thamer is a male first name. Like if we’d found a note saying ‘Mike’s Pharmacy.’”

Gonz quickly looked at the technician. “Do we know–”

“Yep. It’s a pharmacy in Jadida. Suburb of Baghdad. Owned by a Thamer Rayhan. Been there for nearly thirty-five years.”

“And this guy Thamer?”

“We’re still working on it. Nothing came up, but who knows?”

Gonz turned to the technician. “So, the note came from what? A pad of paper from this pharmacy?”

“Small receipt tablet. Carbon copy. Maybe one of two sheets. One of three. Usually white, then yellow, then pink.”

Gonz nodded. “So we’re looking at the middle carbon?”

“We won’t know for sure until we get to the pharmacy and find the writing pad this came from. But yeah, that’s what it looks like.”

“So, yellow copy might be the customer’s?”

“Normally, I’d think so. But there’s only one thing on it besides their note to us.” He clicked the mouse. “Look at this.”

The screen changed as the right corner of the note zoomed into view. Arabic handwriting. Very faint. “Appears to be someone’s name.” The technician flipped through some notes near the computer. “Could be ‘
Aref
.’”

“
Aref
?” Gonz repeated.

“Again, a male first name. But that’s a bit dicey since it’s so faint. We’ll still see what we can do.”

“That it?”

“All I can do from here. It goes in a pouch to Langley in a few hours. See what they come up with.”

Someone was pounding on his door. Hard.

Adnan’s heart thundered as he lay in bed. The Americans? Or even the Iraqi Security Forces? Like his sister, he had seen the news on television. He too had been horrified to see his own legs on television as the head rolled to a stop near his feet, blood spraying his pants. Be reasonable, he told himself. No one had seen his face. And he had taken off his shoes, socks and all the clothes he had worn for the beheading, even his underwear, put them in a plastic shopping bag and tossed it in a dumpster behind a nearby restaurant.

He had had no idea what else was in that dumpster, but it smelled hideous which gave him comfort that no one would rummage through it. He also knew the trash would be picked up the next day. Electricity may cut in and out at random in Iraq, but the trash was picked up on time. Another strange phenomenon of the war.

More banging and a muffled voice calling his name. He quietly slipped out of bed and stood frozen, listening. Another pounding. There was no point in hiding, Adnan reasoned. They would just break the door down. Or wait him out. Better to open the door and act surprised. Innocent. He grabbed a pair of pants from the end of the bed, put them on, and went into the main room.

His heart in his throat, Adnan opened the door. It was Aref. Holding a blood-soaked cloth tightly with both hands. Adnan didn’t see any police or the Americans. Strange. He abruptly stepped past Aref and stood on the narrow second-floor breezeway. But it was quiet. No one else around. A car passed on the street below. Then it was gone.

“Adnan?”

He turned to face the old man. “What’s going on?” he asked, showing his annoyance at being awoken.

“I cut myself. Fell off my bike.”

Adnan finally noticed the bloody hand. “Let me see.”

Aref peeled away the bloody cloth that was stuck to his ring finger. Adnan carefully looked at the deep cut which still bled. Aref explained, “It stopped for a while. I went to bed. Then I woke up and it was bleeding again, you know?”

“You need stitches.”

“That’s what I thought,” Aref agreed.

“Just a minute.”

As Aref waited by the door, Adnan disappeared inside his apartment, then came out carrying a ring of keys. He shut the apartment door and headed toward the stairs at the end of the breezeway. Aref followed.

Living above the pharmacy had its advantages and disadvantages. Being disturbed after hours was definitely one of the disadvantages, but Adnan liked the old man, so he really didn’t mind. Besides, he knew the man didn’t trust doctors. As they headed down the narrow walkway between the pharmacy and the building next door, Adnan said to the old man, “You should see a doctor. In case of infection.”

Aref waved him off with his bloody hand. “No, no. You’ll clean it up good.”

At the side door to the pharmacy, Adnan slipped a key into the deadbolt lock. A moment later, he opened the door, flipped on the lights and went inside.

Heisman held his breath. He had been about to leave through the side door when he had heard voices and quickly took cover. Then he heard a key slide into the deadbolt lock, and he gave a silent prayer of thanks that he had had the presence of mind to flip the deadbolt back in place after he had entered. From his hiding place he had then seen two men enter, one older, holding his hands together, the elbows bent in front of him. The other man was younger. Neither man said a word as they walked to the back of the pharmacy.

His knee ached as he now squatted behind a free-standing display case near the front of the building. When the lights had come on, Heisman had scrambled toward the front of the store, further away from the two men. The problem was that with the interior lights on, he was now exposed to anyone on the street.

He wouldn’t be able to keep his position long.

Sitting in the passenger seat of an old Toyota, Peterson used powerful night vision binoculars to scan the street. It was quiet. As it should be. It was after one in the morning. “No signs of traffic. Repeat, no signs of traffic,” he said into the tiny microphone on his wireless headset. Since the lights were on inside the pharmacy, he picked up a regular pair of binoculars to look inside the shop. Heisman could clearly be seen, and Peterson thought he saw some activity behind the long counter in the back. Peterson’s heart raced. What was he to do if the men caught Heisman? Was he to somehow intervene? Or go back to the base? It hadn’t been discussed.

It was the second time in twenty-four hours Adnan had seen blood run free in the sink basin. He kept Aref’s hand under the water, cleaning it thoroughly with soap.

“Remember the ink?” Aref asked with a laugh.

Adnan nodded. The old man had voted in Iraq’s first democratic election, dipped his index finger in the well of ink, and then became panicked several hours later when he discovered that he couldn’t easily wash it off. While many people in Jadida had voted that day, all the residents knew that the sight of the ink stain could infuriate Sunni radicals who insisted the election was American propaganda. Aref didn’t want to quarrel with anyone and had come to the pharmacy asking for help in getting rid of the stain. Adnan had taken him to the bathroom and using a powerful cleanser, removed the ink stain.

Now that the finger was clean, Adnan could better see the wound. He led Aref to the toilet and put down the seat lid with his foot so he kept his hands clean. “Sit.” The old man complied and Adnan started stitching.

Peterson couldn’t believe it. Someone was walking down the sidewalk toward the pharmacy! It was way past curfew. The person was taking a huge risk. “Someone’s coming!” he blurted out. “Someone’s coming!”

From which direction!? East or west?
Heisman wanted to scream into his wireless headset. Exposed in the lights, he silently moved around the end of the wooden display case. He was now hidden from anyone looking in from the front, but completely exposed to the men inside the pharmacy should they look his way. He heard laughter now and surmised that the men were still in the back somewhere. He crept forward, staying low until he was crouched between the pharmacist’s counter and another free-standing product display case. Now the men would only see him if they came down the steps from the back and made an immediate left turn.