The General and the Elephant Clock of Al-Jazari (11 page)

John started a new map, put
Green
and
Forsyth
in a circle. What did he want? Nobody dead. Nobody hurt. Both boys home. No political crises, real or manufactured. No destabilization of critically balanced situations in the region. As little harm as possible for Painter’s company.

Brightman got up to let in the waiter with their breakfast, and John pulled his original map of Ali Bahktar over, set it next to the map with Green and Forsyth’s names. “If this guy was General Painter, we might think what he wants the most is power. If he was one of those good-looking Hollywood actors, we might think he wanted fame and money. If he was working his way up a major corporation or the ranks of an Islamic jihadist group, he might need money and power, or have the desire to change the world. If he was me? Work, and love. If he was you?” John looked over Brightman’s mind map. “If he was you, he might want to be a better man. For now, let’s assume he is more like the rest of the world than like you, keeping these other human needs in the back of our mind. Okay? So what does Ali Bahktar want most?”

“Money and power,” Brightman said. “Possibly fame.”

“Exactly,” John said. He picked up his phone, called the number David Painter had given him. “David, when you got word the boys had been taken, did you get the feeling some baksheesh would make the problem disappear?”

“No, I didn’t. That’s what I assumed, just the usual, but I got a lot of flaming rhetoric in return to the standard preamble. I got the feeling the boy was looking to make his name by winning a pissing contest with an American.”

“If I can negotiate peace for cash, how much can you afford?”

“The insurance will give me half a million for each boy. Unless you want to throw your fee in to sweeten the deal.”

John laughed. “It’s more expensive than you might think, David, to dress well.”

“I’m sure it is! Is Brightman holding it together?”

John looked at him, tucking into eggs Benedict and drawing exclamation marks and stars with green magic marker on his mind map. “He’s good.”

Brightman looked up when John set the phone down. “Painter tried money. It looks like power, Brightman.”

“Sir? So how do we proceed?”

“We haven’t done our due diligence yet, so we don’t really know. I believe in backing up a good guess with some evidence. Also, the warrior-philosopher always has a secondary plan or two, in case the primary is a failure. Never forget that we may be wrong. The most power hungry, money hungry vulture of a man might still have a grandmother who loves him, and for her, he is a different man. She might be the crowbar we can use to crack his rusty chest open. Now, why don’t you tell me about what happened with you?”

“You mean, to my eye?”

“No, I mean to your eye surgeon.”

Brightman got busy suddenly, clearing dishes from the table. John waited, enjoying the excellent coffee, watching him. He was a nice kid, John thought suddenly, not even waiting for the explanation. John was looking at a man embarrassed by his loss of control. He’d been right to pick him and felt a tiny bit of relief that his people radar had not become rusty.

“It was a detached retina, and it just took too long to get back to the states, to a good eye surgeon. I mean, I understood that part. There was a head injury, too, and I wasn’t the only person hurt, one of the other guys in my unit, Jake, his arm was shredded, and Colt blew out his eardrum in the blast. So there was a lot going on. It wasn’t just me.”

“They sent you back to Walter Reed?”

Brightman shook his head. “Walter Reed’s closed down. They sent me to Bethesda.”

“Oh, right. I had forgotten.”

“So the surgeon, he tries to repair the retina and it doesn’t work. And he just sits there and looks at me with these big eyes, he had such pretty blue eyes, long black lashes, and he stares at me and his eyes were empty. He never even saw me. He was looking right at me, and I could tell he didn’t see me, didn’t care about me, and then he said I needed to get used to it, I should be happy I still had one good eye. Just don’t plan on playing baseball.

“I didn’t intend to hit him, General Mitchel, I swear. I just couldn’t stand it, him looking at me and not even trying to disguise the fact that he didn’t give a shit about me. That he didn’t really care that I was not ever going to see out of my right eye, not ever again on this earth. I mean, how could that not mean anything to him? But it didn’t, and I hit him.”

“And what happened then?”

“Well, the blow partially detached the retina, but of course he was right there in the hospital and had excellent medical care, so he’s walking around with two beautiful blue eyes and a good story.”

That sounded like a piece of irony worthy of God himself. “I meant what happened with you.” John held up a hand. “Not what they did to you. You’re still mad about it, Sam. You still feel a grievance. You haven’t been able to let it go? Are you seeing a counselor?”

Brightman studied his shoes for a moment, then the walls of the hotel room seemed especially interesting. John watched him, remembering how young he was, very young and still hurt. He was hurt because he had been expecting care, tenderness, concern, and had been slapped in the face by someone he was depending on. “Sam, can I offer you a practical suggestion?”

“Yes, sir.” His voice was wooden again, like it had been in the airport.

“I like to contain the poison. When someone behaves in a way I think of as especially shitty, I like to study on it a bit, see what I can learn from the encounter. But I hate to let those thoughts and feelings run loose in my head and make me crazy. And other people can make you crazy if you let them.” Brightman looked up, his face starting to show a little interest. “I just stick it all in a box, and I have a huge warehouse full of boxes in my mind. And when I feel calm and in control and I need to think on something, I pull out a box and work my way through. Think about how much of my reaction to a situation was their behavior and how much was actually me. I guess I don’t mind owning up to some of the lesser emotions. If I can recognize the way I felt in certain situations, then I have control over those emotions in the next encounter. I’ve brought them forward in my mind, where I can keep an eye on them. I don’t like to be blindsided by my own feelings.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Here’s a recent example. I had an old acquaintance. I counted on him to support me through a conflict. But he discovered I was gay, and his feelings changed. He didn’t betray me, but he was just less helpful, less supportive than I had come to expect with our history together. I suppose it was a betrayal of sorts. He stood on the sidelines and watched a situation fall apart, rather than coming to my aid. I let that situation become dangerous, because I didn’t want to recognize that he didn’t like me anymore. I kept insisting to myself that he had my back. I didn’t want to feel the pain of rejection. He gave me plenty of clues, and I just didn’t want to see them. So I didn’t, and the result was people I loved were in danger. I beat myself up about that a bit, and then I put it in a box. And I pull it out and think about it sometimes.”

“So what did you do?”

“I developed a bullet point.” John felt his face heat up a bit at the confusion on Brightman’s face. “It doesn’t sound like much, but I write a lot of reports, and bullet points are how I corral information into manageable bites. And I did not want to feel like I was childish enough to want to hit back at someone who had hurt me. Though I admit I did write an article about the USS Maine that was a brilliant piece of scholarship, and I know he was fucking green with envy when he wrote me a note of congratulations. Cuban-American relations are his area of scholarship,” John explained. “But I am better than him in every way.” He smiled, and Brightman smiled back at him. “So put it in a box, kiddo. Draw yourself a mind map to find your way back home.”

B
RIGHTMAN
set to work on logistics, and John looked at his phone again, for about the tenth time in the last hour. Gabriel was still in the air. He couldn’t expect a call for a couple of hours. But no one would mind if he called home to check on his boys?

Billy answered the phone in the kitchen, a modern phone that was tarted up to look old, and in fact looked like the phone from his mother’s kitchen. John particularly hated the new phone. “Hey, Billy. You hanging in there, kiddo?”

“Uncle John! Hey, guess what? Juan loves herbal tea! His favorite is ‘Love those Berry Blues.’ It has dried blueberries, lemon peel, lemongrass. I can check the label for the full ingredients if you want.”

“Everything going okay?”

“High drama around here last night. Kim sort of morphed into you right in front of my eyes. Scary.”

“Billy, is Kim around?”

“He’s sleeping. Abdullah is on guard duty. But Juan’s cool.”

“Is he there with you? Let me speak to him.”

John heard Juan’s cautious “Hello?”

“Hi, Juan. This is John Mitchel. Are you all right, son?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s no big deal.”

“Your father’s on the way to you. He thought you might have been in trouble, and I had to keep him from bolting out of the hotel and running into the street and stealing a motorcycle and racing back to Albuquerque like he was in some movie. All he could think about was you might be in trouble, and he was getting home to you.”

John heard a sniff, but he had been around enough teenagers. Give them a millisecond, and their moods would change. “I didn’t know my dad knew how to drive a motorcycle.”

“If it moves, he can drive it or fly it or sail it. When he was coming home to see you after you were born, he took a helicopter, then a troop truck, then a ferry, then an airplane, and after all that he drove four hundred miles without stopping to get to you and your mom. It took him three days to get home.”

“Is he mad?”

“He’s scared for you. Sometimes that might seem mad, but don’t ever forget how much he loves you, Juan.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is there anything you need, son?”

“No, we’re cooking. Billy’s showing me how to make a cowboy fry-up. That’s what his mom used to make for breakfast when they had people come up to the ranch in summer. They used to have a dude ranch, but there’s no money in it. That’s what Billy said.”

“A cowboy fry-up sounds like fun. I’ll talk to you soon, Juan.” John hung up the phone, thought about Gabriel walking into a house that smelled like sausage and frying onions and green chilies. Maybe Gabriel could sit down and eat with the boys. He sent him a text message,
call me, love u
, then went back to work.

Ali Bahktar’s paternal grandfather had been the treacherous old Bedu that John and Gabriel had encountered. Who was the head of the family now? Were there any male relatives from the mother’s family who might have influence over the young man?

He researched for a couple of hours, studied the briefing paperwork Painter had sent over. Under in-country resources, Painter had listed Jennifer Painter with Amnesty International as a friendly, with a question mark by her name. He looked over at Brightman. “Jennifer Painter?”

“Oh, God.” Brightman blanched at the name. “Himself’s daughter. She’s off trying to save the world from her father. That’s what he says. She works for Amnesty International. She’s counting bones in mass graves or something like that.”

“Do you know her, Sam?”

His face was cautious. “We’ve met.”

“And?”

His cheeks went from pale to pink. John wasn’t quite sure what this meant, other than that Jennifer Painter evoked a strong response in young Brightman. “Nobody can tell her anything!” he said. “I don’t know why I’m getting the blame. I mean, he raised her.” John sat back. “Okay. So what happened is we were in college together, met our freshman year. But I ran out of money and joined the National Guard, and they shipped me into that hellhole blah blah blah. So after all the shit happened, General Painter came to find me and offered me a job. Said he wanted me to try and keep Jen from joining Amnesty International. Sir, I am the last person in the world to try and work undercover. It just isn’t in me, you know? I can’t hide information like that. And Jen, she’s the smartest person I’ve ever known. So it took about five minutes for Jen to get the whole story out of me, and when she found out what her father had said, she went straight to New York and the next thing we all heard she was heading for the Middle East. She wanted Iraq but the general paid big baksheesh and got her diverted to Algeria, where he had company people who could watch out. And then we heard she was part of the Amnesty International group going into Tunisia for the prison watch. You remember they let all those Islamic prisoners out of the Tunisian prisons last year? After all the riots and everything?”

John nodded.

“So now General Painter and Jen are in détente, not even speaking. And I am in the doghouse with both of them for the rest of my fucking life.”

“Why did you stay, Sam?” John studied his moody, conflicted face. “So Jen, is she…?”

“Yes, sir. She’s the one, even if it’s from a couple of thousand miles away. And besides, who else would have me?”