Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
"You had. No intelligence. To offer." Hodji slumped backwards to stare at them incredulously. "I want you two to understand something.
You are not intelligence vats.
If you had any idea of the grief you laid on the New York squad ... Mine wasn't the only resignation offered. I think there were four, total. Including Miss Susan—"
Shahzad flinched. Obviously, this agent was important to him.
"God knows they need every agent right now. I haven't slept, conjuring up all sorts of nightmares. The downstairs of the house didn't burn so badly. All your medication was right there on the counter, and your asthma canister was in the middle of the kitchen floor, Shahzad, black as pitch. As far as I knew, you had the clothes on your back, no money, no medicine—"
"We get more medication very quickly," Shahzad said, unlacing his fingers finally to pat Hodji's shoulder. "You should not worry about us."
Hodji's incredulous gaze turned to him. "What'd you do, hack into the CVS computer system and rewrite your own prescriptions?"
"Mm, not CVS. They have big, bad firewall ... nasty firewall."
Hodji held up a hand like he didn't want to hear any more.
The door opened. Marg and Rain came in carrying plates. Rain must have woken Owen with this piece of juicy news, and he carried a pitcher of water, his eyes swollen but alert.
"Hi!" Tyler grinned at them, obviously loving this. "What's up?"
"'Sup?" my brother responded, and laughed in a way I hadn't heard him do in months.
Tyler took a plate Marg handed to him, dropped down to sit on the floor, and landed the plate on the coffee table. He bit into a drumstick, rolling his eyes heavenward and staring at Rain while he chewed. "So. This is the famed 'yellow-haired female.' That is totally what my roommate calls you." He gestured with the drumstick. "I was just making a big deal of Cora before you came in here. See, Shahzad comes from a country where if you stare at a woman's ankle, your parents will smack you. And no girl has ever taken any interest in me, obviously. Let's just say"—he turned to me with a smirk and a cheek full of chicken meat—"we're infatuated with your womenfolk."
"Tyler, do you ever shut up?" Hodji asked. Shahzad was turning quickly to stone, which got me biting my lip. "I was in the middle of a lecture."
"Hodji, you won't be mad anymore. Honestly. When can we tell you what we got today?" Tyler giggled.
Hodji shot up straight. "Never, that's when. It all goes down the toilet, and I don't care what it is. You're two boys. You're not two computer chips."
"Boys, schmoys," Tyler griped back defensively. "Hamdani is not a boy. I'm not a boy. You want us to act our ages? Really? What's your pleasure? You want us to ... snap each other with towels in some locker room and talk about what great movie we saw on Friday night? You want us to slip Scott, here, a few bills so he can get us a little buzz down at the liquor store? You want us to go out cruising in my mom's Audi? It's a convertible! Hey. Maybe we can get in a drag race and a fistfight. Maybe we can get laid in the back seat—"
"Oh ... he makes to speak dirty before the women." Shahzad stuck his fingers in his ears and squinted his eyes totally shut, though he never stopped chewing his food.
Hodji drowned them out. "I want you to ... read the classics! Go to Princeton!"
"Maybe we'll get around to it when we're done doing what we need to do now." Tyler gestured at Shahzad with his drumstick again. "We're graduates of the School of Double Dealings and Internet Hard Knocks. I feel good. For once. So lay off, maybe."
Hodji pulled his cell phone absently out of his pocket again, staring at it for calls missed, I supposed. His own son had not called, I took it, by the way he tossed the thing onto the couch.
Spoiled. Parents can wind up dead, and then you got nothing, and in the vast majority of cases, something is better than nothing.
I looked over at my brother, who was watching Tyler totally, like maybe he finally understood something.
Shahzad took his fingers out of his ears, and hearing nothing from Tyler, took another chomp from Marg's organic drumstick. They ate like I've never seen people eat. Marg went to get them seconds of macaroni and cheese.
I sat down beyond Cora's feet and asked a question. I couldn't help it. "That e-mail this afternoon was from you? About fires on an island?"
"Fires of Magog, yes," Shahzad said. "That message was an e-mail signature my father used to send off to Hodji in Karachi. If dangerous extremists come and we want more security before scripting them? That was one of several e-mails we make. I knew he would know it, would know we were close by."
"It sure fits the situation," I noted incredulously.
"Yeah. I thought of that. That's what made me laugh the first time." Tyler went off in high-pitched giggles again, looking apologetically at Cora.
Hodji tried one more time. "Scott. Tell these boys they need to go to college and put all this on hold, and ... act normal."
Since my own history of "normal" was a lot like what Tyler had jokingly described, I finally said, "I think you love them. Hence, I think you're playing typical parent. But not much in this room right now is typical." I kicked Tyler in the back with my foot—not too hard, but to keep him from rolling out some inappropriate victory laugh. He didn't.
But he still took advantage. "Okay, Hodji. If you don't want to hear what we have, I'll just tell Scott. Okay?"
Apparently, he really wanted Hodji to hear, because he got up and left his food to pull me up again and look me in the eye. He put a hand on my shoulder. "Scott. Pulling the drapes was just a formality. VaporStrike is in Texas tonight. Omar sneaked across the border this morning, and VaporStrike is picking him up—in a blue Camry rental car in back of the Burger King in Amarillo, Texas, at 2 a.m.
Scott.
How do you like them apples?"
My eyes drifted to Hodji, whose jaw was somewhere low enough that I was afraid he'd drool. In one fluid movement he picked his cell phone off the couch and hit three numbers.
Rain piped up finally. "Who's Omar? Wait. Maybe I shouldn't ask."
"Yeah, maybe you shouldn't." Tyler giggled.
Hodji held out the cell phone like he himself didn't want any part of it. Tyler took the phone and walked out into the corridor. I could only hear, "James Imperial? Hey. It's a blast from your past," before he closed the door.
Hodji turned to Shahzad with a gesture of confusion. "You can go with him, too, talk to the big guns. I'm out of the game. I don't want in. If something like this can happen to the two of you—thanks to bureaucratic nonsense—I'm not playing."
Shahzad looked alarmed. "Does James Imperial know that we're alive?"
"He does
now.
"
Even I flinched, putting myself in Imperial's shoes. He'd probably spilled a massive obituary to
Dateline
today.
Shahzad breathed in awe. "Hodji. He will surely have your badge."
"I
gave
him my badge. I'm going to go work as a farm hand in Egypt. I don't even want to buy a farm. Too much responsibility. Do I look bothered right now? By James Imperial?" He actually looked pretty calm beneath his swelling.
Shahzad didn't. "Surely you will not leave me again."
"You had no trouble leaving me!"
"Farm hand ... You were afraid of my mother's cow. She shakes her horns and you run like the big baby that you are!" They took off in Punjabi. We couldn't understand a word of it, but this whole thing was like a foreign film that is so suspenseful you can watch without reading the subtitles.
Tyler came back in holding the phone out for Hodji, looking only slightly less amused with himself. "He wants to talk to you."
Hodji shook his head.
"He's not mad. Honest."
Hodji kept shaking his head until Shahzad shoved his shoulder, muttering something in Punjabi that made Hodji reply in English, "When did you get such a fresh mouth? I don't remember this from Karachi. I'm calling your uncle. Tonight."
"You bluster. Take your phone call." And he finished with a Punjabi term, some breed of name-calling, as Hodji took the phone, left the room, and pulled the door shut again.
Tyler grinned at us. "Loose translation? 'Pudding face.' I'm getting used to Punjabi. The Pakistanis are a little more retiring than we are. It's their word for 'shit for brains.'" He giggled again, jerking his thumb between Hodji and the closed door. "They argue a
lot.
"
My brother and Rain watched Tyler, warily and yet entranced. They were sitting on the floor by the door, and as he dropped down in front of his food again, their necks lowered automatically. They had never been mean kids, but they knew gleeps and nerds in only one context: such people had been invisible before. Owen talked sometimes about his dreams of mists and of misty beings circulating in them. He thought the beings had been Mom or angels. I wondered if they were Tyler.
"So, um, how did you guys fool everyone?" Rain asked.
"I don't think I'm at liberty to say." Except for Tyler's lips smacking, the silence resounded.
I realized all these exits with the phone need not happen if Rain and Owen and Cora weren't in here. As they were adding nothing, I reached down and tugged at Rain's arm. My head was so exploding with questions that I couldn't even be nice about it.
"Go. Cut some logs. They'll be here tomorrow, and you can chat it up then."
My brother stood too, looking torn, and if I was gauging it out right, a little humiliated. It was a strange moment, splitting a room of people exactly the same age in half, because some knew things that the others had chosen not to know.
"Are you
sure
they'll be here?" Rain asked.
Actually, I wasn't. They looked at each other, and Shahzad said quickly, "I have been so very happy to meet you and see all of you looking so well. But we..." He cast a glance at the closed drape, and I thought I heard Alan's car pulling in, finally. "...are not good to have around. But I shakes your hand again, Miss Rain. You give me much strength to go on. You do not know."
Marg came in with her medical bag as Rain stared down at Shahzad's hand clutching hers. He pulled away, but she and Owen didn't leave right then. Wise choice. Tyler and Shahzad removed their shirts, and Marg examined their skin. It was probably not as painful as it looked. If this new strain worked like chickenpox, I noticed their pustules were dry, no longer oozing, so they looked at their worst but probably had been there over a week ago. Still. I would be damned if they went anywhere else.
I could suddenly hear Alan's and Mike's voices rising with Hodji's. I gathered he was trying to tell them all of this while simultaneously telling Imperial.
"You're staying," I said, and I can't say I was totally surprised that my brother agreed with me immediately.
He hadn't said much, but he now said, "If you guys can't stay here, then trying to save us is a joke."
He looked shell-shocked and after some sleep would wake up with his complicated thoughts aligned better. He finally pulled at Rain's T-shirt, and they passed Alan and Mike in the doorway. Suddenly, this room was just how I wanted it—full of USIC, full of protection, full of questions for these kids that I would get to hear the answers to.
I barely noticed that Cora hadn't moved when Marg led Rain and Owen out.
"Want some help?" I reached out my hand to her.
"No, thank you."
I had no idea what she was thinking, but she could get up and leave anytime she wanted to.
CORA HOLMAN
TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2002
12:30
A.M.
PARLOR
I
'
D SAY IT WAS ALEESE MAKING ME STAY
. I was nowhere close to forgiving her, but it was as if she had parked herself beside me, neither of us looking at the other, both of us looking around this room with interest. These agents were not musclemen, but their presences were somehow huge. Fortunately, the couch I sat on was removed from them, and it was more like watching a theater production than being an actor.
Mr. Steckerman and Mr. Tiger observed the skin outbreaks in silent reverence as Marg said, "Unless it's somewhere where we should retire before I look at it, I'd say you've got no localized infections."
She looked at the inside of their mouths with a light pen, making a bit of a face and saying, "
No
more junk food ... full of acid."
Shahzad looked warily at Mr. Steckerman. He was definitely being the shyer of the two, and I think he was very surprised when Mr. Steckerman said, "I want to hug you. How do I do that?"
"You forgive much," Shahzad said, after easing back into his shirt and letting both agents hug him. "We are sorry. Much big mess. We have to think fast the other night."
"Don't worry about that now. That's part of our job. We clean up messes. Just ... tell us everything you know, and how you know it."
He turned and half pointed to me and then Scott, who sat on the arm of Tyler's chair three feet away. "These two are CCs. That's 'classified clericals.' You can speak at liberty."
Mr. Tiger leaned against the double doors, and Mr. Steckerman sat on the couch kitty-cornered to Shahzad and Hodji. I had to look past Scott's back to see much, which was fine with me.
"Who caused the fire?" Hodji asked.
Tyler raised his hand. "I used snap judgment. Well, bad judgment. Earlier that day it totally occurred to me to set off this pong bomb I had—after USIC couldn't find it in their paperwork trail to help us get out of my mom's house. I had a whole plan in mind of how to force their hands, but I have a conscience. It was all pissy daydreaming. I hope you believe that. Maybe thirty seconds after Shahzad sent you the text message that VaporStrike was nearby, one of their v-spies picked us up on Shahzad's terminal. It didn't have a patch. The IP address was in their laps, so we were sitting ducks."
It was a lot of French to me, but Hodji seemed to understand.
"So you blew up the house?" he asked. "I said I was done lecturing, but I can't help it. A pong bomb ... you could have blown yourself and him into twenty pieces."