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Fouad’s mother had had a confused notion about the Twelfth Imam, a concoction of fairy tales told by her grandmother or gathered from the stories in the many books and pamphlets that she had read in both Farsi and Arabic. ‘So we tell tales of exile and waiting,’ she had once said. ‘Who can it hurt?’

Her stories had grown more elaborate as the years had dragged on in London and the United States. She had invariably begun her stories with a formula: ‘So for now, this beautiful little boy—blessings and peace be upon him!—lives in a house made of ivory and precious stones, high atop a mountain, and day after day—and in appearance he is only five years old, this is a miracle! But it has been many centuries since and the doves and the Jinn who are Muslim protect him and carry messages to the towns and cities and prayers back—and day after day, he walks around the perimeter of this compound, which no satellite can ever see nor any pilot, nor any passenger in an airplane, and no eye that passes near can behold. And the air atop that mountain is so rarefied that no man who climbs to that altitude will remember what happened when he returns, it will all go blank in his thoughts, but for a beautiful impression of a child full of wisdom, waiting to rule under the banner of al-Mahdi, peace be upon him and his progeny. And that has been reported by some whom I believe. But of course your father does not.’

She had told Fouad other tales as well, about Jesus—who had not died on the cross but whose essence awaited in another protected place—’Some say it is like this Twilight Zone, only friendly and beautiful’—and how Jesus (peace be upon him) would visit the boy, and they would eat almond cakes and drink coffee and sweet tea and listen to the soughing of the doves and the screeching of the falcons and eagles who constantly circled over the compound. And then she had added that all the great prophets and men of history who were waiting to return would also visit the boy, the greatest among them but for the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him and his progeny.

A grand and never-ending garden party attended by the Buddha, by Zoroaster, and so on, peace be upon them all.

Near the end, the Alzheimer’s took away her stories and she did not remember either Fouad or his father, and a nurse had attended to her. Months before the end she had spent hours talking on a telephone that was not hooked up, speaking with relatives he had never met—dead relatives.

Fouad had been ten years old when she had died. With his mother’s memory had passed Fouad’s already shaky belief in her stories. He had kept only the core—God and prayer. No fairy tales.

He pushed back against Harris under the thermal blanket. Harris moaned again, not very loudly. When awake, Harris was almost out of his mind with the dull throbbing pain of his arm and his ribs. The pills did not seem to do be doing much good.

Fouad saw the morning and stood beside the boulder, leaning against it. There were now distant figures on the plain, wandering between the whirlwinds like ants between huge silken scarves.

In the cold their water was holding up and they had plenty of food but that would not matter if the figures on the plain found them. In the moonlight two men had passed by just
fifty or sixty meters away, no doubt following a trail from the wreckage of the Superhawk. There had been the shuffling of lightly shod feet and muttered conversations in Farsi.

So now Fouad did not dare stand up and pray. Under his breath, he said, ‘
Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
’ But prayer was incomplete without the motions so he stopped and silently promised that these prayers would be made up for, all of them, when there was a place and a time. God was understanding and all-forgiving.

Fouad’s father had been a severe and serious man and no doubt he had participated in many treacheries, and perhaps even now was involved in such. But his father had called prayer a blessing in life beyond measure, the moment when all else faded and the mind was quiet and in touch with the One that is One. In their years in Washington, DC, they had gone to mosque and prayed together daily until Fouad was sent away to school in Maryland.

There had been a few months in his late adolescence when Fouad had stopped praying, but he had soon found he missed the blessing of opening his heart.

Had they informed his father he was missing?

Harris lay quietly. Fouad gently lifted the blanket to avoid pulling it off his companion as he rolled over, and then realized that Harris was alert. His face was pink with fever.

‘Do you hear that?’ Harris whispered. At first Fouad heard just the wind. Then a distant roaring.

‘Activate the C-SARB,’ Harris said.

Fouad looked around to make sure they were not about to be set upon by trackers. The figures on the plain were heading for another outcrop a few kilometers west. He switched on the beacon.

‘Look for it,’ Harris said. ‘It’s going to be a big one. They’ll be doing, I don’t know, atmosphere recon, taking samples to track fallout. A big chopper or an airplane, accompanied by
Warthogs, maybe F-18s, F-22s. I don’t think they’ll come out here just for us.’

‘Shh,’ Fouad said. ‘Of course they will extract us. You are valuable. And the specimens.’

‘Who the fuck cares about some dead Kurds?’ Harris said. ‘They’ll come to track the radiation out of Iran.’

Fouad turned, looked up, and saw the aircraft and it was as Harris had suggested—a very big helicopter and heavily armed. It was coming from the west and dipped briefly and arrogantly over the few figures on the plain but did not fire upon them. Then it sped toward the hills. He could not see or hear other aircraft. He crept to the edge of their rocky promontory, leaving Harris in the shade of the large boulder. This was the most dangerous time of all, Fouad knew. He left the C-SARB on but crept low in case pickets had been stationed nearby waiting for them to be rescued.

Watching the helicopter, still kilometers off, Fouad remembered more of his mother’s story.

‘For the great King of the Abbasids had worries of this boy, and his powers, and sent soldiers to search for him high and low, and found him neither in the Earth nor in the cities nor in the mountains. The doves hid him from sight, the Jinn made him invisible, and sometimes even his father the eleventh Imam, peace be upon him and his progeny, could not find him when he was at play…’

The C-SARB would guide the helicopter. Up until the last minute, he would try to make himself as invisible as that fairy-tale boy.

Then he heard a sound like a small animal being stepped on. Fouad glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see a bird of prey with something in its talons—an irrational hope. A piece of light fabric bobbed above the thrusting spine of rock that defined their promontory, within a few meters of the large boulder. Fouad crept along the gravel between the rocks, pistol in hand. He had studied the area that morning, looking
for a place to pray, and remembered ways where he could stay hidden. He could not use the pistol unless he absolutely had to, it would attract attention. So he drew the knife from its sheath around his calf.

A tall, bony, bearded man in ragged desert camouflage stood up from a crouch. He had wrapped a dirty length of cloth around his head and it trailed down the back of his neck. His expression was of horrid satisfaction like a butcher who enjoys his work. He lifted Harris’s severed head and began to bob up and down, a little dance of triumph and pride. He sang a quiet song in Farsi, too low for Fouad to understand.

His back was to Fouad.

Fouad ran from his cover and grabbed the man’s knife hand from the lower wrist and twisted his hand and arm around and quickly had him back and down as he had been taught. The man’s long serrated blade flew off to one side. So surprised, the man made not even the sound that Harris had made. He saw Fouad’s face and seemed to think that this was a joking friend, wrestling with a fellow insurgent. And indeed Fouad was smiling reassurance. He covered the man’s mouth with one hand and with the other pushed his blade just behind the man’s prominent Adam’s apple, twisted it sideways, and pulled up, then twisted again. The man quivered like a lamb, staring up in silent dismay. His blood flowed in a controlled stream, copious but not spraying or spurting.

Slowly the dying man’s face grew sleepy and calm. His quivering subsided to slack twitches.

Fouad felt nothing except a formless loathing at something so stupid, so vicious, like an idiot who tortures kittens or birds. His father had cared little for the jihadists or those in the
umma
who supported them. ‘They will get us all killed,’ his father had growled over the dinner table after 9-11. ‘They care nothing for Islam, nothing for Allah. They are like jackals chewing on the foot of a tiger.’

Now Fouad understood. He withdrew his knife. The man who had grinned and danced in joy at his work now appeared sated, with the expression that comes of having no blood in one’s brain. His eyes sank back. Harris’s head had rolled a couple of meters and lay face down, awful.

A few minutes later, as the helicopter fanned a great wind, Fouad let go of his kill and stumbled across the rocks to rearrange Harris. He waved his hands and began to weep.

There was nothing. Even as the huge machine set down, he was utterly and forever alone. He could not visualize his mother’s face. God was not with him, and would never be again.

Sam slid the wand over the electrical contacts.

The pillar of fire rose in the early morning, brief and smoky. Twenty starbursts bloomed over the small park at an altitude of just over two thousand feet. They formed a curve with the highest end in the east and the lowest pointing north.

Somehow, given the silence and the stillness after the loud pops, Sam did not think there would be much fuss. And certainly nothing to attract attention to him. Doubtless only a few people saw the flashes of light before the dawn and wondered. Police might be contacted. There might be a report filed. A cruiser might be dispatched to search for anything suspicious.

Sam closed the lid on the trailer, put on his filter mask, cinched it tight, and got behind the wheel of the Dodge. He drove into the wind for a few minutes, then circled around, caught the freeway, and headed east.

He clamped his jaw and imagined the descending ragged plume of invisible dust, so fine, drifting and falling, rising again, spreading and dropping for miles; a few would hear the rattle of small glass beads on their roofs.

For all the angry people, for the righteous, for the zealots and the monsters: a small gift. A gift of the small.

So simple.

It had worked.

William Griffin stood in the parking garage at the center of six growing piles of sorted trash and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He could not reach under his mask to wipe his nose, which was running continuously. No mask and no amount of cream could cover up the stench. The twelvestory building overhead contained three restaurants and fiftytwo businesses that produced at least four tons of trash each day, sent down three chutes to dumpsters rotated out and stored behind a chain link enclosure to be picked up once every two days. This was the end of the second day and the dumpsters had all been full. And somewhere in the piles, they might find a paper coffee cup, chewed chicken bones, a receipt, a photo, a stack of paper inadvertently left unshredded, in close archaeological association with each other, with just the right set of DNA or fingerprints to connect four Thai scumbags currently in the custody of Border Security to trafficking in underage prostitutes.

Ten-year-olds.

Nine-year-olds.

Five-year-olds.

After only two months in New Jersey, the excitement was gone. This was awful work, sausage work. You never wanted to know these details about how life was made and what it was made of unless you were blue through and through, and even then you regretted it. Whatever its slim rewards—seeing children deported back to the situations their parents
had found intolerable in the first place—it had to be done, to maintain his standing with his fellow agents.

The number of crimes you suspected were going on would never match your successes in capture and prosecution. But you did not turn back, once you knew such things intimately, face to face. The door would never be closed. As in a war, the spirit of the squad was everything.

Especially in the last stages of the political siege.

He had seen the headline on the online streamer of the
NYT
:

SENATE, HOUSE VERDICT FOR FBI: DEATH

William used a long stick to poke through the office paper debris sorted to his left. The cold fluorescent lighting in the parking garage made everyone look sickly, above their masks. Some of the agents wore sealed ski goggles, Tyvek suits, and full filtration gear as they waded through the trash contaminated—illegally, as it turned out—by unsorted restaurant food waste. Animal food waste was supposed to go down a particular chute and be hauled off to a rendering plant, from whence it would return as tiny little bars of hotel soap. It had not. Vegetable food waste and even old oil had been mixed and then the lot had been dumped in with the office and apartment waste. William had long since learned a basic cop truth: some people, in fact a lot of people lived life with little more sense of responsibility and guilt than a bug, intent only on reducing their random walks to a minimum of distance and effort just to get by, to get home and sit in front of their satellite TV or earn discounts on merchandise by signing up for sleep ads.

Five years in NYPD had given William a dark view of life, but it had been a concentrated one. Now, at the bottom end of Newark’s thin blue FBI line, he was getting a more smearedout, multifaceted view. The view of a squashed fly. So be it. The best jobs were the hardest. That’s what he tried to tell himself when the going was so disgusting. Why would anyone
want to be here, doing this? Better almost to be in the ME’s office opening rotting corpses.

‘Hey, Tracer, I just had a sentimental moment,’ he called across the pile to Tracy Warnow, who shared his general build and age. They had been called the Blues Brothers a few weeks ago but the name had not caught on—neither of them looked like Jim Belushi.

To nearly everyone, William was known as TP. Warnow was known as the Tracer.

‘Do share,’ Warnow said. ‘If it brings tears to my eyes, it can’t be any worse than this shit.’

‘Which would you rather attend, autopsies or garbage detail?’

‘Autopsies. Hands down. Now tell me whether this is animal, vegetable, or mineral.’

William walked around the paper pile and joined Warnow in peering over the steel rim of a dumpster. A greasy gray something lay in the bottom, refusing to be pried loose.

‘Fungus, I think,’ William decided. ‘It likes it down there. It looks happy.’

‘If it gave up its secrets, would it make our lives any easier?’ Warnow asked.

‘Bag a couple of cc’s, just in case,’ William advised. ‘If it’s human, we can pass it on to Trenton P.D.’

‘I worked New Orleans for three years,’ said Davis Gorton, a forty-something, pasty-faced forensic bookkeeper on loan from Pennsylvania. ‘After two summer days, everything was like that. You couldn’t tell a hooker from a dead pig.’

‘You guys looking for blank DVDs?’ called a Trenton detective. ‘There’s a pile over here. Looks like they were tossed down the chute the Thais used.’

‘Bag them all,’ Gorton said. ‘I love spinning discs all day.’

William lifted his arm to retract his sleeve and look at the time. It was one in the morning. They would be down here past sunrise. Coffee did not help. Some of the agents used
Zak-Hepsin, a legal variation on Tart, but William did not like the side-effects, which included—for him, at least—a couple of days of limp pecker. Not that he had had many opportunities to so fail in recent weeks.

‘Coffee break, TP.’

William had not seen Trenton ASAC Gavin North descend the ramp into the garage. He waved his arm at the piles. ‘Don’t prolong the agony, sir. Give us a couple of hours. We’ll have it sorted by five.’

‘You’re dead on your feet. So’s everyone else. We’ve set up a break room in an empty restaurant on the first floor. There’s coffee and a few cots in case anyone wants to catch a nap.’ North waved his hand and whistled loudly. ‘That goes for everybody! Half an hour.’

The first-floor vacancy was indeed bleak but a quiet, cleansmelling paradise compared to the parking garage. Counters and dividers and all but one of the tables had been removed and cooking and plumbing attachments stuck out from a grease-stained back wall. Linoleum patchwork marked the boundaries of the restaurant that had once been there. There was a bathroom at the back but the lights had burned out and William had to take a whiz in the dark.

He lay back on three plastic chairs with his eyes closed but he could not rest, not really. He had just signed papers to move his father into a rest home, on disability, and not just for recuperation. Griff was no longer his father; he was an empty shell living from hour to hour, recovering well enough physically—but memories of anything before the last few months were gone, or liable to pop up sporadically, peppered into brief conversations that within a moment or two seemed puzzling, inexplicable.

Yet Griff was happier than William had ever known him to be. ‘It hurts all the time,’ he had told his son last week, ‘but the hurt is on the outside. I can take that kind of hurt.’

Tracer Warnow flapped out a newspaper and said, ‘Listen to this. Senator Josephson kicks a dead horse.’

‘We’re not dead yet,’ William said in his best Monty Python accent.

‘Just listen. This is better than coffee.’

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Gorton said.

‘Gets your blood moving.’

‘Hand it here,’ William said wearily.

‘You’ve got your slate. Look it up. I prefer newspapers. They belong to an earlier, civilized age.’

William pulled his slate from his pocket and scanned the headlines from AP and Reuters. Nothing on Josephson: they were full of news from the invasion of Saudi Arabia. ‘Here’s something to warm your cockles,’ he said. ‘ANTI-SAUDI FORCES ADVANCE ON RIYADH: THOUSANDS FLEE.’

‘Bastards are reaping the whirlwind,’ Gorton said. ‘Mecca’s next. Stay out of it, I say,’ he added. ‘I don’t want my son dying to defend King Abdullah.’

William moved past two more headlines: OHIO PUBLIC HEALTH: MEMORY CASES APPARENT FLUKE, and 10,000 ACRES BURN IN EASTERN SAN DIEGO COUNTY:
Blazes not yet contained, rain and floods may follow.

‘The whole world is going to hell,’ Gorton went on, his voice a low rumble. He had pulled out the last remaining picnic-style table and sprawled across it.

William frowned and tapped on the Ohio headline. The dateline read yesterday, Cleveland.

…hundreds of residents in Silesia, Ohio, and in at least five neighboring communities cannot seem to clearly remember events that happened years or even months ago. A few exhibit all the symptoms of advanced dementia. Doctors are puzzled by the diversity of cases, but all symptoms, according to Doctor Jackie Soames of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, appear to tie into defects in how memories are processed. ‘Short term memories seem to be unaffected. Our patients can function on a day-to-day
basis, and can even perform jobs that do not require deep memory. Most of them, however, remember little about their history of the past few years, or even why they live where they live, or how they acquired families.’

Theories range from a new and unknown viral infection to BSE, or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, commonly known as Mad Cow Disease…

William felt an urge to call Rebecca, but what was there to act on? A coincidence? Loss of memory had nothing to do with anthrax, of that he was certain.

He pinched his nostrils to stifle a sneeze, then read on about the fires in San Diego County.

‘Hey, Agent Griffin! TP!’

He raised his head and saw the Newark SAC, Tom Hartland, standing in the open glass door of the empty restaurant. ‘Warden’s giving you a reprieve. You’ve got a ticket to Quantico.’

William looked at Gorton, who smirked and shook his head in envy. Hartland escorted William to the street and a staff Lincoln Town Car idling at the yellow-marked curb.

‘Get in.’ Hartland unlocked the car and climbed into the driver’s side door. ‘Tell me, Griffin—what do you know about solid rocket fuel?’