Threat Level

by William Christie

  Abdallah Karim Nimri was wandering through Lea Market, checking his back. He’d chosen the market because it was a surveillance nightmare. Spanning whole blocks, both shops and open air, Lea had everything for sale, from automobiles to produce to pushcarts.

  Vehicular surveillance was impossible. The roads were a dawn-to-dusk traffic jam. There were the cars of shoppers indulging in the latest fad of curbside purchase without even leaving their vehicles. The trucks of shippers and the buses of the transport operators. Both of whom, following Pakistani custom, would simply pick a spot to use as their terminals and grease the palms of the police to seal the arrangement. A thousand horns blared continuously, in the custom of cities around the world. Something in their DNA leaves human beings positive that if they only lean on their horns long enough and loud enough, the traffic obstruction in front of them will somehow dematerialize.

  Anyone trying to surveil a target from a distance with high-powered optics would be confronted by thousands of men who looked almost exactly like Nimri: early thirties, dark hair, moustache, dressed in inexpensive Chinese slacks and long-sleeve dress shirt. More than a few would also be carrying cheap canvas shoulder bags.

  The only possible way to trail someone in Lea Market was on foot, and even that was problematic. There was barely room to walk. The vendors had encroached on every bit of open space, again after paying off the police.

  Nimri took more than usual care, because his contact had sent him the signal for an emergency meeting. This made him suspicious. Especially since the contact was an army captain from the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani spy agency.

  Knowing any surveillance in the teeming market would have to be close-in, Nimri stopped abruptly at a jadoogar’s shop. No one in front or behind him stopped abruptly, so Nimri shifted his peripheral vision to the magician’s wares. The usual snakes and scorpions. A mummified bear cub. And, in pride of place, a moldy stuffed lion that reminded him of the toy animals at a state fair in America.

  The proprietor was busy, having just killed a large lizard right before the eyes of an enraptured customer. He then lowered the reptile into a cast-iron caldron filled with boiling oil. After filtering it, the oil would be used by the customer to improve his sexual Shakti.

  Hiding his Islamic disapproval, Nimri passed a few rupees to the shop boy and was led into the back storage room. Parts of every dead creature imaginable were in jars, stacked up in piles on shelves, or hanging by cords from the ceiling. The smell inside the shop had been heavily masked by burning incense, but in the storage room it was indescribable. Fearing he would vomit, Nimri held his breath and pushed the boy before him. He didn’t take another breath until he was out the back door and in the narrow alley behind the shop. The alley was littered with filth, and someone nearby was burning waste in a fire, but these odors were almost pleasant compared to those of the jadoogar’s shop. Nimri stood immobile, bent over slightly, until his stomach stopped rolling.

  A glance at his watch told him he was running out of time. Turning onto an aisle of produce stalls, Nimri spotted Captain Husain Baloch pretending to evaluate melons while also searching the crowd.

  Catching Baloch’s eye, Nimri mopped his face with a red handkerchief, the all-clear signal. It was just as well, because he needed it. The heat from all the bodies, stoves, fires, and vehicle exhaust was like a furnace. Baloch nodded imperceptively, and they began pushing through the shoppers toward each other.

  Nimri’s head throbbed. He knew that one day the wind might shift and Baloch would show up not to pass a message, but to arrest him. Abdallah Karim Nimri had spent two years in prison in his native Egypt, and had no intention of ever again repeating the experience. Especially not at Guantanamo Bay. Taped to his belly was a Chinese Type 82-2 hand grenade, and tucked away in his shoulder bag a Russian Makarov pistol.

  This would be a “brush pass.” In what would look like accidental contact, Baloch would pass Nimri a written message, then both would continue on their way without a word.

  When the two men were shoulder to shoulder, Nimri turned his body inward. He felt the hand touch his shirt, and waited for the pack of cigarettes to be slipped into his pocket. But an unexpected shove from another impatient shopper instead caused the pack to slide down the front of his shirt and bounce off his shoe.

  In violation of all tradecraft, Nimri and Baloch both stopped, took a step back, and stared at the cigarette pack lying on the ground between them. As if each waiting for the other to bend down and pick it up.

  The decision was made for them. A boy, certainly no more than twelve, flashed between them, snatched up the pack, and broke into a run.

  Stunned hesitation overcome by an eruption of rage, Nimri sprinted after the boy, plunging a hand into his bag and yanking out the Makarov.

  Street children spent their lives running. For them the stakes were higher than any track meet; natural selection took care of the slow. The boy had started out with a ten-foot lead, and the only thing that kept the race close was him having to push his way through a mostly unyielding public.

  None of whom made any move to stop him. People would be more surprised if an hour passed without a wallet snatching, and why risk a knife in the stomach? Especially for someone else’s wallet.

  The boy cut to the right at the end of a row of stalls, and Nimri almost got a hand on him. But the crowd thinned out and another alley loomed ahead.

  Knowing the chase was lost, Nimri extended his right arm. One, two, three, four, five shots, the pistol bouncing in his hand. Screams rang out from behind, but still the boy kept running. Now totally consumed by his wrath, Nimri fired again.

  The boy stumbled and went down, skidding to a stop. In four strides Nimri was on top of him.

  The boy, crying, had one hand pressed to a dark blotch on his hip. The other, outstretched toward Nimri, held the pack of cigarettes. He said nothing, probably not wanting to risk saying the wrong thing, but all his body language was begging for mercy.

  Panting heavily, Nimri snatched the pack and jammed it into his trouser pocket. Then, grasping the pistol with both hands to steady it against his breathing, he fired two shots into the boy’s face.

  He’d actually yanked the trigger three times, but nothing happened on the third. Nimri nearly screamed out his fury before he realized that the Makarov slide was locked to the rear, signifying an empty magazine.

  Glancing over his shoulder to confirm what he expected, a crowd silently watching him, Nimri thumbed the release to send the slide home and jammed the pistol back into his bag. He trotted down the alley, away from the mob of onlookers. A few more rupees to calm the proprietor of the shop he entered from the alley, and soon he was again one of the anonymous mass of shoppers.

  The audience to the shooting would soon disperse with Karachi cold-bloodedness, leaving the body where it lay. The other part of the story would be the useless questions and time-wasting procedures of the police, whose capriciousness might just as easily result in an innocent witness being dragged off to jail, beaten with an inch of his life to extract a confession, followed by his family being extorted for money for his release. Better to move on.

  Nimri caught a bus. A wheezing old Ford, not one of the new Japanese Hinos. Optimistically, the transport company had put up a sign near the entrance: MODEL 2004. Model 1973 would have been more like it, and the fact that it was only the year 2003 did much to water down the impact of the advertising.

  When Islamic law had been imposed in the country, Pakistan’s buses were fitted with an iron wall to segregate the women’s section. Some sportsman had opened a peephole in this particular wall, and a few men were gathered around it, making lewd remarks.

  Nimri paid them no mind. The adrenaline draining from his system, he sat with his hands on his knees to stop them both from shaking. He was still furious, this time with himself. He knew he should have let the thief go. The message inside the cigarette pack was in code. Even if the boy, or whomever he sold the
cigarettes to, had turned the paper over to the police instead of throwing it away, the police would not have been able to break the code.

  He could easily have signaled Baloch to break off the contact. But the captain’s urgency in requesting the meeting had put him on edge. And after all the precautions, to have the pass fumbled and the message container dropped at their feet, and then stolen, was simply too much. He had charged off after the boy without even thinking.

  And it could have been disastrous. Only by God’s will was he not sitting in an interrogation room, an Egyptian with Pakistani identification that would not stand up to close research, the police peering at the coded message, Baloch and the entire network on the run. All due to his rash foolishness.

  The bus traveled south down Chakiwara Road, then west into the Saddar district. Nimri got off as soon as he thought it safe. Karachi buses had a tendency to blow up, either due to disagreements of business or politics. He stopped at a news vendor and took a park bench in the shade. Now, for the first time, the cigarette pack was open.

  Nimri badly wanted a smoke, but the Prophet, God’s blessings upon him, had forbidden the use of tobacco. So he only removed and unfolded the message, groups of numbers on flimsy onionskin paper.

  The more times a code is used, the easier it is to break. Especially in the computer age. Ideally, a code should be randomly generated and used only one time. Preferably on a computer of one’s own. But Nimri no longer used one. Too many brothers had been captured along with their computers, giving valuable information to the enemy. And the Americans had given the Pakistanis the ability to trace the e-mail messages from Internet cafés, along with mobile phone calls. Nimri communicated either face-to-face or written messages in his favorite book code.

  The sender and recipient of a book code used identical volumes. The sender thumbed through and picked out individual words to form a message. The recipient decoded number groups that indicated the proper page, paragraph, line, and finally word.

  Book codes could be broken with enough computer power, and if the individual and his volume were captured, all previous messages would also be compromised. But Nimri had added his own twist. His book was a daily newspaper, each edition used only once. Even if a message was delayed, it was a simple matter to visit a library for a back issue.

  He and Baloch had chosen the Urdu-language Daily Jang, a pro-government paper, with the knowledge that the Americans had precious few Urdu translators.

  Nimri now had that very newspaper draped over his knees, the message concealed from view behind it and a pencil at the ready. Until, that is, he realized he was being watched. A thin young man in the traditional shalwar kameez of matching pantaloons and knee-length shirt. But with his hair in a most untraditional ponytail.

  Nimri searched for the others. Somehow they had followed him. An American tracking device?

  The young man seemed to make a decision, and began to approach him. Nimri slid his right hand into his shoulder bag. Only to realize in horror that he’d forgotten to reload his pistol. Another flash of anger, this time at his continued foolishness. His fingers relinquished the plastic grips of the Makarov and passed into his shirtfront to begin rolling the elastic band off the pin of the hand grenade taped to his stomach. The elastic off, he slipped his finger through the pin and took up the slack, muttering quietly to himself, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is his Prophet. God is great.” The last words that would speed him to Paradise.

  The young man kept looking nervously from side to side as he approached. Nimri applied pressure to the pin.

  Then, standing before him, the young man smiled shyly and said, almost whispering, “Oil massage?”

  Nimri almost jerked out the pin. “What?” he demanded sharply.

  More hesitantly this time. “Oil massage?”

  At last finding his wits, Nimri barked, “Be gone!”

  The young man departed quickly, before Nimri could call for the police. Something he had absolutely no intention of doing.

  Nimri had been so offended by the insult to his manhood that he’d forgotten one more thing. His finger was still inside the grenade pin. His heart thumped even harder when a touch told him that it was halfway out. He carefully pushed the wire back in, them refitted the rubber band around it, checking the work twice before removing his hand from inside his shirt.

  The killing at the market had shaken him, but not like this. Rather than dying in holy war against the forces of American imperialism, he’d nearly blown himself to pieces over a homosexual proposition.

  The message he decoded didn’t improve his mood. Imram Hasan source for Federal Investigative Agency. Extent of information he provided unknown. Assume everything. Take precautions. Advise.

  “Son of a whore!” Nimri exclaimed out loud. The Federal Investigative Agency was the Pakistani police unit with the reputation of being friendliest to the Americans. While Inter-Services Intelligence was thoroughly Islamic. In fact, the creators of the Taliban who had equipped and trained Al Qaeda members to do battle with India over Kashmir.

  Imram Hasan was his number two. He had to assume that whatever Hasan knew, the FIA and the Americans did also.

  Abdallah Karim Nimri took out a cigarette lighter and burned the decoded message. Then he spent the rest of the day on the park bench, planning what he was going to do. He paused only for prayers.

  5

  Joseph Oan loved his garden. When he finished work and returned to his home in Manassas, Virginia, he always went directly to his backyard. The roses along the border fence; the grapes spreading across the arbor he’d built himself. He loved sitting at his lawn table, and he loved it when his wife, Yasmin, brought him tea.

  Then came the part he didn’t love. When his wife had to unburden herself of everything she had been fretting about all day, while he longed for peace and sanctuary. But it was always like this.

  “Why won’t you take the supervisor’s job?” she demanded, as if in exchange for the tea. “Don’t you want to wear clean business clothes and work in an office?”

  “If I’m a supervisor, I’m not in the union,” he explained, trying to be patient with her. “The next time they cut jobs, they could decide they don’t need another supervisor and cut my job. But if I drive the truck I’m in the union and my job is safe.”

  “But you would be home more—”

  “Enough,” he said.

  A pause from her, then, “Steven is being teased at school.”

  “Again?”

  “They call him an Arab terrorist.”

  Oan was silent.

  “You’ll speak to the principal,” said Yasmin, making it more of a statement than a question.

  “No.”

  “Why no?”

  “Because I won’t. He has to be a man.”

  “The principal won’t mind.”

  “I won’t complain about my son the same week the FBI questions me about driving a gasoline truck.” Women always wanted what was impossible, never considering how, only the wanting.

  “Rashid,” she said. “It is always about Rashid.”

  Oan turned on her. “Never speak his name again! I have no brother.” And, as always, the expression on her face made him sorry for his temper. “Let me drink my tea.”

  She went inside. He took a sip and sighed. His tea had cooled. He liked his tea hot. And calling her would only start it again.

  The phone rang inside the house. He sighed again, not wanting to get up.

  Yasmin appeared, holding the cordless handset. She looked terrified. “Who is it?” he said.

  “Them. Again.” She was on the verge of tears.

  He snatched the phone and waved her away. “Who is this?”

  “The brother of your brother,” the voice said smoothly. In English, though English was obviously not the man’s native tongue. “The blessings of God upon you, Youssif al-Oan.”

  Oan pronounced his name “Owen.” But the caller used the Middle Eastern pronunciation. “Wh
at do you want?”

  “To help you, of course. In any way we can. As your brother would have wished.”

  “I need no help. Do not call me again.”

  The voice lost its soothing lilt. “You will always be part of us.”

  Oan punched the Talk button, and the red light died. He set the phone down on the table and stared out over his lawn without really focusing on it.

  After awhile he sighed again, rose, and went into his house. The caller ID on the phone read area code 419. All the others had been overseas calls. He thumbed through the phone book. Toledo, Ohio. They wanted him to know; otherwise they would have blocked the caller ID.

  His wife was in the kitchen; he could hear his son tapping away at the computer keyboard. He unearthed the stepladder and carried it up the stairs to his bedroom closet. The trapdoor to the attic crawl space revealed ceiling framing, ductwork, and insulation. It was stifling hot. Peeling back a slab of insulation exposed a fireproof document case.

  Oan returned to his backyard, the case under his arm. He removed the lid from the barbecue grill, then unlocked the case.

  Photographs of him and his brother, Rashid, when they were children in Lebanon. Then in Virginia. Only letters from the madrasa, the religious school in Pakistan, because by then photographs had become forbidden graven images.

  As the eldest he had always worked. It was his fault that his brother had too much free time to never feel at home. His brother hated being teased at school, hated twisting his first name to a Christian-sounding one. Hated that when he did so it made life easier.

  So dissatisfied with the world was Rashid that he fell in love with the idea of a perfect world that did not exist, a world that fierce men in beards were going to create. His brother didn’t remember enough of Lebanon to remember the perfect world men tried to create there.

  For every neighbor who snubbed him after September 11, there were more who sought him out and offered their friendship. And when the FBI agents had interviewed him, the union representative and a union lawyer had sat in the room. In Lebanon they would have tied him to the back of a car and driven until there was nothing left but the bloody rope.