The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  “You’re sure this was the only object?” she said. “There weren’t any other crates?”

  “Not like this one.” Fawzi snorted laughter. “Not unless the Parthians also made home theater systems.” Sobering, he continued: “I hope you aren’t suggesting I would try to cheat you.”

  No, never, Amal thought. She wanted to consult with Mustafa, but knew that that might spoil their charade.

  But then Mustafa spoke up on his own: “Was there a stopper?”

  “What?” said Fawzi. Amal turned around. Mustafa was staring at the bottle with a hypnotic intensity; he was also leaning heavily on Amal’s chair, as though to keep himself from falling.

  “Was the bottle sealed?” Mustafa said. “Was there anything inside it?”

  “Inside it?” Fawzi gave another snort. “Like what, a double-malt whiskey?” Mustafa didn’t answer, but after a moment he looked at Amal and gave a firm nod.

  “Very well,” Amal said. “Let’s talk about payment . . .”

  But now Fawzi was frowning. “I’m sorry, I am confused,” he said. “I thought I was dealing with you.”

  “You are,” said Amal.

  “And this man? Your bodyguard? He’s an antiquities expert as well?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “No.” Fawzi shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s a bodyguard, either. He looks stoned. And this one”—turning to Samir—“this one looks scared.” He focused on Iyad next, saying nothing, only staring, then looking back at Mustafa as he noticed the family resemblance. “What is going on here?”

  “What’s going on here is, we’re making a deal,” Amal said. “Come, Fawzi al Walid—whatever unfounded suspicions you have about my men, you know who I am. And I am ready to meet your price, so—”

  “Let’s not rush things,” Fawzi said, easing back in his chair. “Let’s talk a bit more, about what your real interest in this object is.”

  The stairs came down at the rear of the storage area. The commandos surprised another gang member there, killed him and stashed his body. They paused again to listen. The leader sent three of his men to circle around to the chop shop while he and the other two entered the warren of shelves. They followed the sound of voices until they were right outside the inner sanctum, with just a meter of boxes between them and the chair where Fawzi was sitting. To their left was a gap in the shelves through which they could see Shadi leaning on his AK-47.

  “Let’s not rush things,” Fawzi said. “Let’s talk a bit more, about what your real interest in this object is.”

  The lead commando slung his weapon and took out a flash-bang grenade. There was a final exchange of hand signals. The commando pulled the pin on the grenade and cocked his arm back, even as a wild-eyed teenager came darting around the shelves behind him holding a machine pistol taken from a dead man. One of the other commandos saw the boy coming and snapped off a shot, but the boy tripped over his own shoelaces and the bullet only grazed his ear. Then the boy cried out “Al Sadr!” and pulled the trigger on the machine pistol.

  The machine pistol’s ammunition clip held thirty rounds. Twenty-six hit nothing of consequence; three struck the commando who’d just fired, killing him; and one caught the lead commando in the throat, which, among other things, caused him to lose his grip on the flash-bang. As the unwounded commando pivoted towards the boy, the grenade went off.

  Fawzi, Amal, and the others were shielded from the blast by the wall of boxes, but the sudden close explosion of sound stunned them all anyway. The boy continued shouting, his battle cry of “Al Sadr!” replaced by a warning: “Badr! Badr!” The blinded and deafened commando staggered into Fawzi’s parlor. Shadi reacted first, raising up his AK-47, but even the legendarily reliable Russian Orthodox weapon was no match for misapplied duct tape, and it jammed. The commando’s SMG coughed out a bullet that flicked Mustafa’s collar and sent Samir and Iyad diving to the floor. Amal leaned forward in her chair. There was a crack of a pistol shot and the commando fell dead.

  A moment of stillness, as smoke curled from the muzzle of the gun in Amal’s hand. Then the gang members running in from the front of the building were ambushed by the other three commandos and a massive firefight broke out in the chop shop. Shouts of “Al Sadr! Al Sadr!” mingled with “Badr! Badr!” and then “God is great!” as the Qaeda men realized they might be outgunned.

  Fawzi was staring at the body on the floor and trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Concerned that this thought process would end badly for her and her colleagues, Amal put her own confusion aside and seized the initiative. “It seems I was wrong about being ahead of the competition,” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought the Badr Corps would join forces with Saddam, but I guess it’s true what they say about the enemy of my enemy.” When Fawzi didn’t respond, she continued: “Let me take this cursed object off your hands, Fawzi al Walid. I believe Iyad said your asking price was ten thousand riyals.”

  This deliberate lowballing broke through to him. “The asking price was thirty thousand,” Fawzi said, glaring at her. “And that was before—”

  “AL SADR! AL SADR!”

  “Let’s say twenty thousand and be done,” Amal suggested.

  “Thirty thousand.”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Thirty.”

  A stray round passing above the shelves struck a light fixture directly over their heads. Amal managed not to flinch but recognized that she was running out of time and luck. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “We’ll call it twenty-eight thousand—and two thousand more for your man Shadi here to show us where the side door is.”

  “—other men are down and I am cut off. I cannot—”

  “Al Sadr! Al Sadr!”

  “Abu Musab?” Idris said. “Abu Musab, are you there?” Static in the headset. On the camera feed, he saw Mustafa, Amal, Samir, and Iyad come around the building and run for the taxi. Idris told the pilot: “Take me down there.”

  But the pilot, noting the black line of a power cable suspended over the lot, and guessing there might be others he couldn’t see, said: “I don’t think—”

  “Take me down!”

  So the helicopter began to descend, and Idris took off his headset and unbuckled his seat harness. As he got up to go back into the cargo compartment, there was a loud crack! and a hole appeared in the right side of the cockpit windshield.

  Idris and the pilot both turned their heads in time to see the second muzzle flash. The shooter was in the tower of a nearby mosque. A Guardian Angel on night watch perhaps, or the muezzin himself, up in his roost after hours and doing what any good Sadrist would do upon spying a black helicopter hovering over the ’hood.

  “Son of a bitch!” the pilot cried, blood running down his cheek where he’d been cut by flying glass. His trigger finger twitched on the control stick, but it was an empty gesture. The helicopter was unarmed.

  And unarmored. The next muzzle flash had a different shape, the shooter switching his aim towards the tail of the aircraft. A red lamp lit on the control panel, and a recorded male voice began warning of damage to the hydraulic system.

  “Take me down!” Idris repeated.

  But the pilot, in sudden panic at the thought of crash landing amidst a million Shia, shook his head. “No,” he said. “We must abort!” As Idris continued to yell at him, he increased throttle and yanked the control stick hard to the left. The chopper flew away into the night, trailing smoke. The last image on the camera feed before line-of-sight was lost was of the taxi speeding away as well, Iyad laying rubber to escape before the Mahdis could close down the streets.

  THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

  A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

  Scheherazade

  Scheherazade is the master storyteller in the classic Arabian folk tale collection One Thousand and One Nights.

  In One Thousand and One Nights’ framing story, King Shahryar of Persia is driven mad with rage when he discovers that his
wife has betrayed him. Not only does he execute her, he vows to take a new wife every night and have her strangled the following morning. These executions are carried out, reluctantly, by the king’s grand vizier, until the vizier’s eldest daughter, Scheherazade, comes up with a plan to put an end to the cruelty.

  Scheherazade marries the king. On her wedding night, she asks permission to say farewell to her sister Dunyazad. Dunyazad is brought to the king’s chambers, where, in accordance with Scheherazade’s plan, she asks Scheherazade to tell her a story. Scheherazade begins the tale but is forced to break off at the coming of dawn. The king, entranced, grants her a one-day stay of execution so that he can hear the end of the story. The following night Scheherazade finishes the first tale and begins a second, earning another stay of execution. This continues for a thousand and one nights until at last King Shahryar, transformed by love, lifts Scheherazade’s death sentence and makes her his queen . . .

  In the small hours of the morning, Saddam Hussein descended to the deepest cellar of his Adhamiyah estate.

  West of the main house, in back of the outbuilding that abutted the lion enclosure, was a plain-looking steel door secured by an electronic keypad. Past the door, a circular stairway descended to a guard room staffed by a half dozen of Saddam’s most trusted men. Two of the men wore the standard Republican Guard uniform and were armed with riot guns. The other four were dressed as if for a heavy contact sport: chest, shoulder, and thigh pads; knee, shin, and elbow guards; groin cups and throat protectors; reinforced gloves and boots; and helmets with face shields that they lowered into place as Saddam entered the room.

  The four-man extraction team preceded Saddam and the two gunmen through a long cellblock. The cells were empty and had been for some time, but bloodstains were still visible on some of the walls and a search of the floor would have turned up the occasional tooth or fingernail among the rat droppings.

  At the end of the cellblock was another flight of stairs and another security door, beyond which was a brightly lit antechamber containing two chairs. One was a throne-sized easy chair with a matching ottoman; the other was a steel-backed restraint chair that had been bolted to the floor.

  The antechamber also contained a liquor cabinet, and Saddam helped himself to whiskey while the gunmen positioned themselves to either side of him and the extraction team continued on through a final security door. From beyond the door came sounds of a man being tackled and pummeled into submission.

  The extraction team returned with the prisoner. He was a blond American in his early thirties, tall and muscular. He wore camouflage fatigue pants and a gray ARMY T-shirt; a skull in a green beret was tattooed on his upper right arm.

  The prisoner was limp and unresisting as the guards carried him out, but as they approached the restraint chair he abruptly came alive and began to fight again. This was an old trick and the extraction team were ready for it. They kept hold of him, and with some joint-twisting, a bit of head trauma, and a few hard taps to the solar plexus they got him into the chair and strapped down. Saddam picked up a small remote from atop the liquor cabinet. There were electrical contacts inside the chair’s wrist and ankle straps, and by pressing a button on the remote he could deliver painful shocks.

  The extraction team had stepped away from the chair and were looking at Saddam expectantly. A flexible black cable tipped with a large alligator clip dangled from the seat of the chair between the prisoner’s legs. This was an optional attachment that could be used to deliver current directly to the prisoner’s genitals, but to put it on him, they’d have to remove his pants or at least cut a hole in the crotch—a delicate procedure.

  “No,” Saddam said, to the unspoken question. “We won’t need that tonight, I think. Leave us.”

  His men went back up the stairs. Saddam rested a forearm on the back of the easy chair and sipped his whiskey. The prisoner watched him, grinning despite a bloody nose and a black eye; probably he was thinking about what he would do if his restraints were removed.

  “You know, these displays of defiance are unnecessary,” Saddam said. “No one here questions your manhood. But you are alone and powerless. You can’t escape. You can’t kill me. There’s no shame in accepting these facts.”

  “Thank you for the advice,” the prisoner said. “I appreciate you acknowledging my manhood. But you know I don’t have that much else to occupy me, so I might as well try to kill you.”

  Saddam smiled. “Your Arabic is improving. You must be studying very hard.”

  “Like I say, I don’t have much else to do. I couldn’t even follow the TV, without it.”

  “So you’re happy with the television? The screen is big enough?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that Xbox thing I got for you—you like that?”

  “I do,” the prisoner said, truthfully. “I could use some more games for it.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. I want you to be happy. Anything else you’d like, just ask . . . Are you sure you don’t want a woman?”

  “No, and we’ve been over that. I’m not interested in Helen Keller, and if she can see me or hear me she can tell people about me, and that means you’ll kill her, after. I don’t want that on my conscience.”

  “This world is full of people who are already as good as dead,” Saddam Hussein said. “I could find you a woman like that, a beautiful woman. There’d be nothing for you to feel bad about.”

  “No thank you.”

  “Or we could keep her here as your guest. Someone to play Xbox with, how would that be?”

  The prisoner considered it. “No,” he finally said. “Trapping a woman in this place wouldn’t be much better than killing her.” Thinking of Uday: “Maybe worse, in some ways.”

  “Very well,” Saddam said. “But if you change your mind . . .” He freshened his drink, then took a seat in the comfy chair. “And now I would like some entertainment. You have a story for me?” His eyes narrowed. “A good story, this time?”

  The prisoner smiled. “You didn’t like that last one, huh?”

  “No I did not.”

  “What part didn’t work for you? It was the ending, right? Where the Mahdis stretched your fucking n—uuhhhhhhhh!”

  Saddam kept his thumb on the button of the remote while he took a long sip of whiskey. When he finally let up on the current, the prisoner sagged forward, gasping.

  “That was four,” Saddam said, indicating the remote’s numbered dial. “Would you like me to remind you what ten feels like?”

  The prisoner was too busy catching his breath to answer.

  “Now I want to hear a story,” Saddam continued. “It doesn’t have to be perfect—I know you’re not a professional—but it needs to be inspirational, something that acknowledges my manhood. No more of these ridiculous fantasies about military defeats, or spider-holes, or . . . guilty verdicts. I want a tale I can believe in. Are you ready to give me that?”

  The prisoner had recovered enough to fix his captor with a look of absolute hatred. For a moment it seemed as though he might spit, but Saddam held up the remote, turning it to show the numbers on the dial. The prisoner held out a moment more, then lowered his eyes and capitulated.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll tell you what you want to hear.”

  “You’ll tell me what I want to hear, what?”

  “I’ll tell you what you want to hear . . . Mr. President.”

  The call to dawn prayer had just ceased when Saddam came back up out of the cellar. His son Qusay was waiting for him.

  “What is it?”

  “Mustafa al Baghdadi,” Qusay told him. “He’s inside. He has the object.”

  Saddam smiled. The day was starting off well: He’d enjoyed the prisoner’s story very much, and now this.

  “The senator’s daughter is with him,” Qusay continued. “And the other agent, Samir, the one the Mukhabarat say is reporting to Al Qaeda.”

  Better and better. “So Bin Laden will hear about anything we say.” Saddam nod
ded. “We’ll have to make sure he gets an earful, then . . . You had them all searched?”

  “Yes.” Qusay hesitated. “There was a problem with the senator’s daughter. Uday tried to pat her down himself, instead of calling a woman from the house to do it. She reacted violently to the insult.”

  “Tell me that idiot didn’t hurt her.”

  “She is fine. Uday I think is very lucky she’d already surrendered her weapon.”

  Saddam reddened. “Where is your brother now?”

  “Out. I told him to go for a long drive.”

  “When he gets back, I want to speak to him . . . What about the object? Where is it?”

  “The Guard are taking it to your office.”

  “Bring Mustafa and the others there, too.”

  “Do you want me to exclude the senator’s daughter?”

  “You are sure she’s not armed?”

  “Positive. Still, she has reason to wish you dead, so perhaps to be absolutely safe—”

  “No, that’s fine. Let her in. She’s welcome to stare daggers at me all she likes.” Saddam rubbed his hands together. “But the only one getting his wishes granted today, is me.”

  Amal did stare daggers at him. But the sharpness of her gaze was tempered by a small smile, the latter inspired by knowledge of the .22 pistol, hidden in a fold of her abaya, that both Uday’s clumsy pat-down and the more thorough search that followed had failed to discover. The gun was single-shot and not very accurate, but Amal was confident of her ability, if she chose, to put a bullet in Saddam Hussein’s brain.

  Of course she would die too, then. On another day she might have at least considered making the trade, but now, like Mustafa, she had other priorities. It was enough to know that she could have done it—that Saddam was vulnerable. She could always come back and shoot him later.

  Though his face didn’t show it, Samir was also thinking about shooting Saddam. But he didn’t have a hidden weapon and he definitely didn’t want to die. That was the problem: Idris had been very insistent about acquiring Saddam’s prize for himself, and while the botched commando raid wasn’t Samir’s fault, he knew Idris would hold him responsible anyway. So while Amal stared at Saddam, Samir cast side glances at the submachine gun slung over the shoulder of Saddam’s nearest bodyguard. He thought: Grab the gun, take down both guards, take down Saddam, take down Qusay, grab the battery, and run, run, run . . .