The Godless One

by J. Clayton Rogers

  "Colts! Colts! Colts!"

  "They must have forgotten their coats," said Ari. "I wonder why they don't roll up their windows?"

  "Of all nights!" Karen moaned.

  "It will be getting dark, soon."

  "I guess by now you're wondering what this is all about?" Karen sounded as though she was sucking a half-blocked straw.

  "I assume it's something of an official nature."

  "So around four today I got a call on my personal cell phone," she said. "My phone, and very few people have that number."

  "I'm sure you have many stallions in your corral."

  "Shut up and learn English. This call comes from a tiny little toilet trap in tiny little Cumberland. You remember, that's near where they found Carrington's body."

  "Your good friend," said Ari, wondering if his theory that Karen had been one of his lovers was correct.

  "This girl tells me she's seen the same van that she saw the night Carrington was murdered. She was hiking with her father in the state forest—in this weather, can you believe it?—and there it was, pretty as you please, off on a side road. I was going to treat it like some kind of sick crank call, but then she tells me she's already called Officer Mangioni of the RPD, and that he was going out there with his partner to personally check it out. I ask this girl, who said her name was Fatimah, what Mangioni's phone number is, and when I get off with her I call him. Sure enough, not only did he get a call from Fatimah, but he got it at one this afternoon. It's an hour drive to Cumberland and he was already on the scene. As a matter of fact, he and his partner were still in their city cruiser, which must be a rule-breaker—but they were after a cop killer, so I guess their commander was OK with it. Now, you're not going to believe what happened next." She cocked an eye at him. "At least, I hope you won't believe it. They found the van. They punched in the license plate number, and guess what? It belongs to Joe Rizzuto, a cousin of Vito Rizzuto."

  Ari made a sound of baffled ignorance.

  "Vito was head of the Montreal Cosa Nostra up until last year. He was extradited to the States, but he’s still a big shot you wouldn’t want to mess around with. They're into coke and heroin up to their necks. The license actually belongs to a Jaguar, but the coincidence is too much to brush off. Maybe those guys like to play three shells and a pea with their plates. Now…if you'll remember, poor old shot-in-the-head Carrington got himself mixed up with something called the Kayak Express. They sold coke to those posh residents who live on the river."

  "You mean, posh like me," Ari observed. And, unable to resist, gave a loud sniff.

  "Yeah, and I hope that's a cold. A real cold. The DEA could never find the Express's supplier. But now I'll bet they have. Carrington screwed up when the Express shut down, and paid the price." She slammed her palm on her steering wheel. Ari concluded Abu Jasim had picked up this habit in North America. When Baghdadis hit their steering wheel, they were trying to convince the driver up ahead that he was a dolt.

  "I knew he didn't kill himself. I knew it! Tell me, that story you gave me was pure bullshit. I mean, about confronting him about killing Moria Riggins and him going off and..."

  "It's possible I came to the wrong conclusion," said Ari after a pause. His real conclusion was that Carrington had intended to kill him on that isolated fire road, dump his body on Uday's property, and then make an anonymous call to the local authorities. The reason was clear enough. Uday was supplementing his income by selling drugs on the side. He had corrupted Carrington (it certainly would not have been the first time he corrupted a policeman), using him as the courier to the Express. And when the Express blew up in his face, thanks to Ari, he knew Uday would come chomping for his balls. A frame-up must have seemed like the best and easiest solution, until it all backfired on him.

  "Wrong conclusion." Karen shook her head mockingly as she turned onto Huguenot Road. "At least there isn't much traffic tonight. Everyone's at home, getting ready for the game."

  "I didn't think the World Cup was tonight."

  "Don't interrupt. What happened next is even more amazing. Mangioni told me that there was another car parked next to the van. He punched the license number in and it came up with an address for an Albert Lukas in Mineral. That's in Virginia, by the way, as rinky-dink as Cumberland. Mangioni didn't buy it—good man, it looks like. He popped the hood and got the VIN number. It turns out the Grand Turismo belonged to Mustafa Zewail."

  "I'm speechless," said Ari.

  "What?"

  "Should I say, 'all agog'?"

  "I'm going to kill you, one day," she snarled. "So this all happens around two, but of course I don't learn about it until a couple hours later. In the meantime, Mangioni has called in some TAC guys from Richmond, and they've called in some FBI guys because of the interstate angle, and they've called in the ATF because Homeland wants us all to be chummy, and next thing you know they've got a real party."

  "You think Mustafa was involved with a drug ring?"

  "No!" Then Karen caught herself. She had put on a convincing act the day they drove out to Mustafa's house, pretending she had never heard of the man. "I think Mustafa found out something he shouldn't have when he interviewed Samir Salman."

  "Ah," said Ari.

  "This is where you come in. I hope you don't mind me dragging you out on Super Sunday. The game doesn't mean anything to you, right?"

  "I admit it's a bit of a mystery to me. But I still don't understand why you want me to come with you."

  "They let loose some ninja boys in helmets and black tights in the woods, and pretty soon they found a Lexus across the road from the van and GT."

  Garager! He had neatly arranged things so that it was all but inevitable that Karen would summon him to Cumberland. He had not included his Scion in the plan. In his condition, it would have been a difficult trip, though not impossible. Having Karen herself chauffeur him was a bonus he had not anticipated. But he had placed too much faith in American incompetence, examples of which he had seen aplenty in Iraq. Nothing he had seen since arriving in this country convinced him that they were any more efficient at home. But with the discovery of Uday's escape hatch, his plan was reduced to dust. At least Joe and his daughter would benefit from all of this—unless someone put a stop to the operation. But what about Ahmad? Had they discovered him hunkered haplessly in the woods? The boy had made his misery so evident that Ari wondered if he would turn himself in just to get a warm seat in a paddy wagon.

  "Next thing, some big shot from the Federal courthouse in Richmond shows up and waves around a warrant that he managed to get in record time. Mangioni will catch hell for popping the hood on that GT, but the van and Lexus are by the book. They field-tested for coke and found traces in all three vehicles."

  The van, yes. The other two came as a pleasant surprise. He wondered why he had not thought to plant drugs in them before. Well, he had no cocaine at hand, for one thing....

  "There's a path from the Lexus to a house. One of the surveillance teams planted a parabolic dish across the road and they've been eavesdropping for an hour. They've got some recordings already—but it's all in Arabic! Or most of it, at least. I got a call from Fred just before I picked you up. He went ahead with a team from our office."

  "Oh?" Ari asked innocently.

  "Okay, all right, shit on you. I know he spilled the beans on Mustafa and told you he was one of our guys."

  Did he also tell you about my gun? Ari wondered.

  "So this is our 'bailiwick', too, as you would put it. Fred said they had a vet back from Iraq with them who swore he spoke Arabic, but when they put him on the recordings all he could make out was an argument going on inside the house about pistachio ice cream. That didn't sound kosher...sorry..."

  "No need to apologize. I love kosher."

  "Anyway, they're screaming out there for a real translator. Fred told them he knew just the guy, a real Arab who knows his stuff, honest, straightforward, a whole lot of other lies. The Arab community is really spooked by th
is Mustafa business. We don't want to bring in someone who might repeat everything he sees and hears and spook them even more."

  "I am grateful for your trust in me," said Ari.

  "I didn't say anything about me. Fred trusts you, although I don't know why. Looks to me like you scared the dookie out of him at McDonald's. What is it about you and McDonald's, anyway? Does it bring out your aggressive side? Is that where you got into a fight?"

  "Stairs are dangerous," said Ari.

  "Right. And—shit!"

  The Civic fishtailed briefly on a patch of black ice. Karen just managed to recover before slamming into an oncoming car.

  "I am not in the mood to die, Deputy Karen."

  "You and me, but I can't slow down."

  Her phone rang. At the moment she most needed to keep both hands on the wheel, she pulled it from her clip. "Fred? Okay...good...but that means we're committed, now...yeah, I know we'll miss it, but this is the best time to catch them all in the house, while they're all watching TV. How are the roads out there? They get better? Are you lying to me? I'll kill you." She hung up. "They caught one of the perps after he left the house. He was almost to Route 60 before they pulled him over."

  "Was he trying to escape?"

  "No, he was going to Joe's Stop-N to buy ice cream. But listen, even if the translator they have out there is half good, I still want you in on this. I want to show you what a crock of shit you were feeding me about Carrington. And after what happened with Mustafa...I guess you deserve to be there. You're all right with that? You weren't going to watch the game, were you? Absorb some American culture?"

  "I don't own a television."

  "Oh man," said Karen in disbelief. "I guess the government doesn't compensate you enough."

  Ari peered out of the passenger window, thinking of his night ride with Carrington, of Ahmad, of what they were going to do now that there were police guarding the fire road. It had been such a long shot, and now the odds were petering out.

  Karen got more calls from Fred. He said they were holding their captive in a temporary command post in the Cumberland Community Center and that their translator couldn't understand the man's dialect. They needed Ari there as soon as possible.

  "Fuck you, Fred!" Karen shouted as she more slid than drove down a long hill. "You said these roads were decent!"

  Ari did not know what the answer was, but it obviously did not satisfy Karen, who closed the phone with all the force in her thumb.

  "I pray this doesn't turn into some dipsquad operation," she fumed. "Everyone and their aunt is out there. You think you have an ego, Ari? Just wait 'til we get there. We've got a place oozing with Arabs and what we've got against them is a bunch of airbags."

  "I don't think 'oozing' is appropriate," Ari sniffed.

  "Don't go all offended and correct on me now. You can file a complaint tomorrow, while the rest of us are reading about the game we fucking missed."

  "Is this Super Game so very important to you?" he inquired.

  "You don't know us at all."

  As they reached the outskirts of Cumberland, Ari noted two cruisers in the Stop-N parking lot, one belonging to the State Police and the other to the Cumberland Sheriff. Through the glass storefront he saw Fatimah, her hands over her face. He recalled what Joe and Fatimah had said about the local sheriff being on Uday's payroll and prayed it wasn't true. Perhaps, on the day Uday ranted unhindered in the shop, the officer parked out front had been summoned away on an emergency call. A car wreck, for instance, would take precedence over an abusive customer.

  The community center was an old, converted school house on the other side of town. The parking lot in the back was packed. Fred came out to greet them and ended up playing parking lot attendant. He finally found an empty slot between a Lenco BearCat and Peacekeeper II.

  "Get ready for a war zone," he told Karen as she got out of the car. "And I'm not talking about the opposition." He jerked his head towards the community center.

  They entered chaos incarnate. Officers and agents, policemen and deputies, uniformed and un-uniformed were sprawled in a large room that must have once been a cafeteria. Several men were near the front door, arguing about which frequency they should be using. Another group was angrily denouncing a shortage of night vision equipment and how it should be allotted. One of them threw up his hands and yelled, "The night? The night? Doesn't anyone around here own the night?"

  Small islands of portable consoles dotted the hall, like boastful displays at an electronics show. But Officers Jackson and Mangioni were huddled around a diminutive radio. They were seated on wood benches, away from the great morass in the center, like small-time entrepreneurs who knew they were completely outclassed. Ari walked over to them. They beamed when they saw him. Standing up stiffly in their armored vests, they took turns shaking his hand.

  "What happened to you?" Mangioni asked.

  "I fell off a cliff."

  "We've got them!" Jackson said with unprecedented elation. "The bastards who killed Detective Carrington!"

  "And how much of this is your doing?" said Mangioni, giving Ari a knowing wink. "You've got Feds here I never heard of."

  "I am sure I am ignorant of whatever I don't know," said Ari.

  The two policemen from the RPD looked a little nonplussed, and even Ari wasn't sure of what he had just said. All three of them jumped aside when dogs from the narcotic canine team clashed with some tracker dogs, which almost resulted in a fistfight between their handlers.

  There were tactical teams, search and recovery teams, explosives teams, surveillance teams and even, if Ari's eyes didn't deceive him, a scuba team. Perhaps there was a well that needed exploring. Ari gathered from hurried whispers that the two teams that most concerned everyone weren't even in the room.

  "Kickoff's at 1825 Hours," a man wearing an ATF jacket said.

  "We're going in at 1825?" a man bearing an FBI logo queried.

  "No, you moron! The game starts at 1825!"

  "Shit. What are we doing here, then? Can't these bozos wait until tomorrow?"

  Bozo, Ari thought lexigraphically. He wondered if it was slang for criminals. Or were the two talking about the men and women in the community center?

  "This is going to be straight out of Scarface," he overheard another agent say. Ari had heard an identical reference several years ago, when the Americans assailed Uday in his Mosul bastion. He understood that it was a movie about a crime lord, but had never had the chance to see it. He would have to ask Lynn if she could obtain a copy of it for him. After he got a television.

  Karen had been silently observing this madhouse from the main entrance. Finally, her impatience got the better of common sense. "Hey! All of you! You're supposed to be professionals! You're behaving like children! Let's get organized!"

  There was a momentary lull. A few agents clapped approval. Then someone shouted "Fuck you!" and the noise began all over again.

  Shaking her head, Karen came over to Ari. "There’s not as many here as I expected, but they’ve got every acronym in the book. Might as well be a million, with all this noise. Okay, Fred says they're holding the perp down the hall. Come on. And here…" She clipped a U.S. Marshal tag on his coat. "We don’t want anyone mixing you two up."

  "I look like a perp?"

  "You look like someone the County Mounties ran down with their convention bus."

  After giving Jackson and Mangioni a congenial smile, Ari followed the Deputy Marshal out of the main hall and into a former classroom. Although astonished by the pandemonium he left behind, he was content. He had feared that the operation would be quashed by an unknown force higher up in the chain of command. But the ball was bouncing nicely, if erratically.

  They entered what had once been a classroom. The captive was seated in a small chair once used by elementary school students. His jacket was draped over the back of his chair. Across from him was one of the ninjas Karen had spoken about, his M40 as black as his combat shirt and trousers. He had removed
his helmet and goggles, which sat on a table next to him. When he saw Ari, he nodded.

  "Assalam alaikum."

  "Valaikum-salam."

  The ninja remained stiffly on guard until Karen flashed her ID.

  "You are the translator?" Ari asked.

  "I thought I was," the man confessed. He was in his early thirties. "Back in the Sandbox, standing in front of an M-1 Abrams, I could get these guys to slow down when they talked." He gauged Ari narrowly. "Are you in any shape for this kind of thing, sir?"

  "I fell on my face, not my ears."

  "He's fine," Karen testily interjected.

  "This guy talks a million miles a minute. So do the guys on the tape. I picked out a lot of 'you idiots' and something about pistachio ice cream, but not much else that makes sense."

  "You were in Iraq?" Ari asked.

  "Yes, sir, 1st Marines."

  "Ah, a fabled division."

  "Yes, sir!"

  "An-Nasariyah, Baghdad, Tikrit..."

  The ninja gave Ari a curious look. "You follow the war closely, sir?"

  "I have a passing interest in it."

  "Sssssssst," said Karen.

  "In all your extensive travels across the Iraqi landscape, did you ever see anything like this?" Ari reached down and pulled up the man's shirt sleeve. Ari had seen the bottom tip of the tattoo the moment he entered the room. Fully exposed, it revealed two rifle-holding fists clenched over a dark mass in the background. The prisoner jerked away, almost toppling backwards in his chair.

  "Can't say that I did, sir," said the former Marine—although Ari had heard the phrase 'once a Marine, always a Marine' more than once. "What does it mean?"

  "I think it means your people might have bitten off more than they can masticate."

  "'Chew', Ari," Karen corrected.

  "I stand miscorrected, as I have heard at least one American say."

  "Oh, I don't think we have to worry about these people," said the ninja confidently. "We've got plenty of men with state of the art ordnance here. Night Ops to the gills."