by Bill Evans
A wonderfully lithe Indian woman in a red sari led the reporter up a winding staircase to the minister’s office. The rear view was enticing as the rounded cheeks of her bottom glanced temptingly against the shiny fabric. Never had Birk felt so strongly that youth was wasted on the young. What he wouldn’t give to be thirty-five again, with a broad, brilliant smile. Back in the long ago, women like Miss Sari had led him on just such a meandering path to their bedrooms in just such a flirty manner. Just once more, for God’s sake.
At least she was eye candy. The minister’s office lacked all appeal. The walls were white and stark, no more encumbered with style or flourish than the sapped religion they believed in. Wait, he spotted a crescent and a star, and some mumbo-jumbo lettering that might have been Maldivian in origin—or from the moon, for all Birk knew or cared. These Muslims were a boorish lot, positively thirteenth century.
Another look around was a cause for real grief: not a drop of gin. No tonic. Not even a single lonely lime in the minister’s office. Water? She offered him water? Whales shit in water.
“The new austerity?” he asked Sari archly, who might have been a secular holdover in her sleek red dress. But she didn’t favor him with so much as a smile as she left.
Birk was old school enough to carry a silver flask neatly curved to fit an aging gent’s not-so-nimble frame. And as soon as the door shut behind his comely escort, he nipped the elixir that he loved so much.
He’d no sooner felt the gin’s first soothing effects when Minister of Defense Hassan Darby entered, a short man with a long beard and the faltering steps of a rickets-stricken midget. His excessively large brown suit didn’t help, cuffs overrunning his wrists like starving tribesmen laying siege to the gates of a refugee camp.
“Mr. Birk. So sorry to keep you waiting. It seems we have so many luminaries today that I have only ten minutes for you.”
“Luminaries?” It didn’t pass Birk unnoticed that he hadn’t been included in that breath, but mostly he was gobsmacked that the little brown fucker had the temerity to cut short the forty-five minutes that he’d been promised. Bad enough that he hadn’t permitted Birk to bring along a cameraman. “What other luminaries are you expecting today?”
Birk’s question appeared to flummox the minister, but briefly: “Surely, you must know about the arrival of the Dick Cheney.”
The former vice president? “No, I didn’t know. When’s he coming?”
“He? No, no.” Ho-ho-ho.
What an annoying laugh.
“It is the ship the Dick Cheney. A giant tanker ship. It is in our Maldivian territorial waters even while we waste Mr. Birk’s precious time. Goodness, we are down to six minutes.”
The tanker, right. He knew about that. Didn’t know it was named the Dick fucking Cheney. And if the Dick fucking Cheney was plodding along in local waters, then Senator Gayle Higgens couldn’t be far behind. Birk would have to act fast.
“Tell me, Mr. Minister, how serious is your problem with homegrown terrorists?”
“No, Mr. Birk, you must not say … what is that word? ‘Homegrown’? They all come from far away. No proud Maldivian would ever take the life of his brother or sister. You must get that right in your reports. We insist.”
“What about your homegrown jihadists? They’re not so proud, are they?”
“Ah, look at this, Mr. Birk.” He pointed to his gold Rolie. “Time for you to go. Me, too. A luminary is coming.”
* * *
Adnan sat in the small fishing boat, squeezed below the gunwale with four jihadists from Waziristan. They’d arrived on his island at dusk last night, minds laden with the schemata of the tanker they planned to hijack, eyes gleaming with paradise. All of them knew death was imminent, either from seizing the vessel or from the detonation of the bomb that Adnan had become.
Last night Parvez had strung a large black Islamic flag between two trees. Then he’d brought out a video camera.
“Adnan, you are a martyr…”
Recording Adnan’s final statement had always been part of the plan. Even so, when Parvez said those words, Adnan’s spirits soared as surely as if he’d been praised by Allah Himself. Martyr. The highest honor—and it had been bestowed upon him. How great to have lived to hear such praise. The supreme leaders of Islam would know of him, and of Parvez, too, for he was the orchestrator of a martyrdom so great that billions of people would bear witness.
His friend went on: “Do you wish to say anything before you start on your path to martyrdom?”
“I wish to say that I’m doing this, inshallah, to make retribution for the Christian and Jewish pigs who are killing my country…”
Parvez nodded approval of every word. Then, on cue, the jihadists rushed up from the beach and flanked Adnan for the camera with their guns and heavy cartridge belts and RPGs. Their shoulder-mounted weapons pointed straight to the heavens, and Adnan had been startled to notice for the first time that the rockets were shaped like the minarets of Malé. Surely chance alone could not explain such a blessed coincidence: The unholy who dared to ban the most sacred towers would be answered with minarets of steel and explosives that would claim them in storms of fire and death.
Those weapons now lay hidden beneath layers of netting thick with the rotting smells of the sea. The fisherman who had sailed them past dozens of the country’s tiny islands now trailed the Dick Cheney and the five Maldivian Coast Guard boats that were escorting it.
Adnan had been approved for duty on the supertanker. Given his experience, training, and seaman’s papers, his employment had never been in question. He would be welcomed when he walked onto the wharf, his fully packed vest covered by a layer of clothes.
But disguising his true intentions would get him only as far as the gate to the gangplank. To board would require his fellow jihadists to shoot their way past the Maldivian security forces who would search each sailor. In the past, the security detail often lazed in the sun and performed cursory baggage checks, but Parvez had warned that they would be more alert tomorrow, and that the jihadists must take the ship. Adnan’s assignment would be to get on board, not to engage in battle. Even so, a Mauser pistol lay under the netting for him. Once on deck, he could hold everyone at bay with the threat of the bomb. He had to buy time, Parvez said, and make them sail the tanker into the ocean. Time to get the attention of Satan’s media, east and west and north and south. The unclean everywhere.
The fisherman let his boat drift farther astern of the tanker, and then headed for a beach only three miles from the outskirts of Malé. From there, the greatest journey would begin: to paradise, with the whole world watching.
* * *
Rick Birk walked out of the minister’s office with as much dignity as he could muster. Ten minutes. And to think he’d also been admonished to not even suggest that the Maldives had its own native-born killers. The minister himself had taken a sudden detour to a lavatory, though Birk suspected the man wanted to free himself from the incisive questions of a brilliant veteran correspondent.
Of course, the denial about homegrown jihad was hardly surprising. In his entire career, which now spanned a half century, Birk had run across no more than a handful of leaders in the developing world who had readily accepted that their country’s problems lay within their own borders—from a sorry lack of resources and the pervasive futility that poverty inevitably spawned. The rest of the riffraff spewed blame on “outsiders” until, of course, the rude reality exploded with bombs and bloodshed. Then they “got” it—but only in the moments before they fled to Switzerland with their national treasury.
These little brown buggers, however, had a case for finger-pointing: The looming disasters throughout much of Oceania could be laid at the feet of the smokestacked, tailpiped West.
As Birk took the last three steps to the main floor, he spotted Senator Gayle Higgens and her entourage bustling through the main entrance. Argh, the sight of her spurred a memory painful as a lesion, a real standout in his fat catalog of se
xual misadventures.
She’d been a freshman Texas legislator when they’d met, as foulmouthed and shameless in private as she was sanctimonious and born-again in public. He’d been young, too, sent to the Oil Patch to cover some long-forgotten hurricane, whose force, even then, couldn’t have stood up to Gayle Higgens. She’d rounded Birk up like one of her stray steers and herded him right into her bed. She’d tied him down as if she were a real buckaroo, then laughed bitterly when he couldn’t perform.
He’d sworn never to go near Higgens again, and there she was. Christ almighty, aging was pitiless: Look at her pastry-crust skin; bloated, mashed-potato body; and swollen ankles, shapeless as bread dough.
She pointed the sharp tip of her pink umbrella at him and bellowed, “Get your rascal self over here, Birk.”
He looked around, finding no reprieve.
“What are you doing here?” the senator demanded.
“Scoping out the restless natives,” he responded as suavely as he could, wondering why in God’s name he was even bothering. But he couldn’t help himself: She’d humiliated him almost fifty fucking years ago, yet the moment he saw her he was filled with an unruly desire to reclaim his dignity.
“But you must come for the launch of our pilot project. Surely you know about it, you old crow.”
Old crow? That’s some cheap goddamn booze.
Yeah, surely he did know about her pet project, but the seeding of the ocean with iron oxide held no more interest for him than all the bizarrely shaped sea critters whose names escaped him and whose culinary appeal lay chiefly in their most crushed, pounded, and fully processed, deep-fried forms.
“I’m on the hard news beat, Senator.”
She looked at him, openly askance. “Hard news?” she laughed. “You?” With those few words, and with that sharp inflection, she brought back the single biggest humiliation of his sex life. “We’re here to change the world. If you’re smart, Ricky, you’ll come along.”
“I’ll be busy.”
“Sorry to hear that you’ll be tied up. I’m at the Four Seasons. Come by for a backgrounder, if you’d like a good one.”
Why was everything a double entendre with her? And was that a wink? Had that old sack of nickels actually winked at him?
She turned away in the next instant. “Ten o’clock. Down at the port,” she said in parting.
He harrumphed. At ten he’d be at the port, all right, but it would be to catch a water taxi to the island of Dhiggaru. He’d found out the name of weather girl’s old flame—Rafan Yoosuf—and now knew exactly where he could be found. Wasn’t hard. Malé was a small city, and memories were long for beautiful blond girls who scandalized the locals by stealing the heart of one of their sons.
And if Rick Birk understood anything, it was how to trade on resentment to get information. Safe to say that if this Rafan Yoosuf was taking dirt from one island and larding it on another, there would be resentment afloat, never more so than when land meant life.
CHAPTER 12
Blame it on the Barbie Master and Halloween. Jenna could not escape the wardrobe chief’s red footwear. First, it was the booty-boosting, toe-crunching high heels that she’d intentionally ruined in the torrential rainstorm. Now it was slippers. It was as if the Master had fetishized the color … or her feet. She glanced down. Well, at least these things didn’t have those confounded heels. No, these were just ruby-red slippers, but with sequins—replicas of the ones that Dorothy wore so memorably in The Wizard of Oz. The slippers formed the foundation, so to speak, of Jenna’s costume for the annual “trick or treat” shenanigans on the set of The Morning Show, when all but one of the regulars dressed up for viewers. It seemed like a good, even wholesome idea the first year they tried it, but Jenna had noticed that the women’s costumes had been getting steadily trashier, shrinking in the hot wash of network competition.
“I’ve got the sexiest outfit for you,” Barbie Master said, looking up from carefully tweezing his dark and narrow eyebrows in a vanity mirror.
Jenna wasn’t sure “sexiest” was an adjective that ought to describe any clothes—costumes included—that she wore on morning TV. But as her executive producer and twit extraordinaire Marv Balen put it, “Barbie Master knows best.”
The head of wardrobe offered her a blue Dorothy dress so mini that it might have provided modest cover for the teenaged—and diminutive—Judy Garland herself. Shamelessly short. “There’s no business like show business,” Barbie Master sang. Jenna sighed. It could have been worse: He might have dolled her up in a little French maid uniform with black hose, black garters, and more booty-boosting heels. Wait till next year, she thought.
Still, Jenna’s costume wasn’t even the raciest surprise of the morning. That honor fell to Andrea Hanson, who, despite her pregnancy, was posed as a hyper-sexed Daisy Mae from the Li’l Abner comic strip. Her idea, or Barbie Master’s? You never knew with Andrea.
Jenna took a bracing breath and swished onto the set, her stratospheric hemline ogled by virtually every eye in the studio. Do not bend over a frickin’ inch, she told herself.
Moments later, Andrea greeted viewers, joking about her own “PG-rated” appearance, though considering that the host was in her sixth month, Jenna doubted that many viewers were laughing along. More likely they felt like squirming at the mother-to-be’s swollen appearance in Daisy Mae’s button-popping, polka-dot blouse.
“Hanson, you are such a hottie,” gushed the usually staid Phillip Gates, the show’s news anchor—wearing his customary suit. Gates’s manner suggested a penis with an untoward regard for expectant mothers. After his breathy appraisal, Gates composed himself and began to deliver the news:
“Halloween took on real horror for Roger Lilton’s presidential hopes this morning when a team of FBI agents knocked on the door of his Washington campaign headquarters with a search warrant.” Video of dark-suited men appeared. “No trick or treat here as agents arrived only hours after the brutalized body of Pagan leader and self-described witch, GreenSpirit, was found in a remote cabin in upstate New York.” A shot of the cabin, taken with a long lens, filled the screen, followed by three-day-old footage of the candidate. “Lilton was once linked romantically to GreenSpirit, and that relationship has become the election season’s biggest controversy.”
Lilton’s press secretary, Jean Mayer, popped up next, calling the FBI raid “a political smear engineered by President Reynolds.” Over file footage of FBI chief Martin Aimes testifying before Congress, Gates read Aimes’s statement, released that morning, characterizing the visit as “routine,” and saying that it did not mean that Lilton was a suspect in the murder.
He didn’t rule it out, though, Jenna thought.
Two and a half minutes later, Daisy Mae Hanson turned to Jenna in the Weather Center.
“Here’s our own Jenna Withers, eagerly awaiting her unveiling—I think that’s the right word—as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Jenna, that has to be the shortest Dorothy dress on record. Better hope nobody sneezes in your neighborhood.”
Better hope Li’l Abner doesn’t demand a blood test, Jenna almost shot back, but she kept her demeanor bright and cheerful, in accord with the unwritten rule of the show that you took Andrea’s handoffs with a big smile no matter what.
“No twisters or windstorms today, Daisy Mae.” Jenna turned to the camera to report the return of sunny skies and the continuation of high temperatures, chatting about how little of the heavy rainfall had been “captured” because the drought-stricken land was so hard and dry, and the storm had been so fierce and fast. “Plus, those high temps evaporated a lot of the moisture before it could trickle into groundwater supplies.”
In her earpiece, Nicci said, “Don’t get too sciencey,” as if the producer knew that “evapotranspiration” was on the tip of Jenna’s tongue. But, alas, another unwritten rule of the show was that Jenna should never appear to be a brainiac, and she had to think that this was especially true when she was tramped up like a ten-thousand-d
ollar-a-night call girl.
At ten of nine, after Jenna finished her last weather report of the day, she held down her hem and bolted to wardrobe, scooting behind the Barbie Master’s door. She kicked off the red slippers and pulled off the microdress and white blouse. Quickly, she slipped into a pair of black slacks, a collarless white blouse, and a burgundy jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves. She would have liked to have kept Dorothy’s slippers, but the Barbie Master swooped right down on them.
Nicci popped in to remind Jenna that she had a conference call with the presidential task force in one minute. “And there’s talk that the White House is about to drop a bombshell on you guys.”
Jenna rushed to her office, plugged in an earphone, and patched in to a special White House line. In the seconds of silence that followed, she glanced at a headline in the Post, CARNAGE IN THE CATSKILLS, and eyed a front-page picture of the remote cabin.
During their nightly phone call the previous evening, Dafoe had told Jenna that the rain that had flooded parts of the city—harmlessly, in most cases—had apparently proved ruinous to the Sheriff Walker’s investigation of GreenSpirit’s murder. Walker had announced that he’d called in the New York State Police homicide unit and soon after, the FBI said that it would join the investigation.
In these lazy, waiting moments Dafoe came back to mind, and she found herself thinking how nice it would be to take in an art show with him. Or stroll past the ponds in Central Park. Her reverie snapped when a crisp “Good morning” filled her ear. It was Vice President Andrew Percy’s sharp voice. She sat up in her chair as if reprimanded in class.
* * *
Forensia, still hobbled by the coyote bite above her knee, limped up a trail with Sang-mi. Both witches carried flowers and candles, planning to build a shrine as close to the murder scene as possible, and to offer prayers to their religious leader.
