by Sarah Black
He came back into the suite, poured a cup of coffee, and then nudged Jen in the foot. She stirred, sat up. “Where’s my aide?”
“He just lay down a few minutes ago. Can I help?”
“Yes. Get two thousand dollars out of the cash and give it to Wylie. And then get your father on the secure sat phone. Give me five minutes.”
He stuck his head back out the door and handed the coffee to Wylie. “Wylie, can you round up some of those security service guys? We need two people around the clock to watch the doctor’s house. His father is here. One sister is a blogger, one of those pro-democracy girls Jen has been helping. She’s out of the country now, on the run, but there may be other family who are going to be at risk because the doctor came to help us. Jen’s getting the money.”
“Yes, sir.”
He opened the door to the boys’ room. The light was muted, filtered by the curtains pulled tightly over the windows. Green and Forsyth were sleeping, IV bags duct-taped up high on the wall above both beds. The young doctor was sitting next to the bed in a chair, and when he saw John, he rose and joined him at the door. They stepped outside, and John closed the door softly. “Does he need a hospital?”
“Maybe,” the young man said. He had curly dark hair, tired eyes, and pale skin. “I will know more in three or four hours. We don’t have a portable X-ray machine, but I think the arm is infected, as well as broken. I cleaned out the abscess. We’ll keep it splinted in the meantime, but he is mainly suffering from sepsis and dehydration. The eye seems okay, no retinal damage.”
“Okay, we’ll give it a few more hours. If he takes a turn for the worse, I’ll make other arrangements for him.”
“Sir, he was assaulted.”
“I know he was assaulted, Doctor. He’s bruised from his head to…. Wait a minute. What do you mean?”
The young man stared at the carpet, color flooding his face. “He was assaulted,” he said again. He couldn’t make eye contact.
“What are his injuries exactly?”
“There is an anal tear and bruising. As far as I can tell on exam, no rupture of the rectum. But if the fever does not go down soon, I would infer there might be a rupture higher up, and he will need to be evaluated at a tertiary care center with a good surgeon and intensive care. We will know more in a few hours.”
“How about the other boy?”
“Some trauma to the kidneys, a possible boxer’s fracture to his right hand, and also dehydration. Both young men took significant traumatic blows to the head and may suffer from concussion. I gave Mr. Forsyth some pain medication, which is not usually indicated with a concussion but his boxer’s fracture was several days old, and he had been trying to help his friend. He reinjured it repeatedly.”
“What exactly do we need to do now?”
“Nothing. They are getting IV fluids and antibiotics and sleep. Now we wait.”
“I will sit with them for a few moments if you need to get something to eat or drink. I believe your father is still here as well if you would like to speak with him. I’m arranging for security services to watch your home, to head off retaliation by the Salafists.”
“Thank you, General Mitchel.”
“And I thank you, Doctor Shakir.”
John walked to the chair, sat down next to Green’s bed. Eli opened his eyes, looked up at him. “Did he tell you?”
“Yes.”
Eli Green had the same coffee with cream complexion as Gabriel, with tightly curled black hair and moss-green eyes. He had a nose that looked like it belonged on a coin.
“If I didn’t know better,” John said, “I would say you looked like a Roman.”
“Rome?” he said, light kindling in his green eyes. “You know what Cato the Elder used to say? He used to end every speech with the same words: Carthage Must Be Destroyed! I don’t know how to say it in Latin.”
“Carthaginem delendam esse!” John said.
Green closed his eyes, smiling. “‘Carthaginem delendam esse.’ How cool is that? Will you write it down for me? I probably won’t remember.”
“Sure. You have anyone you need to call? Family?”
Eli shook his head.
“I can have a plane here in a few hours, get you to a hospital in Tel Aviv, or I can get you to Germany or back home. What do you want to do?”
“They still have my passport?”
John nodded. “There are charges pending against you for blasphemy, according to the embassy.”
“I’m not going anywhere. It wasn’t blasphemy, and I won’t let those dickheads use me to try and inflame a jihad. What they’re trying to do, it’s not right. I won’t let them use me for propaganda.”
Jen stuck her head in the door, waved the phone. “I’ve got him on the phone. You want to talk to him now?”
John nodded, took the phone. “David?”
“Did you have to let that little shit punch you out in front of a hundred fucking cell phone cameras?”
“All part of my plan. I have Green and Forsyth with me at the hotel, the Regency. I’m trying to talk them into getting on a plane. Maybe Tel Aviv. It has the nearest tertiary care center.”
“You’ve got them? What the fuck happened? Are they hurt?”
Green was shaking his head, trying to get out of bed. “Wait a minute.” John handed the phone to Jen, sat down next to Green and eased him back to the pillow. He bent over so the boy could speak in his ear. “Please don’t tell him. I don’t want anyone to know. And tell him I’m not going anywhere.”
John nodded, took the phone back. “They both have some dehydration, a little sepsis, kidney contusion, I think Forsyth has a boxer’s fracture, and one of Green’s arms is broken, but we haven’t been able to cast it yet, too swollen. I’ve got a doctor on board.”
“I’ll send a plane. We’ll figure out papers later.”
“Wait, David. The embassy helped get them out,” John said, “but they can’t just give them new passports, not with charges pending. Things are complicated. Just slow down and let me handle this.”
David sounded weary, worried. “Jesus, let’s not fuck around. You always loved it complicated.”
John looked at Eli Green, at the tight mouth and the stubborn tilt to his chin. “They don’t want to go until the situation is better resolved. Jen is helping. You want to send somebody to watch her back, why did you send that idiot Fields? All he managed to do was whine and sit on his ass drinking beer at the hotel. He let her walk into a prison and try to get these boys out herself, David. What the fuck is wrong with that guy?”
“And you just stood up in a two-thousand-dollar Italian suit and shouted, ‘You are not Islam’ while a jihadist prick punched you out? I swear to God, you could start a war, John!”
“Ali Bahktar’s grandfather is Hamid Dilou. You know who he is?”
“Wasn’t he the smuggler who tried to cut your throat over a plate of Turkish delight?”
“No, that was the other grandfather. This grandfather is the Minister of Culture for Tunisia. And as soon as Tunisia wakes up and starts reacting to our democracy theater, Dilou is going to owe me. What I hope he can do for us is make sure the Ministry of Justice returns their passports and drops the charges of blasphemy and stomps hard on any retaliation from the Salafists. Then we go.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“We may need some more cash. Can I get Jen to call you? I’m going to make her my communications officer.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He hung up, and John handed the phone to Jen.
“Your father says hello.”
Chapter 14
JOHN walked into the living room and opened his computer. “Jen, what’s the time difference between here and Albuquerque?”
“They’re seven hours behind us.”
Okay, that made it just after one am. He should be safe.
“Sir, you might want to see this.” Jen worked the remote control and the voice from the TV, with a very posh British accent, wa
s saying, over the footage of his confrontation with Ali Bahktar “… and this raw footage out of CNN, a retired American Army general, travelling to Tunisia on business, was assaulted publically in the lobby of one of Tunisia’s finest resorts. General John Mitchel was recently the subject of controversy when he appeared on the cover of Out magazine and gave an interview about being gay in the army. We don’t know if the attack was motivated by anti-American feeling or if this was a gay hate crime, or if this attack was more evidence of the rising violence by the ultra-conservative Salafist group that seems to be gaining a political foothold in post-revolution Tunisia. We’ll….”
“Oh, God.” John was remembering Kim’s comment about monitoring CNN for any flares in violence in sunny Tunisia. He needed to gather some more intel. It was dangerous to operate without adequate information. An unexpected piece of information cropping up at the wrong moment was like walking across the floor in your bare feet and stepping on a nasty bit of broken glass. John stuck his head back in Eli and Daniel’s room. “Do you want coffee or a Coke?”
“Coke,” Eli said. John got him a bottle and brought it into the room. Jen followed him, but he turned to her. “Can you check on something for me? The little taping we did in the lobby—I hope the Tunisian government is going to see it and apologize by dropping charges and returning a couple of passports. Will you check if the video is getting around the places it needs to go for the people in power in Tunisia to see it? Maybe if you know how these bloggers work, you can do whatever they do.”
“Of course I know how to blog!”
John raised his hand. “Nothing can come from us, and you need to be absolutely silent. Remember operational security.” He looked at her pug nose and freckles for a moment. “Do you know what operational security is?”
She folded her arms over her chest and sighed. “Yes, General. I understand what you need. Let me get to work. Do you need me to wake up Sam?”
John shook his head. “I’ll try to get along for a few minutes without my aide.”
“What taping did you do in the lobby?” Green was waiting for his Coke, and John handed it to him. He studied the boy for a moment. He wasn’t a boy, he was a young man, probably Kim’s age, and he reminded himself he was going to have to let this younger generation grow up and be men, even when they looked as damp and fresh as newborn baby chicks.
“Jen, can you get it on your phone?”
She reached into the wide pockets of the shapeless brown dress she was wearing, pulled out a phone. Her thumbs moved rapidly across the screen, then she handed the phone to Eli.
Eli stared at the phone, his eyebrows flying up and his mouth dropping open. He watched it through, then played it a second time, his eyes narrowed. John settled into the chair next to his bed, checked the level of fluid in the IV bags the doctor had taped to the wall. “Hey, you speak Arabic! Cool. Why did you say everything in Arabic and English?”
“Why do you think?”
Green looked at him a long moment, his pretty eyes narrowed. “Because you weren’t just talking to him. Did you mean it? Did you mean what you said?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about. Why I don’t want to just run away in the middle of the night like I fucking did something wrong!”
“Let’s talk about what got you arrested in the first place, Eli.” John pulled the phone from his hand, handed it back to Jen.
“Sir, I’ll go get started.”
“Thank you,” John said. He turned back to the boy and waited.
“I wanted to see the Bardo. Daniel didn’t even care, he was just going with, you know? Well, he had his own thing in Carthage, but not at the museum. Anyway, the Bardo’s closed for renovations. They had this page of a book. I’ve wanted to see the real thing since I was a kid. It’s from Al-Jazari’s book called The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices.”
“I think I’ve seen some of the pages of that book. I trained as a civil engineer for my undergraduate work,” John said. “Then when I was in grad school, we came through the Middle East. If I’m not mistaken, there’s a copy of the book in Istanbul at the National Museum.”
“They have some pages in the Met in New York too. So back at the hotel I printed out a copy of the page the Met has on display on their website. I was just so close, you know? I wasn’t going to give up. So I had these color copies of the pages. I printed them in the business center at the hotel, and one of the staff there saw what I was doing. He didn’t stick around long enough to see what they were, just stared at a page with some Arabic script and ran out of the room.” He stopped, drank some of the Coke. “Sir, this book was finished in 1206. It’s like the most incredible book ever written, I mean, the thinking is wild! Doesn’t anybody even know about it anymore? Do people think the only pages of a book an American would have in his possession are pages torn from the Qur’an?”
“Is that what you think happened?”
Green nodded. “After the guy who had been watching me in the business center ran out, I took the copies and put them in my pocket, and then me and Daniel took a cab down to Carthage, to the ruins. I showed him one of the pages in the taxi. It was my favorite one when I was a kid, the one called the Elephant Clock. So we were down in the ruins, walking around, and we’re doing our thing, and next thing I know this whole group of men surrounds us, they’re pulling our jackets open, pulling out papers, and finally one of them holds up the papers from the book. He’s waving them around, talking to the others in Arabic, I guess. I didn’t know what he was saying, but he manages to get the other boys whipped up and the next thing I know, we’re on the ground and they’re kicking us and screaming and pulling hair. I tried to tell them, you know? Tried to tell them what the pages were, about the book. They only looked at the writing for a second.”
“I’m not entirely sure that little shit can read. And I wouldn’t assume it would have made a difference if he knew the pages he was holding were not from their holy book. You were a target of opportunity.”
Eli stared blankly at the wall until John nudged him, and he lifted the Coke to his mouth again. “God, I want a cheeseburger. Half a pound of ground sirloin with cheddar on top from Fuddruckers.”
Just for a moment, John could smell beef on a grill, and his mouth started watering, too. “America is a great country, Eli Green,” he said, standing up, and the boy laughed and closed his eyes.
Jen had the computers pulled up to the YouTube video, one with English subtitles and one with Arabic. She was making notes on a legal pad. “Jennifer, keep an eye on it, but turn the volume down. I’m waiting for a call from anyone at the Ministry of Justice or the Ministry of Culture. When they call, try to set up an appointment here at the hotel. Tell them I’m too tired to drive or I can’t leave these boys, whatever. But set up the meeting on my turf. I’ll be in my room for a few minutes. When Sam gets up, have him check with the front desk and our Marines outside and give me an update.”
“Does that mean it’s time for Sam to get up?”
He smiled at her. She was a smart girl, even though she had stolen the shoestrings from his new shoes. Dr. Shakir had neatly cut the shoestrings when he took off the makeshift splint to examine Green’s arm. John had seen the remains in the trash can. “I need a few minutes to call home.”
Kim picked up before the first ring was done. “Uncle John. We saw it. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, nothing to worry about. How’s everything there?”
“I’m going to put you on speakerphone. Abdullah and Billy are here with me.”
“Shouldn’t you boys be asleep?”
“Uncle John, are you okay?” It was Billy. John could hear the thread of anxiety in his voice.
“Oh, I’m fine. It was just a piece of democracy theater, Billy. Nothing to worry about. You know, just like in the movies.”
“Really.” Kim could inject so much disbelief into his voice. “Did the other guy, the one punching you, did he also kno
w he was engaging in a little democracy theater?”
“That was part of my genius,” John said. “Listen, boys. I need your help.”
“Me and Abdullah, we’re already packed. We should be there tomorrow.”
“No! Oh, my God. No, Kim. It’s dangerous over here.”
Now Abdullah spoke. “It’s dangerous? Thank you, Uncle John, but I’ve been to the Middle East before, remember? And you might also recall that I speak Arabic, and I look like an Arab, in fact, I am an Arab! So I might be of some help. Oh, and did we tell you? We’re grown up now.” He laughed, and John could hear Billy’s voice in the background. “Hey!”
“Okay, me and Kim are grown up. Not Billy, though he is getting close.”
“Uncle John, you’re fifty-two.” Kim had his soothing voice on, like he was trying to talk John down from the ledge. “You’re really too old to be punched repeatedly in the stomach. It’s dangerous. You need younger guys for the physical stuff. You can still be the brains behind the operation, though.”
“Thank you so much!” John wanted to scream, just a small scream, to vent his frustration. Okay, he thought, be the brains. Be the brains of the operation. “I called to tell you guys I was okay and to ask for some help. I need you to research something for me.”
“Sure, of course.” Kim had control over the phone. “What do you need?”
“I went to Tunisia with Abdullah’s father a long time ago when I was finishing up my dissertation. On that trip, we went through Istanbul and visited a museum. I think I saw a copy of a book there, called The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by Al-Jazari. I need you two to track down where the other copies of that book are, what libraries and museums. I know there’s a copy in Oxford, at the Bodleian. Figure out where the rest are and e-mail me the information as soon as you can.”
“Are you giving me busy work to keep me from flying to Tunis?” Kim sounded outraged.
“No, son. This book might be critical to getting us all home. I got the boys out of prison last night. They’re here in the hotel, but they’re still charged with blasphemy. One of the boys, he came here with a copy of a page in that book, the Elephant Clock. His middle name is Hannibal. You get it? He wanted to look at the Elephant Clock of Al-Jazari in the Bardo Museum on his first trip to Carthage.”
