Cold Snap

by J. Clayton Rogers

  "A splendidly empty house," Ari noted.

  "Well, it's filled out beautifully," Karen sniffed.

  "Wisconsin," said Fred suddenly.

  They looked at him.

  "Don't either of you watch the news? That girl who was going to fly off to Syria and join her fiancée. He's a mujahideen. They were going to cross the border and fight the Coalition as a couple. You should know, Karen. It was on our OPI brief. She's in custody, now. U.S. Marshal custody."

  "And this is supposed to mean...?"

  "That you can't trust anyone," Fred shrugged. "Even good, clean-cut American girls."

  Karen shot daggers.

  "One last, last thing, Ari. The log for your Scion shows that you were parked very near to an import company called A-Zed at the time of a rather major shoot-out. How do you explain that?"

  "I was there, of course...as you know."

  "And how do you explain that?"

  "I wanted to purchase keychains for some of my friends. Yes, I indeed I heard gunfire...and I immediately fled. It was quite unnerving."

  "Was it, now?" Karen gave him a long, searching look. "Maybe tagging you isn't such a bad idea, after all."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Ben Tolson looked like the last place he wanted to be was in their company, and yet there was no other place he could be if he wanted to know more about why his face had shown up on the Chaldean Mafia's database.

  Nor was he pleased that this meeting was taking place under his own roof. His wife, Becky, had a weekend job at a fabric store and would not be home until that evening. It being Ben's day off, the timing was ideal.

  They were meeting here at Ari's insistence. Ben's was not the only familiar face that had shown up in the gallery of faces Ahmad had discovered while perusing the files he had copied. Sitting in a motel near Ashland, where Ahmad had driven the night of the near-shootout on Jeff Davis Highway, he had come upon images of the two Richmond bombing victims. There were also a number of Iraqis who had met similar explosive fates in Baghdad, Mosul, Fallujah...as well as Mogadishu, Hong Kong and Rome. Included in the gallery was Saddam Hussein.

  "That's not Saddam," growled Abu Jasim when Ahmad showed him the image. He was still under the baleful influence of the great god Thunderbird. "That's me."

  "How can you tell?"

  "You think I can't recognize myself?"

  "Not when you're—"

  "What?" demanded Abu Jasim, raising his fist.

  Confronting a moment tailor-made for politesse, Ahmad said, "This is charming."

  Upon which Abu Jasim had dropped on his bed and passed out for the fourth or fifth time that evening.

  On hearing this story after Abu Jasim had picked him up again at Manchester Docks, Ari released a moan.

  "What?" Abu Jasim asked, once more behind the Sprinter's steering wheel. "You think I'm a potential bombing victim?"

  "Yes, but that's not what's bothering me."

  Abu Jasim looked at him in the rearview mirror. "I'd like to see your face in that file."

  Ari had wanted Lawson to be with them. He had saved all their lives. The least Ari could do was keep him in the loop. But when Ari called, Lawson gruffly informed him that he was too busy.

  "My troopers here are still hyped up. They want to shoot up everything in sight. Including me."

  A jovial lift in the last sentence told Ari he was concocting a group caricature of his workers. It was possible he was negotiating a bonus with them for getting their boss and his companions out of hot water. Ari considered this perfectly normal. After all, Abu Jasim had finessed a substantial profit out of his association with Ari, including the Sprinter that took them to Ben's front door that morning.

  They settled into Ben's living room. Ahmad immediately opened his laptop and connected the Simplex drive.

  "You haven't really uploaded anything to this mysterious 'cloud', have you?"

  "I was bluffing," said Ahmad proudly. "There wasn't time, even with the motel's wi-fi. I could do it now, though. You have a router here?" He turned to Ben.

  "A what?"

  "I guess not. You have a computer connected to the Net? I could email the files to myself. That would be the same as the cloud—I guess it's pretty much the same, anyway."

  "I'll have to go turn it on now," said Ben, starting out of the room. "It takes about ten minutes to warm up."

  "Uh..." Ahmad donned the same expression elders had worn for millennia when confronted by uncomprehending youth. The roles had been switched worldwide, from geeks gawking at their computer-illiterate parents to pimply fanatics holding guns on village wise men.

  "You don't have cable, at least?" Ahmad asked, not a little amazed. Ben was thirty years old. He couldn't be such a duffer. "What's your mpbs?"

  "Hmmm?"

  "Your upload speed? .71? Uh...lower? Like down at .37 or something dorkey like that?"

  "I don't know," Ben admitted. "I can get on the internet, though. You just have to wait until all that electronic noise finishes."

  Ahmad's jaw dropped. "A dial-up? That's a box of rocks. Forget it."

  "Don't be rude to your host," Abu Jasim warned.

  "Forget it, sir," Ahmad fidgeted. "Some of these files are pretty big, especially the ones with jpg. There's a university near here, right? I can go in their cafeteria and use their wireless. It would be best if we went straight back to Chicago so I could use my own connection."

  "Not yet," said Ari.

  "I guess we're OK so long as I have this backup," Ahmad shrugged with a poorly assembled show of indifference.

  Ben went back to his chair, looking a little defeated. He had not kept up with the cybernetic Joneses. He had not even kept up with Dick and Jane.

  "What have you discovered?" Ari asked Ahmad.

  "Lots of spreadsheets. There's immigrant names, addresses, dates of entry and payments. It looks like a lot of them were paying this Mr. Rhee guy on the installment plan. They probably won't be too sad now that his business has bit the dust."

  "Probably not," Ari agreed sadly. In an odd way, he had liked Rhee. A solid, hard worker. He would have liked him more had he succeeded in wrecking Ari's despised xB. He wondered where he was, now. In jail?

  "Here's another spreadsheet that I can't read. In Korean."

  "Show it to me."

  After a minute, a smile spread across his face.

  "What? You can read that?"

  "Some. It's a list of insurance companies and what they owe various A-Zed proxies. Everything from fender benders to whiplashes. It seems to have been a very profitable sideline for Rhee. Over a million dollars last year alone."

  "Cool. You know, I have some psychological damage from having a gun held on me the other night. How much is that worth?"

  Abu Jasim slapped him on the back of the head.

  "Yeah, and that, too," the young man grimaced.

  Ari glanced up at Ben. "While we're looking at this, perhaps you can conceive of a connection between yourself and those men killed in the bombings. I cannot imagine why they would be interested in you. It's not the business with Uday. These people were not beloved by the Saddam regime. They would show no sorrow for his departure."

  "I've already racked my brain," said Ben hopelessly.

  "The picture of you on the laptop shows you in uniform. Was it taken in Iraq?"

  "No," said Ben. "That was taken at Fort Bliss in Texas. My cousin posted it on something called Facebook."

  "Wow," said Ahmad. "You've got a Facebook page."

  "My cousin is the super-patriot type, praise the lord and pass the ammunition."

  "That sounds like a quote from Adam Gadahn."

  "It's an American hymn. Yeah, sort of bellicose."

  "Can you see if the other pictures came from the internet?" Ari asked Ahmad.

  "Sure, I can access the net here using my satellite data. Just don't ask me to upload or download anything, or we'll be here all day."

  Ari left the boy to the laptop and sat across from B
en. He pressed down on the thick arm cushions approvingly. "I have a similar chair. Obviously, my friend here appreciates fine upholstery." He nodded at Abu Jasim, who had slumped into another chair and fallen asleep.

  "Can't hold his booze?"

  "As you know, he was attacked by a Thunderbird."

  "That'll do it."

  Ari made a show of surveying the living room to prepare Ben for a question that had already formed in his mind.

  "There is no memorabilia here."

  "From Iraq? No, not here or anywhere else in the house."

  "You brought back nothing at all?"

  "Why do you ask? Oh, right...you're looking for a connection. But these two bombings around Richmond...the victims were Iraqi?"

  "One of them was a naturalized American…but yes."

  "You met these fellows?" Ben asked

  "No."

  "Then how do you know..."

  Ben knew Ari was from Iraq, and had been a translator for the Coalition. Beyond that, Ari was pretty much a blank—except he seemed exceptionally capable of handling himself in a fight.

  "They were well-known in the country," Ari lied. "But the connection—"

  "If there's a connection," Ben asserted.

  "You have been followed."

  "By a mystery woman," Ben grinned. "Kind of flattering. Don't tell Becky I said that."

  Abu Jasim snorted in his sleep and turned sideways in his chair.

  "Fuuuuuck..." said Ahmad. His head darted up. "Sorry." Then he saw his uncle asleep and shrugged. "I got a hit."

  "But you're not smoking."

  "Not weed. On the Net. This guy here...Andrew Little. Definitely not an Iraqi. There's an article in Salon about him. He was a contractor working for the National Mines Advisory in Iraq."

  "Yes?"

  "He was killed in an explosion in some bo-dunk town in Idaho...someone planted a bomb—"

  "He is in the gallery?" Ari asked.

  "Oh, yeah. And guess what?" Ahmad sat back, looking grimly pleased.

  "Well?" Ari said.

  "You don't want to guess?"

  "That would be infantile."

  "Uh...OK. There's an 'X' by his name. As in 'crossed off the list'."

  "Are there any more 'X's?"

  "Didn't think of that..." He began scrolling through the gallery.

  "As you see," said Ari, turning back to Ben, "this is a situation fraught with dementia."

  "I think I know what you mean."

  "Being an Iraqi is no longer the connection. The list includes people who served in Iraq, and now we know at least one non-Iraqi has been killed by an explosion. The only reason I felt comfortable meeting here is because I think these assassins are having difficulty tracing you. You moved here after you returned from overseas, and you are listed under your wife's name. The other victims didn't take adequate precautions to hide themselves."

  "Over a dozen," Ahmad announced. "Not including the two in Richmond."

  "All killed by bombs?"

  "I don't know. I'll google them. But there a couple of Americans with X's by their pictures."

  "Military?"

  "Hold on..."

  "It seems quite a few people did not take adequate precautions, Benjamin."

  "Precautions against what? Who expects to come home and get bombed?" Ben shook his head. "I didn't do anything special in Iraq, except..."

  "Kill Iraqis?"

  "Maybe a couple. But in that case you're talking about a gang taking revenge on every GI who served over there and every Iraqi who collaborated."

  "That wouldn't be practical," Ari said. Then he found himself wondering briefly if, in fact, it was that farfetched. Saddam Hussein had managed to eliminate quite a few enemies from a distance, as Ari well knew.

  "I did bring back one thing," Ben said with a rueful grin. "'Scenic Iraq'."

  "A book?"

  "A DVD. Like one of those old travelogues. You know. 'Here are the picturesque natives picking dates in Dhi Qar.' Nothing special. I took it back to base and we got a hoot watching it. I guess Saddam had it made back when he still thought he could get tourists into the country."

  "May I see it?"

  "Right there...in the CD stack." Ben stood and retrieved a DVD from a wire rack next to the television. He handed it to Ari. The plastic case cover showed the Imam Ali Mosque lit up in the middle of the night. The title was printed in several languages, but they all amounted to:

  'Scenic Iraq'.

  "May I watch it?"

  "Sure, if you have 45 minutes to waste," Ben shrugged. "It's in English, with subtitles in Arabic, French and German."

  "I am very keen to see it."

  Ben opened the case and slid the disc into the DVD player. He turned on the TV.

  Bland music from the Arabic version of Musak swelled from the speakers. The first image was of the ruins of Babylon, and the first words were:

  "Cradle of civilization, Iraq is the home of writing, astronomy, philosophy ..."

  "The Greeks and Egyptians might have something to say about that," said Ahmad without looking up from his laptop.

  "Shush," said Ari.

  "Through the fabled cities of Sumer, Ur and Babylon marched the armies of Babylonia, Assyria and Sargon of Akkad..."

  "What, no 1st Armored?" Ben griped.

  "Here are the ruins of Akkad, destroyed by the famous Curse of the Oracles of Nippur..."

  "Sort of like 'Mission Accomplished," said Ben.

  "And here is the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, with mace and lion-headed eagle..."

  Ben was visibly agitated. He reached for a bag of chips sitting on the side table.

  "And now, Babylon, beautifully restored in 1983 by President Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar."

  "And now home of Camp Alpha," Ben quipped maliciously. "Where's the helipad?"

  "Very amusing," said Ari.

  "Sorry. Young guys under stress...you know."

  "Just like your enemy. And you are no longer so young."

  "Can I interrupt?" Ahmad asked. "I mean, I'm sort of under stress here, too."

  "What is it?"

  "Those dozen or so guys we were talking about, with X's?"

  "Yes?"

  "Three died in the States...bombs."

  "The others?"

  "One in Germany, one in Holland, one in France. According to the news, they were all accidents."

  "It appears Europe does a better job controlling illegal explosives," said Ari.

  "Doesn't keep people from dying," said Ben.

  "Indeed..."

  He switched his attention back to the television. A gorgeous golden dome filled the screen. "Such a lovely country," said Ari. "That's the Al-Askari Shrine, very holy to Shiiites."

  "If you're into sandboxes," came Ben's surprising assessment. "And wasn't the dome blown to bits a couple years ago?"

  Ari wondered if, having come from the lush Virginia countryside, deserts held no appeal to the veteran.

  Five minutes later, as they watched Bedouins accompanying their camels over a barren landscape, Ari realized the sound of fingers traipsing across the keyboard had stopped. He found Ahmad watching Scenic Iraq.

  "You are interested in your nomadic roots?" Ari asked him.

  "My roots are in Chicago. You mind if I look at that disc?"

  "The movie?"

  A grand swelling of lush Western-style violins signaled the arrival of a grand climax. Probably a return to the ruins of Babylon and Sumer.

  "Yes, I think we've seen enough."

  Ben got up and took the DVD out of the player. He handed it to Ahmad, who held it up and grinned. "I was wondering about that."

  Ari nodded for him to continue.

  "It's DVD-RW. Commercially produced movies on DVD's can't be erased because the session has been closed. But ten-to-one this is a bootleg. Whoever made the copy probably had a bunch of blank DVD-RW's he wanted to get rid of and used them for this."

  "Which means?"

  "You can re-open the s
ession and burn more files on the disc."

  "But that's the only video on there," Ben protested. "We just watched it."

  "But if the file isn't in a format your player recognizes, you won't see it."

  "There could be invisible files on there?" Ari asked.

  "Not invisible." Ahmad put the disk into his laptop. There was a tiny electronic whine as the contents loaded. Ari rose and looked over the young man's shoulder as he opened the drive.

  "Do you see anything?"

  "Oh yeah," said Ahmad. "See? The video you were watching was mpeg. So long as you set up the burn properly, you can watch it on TV. But there's this other file in wmv format, which won't play on a basic DVD player."

  "And you can view it?"

  "On the laptop, sure."

  "Then do so."

  Ahmad clicked on the unnamed wmv file. A moment later, two orange and black logos appeared on the screen.

  "You know those, Colonel?"

  Ari pointed at the one on the left.

  "This is the symbol for the University of Mosul. You should be able to read the inscription. It's from the Sura Ta-Ha."

  "Uh..." Ahmad squinted at the Arabic letters. "'Say, My Lord, grant me more knowledge'."

  "Excellent! You would do well to heed. This second logo is of the University's College of Medicine."

  "How do you know?"

  "That image of the falcon represents Horus, and of course the staff with curling serpents is a caduceus."

  "Gotcha."

  They waited fifteen seconds, which was an eternity to Ahmad. "When's the show begin?"

  The image of the logos faded, replaced by white lettering:

  'College of Medicine, Al-Shefaa Sector, Nineveh School of Medicine. Presentation by Prof. Dr. Azz edin Shkara.'

  Ari grunted.

  "You know him?" Ahmad asked.

  "I know of him. He made the mistake of joking with the IAEA people. I think he was only practicing his English."

  "So...what happened to the professor?"

  "I believe he is no longer among the living."

  "What, he was killed for joking?"

  "Saddam took a very dim view of joking with weapons inspectors."

  The titles gave way to a view of two sizable four-story buildings, their white exteriors shining in the sunlight. The medical campus. This dissolved into a close-up of around a dozen domed squat barrels lined up on what appeared to be a basement floor. They were orange, and all bore the tri-foil (in this case black on a yellow background) that was the international symbol for hazardous radiation. Labels had been affixed to all of the barrels, and while the writing in the fill-in blanks was smudged an illegible purple, the printed categories were clear: