Ahmad emitted a warning cough and nodded at Ari.
"Uh?" Mohammed gave Ari's dark complexion a speculative glance. "Well, anyway, the Chaldeans didn't think much of us. We were raised in this country. We weren't really Sunnis or Shia or Yazidis or Christians...you know. You come to America, and you become pretty much nothing."
Ari was about as spiritually null as a living human could get, but it wasn't pleasant to hear.
"This does not conjoin with being a jihadist," he said.
"We aren't jihadists!" Mohammed cried. "Jesus! We're just...we didn't want to convert anyone. We sure as hell didn't set out to kill..."
"Continue."
"The Chaldeans...you wouldn't believe how much they were asking for per head. We didn't find out until later that they didn't have a pipeline at all, they were just middlemen."
"So that you were paying both the Chaldeans and A-Zed...both very pricey."
"No kidding. Well, Gail set up an emergency funding site on the internet. You know, asking for donations to bring in people whose lives are at risk."
"And people gave?"
"Lots."
"Hmmm," said Ari thoughtfully.
"It was the way Gail presented it. You should have seen that site. She's...she was first-rate with websites. People who clicked on it ended up in tears. They sent the money through Paypal."
Ari looked at Ahmad. "Why don't you begin a site like that?"
"You mean, for donations?" asked Ahmad, surprised.
"What else?"
"But donate for what?"
"I don't know. Perhaps create a fund for the chronically brain deficient." Ari was disappointed that Mohammed was shooting down so many of his theories, and seemed on the verge of shooting down many more. He was taking out his frustration on Ahmad.
"Aw crap," said Ahmad. "And speaking of my uncle, he's bleeding to death outside."
"Death and vultures avoid Abu Jasim like the plague," Ari asserted. "He will survive."
"Are you sure?" said Mohammed. "I warned you...this is a long story. A really long story."
"Then can you untie me?" Ethan complained, thumping a bit in his chair.
"I'm getting nut-burn here."
"You are a thief and a philanderer," Ari shot back. "Allow your nuts to simmer and annoy me no further."
"It worked." Mohammed took a deep breath. "We got our people out of Iraq. Then word began to spread and we got caught up bringing in more and more refugees."
"How did you, Hasan and Quassim fit in with this scheme?"
"I was the contact with the Chaldeans...they wanted their money up front, in cash, and face to face. I didn't want Gail dealing with them."
"Dangerous Assyrians," Ari nodded sagaciously.
"Well, some of them. But I guess most are just what their name says: Chaldean. Still, a bad lot."
"I advise all of my acquaintances to keep their distance from them."
"Hasan and Quassim helped with the charity site...we used Hasan's domain name. And Quassim cooked up some kind of raffle...win a free trip to the Bahamas or something. It was all pretty innocent...I mean, decent. We were doing good work."
"And then you became serial killers."
"Hold on! There was this guy...Al-Samad...I met him a couple times in Detroit, where the Chaldean Mafia...well, they took him in. He was even scummier than they are."
"He was Shia."
"I don't think that mattered. But the Chaldeans really loved him, because he showed up with a ton of active credit card numbers. He was straight out of Baghdad—in fact, almost straight from the Green Zone. He ran some kind of magazine stand and was skimming off credit card numbers. Some from Iraqis, but a lot from American soldiers. I thought they used Army script or something. But some chaplain found out he was selling pornographic videos and went to get the MP's."
"American soldiers buying pornography?" Ari clucked.
"Yeah, 'Macho Gonzo ravishes Egyptian Beauty Queen'...that kind of thing."
"Can't you get your head cut off over there for that kind of thing?" said Ahmad.
"In some places, sure. But it's still a big business. Lots of money."
"But there's the internet," Ahmad protested, then blushed. "Not that I would know anything about it."
"I think the Army filters out pornographic content," Mohammed speculated. "Anyway, Samad figured a lot of the soldiers wouldn't always have internet access. So they could just buy a DVD, pop it into their laptops, and enjoy Arabic culture. All the tourist stuff Samad was selling in the Green Zone was just a cover. But...uh...well, he made some money off of that stuff, too. A little."
"Yes," said Ari.
"Samad used A-Zed to get here, which is probably how he got in contact with the Chaldeans."
"He was a bad boy," said Ari.
"It's not like we didn't know what we were getting into," Mohammed said contritely. "I mean...the Chaldean Mafia..."
"What else did Samad bring with him, besides credit card numbers?" Ari asked. "Did he not also bring some of his old merchandise with him?"
"How did you—" Mohammed's eyes narrowed. "You're in this with them, aren't you?"
"I'm still in the dark, I assure you."
"Doesn't sound like it, to me." Mohammed glanced at Ahmad.
"Hey, don't look at me," Ahmad said. "I don't know what he's up to one minute to the next."
"And you don't want to know," said Ari.
"You got that right."
"And you say you've never heard of 'Bill'?" said Mohammed.
Ari's response was a blank face.
"A few months after I last saw Samad in Detroit, I got a call from home. My father had been beat up pretty badly. It wasn't really a mugging...it was a message. This guy told Dad to tell me that he knew I was mixed up with a bad business, and that he...Bill...would be contacting me to talk about it."
"Interesting," said Ari.
"The next week, way out in Washington State, the same thing happened to Hasan's father."
"With the same message?"
"It happened to all our families," Mohammed said grimly. "Gail's father died years ago, so this guy broke into her home back in Los Angeles, in the middle of the night...and threatened Gail's mother..."
"And after this Bill chap showed up you understood he knew where you lived and how easily he could harm your families..."
"He contacted us on Gail's charity website. 'If you don't want worse to happen, meet me at the Holiday Inn in Takoma Park on such-and-such date and time. Don't call the police. They would be very interested in your dealings with the Chaldeans.' I mean, this guy knew all about us! Even though Gail's site was anonymous, with no names or anything!"
"You met him?"
"We went. There were the four of us, and we had fair warning. We figured we could handle him."
"You didn't take a gun?"
"Where would we get a gun?"
"This is America."
"Well, it crossed our minds, but we didn't think we would need one. None of us even knew how to fire one."
"Which has changed."
"Yeah..." Mohammed lowered his head. "We got to the motel, went to the room he told us to go to, but no one answered when we knocked."
"He was waiting outside to see if you were followed."
"I guess. We were about to leave, when this guy comes walking out of the dark..."
"Bill."
"Yeah. So we...followed him inside."
"What did he look like?" Ari asked.
"Oh hell...well, a little like you. About the same height, but bulkier. No moustache, but he had the same..."
"Complexion?"
"Sorta. Maybe lighter. But no distinguishing marks that I could notice."
Ari's mind raced across a gallery of old SSO comrades in arms. There were several that could have fit this description.
"We sat down—five of us total and only two guest chairs, so the rest sat on the bed."
"In bed with Bill?"
"He stayed standing. He h
ad a quiet kind of voice, the kind that makes you lean in."
"Putting you within striking distance."
"I got that feeling, although he didn't make any threatening moves. He started off by telling us he had some ominous news. We couldn't think of anything more ominous than what had happened back home, and we told him so."
"Did he have an accent?"
"Not really. He never actually said he was from Iraq." Mohammed paused. "You get actors like that, who can play any nationality—well, almost—without a touch of makeup."
"Anthony Quinn," Ari suggested.
"Yeah. He brushed off what he had done to our families. He only wanted to get our attention, make us realize how serious things were."
"What was so serious?"
"He said that Samad had bolted out of town. Out of the States, in fact. We just sort of sat there. I mean, it took me a minute to remember who the hell Al-Samad was. So we said: So? That's when he pulled out a laptop, and then held up a disc for us to see."
"'Scenic Iraq'," said Ari blandly.
"Oh fuck, you are in on this. You plan on killing me out here?"
"It is not part of my nature to lethally spank young brats."
"Ha!" said Ahmad.
"Well...he loaded the disc in the laptop. It opened on some stupid travelogue, but he stopped it and went back to the file folder. He opened another file and it opened on a video made at the University of—"
"We are aware of that."
"I got the idea you might..." Mohammed winced and held his side. "When he finished showing the video, Bill said he had an outstanding death warrant for anyone who had seen it. Having just seen it...it sort of put a chill on the party."
"I can imagine."
"The original video was made by some travel agency in Baghdad. 'To the Ends of the Earth'. There was nothing special about it. But it turned out the owner of the agency somehow came across the video of the nuclear stuff. He was a real believer. Shia. And he decided to pass the video on to his hero, Muqtada al-Sadr."
"Oh, great," Ahmad commented.
"You can imagine, he had to be discreet, what with the Americans all around and the Sunnis and Shia cutting each others' throats. So he burns the file onto 'Scenic Iraq', hiding it in a different format. Then he must have gone out for lunch or called it a day or something, because Samad walks in and sees the disc sitting next to the desktop. He did odd jobs for the agency, was always popping in and out. They had one of those multiple DVD burners and I think he used it to make copies of his porn movies. Well, he sees the tourist video and thinks it would be a perfect camouflage for his little kiosk business. You know, they would sit on top of the counter, and when a customer asked if he had anything more interesting, out comes the diddle flicks."
"Or torture movies," said Ari.
"What?"
"Samad was known to have filmed people having their hands chopped off on the streets of Baghdad. Or flayed, or castrated—"
"Fuck!" Mohammed looked horrified. "That little fuck!"
"Please proceed. Time is remiss."
"It's what?"
"Please continue. Do you know how many copies of the DVD with the secret file were made?"
"About fifty. Samad didn't have a clue about the Mosul video. It was only when he got to the States that he noticed it. I can't believe he brought a copy with him..."
"Perhaps he thought to sell copies to A-Zed, which had a side business in tourist curios."
"Maybe. Yeah, you're probably right. But somewhere down the line he finally saw the secret file and the night light in his head went off."
"And the original video?"
"It didn't go anywhere. The travel agency was blown up just around the time the Coalition was setting up the Green Zone. I don't know if it was because of the video...but it probably was. Can you imagine the Sadrists making bombs with this stuff? Obviously, someone else didn't like the idea, either. The only copies left were the ones Samad sold and the one he brought here with him."
Ari nodded encouragingly.
"So...Bill said there was every indication that Samad had returned to Iraq, and that he was planning to retrieve the nuclear material and sell it on the black market. What balls! A Shia sneaking into Mosul to steal WMD's! He'd have been cut up for fish bait. But Bill said he couldn't take that risk. And that we had to stop him."
Mohammed looked up.
"Yeah," he continued, "you're asking 'why us?' We asked the same thing. And he said our parents were being punished for betraying Saddam. Which is sort of why I think..." He cocked a bruised, wary eye up at Ari.
"But this is phenomenal!" said Ari. "This Bill chap sounds like a man of resources. He could have contacted his associates in Baghdad. They would have dealt with this worm in sure fusion."
"Fashion," said Ahmad, who received a scowl for his trouble. "It didn't sound grammatical, anyway," the young man added haughtily.
"I think there was more to Bill's agenda. Maybe he was hoping we'd be killed. What a stink! American jihadists slain in Iraq while fighting American interests! But we wouldn't even have to die. You saw that video. We had to give proof the job was done, and done the way he wanted it. Bill wanted a beheading, but...you saw. I think Hasan left the sword behind on purpose. I can't say I like what we did in its place, but Bill said if we didn't, he'd..."
"I understand."
"What you don't understand is that he threatened to post that video on YouTube if we didn't do everything else he asked of us. I wondered why he insisted we uncover our faces..."
"But how did you get to Iraq?" asked Ahmad, lured into the conversation by the mention of YouTube. "It's not like driving down to Virginia Beach."
"And I was the only one with a passport!" Mohammed laughed harshly, then wincing and clutching his shoulder. "I was going to go to Paris! Well, forget that. You'd be amazed how many holes there are in the system. Bill arranged for us to go to Canada—you'll need a passport to go there, too, pretty soon. When we arrived in Toronto we were given phony passports and visas. Top quality, no one gave them a second glance. Yeah, I finally got to Paris, but that was only for a five-hour stopover. Before we knew it, we were in some dingy field near Aleppo getting training in weapons and bomb-making. They weren't too happy about Gail being there. They weren't too happy with any of us, with only ten words of Arabic between us. There was definitely some big authority behind all of this. I wonder who paid for it all..."
"You were taken over the Syrian border..." said Ari.
"We met a guide on the Iraq side. Good thing, too. We didn't know one sand dune from the next. They had informants, by the way. They knew exactly where Samad was and where he was headed. And the rest...you know."
"Hardly," Ari sighed. "I suggest that was only the beginning of your ordeal."
"Well yeah, what with you and the police shooting at us and all."
"You said Bill was holding the video taken in Nineveh Province as a threat over your heads. He had more tasks lined up for you."
"I told you, he said there was a death warrant out for anyone who had seen, or might have seen, the secret video."
"Yes," said Ari. "The famous bombings."
"We tried to scare people away, you know. Scare them so much they'd leave town. But we couldn't be specific."
Ari thought of the mutilated GI Joe left at Elmore Lawson's office. "Perhaps not specific, but certainly graphic."
"None of it worked, anyway. No one left. I guess people couldn't figure out why they were being threatened, or why they should be scared."
"But there were bombings all around the world!" Ahmad protested. "You mean you flew out—"
"Not our doing," Mohammed cut him short. "We're not the only chumps Bill has his claws into. But for us, it got even worse."
"A-Zed," said Ari.
"I never heard about them until a bunch of Chaldeans showed up on my doorstep and told me that some hole-in-the-wall company in Richmond had been hacked, and that we had to go down to get hold of the immigration datab
ase. They told us to copy the latest immigration list, with all the updates, and then bust up A-Zed's computer. These guys aren't too bright, though—asking us to close the barn door after the cow was gone."
"Which cow?" asked Ari. "Which barn?"
"And they expected us to…well, after all, we were such big-league killers..."
"They saw the execution video?"
"Bill must have sent them a copy, just to dig our graves a little deeper. The Chaldeans were furious. They paid Samad's way back to Iraq because he told him he could get more credit card numbers for them. He was their golden goose, and we had snuffed him. They wouldn't kill us for it, no. They would make us do more killing. And we almost did, too. But after we jumped Rhee and his men and had them all tied up...my stomach just gave out. I just couldn't do it."
"You tried to kill Mr. Lawson and myself."
"You were shooting at us."
"Wait," Ahmad interrupted. "That tells me how the immigration database got on your laptop. Check: A-Zed. But the photo gallery and biometric images…I've got a problem there."
"That's from Bill."
"Yeah…but the credit card numbers are tied in with the gallery…that's how you got the bombing targets' addresses. And since those credit card numbers were skimmed by Samad in the Green Zone…"
"You are temporarily not an idiot," said Ari in admiration.
"Thanks," said Ahmad, not taking his eyes off Mohammed. "You see what I'm saying?"
"That Bill and Samad were in it together from the beginning?" Mohammed dwelled on this. "Actually, that doesn't surprise me all that much. But it does make me wonder what the real reason might be for us being sent to Iraq…"
"Perhaps it was no more momentous than a falling out of thieves," said Ari.
Mohammed snorted. "So we can't even say we were out to save the world."
"Not at all," said Ari. "You drew the world's attention to imminent destruction."
Mohammed and Ahmad stared at him.
"Say what?"
"How did you discover who the hacker-person was?" Ari asked Mohammed, ignoring Ahmad.
"Yeah, drag me into it," Ethan complained from across the room. "And now my nuts are scorching, not that you care."
Cold Snap Page 39
