Team Red

by David DeBatto

  DeLuca liked him.

  “You can put your stuff over there,” he said, gesturing toward Doc’s cot. He noticed, included among Vasquez’s gear, an oversized black nylon bag. “What’s that?”

  “Satellite dish,” Vasquez said. “You mind? In Tikrit, we could get Lakers games. My TV is tiny but the picture is good.”

  “Where’d you get the dish?”

  “From a kid in the market,” said Vasquez. “Traded him a Shaquille O’Neal jersey and some cheap bling-bling. It’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “As long as you finish your homework,” DeLuca said. Vasquez made it three Californians, all in their mid-twenties. “Welcome to the team. You might want to brush up on some of the files when you get time.”

  “Already started. I heard you guys were good.”

  “We’ve done okay.”

  “Just okay?” Vasquez said. “Man, word I got was that Mr. David took more names off the blacklist than anybody.”

  “Sometimes things have fallen our way,” DeLuca said. “It’s mostly luck.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” Vasquez said. “I heard you’re the best.”

  “Do you blow smoke up everybody’s ass, or is it just me?”

  “Little of both,” Vasquez said. “My abuelo taught me you catch more flies with honey.”

  “Actually, you catch more flies with shit,” DeLuca said.

  “What I could never figure out was why anybody would want to catch flies in the first place,” Vasquez said. “I hate flies. I had enough of them growing up, man.”

  With his wavy dark brown hair, dark complexion, thick eyebrows, and the swarthy five-o’clock shadow of a beard,Vasquez could probably pass for Arab, DeLuca surmised, and that could be a good thing, an advantage that neither he nor Sykes nor the fair-haired MacKenzie could boast of.

  “How’s your Arabic?”

  “Good enough to sell camels,” Vasquez said. “My Spanish is better.”

  “How are you at waiting tables?”

  “Lousy,” he said. “Why?”

  “Tomorrow night, CENTCOM is having a big banquet for all the top sheikhs and tribal leaders in the country. They want the wait staff to be CI.”

  “This is more than a hospitality gesture, I take it?” Vasquez asked.

  “Fancy as it gets,” DeLuca said. “You’ll be wearing white gloves. And surgical gloves underneath. While everybody else is schmoozing, we’re going to be collecting fingerprints and DNA off the glasses. And wearing wires to assist in any eaves that need dropping. Plus we get to eat in the kitchen.”

  “I come all the way to Iraq to be a waiter,” Vasquez said. “My mother would be so proud.”

  “You go by Julio?”

  “Hoolie,” Vasquez said.

  “Hoolie it is, then,” DeLuca said.

  When Sykes and MacKenzie returned, DeLuca introduced Vasquez and called for a team briefing in the OMT. Before the meeting, he introduced Vasquez to Reicken and was impressed by how quickly Hoolie greased the lieutenant colonel and ingratiated himself, using all the techniques they taught in books like How to Win Friends and Influence People. DeLuca had instructed him not to ask about the fourteen caramels. Vasquez recognized Reicken immediately for what he was, “a real Class-A Remfro.” In soldiers’ jargon, “Remfro” was a Vietnam-era term that stood for “Rear Echelon Motherfucker” and identified the guys who took all the credit without ever leaving the safety of their desks. Hoolie had spent the time waiting reading the sitrep on the raid at Ad-Dujayl and then Al-Tariq’s file. DeLuca had spent the time reviewing Julio Vasquez’s 201 file.

  “So what have you got for me?” DeLuca said at the briefing. “Halem Seeliyeh.”

  “Where do you wanna start?” Dan asked.

  “Anywhere,” DeLuca said. “Microbiologist?”

  “Not even,” Sykes said. “No person by that name took a degree from the University of Cairo during the years he said he was there. Apparently he was padding his résumé. I’m thinking maybe he was just a biology major somewhere. I didn’t press it. He did work for Hazem Ali at Salman Pak, mostly drive his car and take care of the chickens.”

  “This was at the so-called chicken-feed plant with the guard towers?”

  “That was Al-Hakam, not Salman Pak,” Sykes said. “But they had chickens there too.”

  “I was thinking maybe it was like the way they take canaries down in coal mines,” MacKenzie said. “If the canary stops singing, you know you’ve got a leak. Maybe the chickens were there to detect BW leaks.”

  “Or to test them on,” Dan said. “Or it was just to maintain the cover story that it was a chicken-feed operation.”

  “I saw a nasty cock fight in Basra,” Hoolie said. “Maybe it was just a hobby.”

  “How many chickens?” DeLuca asked.

  “How many?” Dan said. “I didn’t ask. It sounded like a lot. Hundreds.”

  “What about Al Manal?” DeLuca asked. “The Daura Foot and Mouth Disease Facility.”

  “He got transferred there,” Dan said. “In 1999. Right after the U.N. inspectors got thrown out. He saw a lot of construction equipment, at first, but he wasn’t sure what it was for.”

  “What did he do there?”

  “Well, from the sound of it,” MacKenzie joined in, “they kept everybody pretty isolated so that whatever the process was that they were working on, the workers only knew their specific step, but not the whole thing. Seeliyeh’s job was to take powder from brown bottles and add it to a growth medium in vials. He’d let the stuff sit for a few days, and then he’d add something to it and run it through a centrifuge and drain off the liquid at the top. He said he’d run that liquid through a filter, add a few drops of some other liquid they gave him, and then pass the whole batch along to the next room.”

  “Were there chickens at Al Manal?” Hoolie asked.

  “That was Salman Pak,” Dan said.

  “I know there were chickens at Salman Pak,” Hoolie said. “I was wondering if there were chickens at Al Manal.”

  “I don’t know,” Dan said, sounding slightly perturbed. “Foot and mouth is a cattle disease, so if that’s what they were working with, I’d assume they’d keep cattle around as a cover and not chickens. It might have been part of a plan to attack our food supplies.”

  “Let’s not assume,” DeLuca said. “How long was he working there?”

  “Right up to the end,” MacKenzie said. “He said they pulled everybody out and shut it down when they knew the war was coming.”

  “What did he wear when he worked?” DeLuca asked. “Did he wear a hot suit?”

  “Nope,” Dan said. “But he saw other areas where they wore them. And he said his ears kept popping when he moved from room to room sometimes. You know what that means, right?”

  “Negative air pressure,” DeLuca said. “It sounds like a biocontainment lab.”

  “Sounds like,” Dan agreed.

  “Did he ever see Dr. Germ, or Hazem Ali, or for that matter Mohammed Al-Tariq, hanging out in the cafeteria?”

  “Negative,” Dan said. “But I don’t think he would have. My impression is that he was pretty far from the center of things. This was one step up from tending chickens, remember.”

  “Lanatullah?”

  “Never heard of it,” Dan said. “I mean, he knows it as a curse, but as far as he knows, that’s all it is.”

  “So he had no idea what he was working with?”

  “They didn’t tell him,” Dan said. “All he knew was that he was working from instructions from a book and the instructions were labeled ‘protocol 16.15.’ And he thinks the brown powder was something called IL-4.”

  “Which is?”

  “IL-4 is the gene that produces interleukin-4,” Dan said. “Interleukin-4 stimulates the production of antibodies to fight off infections. Which would more or less check out if they were making vaccines, the way they said they were. Biology was never one of my better subjects. Plus if you Google ‘IL-4,’ you get sixteen thousand diff
erent scientific papers on it, so we might want to narrow it down some. My sense is that it’s one of the more common genes used in medical research.”

  “Could somebody get me the name of somebody who knows about this stuff?” DeLuca asked. “Preferably somebody in country I could meet with face to face.”

  “I’ll look into it,” MacKenzie said.

  “I’ll see what I can find out about ‘protocol 16.15,’” Dan said.

  “What about when they shut it down?” DeLuca asked. “What did he remember about that?”

  Sykes and MacKenzie exchanged glances, and Sykes smiled, taking a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and handing it to DeLuca, who opened it. On it, he saw two names, Faris Saad and Razdi Chellub.

  “Okay,” DeLuca said. “And they would be?”

  “Truck drivers,” Sykes said. “More specifically, the guys who moved everybody out of the lab.”

  “Two guys?” DeLuca said. “Moved a whole lab?”

  “Probably not all at once,” Dan said. “Maybe not the whole lab. Nobody’s been through the debris field to figure out what the pieces are, so for all we know, the lab equipment itself is still under there.”

  “How did Seeliyeh know their names?”

  “His boss asked him to recommend some truckers,” Dan said. “‘Men who could be discreet,’ supposedly. One is his cousin, and the other is a friend of the cousin. I’m not sure which one owns the truck. I guess they used the truck to run the embargo.”

  “Addresses?”

  “He hasn’t seen them since the war started,” Dan said. “He thinks they might be in the Hurriya district in west Baghdad.”

  “I can do the truckers,” Hoolie said. “I’m going to need a translator, though.”

  “I’ll introduce you to Adnan,” DeLuca said, handing Vasquez the slip of paper with the truckers’ names on it.

  “All right if I give Seeliyeh a call myself?” Vasquez said. DeLuca saw Dan bristle a bit, Hoolie’s request implying that Dan might have left something out.

  “Sounds like Dan covered it,” DeLuca said. “Why do you want to call him?”

  “I just want to ask him about the chickens,” Hoolie said. Dan rolled his eyes. “I like chickens. I used to keep them when I was fifteen.”

  “We don’t want to know what you did with them,” Dan said, “especially if there was any duct tape involved.”

  “Hey, cabrone,” Hoolie says. “Everybody knows you can’t duct tape a chicken. Didn’t they teach you anything in that Ivy League school of yours?”

  “Stanford’s not in the Ivy League,” Dan said.

  “I know it’s not,” Hoolie said, smiling brightly. “I was just kidding you.”

  “Where did he go to college?” Dan asked, once Hoolie was out of earshot. DeLuca could have answered the question—Vasquez had gone to Harvard—but given how he preferred to portray himself as a street-smart Angeleno, DeLuca decided he’d let Vasquez tell Dan himself, if the subject ever came up again.

  “Don’t anybody forget the banquet tomorrow night,” DeLuca said.

  “Looking forward to it,” MacKenzie said. “I never get tired of behaving subserviently in front of Arab men.”

  “Dan, I’ve got something else for you tonight,” DeLuca said. “Mack, you help Hoolie get up to speed. Dan and Khalil and I are going to pay a sick call.”

  The job was locating specific Iraqis, starting with the little guys and moving up the food chain, a task complicated by the fact that there were no working telephones, no phone books where you could look somebody up, and no public records of where anybody lived, on streets that didn’t have names. Occasionally you could find the local postman, who knew where people were, or seize the records in a police station, which occasionally proved useful, but lacking that, the best a team could do to collect human intelligence was to rumble into a town in four or five Humvees accompanied by tanks or Bradleys and start asking around, shouting in the middle of the marketplace, “I’m looking for Ali Baba or anybody who knows him.” That was often enough. Traveling in armed convoys, it was impossible to sneak up on anybody, but at least you didn’t have to honk the horn to get attention. For all the resistance to the occupation, there were still a lot of people who wanted to work with U.S. troops, to curry favor, to suck up to power, in exchange for cash or just to finger their enemies, but there were ways to work it.

  From the outside, Ad-Dujayl Hospital resembled something like a California elementary school, a long, low two-story X-shaped building surrounded by date palms, with a circular driveway in the front and a large parking lot to the left of the main entrance. Inside, it hardly looked like a hospital, the floors filthy, ceiling panels missing to expose the wiring behind them, cracked plaster, flies buzzing everywhere, toilets that were simple pear-shaped holes in the concrete floor, no running water, and few medications available, few before the war due to the embargo and even fewer now that so many people needed them. He saw patients lying on dirty blood-soaked sheets, their bandages bloody and in need of changing. He heard patients moaning, and screaming babies, children with birth defects, and he saw young injured men lying on cots, surrounded by their families, waiting for haggard-looking doctors with impossible work loads to make their weary rounds.

  DeLuca found the patient he was looking for in a private corner room, number 406. His sheets were clean, and he had equipment that was apparently unavailable to the other patients, including a morphine drip with a microflow regulator he could use to self-medicate. He didn’t have a private nurse, but he did have a personal servant who slept on a blanket in the corner to prepare his food and bathe him.

  “Hassan Al-Tariq?” DeLuca asked.

  The man in the bed looked at him.

  “Tell him my name is Mr. David. Tell him we know he’s here under a false name because he has enemies. Tell him we can move him to a safer hospital where there are better doctors.”

  Khalil translated.

  Hassan said nothing. His breathing was rapid and shallow, his forehead coated with a patina of sweat indicating a high fever. DeLuca noticed a doctor in a dirty white coat standing in the doorway, a confused look on his face.

  “Are you his doctor?” Khalil translated. When the man said he was, DeLuca asked him, through Khalil, what Hassan Al-Tariq’s condition was. The doctor invited Khalil into the hallway, where he spoke at length, in a voice too low for the patient to hear. DeLuca took a position at the door.

  “He says his blood is poisoned,” Khalil said. DeLuca looked at the doctor.

  “Sepsis,” the doctor said, nodding. He struggled for the English word, then corrected himself. “Septicemia.”

  “He was shot,” Khalil continued, “defending his house from looters. He has a bullet in his spine and will never walk again, but the doctor thinks it won’t matter because he doesn’t have what he needs to fight the poisoning. Antibiotics. If he goes into shock, he will die.”

  “Is he in pain?” DeLuca asked. “Can he talk?”

  Khalil translated. The doctor answered.

  “He is in much pain,” Khalil said. “He has morphine. The doctor says they received a phone call from someone instructing them to give this man whatever he needs to not feel pain.”

  “A phone call?” DeLuca said. “From whom? Did he know who called?”

  Khalil and the doctor spoke again.

  “It was the hospital administrator who received the phone call,” Khalil said, “but it was from someone he knew to be afraid of. Under Saddam.”

  “Daddy?” Dan said.

  “Or somebody who used to work for him,” DeLuca said. DeLuca wasn’t sure the phone call proved anything. “Has he had any visitors?”

  The doctor shook his head.

  He returned to the patient. Khalil joined him.

  “Do you understand English?” he asked.

  Hassan Al-Tariq appeared to be more alert than before.

  “Fuck you,” he managed to say.

  DeLuca waited. When Hassan reached for the flow reg
ulator connected to the IV drip, DeLuca grabbed it, holding them just beyond Hassan’s reach.

  “If you want this, you have to talk to me,” he said. “I’m sure there are a lot of other patients who need this more than you do. I’ll give it back to you if you help me.” Khalil translated.

  “Lanatullah,” Hassan said.

  “Tell him his father wants to see him,” DeLuca said. “Tell him I can take him to see his father.”

  The ploy seemed only to confuse the man in the bed.

  “We’re holding him not far from here,” DeLuca said. “He’s asked to see you.” Khalil translated.

  Hassan glared at them both.

  “Waish itgul? Abouy mat zaman,” the son said.

  “‘What are you talking about—my father is deceased,’” Khalil translated.

  DeLuca leaned down and put his face close to Hassan’s face, holding the flow regulator in front of the sick man’s eyes. He couldn’t be certain, but it appeared that if Mohammed Al-Tariq were alive, Hassan was unaware of it.

  “Alf Wajeh,” DeLuca whispered.

  “Lanatullah,” Hassan repeated.

  DeLuca decided it was time to play a hunch, something that had been in the back of his mind since speaking with Ali Hadid. If the Thousand Faces constituted a terrorist group within the United States, subdivided into autonomous cells, then somebody had to be coordinating them. There was something odd about what Ali had reported, the quote, “Lanatullah is in the land of the infidels.” It made “Lanatullah” sound like the name of a person. Perhaps it was, a code name of some sort.

  “Lanatullah can’t help you,” DeLuca said. “Lanatullah is sitting in a prison cell in Guantanamo, Cuba, right now.” He held the control to Hassan Al-Tariq’s pain medication behind his back, his thumb on the red button. “Lanatullah is telling us all kinds of things. We know about Jamrat. We know the names of the Alf Wajeh. We know about your father’s involvement.”

  “Never,” Hassan said in English. “Lanatullah is become death. He is the teacher and you will learn. Rah yentagem lana. Lanatullah cannot be contained. You do not have it.” With each sentence, as Hassan spoke, DeLuca pressed the red button behind his back, delivering a series of small doses of morphine to Hassan’s bloodstream, positively reinforcing the defiance as a way of getting the walls to fall and the gates to open up. As a cop, DeLuca had worked reticent gang members the same way, pretending their curses hurt his feelings or that their foul mouths offended him, until they started saying more than they meant to say simply because it made them feel powerful, and power was the ultimate narcotic. Sometimes the best way to get somebody to talk was to make sure talking felt good.