“Are these attempts at levity for my benefit?” she asked. “Because if they are, I appreciate them. Any progress?”
“I’ve got a notch,” he said. “That’s a start.”
“You’re sure you’re not sawing through my wrist?” she said. “Not sure I’d feel it if you were.”
“Well if I do,” he said, “it’ll make it easier to get the cuffs off.”
“Hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “Would you call that an off-handed remark?”
“Just off-the-cuff,” he said.
“Don’t make me laugh out loud, or they’ll know something is up,” she said. “My fiancé used to make the most inappropriate comments, just to make me look foolish when I laughed.”
“He stopped?” DeLuca asked.
“No, he went right on doing it,” she said. “The engagement stopped.”
“Sorry to hear that,” DeLuca said.
“I’m not,” the Englishwoman said. “Bit of a farce, really. Known him since public school, where we made one of those desperate deals that teenagers make—if neither one of us found our true love by the time we were forty, we’d marry each other. That was the pact we’d made. Good thing we didn’t follow through, all in all.”
“You don’t look forty,” he told her.
“Oh, really?” she said. “And just how old do I look?”
Alarms went off—it was a question he knew not to answer, along with, “Do these pants make my ass look fat,” and, “If you could sleep with any Hollywood actress, who would you sleep with?”
“I think I’m in quite enough trouble already,” he said.
“Fair enough,” she said.
“Thirty-two,” he said.
“Bless you,” she said. “Just a bit more than that, but no, I’m not forty. I think we jumped the gun because I was listening more to my biological clock than to my heart.”
“Are the biological clocks of women in England set four hours earlier than they are in the States? Almost through,” he said. “Hanging on by a thread.”
“So’s my love life,” she said. “How about you? Are you married, Herr Tischler?”
“I was when I left Hamburg,” he said. “She didn’t want me to make this trip. She was afraid something bad would happen. I promised her nothing would.”
“So far so good, then,” Evelyn said.
“What do you know about Abu Waid?” he asked, changing the subject from one that was dangerous to one that was simply life-threatening.
“Abu Waid?” she said. “You mean Ansar al-Islam’s Abu Waid?”
“That’s who he’s with?”
“Well, he was the number-two man in the movement until you chaps blew up the number-one man when you bombed their strongholds in Sulaymaniyah Province. Or I should say he was number three until you blew up number two, because number one is in Norway. Chap named Mullah Krekar. I interviewed him once in Oslo. Completely out of his mind and full of hate. I’ve heard Ansar al-Islam compared to a group of Kurdish fundamentalists similar to the Taliban, but I think they’re worse. Beyond Wahabism. I read someone say they thought 10 percent of Ansar is Al Qaeda, but I think the figure is much higher. Half of them fought in Afghanistan. And now all the little splinter groups are coming back together. The Islamic Unification Front, Hamas, the Soran Forces, the Soldiers of Islam, thanks to Mullah Krekar and Abu Waid.”
“How big is Ansar al-Islam?” he asked.
“I’ve read from five hundred to a thousand fighters,” she said. “I tend to believe the higher figures. Used to occupy themselves blowing up PUK offices and massacring PUK villages, to the delight of Tehran, I should say. Anything to destabilize prospects for Kurdish independence has always been jakes by them. Most of Ansar’s funding and arms have come from Iran.”
“And Abu Waid is the leader?” DeLuca asked.
“I believe so,” she said. “And he was Mukhaberat. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Then he’s the link,” DeLuca said. “With Al-Tariq. Have you ever heard of the Thousand Faces of Allah?”
“Alf Wajeh,” she said.
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Them?” she said. “The Alf Wajeh I know is an old poem.”
“What old poem is that?”
“You probably know the biblical version,” she said. “God sends the plague and the only ones left behind are the true believers. Al-Alf Wajeh is the Muslim version. Very ancient but basically the same myth. God delivers a plague and the only survivors are the thousand believers who go on to create a perfect world.”
“Hmm,” DeLuca said. “So what do you think the odds would be for some group of terrorists to come to think they’re the descendants of Al-Alf Wajeh?”
“And therefore, invulnerable to plagues?” she asked, connecting the dots. “Not as long as one might hope. I did a story on the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, led by a religious fanatic chap named Joseph Kony, where thousands of village boys as young as five and six years old have been essentially abducted and trained to carry guns and magical charms and amulets, and then Kony tells them that the enemy’s bullets will turn to water when they hit them. You can get impressionable people to believe a lot of things. I should guess with a group as indoctrinated as Ansar al-Islam, it wouldn’t be too hard to persuade a good many that they were the Alf Wajeh.”
DeLuca considered all the possibilities.
“So here are our options,” he said. “We could let them take us to Abu Waid with the hope that he could lead us to Al-Tariq, or we could leave tonight and start over once we’re back at Balad. What’s your preference?”
“That first choice is truly tempting,” she said, “but I think the second.”
“Agreed,” he said, severing the last band holding her wrists together. She tried to undo his cuffs, but her right hand was useless after so prolonged a period of constricted circulation. She swung her arm around for a few minutes until the blood returned to her hand, then helped DeLuca off with his cuffs. She wiped the blood from the side of his face and head as best she could, using the hood he’d worn, already blood-soaked.
He looked around, the only light coming from a boarded-up window next to the door. The room they were in appeared to be some sort of pen meant for animals. A quick search of the room turned up nothing he might be able to use for a weapon. He saw two bales of hay, stacked in one corner of the room.
The door opened out, but it seemed too sturdy to kick down. If he tried and failed, the others would hear.
“Any brilliant ideas?” she whispered, joining him at the window, peering out between the boards nailed there.
“I’m currently between brilliant ideas,” DeLuca whispered back. “How about using your feminine wiles? Or is that a sexist thing to say?”
“I’m flattered that you think I have any,” Evelyn Warner said. “Not sure ‘feminine wiles’ is the way to go. Not with an Arab boy. Most of them are virgins, you know. I’d probably scare him half to death if I said anything at all.”
“So the ‘seventy-doe-eyed-virgins-in-paradise’ thing for martyrs is real?” DeLuca said.
“It’s real to them,” she said. “It’s their best hope of ever getting laid. Thing is, the more the Arab world sinks into poverty, the fewer among them will ever have the resources to marry. Dowries and all that. My ex-fiancé used to joke that half the suicide bombers you read about are detonating from sheer horniness. Then of course, they have no actual experience with real women, but any Arab boy with Internet access can see more pornography than he’d know what to do with. The heat generated by the cognitive dissonance must be fierce.”
“This kid thinks he’s Pancho Villa,” DeLuca said. They saw their guard, leaning against a car, with his Uzi and his crossed ammunition belts.
“The machismo is just a bluff, you know,” she said. “And that’s not so unlike teenage boys everywhere.”
“Let’s use that,” DeLuca said. He looked up into the sky, which was full of stars on a moonless night. “We gotta
get him to open the door. Call him over here.”
He took off his boots, then stripped off his shirt and pants and used the hay to stuff his clothes until he’d made a straw dummy of himself. He tied the sleeves together with the flex cuffs he’d worn and stuffed the hood with hay as well, arranging the “body” in the corner against the wall opposite the door, his pant legs stuck into his boots. It would only fool the guard for a few seconds, but a few seconds would be all he’d need.
“I’m going to whisper in your ear and tell you what to say,” he told the Englishwoman.
She called the boy over. He was hesitant, lowering his weapon suspiciously at the window as he approached.
“Tell him you don’t think it’s fair that he should be out here standing guard duty when the others are all inside,” DeLuca whispered to Evelyn.
She complied. The boy had no response.
“Ask him if it’s because he’s the youngest that he has to stand guard duty,” DeLuca said.
The boy replied with an angry outburst.
“He says he’s not the youngest,” Evelyn whispered to DeLuca. “Two are even younger than him, and they get to be inside.”
“Tell him you want to trade him information for a drink of water,” DeLuca said. “Nothing more than that, just a drink of water.”
She did. The boy paused, then spoke.
“He wants to know what kind of information,” she said.
“Information about the man you’ve been locked up with,” DeLuca said. “A man who is not who he seems. Information that will make him an important person to the others.”
She translated, then waited for an answer. Pancho Villa spoke.
“He wants to know who you are if you’re not who you seem,” she said.
“Not until you get some water.”
She repeated it in Arabic. The boy responded angrily again.
“First information, then water,” she translated.
“Tell him I work for a company that puts satellites into space, and that I told you the Americans have been bombarding Arab men with invisible energy beams that make them impotent and unable to have children. You wanted to tell him before but you had to wait until I fell asleep.”
She looked at him.
“Just tell him that.”
Evelyn Warner obliged.
The boy didn’t answer.
“Tell him that even now, there are energy particles passing through his body that will make it impossible for him to have children, and that it’s part of the American plot to take over the Arab world.”
She told him.
“Ask him if he senses a tightness in his throat that makes it hard to swallow.”
She translated, then conveyed the response.
“He says he does,” she said.
“It’s an old psychic’s trick,” DeLuca said. “You get somebody nervous and then you tell ’em difficulty swallowing is a sign that their dead grandmother is trying to contact them. Now tell him the stars in the sky are not all stars, and that some of them are satellites. Ask him if he sees one that looks green or red and seems to be blinking.”
She translated. The boy looked heavenward, then pointed and spoke.
“Tell him you have more, but you’re not going to tell him unless he gets you a drink of water. We have to get him to open the door.”
She told him.
“Now go back and sit next to the dummy,” DeLuca said, pressing his back against the wall next to the door. It had been a while since he’d practiced hand-to-hand combat, but he’d spent enough time training recruits in the art at Fort Huachuca and again at Fort Devin to know what do to, and he’d restrained enough freaks on crystal meth or angel dust as a cop in Boston to trust his instincts.
He heard the guard fumbling at the door latch, and then words in Arabic, shouted through the door, which he took to mean “stand back!” The door opened, and then the beam of a flashlight shone cautiously through the crack. The door opened wider, the flashlight thrust through the opening, then the barrel of the Uzi and the guard’s head.
The guard leaned cautiously into the room, shining the flashlight on the Englishwoman, who’d temporarily placed her hood back over her head, and on the dummy next to her.
The boy stepped forward.
DeLuca punched him in the Adam’s apple, collapsing his windpipe. To an unsuspecting victim, such a blow was instantly incapacitating, a variation on the old police choke-hold that had been banned in a number of cities for being too violent a method of restraint.
The boy went down like a sack of concrete. DeLuca caught the weapon as he fell, stripping it from his hands.
The boy could neither breathe nor call out.
DeLuca knelt on Pancho Villa’s back as he searched him. He removed the ammunition belts, then felt a small lump in the boy’s pocket, about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
It was his sat phone.
“You better not have made any calls,” he said, completing his search while the boy gasped for air. Left in that condition, there was a good chance the boy would soon suffocate, a casualty of war, and he had no problem with that, but with the Englishwoman watching, DeLuca didn’t see the need to let it go that far. He rolled the boy over, tipped his head back, opened his mouth and stuck his fingers down the boy’s throat, prying his air passage open again. The boy gagged, then coughed violently, struggling to recover. DeLuca quickly gagged the boy with one of his own socks.
“Take the cuffs off the dummy, and the hood, too,” he told Evelyn. She brought them to him. He bound the boy’s hands behind his back, used the boy’s own belt to bind his feet, then threw the hood over his head to finish the task. He handed the boy’s kaffiyeh, ammunition belts, and weapon to the Englishwoman and asked her to put them on.
“Just walk back and forth outside while I get dressed,” he said. “And before you go . . .” He hesitated.
“What?” she asked.
“Explain to him that he’s going to be okay, and that I’ve spared his life. And that to repay me, he should go home to his mother and stop playing at war.”
She knelt beside the boy a moment, then went outside to play her part.
DeLuca dressed quickly, shaking as much hay from his clothes as he could.
He joined Evelyn Warner outside. She was about the same size as Pancho Villa had been. From a distance, it would be possible to mistake her for him. DeLuca put a finger to his lips and gestured for her to follow him. Staying to the shadows, they made their way to the SUV, putting the body of the vehicle between themselves and the house. Crouching low, he opened the driver’s side door. The keys were in the ignition. His Beretta was on the dash, his police special on the seat opposite the driver’s.
“This just gets better and better,” he told his companion, grabbing his weapons and strapping on his leg rig. The only other vehicle on the property, that he could see, was the green pickup truck he’d noticed when they’d been ambushed at the bazaar. He told Evelyn Warner to wait by the SUV.
“That Uzi’s a piece of shit, but it makes a lot of noise,” he told her. “If anybody comes, shoot ’em. But make sure it’s not me first.”
“I’ll make noise,” she said. “But I won’t shoot anyone.”
“Fair enough,” he told her. “Just remember those are your rules, not theirs.”
He heard music coming from the house. He smelled what he thought was incense, then realized it was curry. He couldn’t see anyone when he looked in the window, but if they were eating, they were most likely seated on a rug on the floor. The music would mask the sounds he needed to make.
He crossed to the green pickup truck and gently popped the hood, lifted it, and quietly ripped out the distributor cables, flinging them as far out into the bushes as he could. He was about to move to the house when he saw something interesting in the back of the pickup, a thick yellow nylon towing cable with large metal hooks at either end. Most of the vehicles he’d seen carried such cables, in a country where sudden sandstorms could
quickly bury vehicles up to their fenders in shifting sand drifts. He saw where a pole carried power and phone wires from the road to the house. He grabbed the towing cable, returned to the SUV, coiled the slack in one hand, swung the metal hook at one end of the cable in a three-foot circle, then threw the hook high in the air, draping it over the wire. When it stopped swinging, he pulled the cable back slowly until the metal hook caught the wire. He tied the other end of the towing cable to the roof rack of the SUV.
“Get in the car and stay down,” he told Evelyn Warner. “I’ll be right back. If you hear shooting, start the car and take off, and don’t look back.”
“Where are you going?” she asked. “We should go now.”
“I’ve got two more people to find,” he told her.
Khalil and Adnan had to be somewhere in the house. There were no other outbuildings to look into.
He circled the house, then crawled until he was directly beneath the side window to the main room. He chambered a round in his Beretta, then rose against the wall. The bedroom was lit by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.
He saw four men. Hmood sat in an easy chair before a television with the sound off, watching a soccer game. Two men sat at a card table, looking at magazines, a radio on the table next to them playing the music he’d heard. The fourth man sat at a door across the room, in a folding chair, his AK-47 propped against the wall next to him. The kitchen was empty. There were two twin mattresses on the floor to either side of the fireplace, each strewn with castoff clothing. Three other Kalashnikovs and an Iranian SIG rifle rested against the wall by the door. Hmood wore a .45 automatic in a shoulder holster. The house had three rooms, the kitchen, the main room, and the room being guarded. That had to be where Adnan and Khalil were being held.
He circled around the back of the house, until he found the back window to the bedroom. The room was dark, but even without lights, he could see a pair of legs belonging to a body on the floor, the rest of the body hidden by the bed. He couldn’t see anyone else. He considered his options. If the men in the other room heard him, he would have to bolt and leave his informants behind, something he didn’t want to do unless he absolutely had to.
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