DeLuca watched the arrest on a plasma screen at the TOC. In addition to the UAV imagery, Scottie had patched in a feed from the Cuttyhunk’s thermal imaging camera, which was what a marksman on the Cuttyhunk used to locate and then disable the sailboat’s engine, firing a .50-caliber shell through the hull and then the engine block. A second shell was fired into the engine, just to be sure, and then a third was fired at the rudder, disabling the Aafia’s Ark to prevent Jaburi from making any kind of run for it. The stern of the Livingston housed a docking bay and a “moon pool” large enough to tow the sailboat in and capture her whole and afloat, but of course, Admiral Bishop explained, “You don’t pull a boat in until you know she hasn’t been rigged to explode and that those on board are fully compliant.”
The thermal imaging, which could read body heat signatures right through the hull of the sailboat as easily as if it were made of glass, created a cartoonlike image that showed a single individual down below, a bright orange figure against a cooler blue background, the man scurrying at first when the shots were fired, then moving more calmly, contemplating his options, from the look of it. DeLuca had heard so much about Professor Jaburi that he was hoping to get a picture of his face before he was taken into custody, assuming he let them take him into custody.
He wondered about the man, so intent on destroying America—destroying the world, more or less—what motivated him? How was the horror of what he was hoping to accomplish not a deterrent? Did he really believe the Alf Wajeh mythology? Even after all of Walter Ford’s notes, Jaburi was still a mystery. Was it possibly some kind of perverted desire to go down in history, the biggest mass murderer the world had ever known, or was it more complicated than that? The man had convinced himself that what he was doing was right, unlike most criminals who at some level knew and frequently admitted they knew what they were doing was wrong, but they just didn’t give a shit. Jaburi thought what he was doing was right. Did he think he was doing God’s bidding? He’d known Al-Tariq as a child—what had happened between them? Did he respect Mohammed Al-Tariq, or even love him, or did he simply fear him? Did he think Al-Tariq spoke for Allah? Or did Jaburi speak directly to Allah and regard himself as his chosen personal envoy? DeLuca imagined the latter to be the case, and that Jaburi, with his superior intellect, had probably considered himself “chosen” for some time.
But where did the hate come from? Who did he hate? Or what?
DeLuca could only guess, but his guess was Jaburi hated his own flesh, his own physical body. It was kind of an intuitive conclusion, but it made sense: Jaburi’s immaculate style of dress, the way he combed his victims’ hair—the physical body was something he needed to control. He probably felt separate from it, isolated or disconnected, a superior intellect transported around by an inferior vehicle, like the queen of England getting a ride in a rusted-out Ford Fiesta. Jaburi hated his body, its urges, the things it made him do and think. Lots of people hated their bodies, girls who starved themselves to death or cut themselves with razor blades, men who castrated themselves, hating their bodies. The question was, how might such a psychosis manifest itself in a man, a brilliant academic living in a world he thought was impure and full of evil?
DeLuca considered. In all his experience as a police officer, the craziest thing about crazy people, something he’d found to be true with a remarkable consistency, was that they all thought everybody else was as crazy as they were. The “guy with the heads” who Walter Ford liked to joke about, a mass murderer from Georgia who’d beheaded his victims and planted the heads in his mother’s garden so that he could tell her, “Hey Ma—people look up to you,” had actually told the police that in his opinion, everybody wanted to cut other people’s heads off—everybody thought about it, they were just afraid to admit it, and he’d simply had the courage to act on the normal impulses that everybody had.
Crazy people thought that way.
So if Jaburi was crazy, and he was (brilliance was no ticket out of madness or delusion, and often, it was the ticket in), and if he thought that everybody thought the same way he did, and if he hated his body, then he probably thought everybody hated their bodies. Everybody was impure. Everybody needed cleansing. Everybody secretly wanted cleansing. The whole world, in other words, wanted him to do what he was about to do—everybody thought about it, but they were afraid to admit it or do anything about it. And he wasn’t.
On the plasma screen, he watched the Coast Guard cutter Cuttyhunk close in on the sailboat, approaching within hailing distance, still upwind. He saw the LST pull to within a thousand yards, and he saw the Navy SEAL teams in their Scorpions, and then a boat he recognized as The Lady J. He wasn’t surprised that Sami and Walter wanted to be on the scene for the arrest. He was surprised by Jaburi’s behavior, watching as the academic climbed the stairs from his cabin and stood on the deck of the ship, his hands in the air. DeLuca had expected Jaburi to flee, or put up some kind of fight.
But he wasn’t doing that.
“My name is Mahmoud Jaburi,” Jaburi replied to the captain of the Cuttyhunk, who’d called to the smaller boat. The beam of the cutter’s spotlight shone in Jaburi’s face. “I work for the Central Intelligence Agency. You can ask a man there named Andrew Timmons. He will tell you. Or you can ask that man here, in the rain slicker. His name is Walter Ford, and he knows all about me. He has spoken to Agent Timmons. Ask him. He will tell you . . .”
The image from the Global Hawk circling the scene was remarkable, as good as if a movie crew were circling the ship in a helicopter. DeLuca watched. He saw Jaburi with his hands in the air. He seemed relaxed, unconcerned. Cocky? DeLuca couldn’t be sure. He saw Jaburi point to Walter Ford. He saw the spotlight from the Cuttyhunk shine on Jaburi’s face.
“Can you get me a closeup?” he asked Scott.
“Just a second,” Scott said, tapping at his computer keyboard. “Nope. That’s as close as I can go. Maybe . . . nope.”
“Get me as close as you possibly can, okay?” DeLuca asked his son.
“He’s saying he has nothing to hide,” Admiral Bishop said, listening on headphones to the radio chatter on the Navy’s encrypted high frequency and relaying the communications. “He’s telling the Cuttyhunk he works for the CIA. Who’s the guy in the fishing boat?”
“He works for me,” DeLuca said.
“Jesus,” Abizaid said. “You people are everywhere.”
But DeLuca wasn’t listening, paying attention instead to the imagery coming from the Coast Guard’s thermal imaging camera.
“Does anybody here know about thermal imaging?” DeLuca asked.
“I know a bit,” Colonel Eagan said. “What’s your question?”
“Well, look at the image of Jaburi. Now look at the image of my friend Walter. Or Sami next to him. These colors are correct, right?”
“The colors indicate temperature variations,” Egan said.
“Right,” DeLuca said. Jaburi was gesticulating. “So Walter and Sami are mostly orange with a little red in the core and then at the extremities they start to fade to yellow and green? Why is that?”
“Their body temperatures are cooler at the extremities,” Eagan said. “These cameras are incredibly sensitive.”
“Okay,” DeLuca said. “So then why is Jaburi almost completely red?”
“Different people have different signatures,” Eagan said. “I have boys who tell me they can read these things and tell whether or not somebody’s angry.”
“You’re saying you think he’s angry?”
“Well, no,” Eagan said. “He wouldn’t be that red. He’s definitely warmer than the others. Maybe he’s been exerting himself.”
“Or maybe he’s running a fever,” DeLuca said. “Tell them to abort!” he shouted. “Tell them now—abort! Back off, don’t arrest him—he’s infected himself. He’s got it, and he’s trying to spread it!”
He watched, horrified, as Sami pulled his boat up alongside the Aafia’s Ark. Jaburi still had his hands in the air. It looked
as if he were arguing with the captain of the Cuttyhunk, pointing at Walter, then at the ladder hanging from the toe-rail, waving and inviting Walter aboard, Jaburi with his hands out to his sides in a gesture that tried to say, “Relax, you have nothing to worry about . . . trust me.” DeLuca saw Walter talking to the captain about something, then Jaburi joining in a three-way conversation.
He saw Sami look over his shoulder.
“Answer your goddamn radio, Sami,” DeLuca pleaded.
Jaburi and Walter continued to converse, the two men’s body language casual and relaxed, DeLuca thought, the two ships no more than fifteen or twenty feet apart. Sami left the picture, then returned and whispered something into Walter’s ear.
“Good, Sami, good—now back off,” DeLuca urged.
Jaburi wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.
Walter and Sami disappeared into the wheelhouse, then the fishing boat reversed engines and separated from the sailboat, slowly at first, then engines full. The Coast Guard cutter and the rubber raiding crafts backed off as well.
“Jesus, Walter!” DeLuca said, breathing easier now. “Could you possibly move any slower?”
Epilogue
HE ASKED HIM THE SAME QUESTION IN PERSON a week later from his hospital bed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he’d been sent to recuperate and mainly to rest. He was taking medications to get the swelling down in the disk in his neck that was on the verge of rupturing. Phil LeDoux had, in fact, pulled rank on DeLuca for the first time in his life and ordered his friend to rest. For now, anyway, DeLuca felt like he could stand down. Of the twenty-four e-mail addresses, twenty had reported back, leading to the very quiet and highly secret arrests of more than two hundred terrorists. Of the remaining three addresses, two jihadis had turned themselves in, reporting that they’d lost their nerve and hadn’t had the heart to activate the virus that had been sent them, meaning it was still live, at which point the bottles they turned over, still sealed, were handled very carefully indeed. The last terrorist was never found, simply missing from her apartment, but the bottle of “olive oil” was recovered, unopened, and neutralized.
Walter and his wife had driven down, to see their friend David. Sami would have come, too, but at the last minute he got a call from a group of Harvard professors who wanted to take one last trip while the bluefish were still running. DeLuca was tempted to tell Sami what he’d seen a week earlier, watching the arrest scene via the thermal-imaging feed, an image of Sami’s boat and then, slowly circling it, a large school of fish, following one alpha fish twice the size of the others. A tech specialist with a degree in marine biology who was watching identified it as a school of migratory bluefin tuna. It was the thirty-thousand-dollar fish Sami had seen, and it looked like it was following him. DeLuca decided to keep that information to himself. It would only make Sami crazier than he already was.
He debriefed Walter Ford as best he could, filling in the details while Martha watched the television. By the second day, Jaburi had been too ill to rise from the berth in his cabin. Scottie said somebody at IMINT guessed, looking at the thermal images, that Jaburi’s fever spiked at around 106 degrees. There’d been talk of sending over SEAL divers in Jack Brown dry-suits or boarding the ship with gowned-up NBC technicians to decontaminate and salvage the boat, but then the let’s-just-blow-it-up-and-go-home argument won out, once all the risks were factored in. Seventy-two hours after the first shot had been fired, an eight-inch gun from the Livingston put Mahmoud Jaburi out of his considerable misery, obliterating the vessel with a thermobaric shell that created an instantaneous sixteen-hundred-degree plasma. Jaburi was no more. His ship was no more. Alf Wajeh was no more, just as Mohammed Al-Tariq was no more.
“So I’m still confused,” Walter said. “If you didn’t know Al-Tariq was alive until after you talked to Ali Hadid, how could he have known to put a reward on your head?”
“I don’t know that he did,” DeLuca said. “There’s a lot of guys over there putting rewards on people’s heads. Half of ’em are just plain assholes. The insurgency’s not the half of it. Hopefully, the Iraqi cops we’ve been training will get it under control when they take over after we leave.”
“David,” Martha interrupted. “Excuse me, but I think you might know this man talking to Geraldo Rivera. I think he was in your unit. Wasn’t that your unit?”
DeLuca looked up at the TV on the wall. He saw a familiar face, the words, “Lt. Col. Stanley Reicken, U.S. Army, 419th Counterintelligence Batt., Ret.” at the bottom of the screen. He’d known they were going to ask him to resign, but the demotion was a pleasant surprise. He turned the sound up.
“Actually, Geraldo, I think they’re wrong,” Reicken was saying. “I was there. We are winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. It’s a slow process, but we’re winning it. I personally supervised the installation of an electrical generator at a hospital in the town of Ad-Dujayl, and let me tell you . . .”
DeLuca turned the sound down again.
“To quote the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, ‘Some people with no brains do an awful lot of talking.’”
“Do you think that’s true, David?” Martha asked. “Are we really winning the hearts and minds?”
DeLuca could have given her a more complete answer, but then he recalled Phillip LeDoux’s orders—he was supposed to rest, and not upset himself.
“No, Martha, I don’t think that’s true,” he said.
“So Bonnie’s coming down tonight?” Walter asked, changing the subject. DeLuca nodded. “How’re you with that?”
“She’s called off the lawyers,” DeLuca said. “They tell me the VA has a free marriage counseling program specifically for these sorts of things.”
“Well that’s good, then,” Walter said. “Of course, you’re not going to just rely on the VA program to save your marriage.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Okay, then,” Walter said. “Martha, we should go.”
“Can we bring you anything before we go home?” Martha wanted to know, eyeing the card sitting on the windowsill next to him.
“I’m good, Martha,” he said. “Thanks anyway. Thanks for the flowers, too.”
“Oh, wait a minute,” Walter Ford said, reaching into the shopping bag he’d been carrying. “I almost forgot. This is from Gillian. I know she was saving this for you.” Ford handed DeLuca the fifty-year-old bottle of McCallums that she’d locked in her safe. “When you get back, we thought we’d have a little service for her.”
“I’ll save this for then,” DeLuca said.
After they left, he reread the card on the windowsill. It was from Evelyn, handwritten. It said,
Dear David,
I couldn’t believe it when they told me you’d gone home. I’m so sorry I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, but then, that’s been more the rule than the exception for me, these last few years, with people I care about. And the people I don’t, I can’t seem to get rid of. I hope they take good care of you—I know it’s not like you, but do try to listen to the doctors and do what they tell you.
Now I must say, I believe you were quite a naughty boy, telling me about your “friend” who died in the “bombing” of “counterintelligence headquarters.” But it has since been explained to me, and I understand. Your secrets are safe with me (all of them) so let’s not not speak any more of it. They say the first casualty of war is the truth, and I’m afraid I may have inflicted my share of wounds to it myself (friendly fire, but that’s hardly an excuse)—that’s what happens in war, isn’t it? That’s just what happens.
It seems rather imperative, then, that I tell you, so that you know, that there are other truths I never fudge, and things I said to you that I meant completely and will always stand behind. There were things that happened that might not have happened, under other circumstances, but that doesn’t make them any less true or meaningful in hindsight. You should know, I keep the friends I make and I protect my friends fiercely. And I consider you much more than
a friend, David. I can’t talk of love, though, can I? Too risky, isn’t it? Too dangerous, and I know danger doesn’t have much of an effect on you, but I’m going to let it go anyway.
So you be well, and perhaps we shall see each other again. We’ll always have Sanandaj. We’ll always have Balad. And we’ll never pass this way again, they say, so there it is.
Be good.
Evelyn
P.S. I suspect you’ll want to destroy this note. Go ahead—I won’t mind.
She was right, of course. She was right about everything.
He tossed it into the wastebasket.
For an hour, he watched television. There were reports of a car bombing in Fallujah, an IED killing two soldiers at an intersection in Ar Ramadi, a mortar round that killed three Iraqi civilians in Samarra, and on and on it went. He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Phillip LeDoux stood in the doorway.
“Got a minute?” LeDoux said.
“Phillip,” DeLuca said, smiling. “When did they let you out of the asylum?”
“I had to come in yesterday for meetings at the Pentagon,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t call first but they told me you had visitors.”
“Walter and his wife,” DeLuca said.
“I’m sorry I missed them,” LeDoux said. “Anyway, Dave, there are some other people in the hall who want to see you. I said I’d come in first to see how you were feeling. You up for more visitors?”
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