Grayman Book One: Acts of War

by Michael Rizzo

5

  Thomas Richards:

  The Agency rep Henderson sends me is no different than the usual CTI “expert”: a cocky Special Forces captain who thinks he’s something because he’s SOF Downrange HumInt and doesn’t feel the need to wear the uniform. Or shave. Or show up on time. Or salute. I feel sorry for the Specialist I sent to babysit him.

  “Wahabi Barbeque?” he says like this is fun times. I ask myself (again) what I’ve done to deserve these idiots.

  “Captain Matthew Burke,” he finally introduces himself and manages a half-assed salute after I glare him down for a bit. “Sorry for the delay, Colonel…” He’s not. I catch that in my driver’s involuntary eye-roll. No shock there.

  “Mohamad Al-Fath,” I introduce him to the charred corpse in the half-open bag, then give him a better look that I hope ruins his gourmet lunch by nudging the bag open further with my boot. It doesn’t appear to, unfortunately. “It’s not a real name—means ‘victory’ or some such. He used to be a good local Catholic boy named De Paolo. Conversion apparently gave him a good excuse to divorce the wife and take the kid.”

  “So, the whole ‘faith and submission’ thing didn’t work out for him then?” Burke can’t turn off the sarcasm. Just what I need.

  He’s got eyes though: locks on the well-thumbed Koran left open on the floor, soggy from the fire sprinklers that eventually extinguished De Paolo. The Book stayed open because somebody stomped hard enough on it to break the binding.

  “Interesting,” he hums. “This would be rather inflammatory, yes?”

  “Very much so.” There are hard rules about treating the Book, not putting it on an unclean surface, not putting anything profane on top of it. Throwing it down and stomping on it—especially stomping on it—could get a fatwa declared on your ass.

  He’s also at least pro enough to ask if the place has been scanned before he disturbs the evidence by gently flipping the wet pages with his notepad stylus. He immediately notices the garish marker hi-lighting of certain verses and the now-smeared handwritten notes—something not unusual to see in a Bible, but a defilement in a Koran. The ink is aged enough to say De Paolo probably did it himself, which means Grayman (assuming Grayman did the stomping) technically defiled an already defiled text (so he could be Muslim himself, righteously pissed at how his faith has been twisted).

  “All the repetitive ‘death to the unbelievers’ lines,” I tell him what my translator told me had been hi-lighted. “The burning-in-hellfire stuff.”

  “Also the great descriptions of heaven for the good martyr, I’ll bet. Classic Wab recruiting lines. Virgins and water-features and all. Paradise for the desert-grown hetero. They’d probably really like Vegas if they weren’t so pissed at us.” He stops, like he’s thinking about how he sounds, the impression he’s making. “Not that I’m giving the Rads controlling interest in the twist-the-scripture market—way too much historic competition there…”

  Bitter, too. Something we almost have in common. But he looks at the doubly defiled book thoughtfully. “Italian translation—not traditional Arabic, so he didn’t invest in learning the language to read it in its original form. Any significance to the pages it’s mashed open to?”

  “It’s the ‘Table’ chapter. The verse the Moderates most regularly quote to condemn the Extremists: ‘He who kills one man should be regarded as if he’s killed all of mankind…’”

  “’And he who saves one life should be regarded as having saved all of mankind.’ Heard it. Of course, the Rads are quick to point out that the ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ rule was for the Jews, back from the whole Ten Commandments deal, and since the Koran doesn’t specify that it applies to Muslims as well, they happily jump back on all the juicy caveats ‘Victory’ here has colored in about when it’s okay with God to off the unbelievers.”

  He seems to be actually thinking for a few seconds, then grins like he’s figured out something important.

  “But it tells me Grayman knows his Wab, or at least his Koran.”

  Grayman. At least he didn’t say Gray Ghost. And he doesn’t assume knowing the Koran makes Grayman Muslim.

  “That could apply to a full quarter of the population, Captain,” I discount, trying to get a feel for him. “What makes you think this was Grayman?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think, does it?” he comes back with unusual speed. “This is where they sent me, Colonel. You tell me why…”

  No idea, Captain. But I don’t say it. I also don’t say that I can’t figure why they sent me an “advisor” whose resume puts him in a whole different continent for most of his questionable career. Columbia? Is anybody thinking?

  “The obvious connection is the girl—De Paolo’s daughter Sarah,” I decide to go the business route with him. “He must have gotten a heads-up from the flashware he’d lifted along the way. There’s the requisite martyr’s video and all—the original was still running in the player when we got here despite the soaking—it probably got sent out over the nets in advance so the rest of the cells could get the popcorn ready for the big event…”

  Burke walks over to De Paolo’s soot-smeared and water-splattered but amazingly still-working big-screen. There’s still the frozen image of him with his arm around his little girl. She’s wearing the vest and beaming with vacant pride. Paused, his mouth is contorted in the middle of some shouted bit of rhetoric. It was probably one of the last things De Paolo saw while he burned.

  “Makes me wonder: Could Gray have stopped her sooner?”

  Not something I want to think about, but

  “Maybe Grayman got here and Sarah had already gone, so then he had to go running after her. Or maybe he just cased the target to see if she’d really show. No idea. Maybe you can ask him when we find him, Captain.”

  “Is that the plan?”

  I don’t answer him. He gets the hint and changes the subject:

  “So: Have the Rads seen him?” he asks the priority question. “On the news, I mean…”

  “No. The newsfeed was edited before release. It shows one of the local uniforms ordering her to stop, then firing when she ran.”

  “A sim?”

  “A good sim. I don’t think it will be detected. Plus we didn’t pick up on any credible eyewitnesses to the contrary—it happened too fast. In realtime, you can barely hear the gunshot separate from the blast. No gray trench coats to be seen.”

  He processes it for a moment. Nods thoughtfully. I’m actually thankful that I don’t have to explain it to him. But then he pushes it:

  “How are you going to explain this, then?”

  “Locals don’t need to know that somebody kneecapped De Paolo with a couple of hollow-point nines, then doused him with solvent and set him on fire—apparently after a bit of a scripture lesson.”

  “Maybe Gray was trying to give poppa an advance taste of those vivid descriptions of hell he was so fond of hi-lighting.”

  Sick. But yes, I’d thought of that. It worries me that Burke was so quick to the same conclusion. I’m beginning to think what they sent me is a profiler, but his resume doesn’t say so. What his file does say—that has me wondering: Are they thinking?

  “De Paolo blew himself up prepping another vest,” I tell him what the official report will say. “Or maybe he killed himself in grief over driving his little girl to a stupid death. That’s all anybody needs to think.”

  “And the rest of Gray’s targets?”

  I give him a glare to shut him up and lead him back outside, away from the McCain scanning team. The relatively fresh air is welcome, at least. The sun is low in the sky, below the urban roofline. It’s starting to cool. There’s no sign of life in the courtyard below us, or in the discolored windows of the aging townhouse block. The locals all cleared out when they knew they had a terrorist in their building—and a vest-bomber to boot. Let’s hope none of the neighbors will swear they know the difference between a gunshot and a vest-blast (though we’ll probably blow one in the apartment to further sell the cover story
once we’ve finished scans and cleared out).

  Burke, for his part, gets the hint and keeps his mouth shut while I suck in the relative serenity. Then I clarify things:

  “There is no ‘rest,’ Captain. Not officially. Wiesbaden didn’t happen—we contained it. Frankfurt was random street violence. Klemp was robbed. Milan was an old blood feud between the Baath and the Wabs…”

  “Because we can’t let them know that someone is thinning the deck with their own intel.”

  Good. I really don’t have to explain it to him. But then he has to go and show me how smart he is by telling me my biggest headache right now:

  “And you think you have a shot at getting to this guy Grayman before he does something—well—more visible?”

  No, I don’t. But I don’t tell him that.

  “I’m going to need a good coffee, Captain. Why don’t you join me back at the green zone when you’re done here?”