DOUBLE DOWN
by
Jameson Patterson
© 2019 Jameson Patterson
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without the express written permission of the author or publisher.
Global Book Group
We live in a world where there is more and more information,
and less and less meaning.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
PART ONE
ONE
When the headlights of the Toyota Land Cruiser washed the bearded head impaled on a stick beneath Raqqa’s clock tower Catherine Finch felt nothing. No revulsion. No pity. Not even a flicker of morbid curiosity about who the man had been or what crime, real or imagined, had brought him to this fate at the hands of the caliphate. Over the last four years she had become inured to sights like these and had shed inconvenient emotions like layers of dead skin.
She had no time for emotion. Her sole purpose was to speak her truth. And if she could no longer do that it was her intention to go to her death with dignity. No tears. No begging. No histrionics. She lived, as far as her circumstances allowed, on her own terms, and that’s how she would die, and it required vigilance, concentration and attention.
She had mastered living in the moment, and the dregs of her family in Kansas, and her husband in Los Angeles—how like Rick to use the swell of media attention to carry him from staid Lawrence to the frolicsome West Coast—were long ago and very, very far away.
Wrapped in a robe-like black abaya, she sat staring out the Toyota window through the slit in the niqāb, the face veil covering all but her eyes—they no longer bothered to blindfold her—as the car circled the clock tower, the place where their version of justice was done.
Stonings.
Beheadings.
Crucifixions.
Back when she’d first volunteered as a doctor in a makeshift clinic located in the basement of a mosque after the city hospital had been shelled by the Syrian military, the town was still controlled by local rebel forces and there’d been an all-night café across from the clock tower. She and other volunteers and activists had gathered there at night, watching CNN while drinking tamarind smoothies and smoking hookahs, predicting the downfall of the regime without fear that Assad’s Mukhabarat would be eavesdropping.
Gone now.
Swept away by the invasion of Islamic State. An invasion that had trapped in its wake Catherine Finch and other medical workers who had left it too late to flee.
It was nearly midnight and a curfew was in place that permitted only members of Islamic State security, Amn al-Dawla, to be on the streets.
There were four men in the car with her. The driver, who smelled of smoked meat and sweat, had said not a word. Beside him sat one of the glamour boys of the propaganda unit, a Moroccan judging by his accent, who had a camera bag on his knees. She was pressed between two of her black-uniformed captors. One was a chubby ginger-bearded mouth breather they called the Chechen—all fighters from the Caucasus or former Soviet republics were referred to by the catch-all term, but he was, in fact, a Dagestani—who had an insatiable appetite for captured Yazidi women. The other was a dour Hollander with who had pulled out her fingernails with pliers and raped her with dispassion bordering on distaste back when they had still inflicted those things upon her.
Before she had become prized.
Catherine heard a distant rattle of gunfire, then silence. No bombings yet tonight. No American, French, Russian or Jordanian jets releasing their payload into the night sky like spawn.
She hadn’t bothered to ask where she was being taken. The presence of the Moroccan told her they were going to let her shoot one of the YouTube videos that had brought her adulation and hatred in equal measure. And that meant they were driving her to Ahmed Assir, the caliphate’s chief propagandist, who had nurtured and groomed her.
“Think of me as your Spielberg,” he’d said the first time she’d been brought before him, his American teeth very white in his black beard. Born in Newark to a Lebanese Muslim father and an American Episcopalian mother, his New Jersey accent was unmuted by the years studying law at Harvard and then the Quran at austere Wahhabi madrassas where his newfound fanaticism had been forged and tempered.
Assir was sophisticated enough to understand her value. Sophisticated enough to allow her, in her videos, to voice her opposition to Sharia law, to the suppression of women, to the anti-Shi'a atrocities, as long as she spoke out against what America and its allies were doing in the region: the adventuring, the indiscriminate drone strikes, the civilian deaths, the pandering to the multinational armaments manufacturers, swollen as ticks on blood money.
Sophisticated enough to understand that her criticisms of the caliphate removed all suspicion of coercion and lent credence to her attacks on her country and its accomplices, which were taken as gospel and inhaled as nourishment by the disaffected and the marginalized across the globe.
- - -
Assir was waiting for her in one of the few intact apartment buildings in a street of rubble. To reach it the driver had to skirt a toppled minaret that lay like discarded Lego blocks across the cratered blacktop. Catherine had never been here before. As nomadic as a Bedouin, the American jihadist swapped safe houses almost daily to evade the electronic surveillance of his erstwhile homeland.
Her guards marched her up a flight of stairs into an apartment that stank of stale food and unwashed male bodies. It was filled with the usual entourage of heavily armed flunkies who slid their eyes over her and muttered obscenities in Arabic as she was led to the windowless room where Assir, wearing black-and-white Adidas sweats and running shoes, lounged on a molting sofa. His beard brushed his sternum and his long hair was wound and gathered in a bun. A filter-tipped Camel smoldered between the fingers of his right hand that dangled near the tiled floor.
Cigarettes, like alcohol, were haram—forbidden in the caliphate. Tobacco traders were whipped, stoned and caged for days beneath the clock tower. But Assir’s seniority allowed him to float above such things. As he looked up at Catherine he took a drag on the cigarette, exhaled two streams of smoke through his fine nostrils, and smiled. A handsome man, at ease with himself.
She hated him. Not because he was a traitor—those lines, anyway, were blurred for her; many called her the same—but because he was intelligent. He knew exactly what he was doing, unlike most of the scum who were drawn to Islamic State to give meaning to their useless lives.
She lifted her veil and he waved her to a chair but she stayed standing.
“So,” he said, “when you eat that chicken chow mein you think of me, okay?”
An ongoing thread of small talk, how he missed Chinese junk food. She’d never joined in, never allowed that she missed anything (although, of course, she did miss so many once-trivial things: Starbucks coffee, organic food, Ben and Jerry’s Boom Chocolatta, Californian red wine, Wella hair repair shampoo and—God knew—tampons) but he spoke now as if they were complicit in this hankering after a plate of monosodium glutamate hashed up in some Jersey strip mall.
She stared at him and said nothing.
He blew a smoke ring and watched it disperse. “You’re going home,” he said.
She stayed silent, waiting for his next smart-ass zinger designed to keep her off balance.
Assir scratched his cheek through his beard. It was quiet enough in the room for her to hear the feral rustle of his fingers in the dark hair.
“F
or real, you’re heading stateside.”
“You’re fucking with me,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, I’m not. We’re releasing you.”
Her legs felt rubbery and she sat, trying to keep her face impassive.
Assir laughed. “It’s okay, Cathy,” he said, using a name that nobody, ever, had used for her. A demeaning name, American to American. “You’re allowed to be excited.”
“When?” she said.
“In the next twenty-four hours. We’re lining things up. You’ll emerge in southern Turkey like Alice through the rabbit hole. You’ll stay here until then.”
“Why?”
“Why are we releasing you?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “Because you’re valuable. We’re getting a boatload of cash for you.”
“Bullshit. The U.S. doesn’t pay ransoms.”
“Tell that to the Iranians.” He stubbed out the cigarette in a coffee cup. “The money’s not coming from the U.S. government. Well, not directly, although you better believe that the State Department is doing the backchannel hustle. As you well know, you’ve become a symbol, Cathy. A beacon of hope. There are all sorts of people who want you back out there and are prepared to pay for the pleasure.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That you’re going?”
“No, that it’s about money.”
“Hey, we need funds. Jihad don’t run on water, baby.”
That winning smile again, the one that she imagined gleaming out of his high school year book when he’d been voted the boy most likely to do what exactly?
Well, not this. Not what he was doing now.
He tapped another Camel out of a soft pack and as he lit the cigarette and shook the match dead he said, “Fuck, Cathy, I’m giving you your ticket home and you’re sitting here busting my balls?” He eyed her shrewdly. “You don’t want to be freed, do you? You dig this Joan of Arc thing you’ve got going here?”
When she didn’t reply he shrugged again. “Anyway, enough of this shit. You’re outta here.”
As he was raising the Camel to his lips he paused as if he’d heard something, and she too, for just a nanosecond, was aware of a sound, like a jet taking off in the distance. Then the 100-pound AGM-114R "Romeo" Hellfire II air-to-ground precision missile with the thermobaric blast fragmentation warhead fired by the MQ-1 Predator drone piloted from an air-conditioned trailer in the Nevada desert slammed into the apartment, detonating on impact, and they heard nothing more.
TWO
Richard Finch had to stop himself from flirting with the FBI agent who had arrived on his doorstep not long after dawn with a couple of male subordinates sniffing at her kitten-heeled pumps. She’d told him she was attached to the newly-formed Family Engagement Team of the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell, seemingly unembarrassed by this stream of throat-clotting jargon.
She’d ordered the flunkies to take up stations outside Finch’s Eagle Rock craftsman bungalow where they stood glowering through their Aviators at the swelling throng of media that pressed ever closer to his porch.
The woman, Special Agent Amy Branch, was tall and slender, dressed in a dark pant suit that he found kind of hot on her athletic body. She had sandy hair and a thin mouth that seemed to have been trained to flicker out a ration of tight smiles that never reached her green eyes.
She’d walked through the house, taking in everything from the unmade bed with its “Me” and “You” pillow covers (a kitschy touch he now applauded himself for) to the photographs of his wife that were displayed in every room. Finch had resisted mothballing the pics, which he found unsettling, as if Catherine’s eyes were measuring the distance between what he had once promised to be and what he had become.
His nerves were shot and, as he’d traipsed after Special Agent Branch, he’d had to tamp down first the flirt reflex and then the urge that replaced it to blab on about how he’d wanted to live somewhere more fashionable, down near the ocean, or in Silver Lake or Los Feliz, but how Eagle Rock had suited his pocket after the once-lucrative speaking engagements and interviews had all but evaporated when Catherine had transformed herself into a YouTube crusader with distinctly unpopular views.
The agent had said nothing during her inspection, eyes moving across windows that framed palm trees silhouetted against the gasoline-infused sunrise that still enchanted him a few years out of Kansas. She was probably checking sightlines, Finch had thought, wondering where a sniper might be positioned. But why would anybody want to shoot him?
In the first year that Catherine had been held hostage he’d had dealings with the FBI, the Defense and State Departments and representatives of the so-called intelligence community who had frequently offered contradictory reports on his wife’s whereabouts and welfare.
Then, after she’d started her broadcasts, the visits had ceased, as if they were washing their hands of her, and this was his first contact with the freshly minted entity that had been formed to streamline official communication after much criticism from the families of hostages.
Special Agent Branch stood at the living room window, taking in the uniformed cops stationed on Finch’s lawn, and beyond them the trucks and the satellite dishes and the preening anchors being made up as Finch’s neighbors stared from their gardens. The media horde was growing impatient, lenses and microphones held ready to leach the banal words of grief and bereavement from Finch’s mouth, words that would be given weight only because they’d be about his wife who had left America a nonentity but had acquired over the last few years both fame and notoriety.
The last time he’d seen Catherine they’d had a fight, a nasty brawl, and they’d both said things that they hadn’t meant. Or perhaps they had meant them. He couldn’t remember. Anyway, she’d gone off to sanctify herself amongst the empty-eyed victims of daily violence in desert towns and he had drifted for a few months, rudderless, until she was taken captive and he had become forever branded as “the husband of ISIS hostage Catherine Finch.”
Amy Branch looked at her watch. It was almost 9:00 AM, the hour of the press conference, and she signaled her minions, one of whom appeared at the front door.
“Are you ready, Mr. Finch?” she asked.
He’d tried to get her to call him Rick without success.
“Yes,” he said.
“Please stay on-message.”
“Ten-four,” he said, which earned him nothing but a blank look.
He stepped out into the heat and the pitch of the throng rose. Microphones and smartphones were thrust at him and questions were shouted. Finch felt a curious dislocation, as if he were playing himself in some cable biopic.
Special Agent Branch stepped past him and raised a hand, quieting the mob just enough for her voice to be heard.
“Mr. Finch will address you now. He will not take questions.” She stepped aside, nodded and he shuffled forward, suddenly dizzy, running a hand through his limp dishwater blond bangs that were in need of a trim.
He almost lost his nerve and told them what they were expecting to hear, uttering those bereavement banalities, inchoate words of loss, but he cleared his throat and he heard himself say, “I received a text message from my wife just after 7:00 AM this morning, which as you know, was nine hours after the, uh, incident in Syria.”
The media roared and surged forward and the cops had to hold them back.
“So, yes, Catherine is alive,” he said. “She was wounded in the drone attack and I have no idea of the severity of her, uh, injuries but I do know that she is alive.”
Unintelligible interrogations came flying at him like missiles.
He held up his phone. “I will read you the message.” He swiped the screen and read from it, having to shout over the babble. “‘I’m OK. Hospitalized. But OK.’” He stared down at the yelling faces. “The, uh, authorities will give you the technical details, but it has been confirmed that the text was sent from Raqqa, Syria.”
A chorus of voices roared: “
Richard, how do you know it’s real?”
Special Agent Branch had anticipated this question and had told him not to respond, talking curtly of how he could compromise further proof of life if he did.
But he blinked and said, “She used a pet name that only I knew.”
“What name?”
Amy Branch was beside him, standing close enough for him to feel her breath on his face. “Shut it down, Mr. Finch. Now.”
“Dorothy,” he said, “from the Wizard of Oz. It was kind of a joke.” He shrugged. “We’re from Kansas.”
He turned his back on the reporters and their rowdy demands and went into the house, the woman following him, her anger barely contained.
“Why did you do that?” she asked. “Why did you deviate from what we’d agreed you’d say?”
He didn’t reply, walking through to the kitchen, bending over the sink and drinking endlessly from the faucet.
How could he tell her?
How could he tell her about the man who’d come here hours before she had, who’d disappeared like a vampire before the sun rose?
A limping gray-haired man in a gray suit, with the gray pallor and yellow fingers of a life-long smoker, carrying with him (though Finch would never see him hold a cigarette in his hand) the taint of old tobacco.
A man who had weighed Richard Finch with his tired eyes and had judged to a nicety the price of his soul.
THREE
The phone he thought he’d never hear ring again woke Pete Town from a restless slumber. He slid the bedside drawer open and fumbled for the device, moving aside an unopened bottle of Ambien. Sleep had never come easily to him, one of the unwanted byproducts of his erstwhile profession, and in his retirement his wife, who lay snoring softly beside him (a deep sleeper, she) had urged him to get a prescription for the pills that he would never take. The phone warbled relentlessly as he lifted a dog-eared paperback of John Cheever’s short stories and finally got his fingers on its squat body.
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