Ashley Bell: A Novel (14 page)

Bibi had folded the pajamas and the robe into her drawstring bag and had donned the jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt she’d been wearing when Nancy had brought her to the hospital. This was an expression of confidence in her belief that the brain cancer had gone into remission, that the glioma hadn’t merely shrunk but had vanished.

When Dr. Sanjay Chandra entered the room, Bibi was pacing not to work off a bad case of nerves, but with impatience to get back into the world and reclaim her life. He halted at the sight of her, and his expression was so solemn that something caught in her throat, as if she had tried to swallow a large bite of meat without chewing it, though she hadn’t eaten anything.

What appeared to be solemnity, or even distress at the news he had to deliver, proved to be awe. “Nothing in my years of practice, nothing in my
life,
has prepared me for this. I’m not able to explain it, Bibi. It’s not possible, but you are entirely free of cancer.”

The previous day, Nancy had said that Dr. Chandra reminded her of Cookie, the gingerbread cookie that had come to life in an old children’s book that she had shared when Bibi was five years old. The resemblance owed more to Nancy’s sense of whimsy than to fact, and it certainly wasn’t so pronounced that some snarky magazine would pair Dr. Chandra’s and Cookie’s photographs in a “Separated at Birth” feature. However, everything about the physician—his boyish face, chocolate-drop eyes, musical voice, humility, and charm—made her want to like him. Upon his confirmation of remission, she
loved
the man. She flew to him like a child into the arms of an adored father.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she gushed, exhilarated even as she was embarrassed by her exhilaration.

He returned her embrace and then held her at arm’s length, his hands on her shoulders, smiling broadly and shaking his head slowly, as if marveling at her. “The first diagnosis was not mistaken. You did have gliomatosis cerebri.”

“I’m sure I did. I know I did.”

“Other tumors can break down and be absorbed, and the remission can be surprisingly quick. It’s not common, but it does occur. Except with
this
cancer. Never with this hateful thing. I’ll want to see you for follow-up. Quite a lot of follow-up.”

“Of course.”

“Oncologists specializing in gliomas will want to study you.”

“Study me? I don’t know about that. I don’t think so.”

“What is it about you that made the impossible possible? Is it genetic? A quirk in your body chemistry? A higher-functioning immune system? Studying you might save uncountable lives.”

She felt irresponsible for having shied from the prospect of being studied. “Well, if you put it that way…”

“I do. I put it that way.” He released her shoulders. His happy expression was infused with wonder again. “Yesterday, when I said you had at most a year to live, you said, ‘We’ll see.’ Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“It’s almost as if you knew then that you’d go home today.”

Because Nancy and Murphy were coming for a long visit at four o’clock, Bibi hadn’t called to tell them what had happened in the night or that her death sentence had been miraculously commuted. Although she’d
known
that her health had been restored, she hadn’t wanted to pop the champagne cork with them, figuratively speaking, until she had Dr. Chandra’s confirmation. Besides, she wanted to see their surprise, their disbelief, their joy when they walked through the door and saw her in street clothes, her former glow restored.

Fifteen minutes before Bibi’s parents were due, Chubb Coy, chief of security, peered through the open door. His pale-blue shirt with epaulets looked fresh, and his dark-blue slacks still held a sharp crease. He said, “Got a minute?”

Rising from a chair by the window, Bibi said, “Suddenly, I have millions of minutes.”

Failing to match her smile, Coy entered the room. “Since I spoke to you last, we’ve quick-scanned the parking-lot video for the past twenty-four hours. No Mr. Hoodie. No golden retriever. Seems they didn’t drive here or walk, and I’m not a guy who believes in crap like teleportation. What about you? You believe in teleportation?”

“What? No. Of course not.”

“So I asked myself, did they come here more than a day ago and hide out in the building? Are they still hiding in the building?”

“Why would they do that?” she asked.

“Damn if I know.” He shrugged and looked bewildered, pretending for a moment to be without suspicion. “So we searched the place, end to end. Nada. Zip.” He walked past her to stare out the window. Head tipped back. Pondering the sky. “It makes me feel stupid, you know? So I kept looking at the same scrap of video till I noticed something weird. Want to guess what it was?”

“I have no idea.”

Still at the window with his back to her, Chubb Coy said, “When the guy and the dog come along, they pass two other people going the opposite direction. A nurse. Then an orderly. Neither one glances at Mr. Hoodie. Kind of peculiar, huh? That hour, the hoodie, and not even a glance? But stranger still, here’s this beautiful dog at four in the morning, and they don’t glance at it, either. People see a beautiful dog, they stare, they smile. Most want to pet it, ask the owner its name. They’re off-duty now, the nurse and the orderly, so I called them. Both swear there wasn’t a dog. They’re adamant. They never passed a dog in the hallway. You know what I’m wondering now?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Bibi said. “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

He turned from the window to face her. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but just about anything is these days, when it comes to fiddling with digital recordings, sound or image. So I’m wondering if some hacker breached our security archives, somehow inserted Mr. Hoodie and the dog in our video, made them be where they never were.”

Perplexed, Bibi said, “Who’d go to all that trouble? And why?”

Instead of answering her, Chubb Coy said, “Watching it about a hundred times, I still can’t see any technical giveaway. The guy and the dog register with the same clarity as the nurse and orderly. The light plays off them exactly as it does other people in the scene. But I’m no expert. A first-rate techie specialist, an analyst with the right credentials, should be able to prove it’s a fraud.”

“Except for one thing you seem to have forgotten,” Bibi reminded him. “I saw them. The man, the dog. They came into my room. The dog stood on its hind feet, put its front paws on my bed. Those lovely luminous gold eyes. It licked my hand.” She held up her left hand, as though a residue of case-closing golden-retriever DNA might still be found between her fingers.

The security chief’s blue-flecked steel-gray eyes were to him as scalpels to a surgeon. Direct and sharp and intent on cutting through all deception, his gaze seemed to flense her with exquisite delicacy, peeling away the layers of her image in a search for the most artful chicanery, some subtle telltale, that would put the lie to everything he’d been told.

“These days,” he said in a dead-flat voice from which he took care to bleed all inflection, “I may be just a glorified mall cop, in a somewhat more respectable environment, but I was once the real thing, and I still have good gumshoe instincts.”

Regarding him with growing amazement and uneasiness, Bibi asked, “What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything, Miss Blair.”

“That I’m some kind of suspect?”

He raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes in an unconvincing pretense of surprise, as if she had misinterpreted what he’d said and had leaped to a conclusion about his intentions that astonished him.

“What am I supposed to have done?” she asked, not with offense or anger, but with a kind of amused bafflement. “Faked the remission of my cancer? Tricked the MRI machine? Deceived all my doctors? Does any of that make sense?”

If the irrepressible joy she felt as a result of her recovery had not been still so fresh in Bibi’s heart, the security chief’s smug smile would have ticked her off.

“That old cop intuition, Miss Blair, it’s like poison ivy. It just itches and itches, you can’t ignore it, so you have to scratch it real good to get relief.”

With those words, which Bibi took to be a promise or even a threat, Chubb Coy headed for the door.

She said, “Try some calamine lotion. It has a funny smell and it’s lady-pink, but it relieves the itching.”

Without glancing back, Coy left the room.

The soft laugh that escaped Bibi had only a slight nervous edge. She said, “Looney-Toon.”

Throughout the morning and the afternoon of their first day on the roof of the three-story building, the four members of the SEAL team used periscopic cameras with nonreflective zoom lenses to scan the dead village without much risk that sunlight, flaring off the glass, would betray their presence. The images transmitted to the display screens were crisp, clear, and tedious. When the sun moved west but not directly behind Paxton and his men, they were bold enough to poke just their heads above the parapet to study the townscape: a drab gray-and-sand-brown hodgepodge of characterless structures, bullet-pocked stucco, cracked and crumbling concrete, and iron security gates hanging useless from broken hinges, strewn through with rubble.

Their target, the Ghost, whose name was Abdullah al-Ghazali, was holed up somewhere in these grim ruins, and he had with him six acolytes, all true believers, two of them possibly women. He had chosen to hide in this town, whose population he had slaughtered seventeen months earlier, perhaps because he thought it was the last place anyone would look for him, but perhaps because the atmosphere of an abattoir appealed to the bastard, surrounded as he was with memories of vicious cruelties and abhorrent violence, which he found delectable. Paxton had studied the culture that produced such men, but a lifetime of study would not help him understand why they became death-loving haters of everything the rest of humanity held dear.

An equal-opportunity terrorist who murdered not only Jews and Christians and Hindus and those who had no faith, Abdullah al-Ghazali also butchered Arab tribes other than his own, Muslims he considered less than pure. He claimed to have taken—or ordered taken—the lives of ten thousand people, and most experts thought he had undercounted.

He usually moved with impunity through countries impressed by his barbarism, but not since the past October. In spite of Homeland Security and no-fly lists and surveillance of every transportation system coast to coast, he had gotten into the States, activated ten sleeper cells, planned two attacks—led one—on shopping malls, and murdered 317 people. Most of his associates had been killed or arrested, but he had escaped the United States, only to find that he was now too hot to be welcomed in those kingdoms and fake democracies that had once provided him with rent-free villas when he needed them.

Pax, Danny, Gibb, and Perry had been sent to provide justice, which in this case did not require a judge and jury. Now that they were in town, they were eager to do the job and go home, impatient with the need to conceal their presence until the targets revealed themselves, instead of boldly going on the search.

Later in the afternoon, only half a block away, a man appeared on the flat, railed roof of a two-story building on the farther side of the street. Although he was dressed in gray to match the concrete around him, his camouflage was pathetic. A pair of binoculars hung around his neck. The SEALs at once put down their field glasses and ducked out of sight.

Perry raised a camera on its stick, so that it barely cleared the parapet wall. The instrument was so small, there was little danger that the watchman would spot it. Perry and Pax lay with the display between them, watching an enhanced image of the terrorist. Not Abdullah. One of his butt-kissers. The guy lit a cigarette and took two draws before raising his binoculars to survey this jumping-off place that he and his companions used as their rats’ nest.

Having put up a second camera, Gibb and Danny huddled over that display. Four men scoping the scene, analyzing the smoker’s behavior, were better than two. Each might see a crucial detail that the others missed. For starters, Pax figured the six targets must feel safe if one surfaced only periodically to perform a cursory surveillance of the town. Maybe their edge had worn off because they were doing good dope, which, among their teetotaling kind, was a common indulgence. Mass murder was stressful. They had to chill out
somehow,
after all.

Three hundred seventeen shoppers. Ten thousand victims. Back when Muammar Qadhafi had ruled Libya, the Ghost had done an American-TV interview from a villa there, in which he’d said—in addition to the usual propagandist rant—that he possessed a small collection of severed heads in one of his residences. The heads, he declared in his taunting manner, were much like books on a shelf, each one a story. He wished that he had a library large enough to hold ten thousand.

Throughout the day, Pax had thought often about Bibi, worried about her, wondered about the vivid image of her that had thrust into his mind the night before. Now she receded to a back corner of his thoughts.

A job needed to be done. He and his guys would do it as well as it could be done and with considerable satisfaction.