Escape from Baghdad! (4 page)

The insurance company, meanwhile, had not paid. Beset by random acts of destruction, outlandish claims, impossible force majeure, they had done the only sensible thing and filed for bankruptcy. The directors had subsequently fled to their villas in Beirut. And so went the bulk of Amal's stock portfolio. In the end, the man had been reduced to this single shop, which was, incidentally, the one he had first started out with, a piece of circular fate that drove Amal to despair often enough. He lived upstairs in a one bedroom flat with his son. The room at the back of the store had been converted into his office, where he still kept accounts of his many assets, now mainly fictional, a wistful passing of the time, a fiscal fantasy train set providing both employment and misery.

All of this Dagr soaked up as he sat with Amal, cramped in the back room in a haze of stale smoke, plotting and drinking coffee. Kinza sat in the far corner, half asleep, watching football on a tiny set. There was a static tension in the air, the unease of too many strange
men in a small place, desultory conversation, the memories of guns and grenades a palpable white elephant, neither side quite believing they are now allies. Hamid was a sullen, oozing wound in the middle of the office, a black hole that swallowed up all normal forms of bonding, the swapping of war stories and misfortunes, sympathies, and secrets.

“You men are young,” Amal was saying, after a paltry lunch. “You two can start again, make something of yourselves.”

Dagr shrugged. His stomach churned slightly with hunger, and he considered breaking out some chocolate, but he did not want to embarrass his host.

“My life is almost over,” Amal continued. “What can I do now, but endure and hope to die in peace? My entire fortune, my whole history, erased. You know the worst thing? I dream about food every night, the scraps I used to throw away from my table. Never did I think I would go hungry again.”

“Surely you have savings?”

“Savings, yes,” Amal lowered his voice. “But I also have a father with Parkinson's. He used to be in a great nursing home. Fully paid for. Very exclusive. But it went bankrupt after the invasion, and the Americans converted it into a triage. Now I have to keep him in the hospital ward most of the time, not even a private room, and it's still too expensive,” Amal grasped Dagr's forearm. “Every day they threaten to throw him out. What can I do? Me and my son live upstairs in one measly room. We eat the rotten stuff that doesn't get sold. Every penny I have, I give for medicine. Now this Lion of Akkad haunts us every day. How can we live?”

“How does anyone live?” Dagr said. “Badly.”

“Too right,” Amal said. “In days like these, who helps a stranger, eh? Who
asks
help from a stranger?”

“Only the desperate,” Dagr said.

“The bastards are all the same,” Amal shook his head. “Every bastard with a gun walks the same. We used to have lives before, you know? All that taken away…for what?”

“I used to teach economics, at the university,” Dagr said. “My wife taught mathematics. We met there. I had friends, students—hundreds of students. I don't even know what happened to any of them.”

“There's no place for people like us,” Amal said. “No place safe. This city belongs to them now.” He lowered his voice. “Men like your friend.”

“He does what he must,” Dagr said softly. “Same as you or I.”

“Not the same,” Amal said. “Not the same. In the alley last night, I believed. I saw his finger on the pin, and I believed, more than in any bastard god, that he would kill us all; that he would rather die than take one step back.”

“Kinza is not suicidal,” Dagr said. “He just wants to see the world end.”

“Then maybe he will be a hero before the end,” Amal said. “And rid us of our enemy.”

“Who is this Lion of Akkad?”

“No one knows. Six months ago he just appeared in the night,” Amal said. “There were random murders, thefts. Some say he works for the Jaish Al Mahdi, here to settle scores and collect debts.”

“The Mahdi Army does not collect rent.”

“We know,” Amal shrugged. “What can we do? Some say that he has a brother in the JAM. Whatever the truth, we asked them for help and received none.”

“The police?” Dagr said. Even to him that sounded dubious. No one in Iraq went to the police. That was like asking to be extorted.

Amal snorted. “This man is a killer. He strikes suddenly, in the darkness, knocking on your door, holding a knife to your throat, a gun to your head. No one knows where he eats or sleeps or anything. In the day, poof! He is gone, like a ghost.”

“He comes only at night?” Kinza, woken up now, joined them with a faint stir of interest.

“Mostly after the evening patrols,” Amal said.

“How often?” Kinza asked. “Once a week?”

“Sometimes more or less,” Amal shrugged. “There is no pattern. In the beginning, some of us tried to ambush him. He took a bullet
in the chest and kept on walking. Two days later, he cut a little girl's throat. Last week, he threw my neighbor down the stairs. Broke his legs for no reason. We don't even know what he wants. I think he's one of those American serial killers like they have on TV.”

“Excellent tactics,” Dagr said. “Terror in the night. Random violence. Swift, excessive retribution. Sort of thing the Spartans used to do to the Helots to keep them in line.”

“You said you shot him?” Kinza asked. “Did he bleed?”

“It was dark,” Amal said. “We couldn't see. He kind of stumbled but then kept on coming. We scattered.”

“Kevlar,” Kinza said. “Our boy has body armor. Does he use a gun?”

“He carries a revolver,” Amal said. “But he prefers to use his knife. It's the size of my arm, almost like a sword. And his fists. He has the strength of ten men.”

“Ten Shi'as or ten Americans?” Kinza asked, straight faced.

“What?”

“Just saying,” he said. “It might make a difference. Americans are very strong.”

“Knives are psychologically more frightening than bullets,” Dagr said.

“He wants to stay silent,” Kinza said. “He's using the darkness and the fear of these people, the sudden violence, to keep them off balance.”

“No one knows what he looks like?” Dagr asked.

“He wears a hood,” Amal said. “And he's fast, silent. One minute you're sleeping peacefully in your bed and the next you're on the floor with a knife in your eye.”

“Ok, we're getting a picture here,” Dagr said. “This Akkadian works alone. He's well armed and wears Kevlar. Probably some kind of military training, too.”

“You left out super strength and super speed.”

“You mock us,” Amal said. “But you have not faced him yet.”

“He slinks around at night picking on infants and the elderly,” Dagr continued. “He wears a hood. He wants to protect his identity. This suggests that his position with the JAM is not official, at least.”

“So, professor, how do we find him?”

“We could always wait,” Dagr said. “Camp out here. He's bound to come sooner or later.”

“Yeah, maybe in a month,” Kinza said. “Not a good option. Plus he will find out about us soon enough. I'm guessing he lives somewhere in this neighborhood.”

“Then?” Amal asked.

“He hunts at night,” Kinza said. “So must we. We'll take to the streets. Give us a map of the area he covers and all your volunteers. There is an old way to hunt wild game. Let's see if we cross paths with any lions.”

The darkness in the streets was a smear of tar, a discombobulating colorant turning harmless daylight noises into the snickering of hyenas. Lights were absent, windows bricked or boarded mostly or shuttered at least against this most deadly hour. The Joint Forces stayed far away in their reinforced boxes; this was not their half of the day, not the time for pretend patrols and breaking down empty fortresses. Nor the time for Mahdi Army men to parade in their black scarves and AK47s, holding aloft their pages of calligraphy. This was the business end of the hour, where the real predators of each side mingled, open season for the ones in the know, springtime for men with guns, when the harmless cowered in their beds and hoped to hear nothing.

It had seemed a fine plan to Dagr, sitting cramped and safe in Amal's fantasy office two days ago. Now the darkness sucked everything out of him, and he was a walking husk, hands jammed into his jacket pocket to stop the shaking. Kinza was ahead, sure-footed, wolfish, snapping into place like the last piece missing from the jigsaw street. Dagr worried at the ancient gun in his pocket, the snub muzzle
poking through the silk lining of his coat, fretting that it would go off and cripple him, that he would shoot the wrong person.

They did not belong here, and their convoy of three was disturbing the routine of the regulars. Dagr felt men shuffle close in the darkness, veering off in tangents after a sniff, split second decisions demarking victims and victimizers. Dagr too fell infected with their mindless aggression, heard whimpers and ragged wet tears from far corners, felt with shame some of the exhilaration of walking the night with a gun.

They were following tiny pinpricks of light, a system Dagr himself had designed. Men and women tired of the depredations had risen up in this meager rebellion. Small lamps hung in high, street-facing windows, staggered in a mathematical pattern that Dagr had memorized. The idea was simple. Watchers lined each of these windows. Whoever recognized the Lion of Akkad would put out their light. If he moved away, they would turn their light back on. The blink in the pattern would follow the Akkadian throughout the night, hopefully leading them straight to him.

The first few nights had been unsuccessful. The tracking system had been refined, the watchers reinforced, his probable routes calculated. It worked well on paper, but humans were fallible. Watchers fell asleep or were too scared to act fast. The advantage of the terrain was also with the Lion, as myriad routes became available at night, sudden shortcuts that allowed him to cut the pattern in half.

In the hour just before dawn, luck finally favored them. Weary with nerves, they were resting against a shattered streetlamp when a sliver of light abruptly disappeared from the horizon. Five minutes and another light blinked off, this time closer, barely half a kilometer away. It was unmistakable. Kinza was on his feet, moving swiftly, a quick word behind him, telling his companions to fan out across the street. Dagr felt every neuron firing simultaneously with something akin to terror. The colossal stupidity of this plan smashed the breath out of his ribs. He fought the urge to slink back, making his legs move forward until he was parallel with his friend. Behind him, to the left,
he could hear Hamid make similar, reluctant steps, well back. The torturer had little intention of taking part.

The blinking came closer, closer, until he could imagine the entire street lined up and watching, judging. A few hundred meters more and he could almost see the Lion of Akkad, a tall man in a dark coat, an indistinct blur, ensconced no doubt in his Kevlar, a one man tank. In spite of himself, Dagr felt his steps faltering, his stride shortening until he was barely mincing along. Kinza broke ahead, slinking along the walls, two, four, then ten meters away. In some glint of moonlight he actually saw the face, hawk like nose jutting out, a black scarf wound around the rest of his features.

Kinza crouched into the hollow of a doorway winking abruptly out of sight, even as Dagr continued edging forward, his mind frozen into a kind of panicky inertia. A flicker of darkness, a slight bend in the street, and suddenly the Akkadian was gone, disappeared in a breath, leaving Dagr standing paralyzed. He began to edge his gun out, and it caught in the lining; a second later he was face to face with the Lion of Akkad, yellow eyes glinting with feral madness.

A blur of motion and the man was spinning into him, the blade of his knife caught in Dagr's sleeve, buttons popping, slicing a shallow groove along his forearm. Dagr bulled forward, desperately trying to grapple, his knee giving away even as he heard Hamid's pus-ridden voice shouting, “Down, down you fool.” Guns barked in close range, blinding and deafening him. A heavy blow knocked him sideways as his hands clawed across the Lion's greatcoat, and Dagr fell away useless. He saw Kinza leaping out of the darkness, a split second of struggle before he was
thrown
back, skittering through the street.