Jihadi (20 page)

Dayton just wanted to relax and not think about Jamal.

‘Up to this point, Bobbler,’ Mike Mazzoni said while losing at cribbage, ‘we’ve played a game with all the rules dictated by the fucking ragheads.’

His brother played a card and said nothing.

‘And then,’ Mike continued, ‘we wonder why we keep
losing
out here. It’s because we are playing by raghead rules. We have to change the
rules
. Out here, if you play defence, you die. I don’t know about you, but I’m going on
offence
. You know what I’m saying?’

Dayton nodded and said, ‘Offence.’ Mike played a card and pegged three points on a go for which he should only have received one point. Dayton considered pointing out this error but opted, as he usually did, not to risk an escalation.

‘Say it
louder
, dammit,’ said Mike Mazzoni.

From her study, Wafa’s old bedroom, Fatima did her work with her head down that first week, in no mood for a vacation.

Work consisted of logging on under a new username to message boards with which she was already familiar, asking questions whose answers she could usually predict, making compliments and combining a feigned ignorance of scholarship with a pronounced and quite authentic disinclination to flirt. All of that spoke powerfully,
to some men, of her viability as a future Muslim wife. They opened up to her, dozens of them.

In just three days she had identified and charmed contact information out of four likely troublemakers. She left the job of confirming their physical whereabouts to the BII. She had been right about them all, though. Each turned out to be a zombie.

Fatima took pleasure in identifying zombies at a distance, and took pleasure in being paid for it, but there was something that made her uncomfortable about this job.

It was the weekly ride into Islamic City. She had agreed to frequent three of Islamic City’s internet cafés on her ‘city day’, but she had regretted this promise on the very first day. Uneasy and skittish during this tour of spaces simultaneously public and private, she certainly hadn’t uncovered any offline behaviour likely to belong to a zombie. Men’s eyes were on her, veil or no veil. Her driver had been dour and morose throughout.

She couldn’t imagine they weren’t attracting attention when he parked outside these places, waiting for her. The trip into the city felt unnecessary, ugly and dangerous. All the way there, all through each ride within the city, and all the way back, she pressed her knees together.

The noun Murad Murad liked to read most was ‘insurgents’.

‘Insurgents based near Jahannum,’ Indelible typed in the latest of his dutiful, obsequious reports, ‘scuttle through mountainous and wooded areas near the border, areas that afford ample cover. The insurgents (my sources say) move in small bands and constantly shift position. The insurgents occasionally make appearances at the camp and leave stolen American supplies for the children, but I have been
unable to engage them in discussion. The insurgents seem to avoid me now. The insurgents advocate (my staff members report) a return to the Khilafah system of government. The insurgents (they tell me) steadfastly refuse to disclaim that point of view. The insurgents never stay in camp long and never give me their names. They appear stealthy and resolute.’

All this was plausible enough. Indelible never identified an actual insurgent for Murad Murad, though. Not one.

Damned if the Raisin wasn’t up and about in the middle of the night, certainly before dawn, bowing and scraping again. Thelonius, shivering in the dark, passed in and out of sleep as the prayers wove their way in whispers through the cell. Presumably he was within his blanket.

He turned over in it, inside something, at any rate, trying his best to keep his back to the mutterings. Then he walked down a street, holding his father’s hand, and he saw a Lincoln Continental. Then he heard a murmur very close, right behind him, a voice raspy and hoarse with recent injury, a voice full of ashes and holes:

‘Run.’

But his legs would not move. His blood ran cold. He looked behind him, saw nothing, clasped his father’s hand tighter. His father’s hand, made of metal now, tried to withdraw. Thelonius would not let it.

Another voice, concerned, said: ‘Where, then, are you going?’

His father’s hand had changed; in its place, Thelonius felt a revolver.

The sound of the Raisin’s rasping breath roused him.

Thelonius turned and looked. The Raisin’s bed had somehow shifted, and the glowing embers now occupied a different corner of the cell. Thelonius caught an image from that dark corner: the spur of a flame. An unseen hand shook its dark matchstick, and the flame disappeared.

To get up now seemed unwise. He turned his back on the orange tip of the otherwise invisible cigarette.

The cell wall was dark and cold against his face. Footsteps. From directly above, violating the safety of the blanket, or whatever it was that had cocooned him again, Thelonius felt the near presence of the Raisin whispering.

‘How you concealingly deny against One God, while you dead not existing, and This One aliving you? Then This One will give you death, then will bring you to aliving! Then unto This One your RETURN!’

Get the hell back in your bed
, Thelonius said, or perhaps thought.

The desire to sleep. Then a long plain of green beneath him.

After a tense breakfast the Raisin insisted that Thelonius had memorized a verse of the Koran. And recited it to himself. In his sleep.

‘That’s absurd.’

‘It is quite a famous verse,’ the Raisin insisted. ‘And may I point out: the cots are bolted to the floor. You said the bed had moved. Presumably you meant the cot. Do you mean to suggest that I unbolted it with my bare hands and moved it around the room without waking you? Or the whole cell block? Do you imagine I then moved it back? And rebolted it?’

Thelonius cracked his knuckles. ‘Don’t get me after you, goddammit. I didn’t say anything from the Koran. And stop staring, will you?’

‘As you say.’ And the Raisin looked away.

The Raisin was hardly a person anyway. The cell was basically empty. And cold despite the dawn. Counting those damn beads. Thelonius rubbed his hands together and hugged himself.

The quiet got bad.

‘Suppose you cut me some slack. I don’t do well in enclosed spaces. That’s all. I just want to get the hell out of here. I just want to go home. You’re a lifer. Maybe you wouldn’t get that. You’re used to this now.’ The cell got quieter still and the grey walls lightened and Thelonius wondered whether he should have even tried.

‘To the believer,’ the Raisin said, ‘the world itself is a prison. We are both in a prison, you and I. It is the kind of prison from which escape is only possible through obedience to God unto death.’

Thelonius worked his tongue in and out of the side of his mouth. ‘Not a believer, buddy.’

‘As you say.’

‘Well, I suppose the boys do need to blow off some steam from time to time.’

By special permission of Captain X, the Wreck Room was unboarded, on the condition that all locals would be excluded and ‘this dog business’ forgotten. The place was alive in the night again, glowing with movement and money and beer. A boom box thudded Mazzoni’s favorite mix, which inclined to Metallica and the Ramones. No women were in attendance (there had never been any women present at any of the evening Wreck Room sessions, and never would be) and no dogs.

Mike Mazzoni watched from his table, nursing his second Heineken of the evening. Bobbler passed out the sheets. Bobbler who fucked things up for a living.

The phone’s email alert chimed. Fatima clicked on the message.

It contained instructions to relay a certain confidential offer to the American.

Fatima was to discuss the attached confidential offer with the American in person with all due speed, and in a manner that did not intimidate him or antagonize him in any way.

The American’s interrogation sessions (she read in an encrypted email) had been suspended on the direct orders of the prime minister.

That meant the religious faction had been overruled. A pragmatic rapprochement with the Americans, it had been decided, was in order, at least for the time being. Fatima was to be the American’s primary point of contact from this point forward. This was as a result of her familiarity with American culture, her presumed advantages in the arena of appropriate communication between genders and her apparent ability to elicit sympathy. She had been granted visiting privileges and was advised to take advantage of them as soon as practicable.