Streams of Babel (33 page)

BabylonDoo ... Get it?
Babble Undo?

"Can you read that now?" I asked, hearing myself giggle.

"Mostly. It no makes perfect"

"What the hell did Omar say?" I cut to the chase.

His English got pretty good, like I noticed it could sometimes when he didn't stop to think about it. "Today, Omar do a very bad thing. Very, very bad. Hodji told me often this truth when we would tire of wait, wait, wait to catch terrorist chatter that is not forthcoming. Hodji says that people grow careless and feel powerful and take risks, and in time, these men would do this. He is correct. It seems that Omar thinks he is so smart that he can get away with careless jokes on those he despises. Now, I have a script of his joke.
Big bingo
is in his joke."

I figured I needed to read the script to understand what he was talking about, and I had my doubts about other things. First, I didn't really expect anyone to believe us, and second, I couldn't imagine anyone reading it immediately. He'd just sent an emergency e-mail to his uncle on the other side of the world, who is supposed to find some Hodji guy who could be anywhere in the world. And it's like Hamdani is afraid of having anyone read the thing, so he didn't paste the Arabic translation into the e-mail—he pasted the alphabet mishmash of what happens if you tried to use an English keypad like an Arabic keypad. If this Hodji person turns up in OutToLunch, Mongolia, he's supposed to know how to decode the thing.

Hell, I wake up each day and go on the Internet, and I practically live there all my waking hours. I barely know what it's like to not have faith in virtual reality. But I couldn't bring myself to imagine that his e-mail is actually going to be received, deciphered, understood—and believed.

"People are dying three hours from here, and you're launching strange e-mails at Pakistan," I reminded him.

He just sat with his hands folded, staring at the screen and waiting, like a kid in the Great Pumpkin patch on Halloween.

SHAHZAD HAMDANI
FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2002
3:30
P.M.

TYLER APPEARS TO have a chronic itch on his insides, such that he cannot sit still for three minutes to see if Uncle will send me an acknowledgment of receipt. I glance at my watch: Just after three in the afternoon.

Maybe Tyler forgets that it is the middle of the night in Karachi. But I had set up an alarm with Uncle, which he promised to have turned on and functioning for if ever I got into trouble. It would crow like a rooster and shout in Urdu, "
WAKE UP FOR TO HELP YOUR NEPHEW
!" at the terminal at his bedside—if he remembered to leave it dialed up at night.

Sometimes I have had doubts about Uncle's love for me. Now is one of those times. I
know
he loves money and
think
he loves me also. But as minutes pass and I receive no reply, I get a queasy feeling and wonder if Uncle is glad I am gone from him. Perhaps he does not remember to leave his terminal dialed up, because if he thinks of me at all, it is with gratitude that he no
longer has to split the café's money with his brother's son. His forty thousand in Pakistan is as good as four million dollars in America, and as far as I know, he still thinks he is coming into it. Maybe all he thinks of is building a villa for himself and Aunt Hamera, and I am forgotten.

The thought drives me to pay attention to Tyler, who is itching to know what bad thing Omar did. I take my Arabic copy, run it through another program on BabylonDoo, and it comes up in English.

He scrolls very quickly. I feel that Hodji would be outraged over this breach. But what am I to do? Tyler captured the intelligence in the first place, and besides, I find myself trusting him, in spite of his bad attitude and dirty mouth. I see something behind his eyes that is not hateful and full of impudence. There is a big heart driving him, my instincts tell me, and I am tired of ignoring my instincts.

Omar0324:
I sent a foot soldier over to the hospital today to finish off the girl.

Manuel:
He was successful, I presume?

Omar0324:
I told him not to contact me until tomorrow just to be safe. USIC is roaming the hospital. But he was an assassin in a past life ... bloodthirsty in my estimation. He injected her with something unspeakable.

Manuel:
Ah, one of your charming unspeakables.

Omar0324:
It takes time to work, but the end results should be worth photographing. I'm sure the doctors will take pictures, and we will find them on their Web pages and download them for my colleagues. However, all this waiting brings close to me a certain level of
frustration and acting out. I am not always mature and sensible.

Manuel:
Oh dear. And how have you acted it out?

Omar0324:
Today, I named the makings of Red Vinegar ... in a roomful of thirty people.

Manuel:
Not the scientists on faculty, I would hope.

Omar0324:
Great god, I'm not blatantly stupid. It was only the students. America spends so much money to make them so mindless. Sixteen years of alleged education, and their laughter reminds me of the bleats of a lamb. I told them the history of Red Vinegar. I told them I was joking afterward. I am a teacher: I laugh, they laugh. It was pitiful—and enjoyable.

Manuel:
Nonetheless, you are taking risks.

Omar0324:
I deserve the adrenaline rush, which I certainly am not getting from USIC.

Manuel:
How much did you announce?

Omar0324:
The whole thing. I said there was a deserted bayside town in the Soviet Union, where formerly biochemical agents of germ warfare had been stored and cultivated. I told them that if you knew what to look for, all these years later, you could find the cultures growing out of the very tree trunks. It's inherent in the bloodstreams of the squirrels. I wrote on the blackboard how you could mutate the germ. At the third mutation, you would have a waterborne agent, whereas before you had a germ that would only pass via dust, or the saliva of an infected animal.

Manuel:
Did you mention the former germ warfare agent? Did you say the exact term, "Q fever"?

Omar0324:
My friend. I can all but hear you sweating profusely. Don't be so given to nerves. I did not mention the term "Q fever," but believe me, I could have written it on the blackboard a dozen times and shouted it from the rafters in there. American students know nothing about history—nothing about their own roots, not even from twenty-five years back, when their parents were scared of the Russians. So long as I don't say, "It's on the next exam," I could tell them how to use smallpox to their advantage—or how it could be used against them. They will not remember if it does not apply directly to them, in this week or next.

Manuel:
Your laughter does the heart good, Omar, but please don't take unnecessary risks.

Omar0324:
The only people in the room who would have suspected my seriousness are those we would want to recruit. We need a few good recruits for our upcoming meeting Monday night, do we not? I would like to see if I got at least one student of the sciences to understand me. There might be all sorts of foreign nationals in that class. It is a very mixed-looking bunch—

With that, Tyler punches me in the shoulder. I am waiting anxiously for Uncle to indicate he indeed is awake and helping us, but Tyler pulls my hair so I must look him in the face.

"Were you listening to him, or were you just type-typing away? There's a recruiting meeting Monday night at some college near Colony One. Gotta be Astor College. Omar will be there. Are you hearing this?"

"Of course," I say. It is beyond my comprehension that Tyler thinks we should go there.

The conversation ends a few lines later. Tyler has jumped onto an Astor College website and is rooting through pages of announcements using the site's search engine. He finally opens "Panel to Discuss 'The True Nature of American Foreign Policy,' featuring" several names I am not familiar with but think they might be a
bingo
—more people in this terror cell. Their names are followed by "Visiting Professor of Biochemical Engineering Omar Loggi of the University of Hamburg." Tyler continues, "Betcha Omar Loggi is your Omar Hokiem."

I nod in stunned agreement.

"Bet it'll be a lot of rhetorical bullshit and nothing hard-hitting at that meeting," Tyler mutters. "They'll just keep drawing the right guys in closer and closer, and those guys will get invited to 'private parties' where the talk will grow thick."

"Yes." I am almost certain he is correct. This is how extremists behave online before finally making friends with someone they meet often in a chat room.

Within moments, I hear car doors outside. Two of them.

TYLER PING
FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2002
4:15
P.M.

CONSIDERING I HAVE zero friends, I figured the car doors and adult voices floating up from the street were a couple of my mom's goons. Hamdani merely turned and said with ridiculous calm, "That would be USIC at your door. Please answer it."

I was all "Impossible. Not in twenty goddamn minutes." I stood up and looked out the window. The cars had pulled up across the street. A guy with jeans and a huge cowboy hat was holding open the front gate to my house, allowing a man and a woman to shoot in before him. The roofline didn't allow me to get a look at those two, but I saw Cowboy Man well enough, and cowboys tend to look out of place on Long Island.

I mentioned as much, and Shahzad jumped up like he couldn't help himself. He ran, taking my stairs two at a time. The three people on my porch turned out to be Miss Susan, the guy in the cowboy hat, and another guy I didn't know.

Miss Susan introduced the last man to me only as Michael. Hamdani ignored Miss Susan and Michael, but he seemed awfully glad to see the man in the cowboy hat.
Hodji,
Miss Susan said. Shahzad tried to look tough but threw his arms around the guy's neck after the guy said something in some other language that made them both smile.

Then Shahzad went on and on to him. "
Blee blay blo blo blu blu blu blo blo!
" He sounded truly pissed. The cowboy hat guy shushed him with an attempt at a calming tone. "
Blee blay blo blo...,
" he replied.

Miss Susan ignored them and smiled at me like she was making an attempt to be happy to see me. "
I don't think anyone in USIC could work, even sporadically, with your personality.
" Yee. Why hadn't she said my
copped attitude
or my
impudent mouth?
Personality—that cuts to the heart of things. It sounds like something you just can't help. Something you're born with. I'd never trust her again, after she used that word to describe my inadequacies.

"
Blee blee blay blo blu!
" Shahzad was still on a rip-tear at this Hodji, and I invited them in, half panicked. What a cluster fuck. My mom would know to shut up as soon as she heard adult voices in the house, but she would definitely go into cardiac arrest if she knew who these people were.

"Mom?" I shouted up the stairs. Her door opened a crack. "Mom! I've got the hardware guys here. They're coming upstairs to look at my hard drive. It's way fritzing. Okay?"

And I turned to them. It was too easy a situation, considering how many things could have gone wrong. They didn't want her to know who they were any more than she wanted them to know who she was. They figured I had done that for them and
nodded their thanks. I took them to my room, and we closed the door. Even at that, Miss Susan and Mr. Michael talked very softly to me while Shahzad and Hodji continued to argue heatedly in some foreign language.

"Where did you get this conversation with Omar that Hodji just e-mailed to us?" Miss Susan wanted to know.

"Uh..." I trusted her not to arrest me about as far as I could throw her. But the truth was too grand to patch out. "I hacked into his cell phone."

"And how did you find his cell phone number?"

It's like somebody asking you, "
And just how did you find out what was on television tonight?
" "Can we leave it that it was easy?"

"No," she said. "It's important. We really need to know."

"Are you going to arrest me if I tell you?"

Her gaze rolled sideways to find this Mr. Michael, and he said, "USIC has no interest in arresting minors, especially with many things going on. We want to work out some assurances that you will leave these men alone after this. They're beyond dangerous. You have no idea what you're tangling with."

"You mean ... after all this, you still want nothing to do with us?" I asked.

Michael managed to look sad. "I'm afraid we don't have options. If we were soliciting favors from minors and something happened to you,
we
could end up in jail. We're going to play by the rules, all the way."

I reached over and turned up my music so my mom wouldn't catch any stray words, and I made sure it was my most irritating hip-hop, to get even with these ancient crows. Hamdani finally stopped arguing with Hodji, and the man just
picked up in our conversation like he'd been listening all along. I heard intelligence agents could be trained to do that—hear like three conversations at once.

"Listen, Tyler. Susan, Michael, me, we've all got kids your age. We know you're plenty smart. We also know most of you don't have the fear factor yet."

"What's the fear factor?" I asked. I knew fear. At least, I knew what it was like to walk into my school every morning at eight and know I could have my face kicked in at any moment. I don't suppose these guys walked into their offices feeling like that.

"Fear factor is when you hit a certain age, or you have an experience that is highly traumatic, and you say to yourself, 'I could be dead tomorrow. Or the next day. I really don't know what the stars have in store, but I ought to live my life carefully, every day, no matter what.' That's the fear factor. Shahzad has it. Unfortunately, sixteen is far from old enough to work for us. We, uh, thought he was eighteen. But I understand that you are seventeen. I watched your tapes from the police station today, and you are nowhere close to having the fear factor. In fact, I'd almost say you're on a suicide mission."