The Command (48 page)

“House?” she said, like a child repeating a word it has never heard before.

“I have a house on the Red Sea, in a place called Bir Sudan. I'll take another wife. But you'll still be my senior wife.”

“Your senior wife,” Haleemah mumbled. “But what of the girl—”

“We'll hire a Sudanese woman to help you take care of—” He nodded toward the other room, assuming she was in there, though he didn't hear her. He remembered her as never silent. That mindless crooning, wordless, endless, not disturbing, unless you were disturbed by the wind in the desert or the mindless tinkle of a fountain.

His wife trembled. Her eyes burned. She clutched his hand and began kissing it feverishly again and again, mumbling rapidly “God be praised, God is great, God be praised.” He caught her smell, close, rotten, the stink of a woman who has not bathed in months. There was no air-conditioning or even ventilation in this concrete tomb. The glass-less windows were shrouded with dark cloth. She was muttering rapidly now about houses and maids and money, interspersing it with pious
du'a
and praise of her husband's generosity.

And something within him moved away from her. She was so intent on her comforts, on the outward things that meant nothing. Her breath
stank. He shook her hand from his sleeve. “Where is she? I will see her now. Then I must go.”

“Oh—she's—in her room.” She grabbed his sleeve again, then, as she grasped what he'd just said. “Go? Wait. Coffee—I don't have any— a bad wife—not ready—so expensive—I'll go across the hallway. Sit down, wait, sit down—”

“Don't disturb yourself. Be calm. All things in good time,” he said, trying to make his voice reassuring. He pressed her hand again, felt its roughness. She was old. Old.

He went into the next room. Pushed aside a sheet hanging in the doorway, realizing too late it was damp, hung there to dry.

He stopped, breath catching in his throat.

Small bowls of lentils and couscous, half eaten, half decayed, covered the floor. The stench of feces hung where flies swarmed above an uncovered pot. Cloths stained with brown dangled from a line.

A black bundle lay on the truckle bed. The room was very hot. The windows were sealed. He moved carefully among the pots of food and ordure until he could bend over, then sit, carefully, twitching aside the blanket.

His daughter's cheekbones stood out like those of a corpse. She breathed rapidly and shallowly, as if she'd just been running, and red spots flamed on her cheeks. Her eyes were closed. He touched them gently, the blind eyes that had been so beautiful when she was little. Her skin was puffy and unnaturally pale, save for that flush. A smell welled from beneath the blanket. He touched her cheek, but she did not open her eyes or move. He shook her shoulder, so thin he felt bone; nothing altered. Indeed, now that he looked close, he could hardly recognize her.

He glanced back, becoming angry. “Why's she asleep?”

“She's like that all the time now.”

“What do you mean? Doesn't she sing?”

“She hasn't done that since you went away.”

“She opens her eyes?”

“She no longer opens her eyes. She no longer sings. There is no money for doctors.”

He grew angrier, rage grew monstrously within him. “Where are the things I sent?” he shouted. “The silk? The furs? For her to touch, and stroke?”

“No, no! Don't shout at me!” His wife covered her ears, cringing. “I had to sell them.”

The bowls shattered as he kicked them aside. He shouted, “You sold

them? She loved to touch them. That was her only pleasure! You have not taken proper care of her!”

“There's no money—no help—I can't do everything—”

“What have you done to her? Who were you expecting to see when you came to the door? Bitch! Whore! I will not take you to Sudan. You would shame me before my friends. You are no longer my wife. This is a sty.”

He kicked over the chamberpot, then jumped back as a flood of shit poured across the floor. His wife screamed and fell to her knees in it. She screamed, throwing her abaya over her head, pleading for forgiveness, for God's mercy to enter him, for him not to leave them again, for him to stay.

He strode down the hall, filled with disgust. The sound of her wailing followed him. But he did not look back.

HE stopped at the store again for more soft drinks and
baladi
bread on the way back to the harbor. The old storekeeper served him with unspoken questions in his gaze. He didn't greet the man, or ask his name, though his face was obscurely familiar. The boy who'd grown up here was long buried beneath other identities, other experiences. His daughter would die soon. He accepted that. It was the will of God, like her blindness, her retardation. Written in the Book before the ages had begun.

All was the will of God, and no man or devil or might of empire could change the smallest jot of what He had written.

The quay, the trawler, the burning sky were the same. The only difference was a battered pickup ticking over in the gritty heat, and in it three dark-haired, dark-skinned young men abiding with the eternal patience of Egypt.

He greeted them courteously, shaking each's hand for a long time, holding it as the dust from the departing truck sifted out of the dry air. Three. Not overmany to crew a hundred-footer. But enough, if they were willing. They'd not need to work the nets, after all.

They squatted in the skimpy shade of the deckhouse and he shared out icy colas they accepted with childlike pleasure and nervous reserve. Their names were Ali, Antar, and Rasheed. He did not know what they'd been told about him, but they seemed respectful, even afraid. He uncapped a bottle for himself and sat questioning them, asking how long they'd spent at sea, what experience they had with engines, whether they could steer and read a chart. As he'd expected,
they were quite young. Older men did not want to sacrifice. Too much bound them to this world. Antar seemed to know enough about diesels that he felt confident appointing him to their care. The others were deckhands, no more, though they swore they could steer. Not a great deficiency. It was only a hundred and forty sea miles to their destination. He could train them well enough on the way that they could make the last few miles on their own.

They sat together for some hours as the sun descended, and prayed together, when the call rang out to
asr.
The volunteers gradually relaxed. They spoke of their families, and what had driven them to oppose the enemies of Islam. They had no children. They were filled with hate and recklessness. This was good, he thought. The network had chosen well. These men would not even miss themselves.

For all of them, maybe even for himself, he thought with sudden insight in that drowsing heat of oncoming evening, that was the Sheikh's wisdom: to find such hollow vessels and show them how God fit the void within them so perfectly none could doubt he had been fashioned to fulfill a greater cause. Sometimes a tool was broken. Sometimes it was lost. And sometimes left behind, when others were more suitable. When the task was truly understood, the fate of the tools did not matter.

“Teacher,” Rasheed said at last, “you will become a
shaheed
with us?”

“I will accompany you. But it is not written that I am to die with you.”

“You'll sail with us? We don't know the way.”

“I will go with you even to the gates of Paradise. From there on, you will be far above me in honor. You will be the truly firstborn sons of God. His beloved soldiers, who will purify the earth of the Zionists and restore His golden land to the Faithful.
Insh'allah,
and your names will be inscribed forever in the Book of Life.”

“Insh'allah,”
they murmured, shyly. May it be the will of God.

“I bow down to you, and wish you the tranquility that comes before battle. I only wish I could join you at the end. But perhaps one day I will.”

This last, he thought, was not perfectly accurate. He yearned for a cool house and a young wife more than martyrdom. This would be his last work for the Sheikh. But these were young and filled with zeal, and he turned his face away that they might not see his thoughts. Might not see his contempt for them … The sun was declining. It would be best to be at sea before the night was complete.

“First we'll pray,” he told them. Then Antar will go below and start his engines. I'll take Ali on the wheel for the first watch. Rasheed, eat of the food below, then sleep against my waking you. And then we will see what God has written.”

H
I. Hi.” The FBI agent smiled shyly as Diehl introduced him around the table. To Aisha, Major Yousif, Commander Hooker, and a somber-suited, light-skinned Arab who had been introduced only as Mr. Hassan.

Arnold Nimmerich was a computer forensic examiner. The first one Aisha had ever seen, though she'd read about them in the criminal justice journals. He was her age, but his blond hair, long in back, was already receding in front.

Presently everybody in the agents-only meeting upstairs in the base security building took seats. At last, as if bringing forth crown jewels, Major Yousif unlocked a briefcase, unwrapped several layers of bubble wrap, and gently placed on the table the drive a joint SIS/NCIS evidentiary team had seized from the Salmaniya Avenue madrassa.

Diehl asked whether they'd dusted it. Yousif said dusted and photographed, but the only prints on it were old, from when it had been assembled. Which meant they didn't need to do the usual rubber-gloves routine.

Nimmerich picked it up and turned it over. Studied the label pasted to the bottom, then rattled it, like a kid with a present. He put it back on the bubble wrap and said, addressing nobody in particular, “So, is this particularly time sensitive?”

“We think it might be,” Hooker said.

“Ey-yup. Well, sometimes these things take awhile. Just to let you know. Was the computer running when it was taken into custody?”

“No.”

“If you take one running, dump the RAM to a disk before you pull the plug. That'll give you passwords resident in memory, any decrypt process that's running, stuff that makes my job easier. If there are usable files on this one I can probably get you some degree of recovery,
unless whoever used it last knew how to do a disk wipe. Was there a modem on the source machine?”

“Yes,” Aisha said, since no one else looked like they knew what he was saying.

“Then there are probably e-mail files. They can lead to other connections and potential suspects.”

She said, “He could have used a Web-based e-mail, like Yahoo or Hotmail. Then the files wouldn't be resident on his computer.”

Nimmerich looked at her and said, rather unwillingly, she felt, “Correct, but you can find traces and sometimes parts of messages in the unallocated clusters. I can do string searches to bring up hidden information like that. But again, it'll take time.”

“What do you need from us?” said Hooker.

“Well, I brought the software I think I'll need, and some blank, formatted hard drives and cables, but I'll need two machines. One like the one this came out of. The other, the fastest IBM compatible you have, with a dual processor and a high-capacity tape drive. A phone line, back to Quantico. And a secure place to work.”

He looked around uncertainly, not meeting her eyes, obviously wondering who was in charge. He picked Diehl to address, probably because he was the oldest white man. “Where will that be? Someplace I can plant myself for a couple of days?”

“Major?” Diehl deferred to Yousif.

The SIS man cocked his head. Running out the various angles, she thought. At SIS headquarters, where his men could learn from the visiting American computer expert? But also where the American could see how well or how badly they were equipped and trained. Here at the base? Where he might lose control of whatever they managed to extract. Aisha caught the flicker of a glance between him and the Arab. ‘Mr. Hassan'—it was like introducing someone as Mister Jones in the States. A pointed little beard, and hooded, watchful eyes over a too-ready smile. He'd spoken only a few words, in Arabic. But she'd gotten to talk to some Saudi sisters in her souk roaming. He had their accent.

“We'll do it at the ministry,” Yousif said. “In a special room, separate from our regular offices. We'll have to restrict access. I'm sure everyone understands how sensitive this information may be.”

“I don't,” said Diehl. He'd hauled out one of his El Stinkos, was chewing it, and seemed, despite annoyed glances from around the table, about to light it. “We'll close-hold it, but this is a criminal investigation of a very nearly successful attack on one of our ships. We led you to the evidence. We want access to the result.”

Yousif said, “Mr. Nimmerich will be your access, Bob. What more can you want? He is, after all, an agent of the FBI.”

Diehl asked Nimmerich, “You read Arabic, Arnold?”

“No.”

“You a Moslem?”

“I'm a Mormon.”

“A what?” said Yousif. No one answered, and he frowned and made a note on his pad.

“Well, Aisha does, and Aisha is. So she goes, too,” Diehl said. “She's got a top-secret clearance. She knows the background of the case. She's hot stuff on the computer, too.”

She reflected bitterly that now she “knew the background.” Somehow the senior agent had conveniently forgotten she'd actually
broken
the case, getting a confession from Childers-Jaleel, tracking down the missing explosive, finding the computer. Yes, a woman needed all the modesty God could give her. Not to mention a hide like a rhinoceros.

And here was “Mr. Hassan” pursing his lips, shaking his head. And Yousif taking his cues from him, saying lightly, “No, no, that won't be necessary.” Who
was
this guy? The only guess she came up with was one she didn't like to contemplate. The Al-Mabahith al-Amma, “General Intelligence,” the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's shadowy and ruthless secret police.