The Unknown Terrorist

by Richard Flanagan

  He had introduced his famous and powerful friends to Australia’s living rooms, preached about Australian wisdom and espoused Australian goodness and embodied Australian decency, led Australia keening at Australian disasters and Australia cheering at Australian sporting success, hosted telethons and Christmas carol specials, to say nothing of the several prominent Australian charities of which he was patron. But there was no peace at all. It was not enough, it had never been enough, and what was, what might be, he did not wish to know.

  With his second wife Richard Cody had as perfect a marriage as it was possible to have with a woman he no longer shared anything with other than large debts, social ambitions and an adult son who worked in a hairdresser’s—how did one talk about that at a dinner party?

  There was, Richard Cody sensed, something about this world that would not allow him to do other than hurt. For a time he rued it, for a time he revelled in it; now, he simply accepted it as his skill for which he was rewarded. There was no peace, that was all. He wished he were able to talk with his son.

  The image that came to him at such times was a childhood memory of a fallen seagull jerking in the sand. He had been at the beach, throwing stones at circling seagulls and with a lucky shot felled one. His heart rejoiced as the bird dropped out of the sky like a rock, then he watched with horror as the other birds dived on its still-writhing body and tore it to bloody rags.

  “No peace, no peace at all,” he muttered over and over to himself as he stood over the lower bathroom’s sink and washed and washed his hands clean of the keyboard. Sometimes a man’s life turns into a cancer, thought Richard Cody, but no one knows that he fears the cancer is him.

  At such times he felt he had somehow transformed into that fallen seagull writhing before his eyes. There had been a woman he never slept with—she died in the mist of a Manhattan winter years ago—while he continued living in the bright light of Sydney. Each—her death, his life—seemed to him pointless. Ambitions, he had concluded, were largely pathetic fevers. He feared his greatest longing was for oblivion. How he wished to talk with his son.

  He turned off the tap and, to avoid contamination from the towel, stood in the dark shaking his hands dry.

  59

  In the room next door a phone rang and would not stop ringing. The Doll, still unable to sleep, switched on a small Panasonic television that sat in a chipped woodgrain Laminex cupboard. A cable station was showing the perfectly preserved body of a three-thousand-year-old woman. The body had recently been found in a peat bog in Sweden. The fossil woman had been drowned, weighed down with stones tied to a noose around her neck. Her head had been shaved. A ritual death, a German expert said, for some crime that no one could now know.

  Still the phone next door rang, and still no one answered.

  As the Doll watched the documentary, she felt other women would have been mixed up with it—she could see all the women together, telling tales and getting high and mighty and het up—because they were scared too; scared that if they didn’t accuse someone else, someone else might accuse them. There would have been some kind of crime, of course there would, just like she was called a terrorist now, and maybe back then she’d have been called a witch, but it was all untrue.

  She could almost hear them—talking like they did in the club’s changeroom, talking like they did on the talkback, talking about how wrong and how bad that woman had been even as she was drowning. And the worst thing was that the Doll knew she would have been one of those accusing women. She was, after all, a survivor and had done a lot of things to get by; she knew she was capable of far worse if forced.

  She changed stations. A news channel was running a story on her by a smiling woman journalist with a vaguely American accent. For the first time she heard her name being used, following on, she guessed, from Richard Cody’s story earlier in the evening. They also had several recent photos of her. And at that moment she felt sick: she didn’t want to be the terrorist on cable; didn’t want to be another bog woman drowning in some shitty swamp; didn’t want to be the French woman she had seen in the book in Moretti’s library with women laughing at her as they shaved her head.

  But maybe, thought the Doll as she lay on her miserable hotel bed watching the tv, there was some need people had to hurt others, some horrible need, that hurting one woman in some way might make others feel safe and good and happy, like the smiling French women, like the smiling woman journalist.

  And maybe she had to accept that she should be hurt, that maybe these things happen for the common good?

  She turned the television off.

  No, she thought, she couldn’t accept that she should be hurt, she couldn’t just give in and give up. She didn’t feel hungry, but it mattered that she kept going. She ate a small pack of cashews and a Chokito bar from the bar fridge and washed it down with a Stoli mini mixed with tonic. And though at first her throat and stomach resisted, the nuts and chocolate tasted so very good, better than they should, and her body calmed with even such poor food as this, and the Doll realised how hungry and exhausted she truly was.

  At some point long after, she must have drifted into a wretched, skipping sleep. She was vaguely aware of car horns and sirens wailing far below; of cries and shouting, and sometimes of people running.

  Her dreams were claustrophobic, she was suffocating, images flickered back and forth in her mind ever more rapidly: the French woman unable to pull her head away from the open scissors; the bog woman screaming into filthy water; flies crawling from between Tariq’s dead lips …

  Some force from outside continued to rumble all the way into her room, and she found it harder than ever to breathe, and still a phone kept ringing and what was its message? What was it?

  60

  Though he slept well and hated being woken in the night, no news could have been more welcome to Richard Cody than the phone call that woke him shortly before midnight.

  “I know it’s late but I wanted you to be the first of our media friends to hear,” said Siv Harmsen.

  Richard Cody got up, and went out to the stairway landing.

  “We’ve found Tariq al-Hakim,” said Siv Harmsen. “Neat as a felafel in a roll, dead and stuffed into a car boot.”

  “My God,” said Richard Cody, not because he was shocked, but because there was significance to this news and to the call that in his sleepy state he didn’t fully understand, and which he needed to draw out of Siv Harmsen. “Any leads?”

  “There’s a long way to go with the homicide investigation.” A short silence followed. “You know how it is.” Richard Cody waited. The air con sounded like the gentlest rain. “Completely off the record …” said Siv Harmsen finally. “Look, we share an understanding, don’t we, Richard?”

  “Completely,” echoed Richard Cody.

  “Well,” said Siv Harmsen, “they’re taking seriously the idea that it might have been another terrorist.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, though,” said Richard Cody. “Why would a terrorist kill a terrorist?”

  “Well, it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?” said Siv Harmsen. “He’d become too public, too well known, and therefore a liability. These people are ruthless, even with their own. What’s that phrase I heard you use this morning on tv?—‘the unknown terrorist’. It’s them, the unknown ones, that can get away with the bombings. They’re the ones to fear.”

  Rather than presenting a problem, the death of Tariq al-Hakim solved one of Richard Cody’s key dilemmas. Jerry Mendes had gone cold on the Bonnie and Clyde title. As no one had yet come up with anything better, the special had only been promoted generally as “a chilling exposé about home-grown terrorism here in Australia”. Jerry Mendes would, he knew, now agree to the special being focused on Gina Davies. And Richard Cody felt he had a new and perhaps vital element in his story. For what does a Black Widow do but slay her partner?

  Richard Cody thanked his ASIO contact for having personally phoned, and was about to hang up, but Siv Harmsen was oddly
talkative for such a late call.

  “All this garbage about truth being suppressed with these new terrorism laws,” Siv Harmsen went on, “you know we want the public to know certain things. And that’s not me saying that, Richard. That’s people much higher up than me.”

  “I’m glad,” said Richard Cody. “We all need to pull together at times like this.”

  “Dead right,” said Siv Harmsen. “You get it, you see, Richard. But a lot of people don’t. And we need them to. My bosses like your boss, Richard,” he added. “My bosses want us to help Mr Frith and you all we can.”

  As his wife grumbled at the disturbance so late at night, Richard Cody lay back on his pillow, feeling vaguely triumphant. Now his special had just about everything. He could even see the title that had come to him after Siv Harmsen’s call. It would dramatically top and tail the ad breaks, backed by a deep voice announcing his comeback:

  “THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST returns after this break.”

  It was enough. It had to be. How he wished he could hold his son. Nobody knows what moves anybody.

  TUESDAY

  61

  WILDER WAS STILL DREAMING when she was lifted off the bed by the explosion. The sensation of once more flying, something she had not known in her dreams for a very long time, was so intense and pleasurable that the noise of the explosion, of her bedroom door slamming open, of men racing into her room, of men yelling, was for a fraction of a second absorbed into her dream before she was taken into their nightmare.

  Not until other sensations took hold—her body starting to smart from the shoes and books she had landed on—did she slowly come to the awareness that somebody was yelling but the sounds seemed to be reaching her from far away. She knew not a next thing, but many things all happening together: her still-dark bedroom, her still-asleep mind, filling with ever more men clad in black, wearing military helmets and goggles and brandishing assault rifles, crashing through her home, and at that moment she felt their fear and their hair-trigger aggression as a complete letting go.

  “Christ, she’s pissing herself,” she heard one man say.

  Later that day she would tell the Doll,

  “I was so scared, just so fucking scared. I thought they were the terrorists come to kidnap me, that’s what I thought. They didn’t look like soldiers. They didn’t look like armed police or security guys. They looked like … like, unbelievable, really, Gina, I couldn’t believe them, they were out of Star Wars, aliens, they were all in black, but their suits had special pockets and bumps and gadgets and what with their helmets and goggles they looked kind of like amphibious monsters, like killer toads crawled out of the sewers to kill us all, that’s what I felt. I mean, they were so weird. They looked like death, Gina, like what happens when you die, and I just thought, I’m going to die.”

  And then the Doll could hear her crying some more, before gathering herself and going on.

  “What I remember isn’t the noise or even them, but the smell, that smell of animals terrified and excited all at once, just like kids get sometimes. And I was so fucking frightened I couldn’t move, not even when they were ordering me to get up. I thought they were going to kill me, and it was some trick. They were pulling my home apart—drawers, cupboards, wardrobes, Max is screaming—looking for I don’t know what.

  “At first I couldn’t understand what they wanted, then I realised they were police, that they had some sort of warrant, but even then it wasn’t clear. Maybe it was drugs or maybe a mistake, and then I realised it was you, Gina, and only you, it was all about you. I was so shit scared, I wet myself again, there on the floor, and this man in black and goggles holding a rifle to my head, not moving, I told him, I said, ‘If it’s Gina, you don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s beautiful. This is just mad. You don’t know her.’

  “And they just said: ‘Have you ever thought maybe it’s you who doesn’t know Gina? Have you ever thought she might be trained to never tell or breathe a word to you?’”

  The Doll said nothing, only moved the phone away from her ear a little. There were many sounds all around, Wilder’s voice now just one. How many sounds equal the end of something and the beginning of doubt? There were cars, drills, sirens, building and road works, signalling that under-tow of terrible movement that no one can understand nor predict, but which everyone must obey. The Doll could feel her feet losing their grip beneath her, could feel other forces sweeping up her body and taking it away.

  “Gina?” said Wilder. “Gina, are you still there?”

  62

  A little over an hour after Wilder mistook the invasion of her home for the freedom of flying, Nick Loukakis, who in consequence of rowing with his wife was sleeping on an air mattress on their living room floor, gave up on the idea of sleep. His thoughts turned to his marriage and it suddenly struck him that they could no longer go on living together and that he must leave her. It seemed not simply important, but overwhelmingly necessary, that they talk. He got up and went upstairs to their bedroom in order to speak to his wife. But she was asleep, on her side, with a slight snoring burr to her breath.

  Still there was the hopeless momentum of his need to change, to no longer live the way they lived, and though all this remained important and necessary in his mind, looking at her now he had no idea what he might say.

  “Are you awake?” he began softly, hoping to wake her gently; hoping even more strongly the opposite, that she would not hear him and sleep on. She slept on.

  He sat back up on the side of the bed, and, having nothing better to do, continued sitting there. He thought of a documentary he had seen about a great inland sea in Russia, the life-giving forces of which had always been taken for granted, until in a few short years it shrivelled up and disappeared. And somehow their love seemed to him like that inland sea that had simply vanished, that sea that seemed inexhaustible and immortal, and after a time he again leant over and once more whispered to her, because he wanted to tell her about that sea, and once more she didn’t answer.

  And so he sat on the bed until the dark night changed into a grey dawn, and he was no longer sure what it was that was so important and necessary, only that whatever it was, it was urgent. Through the course of the night the story about the vanishing sea had also transformed in his mind, until now it was only a tale that really meant very little. But still he hoped that together they might find some words for all the torment he now carried within him and, he suspected, she now also bore inside her.

  But the dawn passed and the day came and when they saw each other in the kitchen an hour later, coffee cups in hand, it was as strangers who have no words other than the dullest and most obvious for each other. For, Nick Loukakis dimly realised, there were no words for any of it, neither the finding of love, nor its disappearance.

  63

  The Doll was still dreaming when the Panasonic television came on. A woman said:

  “This is your in-house wake-up call. And don’t forget, this week our continental breakfast is on special.”

  And then she vanished and the tv flicked onto Six’s breakfast program, New Day Dawning.

  “Well,” a newsreader was saying, “the lap dancing terrorist story just keeps on growing.”

  The television cut to another angle, the newsreader turned to face it, and the Doll began searching for the remote control. She didn’t want to hear any more. If she heard nothing, it might be possible to find a way through all this. But to listen was to become part of the madness. She would not watch, she told herself, she would not listen.

  But the remote control was not next to her bed, and the new world in which she was no longer the Doll but someone and something else altogether continued rolling in, inescapable, tormenting, as undeniable and all-encompassing as the heat she could feel already building outside the sealed window’s glass.

  “In new developments, terrorist suspect Tariq al-Hakim has been found dead in inner Sydney. Police are treating his death as homicide. Meanwhile, fellow terrorist susp
ect Gina Davies, known as the Black Widow, remains at large. Police have issued the following image of Gina Davies, believing she may have altered her appearance.”

  An image flashed up of someone who looked like Gina with a blonde bob. It was a good likeness in the way an ID photo can be a good likeness but, in essence, unrecognisable. That, the Doll guessed, was something, but it didn’t feel comforting.

  “Meanwhile, in a police raid in the inner city suburb of Redfern early this morning,” continued the newsreader, “a woman was taken into custody to assist police with their enquiries relating to terrorism rings in Australia. The woman has subsequently been released.”

  The Doll knew it must have been Wilder they had picked up, but she didn’t want to know. She knew that Wilder would never now be able to get her money out of her flat and to her, but she didn’t want to know that either. The Doll was up out of bed, looking for the remote control on the small writing table with its broken lamp. ‘It could be someone else,’ she told herself as her search grew more frantic, ‘some real terrorist, some crazy fucking Leb like the one in the burkah. Or an Abo, they’re always picking up Abos.’ And then she felt bad, because maybe they no more deserved being hassled and harassed than Wilder, and maybe they were every bit as innocent, but who cared about Abos other than people like Wilder who didn’t matter anyway?

  The remote control wasn’t on the writing table. She should ring Wilder, thought the Doll, then cursed herself for her stupidity. How could she ring her? What if they were listening in? The Doll’s search became more determined.

  “Attorney-General Andrew Kingdon has rejected criticism of the raid as an abuse of new anti-terrorism powers,” the newsreader went on.