My opponent that night was Darien “Demolition” Dixon, and I knew after ten seconds of the first round that he was twice the fighter I was. He toyed with me for a time. I went down in the ninth to the jab, a cross, and a big left hook. I lay there flat on my back, still conscious and aware of the noise, the bright lights, and the ref counting over me. Time went slowly. I knew I could beat the count, get up and fight. Or stay where I was and call it quits. What bothered me most was realizing that my invincibility was gone. Even half knocked out, I was fully astonished by this. I was mortal. Utterly so.
Defaulting to Ford stubbornness and Marine Corps training, I got up, bounced on my feet, and glared at the ref, nodding. Bring it on. He held my gloves and stared back, then let me go. Demolition hit me with a big right hand I didn’t have the legs to slip. I saw it coming, all right. Saw my mouthpiece, too, flying through the lights. What I remember next is a bunch of faces looking down at me. A background of brightness. Then I was watching me sitting on my stool, somewhat pleasantly stunned and childlike, both outside myself and inside myself at the same time. A state of detachment and wonder.
The hospital, an MRI, twelve stitches to close the cut from the knockout punch, which left a nickel-sized, Y-shaped scar up on my forehead, left of center.
Sometimes I look at the scar just for a reality check. A mortality check. To remind me that sometimes it’s okay not to get up before the bell. Okay to not let blind reflex drive you into the punch that puts you down.
When I’m worried or afraid, that scar acts up. Itches, burns, tingles, grows cold—depends. On what, I haven’t figured out yet. But it’s both a reminder and a warning, and I value its input. Sometimes, a lot. And sometimes I feel again that odd state of post-KO wonder come over me, and I’ll be sitting on my stool once again, and at the same time observing myself from a safe distance.
“In some light, you don’t really see the scar,” I said. “Then, in other light, you can’t miss it.”
She listened with her stony expression and said not a word until I had stopped talking. A vehicle passed us from behind. Right taillight out. “I know all about that,” said Taucher. “How something can be almost invisible, then a second later you can’t take your eyes of it. Mine is about quarter-sized, shape of an oval.”
I thought it would be rude to look for the hematoma now, but somehow also rude not to. As if I wasn’t interested. Instead I stared out at Hector Padilla’s dark, still home.
“Don’t feel obligated to look, Roland,” said Taucher. “You can’t see it in a dark car. And thanks for telling me about the knockout. Your scar tells you to be deliberate and mindful of consequences. I admire that. After I got kicked down in my MMA match, my fear broke. It just vanished. So I really went after her. In the end that fight was mine and she was the one who never fought again. So what my scar says is never quit. Never negotiate, even with yourself. Isn’t it funny how similar experiences mean different things to different people? Maybe that’s why we work so well together.”
We watched the street.
Waiting for Caliphornia to show.
Waiting for Ben Azmeh to take the bait.
Waiting for Hector.
But no text messages to the Warrior of Allah, and no 4Runner just in from Grass Valley. I hit the wipers to clear the fog off the glass. Hector’s house sat squat and dark down the street. The angels continued their silent caroling on the lawn and Santa’s sleigh rose from the rooftop.
“Ben has to answer us,” said Taucher. “He’s Caliphornia. I know it.”
“Patience.”
Taucher studied me sullenly. My optimistic word seemed to hang in the quiet. A van went by. A young couple came from the house across from Hector’s place, nicely dressed, got into a small white car. On Taucher’s lap the tablet went to screensaver. I had the unpleasant realization that all our earnest striving and good tools and clever plans might not be enough. Taucher looked at her watch. The likely hour of Caliphornia’s arrival had come and gone and we both knew it.
“Patience was pure Dad,” said Taucher. “He was all patience. Me, you know—the opposite.”
We ate jerky and apples and energy bars we’d picked up at a convenience store. Stared at Hector Padilla’s house in silence, like it was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and we were expecting a miracle.
Mind adrift, I thought about Justine and hoped that God was taking good care of her. Recalled my strong emotions just a few hours ago as I had landed Hall Pass 2 at Fallbrook Airpark. Just as I had done so many times with Justine in those brief and beautiful days. I like to drift, remembering the good and forgetting the bad.
Taucher brought me back to earth, stating that American Latinos were the fastest-growing group of Americans converting to Islam. Had their own mosque in Houston. Two hundred thousand Latino Muslims in the States right now. Mostly women, but guys like Hector, too. I wondered out loud why Islam was appealing to Latinos. She had no facts but said that Muslims and Latinos both felt like second-class people in America. Plus Latinas could then wear a hijab and hide their true ethnic identity, or some blemishes or scars, such as her own “pestilential” hematoma.
A light went on in the back of Hector’s house, then another in the living room. A faint human shape moved behind the curtains and was gone.
“Well, well,” said Joan. “Does he work Sundays?”
“He’s not scheduled, but he fills in a lot,” I said. This from my contact with the company that did security for First Samaritan Hospital.
Five minutes, then ten.
A Miata came past us, top down in the cold, older guy in a knit cap, surfboard riding beside him, heater probably pegged. Retirement in the Golden State, I thought, endless summer.
Fifteen minutes later Hector’s garage door rose and his gleaming black Cube backed into the foggy night.
33
HECTOR WORKED HIS WAY through the neighborhood, signaling long before his turns, always at or below the speed limit, going extra-slow in the fog. I stayed well back, the signal on my GPS tracker strong.
He merged onto Interstate 8 with the determination of a bed of kelp. Taucher cursed him under her breath as she monitored her phone and the tablet at her feet, throwing its cool light up at us. “No man should drive like that,” she muttered. “It’s a sin.”
No sooner had he hit sixty miles an hour when Hector signaled to exit. Off at Los Choces toward Lakeside. Hector took the right lane, of course, his Cube glimmering even in the fog.
“Maybe he’s going to the Walmart supercenter,” Taucher said. “I get all my household stuff there. Save a bundle.”
And sure enough, Hector pulled into the Walmart supercenter at Camino Canada. He parked far out in the lot. I pulled forward into a space with a good view of him. He sat in the driver’s seat, his head bowed to his phone, his distant face uplit by the screen.
“All yours, Joan,” I said. “He’ll recognize me from the Treasures of Araby.”
“Need anything?”
“I’m fine for now.”
She got out, set the tablet on her seat, and shut the door. I watched her and Hector converge on the entrance. Taucher had her black purse slung over a shoulder, her peacoat and sweater and duty boots. A black watch cap snugged down. Strong legs, long strides, poise and balance. I didn’t know what to make of her. Never had. Some big part of her remained unknown to me—to the whole world, for all I knew. Attracting but not welcoming. Walled but not hidden. Taucher’s words expressed my feelings, too: I don’t dislike you. But who, really, are you?
Then Hector, angling from her left in his too-big Raiders hoodie and too-small jeans. A puffy wad of plastic Walmart bags in each hand. He stopped to look at the window decals on an SUV. Hiked his jeans and wiggled his hips as he read, grocery bags flapping in the breeze. A multifaceted man, Hector. A football fan. A Cube owner. A seeker of Allah, a student of Arabic, an admirer of Muslim wom
en. A reader of the jihadi magazine Rumiyah, owner of two new janbiyas and one large sharpening stone, deliverer of five thousand six hundred eighty rounds of new ammunition in weatherproof cases. Now trying to stuff the plastic bags into one bag as he ambled into Walmart to stock up on Allah knew what.
I watched the American shoppers come and go. Baskets and bags of loot. Each time Taucher’s tablet went to screensaver mode, I touched the space bar and brought the screen back to life.
Not going to answer the Warrior of Allah, Ben?
Wouldn’t you like some easy money? Oh? How much?
Nearly forty minutes later I saw Hector pushing a well-burdened cart through the sliding exit door and heading toward his car. He stopped and answered his phone. Someone backed toward him and honked to get him to move. Hector waved, walked behind another car, stopped, and continued talking.
Taucher came briskly from the store, a plastic bag dangling from one hand, peacoat unbuttoned and watch cap off. Hector was off his phone and back en route for the Cube when Taucher threw open my truck door and climbed in. She slung her bag into the back.
“He bought holiday party stuff,” she said. “Red paper tablecloths and napkins, green drink napkins, green and red plastic tumblers, ‘Happy New Year’ placemats with champagne glasses and top-hat designs on them. Quantities of all. Enough plastic flatware for two hundred and fifty people. Tins of those wretched holiday sugar cookies. Other than that, no food or drink, just the supplies and decorations. I timed my purchases perfectly to be in the next line when he paid up. He dropped two hundred and eighty-six dollars and thirteen cents. See, you really can save a bundle here.”
While Hector tied each bag snug and loaded it into the back of his Cube, we speculated. Was the Muslim wannabe throwing a Western-style holiday party? Was it a First Samaritan Hospital employee event? Did Hector have two hundred and fifty friends?
He got back into his Cube and took the interstate west toward his home. Passed his exit. Held a solid fifty-five miles per hour in the slow lane. I-8 west to the 163 south, to I-5 north, exiting Fifth Avenue, then west toward the fog-shrouded Pacific Ocean and a left turn on North Harbor Drive.
He parked along the Broadway Pier, short of the Cruise Ship Terminal. I went past him and found a place. This is one of San Diego’s postcard views—the bay and the yachts with their masts jutting up against the flanks of the downtown high-rises. Off in the distance an immense aircraft carrier sat at anchor off Coronado. Closer in, the Cruise Ship Terminal, and a big Viking Line ship being readied for a morning departure. Closer still, the smaller commercial ships—Hornblower vessels for lease, bay cruisers, party barges, and private yachts. The lamps on the boardwalk made halos in the mist.
Hector locked his Cube with the fob and headed down the boardwalk. Taucher and I followed far back. When we came to the Cube, Taucher faked a call with her phone, pacing the boardwalk while I knelt behind the car and replaced the GPS tracker with another—battery fully charged and ready to go.
A hundred yards ahead of us, Hector stepped off the boardwalk and onto a private dock. The yacht beside it looked large. He stood outside a white picket gate and entered a code on a keypad. The gate swung open and Hector traipsed down the dock toward Glorietta.
She was an older motor yacht—a vintage dining ship that might have been working the San Diego area for decades. Three decks. She appeared strong and capable and well cared for.
Hector took out his phone and began shooting pictures of the ship. I could see the flash blipping through the lesser lights of the dock. He went bow to stern, composing his shots patiently.
Then he walked up the gangplank and boarded. A few minutes later his flash was going off again inside the dining ship, white blips behind the smoked-glass windows.
“Hector has bought decorations for a holiday celebration,” said Taucher. “Let’s just say it’s going to take place aboard a party ship. Glorietta, for example. Which he is now photographing.”
“It makes me think of the ammunition he delivered to Caliphornia,” I said.
A pause, then we spoke the same words at the same time.
“San Bernardino.”
A moment later, Hector came back down the gangplank and started up the dock toward the boardwalk.
“You know,” said Taucher. “If Ben Azmeh is Caliphornia, he’s the first Syrian American terrorist to take lives on American soil.”
I thought about Ben, the American-born kid who read the Qur’an with his sister and made up last names that sounded American, who couldn’t settle on a faith, who liked art and practiced calligraphy, surfed and snowboarded and climbed rocks and learned Hapkido. And I thought of a U.S. drone strike—flown in part by a friend of mine, from Creech Air Force Base in Las Vegas—that left nine innocents dead in Aleppo, Syria, seven-thousand-plus miles away, one of the dead being Ben Azmeh’s much-loved father. No acknowledgment by the United States until later. Along with a small condolence payment delivered in enforced silence.
Which led me to remember Rumsfeld’s cogent inquiry on war in the Middle East: Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?
And a line I found on the Internet one night: Don’t think of a bomb as going down and destroying stuff. Think of it like a seed that goes into the ground and grows insurgents out of it.
I shut my eyes and imagined a map of the world, with red lines across time and space, connecting what had happened that day at IH-One to what had happened before and after. I saw the red line from Dr. Ibrahim Azmeh’s Damascus all the way to UCLA, and another to Lindsey Rakes’s Fort Worth, another across the American desert to Las Vegas, one stretching across the world to Syria again, then coming back to connect Torrance to Santa Ana to Bakersfield to Grass Valley to San Diego, where this complex collision of fates and nations and families was still happening before our very eyes, right here on the waterfront.
“And if Ben Azmeh is our first Syrian American terrorist to kill his own citizens,” said Taucher, “then I’m responsible for stopping him. This is what I do and this is where I do it.”
I opened my eyes. The Cube started up and Hector backed out. We followed him to the 163 north, past Balboa Park, and under the stately Cabrillo Bridge. Hector exited Clairemont-Mesa Boulevard and drove the speed limit to the Spotted Jaguar adult club, where he parked far out in the lot, as was his habit. A moment later he was shuffling toward the entrance, hiking up his jeans again, looking up at the sky.
“The red lines back and forth across the world just extended to a strip club in San Diego,” I said.
“I don’t see any red lines,” said Taucher.
“They’re imaginary but real,” I said. “They connect everything that’s happened with everything that’s still to happen. An improvised hospital in Aleppo to the Spotted Jaguar. Dr. Ibrahim Azmeh to Hector O. See? Connections. Three out of the last five end with O.”
“So do ‘mumbo’ and ‘jumbo.’ You’re just tired.”
“I’m tired of severed heads,” I said.
“Your duty right now is to stay alert, Roland,” she said. “I shall be taking a power nap. That’s any nap under thirty minutes.”
Taucher released her seat belt, reclined her seat, buttoned up her peacoat, set her watch cap over her eyes. “Dad told me stories before sleep. Made them up on the spot. Most were funny. I’d always demand one more story, so Dad saw how short he could make them. My favorite was ‘This is the story of a snail who tried to cross a busy freeway.’ That was it. The whole story.”
“I like that one,” I said. “You like your dad a lot.”
“Worship,” Taucher said, her voice losing volume. “Mom, too. But I hung Dad’s moon and that means everything to a girl. I was his star and everybody knew it. If he’d been blown to pieces by a drone, I’d track the guilty parties down, too. So I get Caliphornia on that level.”
“I don’t know what I’d do,” I said.
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“Where do you think he is right now?”
“Sleeping,” I said. “I wonder if he has people he can trust, beyond Hector. He has to cache his weapons and ammunition and whatever else he’s got. A storage unit. A cheap apartment. Friends.”
“We need to reach out to him again,” said Joan. “Make sure he knows we’re interested.”
“He knows,” I said. “He’s probably checking out Raqqa Nine and the Warrior of Allah every way he knows. Let your Bureau website fool him, Joan.”
“But what if we scared him off?” she asked. “Should I just apply for the FISA warrant, give my evidence to Blevins, let the old boys take over my operation and run it into the ground? Remember, if I’m the one who stops this son of a bitch, then they can’t transfer me out of my city.”
I thought about that. “You’ll have to bring in the Bureau at some point, Joan.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she whispered. “I know. Here I thought you were on my side.”
“I’m on whatever side gets us all out of this alive,” I said.
“Not my side?”
“You can call it your side, Joan.”
“Good. Because I’m the one paying you the big bucks.” A catch of breath from Taucher, then a long sigh. “Wake me up when party boy comes out.”
An hour and a half later, just past one a.m., Hector traipsed from the exit of the Spotted Jaguar to his car.
Taucher cussed me for letting her sleep that long. I followed Hector back onto the freeway and all the way home.
Then drove the hour back to Fallbrook Airpark for Taucher’s car, parked in foresight outside the locking gate. Before climbing out of my truck she turned and offered me a tired smile. “Night, Roland.”
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