by C. S. Graham
Life here had been difficult at first. So much was strange, different. But most of the people Tourak met in New Orleans were surprisingly friendly, and he had fallen in love with the city’s moss-draped oaks and wide, slow moving river, with its platters of spicy crawfish and cold pitchers of beer. He liked Mardi Gras and shopping malls, cable TV and Baskin Robbins ice cream. But he still really, really hated the American government.
Flopping into a scruffy beanbag chair, Tourak pointed the remote control at the TV and flipped through the channels. He was restless tonight, unable to settle. In just forty-eight hours he would face the most important test of his life. Once, he had prayed to God to be given such an opportunity. Now he was nervous, afraid. His fear shamed him. What if he froze at the last moment? What if he couldn’t do it? He would let everyone down.
He flipped through two more channels, then paused at what passed for an American “news” network. The network alternately amused and infuriated him. So much of what they broadcast was a tissue of lies and exaggerations, all carefully crafted to deceive and manipulate. In other countries, people were more cynical, more suspicious of those with the power and means to deceive. But Americans weren’t like that. They were so credulous, so gullible. Even after Watergate and the Gulf of Tonkin, the Bay of Pigs and Iran-Contra, the American people still believed everything their government and news outlets told them. Tourak found that both incomprehensible and frightening.
He was about to switch the channel when a woman on the screen caught his eye. She appeared to be in her early thirties, dark and attractive in a way that reminded him of his sister Naji, who was a surgeon in Tehran.
The young woman was leaning forward in her seat, her face drawn and serious as she said, “We have to stop them, even if we have to kill them all to do it. If we don’t, they’ll destroy civilization and take over this country. I don’t want my children to grow up in a world run by illiterate mullahs who rant about evil and preach holy war against infidels.”
Practically choking on his beer, Tourak leaped from his chair and pointed the remote at the woman’s face, zapping her out of existence. “You stupid, bigoted donkey!” he screamed at her. “We started civilization, remember? You’re the ones who’ve been bombing the cradle of civilization back into the Stone Age. It’s your politicians who rant about axis of evil and evildoers and preach crusades against anyone who isn’t a Judeo-Christian. We don’t want to take over your stupid country. We just want you to get out of our part of the world and stay out!”
One of Tourak’s roommates, a physics student from Syria, called from upstairs in Arabic, “Ya, habibi. Aish bi’dak?”
“Nothing,” Tourak shouted, then slammed out the door to go stand on the front stoop and look out over the ghostly dark neighborhoods of the ruined city.
He had come from Tehran to the States to study journalism because he’d believed in the power of the truth to overcome ignorance and prejudice. But over the course of the last three years it slowly dawned on him that he had been as naive as he accused the Americans of being. Because most people weren’t swayed by words, particularly if those words were an uncomfortable truth.
Lately, Tourak had begun to believe the only truth Americans understood was the kind delivered by the barrel of a gun, or the explosive exit of a man driven to suicide by the grim realization that while he might be powerless in life, his death could change the world.
7
Most people who knew October Guinness looked upon her decision to move to post–Katrina New Orleans as proof-positive that the girl was certifiably crackers.
She had no previous connection to the city. Her father might have grown up in Louisiana, but he died when Tobie was only five years old and she’d never known his family. Her mother’s people were from South Carolina and her stepdad from Oregon. His career as a petroleum engineer meant they’d lived in some far-flung places when Tobie was growing up, but Louisiana wasn’t one of them.
She remembered calling her parents the night before her scheduled discharge from Bethesda. Her stepdad had retired to Colorado, and her mother had prattled on breathlessly about fixing up Tobie’s old room and the looming deadline to register for next semester’s classes at the University of Colorado—which was where Tobie had gone to school before dropping out just two months shy of graduation.
But she hadn’t wanted to go home. Not as a twenty-four-year-old college dropout with a psycho discharge from the Navy. If she was going to start over, she wanted to do it someplace new. It seemed appropriate to rebuild her life in a city that was also struggling to rebuild itself.
“I’m not coming back to Colorado,” she’d told her mother. “I’ve been accepted into Tulane. In New Orleans,” she added into the stunned silence.
“Are you nuts?” her stepdad, Hank Bennett, had thundered on the other extension.
She’d leaned her forehead against the cold-frosted window of her hospital room and laughed. “That’s what they’re saying, isn’t it?”
Hank didn’t get the joke. He never did. “Do you have any idea what a mess things still are in New Orleans?”
“Yes.”
“You’d qualify for in-state tuition here, you know. How much is Tulane?”
“A lot.”
“I’m not paying for it.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
It was one of the reasons Tobie had agreed to start working for Henry Youngblood. He couldn’t pay her much, but it helped supplement her GI Bill and the small disability payment she got from the Navy. Plus he’d arranged to give her three credits a semester. It was a deal she found impossible to refuse…even though it did require her to confront an aspect of herself she’d spent a lifetime avoiding. If Iraq had taught her one thing, it was that she couldn’t continue to hide from the truth. Whether she was gifted or cursed, she had an unusual ability she needed to learn to understand and to control. Dr. Youngblood was teaching her to do both.
Now, sliding into the driver’s seat of her 1979 yellow VW Beetle, Tobie rolled down the windows and opened the sunroof. Most people thought Tobie drove the old Bug because she liked vintage cars, but the truth was, she had bad luck with modern electrical products. She’d learned to buy the extended warranty on everything from computers and cell phones to DVD players and TVs because few lasted even a year. And she’d learned to buy cars too old to have a computerized anything.
According to Dr. Youngblood, good remote viewers frequently had an odd effect on electronics. At one time, he said, the CIA and NSA had actually tried to find some way to use the phenomenon to crash the Soviets’ computers and weapons systems. But since the disturbances only affected electronics within a person’s immediate vicinity, the government could never figure out how to use it against their enemy du jour. They’d just learned to keep remote viewers away from their own sensitive systems.
The inside of the car was still unbearably hot, so she left the door ajar to catch the evening breeze while she sat and listened to the message Dr. Youngblood had left on her voice mail. His voice sounded hushed, strained. “October? Henry Youngblood here. Listen…I’m afraid I might have made a terrible mistake. They came here, to my office. They don’t know who you are, but these people are dangerous, Tobie. If they—”
The connection ended abruptly. Puzzled, she saved the message and was listening to it again when another call from Youngblood came through. But when she tried calling him back, she went straight to his voice mail.
Checking the time, Tobie shoved her phone into her bag and pulled away from the curb. If she knew Youngblood, he was probably still in his office. It would be easier to just swing by campus on her way home than to keep playing phone tag with him all evening.
She thought about his message as she drove toward the university. She didn’t have a clue what the professor might have been talking about. In Youngblood’s world, dangerous people killed tenure applications or cut off funding for projects. Was that it? Was someone threatening to close down Henry’s program—and her job?
>
She could see a mass of heavy thunderheads building on the horizon, casting an eerie silver light over the scattered piles of building rubble and occasional squatty FEMA trailers that still dotted the streets. This part of town had stewed in Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters for less than a week. Not as long as other areas, but long enough to undermine a lot of aging foundations and wreck havoc with century-old floor joists and timber framing. The neighborhood was starting to come back, but she’d heard people saying it would probably be ten to fifteen years before the last of the FEMA trailers were gone.
By the time she turned onto Freret, thunder was rumbling in the distance and an early darkness had settled over the campus. She spotted Youngblood’s little red Miata in the Annex’s side yard. She thought about pulling in behind him, except she didn’t have a parking sticker for this zone and the fines for violations were stiff. Turning onto Newcomb Boulevard, she had to drive halfway down the block before she found a place to pull her VW in close to the curb.
The evening was quiet, the stately old homes lining the street somber behind their drawn curtains. She walked back toward Freret, her footsteps echoing in the stillness. A nearby stand of bamboo rustled faintly in the suddenly cool breeze, and a dog began to bark. Tobie ran one hand up her bare arm and wished she’d thought to throw on a jacket over her T-shirt.
She was just stepping off the curb to cross Freret when the Annex exploded.
A concussive blast of heat slammed into her, knocking her off her feet. She hit the ground hard, her ears ringing, her arms coming up to wrap around her head as jagged, flaming timbers rained down around her and a roaring caldron of flames leaped high into the stormy sky.
From the black Suburban parked around the corner, Lance Palmer watched the dancing flames light up the cloudy evening. The smell of smoke and burning timbers lay heavy in the sultry air.
A quick search of Youngblood’s files had turned up nothing they needed to worry about. They’d brought the files away with them anyway, along with the professor’s hard drive, just to be sure. It was to cover up the missing files and dismantled computer that they’d decided to torch the building.
An investigation might in time discover that the fire had been caused not by some leaky gas line but by a sophisticated incendiary device of the kind favored by the U.S. military. An autopsy would definitely turn up a couple of well-placed bullet holes in whatever the fire left of Henry Youngblood’s head. But by then it would all be over. As soon as they took care of the girl, Lance thought, his embarrassing little problem would be solved. Even in the best of times, the NOPD hadn’t exactly been known for their brains, and these were hardly the best of times. They’d never be able to connect the dots.
From somewhere in the distance came the screaming whine of an emergency vehicle’s siren. Lance flipped open his phone. “Get me the address of a woman named October Guinness…That’s right, October,” he said again, when the voice at the other end of the line queried the name.
Lance leaned back in his seat and waited. With just a single phone call he could find out virtually anything he needed to know about anyone, from the most embarrassing details of their medical history to the brand of toilet paper they used. Within a minute he had the address.
“Number 5815 Patton Street?” he repeated. He nodded to Lopez. “Good. I want as much additional information on this woman as you can put together ASAP.”
Lance slipped the phone into his pocket and smiled as the Suburban pulled away from the curb. Things hadn’t exactly gone according to plan with Youngblood, but at least they had the girl’s name. All they needed to do now was make sure she hadn’t told anyone about what she’d seen, and then silence her. Permanently.
8
Fire engines and police cars clogged the street, their flashing blue and red lights reflecting off the water that pooled at Tobie’s feet. She stood with her arms wrapped across her chest, her gaze fixed on the roaring inferno before her. Oh, God, Henry, she thought. Please tell me you weren’t in there.
There were times when Tobie believed she probably deserved her psycho discharge. She still broke into a cold sweat when she heard the thump of a helicopter overhead, still awoke too often, screaming, in the middle of the night. And when Tulane’s Psych Annex exploded in front of her, knocking her off her feet, for one hideous, heart-pounding moment, she’d actually thought she was back in Iraq.
When they sent Tobie to Iraq, they told her the linguist she was assigned to replace had been blown to pieces when his Humvee rolled over an IED. She always tried hard not to think about that when she went out into the field as an interpreter. She also tried not to think about the fact that the officers she was assigned to accompany were prime targets—which made her a prime target, too.
But it didn’t take her long to realize that in Iraq, she was never safe. At any moment a mortar round could come smashing into their compound. Snipers might lurk behind any rock or ruined wall. Ambush potentially awaited every convoy that ventured out of the Green Zone. Every person she passed in the souk might be a suicide bomber.
Yet alternating with those intense moments of terror stretched vast hours of tedious boredom. Most of her days were spent at a scruffy desk in an airless room where she translated endless reports and transcriptions of intercepted telephone or radio conversations.
Then, in early September, her unit buzzed with the anticipation of a major coup. Telephone intercepts suggested a large gathering in the western desert, and some of the names bantered around in the intercepts seemed to be on their watch list. Satellite photos showed images of tents and white pickup trucks. The intel people went nuts. They were convinced they’d stumbled on a huge terrorist gathering. Tobie wasn’t so sure. But she was just a linguist, an interpreter, not an intelligence analyst.
It was one afternoon when Tobie was looking at some low-level Predator reconnaissance photos Lieutenant Costello had stuck up on the wall, that the images first came to her, like a daydream or a memory she held in her mind. Flashes of sights and sounds and smells that had nothing to do with the airless office where she spent her days.
A laughing young woman braiding her hair. Gnarled hands kneading bread. A child spinning around, the gold coins on her ankle jangling as she danced before a Bedouin tent, its brown-striped camel hair sides stretched taut beneath the desert sky.
At first Tobie tried to ignore what she had “seen.” She pushed it to the back of her mind, told herself it was just her overactive imagination. A daydream. But she knew it wasn’t. Once before, during her senior year in college, she had ignored the images her mind somehow plucked from the ether. As a result, her best friend had died. The guilt she still carried from her inaction that day had driven her to drop out of college and, ultimately, hide in the Navy. She didn’t understand why or how these images came to her, but they were powerful enough that she finally went to see Lieutenant Costello.
“This encampment,” she said, standing nervously before his desk, “the one in the western desert you think is a terrorist gathering? It’s not. It’s just two tribes who’ve come together for a wedding. Those tents are full of women and children.”
The Lieutenant looked up from the papers spread across his desk. He was a Marine, with a rawboned face and a pronounced disdain for Naval personnel—especially female Naval personnel. “You got that out of some intercept, Guinness?”
Tobie felt her cheeks heat. “No. I saw it.”
His brows drew together in a frown. “Did we get some new photos?”
“No.”
“Then where did you see this, Guinness?”
“I just…” She hesitated. “Sometimes I just know these things.”
He stared at her for a long moment, his lips pressed together, not saying anything. Then he gave her a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all. “You just ‘know’ these things, do you? We’ve been watching this buildup for weeks, Guinness. This is what we do, and we’re good at it. There’s been no indication of any wedding. It’s a gathe
ring of insurgents, and it’s huge. You think it’s something else, you’d better come to me with some solid evidence. This is an intel unit. We don’t operate on feelings.”
“But you’re wrong. There are all these children—”
“That’s the way these guys operate.” Lieutenant Costello stood up and assembled the papers on his desk. “They hide in with women and kids, and then cry when they get them blown to smithereens.”
“But—”
“There’s no ‘buts’ about this, Guinness. A combined air strike and ground assault has already been called in for 0400 tomorrow morning.” He hesitated, then added gruffly, “We’ve all been under a lot of strain here lately. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”
He was being easy on her. She knew that. But she couldn’t let it go. “If you let this happen, our forces will kill dozens and dozens of innocent women and children. They’re—”
His jaw tightened. “Listen, Petty Officer—you’re way out of line. I don’t want to hear any more about this. Now just go to your quarters.”
Tobie went to her quarters—for half an hour. Then she grabbed her helmet and flak jacket and headed for the helipad, where she talked her way onto a Blackhawk ferrying medical supplies out to forward headquarters. She wasn’t sure what she could do to stop the assault once she got there, but she knew she had to do something. She couldn’t just pace up and down in her quarters while innocent people were massacred.
The Blackhawk crew put her in touch with a couple of Marine medics who let her perch on the outside of their Humvee as they headed out across the stony desert in the cold calm of predawn. The attack was scheduled for 0400, but as the Marines approached their unit, they could hear sporadic gunfire in the distance.
“Sounds like they’ve already started boogying,” said the driver. “Our guys must have spooked someone.”
A familiar thunder vibrated the air around them. Tobie leaned down to stick her head through the Humvee’s open window. “Hear that chopper?”