by Matt Ruff
“I’ve got a rifle in the trunk. But if I use it we’ve got no one to interrogate.” He thought a moment, then reached forward to toggle a switch on the dashboard. A warning panel lit, reading AIR BAGS DISABLED.
“David?” Mustafa said.
“Unbuckle your seat belts and brace yourselves. Be ready to jump out as soon as the car stops moving.”
He drove forward before Mustafa could argue with him. When the car was almost at the coffee shop, Sinbad gave the steering wheel a hard jerk to the right and leaned on the horn. As the car swerved onto the sidewalk, Costello and Martin Hoffman jumped up and dove out of the way. But Peter Hoffman bent down and reached for the backpack. Sinbad hit the gas and plowed into the table moving faster than he’d intended; the car clipped the front corner of the coffee shop and slewed around to a stop.
Mustafa, despite bracing for impact, was thrown forward into the dashboard. By the time he stumbled from the car, Costello had hopped back onto his motorcycle and Martin Hoffman was fleeing on foot. Peter Hoffman had disappeared—or so Mustafa thought, until he looked down and saw a hand sticking out from under Sinbad’s car.
Costello kicked the cycle into life. Samir grabbed his wrist and tried to haul him off the bike, but Costello swung his helmet with his other hand, catching Samir in the face. Samir tumbled backwards and Costello twisted the throttle and raced away in the direction of the campus.
“Go after Hoffman!” Sinbad shouted. “I’ll get the American!” He reversed into the street and roared off after the motorcycle.
Martin Hoffman had run to a car parked across the street at the east end of the block. He stood beside it, slapping his pockets for keys, then looked back helplessly towards the coffee shop. He saw Mustafa coming for him and ran into the Ghost Music superstore on the corner.
Mustafa entered a moment later with his gun drawn. A few dark-haired students circulated among the racks of magazines and comics at the front of the store, but there was no sign of Hoffman. Searching for the German, Mustafa’s gaze was drawn to a display of bright yellow books offering easy education in divers subjects: Algebra for the Ignorant; Desktop Publishing for the Ignorant; Yazidi Culture for the Ignorant; and in a special pile, the post-November 9th bestseller, now heavily discounted, Christianity for the Ignorant.
Samir came into the store, followed closely by Amal, Hamdan, and several other agents. They spread out into a line and began a systematic sweep. In the video-game aisles, an exchange student stood up suddenly from behind a shelf of cheat manuals; he looked nothing like Hoffman save that he had blue eyes and pale skin, but it was only the grace of God that kept him from becoming a news story.
Mustafa found himself in an open aisle between two entertainment mediums and two warring sociopolitical viewpoints. To his left, in the DVD section, a bank of flat-screens showed the governor of Lebanon, in his previous career as an action-movie superstar, maneuvering a jump jet between the skyscrapers of Beirut and using the plane’s nose-cannon to annihilate an army of terrorists, all of whom looked like relatives of the man Mustafa was chasing. To his right, in pop music, a wall of speakers and subwoofers blasted out the punk band Green Desert’s anti-war, anti-Saud anthem, “Arabian Idiot.”
And straight ahead, taking no political stances but offering both DVDs and CD soundtracks for sale: a cardboard cutout of the Bollywood Aladdin. Mustafa looked away, then looked back again. A fringe of blond hair was visible above the curve of Aladdin’s turban. Mustafa turned and made eye contact with Samir, who nodded; he’d seen it too.
A woman in an abaya and veil came out of the DVD section, dragging a small boy behind her. Martin Hoffman darted from his hiding place. He knocked the boy aside and grabbed the woman to use as a shield, raising a knife to her throat. The woman struggled. Her veil tore loose, and Mustafa blinked in surprise. “Fadwa?” he said.
Shrieking, the little boy launched himself at the man who’d grabbed his mother. He sank his teeth into Hoffman’s leg. Hoffman’s grip on the woman loosened, and for an instant, Mustafa had a clear shot. His gun snapped up, seemingly of its own accord; this time it was loaded. Hoffman cocked his head to the side and opened his mouth as if he’d heard something shocking. He dropped his knife and fell backwards into the Aladdin display.
As the woman scooped up her son and fled for safety, more gunfire erupted. Mustafa thought at first that one of the other agents had opened up with an assault rifle. But it was movie gunfire—the Governator, slaughtering Christians in Beirut. Green Desert retorted with a lyric about Arab imperialism. Martin Hoffman didn’t react, just bled silently onto the pile of mixed media that had become his final resting place.
“You had to do it, man.”
Mustafa and Samir were on the sidewalk in front of the store. Inside, a team of paramedics, having made a pointless attempt to revive Hoffman, now stood milling around the body with the cops and federal agents. Mustafa had stepped away once the wisecracks started. Samir mistook his attitude for regret: “You had to do it. He’d have cut that woman’s throat.”
“I know, Samir,” Mustafa said.
The woman sat in the back of an ambulance, hugging her son to her breast. Her veil was still askew. Mustafa studied her face and wondered what had come over him. She wasn’t Fadwa; she didn’t even look like her.
“Hey,” Samir said. “That little boy had some fire in him, didn’t he?”
“Yes.” With an effort, Mustafa turned away from the ambulance. He waved to Amal, who’d been conferring with the head of the bomb-disposal team about the contents of Peter Hoffman’s backpack. “So?”
“Two kilos of commercial blasting gel,” she said, joining them. “Maybe from the mining-engineering school, maybe stolen from a demolition site—they’re tracing the lot number now. There was hardware in the bag, too, and tools. Everything you’d need to put a time-bomb together.”
Mustafa frowned. “It wasn’t wired up yet?”
“No,” Amal said. “Also, I was asked to tell you, blasting gel’s pretty stable, but all the same it’s not a great idea to drive over it.”
“Thanks, we’ll pass that along,” Mustafa said. Sinbad’s car had just pulled up to the police cordon at the end of the block. The car had suffered severe front-end damage—two broken headlights, a crumpled grill and hood—but through the cracked windshield they could see that Sinbad had a passenger. A live passenger.
“Hear me, O Israel!” Samir called out, as Sinbad pulled Costello from the vehicle. “You are the man!”
“He led me quite a chase,” Sinbad said. “Did you catch my German?”
“We got him,” Mustafa said, not wanting Costello to know that Martin Hoffman was dead. “He’s inside.”
Sinbad read the truth in Mustafa’s eyes. “Ah . . . That’s good, then.”
The right front tire of Sinbad’s car had been punctured and was beginning to deflate. “So, David,” Mustafa said. “Can we get you a ride to the airport?”
THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE
Miranda warning
A Miranda warning is a statement of legal rights that must be read to any criminal suspect taken into police custody within the United Arab States, before the commencement of questioning that seeks to elicit potentially incriminating information. Incriminating statements made by a suspect who has not been properly “Mirandized” are not admissible as evidence.
The exact text of the Miranda warning varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the following script, used by police in the state of Iraq, is typical: “By the grace of God the All-Merciful and Compassionate, you have the right to remain silent. If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law, where, God willing, justice will be done. By the grace of God the All-Merciful and Compassionate, you have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you by the court. Do you understand these rights as I have described them to you?”
The w
arning gets its name from the 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda v. Morocco. The case concerned Arturo Miranda, a Catholic of Spain arrested in Marrakesh for the kidnapping and rape of a young Berber woman. Miranda admitted his guilt to the police and was subsequently tried and convicted. His lawyer argued on appeal that as a non-citizen who did not speak Arabic, Miranda had been unaware of his right to silence under the UAS Constitution, and that therefore his confession should have been excluded. The Supreme Court agreed, in a landmark 5–4 decision.
The Court’s majority opinion was written by Chief Justice Alim al Warith. Among other authorities, Al Warith cited a traditional saying of the Prophet Mohammed (peace be unto him) which states, “None of you truly believes, until you desire for your brother what you desire for yourself.” Wrote Al Warith: “Surely any man, when confronted by the overwhelming power of the state, would want, at a minimum, to be made aware of his inalienable rights.”
Law enforcement reaction to the ruling was initially negative, with some police and prosecutors predicting a total collapse of the justice system. Al Warith had anticipated this in his opinion: “There are those who will say that by advising suspects of their right against self-incrimination, we eliminate any chance of obtaining a confession. In the case of innocent suspects, of course, this is a desirable outcome. As for the guilty, by treating them with honor and dignity, we hope to reawaken their consciences and lead them back to the righteous path; but those who persist in wickedness will, we believe, be undone by their own moral weakness. Though they be warned ten thousand times not to speak, still Satan will loosen their tongues and bring them to doom.”
Although the wisdom of the ruling continues to be debated, a 1976 study by the Arab Civil Liberties Union, Ten Years of Miranda, found no significant decline in the number of confessions obtained by police. The report did note a drop in the percentage of convictions overturned on appeal, which it attributed in part to the use of signed Miranda waivers to document suspects’ consent to be questioned.
As for Arturo Miranda, he received a new trial. Even without his confession, prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him for a second time. Miranda served 7 years in Rabat State Prison; upon his release, he was deported to Spain. The judge who signed the deportation order urged Miranda to consider the fate of his soul on Judgment Day and mend his ways.
This particular “Miranda warning” went unheeded. In 1974 Miranda was implicated in the hijacking of a bank truck carrying Spanish government funds, including a rumored 6 million pesetas from the personal account of General Francisco Franco. The Madrid police, in an effort to get Miranda to divulge the whereabouts of the truck, subjected him to a brutal interrogation. He died in custody. The stolen money was not recovered.
Arab Homeland Security’s regional Baghdad headquarters was located in an eight-story building within shouting distance of Ground Zero. The building, formerly owned by the underwriter who’d insured the twin towers, had undergone extensive renovation since 2001. Part of the remodel had been the addition of a state-of-the-art “interview suite”: three interrogation rooms surrounding a single, central observation room.
The basic setup would have been familiar to anyone who’d ever watched a television police procedural. But unlike the interrogation rooms on Law & Order: Halal or CSI: Damascus, these came with million-riyal price tags. The bulk of the money had gone towards special sensors that turned each room into a walk-in polygraph machine. In addition to the lie-detecting equipment, there were multiple cameras and microphones; these were supposedly on a closed circuit, but Mustafa had long suspected the existence of an undocumented line out that allowed the higher-ups in Riyadh to monitor the questioning.
Other aspects of the interrogation rooms would have given a civil libertarian pause. The climate controls could be set for temperatures outside the normal human comfort range. Shutters in the air vents allowed the rooms to be hermetically sealed; this was billed as a safety feature for preventing the release of smuggled-in biological or chemical weapons, but a cynical mind could not help asking whether there might not be some other reason for restricting a detainee’s air supply.
And then there was the matter of the wall outlets. The ceiling lights provided more than adequate illumination, and there were, as noted, plenty of built-in recording devices. So why had the designers opted to include so many electrical sockets?
“Well, you know how it is,” Samir had said, when Mustafa pointed this out to him. “Some power drills have really short cords.”
Now, as he looked through the one-way glass into interrogation room A, Mustafa tried to map out an interrogation strategy that did not involve the use of power tools.
“Abdullah,” he said. “Did you remember to offer Dr. Costello a Bible?”
“I did, Mustafa,” Abdullah said. “But you see how he’s sulking in there. He wouldn’t even look at the cart.”
Whatever other rights might be stripped from them in the name of state security, every prisoner was entitled to a holy book. This could be a thorny proposition where Christians were concerned, for while there is only one Quran, there are many Bibles. Woe unto the Muslim who gave an angry crusader the wrong translation or selection of apocrypha.
Sensing an opportunity, Mustafa had filled a library cart with as many different Bibles as he could lay his hands on: the Latin Vulgate; various incarnations of the King James; the Luther Bible; the Revised Standard; the Ignatius Bible; the Scofield Reference; the Reina-Valera; the Louis Segond. Mustafa’s goal was not so much to have something for everyone, but rather, by demonstrating an awareness of Christian sensibilities, to show respect, and thereby establish trust and good will. It was a surprisingly effective tactic, even with prisoners who refused all hospitality.
The observation room door opened and Amal and Samir came in. “Well?” Mustafa said.
“Gaza City PD came through,” Amal told him. “It was a convenience-store robbery. They faxed over the report and a photo of the crime scene.”
Mustafa studied the photograph Amal handed to him. It showed a woman sitting with her back against the door of a cold-beverage case, her head lolling to one side. Her close-eyed expression was peaceful, as if she’d just nodded off to sleep, but below the neck she was a bloody mess.
“So what’s the plan?” Samir asked. “You going to play the sympathy angle with this guy?”
“Something like that,” Mustafa said.
“Hello, Dr. Costello,” he began. “My name is Mustafa al Baghdadi. I’m here to speak with you about your recent activities.”
Costello sat with his elbows propped on the interrogation room table, his gaze fixed on the short length of chain that ran between the cuffs on his wrists. “I have nothing to say to you.”
“Perhaps you’ll just listen, then,” Mustafa said. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to speak Arabic. I understand you’re fluent in the language, and while I do have English, those who are observing us”—he gestured at the cameras, the mirrored glass—“are not so fortunate.”
Costello made no direct answer to this, but sat back in his chair with a sigh. Mustafa held up the folder containing Costello’s ICE file; he’d padded it with a couple hundred pages of unrelated office correspondence, so it made a weighty thump as he set it on the tabletop. “This is everything we know about you.” He sat opposite the doctor, and rather than open the folder, looked straight across the table and began to recite from memory.
“Your full name is Gabriel Brennan Costello. You were born in Boston in 1973. In 1988, following the death of your parents, you went to live in London with your maternal grandmother. In 1991 you received a visa to pursue undergraduate studies at Baghdad University. From 1995 to 1998 you attended the Ain Shams School of Medicine in Cairo. You completed your surgical residency at Jaffa Medical Center in Palestine. Four years ago you returned to Baghdad to work in the trauma unit at Karkh General Hospital. Since then, you’ve taken several leaves of absence to go on foreign missions with the humanitarian group Médec
ins Sans Frontières.
“I must say, it doesn’t sound like the résumé of a terrorist. Of course you’re an American, and a Christian, and those Doctors Without Borders missions have all been to help other Christians wounded in the German Volksaufstand. In the eyes of some of my colleagues, any one of these facts would be enough to brand you a threat, with no further explanation necessary. But I try to be more open-minded than that, and as a resident of this city, I’m naturally curious. You know, right after 11/9, all of Arabia asked itself Why? Why do they hate us? The rest of the country has tried to move on since then, but here in Baghdad, still living with the aftereffects of that day, we find it much harder to put the past behind us. We still want to know: Why do you hate us, Dr. Costello?
“Is it because you’re American? The War on Terror hasn’t been kind to your native country, it’s true, but you were young when you left home, and there’s nothing in your record to suggest a nationalist streak.
“Is it because you’re Christian? It’s tempting to believe that, but even if I didn’t know better, I can still count. There are nearly two billion Christians in the world, and if you were all wicked by nature, things would be very bad indeed.
“So what is it, Dr. Costello? What turned your heart against us? Arabia welcomed you in, gave you an education and a profession, a stake in a civilized society. Was there something else, some basic courtesy we failed to extend? Did we offend you somehow? Why do you hate us?”
Mustafa paused to give Costello an opportunity to respond—perhaps to take issue with Mustafa’s description of Arabia’s generosity. But Costello wasn’t interested in complaining about his immigrant experience. He slouched in his chair and stared at the table in silence, projecting weary resignation.
“Maybe instead of asking why I should ask when,” Mustafa continued. “On your residency application, you listed your own and your parents’ religion as Episcopalian. I confess, I had to look that up on the Library of Alexandria. LoA describes it as an American offshoot of the Anglican Church. Is that the answer to the riddle, Dr. Costello? Did the Church of England get its hooks in you during your time in London? Did the Archbishop of Canterbury brainwash you in one of his parish schools? You know the British prime minister has threatened to unleash a wave of destruction against the Muslim world if we or our allies interfere with England’s nuclear-bomb program. He claims to have sleeper agents in place all across Arabia and Persia. Is that you, Dr. Costello?”