"We’ve heard some rumors about you…"
Ari’s eyes went to the car door. Jackson had been telling the truth. Not merely was there no lock on the handle…there was no handle at all. If they were here to accuse him, he was already neatly packaged for delivery.
"Rumors?" he inquired politely.
"We started asking around about you, after Carrington," said Jackson, a little menacingly. "We didn’t get far before downtown stopped us. They said you weren’t involved, and that was that. But we did hear that you were the last one to see him alive. You said something to him and he went and offed himself."
Ari’s face was magnificently blank.
"Then some detective from the absolute wrong precinct magically discovered that Louis killed Moria Riggins after she had killed everyone else."
Ari performed a small cough and shook his head sadly.
"This is the kind of bollocks we get from the feds when they want to hide something. FBI, Homeland Security…" Jackson had a stiff neck. Turning around was difficult for him. But he managed to give Ari a good dose of eye-fever. "So we think you’re not who you say you are, or who anybody we know says you are. All we know for sure is that you told one set of folks you were an architect, another set that you worked for the Cirque du Soleil, a third that you were a croupier for a casino in Lebanon. Sounds like you were having fun."
Ari decided then and there that he would have to find another way to amuse himself at his neighbors’ expense.
"If you’re in the Witness Protection Program, you need to show a lot more care about what you say to people."
Ari ran a finger over the stubble on his face. He really needed to shave.
"One thing else. There was a big gunfight out at that international food store on Broad Street not long ago. Louis told Mangioni and me he thought you were the shooter. He even thought you might be some sort of hero, killing three perps and all. He also thought you might be dangerous as hell."
Ari held out both hands and said with perfect amazement, "I…?"
"You nailed him on the Riggins case. You confronted him about it. Am I right? He was filled with grief and remorse and all that other good stuff. But let me tell you right now, neither Mangioni or me thinks he did what they said he did out there in the Cumberland woods. He was the last man on earth who would think of killing himself."
"Please, Officer Jackson. How can I possibly—"
"You know something more than you’re telling, because the people protecting you know more. Even if you don’t know who the killer is, we think you can take a good guess. Go ahead, open the pouch. Take a look at the pictures and see if you can see anything we missed. Oh yeah, and another thing. We couldn’t get anything from the State Police. It takes an act of God to get anything out of them. But the local yokels in the Cumberland Sheriff’s Department got a tidbit that even the Staties missed. There was a van with a Quebec license plate seen near Bear Creek the night Louis died."
"You mean…Canadian?" Ari asked, as if he didn’t know the two were part and parcel.
"It had that screwy French motto on it: Zhe My Souvenirs. I think it means ’Buy my souvenirs‘, if you can believe it."
‘Je me souviens,’ you idiot, Ari thought, wanting to smack the man. He was also cursing his bad luck. That plate belonged to Abu Jasim, one of Saddam Hussein’s fedai, body doubles, until he escaped to Montreal. He had worked with Ari in Iraq and was, currently, the most valuable man in his life. How could his license plate have been spotted? Out there, in the dark?
"Did you get the number of the plate?" he asked. "That would lead to a solution."
"No. Stupid self-serve…"
"He was spotted at a gas station?"
"The local Stop-N, and no gas pump jockey. All we have is the girl selling 24-hour barf-my-ass chicken in the mini-cafeteria. She went out for a smoke and went gaga when she read the plate. I’ve heard of girls melting when they hear French, but when they read it? She was a twit minus a half, anyway. What was she doing smoking near the gas pumps?"
"Ah," said Ari, so relieved he almost melted.
"But there was something screwy going on out there, something international."
International. Screwy by definition.
Mangioni, silent up to now, was looking at him earnestly. His expression said: ‘Well, go on…’
Ari unzipped the pouch. He took out several glossy photographs. Carrington, slumped over his steering wheel, blood dribbling out the side of his head and from his eyes.
"Oh," Ari said, putting the pictures aside.
"I told you," Mangioni snarled at his partner. "He can’t take it."
Jackson pursed his lips. "Go fuck a bunny. My guess is he’s seen worse."
Ari took up the photocopy:
Name: Louis B. Carrington
Gender: Male
Age: 48
Race: White
Location: Cumberland State Forest, Jim Birch Fire Road
Cause of Death: Gunshot
There followed handwritten notes of the Cumberland deputy who had responded first to the call from the rangers from nearby Bear Creek Lake. He had found Carrington slumped over the wheel of his car with an apparent gunshot wound to the side of his head. The engine had run out of gas but the headlights were still on. The ground around the car had been disturbed, but nothing definite could be determined. It was possible that footprints had been scuffed away intentionally.
"I know it’s not much," said Mangioni. "But it’s what we’ve got. And we’re hoping you can come up with more."
"With your Fed contacts," Jackson chimed in.
"Really, gentlemen, I don’t see how I can help."
"Don’t ‘gentlemen’ us," said Jackson. "Call us fucking assholes, and help. I bet you could, if you wanted."
"I’ll see what I can do," said Ari wanly, like a maiden asked to sacrifice her virtue. "Could you let me out, now?"
"Since that’s all we’re going to get," said Jackson, getting out and opening the rear door.
Ari’s sense of the absurd stumbled on excess. He had just been asked to help solve the killing of the man he had murdered.
CHAPTER TWO
Ari decided to give Jack Daniels a rest for a few days. While this helped his liver, it was catastrophic for his psyche. Drinking heavily was not in his new job description, but it certainly eased the pain.
Ari had become a desk jockey. He was tasked with reviewing images from Iraq, photographs that the news networks, whenever they came across one, declined to broadcast. Images that, in gory detail, documented the decline and fall of civilization.
In his past life, Ari had committed mayhem on a fairly wide scale. But his victims had, usually, been specific enemies of the state whom any honorable soldier of any country would consider legitimate targets. True, Saddam Hussein’s definition of ‘legitimate’ was broad in the extreme. Ari considered himself fortunate not to have been present when Ba’athist Loyalists used sarin against the rebels in Basra during the 1991 uprising. He had seen survivors of Halabja and did not consider them lucky. At the time, however, he was alone in the Kurdistan highlands dealing with a formidable Peshmerga commander who had survived the al-Anfal massacres. The officer’s demise was unpleasant, but beyond some bruising and arm-breaking, there had been no collateral damage. It had been an amazing performance for the 23-year-old, though his peers mocked his protests against the jash units still operating in the area. That such a born killer could be upset over mass rape and murder and the gassing of five thousand civilians! It was too amusing. Chemical Ali himself laughed in his face.
"Just keep killing, like a good boy."
Ari was contemptuous of the new breed of assassins whose indiscriminate butchery created shock waves, and not much else. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (for whom he should have had some sympathy, since he had been raised a Sunni), the ANO (the late Abu Nidal’s organization), the al-Ahwal Brigade (who liked to style themselves as ‘The Horrors Brigade’), the al-Faruq Brigades (who intended to ‘rejoice
in God’s triumph’), the Fallujah Mujahideen (lots of foreigners led by a Saudi)…the list was tragically endless, and Ari’s retentive mind contained all of it. It was like remembering each and every clown who had ever performed for a circus. They were no better than the blind American ordinance that slaughtered bystanders by the scores, the hundreds…and, ultimately, the thousands. He mocked the ‘martyrs’ of 9/11 who, in his harsh estimation, had not eliminated anyone of importance, such as a head of state or even a deputy minister, when they attacked New York. Even the Boeing 757 that hit the Pentagon failed to weaken America’s military capability or resolve. So far as he was concerned, everyone who died that day—everyone—died for nothing. The only true smart weapon was the lone hunter.
It had taken Ari too long to conclude that Saddam Hussein was a worthless piece of shit. There had been doubts, of course. Ari’s father had criticized the Boss’s handling of the Army during the war with Iran—though only to his wife (dangerous enough) and without realizing his son was keen on every word he said. But Ari had intimate confirmation of Saddam Hussein’s ‘genius for war’ on Highway 80, when a good portion of the Iraqi Army was stretched out like some Mesopotamian eel on the six-lane connector, begging to have its throat cut for a proper anguille au vert. And then, in the aftermath of the 1991 war, Saddam had cut lose his sons for the counter-offensive: the youngest, Qusay, and the supremely repulsive Uday. Ari had seen first-hand the results of Uday’s vengeance.
Up to then, the Boss had been, at worst, a Tikriti fellah with weak political skills, poor taste in architecture and an unfortunate tendency to imitate his ancient progenitors when it came to torture. After seeing his sons at work, though (and from the father proceeds the sons, in every way), Ari thought Hell was created with just these sort of creatures in mind.
He did not rebel openly. He couldn’t. He had a wife and three boys. When it became unavoidable, he obeyed orders. It did not matter if God forgave him—which was doubtful. He could never forgive himself.
The Americans did not have much more sense than the fallen dictator. They had a track record of kicking a dog and then begging for forgiveness, kicking the dog again, then going back down on their knees. And when a dog finally fought back, they demolished it with tears in their eyes. You see? We had no choice…. And yes, torture was part of the program.
Well, it was an old story, repeated in every empire. It was love. It was hate. It was the world’s oldest profession: self-extinction.
Rather than email the ghastly images to him, his sponsors packed them into encrypted thumb drives and sent them via the U.S. Marshals Service. Neither of Ari’s immediate handlers, Deputies Karen Sylvester and Fred Donzetti, knew the passcodes for these memory sticks. This bothered Karen not at all, since she fully understood the ‘need-to-know’ nature of the business. What did irk her was being kept so much in the dark about Ari’s background. She felt she was not being given the tools to do her job properly. She was so suspicious of Ari that she had fed him an alias, ‘Sandra’, when they first met. To her intense chagrin, he had somehow learned her real name. The little she had learned about him filled her with loathing.
Having the pictures hand-delivered, Ari decided, was one way for the Marshals Service to keep tabs on him. Maybe they thought that, by staying low-tech, they were helping to palliate any willies Ari might experience in this strange, new culture. There was the GPS tracker in his Scion, but that only made sense, in case he decided to fly the coop. And it went without saying that his computer was not only monitored, but heavily filtered. But Ari did not take their word that he was not otherwise being spied upon. Every week he searched the safe house for remote monitoring devices and his clothes for RFID tags. This was one reason he did not bring in more furniture or anything else that might make planting bugs easier for his ‘protectors’.
The morning after meeting with Jackson and Mangioni, Ari awoke without waking. Without Sphinx, he had been unable to sleep. There was a hangover to deal with, but this had become integral to his daily routine.
An encrypted Aegis had been left on his kitchen table the morning before, while he was out shopping at the Indo-Pak on Hull Street. He had disdained the flash drive with the air of a man who had more important things to do, although his agenda was as slim as Romeo’s little black book. But it could not be put off more than a day. The minds of young terrorists never stopped churning. It was possible that Ari’s dilatory behavior would result in a hundred un-intercepted murders. It was also possible that the next asteroid would wipe out the whole idiotic mess—one could only hope.
The images comprised the usual assortment of atrocities. Ari’s strong stomach conflicted with the sheer waste of the horrors sliding across his computer screen. He was not a great admirer of humanity, although its artifacts could be pretty nifty. It was the unnecessary-ness of it that appalled him. He could have terrorized Diane into letting him keep Sphinx, but to what purpose? He would have set into orbit yet one more satellite of misery in the world.
The men who appeared on his computer screen (the ones who were not victims) were not adverse to despair, especially when they caused it in others.
Some of the pictures had been scanned, and some of these had little handwritten comments by American soldiers. Anything assumed offensive to Ari's sensibility was digitally brushed away, although the censor missed "ANO dicktraps in Sick City", which amused him. However, they had negligently let stand scribbles they did not think he would understand:
Sine Pari. Latin for 'without equal', the motto of the United States Army Special Operations Command.
Night Stalkers Don’t Quit . Motto for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
DEVGRU. Acronym for the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, and which Ari could plainly see was referring to Seal Team Six.
Had they realized that he comprehended these references and could make uncanny inroads into American strategy, they would have taken their job more seriously.
When he first arrived, Ari would make morbid quips about the terrorists that he recognized in the pictures. These were like comic mnemonics that booted his mental database. He used to pass along some of these self-addressed comments in his email reports. CENTCOM did not admonish him, because it did not want to alienate him—not only because ‘Mr. Ibrahim’ had been, over a two year period, in charge of the registry clerks at Abu Ghraib Prison…but also because Ari had a phenomenal memory for faces. It was not perfectly eidetic—even if such a thing existed, it was so rare as to verge on the non-existent. And Ari’s memory could be woefully inconsistent. He had tried to recall some of his favorite recipes, but the ingredients were churned into nonsense in his mind and ghastly messes on his plate.
But he could not have forgotten the faces of the men whose records he saw even had he wanted to. This was part of the reason why he no longer made jokes about the killers he was identifying. They had all merged into a single expression: the tedium of death.
He wondered how the Americans would react if they found out that he had also occasionally worked in the SSO’s Security Office in the Hai Al Tashriya district…right next to the Director General’s Office. This organization was in charge of producing ID’s for the entire SSO, including the prisons and the security department. And this was where, just prior to the 2003 war, he had prudently removed all records and references to himself.
There were 231 pictures on this particular Aegis. Many, snapped by U.S. troops, were of dead men sprawled in ditches, on roads, in village courtyards, in bedrooms, on mountainsides, in lavatories, in mosques, in apricot groves, in lumber yards, in wheat fields, on rooftops, in basements, in rivers, in forests and even in the Green Zone. These pictures were useful because Ari could sometimes identify the bodies, which was only a short step away from fingering those who might have wanted the victims dead, which was only another short step away from making them dead, too, either via Special Ops or American-hired assassins.
By noon Ari had only reached Digital Image No. 48. H
e was able to email tentative ID’s on four Kurds located in what must have been the Zagros Mountains. It was Ari’s guess that they were losers in a high-stakes smuggling game. For all he knew, these bodies could be in Iran. He wouldn’t put it past the Americans to try and get more bang for the buck by sending him images from beyond the agreed limit. He could not be certain of the victims’ identities because they all had been beheaded and their physiognomy was distorted.
His back was tired. He did not feel particularly hungry. He was determined not to drink. What was left?
He put on the jogging outfit he had purchased from Sports Zone. His official budget was limited to hand-to-mouth, but his cash flow had improved when he robbed the Kayak Express of every nickel and dime (in both senses) in their immediate possession. He had also relieved them of various firearms, some of which were hidden in his gazebo, the rest of which he had sent off with Abu Jasim to barter away up north, along with the Express’s supply of drugs. Abu Jasim would return as soon as Ari contacted him. With his share in the profits, he might begin shopping for some proper clothes, perhaps even a bed.
He was around ten minutes into his run when he realized he had not looked at his watch when he left. This did not put him out. He was more concerned with simply reaching his destination. Timing the run would come when he proved he could survive it. This began to seem doubtful by the time he reached Belvedere. He was gasping so hard his spine banged his chest. He could see his second wind just ahead, but every time he neared it it spun away like a wraith of oxygen. Yet he stumbled onward, drawing concerned glances from younger joggers, who accumulated in growing numbers as he neared the floodwall. A girl sheathed in spandex came up beside him, easily keeping pace as her blonde ponytail bobbed around her shoulders.
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