by James Lepore
“Do you see another car?” Catherine asked. “Between the trees? Anywhere?”
“No. I think we’re dealing with four altogether.”
Catherine did not reply, but continued to scan the scene before them. They had given the house a wide berth on their route back, climbing the bluff near a small bay, crossing the cliff road and then scrambling inside the tree line of the ridge above it until they deemed it safe to recross the road and make their way back; the knoll above the smokehouse, because of the view it afforded, had been their destination from the beginning. They could go no farther, however, because beyond the smokehouse and the stream was a rocky scrim, wide open and treeless, that led directly to the house. The only thing in between was the lone pine tree with the Citroën parked under it—and the two mujahideen types standing at its rear.
“We can’t get closer until tonight,” Pat said, looking at his watch, which told him it was now all of seven AM. “That’s a long wait:”
“I will call them,” said Catherine.
“Call them?”
“Yes, I have my cell phone:”
“To say what?”
“I will leave a message for Uncle Daniel:”meet us at the smokehouse: They will hear it and come for us. We will kill them as they approach:”
“What if only two come?”
“The others will hear the shots. They will come to investigate:”
“No, they’ll assume we have been killed:”
“They want you alive, Patrick. They want you to lead them to Megan. Do you know where she is, by the way?”
Pat took his eyes off the two Arabs to look at Catherine. “Are you saying you don’t believe me? What was last night all about?”
“No, Patrick, my love, I am saying if you do know, they will force it out of you. Better to tell them and die a quick death than be tortured:”
“I don’t know, but they won’t believe me, so they’ll torture me, anyway.”
“We shall kill them first:”
“What if one of them picks up the phone?”
“I will blurt out my message, pretending that I assume whoever answers is Daniel:”
“Okay, make the call:”
Catherine dialed Daniel’s landline and waited for his recorded greeting to end. “Uncle, we are at the smokehouse. Please come to meet us. Someone in the village said you had visitors this morning. What visitors? I am worried. We will wait here for you:”
Catherine ended the call.“We will separate,” she said.“You to the right and me to the left. Find a spot behind a rock. Lay out your extra clips. When you hear me fire, you fire. Remember, aim low. Bonne chance, Patrick.”
“And to you, Catherine.”
They took up their positions and watched as the two gunmen near the car continued their casual chat. A few minutes later—a long few minutes later—another man, the one with the bandaged head, emerged from the house and said something to the gunmen. Then all three looked in the direction of the smokehouse and bandage-head pointed at it. As he did, Pat involuntarily squeezed harder on the handle of his Beretta, wondering if he had been spotted as he lay prone, peering discreetly around a large boulder. The gun now seemed too small and toylike to do any damage, and he rued the fact that he had not chosen one of the bigger weapons. He glanced over at Catherine and saw that she was intently watching the three men. She had taken off her heavy wool coat to lay on, the morning sun warm enough. She was probably oblivious to the weather, anyway. Pat’s heart ached suddenly at this sight and the simultaneous thought of losing her. She looked over at him then and raised and slightly shook a clenched fist. They are coming. Be strong.
Pat nodded in response, and then looked back toward the house. The large man who had thrown Daniel Peletier to his death now appeared and said something to the other three. Then the two gunmen began walking slowly toward the smokehouse, first unslinging their rifles and carrying them at the ready. The other two moved to the other side of the car to watch.
Fuck, Pat thought, looking over at Catherine, who turned to look at him, then simply pointed to the two men who were coming toward them. When, thirty seconds later, they got to a point about ten paces from the front of the smokehouse, Pat, watching with his Beretta pointed at them and his finger lightly on the trigger, heard two loud blasts from Catherine’s Magnum. He fired as well, emptying his clip in the direction of the two men. Both went down and lay there on the open scrim, their weapons under them. Then, to Pat’s amazement, Catherine scrambled down off the knoll toward the dead bodies. Reaching them in a flash, she kicked them over, grabbed their AK-47s and ran back, where she immediately dropped one rifle and began firing the other one in the direction of the men back at the car, who, rifleless, took cover behind it.
Pat hustled along the ground to Catherine and picked up the second rifle. He had never fired one but he would learn on the job.
“The safety’s off,” she said, “it reloads automatically. Aim at the car. I will circle around. Fire once every five seconds. The clip is full. Don’t put it on automatic-here:” She pointed to the lever on the side of the weapon. Then she took quick aim and fired off another burst at the Citroën. ”We must keep them pinned down:”
“No;” Pat said. ”I don’t like it. You’ll expose yourself. They’ll separate and trap you:”
“Yes. They”re confused. I must do this now. We need a car, Patrick. We can’t walk out of here:”
They were lying prone at the top of the knoll, side by side, their rifles pointed at the Citroën below. As they talked, they looked straight ahead. Catherine, her rifle on its four-round shooting mode, fired off a burst. Pat followed suit, getting a quick lesson in the oddly delicate yet rock-solid feel of the famous Kalashnikov as it pushed back against his shoulder.
“I’ll go,” he said. “You’re a better shot. You can keep them pinned down. And if I can draw them out, you could actually hit one. That’s the whole point, no?”
“No, I’m going:”
Before Pat could answer, the large man, the body-tosser, emerged from the front of the Citroën in a mad low dash toward the house. Catherine and Pat fired simultaneously, and to Pat’s astonishment, the man went down, falling hard face forward onto the stone steps that led to the house’s wide front porch. Then their attention was diverted by the sound of the Citroën’s engine starting and the car’s tires screeching as it backed sharply away from them and headed down the driveway. They fired at it, but in an instant it was gone, out of sight behind the tree line, where the driver switched back toward the cliff road.
“I don’t think there are others,” said Catherine. “They would have come out to help. Let’s get to my car.”
They went cautiously, keeping low, but soon it was clear that there were no more terrorists about. Before getting into the Peugeot, Catherine and Pat stepped over to the large man whose body, shot in the chest and head, lay on its side half on the ground and half on the house’s stone steps.
“He threw the body;” Pat said.
“Are you sure Uncle was dead?”
“Yes, I could tell. He was dead already.”
Catherine did not respond. Toeing the body onto its back, she dug out the man’s ID from around his neck, then pulled his billfold out of his back pocket. It contained a thick wad of hundred euro notes and nothing else. On the belt of his fatigue pants was clipped a cell phone, which she took also. Her own cell phone she removed from the front pocket of her slacks and put into the glove box of the car. Then, returning to the body, she placed the muzzle of her AK-47 against the dead man’s crotch and calmly squeezed off a burst of four rounds. Where the crotch of the man’s fatigue pants had been, Pat could now see a ragged gaping hole. “He won’t be able to enjoy his virgins now,” she said, and then, leaning over, she spit on his face.
In the quiet that ensued, Pat remained still, motionless, as if to hold off making what Catherine had just done a historical fact. “I’ll search the others,” he said finally, still not moving.
“Yes, good,” Catherine replied, still outwardly calm, as if she had been interrupted while folding laundry or putting away groceries. “Take their extra magazines and ammunition, and their cell phones if they have them. I will hunt down Unclés cell phone. Doro will be calling:”
When Pat returned from searching the bodies on the scrim, Catherine was in her car, in the passenger’s seat, her head down, sobbing. He slipped behind the wheel, saw that the keys were in the ignition, and started the engine. When he looked at Catherine, she was drying her eyes with the sleeve of Daniel’s bulky old navy blue sweater.
“Paris,” he said. “Monsieur Duval.”
“Yes,” Catherine answered. “Thirty-three Rue de Matisse.”
~17~
MOROCCO, APRIL-MAY, 2003
Throughout April and into early May, Megan visited Abdullah al-Azirris shop weekly and sometimes more often. Abdullah made a living as a pharmacist, but his passions were history and politics. Once he got going on these subjects, it was hard to stop him. Their slow-moving chess games were pretexts. When customers came into the shop, as they often did, Megan stayed seated at the table in the corner, returning their stares until they looked away. Shamelessly, she taped all of her conversations with the pharmacist, as well as all of the conversations Abdullah had with his customers, even those in Arabic and Berber. She turned on the small, expensive, extremely high-performing recorder hidden in her bag before entering the shop and did not turn it off until she was back out on the street, usually an hour, sometimes as much as two hours later. She wore Western clothes, usually jeans or cotton slacks with a light sweater or a layer or two of loose tops. She wore the djellabas she had bought in her small suite at the Farah Hotel, or occasionally when she was with Lahani at his place. Hakim walked her to and from Abdullah’s shop and a cab driver she had hired on a permanent basis took her back and forth from the hotel to the Carrières Thomas market square.
She heard a lot of Muslim history in the shop: the life and times of the Prophet, the spread of Islam to the east and west and south after his death, the forceful expulsion of Muslims from Spain in 1492—and from all of Europe in 1683—Napoleons conquest of Egypt in 1798, the abolishment by the Turks of the caliphate in Istanbul in 1922. This last was, according to Abdullah, “the final blow to the pride of a shame-based culture.” As to the modern faith, it had been corrupted from within, by oil, hatred, and fanaticism: the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia who preached annihilation of everyone except themselves, the Shiites in Iran who stoned children to death, the tribal councils in Pakistan who ordered the gang rape of women who committed adultery, the “leaders” of Hamas and Hezbollah who sent teenage boys and girls to blow themselves up in crowds of innocent Israelis. Much of this Megan knew. She had been reading and writing extensively about Islam for more than two years. Nevertheless, she listened attentively. She could afford to be patient. Lahani had obtained a special visa for her that allowed her to stay in the country indefinitely. After each visit, she dated and labeled her tape according to the participants in the conversation—usually just her and Abdullah, though occasionally others, two Berber women, neighboring shopkeeper, etc. were included.
On the issue of terrorism, the pharmacist was of the strong opinion that al-Qaeda, having aroused the sleeping American giant, was now more interested in retaking Europe than in lashing out in anger at the United States. Only a fool would believe that America could be defeated, and Osama bin Laden, whatever else he was, was no fool. It would be far from preposterous, however, for him to believe that Europe could be reclaimed by exerting pressure from within and without. “It lacks the will,” Abdullah said.“It is like the lamb who trusts its butcher.” He cited excerpts from bin Laden”s taped messages and myriad postings on jihadist Web sites to support this theory. He knew of the Falcon of Andalus as an important figure in the history of Islam, but, like Professor Madani, the scholar Lahani had sent Megan to, he was unaware of a myth involving his return. “But it is a brilliant idea,” he said to Megan, “to rally the angry, humiliated masses behind the Falcon, risen from the dead to return Islam to its full glory, its rightful place as the dominant force on the planet:”
Only once was Megan exposed to the young male Muslim anger that she had seen so much of in Europe. On her third or fourth visit, sometime in mid-April, a man of perhaps twenty-five, in need of a shave, in jeans, running shoes, and a Western-style leather jacket, came into the shop asking for a toothache remedy. Megan and Abdullah were sitting at the chess table in the corner, a sight that the man reacted to with a contempt that he made no effort to conceal. Abdullah rose and, after a series of questions in Arabic, he took the man through the curtain behind his counter. When they came out a few minutes later, the man hurried out without looking at Megan.
“I am going to purchase an ingredient I need,” Abdullah said. “He has a cracked tooth that is very painful. It should come out, but he is deathly afraid of the dentist. I will only be ten minutes or so. You will no doubt need at least that much time to contemplate your next move:”
Megan knew what her next move was going to be. She didn’t care about the game, anyway. She had been left alone in the shop before and had spent the time sticking her nose and her finger into some of the more exotic sounding powders that lined the room. She was about to get up to wander around when a movement through the slats of the shuttered window to her right caught her attention. Two of the three young men she had seen praying on her first visit were in the dirt courtyard, smoking. The movement she saw was the man with the toothache joining them. Having seen him up close, having felt his hostility fill the shop, she remained seated and studied his companions, comfortably concealed behind the wooden shutter but able to see through the thin, sun-filled spaces between its slats. Also in their mid-twenties, the other two were dressed in Western-style clothes as well. Both needed shaves. All stood under a corrugated steel awning that rested on poles in the ground on one end and the tin roof of a small shed on the other. Morocco’s brief and mild winter had passed and the days were getting hotter and dryer.
As Megan was studying them, a fourth man joined the three. Megan immediately recognized this man as Mohammed, Abdel al-Lahani’s bulky, taciturn driver. He greeted them, his Arabic husky and guttural, and then proceeded to talk, commanding their attention with a presence and a confident, insistent voice that took Megan back, it was so out of character. They were only a few yards away. As their conversation drifted toward her, Megan took the recorder out of her purse and put it on the windowsill facing the courtyard. Abdullah had opened the unscreened window earlier to admit whatever breeze was out there but closed the shutters to keep out the African heat. On an impulse, she took her small digital camera out of her bag and snapped off a few pictures of the men, the viewfinder pressed against a slice of sunlight in between the shutter’s slats.
In a few minutes, they were done. Mohammed left. The three young men continued to smoke in the shade of the steel awning. Then a female voice called to them from one of the houses or shops that lined the street and they left, too.
When Abdullah returned, Megan mentioned the men.
“I saw the toothache man with three others in the courtyard,” she said. “When is he coming back for his remedy?”
“He doesn’t work, our young friend, but he is very busy. His mother will stop by later. Why?”
“I would like to talk to him.”
“You be wasting your time. I assume he was with his unemployed friends, the ones that hang out at the café next to the spice shop:”
“Yes, but one was older, more your age:”
Abdullah raised his thick eyebrows at this information, but said nothing.
“Who are they?” Megan asked.
“They are angry children,” the pharmacist answered. “They live off of their parents. They drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. They play the victim game, as there is nothing else for them to do:”
“Do you know the families?”
“Yes. I offered our youn
g man an apprenticeship here last year. He sneered at me:”
“Where do they get their information?”
“Haven’t you noticed all the dishes? Everyone in this neighborhood is dirt poor, yet they all have satellite television. Al Jazeera is on all the time, twenty-four hours a day of jihadist propaganda. For their local poison they go to the mosque near the square:”
“Why won’t he talk to me?”
“You are a whore, and a Western one at that:”
“Are there many others like this?”
“I only know his group, but I sometimes pass the mosque on a Friday afternoon. The crowd spills into the courtyard to hear the new imam:”
“What is the young man’s name?”
“Sirhan al-Majid.”