“You don’t trust them?”
“They don’t trust us,” Anja said. “But why is everybody paying so much attention to us? We’re a smart group, and we’re all edgy—”
“I’m not edgy!”
Anja giggled. “D-girl, you are the edgiest person in the group. You’re the one who’s calling people out. Mei-Mei just follows Drego. Drego’s got his ghetto cape on with the street-cred labels sewn on the outside. You’re edgy, girl.”
“Okay, now what?”
“You have any idea what we have that anybody wants?”
“Maybe they want to take you as a hostage,” I started to kid.
Anja’s face said she wasn’t kidding. “What do you think?”
“Michael’s got something going on?”
She shrugged.
Morning. Coffee in Michael’s room. Everybody’s there, along with Victor, who seemed to be able to speak with authority for the Brits, and a girl who said her name twice and I still couldn’t understand it. Victor was talking.
“Sayeed Ibn Zayad is from North Africa. He mostly operates like a warlord in his country, terrorizing people much the way that your Sturmers do, but on a wider scale,” he said. “We suspect he has some connection with C-8, but we’re not sure what he’s up to exactly. British intelligence knows that he’s in the country, and that he has sent some people to the conference. They don’t want us anywhere near him.”
“You’re dealing with British intelligence?” Tristan.
“It’s more a case of them dealing with us,” Victor said. “It would be an embarrassment to the government to have any formal connection with what amounts to a terrorist group.”
“You could have told us about British intelligence,” Michael said. “And I don’t know anything about this guy. Where did you say he was from?”
“Morocco. But he has some influence in the Iberian Peninsula as well,” Victor said.
“I still don’t know that much about him,” Michael said.
“It’s the American disease,” Victor said. “To you people, history begins in Boston and ends in San Francisco.”
“That’s nonsense.” Michael waved Victor off.
“Michael, you won the bloody Second World War, too, and you don’t know anything about that, either!” Victor said.
“Yeah, and the Revolutionary War, too,” Michael said.
I looked at Anja, and her eyes were huge. We were all feeling a little stupid.
“So what’s up with this guy now?” Michael asked.
“He’s making bolder and bolder moves,” Victor said. “When he was in the mountains outside Marrakech, he devoted most of his time just to screwing up the tourist trade and supporting some incredibly stupid pirates around Gibraltar. He was more of a nuisance than anything else.
“But now he’s out of the mountains, heavily armed, and flaunting his power. The question is whether or not he has any new power, any backing that’s not obvious, or whether he’s just falling in love with himself as every other tyrant has done in the past.”
“So how are you going to find out? Do you have spies?”
“We sent in an eighteen-year-old from Surrey, a very clever boy with golden-brown skin and startling green eyes,” Victor said. “Somehow they found him out and sent us his eyes in a small ivory case.”
“So now what, you gave up on him?” Tristan.
“I don’t give up that easily.” Victor shook his head. “From Sayeed’s letter, I see he’s found you and wants to meet you. The word is that he didn’t bring his people into Dulwich because of the weapons ban. That’s probably eighty-five-percent bluff. Actually, I think he wants us to be impressed by his weapons. But if he’s here, he’s here for a reason. I think maybe your little group can find out. He’s not going to try to intimidate you.”
“We’re Americans … so that means …?”
“Let’s face it, Michael, you are the most violent people on the planet. You can’t seriously deny that.”
“The Sturmers tried to intimidate us,” Anja said.
“You held your own against them,” Victor said flatly.
“You got spies everywhere?” Drego.
“In this country,” Victor said, “we have eyes.”
“So what do you want us to do with this …?”
“Sayeed Ibn Zayad. You’ll have a dossier by tonight. What I want you to do, if you find the scheme appealing, is to answer his letter. By now, everybody knows you met with the Sturmers. Meet with Sayeed, too. In the end he might not show up, but it’s worth a try. Whatever we can find out has to be useful.”
“If that was your intention all along, why didn’t you say it the first time we met?”
“It wasn’t my intention at all,” Victor said, “But beneath the bluster and speeches at the conference, I sense that some people are at least taking us seriously.”
“Why don’t you just clear it with British intelligence and go yourself?” Drego asked. “If you’re as stiff-upper-lippish as all that, why don’t you just contact this Sayeed and invite him to tea?”
“Because I don’t have the nerve to face down our national intelligence system, and I don’t have the mystique of being American. And we’re not led by a rock star such as Michael. Sayeed won’t trust you, but he’s going to want to see Michael up close. He’s going to want to see the Americans up close. He might try to bluff his way through a meeting with you, but he is far more apt to reveal himself than he would in a meeting with us.”
“Victor, I think you’re playing pussy with us,” Michael said. “And I don’t like it. If we meet with Sayeed, I’ll tweet you. Or maybe I won’t.”
8
Watched the news on television, then decided I needed to get some fruit to eat later. I had an itch on my thigh and stopped off in a local pharmacy on the way to the store. After I spent ten minutes explaining to a pharmacist who spoke in what I thought was a Middle Eastern accent, he told me he couldn’t help me unless he saw the area. I think he wanted me to take my pants down in the shop. I said no, and then he gave me a tube of some cream. I hoped it would work.
My leg itched. The rooms seemed drearier than before. The elements were coming together, but I was feeling frustrated. Maybe C-8 was counting on that. I just knew I wanted to go home.
In Michael’s room with the whole crew. Drego asked Michael if he was going to meet with Sayeed.
“What do you think?” Michael asked. “If he pulls the same crap as the Sturmers did, it won’t be of any use. If Victor is right, if we’re getting respect just because we’re Americans, then a meeting will give Sayeed a boost. Do we want that?”
“Michael, listen to me.” Mei-Mei pulled up a chair and sat in front of Michael. “You don’t have the nerve to face Sayeed! The bottom line is that you don’t have the nerve! Sayeed will eat you! He’ll eat you and spit you out like the boy you are!”
Mei-Mei’s round head was inches from Michael as she vented her rage at him. I looked at her: the narrowed eyes, the mouth a red, bloodless wound stretched across the bottom of her face. Her small hands were clenched and pounded into the tops of her knees as she spoke.
“You were a joke at the meeting with the Sturmers! They were laughing at you! At us!”
I felt my heart beating faster. My throat went dry.
“That Sturmer girl would have kicked your ass, Michael! You would have been lying there on that floor sucking sawdust if she’d wanted you there! You are a punk!”
I felt myself reaching for Mei-Mei’s hair.
I snatched it and ripped her away from Michael. Now I was in her face. She was shocked. I didn’t know how I looked, or what anyone was thinking, but I knew I was pissed.
“Back off, Mei-Mei! Back off and give the people who want this thing to work a chance!” I was screaming at her. “And do it now before I snap your doll’s head off your pretty little body!”
Mei-Mei was shocked. The face went blank for a minute. Her hands came up to disentangle my fingers from her hair.
<
br /> She was standing, moving away. Now stumbling. There were tears in her eyes. She wiped them away in a fury of motion.
“I am forever your enemy!” she spit the words at me. “Forever!”
“You and the common cold!” I was already sorry for what I was saying. But I couldn’t stop myself. “Why don’t you just grow up?”
She left the room and rushed into the hallway. There were tourists, stock-still, holding their breaths, wondering what was going on. Drego followed Mei-Mei into the hall.
“We’re all tired,” Tristan was saying. His voice was calm, steady. “Let’s get some rest and start again later.”
Someone was saying yes. We were all tired. Anja and Tristan went by me, and it was just me and Michael in the room. I was collapsing against the walls, close to tears, against the cream-colored walls. Michael came over to me and put his arm around my shoulders.
“Thank you for standing up for me,” he said. “They’re good people, Mei-Mei and Drego. They don’t have to be right all the time. They’re entitled to lose their tempers, to be assholes once in a while. But they’re good people. They mean well. Sometimes good intentions don’t lead to Hell.”
I was embarrassed. Then Michael kissed me, lightly on the cheek. I turned to him and he smiled. I couldn’t read him.
“What are you thinking?” I asked. Awkward. I probably didn’t want to know.
“I think, for the moment, you were thinking about me, not about the movement, or the conference, or anything else,” he said. “My heart is jumping around looking for a place to land.”
I’m available, I think.
“I’ll apologize to Mei-Mei,” I said.
“Not just yet,” Michael said. “Give her time to deal with her anger. We’ll all get back together again. Don’t worry.”
“Then you’re not pissed at me?”
“Dahlia, sometimes when you’re onstage and what you’re playing just sounds like noise and nobody seems to do what’s right, you know the level of talent you’ve got behind you and you give it a chance to happen,” Michael says. “Sometimes it doesn’t happen, but when it does … when it does, it can be the most beautiful sound in the world. We’ve got the talent here. Let’s let it happen.”
I thought I was going to fall as I walked away from him. But I didn’t.
He didn’t know who I really was.
My biography:
Dahlia Grillo. Father is—was—Juan Grillo, accountant in the Dominican Republic, cabdriver in the Bronx. His famous quote—“Life goes on with or without you.” Mother is—was—Estrella García Colón. Waitress in the South Bronx, moved to the west Bronx to move up in the world. Her famous quote—“Know what’s in your head, not just what’s in your heart.” Died of pneumonia waiting for a new Medicaid card.
I got into numbers in elementary school and liked them a lot more than I liked people. Or maybe I just trusted them more. I didn’t have a famous quote.
Sometimes I wanted to be a housewife pushing a stroller through the park. At other times I wanted to be just mindlessly happy. What was wrong with that?
9
I was seriously thinking of adopting Anja. She was so together. It was still early and Michael wanted to discuss whether we should meet with Sayeed’s group. Anja said we should go to Stonehenge and we could talk about it on the journey there. It would take us away from the hotel and give us a chance to see something other than each other. Way cool, Anja.
The weather was cold and rainy and gray. We were traveling in a rented van and Tristan was driving. Drego was kidding Tristan, saying he was just faking driving and he really had the van on automatic, and Tristan almost smiled. He didn’t quite make it, but it was a good effort.
I knew Drego was keeping me and Mei-Mei apart. I felt bad for blowing her up.
“I assume that most of you looked up Sayeed on the Internet,” Michael said. “He acts like some kind of monster. When Morocco gave up its monarchy, he led a group of rebels and took over the area in the High Atlas mountains. Now he holds the little Moroccan security force at bay and makes raids on whatever group he wants.”
“Morocco is largely dependent on tourism, and Sayeed threatens the tourist trade with hotel bombings,” Javier added. “All in the name of some mysterious religious sect. God gets blamed again.”
“So he’s a bad guy,” Drego said. “What’s he doing in England now? And are you just taking what the Brits are handing out? That their intelligence wants them to stay away from Sayeed?”
“Yeah, that smells right,” Anja said. “The English parliament still has one foot in the nineteenth century. They don’t want to be near anything that’s going to be on the front pages of the tabloids.”
“I can see where we might be able to get some useful information from a meeting with this guy,” Michael said. “But with them throwing in the bit about British intelligence so late in the game—I’m not sure.”
“You think American intelligence isn’t onto him?” Javier’s voice softened when he spoke to Michael.
“The question is, does our intelligence, or British intelligence, work for the country or for the fat cats who own the country,” Michael said.
“Maybe they just want to meet a rock star.” Mei-Mei’s voice was shaky. I hoped she was catching a cold.
“People like Sayeed think they’re the only stars in the universe,” Michael said. “They’ll pay any amount of money to get you to perform for them in private, just so they can say they own you.”
“You ever perform for somebody in private like that?” Drego asked.
“Yeah, I guess.” Michael glanced my way and out the window.
My way? Yes! You worried about what I’m thinking, baby? Are you?
“What can we get from Sayeed that’s not already on the Internet?” Drego asked. “There’s like a ton of information on him.”
“That’s the problem.” Tristan hunched over the steering wheel as we rounded a turn. “Too much information floating around; you can’t follow it all. This guy comes out of every armed conflict he gets into with flying colors. He’s not stupid enough to give out information about what he’s going to be doing. That doesn’t sound like him.”
“He works at being a mystery,” Javier added.
“Then the feeling is we shouldn’t meet with him?” Michael asked.
“If he works at being a mystery,” I said, “if he does anything to keep that going, then he’s going to leave a footprint. It’s like measuring a pyramid. If you can’t get to the top of the pyramid, you can still measure its shadow.”
“And he’s going to hold still for you to measure his shadow?” Javier.
“If we can get a rough count of how many people he has, we can pretty much scope out the size of his operation,” Tristan said. “That’s one thing we can figure on.”
“And if we get any hints to where he’s going to be operating, maybe we can measure his shadow while he’s still moving,” Drego said.
It was guy stuff, but it sounded good.
It took an hour and a half to get from London to Stonehenge. Anja started talking about the controversy of the renovations that had taken three years to complete.
“Historians were saying there was more new stuff than old.” Anja had a way of talking that made her mouth look as if she was smiling all the time. “The renovations people said that in a few years, all you would have left would be a pile of dust and a few pictures.”
We had to climb a small hill to see the stones laid out in a circle. They were big and heavy-looking, and it was hard to imagine moving the stones in a world without wheels and modern machines.
“Dahlia, could you have done a model of the people who built Stonehenge?” Michael asked.
“No.” Simple answer. “Too many guesses involved. You don’t know the engineering skills of the people who built this place, or their working conditions. Basically, you need to know what was done, and why it was done, and how it was carried out. You can add some theories about what they
might do in the future, but you need to start with a base of facts.”
“We got enough facts on Sayeed?” Tristan.
“Sayeed’s strength is violence,” Javier said. His motorized wheelchair looked like a throne. There was a screen on the left armrest that viewed the area behind the chair. “Can we stop him if there’s violence involved?”
“Sayeed is not playing the endgame,” Mei-Mei said. “C-8 is playing the endgame and Sayeed is just a strategy.”
That made sense.
Stonehenge was disappointing. It did look old, but you knew they had covered the original stones with a plastic material to preserve the original shapes. I think if it had been a dry day, it would have been cool, but the rain on the plastic made the whole scene too shiny. It was like the backdrop for an animated flick. Still, we walked around it for a good half hour, with me thinking that my narrow butt was freezing. Then the rain picked up and we bought a few souvenirs from a vendor at the bottom of the hill and piled back into the van.
“This brochure says that the Stonehenge stones were laid out in a hexagon that faced a particular pattern of stars,” Drego said. “A gold plate with a near-identical design belonged to the king of Stonehenge and was popularly known as Britain’s first crown jewels. You think there were aliens building this stuff?”
“Dahlia doesn’t think so.” Anja.
How did she know that?
“Dahlia?” Javier.
“Almost everything has some kind of structure. Read Plato. You have structures and patterns that repeat themselves in nature,” I said. “Some we’ve seen all our lives and just kind of recognize, or maybe we just recognize the ones we like. But the easiest thing in the world is to make too much of them. You can go crazy digging up explanations of stuff you don’t understand.”
“So some shit is just mysterious?” Tristan said.
“Something like that,” I answered.
“Dahlia, you think Sayeed is just mysterious?”
“We know more or less who he is,” I said. “Like Tristan and Drego were saying, if we add in other pieces of information, we can plot him out. If the stuff he’s done in the past is more or less consistent with what he’s done recently, we can make pretty good predictions.”
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