by Mike Leon
“Excellent,” Stromwell says. He whistles sharply with his fingers in his mouth. “Hamid, give Mr. Sanchez the other fifty thousand dollars we owe him.”
Sayyid raises a pistol from concealment behind his back and shoots Sanchez between the eyes. The little Mexican man falls forward, cracking his head against the lip of the trailer at Fatimah’s toes. A few of Stromwell’s bagmen jump at the sound of the gun. One man leaps behind a shipping container.
“Agh!” Stromwell shrieks, covering his ears far too late to do anything. “That hardly seemed necessary.”
“He knew too much,” Sayyid says, shaking his head grimly. He tucks his gun into his waistband and jumps down from the trailer. “Besides, executions keep the men in line. You should try it.”
Stromwell snorts. “Sun Tzu said a leader leads by example, not by force.”
“Western camel shit,” Sayyid dismisses.
“He was Chinese—You’re not a big reader, are you?” Stromwell says.
“I have the Quran here,” Sayyid grunts, pointing to his head. “That makes reading unnecessary.” He is not exaggerating. Fatimah sometimes has to read documents for him, as he cannot by himself. “Have your men dispose of the body where it will not be found.”
Fatimah observes as Stromwell studies Sayyid, obviously weighing the benefits and consequences should he choose to differ. He chooses correctly.
“Hamid,” Stromwell says. “Take this to Ramzi. He’ll know what to do.”
Fatimah steps down from the trailer with Sayyid’s help. The land around them is brown and dirty with patches of grass and weeds. The shells of old cars, rusted and rotting, lie stacked along the periphery with piles of tires as tall as three men. Clattering hammers interrupt music from a radio somewhere nearby, and showers of sparks spray the air where men weld heavy pieces of steel to small pickup trucks ahead.
“I present your army!” Stromwell says, spreading his arms wide. He’s a showman, capitalist, a symbol of the godless lifestyle that rules in the west. Under the Caliphate, men like him will discard their wicked vices and bow before the true messengers of Allah. But for now his ways must be tolerated.
“I expected Adnan to be here,” Sayyid says.
“Yes. Me too.” Stromwell grimaces. “Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. Adnan was killed last night.”
“Killed?” Sayyid reveals a rare glimpse of grief. Adnan Hassan was his most trusted lieutenant, and had gone ahead of them to make preparations for the operation. “How?”
“A freak accident. Some racist maniac decided to shoot up the mosque while he was there.”
Sayyid releases something that might be called a sniffle, but is more like a snort. That is the whole of his reaction to the news, and it is sorrowful by his standards.
“This did not put the operation at risk?” Sayyid asks.
“No. I’ve asked al-Kilij to investigate any loose ends just in case.”
“Al-Kilij? The Bosnian? He is with us?”
“He is.”
“Good.”
Behind them, the man Stromwell calls Hamid grabs the arm of Juan Sanchez and drags his carcass away from them. Some of the workers look strangely at Fatimah. She is surely an uncommon sight here, a girl under a black burqa in the west. She wonders how they imagine her. Do they think she is beautiful or ugly under her shield?
“How soon until the fleet will be ready?” Sayyid says.
“A day,” Stromwell smiles. “Not even.”
“Good. And the infidel? You have found him?”
“Oh yes.” Stromwell rolls his eyes and laughs. “Finding him, meh, that was the easy part.”
“How did you do it?” Fatimah asks. The legends surrounding her enemy are whispered in terror among the Mujahideen. They say he flies through the night sky, and that he cannot be seen by the living.
“Let me show you.” Stromwell motions for them to follow him. He leads them through the dirt and past dozens of broken cars and a few that look like they might run, past a team of men welding an arched crossbar over the bed of a pickup truck. Others like it, already complete with mounted Browning heavy machine guns, have been lined up nearby. At a set of tables far away from any of the welding, men wearing filtered masks over their mouths and noses stir sludge in big white buckets with mixing oars. Bricks of white powder crammed into plastic wrap are stacked as tall as Sayyid in the room on shipping skids. The skids are roped off with yellow tape and waist high orange cones.
“Mother of Satan,” Fatimah says.
“No,” Stromwell laughs. “That’s a poor man’s explosive. I have real bomb makers in my employ. What you see is RDX. It’s far more stable and more destructive.”
Stromwell leads them to the rear of a black utility van with its doors wide open. Inside, a sweaty fat man with greasy glasses and a bushy black beard lies back against an old office chair with holes torn in its fake leather cover to reveal the foam underneath. The mouse and keyboard in front of him are half covered by the collection of colorful pornographic magazines that clutter his little desk. More of them lie on the floor. A bank of flat panel monitors display along the wall facing him. He eats Combos, an American snackfood abomination, from a plastic bag and fans himself with one of the disgusting magazines.
“What is this fuhsha?” Sayyid growls, as he scans the spread of pornography. He places a hand on the grip of the pistol tucked into his pants band and his face shifts to the scowl it always does when he’s thinking about executing someone. Fatimah has seen it many times.
The fat man at the computer looks blankly back at them. “Me?” he says through a mouthful of snack crackers.
“An indiscretion,” Stromwell says. “He will take all of the pornography and burn it as soon as we are done with this conversation. Won’t you, Yusef?”
“Oh, yeah.” His eyes fixate nervously on Sayyid’s hand. “Yeah. Definitely.”
“And you will do Ghusl before anything else after that,” Sayyid says.
“Yes. Yes.”
“Good,” Stromwell says. “Now that that’s settled, my friends want to see our toy.”
Yusef releases a deep breath and places his bag of atrocious haram crackers down on the table and begins loading windows on the monitors. He has to push a Hustler magazine away from the mouse for space to use the implement.
“Sayyid, what two things do you need to find anyone?” Stromwell asks.
“Is this a child’s riddle?” Sayyid says. “I do not have patience for games.”
“No. It’s simple common sense. A place and a time. Right?”
“Obvious.”
“The first part is easy. We know where he’s been. We can just go there. But that other thing is the hard part. He’s not there anymore. Time is all that keeps us from finding anyone. What if we could change that?”
“You go back in time?”
“No. That’s fantasy. It’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible for Allah, may He be glorified and exalted.”
“Semantics aside, what if we had a record that we could look at?”
“A record of time?”
“You could find anyone,” Fatimah says. “You only need to know where they were once, and then you can follow them to where they are now.”
“There’s a very smart lady under there,” Stromwell says. “Yusef, show them the shopping mall video.”
Yusef double clicks and a still image stretches across the right hand monitor in front of them. It’s an aerial shot of a massive multi-wing building with truck sized air conditioning units atop the roof. Tiny people flood from the exits, spreading through the parking lot like a stampede. A plume of smoke grows from one wing of the building.
“You know the Morston Galleria massacre?” Stromwell says.
Fatimah does not. World news is not an interest of hers, but Sayyid nods approvingly. “A great triumph for Allah, may He be glorified and exalted,” he says.
“Yes,” Stromwell says. “Except not.”
�
�It is well known that our brothers in Al-Shabaab did this thing.”
“On the TV news, yes. That story was bought and paid for. The internet tells a different story, one which we took interest in.”
Yusef zooms in on a section of the image: on the face of the enemy. He walks from a shattered entryway, burning with hate, as the flames burn behind him.
“That’s him,” Fatimah says.
“Are you sure?” Sayyid asks.
“I could never forget.”
“We’re sure,” Stromwell nods.
“Who gave you this tape?”
“We made the tape.”
“How did you know where to find him?”
“I already told you.” Stromwell smiles mischievously. “We read on the internet.”
“What website is this that tells you the future?”
“Show him, Yusef.”
The unkempt man clicks another button and drags a new window on to the center monitor in front of them even as the video on the right continues to play. The new image is a vibrantly colored aerial view of the junkyard with its mountains of rusty cars. In the center of the frame, Fatimah sees herself standing in the brown dirt behind the big black van. She looks like a little bug.
“Here’s the junkyard right now,” Yusef says. He jabs a button on the keyboard in front of him and the picture skips, the little ant people rearrange in an instant. Fatimah sees Sayyid talking to Stromwell as they carry the dead coyote away. “Here’s the junkyard ten minutes ago.”
“You push rewind. Big deal,” Sayyid says.
“Here’s the Capitol building,” Yusef says. He taps another key and the video skips to a top-down picture of the American Capitol building. People move about the grass outside. Yusef clicks on one of them and the video skips again to a much closer shot. It’s a woman sitting down on a small bench to read the New York Times. Fatimah can almost read the print. Yusef taps a key again and the image skips to the same bench, only occupied by a man wearing big red headphones and fiddling with a cell phone. “The Capitol ten minutes ago.”
“You have a spy satellite,” Sayyid says. “It is neat, but I have seen these before.”
Fatimah understands what he does not yet.
“Yusef,” she says. “Show me Ground Zero.”
Stromwell smiles wide. Yusef pulls up the image she asked for.
“Show me Ground Zero seven hours, two minutes and forty-nine seconds ago,” she says.
Yusef takes a second to type the number into a small window overlaid on top of the picture. Then the video cuts to exactly the time she requested.
“Pick any place in the country, Sayyid,” Stromwell says. “I will show it to you. Now. Yesterday. Three days ago. Any place you can name.”
“How is this possible?” Sayyid says.
“Take it all the way out,” Stromwell says. Yusef taps a button at his command and the image shifts to a crisp view of the middle section of North America. The top border of the window runs through Toronto and the bottom cuts off midway through Mexico. Puffy white clouds obscure much of the southeastern states. “My friends, witness the next next next generation of spy satellite technology. Eight hundred trillion megapixel.”
“At this resolution you don’t even need to zoom,” Yusef says. “You just take a picture and you get everything. You blow it up if you want a closer look later.”
“We are literally recording everything that happens in the United States. Every day.”
“Unless it’s cloudy,” Yusef interjects.
“Unless it’s cloudy, yes,” Stromwell begrudgingly parrots back. “The system has some limitations.”
“We’re measuring files in exabytes here,” Yusef says. “We can only store a few months of footage at a time. That’s with a bank of solid state drives that fill an airline hangar. And the satellite is geosynchronous and points straight down at Kansas, so we can’t look at London or Baghdad or anyplace else. What you see is what you get.”
“What you get is omniscience. You can see with the eyes of God.”
“Do not be so arrogant,” Fatimah warns. Stromwell gives her a thoughtful glance before he continues.
“Once we heard about the shopping mall, we simply hit rewind and had a look. There he was. We pushed fast forward a little bit and we found him. Where is he right now?”
“GameStop,” Yusef says.
“He works at GameStop.” Stromwell shakes his head. “It’s really quite baffling.”
“You know where he is all the time,” Sayyid shakes his head. “Why then haven’t you killed him yet?”
“You heard the stories about him—how dangerous he is?”
“Yes.”
“Let me assure you, what you have heard is all true. Killing him could take an army. I have provided what I can, but I’m not a soldier. I’m a businessman. And if I want to stay in business, I’ll be a thousand miles away when this bloodbath begins.”
INT. GAMESTOP - DAY
“This guy always wears a suit,” Sid says. He stands behind the counter at GameStop, leaning over the second of the store’s two computers. Bruce sways rightward from the computer next to him to look over his shoulder. “I think he might even sleep in one.”
“Why are you looking at pictures of Jason Statham?” Bruce says.
“Lily said to wear what he wears when we go out tonight.”
“Where you going? The Yacht Club?”
“La Mouche Espagnole.”
“Damn! This bitch is like that then.”
“Like what?”
“Thinking she’s fancy. Should have known. She’s a stripper after all. Frontin’ pays her bills.”
“Frontin’?”
“That’s how these triflin’ ass hoes reel you in. They’re all fun and shit at first. They get low on you in the club, send you titty pics, suck your dick. Then, soon as they think they can, they pull all that shit out like a magician’s tablecloth. Then they start telling you get a job, and asking you when you get paid three times a week. Then it’s all about how much jewelry, how many weaves, how many lobster dinners. Lobster motherfucking dinners.” Bruce shakes his head. “I paid for my share before I figured out the game.”
“I don’t think she’s asking for anything like that.”
“She’s asking you now! Most expensive restaurant in fifty miles, and she’s telling you what to wear too, and she doesn’t even suck your dick a little bit? Not even one little lick? You’re so whipped you can just climb up on a piece of pumpkin pie right now.”
“So what do you do about a trifling ass ho that won’t stop frontin’?” Sid asks.
“Pshhhh,” Bruce hisses. “You move the fuck on and find another girl.”
The door to the back room creaks open and in steps the third full-time member of the Morston GameStop staff, Jordan. His ashen hair is uneven and greasy. His face is marked with zits and his oversized Star Wars button-down and brown khakis are disheveled with flakes and spots.
“We’re out of packing tape,” Jordan says. He is unable to hide his hopeful demeanor as he makes the proclamation. Whenever Bruce is present he insists that Jordan remain in the stockroom doing menial busywork. Today’s assignment is to pack up a pile of loose video game consoles, which had grown to fill nearly a quarter of the small stockroom, and prepare them for resale. The lack of packing tape might make it impossible for him to continue.
“I’ll get more when I’m out,” Bruce says, without even a split second to consider. “I have to go to the bank anyway.”
“But I’ve been packing up systems all day,” Jordan whines.
“Maybe if you could sell pre-orders, you could work on the floor more.”
“I get more pre-orders than Dutch every month.”
“That’s easy. He only gets like two.”
“It was three last month,” Sid says.
“I got fifteen!” Jordan croaks.
“I got thirty,” Bruce says. “Top that, Handjob Solo.”
It isn’t entirely clear
to Sid why Bruce hates Jordan so much. He asked him about it once and Bruce said it was because Jordan was just so fucking nerdy, but the meaning of that word seems murky at best. Lily sometimes calls herself nerdy, but she’s not much like Jordan at all.
“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” Bruce says as he draws several one-hundred dollar bills from the cash register in front of him. “Dutch is in charge while I’m gone.”
Then he exits through the front door and leaves Sid standing alone with Jordan, who stares through him quietly from across the room. The store would be deathly silent if not for the chatter of the promotional video playing on the overhead monitor mounted in the rear corner.
“Dark Lord’s Cozen is the first game ever released before the developer even started working on it!” shouts an excited announcer. “Gamespot gives it a nine point eight and it doesn’t even exist! Game Informer says the concept art will be mind-blowing! Dark Lord’s Cozen! Buy it now! Play it someday! Maybe.”
“So Dutch,” Jordan says. “How do you feel about Star Wars?”
Sid shrugs. “It’s okay.”
“Have you done any roleplay?”
“I don’t think so…”
“Now is a great time to start. Our Bothan Scoundrel just moved to Ohio, so my Star Wars Roleplay group finally has a much coveted opening.”
The front door triple chimes as it swings wide open and a woman enters the store, interrupting them and eliminating any necessity for Sid to understand what Jordan just said to him. Instead, he just turns toward the new customer and uses the same standard greeting he uses on all of them.
“Welcome to GameStop,” Sid says, brimming with artificial obsequiousness. “Would you like to pre-order Call of Honor 4: Modern Combat Futurized 6: Zombie Apocalypse Edition 2?”
“Who’s in charge here?” the customer says. She’s a tall woman with curly red hair that tickles the shoulders of a baby blue pea coat. In her left hand she clutches a plastic bag with the store’s logo printed all over it. Her right hand is encircled tightly around the wrist of a young boy, no older than ten.