“My first wife,” he explained, “and our children.”
Clyde looked at Fazoul. He could not bear to ask the question.
“All dead,” Fazoul said gently. “Saddam came to our village with gas.”
Clyde’s head swam and tears welled up in his eyes. He turned around in the doorway and staggered down the narrow hall and out into the cold night air, terrifying a solitary trick-or-treater dressed up as a commando. Fazoul gave him a few moments alone out there, then came out of the house quietly and clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Khalid,” he said. “We will see to it that Desiree has nothing to fear from that man. I am personally committed to it.”
Not until Fazoul spoke these words did Clyde understand that he was in the grip of two emotions: not just shock over what had happened to Fazoul, but fear for what might happen to himself and his family.
The teenaged girl jumped out of the car, exchanged pleasantries with Fazoul, and skipped off into the night.
“She watched her mother getting gang-raped by the Iranians when she was five years old,” Fazoul said.
“Nice girl,” Clyde said. It was all he could think of.
They climbed into the Murder Car and sat there for a few minutes while Clyde collected his wits. Then he started the engine, shifted it into drive, and let the idle pull them forward. Maggie stirred in her seat and said “bvab bvab bvab.”
“Did you say ‘Iranians’?” Clyde said a couple of minutes later, as they were pulling out of the maze of Stanton Court and onto a main street.
“We have bad luck with real estate,” Fazoul said. “We have always been transhumant people, which means that we follow our flocks. We have a problem with fixed borders. So we are equally despised by the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Chinese, Russians, Kazakhs, Armenians, Azeris, and so on.”
“That’s a tough situation to be in,” Clyde said.
“Not for long,” Fazoul said.
“What do you mean?”
“Technology is making borders irrelevant. The governments who still value their borders refuse to understand this basic fact. We are way ahead of them. Of course,” he added sheepishly after a brief pause, “governments and borders are still very important for the time being, as the Kuwaitis could testify.”
“Did you want to drive any particular place?”
“The interstate would be good.”
“North or south?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Clyde headed south out of town, hooked up with New 30, and took it east to the interstate. He had got the clear impression that Fazoul wanted to get away from the city, so instead of heading north, which would have taken them through the outskirts of Nishnabotna, he turned south, following the signs for St. Louis.
Fazoul made himself comfortable and said nothing for several minutes. Every so often he would reach out and adjust the rearview mirror mounted on the outside of his door, apparently looking back at the lights of the twin cities. Clyde checked the mirror, too, trying to figure out what Fazoul was looking at. The only thing visible at this point were the blinking red lights on the water tower and the radio tower.
They drove for another ten minutes or so. Since Fazoul didn’t seem to be in much of a talking mood, Clyde turned up the radio a few notches. He kept it tuned to an all-news clear-channel station out of Des Moines and reflexively reached for the volume knob whenever he heard the jingle that preceded a newscast.
The voice of George Bush came out of the dashboard. Clyde and Fazoul listened to him as they drove through the Iowa night. He was giving a speech somewhere, explaining the situation in Kuwait City right now, telling some awful stories about what was being done to the people there, saying how it was just like Nazi-occupied Europe under the heel of the SS. Clyde saw no reason to disagree with the comparison; but he resisted it anyway, because he knew where the President was going with it.
“That’s a clear-channel station—it bounces off the ionosphere,” Fazoul suddenly said. “But it is an exception. Most radio transmissions are line-of-sight affairs. Radio doesn’t bend around corners very effectively.”
Clyde turned down the volume. He checked the mirror again and saw that the red lights had dropped below the horizon.
Fazoul opened up his crinkly plastic grocery bag and pulled out a tangle of wires. Somewhere in the midst of it was an off-white plastic rectangle about the size of a business envelope, riddled with small holes in a grid pattern. Numerous electronic components were stuck into those holes and hooked together with a bird’s nest of tiny colored wires. A long wire trailed out of the tangle with a plug on it; Fazoul shoved this into the Murder Car’s cigarette-lighter socket. Red and green LEDs came to life on the circuit board. Fazoul pressed buttons and watched LED bar graphs surge up and down on the thing.
“Someone has bugged your car,” Fazoul announced.
Clyde nearly drove off the road.
“But the bug does not include a tape recorder. Only a transmitter. They can’t hear us now, unless they are trailing us with airplanes or helicopters.” Fazoul looked up through the sun roof. Clyde resisted the temptation to do the same.
“Who would bug me? Sheriff Mullowney?” Clyde said. He was embarrassed by the stupidity of this question as soon as the words came out of his mouth. Fazoul chuckled quietly and did not make a big deal out of it.
“If we ripped the bug out of your car and examined it, I could tell you exactly. We have the fingerprints of all the local Iraqi agents on file. But it’s safe to say that it was either the Iraqis, the Israelis, or FBI counterintelligence. Probably the FBI—we have no reason to think that the Iraqis or the Israelis are aware of your prowess as a counterspy.”
“What the heck is going on?” Clyde said.
“You know as much about that as anyone, Khalid. All you lack is context.”
“Context?”
“You have figured out some very interesting things about Iraqi activities in Forks County.”
“But I never actually believed any of it was for real.”
“Imagine that it is for real. Imagine that you are right. Then try to imagine all the ramifications.”
“I’ve done nothing but, Fazoul. I have nightmares about Desiree.”
“That’s not precisely what I mean. Those are personal ramifications. I’m talking about the realm of politics. I’m talking about repercussions in places like Washington and Baghdad and Tel Aviv.”
“I don’t know anything about Washington and Baghdad and Tel Aviv.”
“That,” Fazoul said, “is your biggest problem at the moment.”
They drove on in silence for a while. Clyde laughed hollowly as he worked something out in his head: “They didn’t put a tape recorder in my car because they knew I was a local yokel who’d never, ever drive out of sight of home.”
Fazoul did not contradict him.
They were driving down a long, straight stretch of interstate with nothing in the median strip except tall grass that had withered with the first hard frost. An oncoming semitrailer rig roared northward, doing a good eighty or ninety miles an hour, and its running lights receded into the darkness.
Clyde angled sharply across the passing lane and the shoulder. The big wagon rolled sharply to the left as the wheels plunged off the edge of the shoulder and into the median. “Clyde!” Fazoul blurted, reaching out with one of his mangled claws to brace himself against the dashboard. Clyde sent the wagon plunging down into the median like a diving B-52, braked hard, and swung the wheel around. The massive back end of the car swung around of its own momentum, neatly reversing their direction. Clyde punched the gas, and the mighty 460 hauled them up out of the ditch and onto the shoulder of the northbound lanes. The entire operation took just a few seconds, and then they were headed back into town again at a comfortable sixty miles per hour. Maggie murmured, shifted in her car seat, and went back to sleep.
“First in my class at the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy,” Clyde said. “They taught us stuff like that.�
�
“Very impressive,” Fazoul said, sincerely enough.
“But the FBI, or whoever, is exactly right. I’m just a local yokel,” Clyde continued. “Iowa Law Enforcement Academy didn’t teach me anything about Baghdad.”
“Well, would you take it the wrong way if I offered a suggestion?” Fazoul said gingerly.
“’Course not.”
“Come clean to the FBI. They probably know most of what you’ve learned anyway. If you didn’t approach them with this, it just looks like you’re hiding something.”
“I sort of pride myself on doing good fundamental police work,” Clyde said. “And I don’t have what it takes right now. I don’t have solid evidence. They’ll laugh at me.”
“They may laugh at you because that’s part of the game they have to play,” Fazoul said. “But everything you tell them is going to end up in Washington, on the desks of people who aren’t laughing.”
“Fazoul, who the heck are you?” Clyde said. It felt good finally to ask this question.
Fazoul said, “You saw the photograph. You have seen my new son. That’s who I am.”
“But beyond that—”
“I have friends with access to more information about this matter,” Fazoul said. “Since our chat at the Stonefields’ I have been in communication with these friends, over channels that neither the FBI nor the Iraqis nor anyone else can monitor. They tell me that your wild idea is quite plausible.”
Another long silence. Clyde finally forced himself to say something. He spoke through clenched teeth. “The FBI fellow looked at my report on the horse mutilation and said it was very well done,” he said. “I don’t like to toot my own horn, but that’s what he said. He told me that I should consider sending in an application to the FBI someday.”
“Ah,” Fazoul said very quietly.
“I’m going to lose the election, Fazoul. I’m just going to get my ass kicked.”
“So they say.”
“And it got me to thinking, well—”
“I see,” Fazoul said. “The FBI thing is very important to you.”
“Yeah,” Clyde confessed, feeling kind of thick in the throat. “I didn’t realize it until now. The idea of coming in with a half-assed report—something that would go into my file—”
“Would it help,” Fazoul said, “if I told you that the local FBI man might not have been entirely sincere?”
“Well, that did occur to me,” Clyde allowed. “All I’m saying is that it’s a point of pride for me not to hand in a Mickey Mouse report.”
Fazoul was silent for a minute. Then he said, “They tell me that, in the middle of July, three men carrying Jordanian passports came to Eastern Iowa University in the guise of graduate students. The late Dr. Vandeventer arranged the entire business. These men are not really Jordanians. They are Iraqis. One of them is a very highly placed member of Saddam’s inner circle—a man who was involved with the Supergun program and other such adventures. One is a security man acting as bodyguard and muscle for the first. The third is a biological-weapons expert.”
“You say they came in mid-July. Two weeks before the invasion.”
“Saddam made the final decision to invade Kuwait in mid-July,” Fazoul said. “At that moment any number of contingency plans went into effect. This was one of them.”
“Why are you telling me this? To fill out my report?”
“Yes. You said you lacked hard evidence.”
“But you said that the FBI already knows about all of this.”
“Someone at the FBI probably does. Others do not—or perhaps they are unwilling to believe in it for reasons of their own.”
“Are you talking about, like, internal politics?”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve never been very good at playing politics. You can ask Mullowney.”
“Think of it like football. You don’t have to be the coach or even the quarterback. Those roles are being played by people you don’t know, people in Washington. You are like a center. All you have to do is snap the ball on cue.”
“And then get hammered into the ground by a three-hundred-pound defensive lineman.”
“Something like that,” Fazoul said. “I cannot promise an easy resolution, or even a safe one.”
They came over a subtle rise, and suddenly the lights of Nishnabotna were laid out before them.
“The Velcro diaper covers are handy,” Clyde said, “if you can afford them.”
forty
NOVEMBER
IT WAS the second of November, the Friday before Election Day. At five o’clock in the morning Desiree had called from Fort Riley, wide-awake and very serious. Orders had been filtering down from on high, expanding and ramifying as they made their way through the chain of command, and last night she had got word from her commanding officer that her division, the Twenty-fourth Mechanized Infantry, was going to go over to Saudi Arabia to hammer Saddam’s legions into dust. She had been trying to get through to Clyde all night to tell him the news, but all the long-distance lines out of Fort Riley had been busy.
Clyde had been light-headed and woozy all day long. Many people were honking at him as he drove the Murder Car into Wapsipinicon; he couldn’t figure out why until he chanced to look at the speedometer and realized he had been driving fifteen miles an hour. The ample flanks of the station wagon were adorned with “Vote Banks” signs, and he didn’t think he was doing much for his already desperate standing in the polls by holding up traffic. So he pulled into a McDonald’s, got a large coffee, and burned his mouth on it, trying to get himself snapped back to reality. He turned off the radio, which carried no news of the impending deployment anyway—just endless repetition of George Bush giving a speech the day before and fulminating about the Iraqi soldiers’ “outrageous acts of barbarism.” He took a few deep breaths, got Maggie’s Binky back into her mouth, and then forced himself to drive into Wapsipinicon at a snappier pace. When he picked up speed, the wind flowing over the sides of the station wagon caused the campaign placards to flutter and buzz alarmingly.
They parked in the expansive lot of the University Methodist Church—a crucial repository of strategic espionage data. Clyde chose a space near the street, reckoning that it couldn’t hurt for the official Banks campaign vehicle to be seen at a church, and on a Friday no less. One or two closet Republicans honked their horns at him and waved as he was disengaging Maggie from the automotive transport module and socketing her little fuzzy pink-clad body into the backpack system. He swung her around onto his back and walked into the side entrance of the church. It was a crisp fall morning, but he still felt as if he were wading through syrup. The thing he had feared most since the beginning of August was happening. Desiree was going to the Gulf.
The Howdy Brigade worked out of a spare office donated by University Methodist, which was a sprawling and mighty church with a great deal of office space to spare. The church’s administrative wing had a particular churchy smell to it that took Clyde back to his boyhood; as if all churches, or at least all Protestant ones, used the same brand of disinfectant. Back in the sanctuary he could hear an organist practicing footwork, playing deep, rumbling scales on the pedals. He walked quickly by the pastoral offices, lest he cross paths with a minister and get caught up in endless socializing of the type he used to avoid but that was obligatory since he had become a candidate. Finally he came to a door festooned with snapshots of foreign students of all shapes and colors that had been laminated into a multiethnic collage and labeled “Howdy Brigade.”
“Well, howdy, Clyde, aren’t you the punctual one this morning,” said Mrs. Carruthers. “What can the Howdy Brigade do for you today?”
“I understand you’ve got a deal worked out with Dean Knightly’s wife where you get word of all the new international students coming into town.”
“That’s right. It’s part of our mission to make sure that within twenty-four hours of their arrival in Wapsipinicon, each foreign visitor is greeted by a member of the
Howdy Brigade with a food basket and a three-W packet.”
“Three-W?”
“Welcome to Wonderful Wapsi. It’s a package of maps, phone numbers, coupons, and so on that helps them ease the transition to their new home.”
“Ma’am, do you keep records of which students arrived in town on which dates?”
Mrs. Carruthers considered it. “Well, we receive the notifications from Sonia Knightly—she usually faxes them to us or drops the list by in person. And I think we should have them filed away somewhere.”
She opened up one drawer of a massive battleship-gray institutional surplus file cabinet and picked through it uncertainly for a while. Maggie was fussing to a point that inhibited further conversation, so Clyde hustled her down the hallway to the nursery and changed her diaper on the table there.
By the time he got back, Mrs. Carruthers had drawn out one file folder and was spreading a miscellany of curly faxes and hand-scrawled notes out on a table. “Was there any particular time period you were interested in?”
“Mid-July of this year.”
“Oh. That would be an unusual time for new students to arrive—usually they come a week before the semester begins in August.”
“I’m pretty certain about it, ma’am.”
She picked up a note handwritten on EIU stationery. “This is Sonia’s writing. It’s not dated. But I haven’t seen it before—Roger and I were on vacation in mid-July.”
Clyde took the note from her hand and scanned it for a moment. “This is what I was looking for,” he said. “May I take it with me?”
Mrs. Carruthers looked stricken and put one hand to her breastbone.
“What is it, ma’am?”
“Well, it’s just that, as I said, I was out of town when these students arrived, and I’m afraid they must have slipped through the cracks.”
“Cracks?”
“I have no recollection of assigning a host family to those poor fellows. I don’t think they’ve been visited by the Howdy Brigade.”
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