by John Barnes
“Yeah, a little. Could be jet lag—he’s not saying officially, but you can tell he just came from Teheran—”
“We’ve seen jet lag on him before, Mark, and all that does is make him sleepy.” Jerry stuck his hands in his pockets and looked down at the ground. “This is different. Something’s eating him.”
“Could be,” I admitted. “Figure he’ll tell us about it?”
“If he thinks we need to know. Or if he thinks it’s not dangerous for us to know … and if he thinks we won’t worry. But he’s worried. Do you think we should tackle him about it?”
I watched a couple of kids rolling in somersaults down Sled Hill. “Think we should have Sis and Marie run over and teach those kids to do it right?”
“You’re evading the question.”
“I’m not on your witness stand, counselor.” We walked on a ways; I admired the way the white dress and white pumps showed off the tan Marie had gotten on the dig, and the way the breeze pushed it against her. The Fourth, this year, wasn’t hot, but there was no hint of rain. I think, maybe, then, I felt just a little of how lucky my life had been.
After a while I answered, “I think he’s old enough to decide for himself, and let’s respect that. What he wants to tell us he can tell us.”
“Lots of common sense in that, big brother. Wanna see if we can get these debutantes to be seen with us getting a beer someplace?”
“You’re on.” And that was all we said about it, then.
That evening the problem with Dad was a little more noticeable, but not enough to spoil anything. Mom’s homemade ice-cream cake came off as always, but still Dad seemed sort of abstracted and not quite there, and Mom was working pretty hard to keep us all convinced that she didn’t notice, that there was nothing to notice.
The oddest part was that Dad had no stories at all to tell. Tonight—when he wasn’t staring at the wall—he wanted to hear about the Etruscan pottery we’d found and what it implied about the connections to the Greeks, about Jerry’s candidacy for being a clerk to a Supreme Court justice, and about Carrie’s “summer job” at Battelle—it sounded like she was working on Star Wars to us, but she was being a good girl and not dropping hints, not even when Jerry tried to surprise her … “So, Sis, would you like another slice of cake, and some more coffee, and are you really building a disintegrator ray?”
“Yes, yes, and I can neither confirm nor deny that.”
“Better go into corporate law,” I advised Jerry, “or hang around with dumber criminals.”
In that sense it was a very strange Fourth—usually Dad dominated dinner table conversations. And why not? It was pretty hard to top a guy whose stories began with, “Yasser Arafat once told me—” or “In Tunis, there’s a tiny little bar, hardly more than a hole in the wall divided by a board, with a one-eyed bartender who serves only German beer in bottles from iced coolers, and a lot of old SS men gather there—”
As the light faded into soft grays outside, and the first fireflies were dancing over the wide lawn, we went out on the second-floor back porch to watch the fireworks over the park. I remember the silky tube top Marie was wearing and her soft, deeply tanned skin pressing back against my arm as we sat on the bench next to each other and watched the bursts of flame and listened to the distant roar of explosions.
“The bombs bursting in air,” Marie said softly, musing aloud.
Dad glanced over at her. “What I was thinking, too. Phrase from a dangerous time … within days of those lines being written the White House was set on fire by a foreign army …” He leaned back and stared off into space. There was a long sputtering burst of those very bright, white, loud ones. The light flickered on Dad’s face as he looked up at them, and a long second later the distant booms echoed across our house; we could hear the “ooohs” and “aaahs” coming from the park beyond us. “It’s not a bad country, really, and most amazing is that it’s such a safe country.”
The finale came then, a whole big string of things blowing up and scattering streams of bright colors into the air.
As we went inside, Mom asked Marie for some help on kitchen cleanup, and the two of them headed down that way, just as Dad asked us three to come into his study “for a nightcap.” It had a suspiciously planned feel to it, and after the odd way Dad had been acting all day, Jerry and I glanced at each other; I knew we were both figuring we’d finally find out what was up.
We’d always said our parents’ studies were like them; Mom’s was obsessively neat and orderly, ringed with blackboards from which she copied her work into lined and numbered bound notebooks; Dad’s was a huge untidy heap of books, papers, offprints, journals, videotapes, audiotapes, and crazy-quilt bulletin boards. He heaved a pile of papers off each of three leather chairs onto the floor, then moved his own briefcase off the big old swivel chair next to the mountain of paper that was his desk.
Lifting a crumpled map from the top of the pile on one shelf, he uncovered a bottle of brandy, some little French label I’d never seen before, and a set of snifters beside it. He put a splash in all four glasses, handed them round, took his own glass, and raised it in a toast, “Another year.” We drank to that, and then he sat down in the desk chair and added, “The USA—peace, safety, and prosperity.” That was good for another sip from all of us.
The light in his study was gold-colored from the warm yellow lampshades and the brass fixtures it reflected from. There were many crevices and cracks, dark corners and crumpled papers, forming patterns of warm yellow light and deep shadow. Not for the first time, I reflected that it would have been a perfect place for one of the Old Masters to paint.
Carrie sat so still that she looked like a painted angel in the warm glow from the lamp; Jerry’s face shone with light coming down from above like a martyr’s; and Dad was backlit like an old burgher in a crowd scene, or like the way Death was often depicted, with deep, distorting shadows masking most of his appearance.
“It’s not easy to admit I may have done something dangerous and stupid,” Dad said. “I don’t know yet what the consequences of the dangerous, stupid thing I’ve done will be, or if perhaps I’ve acted quickly enough to avoid them.” He sighed.
Jerry stirred a little, as if to ask a question, and Dad held up a finger for silence. “Let me explain a little. Some years ago I became aware that there was some new force at work in Mideastern terrorism. You all know, I think, that I am not an alarmist. Indeed, with both students and the press, I have always tried to make it clear that there is rarely or never such a thing as ‘mindless terrorism.’ If you think it’s that way, you’ll never be able to combat it—”
For the moment he was talking as if he were lecturing his seminar, and just for that long he was his old self, the way he’d always been before. “Terrorism, at least in the planning stages, is the work of men who go about their business as sensibly, deliberately, and rationally as any banker.
“I know you’ve all heard this before, but bear with me.
“All the same, after all those years of preaching that terrorism happens in a situation where terrorism works, and where there is something to be gained by it—that people do it because it pays off in something they want—all the same, having preached that all these years, I was finding myself confronting the evidence of a terror movement that seemed not to have read that particular book. Moreover, this new group was more shadowy, kept its secrets better … and was also better financed, better organized, better equipped—in fact they were so well equipped that I spent months chasing the red herring of superpower involvement, for some of the small amount of captured equipment seemed to be so sophisticated that the source almost had to be an American, European, Soviet, or Japanese laboratory—no one else could do that kind of work on that kind of scale and get the weapon operational.”
Carrie caught my eye and winked. I don’t think it reassured either of us. She looked too frightened.
Dad coughed and went on. “I could find no rationale for this new group’s activit
ies—none. Much as I have always stressed that terrorists do things for rational if deplorable reasons—though perhaps not the ones they announce—I had to admit that here was a group whose interest was in outrages, and not merely outrages but huge outrages that were difficult to pull off, and ones with no point at all. When Palestinians attack Israeli settlers, it makes a certain sense, for once that land is settled by Israelis the government of Israel cannot give it back—machine-gunning schoolchildren is evil and disgusting, but one understands why they do it. It makes sense for a Shiite fundamentalist to shoot a garrison commander who is Sunni, if uprisings will happen later that year, and the officer next in line is a coward, a sympathizer, or corrupt. It even makes sense to set off bombs in Europe and invite American and European retaliation by aerial bombing, for the population’s reaction to the bombing can be used to shore up a leader—nothing makes a man more popular than to have him denounce the Americans and pledge he won’t knuckle under to them when the night before American bombers were blasting away at his city.
“All these things are horrible and involve gross harm to innocents, but they can be understood. And I long ago learned that I, at least, could look evil straight in the face as long as I knew why it was. But this group—” Dad sighed, almost groaned, and the hand that stuck, pale white like a claw, out of the deep shadow in which he sat, tightened on the brandy snifter. “They call themselves Blade of the Most Merciful. They have staged actions on every continent except Antarctica—and they’re so fierce and so fond of outrage that I wouldn’t be surprised if they blew up an airliner full of tourists making the trip across the Pole. They have accounted for perhaps five thousand deaths and a billion dollars’ worth of property in less than three years. The IRA, Red Army Faction, and PFLP combined have never even come close to such a record.
“And yet because they operate in secret most of the time and in conjunction with other groups—and because they never issue public statements—Blade of the Most Merciful have received very little publicity.
“Their level of activity and the ease with which they have evaded capture suggests Blade must have close to fifteen hundred fighters and a covert logistical tail at least as large, and so far as I can tell none of them ever has to do anything for money, so that the usual tracing through the employment of low-level, part-time members has proved impossible.
“In short they are the kind of organization that cannot have been created or financed by its members. They must surely have been set up by some large, significant power for some large, significant purpose. Yet their purpose does not even seem to be to consistently cause chaos.
“In one African nation they assassinated the dictator, plus every significant opposition leader, in or out of the country, in a single night. That same night they blew up the radio station, phone central, national bank, and Ministry of Defense. All this triggered weeks of rioting and something far too chaotic to be called civil war, while the country writhed like a beheaded snake, not even able to find a bad or an incompetent leader. And then the Blade did nothing to take advantage of the chaos; anyone could have done anything, and yet they did nothing.
“In Colombia they staged a dozen bank robberies, murdered four judges, had the government teetering—and then suddenly the Blade slaughtered the leadership of the drug cartel they were supposed to be working for and shipped so much solid evidence to the government that it may be a decade before they can even get all the criminal charges filed.
“And in both of these cases, they seemed to be functioning much more like a mercenary army than like an Islamic covert terror group. Yet at the same time, they were competing fiercely for turf in the Mideast. The more established groups seemed to learn quickly to get out of their way.
“Which wasn’t always possible.” He lifted the rest of the brandy to his lips—it was good stuff—and swallowed it as if it had been cough medicine. “The Blade often literally forced themselves onto other groups. They would demand that the ‘host’ group they had pinned down act as ‘sponsor’ and claim responsibility for some Blade crime, sometimes insisting that the group supply arms and men for what amounted to suicide missions. They were thus able to keep every little group on every side in the Mideast hating and distrusting each other … not that that ever requires anything like the effort the Blade put into it.
“A senior Mossad official—yes, the Israeli Secret Service itself—told me that their refusal to cooperate with a Blade demand that they butcher one whole refugee camp led to a Blade attack on a secret Mossad safe house in Germany and cost them the lives of six agents. They lost eight more hitting back at a Blade base deep inside Libya—”
I whistled. “Fourteen Mossad agents—”
Dad shook his head. “For what comfort it may be, they aren’t supermen. Mossad killed almost fifty of them, between shooting back in Germany and the Libyan raid. One reason they were able to make the Libyan raid is that Qaddafi saw a chance to get rid of Blade and offered Mossad the chance to ‘sneak past his radar unseen.’ Hell, he even gave them topo maps; the Blade apparently offends Qaddafi.”
“Has Blade of the Most Merciful announced any goals at all?” Carrie asked. Her face was drawn and tight, and so was Jerry’s; mine must have been, too. Dad had already told us that he had done something he considered dangerous and stupid, and this didn’t sound like a group to do that kind of thing around.
Dad shook his head. “None at all. No goals. No purpose. If I had to deduce them from the evidence, I’d say they like to see either complete anarchy or iron-fisted autocracy.”
“Maybe they’re nihilists,” Jerry suggested, “like the old anticzarist terror movement.”
Dad shook his head. “Those people were out to create chaos, but only so that the revolution could happen once authority collapsed, and to make sure the revolution was complete. Blade has no such strategy; they don’t follow up on it when they create chaos, and they sometimes turn the other way and help repressive regimes. They seem to just want violence to happen.”
There was a long silence. Dad stirred slightly in his chair, as if about to speak, but said nothing. Maybe because I was oldest and had usually been first to speak up, I finally said, “And why did you take us aside to tell us all this? Do you think they’re after you?”
Dad pulled his single, exposed, white hand in from the light; now only his bony white knees, exposed by his Bermuda shorts, and the shining bald top of his head, were in the light. He might have been a skeleton. “I don’t think so. Not anymore. I spent the past three years, you see, trying to get to meet some of them, and working on a book about them. After all, studying terrorism and writing books about it is what I do. And strange as it might seem, it has never seemed very dangerous to me, before now, because most of these groups, you know, have a message to get out, and so they are not going to shoot a potential messenger.
“So long as I took no sides and reported honestly and carefully, I was much more useful alive than dead. To normal terror and antiterror organizations, that is. But Blade is not normal …
“Just how not normal took me a long time to realize. For two years I tried to meet anyone, anyone at all, connected with Blade of the Most Merciful. First I tried for the leaders, then for just any spokesman, finally just anyone—couriers, former members, anyone.
“I had no luck. I had to assemble the book from tertiary sources and circumstantial evidence. As sheer detective work it was brilliant. I assembled a very complete picture of the size, scope, resources, activities, and modi operandi of Blade—of everything about them—except for one little detail: why they did what they did. On that, there was nothing, nothing, nothing at all. And despite every plea I sent by third parties, I heard nothing back—until this spring.
“The man who came to see me was short and dark, with large muscles under his baggy sweater. He said to call him ‘George.’ He had a long irregular scar across his nose, and he stepped into my office on the campus as if he had just materialized there.
“He sat dow
n and said he was from Blade of the Most Merciful. To prove that he rattled off sufficient details of every major attempt I had made to contact them. Then he said—I quote him in his entirety—‘Do not publish your book. Cancel it with your publisher. We are speaking to them as well. They will understand.’ And he left.
“I darted out into the hall to expostulate with the man, and he was as gone as if he had never existed.
“Well, of course I went back into my office a very puzzled man. I had no idea what to do. It almost might have all been a hallucination, but if so it had been the first of my life. I knew they meant what they said, and time was short to cancel—my publisher was bound to be angry. Indeed for all I knew the copies were already printed and sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
“The phone rang. It was my publisher. The presses had been bombed, with a man killed, hours before the print run of my book was to start. Blade of the Most Merciful had paid a call on the publisher as well.”
His sigh was deep and heavy, and he seemed to sink far into his chair, as if he might recede right through the black hole of darkness in which he sat and vanish completely. “And there you have it. The publisher is the feisty sort and wanted to make a public stink about it and defy them. But I have a family and a quiet life. Perhaps back when I started in all this … or even if it were just me and your mother … or if anything assured me that the Blade would concentrate its vengeance so that only I would be struck … well, then I would have the courage to defy them. Perhaps. I cannot deny there is a deeply romantic part of me that wants to tell them to go to hell.
“But for all your sakes, and your mother’s—and because I have seen men blown to bits and don’t want to end up the same way—I withdrew publication of the book. The only copy is in safe hands, and I have given instructions such that whether I am alive or not, it will not be released to the publisher if there is even the slightest danger to anyone in my family. As a practical matter that probably means that no one will see it within our lifetimes.”