The Sleeper

by Christopher Dickey

  “These books took you away from me,” she said. “When you were reading them you were far, far away.”

  “They saved me,” I said.

  “Saved you from what?”

  But that I could not tell her.

  I looked out the window of the executive jet at splashes of light five miles beneath us. Small towns set among big farms. The heart of America in darkness.

  “Do you think there’s any chance it’s over?” said Griffin.

  “No,” I said, “it’s not over, and it didn’t just begin. You know that. I know that. The killers know it. The only people who didn’t know this war was on were the people down there. And they still don’t know what to make of it. They’ve spent their whole life in the eye of a hurricane. Death and destruction everywhere around them, but all they saw was blue skies.”

  “Didn’t know you were such a bleeding heart,” said Griffin.

  “Now everybody bleeds,” I said and looked away from America and into the face of this man from the Agency. “So, you tell me, Griffin. We’ve got a whole wide world of people who hate the U.S.A. And whatever it was that kept them off us, whatever that magic shield was, it’s gone. How do you make it safe down there again?”

  “You take out the bad guys,” he said.

  “Which ones?”

  I leaned back and closed my eyes, trying to remember the touch, the smell, the taste of Betsy, and the deep honey color of her eyes before she began to cry.

  London

  September 20–22, 2001

  Chapter 5

  People don’t look into their own backyards very much, not even people like Abu Seif, who should have been looking over his shoulder all the time. It was early night and I stood outside the plate-glass door behind his two-story house on the outskirts of London. Muddy plastic toys and soggy cardboard boxes littered the little plot of scruffy grass. He didn’t notice them. Didn’t notice me. I might as well have been invisible. He never looked up.

  Abu Seif had gained a lot of weight since I knew him in Bosnia. He was one of the preachers who came and went, pushing us to fight and die. I never saw him lift a weapon, or even his own bag. But, Lord, how his language moved us. We were fighting against Evil itself, he said. We were spreading the word and the will of the Lord.

  And whatever it was we actually believed about the Paradise he promised, or the Almighty Allah he said we served, there was no doubt at all about the Evil that we faced there in the dark cold core of the Balkans. Every village we saw after the Chetniks were driven out was overwhelmed by cruelty. Muslim girls were raped and dismembered, Muslim grandfathers mutilated, Muslim children burned alive where they hid, cowering, too scared to cry and too young to know how to pray. We had seen this for ourselves again and again. We told Abu Seif, and he took the message of righteous fury to every new group of recruits, playing on their anger until they—we—were ready to do whatever it took to stop the slaughter. And so we learned, ourselves, to slaughter. We waded through the blood and learned to love the fire.

  Then Abu Seif came to England. To this suburb called Ealing, with its gray rows of half-repaired houses, where I had been tracking him, watching him, looking over his shoulder now for two days and three nights in streets that smelled like curry and cigarettes, mildew and vinyl.

  Abu Seif had claimed political asylum in England. He couldn’t go back to Algeria, where he was born, he said. So he collected welfare checks. He married two women, both of them teenagers. He fathered four children in three years. He kept on preaching the duty of holy war—Good Lord, he could make it sound glorious!—inspiring the sons of Pakistani grocers and Sudanese cabdrivers, inflaming the restless younger brothers of Palestinian bankers and Yemeni doctors. He told so many tales of bravery, some of them were stories that he’d heard, some of them he made up, and all of them he claimed to have seen with his own eyes. Videotapes of his sermons were everywhere in Europe. There were French kids who’d embraced the cause, some Italians and Spaniards, and even pink-cheeked Englishmen. When Abu Seif thought the recruits were ripe for blood and fire, he helped send them to Peshawar and on to Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Philippines, while he stayed here, safe in Ealing.

  Abu Seif sat in front of his computer. He was wearing a short white robe like the friends of Muhammad were supposed to have worn. His legs were spread wide to let his belly push out. His beard was long enough now to rest on his gut. He moved his balls around with his left hand but couldn’t seem to get them in the place he wanted them.

  On the desk near the computer screen were a microphone and headphones, a jumble of Arabic newspapers, a glass full of tea, a couple of Bic pens, a few envelopes, and a letter opener that looked like a dagger. The steel blade was about four inches and engraved with red and green curlicues and crisscrosses. It had a hilt like a tiny Crusader sword. Now Abu Seif put on a pair of earphones and spoke into a microphone. “Bismallah al-Rahman al-Rahim.” I watched the words take shape on his lips. “In the name of God, most Gracious, most Merciful.” So began his sermon about hate. Every Saturday night he preached jihad online. This night, as I looked on from the gloom of his little backyard, I could see dozens of names in the chat room auditorium on his screen. He talked and talked. More names popped up. Others disappeared. As he mumbled into the microphone, Abu Seif looked like a trained bear in a glass cage, a beast in a circus who was perfectly harmless, until you were inside the cage with him.

  I knocked on the sliding door. Abu Seif turned faster than you’d think a man that fat could move. He looked at my hands and saw they were empty. Now, as he switched off his mike, he studied my face. His eyes recognized me, but he didn’t know from where. I knocked again, and he slid the door open about six inches.

  “Salaam aleikum,” I said. “They’re watching out front.”

  “Aleikum salaam. They are watching all places.” He had not lost his heavy North African accent. His voice sounded like gravel under water. “Why do you care?”

  “I met you in Cazin,” I said. “I’m the American.”

  The memory surfaced behind his eyes. “And now you are in my yard? No. I do not know you,” he said.

  I braced my hand and forearm in the door and shoved it wide open. Abu Seif stepped away, but kept his balance, ready to come back at me. I held up my hands, open and empty. “You know me, brother, and if you don’t help me, I don’t know where I’m going to go.”

  “This is not right,” he said. “There is no reason for you to be here.”

  “Listen. I was in the middle of America when the thing happened. Some people know I was a mujahid, and they came after me. I got out through Canada and came here. But I don’t know where to go now.”

  “How did you get into England?”

  “It’s easy if you look like me.”

  “But you came with your own passport.”

  “Yes.”

  “So they know you are here.”

  “They’ll figure that out,” I said. “That’s why you’ve got to help me. I need a new passport. I need to know where to go.”

  Abu Seif looked me up and down. “I will search you,” he said. I raised my hands again. He patted down my legs and felt under my arms. I couldn’t read his expression. “Would you like some tea?” he said. “Have a seat. I will get some.” He stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him. I heard him shouting in Arabic, and a woman’s voice answering. Then there was silence for a minute or two. I picked up the letter opener from the desk and studied the designs. The blade was surprisingly sharp against the sworled surface of my thumb. The scabbard, which I hadn’t noticed before, was half-hidden by a newspaper. “Granada,” it said in flowery letters. A souvenir.

  I watched the door as I heard Abu Seif’s heavy footsteps. I couldn’t be sure if he’d be bringing reinforcements, or carrying a weapon. But all he had in his hand was a tray with two glasses of hot tea and a bowl of sugar.

  Abu Seif sucked the steaming drink into his mouth. “Why do you think I can help you?” He wiped hi
s mustache and beard with his sleeve.

  “I’m hoping,” I said.

  His expression seemed to consider my hope. He looked me up and down again. Then he glanced at his watch, which looked like a Rolex. The steel band was embedded in the fat of his arm. “I must get back to my audience,” he said. “The interval is over. And—there is nothing I can do for you.”

  “Just a contact,” I said, trying to control a kind of anger I hadn’t felt in a long time. This fat, phony son of a bitch held the keys to what I needed, and he was going to sit on them.

  “You may finish your tea,” he said, and put the earphones on again. “Bismallah al-Rahman al-Rahim.” On the screen in front of him, nickname after nickname appeared: Zamzam, slaveofallah, SAD412, ameer_20, friendlyboy, alf_laylah, tiger-eye, amaze_15. Abu Seif took his finger off the Control button on the keyboard, turning off his microphone for a second. “I am not going to help you,” he said, and turned back to the screen.

  “Brother, I understand,” I said. “I am sorry, but I understand. Can you give me a number to call a taxi? I will have it meet me down the road.”

  “A taxi?” Abu Seif was turned completely away from me and toward the screen. He shook his head like he couldn’t believe I would ask for a taxi. I looked at the roll of flesh bulging behind his neck. He pulled up his address program on the screen and typed in the password.

  I rammed the point of the letter opener into the back of his neck, driving it home like a tenpenny nail, straight and true above the third vertebrae, then widened the hole with a quick move back and forth. The cartilage popped, and with it the nerve. Abu Seif rolled off the chair, twitching just a little, then he lay still. More tea spilled across the floor than blood.

  He was the first man I’d killed in almost nine years, and I was glad it was clean. I sat down at the microphone and watched the text messages roll. “Can’t hear you,” wrote alf_laylah. “Something wrong with mic,” wrote slaveofallah.

  “Moment…” I typed. “Someone else speak?”

  SAD412 came on the earphones, and began to talk about takfir—the “anathema” heaped on hypocritical Muslims.

  I opened my Yahoo home page, and started uploading Abu Seif’s address files into my online briefcase. Then one by one I clicked on the nicknames in the chat room to get their user profiles. Tiger-eye wore the hijab, the veil, and was looking for a husband. Slaveofallah was a student in Minnesota. SAD412—“not available.” Friendlyboy did not list a name, but there was an address, in Spain, in Granada. In itself that was strange. And there was the coincidence of the letter opener. I clicked the Start button on the Windows program and launched the “Find” function for files containing text “Granada.”

  I pulled the phones off one ear. I could hear Abu Seif’s children running upstairs, and one of his wives in the kitchen. But I was sure they wouldn’t bother us. They’d be trained not to see, or be seen by, strange men in the house, and Abu Seif must have told them I was here when he went out to get the tea.

  In a box on the screen, a little magnifying-glass icon circled clockwise over a little page icon. Circling. Circling. I heard SAD412 proclaiming all Arab rulers kafir, or unbelievers. Circling. Circling. A message appeared on the screen: “There are no items to show in this view.”

  I typed in “Grenada.” The magnifying glass circled. Nothing.

  Someone was knocking at the door. I took off the headphone to hear better. Sounded like a small hand knocking. A child’s. And she wasn’t giving up. “Baba?” I could hear her voice. “Baba?” I didn’t see a lock on the door. If it opened, there would be a baby standing there, looking at her dead father, and at me. In a kind of panic I pulled the earphone jack out of the socket. The room was filled with SAD412’s voice denouncing the hypocrite rulers of Arabia. The little girl quit knocking. Hearing men talking, she went away.

  The files in My Documents were mostly in Arabic. I uploaded everything after August 1 into my Yahoo page so it would be stored online for me to access anytime from anywhere.

  Abu Seif’s skin was white now beneath his beard. His black eyes were still open and clouded like wax paper. “Welcome to Paradise,” I said, and pulled the letter opener out of the back of his neck. I wiped the blood off on his robe, put the blade under the leg of the desk and jerked up so it snapped. It made an okay screwdriver. I lifted the cover off the computer’s tower to expose its innards.

  “Jump Start Restaurant, best burgers in Kansas, what can we do for you?” Behind Betsy’s voice I could hear the clatter of dishes. Lunch would be over now, and she’d be ending her shift soon.

  “Hey, Sugar,” I said, careful not to use her name and hoping she’d remember not to use mine.

  “Why how you doin’, Sunshine?”

  I laughed. That’s my girl, I thought. We were more than lovers, she told me one time, more than husband and wife. “We’re accomplices,” she said. I never forgot that because it was just so right.

  “I’m fine. Just fine,” I said. “Customers paying their bills?” The first check should have arrived from Griffin’s shop, and that should help put Betsy’s mind at ease. She always worried about money, and she had a right to. We lived pretty close to the edge sometimes.

  “So far so good,” said Betsy.

  “Glad to hear that. Sometimes they stiff you, you know. I always feel like, when they pay up, you ought to cash that check and put it away someplace safe. Someplace they can’t find it.”

  “Sounds like good advice,” she said. “So what can I do for you?”

  “I was hoping I could make a reservation there for a big party around my birthday.”

  “When would that be?”

  “February second,” I said. Not my birthday, in fact. “Groundhog Day. By then, we’ll know if winter’s over.”

  I heard a dish shatter on the floor. “My goodness,” said Betsy, “you do plan in advance. That’s a long time from now. Four and a half months.”

  “Lots to do. Really an awful lot. And it needs doing.”

  “And nobody but you can do it.”

  “Nobody.”

  “Sounds like lonely work.”

  “Very lonely,” I said. “Very, very lonely.”

  Griffin was out of breath as he fell in beside me and we ran along the edge of a long, shallow lake in the middle of Hyde Park in central London. He didn’t say hello at first. He concentrated on keeping pace, and keeping control.

  “You’re toast,” he said at last. “You killed the wrong man.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “That’s what the Brits think. He was one of theirs.”

  “Fuck he was.”

  “He was.”

  “He was a user,” I said. “Using them.” I picked up the pace. More breaths, less words is what I wanted. “They know about me?”

  “Nobody made connection—but me.”

  “So no problem.”

  “It’s over.”

  “Just beginning.” Faster now. “Five. Six. More like him.”

  “No.”

  “You firing me?”

  “Sending you home.”

  We ran for a few hundred yards without saying anything, through a little tunnel under a road, then up toward a huge fountain and pond. The sun was up now, and we were starting to have company in the park.

  “What’d Brits tell you?” I asked.

  “Asset murdered. Ealing.”

  “His hard drive?”

  “They got it.”

  “No, man, you got it,” I said, “if you want it.”

  We were in the middle of a small meadow with a stone monument in the center that looked like a miniature Washington monument. From there we could see everyone for 360 degrees around, and nobody was close. I sprinted toward the monument and stopped beside it like I’d just crossed a finish line. Griffin came up about five strides behind me.

  “You got the drive?” he said.

  I nodded. “You’ll get it.”

  Griffin laughed. “Lord,” he said. �
��Lord. There is justice.”

  I laughed, too.

  “When it comes to this stuff,” said Griffin, “the Brits don’t share shit. But—”

  “But—?”

  “But seriously. Time for you to go home.”

  “Think so?”

  “Know so.”

  I took a long, deep breath. Then another one. “You were smart to find me, Griffin.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Smart enough. But you don’t know these guys. You don’t know what they can do.”

  “I know ’em as well as anybody in my shop,” said Griffin. He put his hands on his knees and tried to get more air. I thought he was going to puke. “I know the faith. Like you. I know the files, which you don’t. And”—his face went stone hard—“I saw Ground Zero.”

  “Yeah, well, they can do that again.” I took another deep breath. “And again.” One more breath, slow. “And worse.”

  “They’re smart,” said Griffin. “Smart as hell. Unpredictable as hell. And that’s why…” He groaned. “That’s why we got to coordinate, got to keep everybody on board—the Brits, the Germans, even the fucking French—work with the other services.”

  “Uh-hunh.”

  “This thing with Abu Seif. Shit! Your mission was to penetrate the organization, not take it out all by yourself.”

  “Let me ask you something. How much time do you think we’ve got?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Me either. But somebody out there is checking off days on a calendar, maybe even setting his alarm clock. And you’re not going to find out who that is and what he knows with some interservice liaison committee.”

  “You don’t follow procedures and I get fucked. I don’t like that.”