Love Thy Neighbor

by Mark Gilleo

  Abu was stirring the pot for dinner. The night’s menu included three ten-ounce servings of freeze-dried chicken and rice, heated on a camping stove. Each man was consuming the daily recommended allowance of calories, per Ariana’s direction, supplemented with multi-vitamins. Syed, the lankiest of the group, had even managed to gain a few pounds. Like the others, his caloric intake was not offset by any exercise. Sleeping, eating, praying, and waiting were not on the back of any diet shake as prescribed ways to lose weight.

  The freeze-dried food, rehydrated with water from the small sink in the group bathroom, was nutritional. With the daily vitamins, the men were as well-fed as the climbers at Everest Base Camp who were downing matching diets in temperatures near zero.

  The three other men sat down at the table as Abu filled the bowls and passed them around. Ariana wedged herself into the corner between James and Karim, her back to the wall, a view of the floor.

  Abu spoke for the group. “When are we going to get started with the machines that were delivered?”

  “You will know soon enough,” Ariana answered stoically.

  “Blowing things up is easy. I only need a few items.”

  “You are naïve, Abu. You think I have you here to blow something up? I wouldn’t need you for that.”

  Karim tried to keep the peace. “Abu, just shut up and eat.”

  “She keeps telling us about a plan, but I haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “Look around you, Abu. Search for what you can’t see on the surface. Why do you think we are living like this?”

  Abu’s eyes darted around the warehouse and he shrugged his shoulders.

  Ariana spoke. “Have you heard the expression to ‘leave a footprint’?”

  “Yes,” Abu answered. Syed and Karim looked around the table but said nothing.

  Ariana spoke forcefully but calmly. “We are eating freeze-dried food to prevent generating trash. We are minimizing our baths to conserve water. We are using camping lanterns when possible to conserve electricity, though we will have to use quite a bit of electricity in the coming days. But by then, it should be too late.”

  “That’s not a plan.”

  “It is survival,” Ariana retorted, almost hissing. “We are not leaving a footprint, we are conserving our resources. We are minimizing our existence. I don’t want anyone to get suspicious about a warehouse in the middle of a run-down neighborhood. This is our bastion of safety. We don’t need someone becoming curious about spiking electricity, a blown transistor, lights, the garbage men wondering where the trash is coming from.”

  James shoved a spoonful of chicken and rice into his mouth and spoke before he swallowed. “I don’t think the CIA has the interest or ability to monitor some warehouse somewhere for spikes in electricity. And I certainly don’t think that the garbage men would give a few bags of trash another thought.”

  “Who are you to say for sure? After 9/11 there was a plan by the CIA to work with the electric companies to flag any commercial address for spikes in power usage beyond what was historically used.”

  “Urban myth,” James said again, chewing with his mouth open and smacking his lips slightly. “I was an electrician. There are too many addresses, too many possibilities.”

  Abu’s mind went back to the truck. “If the truck is not full of explosives, what is it? VX Gas? Chlorine? Fertilizer?” As Abu chewed his food, the scar on his cheek danced with animation.

  “If I show you what’s in the truck, you’ll tell me what happened to your face,” Ariana said.

  Everyone at the table stopped eating except for Ariana who scooped a mouthful of food with her spoon.

  “What does my face have to do with it?”

  “I’m curious. I know you like to talk about your past,” she added.

  Syed, James and Abu all looked at Karim. “I didn’t tell her anything about you guys having conversations,” he said.

  “Deal,” Abu said. “I tell you what happened to my face if you tell me what’s in the truck.”

  Ariana grabbed a packet of salt, and tore it open. She poured it into her hand like a magician, the salt disappearing into a closed fist. “Imagine something that could fit into the palm of my hand and kill a thousand people. Something with no smell and no taste. More importantly, something with no antidote. No remedy. The victim is faced not only with death, but gets to live with their impending doom without hope. That is real terror.”

  Karim and Syed put their spoons on the table and were riveted to Ariana.

  “That’s definitely worse than getting killed in an explosion,” James said, joining the conversation.

  Karim glanced at James who wiped his lips with a napkin. James pulled the white napkin away from his face and the paper smeared with a streak of crimson. He swiped the napkin across his lips again and Karim interrupted Ariana’s speech. He pointed at James. “Your nose is bleeding.”

  James tipped his head back and placed the napkin against his nostrils.

  Ariana continued. “So the afflicted will wait for their organs to shut down, one by one.”

  James Beach’s shoulders started to shake and his head lurched forward. A raspy attempt at a word filled his throat. He raised his head and Abu jumped from his chair. Blood was dripping from the American’s nose and mouth, oozing down his jaw line.

  “Do something,” Syed said, rising from his chair as well.

  Ariana stood and got behind James as his body began to tremble. She wrapped on arm around his neck and lowered him to the ground.

  “We need to get a doctor,” Abu said. “Something’s wrong with him.”

  “No one can help him,” Ariana said, dragging James away from the table and dropping him on the cold cement floor.

  Syed turned pale and he looked down at his half-eaten bowl of chicken and rice. “What have you done?”

  “He could not be trusted,” Ariana answered as James legs kicked haphazardly. His body went into a bone-wrenching spasm and then relaxed. Blood trickled from his nose onto the floor. Ariana asked for another napkin and then wiped the blood from the limp man’s face.

  “Is he dead?” Syed asked.

  “He will be,” Ariana said calmly. “But not just yet,” she added with a smile. She placed James’ head on the concrete floor, and found her seat at the table. Karim looked over at Ariana expressionless. Ariana looked up at Abu and Syed who were still out of their seats, frozen in place, staring down at their fallen brother-in-arms.

  She picked up her spoon and motioned towards the two standing men.

  “Sit down. Eat. You’re going to need your strength.”

  Chapter 28

  With few exceptions — spies, informants, and undercover agents topping the short list — nothing is more suspicious than someone guilty trying to act inconspicuously. Clark’s knowledge of covert operations was limited to information gleaned from a trip to the spy museum, a few Ian Fleming novels, and watching the Jason Bourne movies. His choice of a bright orange Virginia Tech sweatshirt with a hood that dangled out the back of his blue winter coat was not going to go unnoticed by anyone with even marginal vision.

  His fingers found his neighbor’s key more easily on his second visit to the storage closet near the side door, and the key slipped into the lock like an old patron slips into his neighborhood bar.

  The air inside the house was cooler than on his last visit and he immediately noticed the lack of heat. Compared to the balmy temperatures his mother kept at Chez Hayden across the street, Ariana’s was frigid.

  He started his mission in the kitchen with the small cabinets near the pantry. The top drawer was the junk drawer and it burgeoned with the usual collection of crap: scissors, unused postage stamps, a stash of colored rubber bands. Clark shut the junk drawer and looked at the front of the refrigerator. A monthly calendar for January, printed on a plain piece of office paper, was attached to the refrigerator door with a translucent suction cup. The calendar was blank. Not a notation on any day. January was void of a sing
le doctor’s appointment, birthday, or anniversary. Quite an achievement, Clark thought. The blue and white magnet on the left side of the door caught Clark’s attention. He removed the magnet, read its message, and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans.

  The small filing cabinet in the corner of the dining area was locked and Clark faced his first real decision. How far are you willing to go? He bent over at the waist and examined the lock eye-to-eye, the hood on his sweatshirt flopping down as his head dipped past horizontal. He rattled the handle on the top drawer and then ran his hands along the back of the filing cabinet. His fingers located two nails where the pressboard back of the cabinet met the hardwood edge of the frame. I could just pop the back off, Clark thought. Pop the back off, take a peak at some papers, and put it right back on. No one would ever know. The lock would remain locked and maybe, just maybe, I could get some sleep.

  Clark picked up the stack of mail on the floor near the foyer. The mail slot in the front door was still slightly open, the metal hinge pinching the corner of a Capitol One credit card offer. Clark felt a small stream of air coming through the mail slot and wondered about his botanical friends in the living room and down the hall. He would check on them, and the thermostat, just as soon as he was finished with a more important task.

  Clark put the inner dialogue he was having about the filing cabinet on the back burner and headed down the hall. He passed the open door to Liana’s room and stepped into Ariana and Nazim’s bedroom. He paused briefly to look at the two photos on the dresser, one a leather framed photograph of Nazim in a tux. The second photo was Nazim holding his toddler daughter. The husband looked relaxed, happy. Clark’s eyes darted around the room and his mind registered the lack of Ariana photographs.

  Whatever guilt Clark had about snooping around his neighbor’s house ballooned when he opened the top dresser drawer and a silk pair of pink panties stared up at him. When you cross the line, you cross the line, and sometimes once the line is crossed it’s just easier to plow forward than it is to step back.

  Clark put his hand on the panties and pushed them to the side. He dug around through the underwear and assortment of socks like a squirrel looking for a nut he buried in October but couldn’t remember where when the hunger struck in February.

  The second drawer was t-shirts and jeans and the bottom drawer was a collection of dark dress socks and boxer shorts that seemed too small for a full-grown male to wear. God, Nazim was skinny, Clark thought.

  The search through undergarments turned up nothing useful other than insight into Ariana’s color and fabric preferences. Clark wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but the locked filing cabinet in the living room was beckoning.

  He had been in his neighbor’s basement once, when Nazim had taken him downstairs to show him his recently purchased thirteen-drawer standing tool chest, replete with a 540-piece mechanics toolset.

  Clark clicked on the light in the small shop near the bottom of the stairs. He pulled the top drawer to the tool chest and shuffled through a set of metric wrenches before moving to the second drawer. The tools seemed untouched, the stainless steel gleaming in the light from above. For a mechanic who had dropped three thousand dollars on a righteous toolset with a matching cabinet, everything looked suspiciously unused.

  Clark rifled through the drawers, moving from one to another in search of the most basic tool in the collection. As Clark grabbed the flat head screwdriver with the red and white handle from the third drawer, the force of the explosion from the far end of the basement sent him chest first into the standing tool chest, his head hitting a shelf above. He staggered back from the initial impact, falling to one knee. He tried to take a breath and gasped. Blood trickled from a cut above his eyebrow, blocking the vision in his left eye. Clark shook his head as smoke filled the basement. In the clearing fog, his mind issued its first all-points bulletin. Explosion. Smoke. Fire. Shit.

  Clark found his balance as he stood and felt his way around the corner to the edge of the staircase. The Smokey the Bear training he had received in elementary school had concluded with rule number five: Stop, Drop, and Roll. The rule for an explosion in the basement was obvious. Get the hell out.

  As the first stage of panic set in, Clark felt his way around the corner to the stairs. Blood in one eye, smoke in the other, he pulled his cell phone and his thumb punched 911. He reached the kitchen, opened the door to the pantry and took a frantic glance around for a fire extinguisher. The smoke billowing from the basement intensified and Clark felt the heat from the growing flames on the floor below.

  Through the vision in one eye, Clark moved to the side door on the kitchen he had entered through. He turned the knob and pulled. It didn’t budge. He turned the lock, twisted the dead bolt and tried again. Nothing. He sent his elbow through the small window, reached down for the knob from the outside and cursed as his twisting fingers again met resistance.

  His heart pounding, Clark peeled off his outer coat and held it to his face. The smoke turned a thicker black and Clark took three large strides for the dining area. He knocked over Liana’s high chair, pushed Ariana and Nazim’s dining room table towards the chest high window on the back of the house, and climbed onto the artificial wood veneer of the table. His first kick broke the window. The second kick sent the window frame and the screen to the ground eight feet below. Clark crouched on the table, his head touching the plastic chandelier, and moved to edge of the window frame, one foot on the table, one foot towards safety. A second explosion sent Clark through the window opening in the direction of Coleman’s Castle.

  Chapter 29

  The first fire truck arrived as the plastic from the siding burned black, adding to the thicker, whiter smoke that poured from the seams of the house. A hole in the middle of the roof danced with larger flames, the massive gap giving the impression that a volcano in the living room had blown its top. Flames licked the vinyl siding near the blown out windows of the main floor.

  Clark stood on the curb, his aching body wrapped in his coat, stained with blood from the cut above his eye. He nodded as the last team of firemen dismounted from their vehicle in full fire-brigade gear.

  Still dazed, ears ringing, Clark crunched across the frozen yard, past the ambulance and towards the nearest firefighter. He tapped the man firmly on the shoulder with an open hand. The fire-resistant jacket felt heavy and rough to the touch. The firefighter turned, identified Clark as a neighbor, and yelled “Get back.”

  The voice was firm. Professional. Female.

  Clark nodded to show that he had heard the command, and then leaned forward and yelled. “I just want you to know that no one is in the house. They are out of the country.”

  The firewoman looked Clark up and down, nodded and pointed to a patch of grass in Clark’s neighbor’s yard. “Over there,” she said before going in search of the onsite commander.

  Hoses were unfurled from the truck, and the clapper valve on the hydrant on the far side of the street was removed. Within a minute, water was surging through the hose, disappearing into steam as it went through the hole where the intact roof had been. Clark watched with guilt as a three-man unit axed through the side door of Nazim’s and Ariana’s. The shingles over the side porch curled from the heat. Looking at the flames leaping from the hole in the roof, Clark’s eyes then moved next door. One adventurous flame to a single tree and the fire would be within spitting distant of his favorite neighbor’s house.

  Moving behind the impromptu fire-line established by the female firefighter, Clark made his way the thirty yards to Mr. Stanley’s house and then jumped up the stairs to his neighbor’s front porch.

  Mr. Stanley answered on the first knock, completely dressed.

  “There’s a fire next door.”

  Mr. Stanley looked at Clark admiring the slightly singed side of his coat, the blood, and the dull shocked expression on his face. “Were you helping put it out?”

  When the fire was extinguished there were two additional holes in the
roof and 20,000 gallons of water in the basement. The crowd around the house, behind the fire scene tape, had grown to over 50. Over the din of activity, Clark spent the next ten minutes talking to the fire chief in his official red-colored Suburban.

  “The neighbors are out of town?” the fire chief asked for the third time.

  “Yes. They are in Pakistan. The wife asked me to water her plants and keep my eye on things.”

  “And you were in the house when you heard an explosion.”

  “I was in the basement when the first explosion hit.” Clark gestured to the cut over his eye. “I hit my head on a shelf. By the time I made it upstairs to call 911, the fire was out of control. I tried to get out the door, couldn’t get it unlocked and was on my way out the back window when the second, larger explosion hit and helped me on my way.”

  “Were you smoking?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Where were the plants you were watering?”

  “There are plants in the living room and bedrooms.”

  “And the basement.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said you were watering plants, and that you were in the basement.”

  Clark lied. “I was checking to see if there were any plants in the basement.”

  The fire chief eyed Clark and pondered the scenario. “You sure you weren’t in there smoking dope and things got out of control?”

  “No, sir. No dope, no lighters, no matches.”

  The fire chief nodded. “You want to go to the hospital and get that cut checked out?”

  “The paramedics gave me the once over. A butterfly bandage was enough. I’m good. A little shaken up. For a minute I didn’t think I would get out of the house. I’m not sure how the doors got locked. I didn’t touch the deadbolt.”