DeLuca addressed the doctor.
“So can I go now?” he said. “Where do I get the drugs?”
“I at least want you to meet with a physical therapist to show you some exercises to help with your flexibility,” Dr. Thomas said.
“Deal,” DeLuca said.
DeLuca spent another day in the CASH and then checked himself out. He hated nothing more than wasting time. Given the scenario Kaplan had painted for him, that was truer now than ever before.
MacKenzie was in the team room. She looked surprised to see him.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“I was bored,” DeLuca said. He wore a foam collar around his neck that made him feel utterly dorky. Dr. Thomas had suggested a firmer plastic neck brace. The foam collar had been a compromise. DeLuca figured he’d wear it while he slept.
“You okay?” she said. “You need a back rub or something?”
“Muy bueno. Maybe later,” he said. “I just came from the physical therapist and I need to sit down.”
He grabbed one of the desk chairs and rolled his way over to her. He’d decided to take his pills in half-doses, to keep the pain level high enough to avoid being oblivious of it, but low enough to function. For now, it lent a certain stiffness to his bearing, and probably looked worse than it was.
“What have you got for me? Where’re Dan and Hoolie?”
“Waiting at the gate for Adnan and Khalil,” she said. “I think Adnan has something for us. He and Khalil are becoming quite a pair. It’s nice to see they don’t hate each other’s guts anymore.”
“There’s hope,” DeLuca said.
“How were you planning on getting together with them?” she asked. “The CASH was off-limits. And now you’re here . . .”
“That’s a good point,” he said, thinking. “I don’t want them to know I’m not 100 percent. Maybe the Oasis,” he said, referring to a spot in the middle of Camp Anaconda where a half-dozen hammocks had been strung between palm trees in a small grove that afforded the only natural shade on the base. There were lawn chairs, a card table, and a barbecue grill, too, an idyllic scene, if it weren’t for the occasional random mortar round that passed overhead.
“I’ll go make sure it’s available,” she said. “So do you want the good news or the weird news, or the weird weird news first?” she asked.
“Good, then weird,” he said. “Then I’ll see if I’m still in the mood for the weird weird.”
“Good news—remember I said I had the name of the only obstetrician working in the hospital where Al-Tariq was born?” she said.
“Where his birth records were missing?”
“Yeah, but it had to be this guy. Ahmed Shahab was his name. Still is his name.”
“You got him?”
“We got him,” Mack said, swelling with pride. “Dan and me. He’s in a nursing home in Kut. He’s eighty-three years old. So Dan and Hoolie and Smoky and I went and talked to him.”
“And?”
“He remembers the birth,” she said. “He said he delivered a lot of babies but this was the only one where there were men with guns waiting outside the delivery room. Al-Tariq’s family was powerful in that region—I guess the expectant poppa was expecting trouble, too. Anyway, Shahab was working under duress. And something happened all right.”
“Twins?”
“Yup,” she said. “The first baby, Mohammed, came out just fine, but the second, Dawud, was not okay. He was alive, but he was blue, with an umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. The doctor said Mohammed tried to strangle his brother in the womb. At any rate, infant Dawud spent too much time deprived of oxygen for Dr. Shahab to do anything about it. That meant an IQ of somewhere between sixty and eighty. Retarded, or whatever the politically correct term is for it.” She took a long pull on her water bottle. “Now you want the weird news?”
“Okay,” DeLuca said.
“So Dr. Shahab was Al-Tariq’s pediatrician, too,” Mack said. “He said this was something he knew he could never tell anybody, but now that the regime has fallen, he can talk. So when Al-Tariq is fourteen years old, he comes into the doctor’s office and the doctor diagnoses him with syphilis. How do you get syphilis when you’re fourteen?”
“Any number of ways,” DeLuca said. “Not all of them voluntary.”
“Father wheels the kid right out of the office and they never talk about it again.”
“They didn’t treat it?”
“No telling,” she said. “Shahab was afraid to bring it up again, and then they changed doctors.”
MacKenzie took another draw on her water bottle.
“Still want the weird weird?”
“Sure.”
“So Jaburi grew up in the United States, right?”
“Until his family moved back when he was fourteen,” DeLuca said. “The father had a mosque in D.C.”
“Well, close,” Mack said. “Jaburi’s family went back when Jaburi was fourteen, yeah, but his father sent young Mahmoud home two years earlier, when he was twelve, to begin his religious studies. So guess what old family friend the twelve-year-old Mahmoud stayed with?”
“Who?”
“Mohammed Al-Tariq and his family. Al-Tariq’s father and the Imam Jaburi were tight. Mahmoud Jaburi and Mohammed Al-Tariq were like stepbrothers.”
“Interesting,” DeLuca said. “Good work.”
“When you’re feeling better,” Colleen said, “would you tell me about your friend Gillian? She sounds like a remarkable person.”
“I’ll do that,” DeLuca said. “How are you and Dan . . . doing?”
“Good,” she said. “Did you know he’s engaged?”
DeLuca wasn’t sure what to say.
“I knew that,” he said.
“Thanks for not telling me.”
“How did you find out?”
“Have a look,” she said, taking the mouse to her computer, logging on to the Internet and clicking on a web page she’d bookmarked, a website dedicated to the forthcoming nuptials of Sergeant Danforth L. Sykes, Jr., and one Sidney A. Prescott, with a picture of the two of them smiling brightly and toasting each other with tilted champagne flutes. The exact date of the wedding wasn’t set, pending Sergeant Sykes’s return from the war in Iraq. “Don’t tell him. Apparently his bride-to-be is planning this as a surprise.”
“This is how you found out?” DeLuca asked.
“Dan told me, but this is how I found out—I already knew.” She spun around in her chair and looked at him. “I was just Googling him to pay him back after he showed me how he found my prom picture. Plus I found sixty thousand hits for Dan Sykes Senior—did you know Dan’s father is a senator?”
“I knew that, too,” DeLuca said. “He asked me not to tell anybody. He didn’t want any special treatment.”
They were interrupted when the phone rang: an MP, telling them there’d been an incident at the south gate. Someone named Khalil Al-Penjwin had been apprehended trying to sneak a bomb onto the base.
Mack drove. This time, DeLuca remembered to fasten his seatbelt. The gate was a hardened shed between the inbound and outbound lanes, ringed in concertina wire, where vehicles were forced to zigzag between pairs of thick iron rods set into the roadway, leaving no way for a speeding vehicle to crash through the barricade. Outside the gate, there was a truck, manned by MPs, where Iraqis could exchange weapons for cash.
Three MPs with rifles surrounded Khalil, who lay spread-eagled on the ground, face down, and one had his foot on the young Kurd’s neck. Hoolie was holding Smoky back as the German shepherd continued to bark at the man on the ground. Nearby, two MPs knelt on the ground, searching through the backpack that Khalil always carried, strewing the contents in the sand before them. Khalil was shouting something in Arabic. Dan was with Adnan and another MP, who held Adnan firmly by the arm.
DeLuca asked what was going on.
“Smoky started barking,” Dan said. “Right when these guys pulled in.”
DeLuca
saw a beat-up black Mercedes parked outside the gate, a car that Khalil sometimes drove.
He crossed to where Hoolie was trying to restrain the dog. Vasquez told him they were about to bring Adnan and Khalil across when Smoky went ballistic and started barking. The MPs immediately searched the two Iraqis and found a quarter-pound of C4 plastique, attached to a detonating device devised from a car door opener. The MPs had been unable to find the sending unit that could have triggered the bomb. They’d disarmed the bomb as soon as they found it.
“They didn’t search his bag before they let him in?” DeLuca asked.
“I guess we vouched for them,” said Vasquez. “We said we were expecting them.”
“You guess?” DeLuca said. There was no need to criticize. He knew Julio was aware of what he’d done wrong.
He crossed to Khalil.
“For you—I bring it for you, Mr. David. Tell them. I’m your friend. I bring it for you. To show you.”
“Let him up but hold on to him,” DeLuca told the MPs, then went to see the IED they’d found in his pack. The chunk of C4 was slightly smaller than a cigarette pack. The door opener was something you could buy from any auto parts supply house, attached to a common nine-volt battery.
“What do you mean, this was for me?” he asked, returning to where the MPs held the smaller man. “You still hoping to collect the reward? Khalil?”
Khalil was terrified. DeLuca told Hoolie to take Smoky away.
“No no no, Mr. David—a boy gave it to me. I swear I swear. He found it on his uncle’s table. In his house. He was afraid.”
“A boy said, ‘Here, take this bomb and bring it to the Americans’? With a remote detonator on it? And you put it in your backpack, without knowing where the remote was? Whoever had it could have blown you up any time they wanted to. That’s just too stupid for words.”
“I don’t know. I am sorry. I thought I would show you. Maybe you could find who has done this.”
DeLuca crossed to Adnan.
“Did you know anything about this?” he asked.
“No, I did not,” Adnan said calmly. “He picked me up half an hour ago. This is first time I see this.”
DeLuca looked back to Khalil, then gestured for the guards to release him.
“You know what I think?” he said to Dan. “I think he’s telling the truth. It really is too stupid a story, so it has to be true. Khalil’s too smart to try something like this. But he is naïve. Load ’em up and bring ’em to the Oasis.”
“Whussup with that?” MacKenzie asked DeLuca when he got back in the Humvee.
“He was just bringing me a present,” DeLuca told her, climbing into the vehicle.
“You’re looking pretty spry,” she said.
“Adrenaline,” he told her. “Best painkiller in the world.”
At the Oasis, DeLuca eased himself into a lawn chair, just as Dan and Hoolie arrived with the informants. The slightest sliver of a moon hung in the sky. It would be gone soon, and when it reappeared, Ramadan would be over and a night of celebration would ensue, with much feasting and revelry. While DeLuca and the others got comfortable, Mack and Dan went to the mess hall and returned with a cooler full of soda, hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato chips. Khalil decided he’d try a hot dog, even though it contained pork. Adnan stuck to beef. They ate in a circle. Khalil described a wedding feast he’d attended as a child that had lasted for days. Adnan was more reticent, but that was nothing new. DeLuca could see, on Adnan’s face, the times he was reminded of the family he’d lost. DeLuca thought of Bonnie, wondering if he’d truly lost her, and then he thought of Evelyn and wished he could see her again, somewhere far from Humvees and Bradleys and young men risking and losing their lives.
“So Adnan, my friend,” DeLuca said, as the chit-chat dwindled and Hoolie lit a small fire, using the grill as a fire pit and igniting scrap lumber from a pile nearby, “tell me—what have you been up to?”
The night was supremely quiet, stars twinkling against a black canvas. DeLuca wondered how many of them were satellites.
“Mukhaberat,” Adnan said at last. “I think it still operates. The man I spoke with, after the bombing . . . I am sorry you lost your friends.”
“We gave you the location because we thought we could protect it,” DeLuca said. “We miscalculated. It’s not your fault.”
“The man said he wanted me to meet someone, so he took me. I was blindfolded, so I don’t know where, but he took me to Abu Waid.”
“And they mentioned Al-Tariq.”
Adnan shook his head firmly.
“They said I am not to mention this. Not to ask. I deal only with Abu Waid. If I ask who is above me or who is below me, they will kill me, they said. So that no one can betray the others. So I don’t know.”
“What does Waid think?”
“I don’t know,” Adnan said. “He wanted to know if anybody suspected I was the one who gave the information about the building. I said no, I was certain that no one did. He knew about that man, the one who was giving information . . . the American.”
“Richard Yaakub?”
“Yes,” Adnan said, “so I told him Yaakub was the one who was suspected, not me.”
“That’s good,” DeLuca said.
“He told me he had a special thing for me to do,” Adnan said. “I don’t know what. He wants to meet again tomorrow. I think this thing will happen soon. Whatever attack they are planning.”
“How soon?” DeLuca wanted to know.
“I don’t know, but they were saying, ‘Id Mubaraq.’ When they would greet each other, ‘Id Mubaraq.’”
“Which means?” DeLuca asked.
“‘Blessed Id,’ or ‘Happy Id,’” Khalil said. “It is how Arab people greet each other on ‘Id al-Fitr. The last day of Ramadan.”
“When was the last day of Ramadan? I thought it was still going on?”
“It is,” Adnan said. “So why do these men say ‘Id Mubaraq’? I don’t understand.”
“Because that’s the day,” DeLuca said. “That’s the day they’re planning to attack.”
“People say ‘Merry Christmas’ for weeks before it’s actually Christmas,” Dan said.
“Yeah, but they don’t say ‘Happy Birthday’ before it’s your birthday. Or ‘Happy New Year’s’ before it’s New Year’s Eve,” Vasquez said.
DeLuca looked up at the sliver of the moon and asked, “When is it, exactly?”
“Two days,” Khalil said.
“Do you agree?” DeLuca said, turning to Adnan. “Was that what you thought?”
“I think this could be,” Adnan said. “They gave me this and said to drink it. They told me that those who drink it will be well and have no reason to be afraid.”
He handed DeLuca a small glass vial of a pale green liquid. DeLuca held it up and looked at it against the illumination from a distant floodlight. It was clear, with a slight brown or greenish tint.
“You mind if I have somebody look at this?” he said. Adnan shrugged. DeLuca called Hoolie over and handed him the vial, pulling him down to whisper directly into his ear. “Get this to Dr. Kaplan at the CASH immediately. If he’s not there, find him. Tell him I think it could be the vaccine we’re looking for. I don’t care if he’s in the middle of open-heart surgery—tell him to drop what he’s doing and have this tested. He’ll know how important this is. I want to be notified as soon as he learns anything.”
Hoolie took a Humvee and drove off.
“Khalil has told me you wanted to know about Al-Tariq’s family,” Adnan said. “That you wondered if he had a twin brother. I think this could be so. I met a man once who worked in the household, a servant. He said he used to take food to a room, upstairs, where the door was never opened. He would take the food and slide it under the door. But he never saw who ate it. He believed it was a person, someone mutakhalef . . .”
“Retarded,” Khalil translated.
“Mu’aq, yes,” Adnan said.
“That is very interesting,” D
eLuca said. It corroborated what Dr. Shahab had reported, the mentally retarded sibling, apparently kept in a room in the attic. A twin would be the perfect body double. What interested him more was this—he’d asked Khalil about Al-Tariq’s family, but he never asked anything about a twin brother.
So where had Adnan come up with that?
“Did you hear anybody talking about Alf Wajeh?” DeLuca asked. “Or maybe al-Hallaj?”
“No,” Adnan said. “I think tomorrow I will know if I am one of them. They are still suspicious, a little, but I think they will accept me.”
“Let’s hope,” DeLuca said.
Something else about the last day of Ramadan rang a bell, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He went to the team room, after the others had gone to bed, logged on and searched his files for the word “Ramadan.” He found it in an e-mail Walter Ford had sent him, a report containing a translation of a telephone call between Mahmoud Jaburi and his wife. Jaburi had said he would take his family sailing to celebrate the end of Ramadan. The safest place to be, once the plague hit, would be an island. Was that what Jaburi was doing? Was he moving his family to a safe place?
He e-mailed Ford and conveyed his suspicions, telling him they were thinking the attack could be planned for the last day of Ramadan, two days hence, and to follow up on the possibility that Jaburi was going sailing.
Not sure what island—Martha’s Vineyard? Nantucket? Something off the coast of Maine, like Monhegan? I could be wrong, but look into it. Find the boat.
David
While he was online, he received an e-mail from his brother-in-law, Tom, from his office at Homeland Security.
David,
I’m so sorry to hear about Gillian. Words fail me. Again. Her work was flawless. We’re on it. Expect potential vaccine in two to three months.
We also have a match on the face you sent me, the guy your boy Ibrahim was meeting with in Sanandaj. He is a former employee of the Biopreparat facility in Novisibirsk named Sergei Antonov, Russian/Muslim from Tajikistan, home town a few miles from the border with Pakistan. Believed to have worked with BW. Fired for spending too much time on the job praying. We might be looking at a disgruntled-former-employee/
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