by Jon Land
None of the men spoke, keeping their stares focused straight ahead as if the world extended no further than that. The confines around them were primitive at best, an underground cave structure made habitable by generators providing light and ventilation. Al-Qadir had reinforced the walls and ceiling, and used the cave’s natural design to erect separate living and meeting facilities.
“By the grace of God, you are fortunate enough to not just still be alive, but to find yourselves with an audience inside one of the many underground compounds the New Islamic Front calls home,” al-Qadir told them placidly, standing over the men as a cleric might before administering a blessing, including the ISIS commander again in his address. “You find yourselves somewhere beneath a vast desert floor. More than sixty million years ago a vast sea rolled where this desert lies today. In that sea, with each cycle of birth and death, the shells and bones of countless creatures slowly sank to the ocean floor, as if Allah Himself has insulated our holy mission from the prying eyes of our enemies’ spy planes, drones, and satellites. I brought you here as my guests so you may have the opportunity to choose between life and death, mediocrity and greatness, defeat and victory, staid tradition and a fated future. I have amassed more resources, more finances and weapons, than any movement in the history of this or any land. That is why I am winning, that is why the New Islamic Front will win. Now, rise before me.”
The five men, among the most powerful leaders in the desolate lands of western Iraq and Syria, obliged, a gesture utterly foreign to all of them.
“Now, a token of my hospitality,” al-Qadir said to them, as a member of his elite guard shed his assault rifle long enough to move about the guests with a tray holding six servings of cool mint tea in opaque, frosted glasses. “Something to refresh with after your long journey.”
The men took the glasses but stopped short of drinking.
“You have nothing to fear from me, at least not yet,” al-Qadir told them. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be with your ancestors now. Instead, I wanted you to know I could get to you at anytime and anywhere, that the men you command and all your power cannot protect you from me. You wouldn’t listen to my more diplomatic overtures, so you forced my hand. Now, drink your tea. Sample my hospitality.”
The ISIS commander tossed his cup against a stone wall, where it shattered on impact and sprayed the auburn-colored liquid into the air.
“I will have nothing of this,” he raged. “I will not lie with dogs who can’t smell their own shit.”
The ISIS commander stiffened defiantly, refusing to break al-Qadir’s stare. Al-Qadir approached him slowly, his expression calm, diplomatic, placating.
“I will not,” the ISIS commander started, feeling further emboldened.
The rest of his words were lost to a gasp and a gurgle, blood pouring through his hands that had risen reflexively to his slit throat. Al-Qadir had drawn his curved, ceremonial janbīyah knife and sliced upward in such a blur that the other four men had never even recorded the motion. But they watched now as the ISIS commander crumpled to his knees and then keeled over facedown, twitching toward death.
Al-Qadir then handed his knife to a fighter to wipe it clean, and took his own glass of tea from the tray before him.
“I brought you here today to share the wondrous faith I feel, because such faith allows us to overcome any enemy and win any battle. Everything I do, I do Bismillah Arrahman Arraheem, in the name of Allah; so I have and so I will, and I now ask you to join me. Enna lillah wa enna elaihe Rajioun … To God we belong and to Him we will return. But before we do we will take back our destiny with a great weapon Allah has provided us to do His bidding. Your only chance to survive is to join my crusade and reap the riches fighters in my service enjoy in pursuit, not of a mere Caliphate, but the entire world. A plan whose scope matches the great vision of Allah. And your presence here allows you to set aside your differences to share that vision and join me in this holiest of crusades. Now, let us drink,” al-Qadir finished, raising his glass of tea in the semblance of a toast. “Inshallah, as Allah wills.”
NINETEEN
New York City
Max sat behind the wheel of his rental car, slowly peeling off the gauze wrapped over his palm. His birthmark had been bleeding off and on ever since Yemen, the throbbing almost constant. And from the moment the bleeding had started in Admiral Darby’s office on board the George H. W. Bush, Max knew he needed to see his mother. She was the last person alive who knew the truth behind the birthmark’s origins, how he could have been born with one identical in all respects to his father’s to the point that it had grown in proportion with him.
As a young boy, Max had never much questioned its presence, seeing it as nothing more than a bond between father and son. They’d raise their hands and touch palms, sharing something only they could, a unique demonstration of endearing love that left Max so proud of the mark, no matter how much the other kids chided him. Only well into his teenage years had the anomaly struck him. A parent passing a birthmark to a child was utterly unprecedented, as far as he could tell, and that had led to questions his father had always dodged and his mother ignored.
Max had left things at that, choosing not to dwell on the mark, until it was no more than an afterthought that left him fondly recalling the good times he’d shared with his father. But then the fiery pain had come during the raid in Yemen, an agony that cut to the bone and beyond, like nothing that he’d ever experienced, and rekindled the questions he thought buried as a boy. And there was something else beyond that, something that had been plaguing him ever since the raid in Yemen.
Killing was a function of combat, a necessary evil when the mission called upon it. Max was hardly a stranger to the act, but he’d always been impassive about it, seeing his victims as faceless, formless entities more than willing to do the same to him. Yemen, though, had been different. In Yemen, the more he killed, the more he wanted to kill. He remembered the gleeful feeling of watching blood spray into the air as he dropped fighter after fighter. He remembered the joy he felt, the utter ecstasy, as he stood in the courtyard with M60 hoisted, obliterating waves of the enemy and actually feeling a letdown when the big gun clacked empty, and it was time to evacuate the scene.
Max hated the memory of that, the reality of it. Maybe he’d been at this too long already, was becoming desensitized as a result. But that didn’t explain the strange visions he’d been having or his suddenly prescient view of the future.
Something was happening to him, and Max believed it had something to do with his birthmark and his family history. His mother was the only person who knew the truth of its origins, but that didn’t mean she could tell him much more than that. It would depend on what kind of day she was having, the state of her mind varying by the hour or even minute.
Being placed on indefinite leave by Admiral Darby had afforded him this opportunity. He’d hitched a ride on a U.S. military chopper to Athens, where he boarded a military transport for the trip back stateside. But he was taking a great risk by coming here, the risk of being recognized by someone, anyone, as Max Younger here in the city of his birth very, very real. The vast resources that had been expended toward building his new identity might not cushion him from the determined pursuit of someone like his father’s business partner, Dale Denton, who’d like nothing better than to see Max arrested for what he’d done in his former life.
There should’ve been more happy memories sprinkled in amid the sad from that period, but he could seldom conjure even one, other than boyhood trips made with his father, before the demands of business claimed him for good. Grand adventures to far-flung places that dotted his otherwise miserable adolescence with moments of supreme happiness and contentment, where anything could happen and sometimes did.
Max’s mother had shown increasing signs of the madness for as long as Max could remember, dating back, his father had hinted, to his very birth. In the wake of his father’s death and subsequent disgrace, she’d been institutionali
zed at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, a state-sponsored facility located in Queens.
Max had come here straight from the airport the night before, only to learn at the front desk that visiting hours had ended and he’d have to come back today. So twelve hours later, he’d pulled into the sprawling parking lot that adjoined the building to find it strangely abandoned, save for a trio of the facility’s vans laid waste to by locals, wheel spokes sitting on cinder blocks and all the glass shattered. There was also a trio of burned-out car husks that hadn’t been there last night when he’d parked in virtually the same spot.
What had happened? Max thought, reaching into his pocket for the reassuring touch of his old mood ring. Where are all the vehicles belonging to staff and visitors?
He felt about his pocket to no avail. His ever-present good-luck charm was gone.
Max climbed out of his rental car, on edge and wanting for the weapon he wasn’t permitted to carry outside of deployments, especially here in New York City. He took his cell phone from his pocket and absurdly flirted with the notion of calling Creedmoor, even as he approached the main entrance, its glass doors boarded over and sprinkled with graffiti.
It was as if the facility had been abandoned and shuttered in the twelve hours since he’d been here last; impossible, of course, in stark contrast to what he saw to the contrary. Inside, he could hear a phone ringing and ringing. It stopped and then started right up again, continuing to go unanswered. The double doors weren’t locked, which Max took as a good sign. Except the security cameras were nowhere in evidence and a small garden that adorned a sitting area was marred by overgrowth and clumps of dead flowers. The benches were gone too, torn from their chain moorings that remained oddly in place, affixed to red-stamped concrete brick adorning the area.
“Hello,” Max called out, after entering.
The doors rattling closed with an echo had left the reception and lobby area in silence. A normally bustling greeting area, shrouded today in shadows broken only by several flickering overhead lights. The reception station was abandoned and reams of paper that looked to have sprayed from it fluttered to the floor after being whipped up by the flood of air that had preceded Max inside.
“Hello?” he called again, his voice echoing in tinny fashion.
Some of the stray pages were streaked with red, finger paint Max had thought at first glance, while second and closer glance made him think it could be blood. The same was true of the walls, red-smeared designs he tried to tell himself were impressionistic designs meant to add color to the lifelessness of the facility. But the coppery smell told him that was blood too, adding something else entirely.
He continued on, through stuffy, overheated air that grew steamier the further he advanced. A smell clung to that stale air, a rancid mix of rot, waste, and death. He headed toward the elevators, but found neither of the pair to be operational, and took the stairs to the third floor instead where the air felt even staler.
Turning the corner onto his mother’s wing brought him onto floors slick as ice with more of what he’d first thought to be red finger paint streaking the walls on both sides. Max continued on, the stench no less intense even as the steam-baked air gave way to a chill icy enough to leave his breath misting lightly before him. He drew closer to the end of the hall and saw the red streaks traced into a pattern that formed a message in Latin:
Ecce venit cum nubibus, et videbit eum omnis oculus, et qui eum pupugerunt. Et plangent se super eum omnes tribus terræ: Etiam.
Max had never studied Latin but, somehow, when he read the words, he saw the English translation:
Behold, He arrives with the clouds, and every eye shall see Him, even those who pierced Him. And all the tribes of the Earth shall lament for themselves over Him.
He turned away from the wall briefly, and when he turned back, the Latin version of the words was back.
Max started on again. Turning the corner, he spotted a tall, white figure with a shock of flowing gray hair standing at the end of the hall facing an electronic door that kept opening and closing before her, opening and closing. She stood board stiff, elongated skeletal fingers extending toward the floor from her sides, finished in absurdly long nails stained with more of the red finger paint, looking more like nail polish now.
“Excuse me,” Max called to her, picking up his pace, as his heart too picked up. “Ma’am?”
She didn’t turn, didn’t acknowledge him.
“What happened here, ma’am?” he asked, stopping far enough away from her based on his instinct for proximity.
The woman turned slowly, her attention roused, Max recognizing her immediately:
His mother, her eyes empty and lifeless—someone else’s eyes forced into her skull, gashes down both sides of her face, explaining the blood on her nails. She looked ghostly pale, sickly white. A corpse, it seemed, dressed in a white gown-like smock, its front blotched with blood from where she’d wiped her nails. Her spine held so stiff and straight she seemed to be floating weightlessly over the floor and her face quivering in what looked like a constant spasm.
“Mom,” Max heard himself say. “It’s me, Mom.”
The woman’s eyes widened, the slightest of grins edging across her expression. Her voice, when she finally opened her lips, sounded vaguely masculine, gravelly in tone as if it had been strained through a cheese grater, spoken with a grin.
“Your mother’s not here.”
TWENTY
New York City
Max’s eyes snapped open, roused from the nightmare by the sound of a siren screeching close by. His hands were gripping the steering wheel so tight, he’d squeezed the blood from them. He was still inside his rental car, only the parking lot was half full with no sign anywhere of the burned-out husks of other vehicles. So too the entrance of Creedmoor was as it had been the night before, fronted by a sitting area and well-kept garden. And the glass doors were still intact, as opposed to being covered in plywood and graffiti.
Max pushed a hand into his pocket to find the old mood ring just where it always was, breathing a sigh of relief, even as he recognized the same odd feeling that had taken hold of him in Yemen. Just before he’d opened fire with the M60D machine gun, to hold back the last of the fighters breaching the embassy compound.
Your mother’s not here.
Max slipped the ring over his finger, before climbing out of the car. He entered the building with his heart hammering against his chest and beating so fast it left him light-headed. But the lobby was just as he recalled, as well. So he checked in at the reception desk, was given a visitor’s badge, and waited briefly for an aide to escort him to his mother, using an elevator that had been shut down in his vision.
Max had no idea what to expect from this point. His mother’s condition had robbed her of the ability to retain anything for very long, her sense of time and memory skewed to the point that reality had become whatever she chose to make it. An aide escorted him to a third-floor rec room and directed Max toward a solitary figure standing before a window covered in a thick grate that barely allowed any light in. From behind the figure looked exactly like the one from his vision, his mother as a walking corpse.
Max approached her stiffly, fearing the sight that would greet him when she turned around.
“Mom?” he uttered, forcing the word past the clog in his throat.
The figure turned slowly, just as it had in the vision, Max holding his breath in the last moment before they were face-to-face.
“Max!” his mother beamed, hugging him tight.
Max hugged her back, smelling harsh disinfectant soap and feeling his mother’s long, limp white hair. It had been beautiful once and perfectly kept. At least, though, her eyes were the same, as she pulled away to regard him. A bit laggard, due to the medication, but full of life and love.
“Come, we’ll sit.”
She interlaced her arm with his and led Max to a table set against the far wall, treating him as if he’d visited the day or week before. She
shuffled more than walked, her slippers curled up on the underside and dragging.
Max eased her chair out from the table and she sat down before a game of solitaire she’d left unfinished. She gathered the cards up, fingernails well manicured as opposed to dagger-long and polished in blood. The rec room beyond them was plain and casual enough, save for the heavy security grates bolted over the windows looking out over Queens Village to discourage the more unruly residents from attempting an ill-fated flight from three stories up.
“I knew you’d come on my birthday,” she said, smiling. “I knew you’d surprise me!”
Is it her birthday?
Max searched his mind for the answer, but it had been banished from his memory as so many other parts of his life, and past, had, making him feel terribly guilty.
“You look tired, Max,” his mother said, leaning across the table. She started to extend a hand to touch him, but changed her mind. “You’re working too hard. That school’s got you run down. You need to have more fun. You only get to live your high school years once.”
That was over ten years ago. You remember, Mom, not long before I had to disappear, and Dad jumped out of a sixtieth-floor office window.
The thoughts formed, but never quite made their way into words. Max couldn’t bear to do that to his mother and it wouldn’t have stuck anyway. Better to just leave her to the delusions that dominated her life.
Melissa Younger was at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center as a ward of the state. Destitute in all ways, without a dollar to her name that she wouldn’t have known how to spend anymore anyway. There had been millions once, tens of millions, hundreds even. But it was gone now, every penny of it, lost to the scandal and disgrace that had followed Ben Younger’s suicide.