Prepared For Rage

by Dana Stabenow

  A second email followed almost immediately, and his smile faded. He will kill us.

  He felt a cold finger run down his spine.

  Would Isa kill Yussuf for Yaqub's defection?

  He thought of Isa then, a tall man with neat habits and a perpetually stern expression that made him appear much older than he was, livened only occasionally by a charming smile that Yaqub privately thought Isa should make a lot more use of.

  Isa's sense of purpose was unmistakable and persuasive, almost hypnotically so. His loyalty to Islam was on the face of it without question, although Yaqub did wonder now and then if Isa wasn't a little less fanatical than your average Islamic freedom fighter.

  He did not, however, doubt Isa's single-minded determination to accomplish his goals. He decided, regretfully, that Isa would kill Yussuf, thinking that where one was tainted by betrayal, both would be. Isa didn't like witnesses. Yaqub remembered very well how Isa had dealt with Basil back in Düsseldorf.

  Yaqub and Yussuf had separated after they left Isa and Basil in the flight from the mob. In his panic he had taken a wrong turn and chance had found him on their heels. He would never forget the speed and strength the older man had shown in tripping Basil and throwing him in front of the mob. Yaqub himself had gone into an instinctive retreat, backpedaling around a corner and fleeing down a convenient alley. He had never told Yussuf what he had seen, but his awe at the display of murderous efficiency was what had tipped the balance in him following Yussuf into service with Isa.

  It never occurred to him to wonder, then or after, why Basil had been disposed of in such ruthless fashion.

  At present he was focused firmly on the matter at hand. If he had no doubt of Isa's reaction, the question then became, was Yussuf friend enough that Yaqub would sacrifice his newfound sense of contentment to save Yussuf's life?

  He was still arguing with himself as he walked into the airport the following Monday morning. They always flew on Monday mornings, Isa's dictum holding that they were less likely to stand out in the crush of back-to-work business travelers. He had checked in online from his home computer-he gave a wistful thought to Brittany waking alone in their bed that afternoon, warm and sleepy and reaching for him-and checked his one bag. This also according to Isa, that people who checked bags were less an item of interest to the ponderous and so easily circumvented security roadblock the Far Enemy had thrown up against incoming travelers.

  He smiled at the woman behind the counter and handed her his boarding pass. She was twice his age but that didn't stop him from running an admiring gaze over her. She scanned the bar code and returned a rather stiff smile before fastening a tag to his bag and putting it on the conveyor belt. She stapled the claim check to his boarding pass and handed it back. "Thank you," he said warmly, but she was unresponsive. Evidently not a morning person. He turned away, not seeing the man behind the counter who plucked his bag from the belt before it disappeared.

  As he reached the line snaking out of the security checkpoint, someone tapped his shoulder. "Mr. Maysara?"

  He turned to see a nondescript man in a tired three-piece suit smiling at him. "Yes?" he said, unalarmed. Perhaps he had left his passport behind.

  "May I ask you please to follow me?"

  Afterward he wondered why he had. The mild-mannered man in the unremarkable suit with the receding hairline and the belly going slightly to paunch had seemed so inoffensive, so little a threat. There was, too, something in the way he turned immediately after making his request, not once looking over his shoulder, as if he had never a doubt of Yaqub following him when he asked him to.

  Whatever the reason, Yaqub followed him. It was done so quietly that barely a head in the crowd turned to watch them go through a gray door whose outline was almost indistinguishable from the gray wall that surrounded it. It led into a small gray room with another door. The man opened it and motioned Yaqub inside with a hand he then used to stifle a yawn.

  "What's this about?" Yaqub said, finally asking the question, but he stepped obediently through the door.

  A hand covered his mouth and he saw a confusing blur of motion from several unidentified people. There was a sharp sting in the side of his neck. He felt hands around his ankles, he was suddenly horizontal and in motion, and he plummeted down, down, down into a deep, dark well, absent sight and sound and sense.

  HOUSTON

  "Do you think it was deliberate?"

  "What?" Kenai said. "Oh. Do you mean was the Arabian Knight planning to incite an international religious riot from the International Space Station?" She paused to consider. "I don't think so. But then I don't know him very well."

  "None of us do," Rick said. "It's a problem."

  They were still worried about the remarks the Arabian Knight might make when he broadcast from the shuttle. None of them spoke Arabic. "Then he speaks in English only," Kenai said. "One of us stands by the on-air switch and flips it if he shifts into Arabic."

  Joel consulted the ever-present clipboard, a ruse because there was no way he could have anything on it pertaining to this discussion. Wisely, he said nothing.

  Rick looked at Kenai. "You say you don't think he meant any harm. Why not?"

  Kenai shrugged. "Like I said, I don't know him very well, but he just doesn't have the smell of fanatic to me. He's an arrogant, self-righteous little prick with delusions of grandeur, but I don't think he'd ever put himself in danger. He likes the high life way too much, and while he's really looking forward to being on orbit, he's looking forward even more to coming back and bragging about being a bona fide astronaut. What a shuttle ride means most to the Arabian Knight is an upgrade in arm candy, from Paris Hilton to, I don't know, Princess Stephanie."

  "That's an upgrade?" Laurel said.

  "Whatever." Kenai was impatient, wanting to get back to work, and not a little incredulous that this was still even a topic for conversation.

  Rick frowned down at his feet. "All right," he said, ignoring Laurel 's muttered comment. "But, Kenai, I want you to demand to see in advance whatever remarks he is preparing to read. Make sure there's nothing even remotely incendiary in them."

  "I thought you already looked at them."

  "I did. Now I want you to look at them. Try to time it to be as close to just before we go up as possible."

  Kenai nodded. She had no time for this nonsense, none of them did, but she knew better than to argue. "Wilco."

  Rick nodded, a quick decisive gesture. "All right." He looked at Joel. "Anything else?" The set of his mouth indicated that there probably shouldn't be.

  Joel shook his head.

  "Good. Let's get back to work." Rick straightened up and walked out of the room.

  Mike stood up. "Well," he said.

  Kenai interrupted him with one hand held up, palm out.

  The door opened and Rick stuck his head back in. "I'll take a look at the Arabian Knight's scripts again, too, Kenai."

  "You bet," Kenai said. "Just in case," Rick said. "You bet," Kenai said again. Rick nodded and withdrew.

  With a sigh, Bill said, "Why he's commander, I guess." Laurel looked at Joel. "Just how bad do we need to launch this frickin' satellite, anyway?"

  Only she didn't say frickin'.

  GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA

  "He woke up on the C-12," Patrick told Kallendorf on the phone. "He shouted a bunch of questions, in the worst English accent you've ever heard, and in German. We didn't answer him."

  Kallendorf was impatient. "You didn't feed him, you didn't water him, you let him pee and shit where he sat. SOP, Patrick, I get it. What's he saying?"

  "It's only been a day and a half, sir. We haven't even gotten him to admit to his own name yet. We have to be patient."

  "Patient, my ass!" Kallendorf said.

  The bellow was clearly audible all the way across the room. Bob and Mary pretended not to hear. Ahmed, clearly enjoying himself, made a fist and pretended to jerk off, rolling his eyes and letting his tongue loll out of his mouth.

>   "Isa's got a timetable, Patrick, which means our clock is ticking, too. You make that little son of a bitch squeal like Ned Beatty in Deliverance or you tell him I'll be down there myself to bite his nuts off with my teeth!"

  Kallendorf slammed the phone down. His ears ringing slightly, Patrick replaced the receiver and heaved a relieved sigh. It could have been a lot worse.

  Ahmed grinned at him. Bob, a short, hairless man with bulging biceps, looked at the ceiling. Mary, even shorter and thin almost to the point of emaciation, looked at the floor.

  Robert Shadura was an ex-Ranger who had seen action under fire from Panama to Beruit to Afghanistan. When he had to retire, he'd settled in New York and done consulting work with an international security agency that specialized in the return of kidnapped American businessmen, which subsidized his basement flat on the Upper West Side. He entertained no leftover angst from any of the wars he had fought in, had no drinking habit, no family, and his only sin was a lust for Harley hogs, three of which were parked in a rented garage off Canal Street and one of which was an antique, a 1912 8XE V-Twin Legend, lovingly restored, that was worth over a hundred grand. He wouldn't have taken a million for it.

  He was also a gifted actor. In the South Side Players, the amateur theatrical group to which he belonged, he was famous for his portrayal of Macbeth in the Scots play, and he doubled as choreographer for all the fight scenes in all the plays the South Side Players produced. He looked thirty-five, was actually fifty-two, and dated an unending series of beautiful actresses. All such relationships ended amicably, and one so blessed had been known to say in an awed, grateful voice, "I never met a man with such control!"

  On occasion, at the behest of his country, Bob left the Harleys and the actresses behind for short periods of time when he allowed himself to be called back into service as an interrogator, a skill he had perfected in Iraq.

  "Before we were so rudely interrupted," Patrick said. "You were saying?"

  Bob, one of those admirable underlings with no interest, prurient or otherwise, in the doings of his superiors, resumed his narrative without so much as a blink. "He says he was going to Mexico on vacation. He says he never heard of Isa. He says he's a German national, he is innocent of any wrongdoing, and he demands to see his consul."

  "How does he explain the forged Canadian passport in the name of Baghel Maysara?"

  "He doesn't."

  "He doesn't yet," Mary said, her voice as wispy as her appearance.

  Mary Maria Santangelo weighed about a quarter of what Bob did, who was at least twice her age, and the closest she'd ever come to the armed services was an ROTC troop drilling on the Harvard quad when her date walked her home to her dorm on the Radcliffe campus. She looked like Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Persephone stepped down from the frame, only rather less well-nourished. A massive quantity of black hair was bundled back in a ponytail so heavy it looked as if it should bend her slender neck backwards from the sheer weight of it all.

  Mary was a history major, with a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies. She had an eidetic memory and to the distinct disapprobation of his superiors Ahmed had made Mary free of the CIA files on terrorism. With her training in history she was able to digest massive quantities of data to place people into a proper context and events into a proper chronology. The result was an eerie ability to pull the one tiny nugget of information necessary to nudge an interrogatee over the edge from intransigence to cooperation. There were times when it seemed she could read people's minds. She'd been called a witch, and more than one detainee had made the sign to warn off evil in her presence.

  She and Bob had two things in common: an unparalleled ability to elicit information from unwilling witnesses, and a long list of lovers.

  Make that three. They both liked women.

  Mary was also an intuitive chameleon, with the ability to become whatever the detainee wanted at the moment of his greatest need.

  They worked extremely well together, bringing in results where other gator teams threw up their hands and walked away. When Ahmed had asked Patrick who he wanted for gators, Patrick's answer had been instantaneous. "Bob and Mary."

  Ahmed had looked and felt doubtful. "They can be a little volatile."

  "They can be spontaneously combustible," Patrick had said. "But we want results fast, and we want lethal information, right?

  Intel that produced the death of a known terrorist. "Yes," Ahmed said, "we want lethal information."

  "Bob and Mary are the best interrogators in the business. They trained half the people in Task Force 145. They'll get it done."

  "You want him to get the full treatment?"

  "Everything," Patrick said. "I want this guy scared. I want him thinking Abu Ghraib's still in business, and that he's got a front-row cell reserved just for him. I want him thinking we're sending him to Egypt or Romania for questioning if he doesn't talk to us in Gitmo. I want him scared shitless, Ahmed."

  Looking at them now, Patrick saw nothing inherently terrifying in either Bob or Mary. Well, between the biceps and the tattoos, he might have been afraid of Bob if he'd bumped into him outside a biker bar. Mary, an ethereal waif with large, dark, tip-tilted eyes that looked always on the verge of tears, not to mention bony hips that looked always on the verge of slipping out of her inevitable low-rider jeans, didn't look strong enough to swat a fly, let alone scare the shit out of a hardened terrorist.

  But they were the best. "We don't have a lot of time, folks," he said.

  Bob and Mary exchanged an expressionless look. "How did you pick him up?"

  "Idiot used his own name on an email. One of our guys was running a new program on a random e-comm search. I'd just sent out the BOTLF on our friend here, and his pal Yussuf, and their boss Isa. The guy inputs the names and runs the search, which-okay, this is as much as I understand. This program has the ability to search for hot-button words on the Internet, words like 'bin Laden' and 'al Qaeda' and-"

  "'Isa,"'Ahmed said.

  "Yes, and 'Isa,' and this program can also trace them back to their originating server. Always supposing they aren't smart enough to route it through a couple of other servers to mess up the data trail."

  "And he wasn't smart enough."

  "He's been keeping his head down for six months. I think the serenity of his existence might have led him to believe that he was invisible."

  "Ah," Bob said, "one of those." He smiled at Mary. "Ladies first?"

  She looked at Patrick. "You want us to jack him up?"

  Patrick shook his head. "There's nothing more worthless than information received through torture."

  "Drugs, then?"

  "I'm not crazy about drugs, either, you never know if you're going to get good intel or a regression to the time his father spanked him for picking on the girl next door."

  "What, then?" Mary said.

  "We've got people asking questions in Toronto, and we've got some intel from Germany. It all says Yaqub Sadiq likes women. No," he said, correcting himself. "Sadiq loves women. We think one of the reasons he may have joined up with Isa is that he'd been screwing somebody's wife and the husband found out. You can get killed for that if you're Islamic."

  Mary's brow puckered, which was a pity, because it was a broad, alabaster brow. "What was his name? The husband's?"

  Patrick called up the file on his Blackberry. "Rashid Nurzai."

  Something that might have been a smile crossed her face and was gone. "Is Nurzai Afghani?"

  "I don't know." Patrick hadn't seen any need to check. "The file doesn't say." Beneath her considering gaze, he felt the need to redeem himself. "Sadiq was born in Germany. Of Lebanese immigrants."

  She nodded once, a crisp gesture that seemed somehow out of character. But, Patrick realized for the first time, she could have tailored her appearance deliberately to lull a detainee into a sense of false security. "Follow my lead," she told Bob.

  She didn't wait for permission or agreement, she left the room. Patrick got up and walked to the
pane of one-way glass set into the wall, and felt Bob and Ahmed come to stand behind him.

  Sadiq was handcuffed to a metal chair in an otherwise bare room. A pool of urine under the chair gleamed wetly in the room's one bright ceiling light. "Those the same clothes he was wearing when we nabbed him?" Patrick said.

  "When we took him into custody, you mean?" Ahmed said austerely, and spoiled the effect by grinning. "Yeah."

  "He must smell pretty ripe by now."

  "Yeah," Bob said laconically. "Probably time to let him clean up. After a while they stop smelling themselves, so it's less of an incentive to talk. Better to clean him up and let him shit and smell himself again; more motivation."

  "What's taking her so long?" Patrick said, the urgency he felt gnawing at him like a sharp set of teeth. Even more so now, he had the awful feeling of a clock ticking down in the background. The longer Akil stayed out of sight, the more afraid Patrick was of what he would do when he eventually regained the spotlight. Maybe it was a condition of being a spy but more than any other single thing Patrick Chisum hated and feared not knowing what was going on. When you had no knowledge of the horrors in store there was no way to stop them or, worst case, prepare for them. Ignorance was not bliss. Innocent people, hundreds of them, thousands, could die if he remained ignorant of Isa's plans. "Oh," he said, relieved, "here she is."

  The door opened a crack. Mary peeped inside. She waited until Sadiq's head came up to see who was there. "Oh," she said, her voice a nice blend of nerves and compassion. "Oh, you look just awful." She slipped inside, took a quick look into the hall, and shut the door with exaggerated stealth. "You poor thing. I brought you some water."

  She carried a glass of water in both hands like a supplicant. "Is she tiptoeing?" Ahmed said in a faint voice.

  Bob said proudly, "She is in fact tiptoeing."

  Mary held the glass to Sadiq's mouth, one comforting hand on his shoulder. He drank greedily, some of the water spilling down his neck. Mary made a distressed sound and used the tail of her shirt to dry him off, not forgetting to give Sadiq a flash of midriff.