Having Sharjeel and his friends in the picture made her feel terrible, and it took a bit of thinking to work out why. Until now it had seemed that it would be only a matter of time before Jones and his crew would make a mistake and get noticed or caught. Jones had lived in the States, so he knew how things worked in North America. He was quite good at talking like an American black guy and was capable of being charming; evidently he had charmed this RV’s owners for a few minutes before pulling a gun on them. But he couldn’t stay awake 24/7, and he couldn’t do everything. His comrades, by contrast, were now deeply implanted in a culture where they did not speak the language and had no clue as to what was normal behavior. They got along okay in the wilderness, but in a place like this they could not even be allowed out of the RV.
This made Sharjeel and his buddies extremely useful to Jones and therefore distinctly unwelcome as far as Zula was concerned.
They made themselves useful immediately. One of them sat down in the huge rotating Captain Kirk driver’s chair at the front. For Jones proposed to venture into the Walmart with Sharjeel and the other of the new arrivals and wanted an English-speaking person to act as their front man. Which was to say that if some gregarious fellow RVer or Walmart security dick came around knocking on the driver’s-side door wanting to chat them up, it would be best if the person responding did not still have the dust of north Waziristan in the folds of his turban.
Jones scrounged a Strawberry Shortcake memo pad from the glove compartment and began to draw up a shopping list. Sometimes he wrote silently, other times he thought out loud. “Cooking oil … mosquito repellent … matches … cordless drill…”
“Tampons,” Zula called out.
“What brand?” Jones asked without skipping a beat. “Lite, Regular, Super, Ultra?”
“You’ve actually had a girlfriend?”
“I’ll get you a multipack and take your snarky answer to mean that you don’t much care,” Jones said. “Anything else, as long as I’m in the pink-and-pastel aisle?”
“Baby wipes, unscented preferably. Underwear. A pair of pants that hasn’t been peed in.”
“Sweat pants okay?”
“Whatever. Some socks, please.”
“Ah, you’re using the magic word all of a sudden.”
“Anything you see that’s made out of fleece.”
“Anything in Walmart that is made out of fleece,” Jones repeated fastidiously, copying it down. “That should be several truckloads’ worth.” Then he looked up at her. “Will there be anything else, or can I get back to planning atrocities?”
“Knock yourself out.”
Sharjeel monitored this uneasily.
After a few more minutes, Jones and Sharjeel and one of the newcomers, who was apparently named Aziz, all tromped down the steps out the side door and went scuffing away across the parking lot.
“Your family is very nice,” said a voice in English, after a while.
Zula had sunk into a sort of semicomatose state, a listless, timeless despondency in which she had been spending increasing amounts of time lately. Like a computer being awakened from its power-saving state, she was a bit slow to spin up her hard drive and unblank her screen and begin responding to inputs.
She gazed up the length of the RV to see the third of the newcomers, the one ensconced in the big Captain Kirk chair. He had seized control of the laptop and was apparently surfing. Zula guessed that he might have googled her or something.
It took all the will and self-control she had been developing during the last week and a half not to lose control of herself. The only thing that prevented it was a kind of instinctive awareness that this was probably just what the guy wanted; he was trying to say the most provocative thing he could think of. Circling around and poking at her, trying to learn what she was made of. Your family is very nice. She couldn’t believe he’d said that. What an asshole.
But she had opened the door to this by her improvisation, a few days ago, just after the jet crash, when she had revealed her full name to Jones. Of course, the first thing he would have done upon getting access to the Internet would be to learn everything about her, her uncle, her larger family. And he had probably left a trail of bookmarks on the laptop for this guy to follow. Maybe even set up a Zula wiki where jihadists all over the world were posting every piece of data they could find.
So that was the situation. Zula chained by the ankle, out of the laptop’s reach. The man in the driver’s seat looking, she had to guess, at her cousins’ Facebook pages, their Flickr albums, the websites they must have put up during the last week in an effort to figure out what had become of her.
Ten seconds with her hands on that laptop and she could bring the wrath of God down on these people and end the whole thing. A fact that they understood perfectly well. Hence the chain. One padlock at her ankle, the other on the grab bar in the shower stall.
The latter was special in that Zula happened to have a key to it in her pocket.
She could take the key out at any time and be free within seconds. Free to move about within the RV, that is. But there was always someone awake, someone watching her. The key was her one chance. She had to use it wisely. Her first move had to be a success.
The man with the laptop stared at her for a while, waiting for a reaction. Then his attention drifted back to the laptop. He poked it and stroked it for a few moments, then glanced up to see Zula looking at him. He spread his hands apart and gripped the machine by its edges, spun it around, and picked it up to aim the screen toward Zula. From almost the other end of the RV she could not see very well, but she could make out several pictures of herself, which she recognized as having been taken during the re-u or other family get-togethers. Above them were words in block letters, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?, and a telephone number with a 712 area code: western Iowa.
The mere sight of this from thirty feet away brought up a welter of emotions. Joy and fierce pride that her family was on the case. Extreme sadness that it had happened at all. Rage that this man was now trying to use it to manipulate her emotional state. Embarrassment that he was, to some extent, succeeding.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“You may address me as Zakir,” he answered.
The man who was willing to be addressed as Zakir was big and doughy compared to all the other jihadists Zula had encountered lately. Probably a cubicle dweller in his professional life. A member of an IT support group for an insurance company, she decided. Bored with his job, unable to get a girlfriend, feeling conflicted about the way he had sold himself out to the Western system, he had somehow made contact with a group of al-Qaeda-affiliated wack jobs during a family visit to Pakistan and ended up on a list of guys to call in Vancouver if ever the global movement needed some assistance on the ground there. And now here he was and loving it. No doubt shocked to have been rumbled at three in the morning and put in a car to this Walmart rendezvous, he was killing some time doing the one thing he was indubitably good at, which was screwing around with computers.
The shoppers began to come back in shifts. Apparently they had split up inside the Walmart, each with his own list. Aziz came back with half a dozen plastic grocery bags dangling from each hand. Women’s work. Mostly these contained food, but he had also purchased a cheap webcam, shaped like a little eyeball, in a blister pack, and an extension cord for its USB cable. The feminine hygiene supplies were in there too; these were hurled disgustedly back down the length of the RV and ricocheted against the bedroom walls and came to rest, on the bed, somewhat dented around the corners. Sharjeel came with even more camping equipment: sleeping bags, tents, tarps, ropes, and various fleece garments. He tossed the clothing back to Zula, then went back into the store. Fifteen minutes later he and Jones came back, each pushing a big flatbed cart. They brought in a Skilsaw, a cordless drill, construction screws, insulation, two-by-fours, plywood. A full four-by-eight-foot sheet would have been awkward in the RV’s confines and so they had presawn them into four-by-fo
ur pieces. Aziz was sent back into the Walmart and came back with a roll of black roofing paper and a white plastic package, about the size of a well-stuffed garbage bag, with a Pink Panther cartoon on it: fiberglass insulation.
The group now divided up, the lovers Mahir and Sharif going out and getting into the car along with the miserable Aziz, while fat Zakir and weaselly, efficient Sharjeel remained in the RV. At a command from Jones, Zakir spun his chair around and fired up the RV’s engine, then pulled the great land yacht out onto the open road. Jones unboxed the Skilsaw. The RV had a generator that would produce wall power. He figured out how to get it started. Then he began to take measurements in the back bedroom, scooting politely past Zula each time he went in or out. With a fat Walmart contractor’s pencil he stroked out long lines on the plywood panels, then fired up the Skilsaw and cut them to shape, two at a time, suffusing the RV’s confines with sawdust, smoke, and a screeching din. He carried these back into the bedroom as they were completed, pushed them up against the windows, and then used the cordless drill, with a screwdriver attachment, to screw them into the RV’s walls. This was all done with the curtains closed so that anyone outside would see only curtains, drawn for privacy.
In only a few minutes’ time, he was able to screw plywood over all the windows. He deputized Sharjeel to put in more screws while he planned out the next phase of the operation. Sharjeel went to it with a will, driving the screws in at intervals of no more than two inches. It was a statement. Those panels were not coming off.
In the meantime, Jones had been cutting two-by-fours into lengths. He tossed these in through the door, flying right over Zula’s head like spears, and directed Sharjeel to screw them down on their edges to the plywood underlayment. This he did miserably. The procedure, as Zula could have told him, was called toenailing, and it was tricky.
Abdallah Jones slashed open the package of fiberglass and it began to expand uncontrollably, threatening to completely fill the interior of the RV. Wrestling and stomping and cursing, he cut off batts of it and passed them back to Sharjeel who stuck them up against the plywood with duct tape.
When all of the plywood had been thus insulated, they pulled over to the side of the road where Jones vindictively kicked all of the insulation, save one six-foot batt of it, out onto the shoulder. Once they were back under way, he busied himself again with plywood. When he had cut the first set of panels, he had always worked with double sheets, making two copies of each shape, and keeping half of them in reserve. Now he and Sharjeel put these spares up over the insulation and screwed them down into the studs. The Colorado School of Mines didn’t raise no dummies.
So the whole three-sided bay of the bedroom was now a completely opaque arrangement of insulated plywood walls. Presently it became even darker as Jones and Sharjeel unrolled long strips of black roofing paper and staple-gunned them over the plywood, covering the entire interior surface of the room, including the ceiling, with monochrome black, relieved only by the sporadic glint of staples. A few moments’ work with a box cutter removed a disk of tar paper from around the overhead light fixture, so that some dingy yellow light was shed into the space.
They then unlocked Zula’s ankle and let her know that her place was back there on the bed. She retreated, sat down, and busied herself picking wood shrapnel and loose tufts of fiberglass off the bedspread (a quilt that had quite obviously been hand-stitched by the old lady butchered yesterday) as Jones and Sharjeel applied a similar treatment to the inside of the bedroom door, reinforcing it with plywood and then building it out to a full depth of five inches, with a bat of insulation in the middle. This had the desired side effect of completely covering up the inside doorknob, making it impossible for Zula to open the door even if it were not locked.
Jones chucked a long fat bit into the drill and put a hole all the way through the reinforced door, then fed the little webcam’s USB cable through. Using a web of zip ties, duct tape, and drywall screws, he mounted the little eyeball to the inside surface of the door up near the top. Meanwhile Sharjeel had zip-tied the cable and its extension down the length of the RV’s central corridor to its kitchen table and plugged it into the laptop. A long adjustment procedure ensued in which Jones would close the door, leaving Zula alone in the room, and walk up to view the camera’s output on the laptop, then tromp back and open the door and wiggle the camera this way and that, getting the angle just right so that (Zula supposed) it could see all parts of the room.
The entire procedure had taken perhaps two hours. Like all home improvement projects, it had started with amazing energy and speed and then slowly petered out as Jones and Sharjeel had gotten hung up on details. But now it was done, and Zula was well and truly locked in. They slammed her shut in there and did not bother opening the door for maybe six hours.
Day 15
There was now a train that would take arriving passengers directly from Sea-Tac to a downtown station that was practically in the basement of Corporation 9592’s headquarters. In every way it was faster, safer, and more efficient than the antiquated procedure of driving to the airport in a private vehicle to pick up a visitor. Richard had become somewhat cold-blooded about simply telling people to get on the goddamned train. But today the incoming passenger was John, and there was no question that this called for the ancient, full-dress ceremony: checking the flight’s true arrival time on the Alaska Airlines website, driving to the airport, napping in the phone lot, the long radio silence suddenly broken by one-word text messages blossoming on his phone (LANDED, TAXIING, STILL TAXIING!, WAITING TO DEPLANE, FAT LADY BLOCKING AISLE), the carefully timed plunge into the moil of the arrivals curb. John, a legless senior citizen/combat veteran, could have gotten special dispensation from airport authorities on at least three pretexts, but he seemed to find it amusing to stomp out the doors under his own power with his bags slung over his shoulders and to navigate on dead stilts through the vehicular mosh pit to the back of Richard’s SUV. He had packed for a long trip: a trip to China.
It had only been something like four days since Dodge had left Iowa, which was well under the threshold for hugging. And if they weren’t going to hug, there seemed little point in shaking hands. Anyway their hands were busy, pulling the SUV’s liftgate down. John, ever the older brother, initiated the move, and Richard, feeling as if he were being some kind of a bad host, reached up only a fraction of a second later and got his hands on the thing just as it was starting to move down. Four Forthrast hands slammed it shut with much more force than was really called for, and then they parted, each walking up his own side of the vehicle, and climbed into the front seats in unison.
“You can scoot that back,” Richard said, of John’s seat.
“It’s fine,” John insisted, speaking to Richard from across a cultural divide that never got any easier to navigate. The idea being that even if John’s seat were positioned too far forward—limiting his legroom and reducing his level of physical comfort—the mere act of scooting it back a few inches was, by midwestern standards, a gratuitous waste of energy as well as an implicit admission that the scooter was the sort of person who could not handle a little bit of trouble.
Richard paused for a moment, sat back, and asked himself whether he should be driving at all. It was noon. He had not slept at all last night. Then he pulled himself together, looked in both mirrors, checked his blind spot, and accelerated smoothly into traffic. Just like in driver’s ed.
“You’ve got most of a day to kill before we leave for China,” Richard said, once they had made it out onto I-5. He had adjusted to the cultural thing now, so he didn’t say “a few hours to relax” or “freshen up” or “recover from the flight,” any of which would have been construed as Richard implying that John was not up to the stress of modern airline travel. Just “kill” implying that things really weren’t moving fast enough for Richard’s taste. “My condo is just down the street from the office, so you can go there and take a shower if you want, get on the Internet…”
�
��I’d like to sit down with you and look at it again,” John said.
“You’re not going to see anything new,” Richard said.
“Certain words are difficult to make out on my copy. Zula’s handwriting was never the best…”
“Your copy is my copy, John. Listen to me. We are talking about digital files here. What I emailed you is an exact, perfect copy of what I received from the guy in China. Looking at my copy is not going to help.”
“On the second page,” John insisted, “there’s one line that’s sketchy.”
“It is a handwritten note on brown paper towels,” Richard said. “The guy just spread it out on a counter and aimed his phone camera at it and prayed to his gods. The image quality is poor. But your copy is as good as mine. The only way to extract more information is to go to China, and we’re doing that in eight hours.”
“Why can’t we leave sooner?” John asked, though he already knew.
“The visas,” Richard reminded him.
FIVE DAYS AGO, directly following the meeting with Skeletor, Richard had told his pilots to take a day off enjoying the delights of the K’Shetriae Kingdom and then to meet him at the Sioux City FBO. He had then jumped into a rented Grand Marquis and started driving in the direction of home. He never referred to, or thought of, John’s farm as home unless things were really bad. He imagined that the drive would do him some good. It seemed that his brain needed to be doing something and the drive ought to be a good opportunity. He had been intensely occupied the last few days, playing on the worst character flaws of both Don Donald and Skeletor: the former’s avarice and the latter’s insecurity. A performance that ought to have brought the Furious Muses down on him in full resonance. Yet they were silent. Perhaps they’d at last left him for other ex-boyfriends who stood some chance of being improved by their suggestions. So his brain was strangely empty and inactive during the four-hour drive.
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