“Dee and I have something else to do. Can you drop us at the Green Zone?”
* * *
“How can I help you, ma’am?” Private First Class Christopher Choshi stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his cover tucked under his arm. Beads of sweat glistened on his bald head. Olivia, Dee, and the private stood in sweltering shade under a fly in the Green Zone compound.
“You were in charge of bringing out the bodies from under the madrassa?”
“My detail was tasked with securing and identification of the deceased. The one on the table was pretty messed up.”
“I know. Where did you take him, the messed-up one?” Olivia was trying hard to not think about Brian. Trying and failing.
“Well, ma’am, the body had identification, a passport, so we knew it belonged to an American. Automatically, that meant we had to preserve it until positive identification and next of kin could be notified. In this heat, they don’t last long. The bodies. We bagged it, brought it to the Zone, and iced it. Later it got transported to a civilian morgue until arrangements to return it home could be made. But I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“Private, what I’m trying to figure out is when the body lost its head.”
“Ma’am?”
“I want to know who decapitated that corpse. It doesn’t seem plausible it could have happened while in military custody, so—”
“No, ma’am. It happened in that room under the school—under the madrassa.”
Olivia and Dee looked at each other. “What are you talking about?” Olivia said to the private.
“The body was decapitated in that room where we found it.” He looked uncomfortable. Olivia didn’t think he was lying, but what else could it be?
“I was in that room myself,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, I know.”
“Then you know the body was intact when you found us.”
“Yes.”
“Are you saying someone slipped in and sawed the head off while we were all standing around right outside?”
“That isn’t possible, ma’am. They would have had to penetrate our security perimeter. There’s no way.”
“I’m not understanding this,” Olivia said.
For the first time, PFC Christopher Choshi looked not merely uncomfortable but uncertain. In fact, he looked troubled. Olivia felt a prickling sensation on her back.
“It’s kind of crazy,” the private said.
“What is?”
“We brought you up, and it was like a half hour before I went back down with my detail to bag and tag the bodies. Nobody went down before us. I guarantee that. The building was secure. But that guy’s head was gone, and that’s just flat-out weird. Maybe it was already gone and we were all mixed up. The heat does funny things to your brain.”
Not that funny, Olivia thought. “There must be another way into the torture cell,” she said.
Choshi shook his head. “No, ma’am, there isn’t. I checked it myself.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Not a bit, ma’am.”
“You missed something,” Dee said.
He turned a cold stare on her. “What did I miss?”
“Somebody got past your security.”
“Negative.” He turned back to Olivia, clearly annoyed and ready to end the conversation. “Is there anything else?”
* * *
The sound of heavy machinery rumbled through the Old City. In the square where Brian had been shot and where Jodee and Mahdi died, a backhoe’s giant robotic arm pulled at the unstable wall of a shattered mosque. The clawed bucket scrabbled almost daintily at ancient brick. Golden dust hazed the air. Olivia tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes. A slight tremor caused by the movement of heavy equipment communicated through the earth to Olivia’s body, exaggerating her nervousness.
The big green copper door of the madrassa was locked, but she had found a local man to let them in, a friend of Jodee’s from before the war, when he worked as a guide to historical sites. Fawaz was an old man with good English. Stooped, wearing a white dishdashah, he had a bad hip and walked with a pronounced limp. He wore a dust mask that reminded Olivia of the filter masks everyone wore in the America of her aborted probability choices.
She had told him the truth, up to a point—that she had been in the cell under the madrassa when Marines rescued her, and that she wanted to see the place again for an article she was writing. Which could have been true, even if, strictly speaking, it wasn’t. Olivia had no intention of ever writing anything about what had happened to her.
“It’s all very bad.” Fawaz fumbled with keys. He didn’t need to specify what was very bad. All of it was.
The big padlock came away, and he hauled the door open. Inside, Fawaz said, “Wait.” He shuffled over to a chair on which sat a crude power box. Wires ran from the box to the black cedar door frame of the stairwell, passed through an eyebolt, and continued down. Olivia recognized the box. Assad’s men had used it to shock Jacob and who knew how many other victims. Now, when Fawaz touched a pair of twisted wires to a second, naked lead on the power box, a lightbulb flickered in the stairwell.
“Please go ahead,” Fawaz said, gesturing toward the doorway.
Olivia and Dee descended the stairs. A single low-wattage CFL bulb lighted the way. They moved carefully. The narrow stone steps seemed to sag under the weight of time. Only days ago, Olivia had helped Brian struggle down these same steps.
Fawaz followed them, breathing heavily through his filter mask. The madrassa wasn’t a school in the Western sense of the word. It was also a religious structure, dating back to the earliest architectural expressions of Levantine civilization. According to Fawaz, the Prophet had preserved this madrassa, while all around it history fell to war and destruction. Maybe he was right.
Olivia had to stop halfway down. A rank smell wanted to drive her back up the stairs and out into the dusty light of day. The smell of human suffering, old feces, dried urine, blood. The thick, stone-walled sleeve of the stairwell seemed to press in on her.
Dee tapped her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’m good.” Olivia forced herself to continue.
Three more bulbs, hanging from clips attached to the low ceiling, barely illuminated the cell. In the dimness Olivia’s eyes were drawn to the place where Brian had died.
There was nothing much to see. Most of Brian’s bleeding had been internal, like Olivia’s grief.
“Holy shit.” Dee stood by the table where Jacob had been tied down and tortured. “Look at this.”
Olivia walked over. On the table, where Jacob’s head would have rested, a dark glaze of blood gleamed. More dried blood stained the floor.
Fawaz shuffled over, his soft shoes scuffing the stones, his breathing labored through the dust mask. “All bad,” he said. “A desecration.”
Olivia turned to him. “Is there some other way into this room, different from the stairs we just came down?”
“Another way?” He looked confused. “There is only the one.”
“There’s nothing behind the walls?”
“Dirt. Rocks.”
Olivia produced a silver cartridge the size of a pen. She twisted it and produced a brilliant light. By twisting the cartridge one way or the other she could fan the light or reduce it to a narrow beam. Fanning increased the coverage but scaled down the brightness. She adjusted it somewhere between a pencil’s diameter and the broadest, dimmest setting.
Fawaz retreated across the room, visibly uncomfortable. “Many bad things have happened in this place. Such things leave a . . . stain of their own. I think it is time to go.”
Olivia directed her light at the floor.
“We must go now,” Fawaz said.
“Just a minute.”
Olivia stepped away from the table, following the blood. On the floor near the wall a substantial pool had accumulated and dried.
“That’s interesting,” Dee said. “
But I guess Private Choshi didn’t think so.”
“Or he saw it but it didn’t lead him anywhere.”
“That wall looks pretty solid.”
“If you please,” Fawaz said from the foot of the stairs.
Dee glanced toward Fawaz, dropped her voice. “You think he knows anything?”
“No.”
“You must come now,” Fawaz said.
Outside, they left Fawaz to secure the door of the madrassa.
“Seriously,” Dee said, “what the hell—”
Olivia looked back at the madrassa. Fawaz had finished fastening the chain. He gave the big padlock a tug and turned to walk away, taking careful, shuffling steps, favoring his right hip.
“I think I know what it means,” Olivia said. “The missing head. The blood.”
“What?”
“We’ve found the probability machine.”
Thirty-Five
Olivia knew a guy. She always knew a guy.
Covering the Syrian civil war, she had taken pains to foster friendly relations with people on all sides of the conflict. That included members of Assad’s regular army, rebel fighters representing all the major factions, foreign jihadists, American advisors, and—when the coalition forces finally arrived—representatives from all participating member states. She exploited her credentials and reputation to get what she wanted when she wanted it—usually interviews with key people or an embedded position in the thick of the fight.
The day after visiting the madrassa with Dee and Fawaz, what she needed was a satchel bomb.
For that, you didn’t approach Captain Ted Burnley or any other coalition military man or woman; you approached their enemy counterpart. For that, you called in all the favors you were ever owed just to arrange a meeting with the obese man who presently sat opposite her, sweating heavily through his white linen jacket. “And why do you want this thing?” He picked up his cup with the plump fingertips of both hands and brought the steaming black coffee to his lips. This café on the edge of eastern Aleppo was dark and underpopulated, which suited the nature of the conversation. Dee was back at the hotel, waiting—something she did not do well. One of the legs of Olivia’s chair was shorter than the others. Every time she moved, it tipped a little. A small thing, but it made her feel off-balance in the negotiation.
“I can’t tell you what I’m going to do with it,” she said. “But nobody is going to get hurt. I promise you that.”
There she went again, making a promise she was far from certain she could keep. On the plus side, if anyone did get hurt, it was likely to be only her.
The man, whose name was Ashraf, drank some coffee and set down the cup. “Let me tell you about such a thing. I could, if so inclined, locate an M183 demolition charge assembly. That is twenty pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, sufficient to blow up almost any armored vehicle, breach almost any barrier, and kill a large number of people. It is a very dangerous item. Since you are not an expert in handling explosives, one must assume a high possibility, if not probability, of injuries. Such an explosion will bring down a medium-sized building. Such an explosion detonated in any populous area will cause many deaths.”
Olivia sipped warm water from a plastic bottle.
Ashraf saw her determination. “Perhaps a single brick of C-4, about one pound, will be sufficient?”
Olivia shook her head. “I need the satchel explosive, all twenty pounds. With a timed detonator.” In her mind, Olivia saw the madrassa imploding into a burning crater. Not the ultimate goal—but she didn’t know what it would take to destroy the probability machine, which was.
Ashraf studied her. The silence stretched out. “Again. For what do you want this?”
“I have to break into a place.”
“Unless it is three feet of solid steel, twenty pounds of C-4 you do not need.”
“Nobody will be hurt.”
“Girls should not play with explosives.”
Olivia forced herself to not reply.
A smile appeared briefly on Ashraf’s face. “I only say such things because I know you American women hate being told you are girls.”
Olivia waited.
Ashraf shifted in his chair, made uncomfortable by either her silence or his girth. “A remote detonator is safer than a timer.”
“No doubt.”
“But you prefer the timer, of course.”
“Yes.”
Assuming the machine was underground, a radio-controlled detonation might not work. And she couldn’t count on having enough time to reel out a hardwired detonation. Olivia didn’t know what the circumstances would be, but she was pretty sure she would be in a hurry.
“And you say your intent is to not hurt anyone?” Ashraf said.
“Yes.”
“I should hope not.” Ashraf finished his coffee and stood. “Come back in two hours. Bring the money.”
* * *
Midnight. There was a knock on Olivia’s door.
“Dee?”
“Yeah.”
Olivia opened up.
Dee noticed the satchel. “Is that what I think it is?”
“C-4.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“It’s going to be all right.”
“How much do you have?” Dee asked.
“Twenty pounds.”
“Are you kidding? You’ll kill us both and bring the whole building down. You know that, right?”
“We don’t know what to expect. I want to be prepared.”
Dee looked unhappy.
“You don’t have to come,” Olivia said.
“I’m coming.”
“It might be better if you don’t. If things go bad, I don’t want to be responsible for you.”
“There’s a better chance of getting this done if there’s two of us,” Dee said.
“I know.”
Dee threw her hands up. “Then let’s quit fucking around and do it already.”
* * *
A white rind of moon tilted over the dome of the madrassa. Olivia and Dee stood in the narrow alley across the square. All was quiet.
Dee carried the 9 mm pistol she’d taken from Emilio. Olivia had the satchel bomb strapped to her back and held a heavy iron pry bar she had liberated from the trunk of an abandoned vehicle.
After ten minutes of no one passing within sight, Olivia said, “Let’s go.”
They ran across the square. All the heavy, leaded glass had long ago been blown out of the madrassa’s window casements; iron frameworks covered the openings. Dee watched to make sure no one was coming, and Olivia jammed the tapered end of the pry bar between the grate and the cracked stone.
Dee elbowed her. “Wait.”
Olivia turned around. “What?”
“Shhh.”
The square remained quiet. The coalition-imposed curfew was in full force. If Olivia and Dee were caught outside, they’d be in trouble. Never mind the gun, never mind the breaking and entering of a historic structure. Never mind trespassing on a crime scene. Never mind the fucking satchel bomb.
“What is it?” Olivia whispered.
Dee had the 9 mm in her hand. “I thought I saw someone.”
“Thought you saw, or saw?”
“Hold on.”
Dee walked toward the alley they’d just left. She stopped in the middle of the square, listening. Olivia held the pry bar in both hands, flexing her grip, tense.
Dee produced a Maglite and pointed it along the barrel of her gun, which was aimed at the alley. The light slipped around in the dark making hectic shadows, revealing nothing. She turned the light off and joined Olivia again. “Never mind. Let’s do this.”
Olivia turned back to the window. Again she worked the tapered end of the pry bar between the framework and the stone.
“This is going to be loud.”
She got both hands on the bar and pushed, putting her whole body into it, levering the grate out of the crumbling stone with a cracking sound that made Olivia grimace, even t
hough she had been expecting it. She stopped and looked around the square, listening.
Nothing.
“Help me,” Olivia said.
Dee got her hands on the framework above where Olivia now gripped it. Together, they wrenched it out of the wall. Olivia stumbled back, holding the heavy iron, which almost overbalanced her and put her on her ass. She set the grate down, leaning it against the wall. When she looked up, Dee was already climbing through the window.
Inside, Dee switched on her Maglite, shading the beam with her hand. They crossed the debris-strewn floor and huddled over the power box. Olivia attached the loose wires to the lead, and the bulb flickered to life in the stairwell, too dim and buried to be seen from outside the madrassa.
“Come on,” Olivia said.
They passed into the stairwell, Olivia leading the way. The fetid smell of the torture cell rose up the stone sleeve. Again, a part of her wanted to stop, retreat to open air. But she held that part of herself in check and kept moving down.
Three bulbs illuminated the underground room. Immediately, Olivia crossed to the far corner, where the blood had puddled next to the wall. She pressed her hands to one of the stone blocks, big as a steamer trunk, and pushed. It did not give. She brushed her hands over the adjoining blocks, pausing to give each an experimental shove. Dee stood behind her with the flashlight.
“Anything?” Dee said.
“No. Damn it.” She planted her feet and put her shoulder into it, grunting and pushing against the wall with all her strength. Nothing. She stood back.
“It’s just a wall,” Dee said. “If it was anything else, someone would have discovered it before now.”
“Like the Society?”
“The Society wouldn’t have needed to discover it. The Shepherds have always known where to find the probability machine. Maybe you were wrong—maybe it’s not down here.”
Frustrated, Olivia lowered herself to her knees and shoved again on the stone block that formed a right angle with the floor. It didn’t budge.
“Look,” Dee said. “It was a good guess, but I think we should get the hell out of here before somebody finds us.”
The Chaos Function Page 29