“I believe you may be veering dangerously close to the realm of metaphysics with this question, Agent Reizendaark. Or of spiritualism, perhaps.” A beat. “Why are you phoning me, exactly?”
“I . . . honestly have no idea.”
“Mmm. Do you happen to know what time it is here?”
“. . . early? Or late, I guess . . .”
“Yes, very likely one or the other. But then, time zones were always a weakness of yours, as I recall. On a more personal note, however—you sound as though you need sleep, Greer, rather than alcohol. Rather badly.”
“Probably do, yeah.”
“Then sleep.”
“. . . not yet. You hooked up? Online?”
“I’m in bed, Greer. Where you should be.”
“Well, I’m flattered, buddy; don’t think you really want me in your bed, though. I’d wreck the mattress.”
Mehdi made a half-sigh, half-snicker. “Send me your data,” he said, at last.
The next morning, his head full of cotton and mush, Greer saw Mehdi’s number blink alight, and picked up halfway through the first ring.
“You can’t possibly think this is what it seems,” Mehdi told him.
Greer shut his eyes. “Well, that depends. What’s it look like to you?”
“Greer . . .”
“I want to hear you say it, Sheikh. Out loud.”
Another sigh. Then—
“. . . it appears to be a surveillance photo of Cal Fichtner. Standing in the desert. Pointing at someone.”
“Fella at seven o’clock, three from the right?”
“The very same. I cannot, however, make out his face.”
“Crap. I was kinda hopin’ you knew him.”
“Yes, that would be convenient, I suppose—if we had any idea what it was he was doing there, or why we should care to know, in the first place.”
“My geeks think he’s Ajinabi.”
Unimpressed: “Do they.”
“Yup. They say word on the Grid is, he keeps off it—does everything face to face, word of mouth. So if this is him callin’ a meeting, it’s gotta be about somethin’ pretty big. Think he might’ve been the one behind what happened to Fichtner, too . . . and Aqsa Al-Kimani.”
“The great Foreign Devil for Hire, wearing a thousand masks and pulling a thousand strings. I’ve heard those rumours as well, Greer—for quite some time, now. Far longer than you’ve considered them relevant, considering they really didn’t begin to attract your direct interest until a friend of yours . . .” A pause. “In terms of concrete proof, however, that’s exactly all they are. Rumours.”
“I’ve gotten the go-ahead on less.”
“Doubtless. But I’m not sure I’d boast about that, if I were you.”
Greer huffed out hard, and felt his temples start to throb. “Fine, then. What do you think these pics are, if they ain’t—that?”
“As you know, we of Islam tend to find representative images of the ineffable somewhat . . . difficult.”
“Even photos?”
Greer could practically hear Mehdi’s shrug. “Contextually, recent photos of a person one knows to be dead operating in the material world are likely to be almost as suspect as paintings of the Prophet, don’t you agree?”
“I think maybe this is some cultural thing we’re gettin’ into, here, and I ain’t exactly qualified to—”
“No? At best, Greer, this is a ghost, something whose testimony both our religions find equally suspect. We know Cal Fichtner was a good man, though not by all standards; all signs point towards the idea that he had come to terms with his past, made amends, found love, found faith . . . forgiveness. So he should be at peace—either in Heaven, or Paradise. Elsewhere, at any rate. Not—”
“You can’t know it’s not Fichtner,” Greer began, ridiculously annoyed.
“And you can’t know it is. The desert is a bad place to die, Greer—an empty place, home to many strange, empty things. Just because something wears a face you know . . .”
“What the hell you gettin’ at, exactly?”
“Do you really think a dead man still works ‘for’ you, simply because he seems as though he claims to? Or, better yet . . . when has chasing a ghost ever led to anything of true, lasting value?”
“We chase ghosts all the time, buddy.”
“Not literally.”
There was a small silence; Greer breathed into it, carefully, dialling himself back down. Trying to clear his aching head.
“We found her body,” Mehdi added, unexpectedly. “Miss Al-Kimani—buried up to her neck, stoned, then beheaded; the usual. Tragic waste of a perfectly good nurse, especially in a city with so few free clinics.” After a beat. “No further trace of Fichtner’s, unfortunately.”
“Desert’s a pretty big place, is what I hear.”
“Yes. It is.”
“Happened again, boss,” Gal said.
“We thought you’d want to know,” Guy chimed in.
This time, the photo spread came from a market in Casablanca, where some poor burnoosed bastard stood at a stall completely oblivious to the goons closing in on him (Guy had helpfully tagged him with a pop-up caption saying simply “ASSET”), and “Fichtner” was the one occupying the foreground—almost angled towards the fly-over, which was frankly impossible. Unfortunately, this still didn’t manage to bring the guy he was once again pointing at any closer.
“You run a point-by-point?” Greer asked.
Guy nodded. “Pretty much a match, so . . . looks like it is the same dude Fi, uh—” He stumbled, flushing, under Greer’s pointed look. “—same dude the . . . other one fingered.”
“But that don’t really tell us nothin’ we didn’t know before, huh?”
Gal: “Right.”
Greer scowled down at the multi-screen array. “What’s he even doin’ there, you figure that much out?”
They exchanged a look. Said, as one: “Maybe.”
The reason the missing operative grab hadn’t been clocked immediately—taking maybe five hours after he’d been grabbed from a nearby safe-house for his safe-house to call him in missing, plus another hour since after Fichtner’s pixel-geist had picked out “Ajinabi” for the birdie—was because he was just a local hire. Further examination revealed him as also A) one of Fichtner’s C.I.s, specifically during the last fiasco Greer’d puppetmastered with Fichtner as his man on the ground, and B) a guy Fichtner’d first found through Mehdi’s info-gathering networks, making that Greer’s next call. He sent over the new spread at the same time, and waited while Mehdi pulled it up.
“Off-putting,” was all Mehdi had to say.
“Really ain’t no way anybody could fake that, is there?”
“Unless one of your pets is serving two masters, I think not.” Greer heard the click of a mouse as Mehdi fiddled around some, probably trying the image from the same angles Guy and Gal already had.
Muttering to himself, as he did—“If only we could see that man’s face a bit more clearly. If only Fichtner—”
(wasn’t blocking the view)
“Guess you don’t think it’s a jinn, then.”
“Ah, someone’s been Googling.”
“Gimme some damn credit, Sheikh. I work for a department’s been dealin’ with the Middle East for almost sixty years; might be I could’a heard the term, here and there.”
“Oh yes, you’re a veritable fount of Muslim marginalia—that must be why your Farsi is so atrocious.” With one last click: “So . . . are we meant to gather from this latest—communique—that Hasim Gullah is bound for the same place as Fichtner?”
“Beheadings-’R’-Us, then the Internet?” Greer paused. “Don’t suppose you’d be any closer to figuring out where that first stream came from. . . .”
“Must I do all your work for you, Agent Reizendaark?”
Mehdi’d probably meant it to be light, a joke, but the tone wasn’t quite right. Still, Greer knew a kiss-off when he heard one.
So: “Fuck yo
u, son,” he said. And hung up.
You get my message, G?
Thirty minutes earlier, the subdermal bone-buzz voice would’ve muffled itself against alcohol—but sleep had eluded Greer, and now the call rattled his skull straight through into incipient hangover.
My—a skip, sample-scratch brief—new—message?
Greer swallowed cold spit, sat bolt upright: he knew this trick, had used this trick. That one inserted word in a different tone, different stress pattern, different volume even from the rest of the sentence . . . and other than that, the sentence said the exact same way, every time. He was angrier at ever having fallen for the oldest Space Age surveillance gaslighting trick in the book, if only the once, than at being targeted in the first place.
Tic-inducing, scrapy vibrations under his jaw: laughter, more tired than snide. People thinking they always know better.
Then another pause, while Greer timed it out exactly: Sound familiar?
“When I find you, shithead—”
Maybe not . . .
No click, but Greer knew instantly the contact was lost. He closed his eyes, fighting the urge to puke—his mind already supplying the rest of the quote, whether he wanted it to or not—
. . . but that’s the hope.
“Got a phone call from Fichtner, just now,” Greer told Mehdi, minutes later. “Plus last night, and . . . night before that, too.”
“Hmm.”
“Not the reaction I was expectin’, but hell—I’ll take it. Care to elaborate?”
“Very well: this, as you know, is something ‘Ajinabi’ really could fake. You set your share of bugs in Fichtner’s rooms, his cars . . . they would only have had to tune in long enough to capture his half of the conversation, from which to sample and loop a few pertinent phrases—”
“Mentioned the photo array, though. Ajinabi, scopin’ out Gullah’s beat. Gettin’ things all set for the Big Scoop.”
“Directly?”
“. . . sort of.”
my—(new)—message
“How long’d they keep Fichtner alive, you reckon?” Greer asked.
“Impossible to tell, without access to his corpse.”
“But you’ve been doin’ some investigation of your own in the meantime, I’ll bet.”
Mehdi didn’t bother to deny it; his fact-finding methods were legendarily effective, owing far more to the time-worn examples of Haroun al-Raschid and Hammurabi than to anything agreed on in The Hague. “My informants think . . . seventy-two hours at most.”
“Ain’t a whole lot of time to try and do anything about our Mister Gullah’s situation, is it?”
“I hope you recorded the calls, at least,” Mehdi said, eventually. “If so, perhaps you should have them analyzed, by someone not quite so . . .”
“Drunk?”
“I was going to say . . . personally involved. But make no mistake: someone is trying to puppet you, here, Agent Reizendaark—to get you down on the ground, where you are most unsuited to be. Having studied you, they no doubt know you like to sacrifice long-term build for short-term opportunity; they will lead you on some ethereal scavenger hunt in order to trap you, just as they did Fichtner. And what will happen then?”
Greer shut his eyes. “Oh, I think I got a pretty good idea.”
Forget the desert’s empty spaces and deceptive images—a guilty man’s mind had all of that and more, re-splitting under pressure exponentially, like a prism. Grief was an echo-chamber. No matter how hard you thought you were listening, the only thing you ever really heard was your own voice.
Or somebody else’s, still and small in the middle of the night, the way God’s was supposed to sound. Saying: Greer . . . you’re a ghost.
Well, maybe so.
But then again—not just yet.
Barely pausing to shower and shave, Greer hit the Geek Room again, doing his best Angry Fist of God impression. Told Gal and Guy to break it all down, far as they could, then farther.
As they did, he thought yet again about how “Intelligence,” so-called, was a machine that ran on universal constants—secrecy, stupidity, entropy. It wasn’t about the parts, and only slightly about the labour; damn thing’d keep running on its own, even if nobody did their fair share anymore. Stick a cog in, pop it out, throw it away, smash it to pieces; the machine kept grinding, exceeding fine, untouched. And though Greer might occupy its hub for the nonce, he had no illusions that that state of affairs would be perpetual. Lots of guys had held his exact same job, before being discarded and forgotten.
For now, however, he was still Big Man Off-Campus—the legendary Guy on the Other End of the Phone, running a large-ass part of Ajinabi’s competition. Knock Greer Reizendaark off his game, and the Foreign Devil would win a free block of unsupervised time in which to cut a few more people’s heads off . . . starting with Hasim Gullah, one assumed, before working his way back up the food chain.
So: something to keep in mind, maybe, even now. Something to bargain with.
“Got something,” Guy said, finally.
Turned out, the very pixels making up the photos in which “Fichtner” appeared had GPS coordinates encoded in each of them—just beyond the border of Mehdi’s home turf, in (predictably enough) the desert. The location of Ajinabi’s death room, Fichtner’s body? Or both?
“And get this,” Gal told Greer, excited as she ever got. “The phone calls have a frequency and a series of tones mixed in, just underneath the signal itself.”
“A number.” She nodded. “Traceable?”
“Nope.”
Guy: “Looks like it’s been overwritten at least twice, like it’s changing every time somebody switches disposable cells—but a direct line, every time. Somebody important. Like it might even go straight to—”
“Uh huh,” Greer said, then read it out loud, and pressed his ever-present Bluetooth’s “dial” button.
“Wa’alaikum ah salaam,” a voice said, at the other end.
Greer grinned. “Ajinabi, I presume.”
Gal and Guy watched with horror-struck eyes as the negotiations commenced. Greer kept ’em short, if not sweet: a switch, him for Gullah, contingent on proof—positive, not ’Net-based—that the guy was still alive.
“Sheikh Nebbou can ferry you to the meet-point, no doubt,” Ajinabi said, like he expected Greer to be impressed he knew they knew each other.
“He was gonna be my very next call,” Greer agreed—then paused, as he heard the “call waiting” tone.
“Ah, your superiors. You should probably take this,” Ajinabi suggested.
After that things began to move even faster.
Wasn’t much work to convince the CIA-CSIS-MI6 three-way that what had looked from the outside like Greer spiralling down into an alcohol-fuelled psychotic break was really the triple-cross of the century—a trap so obvious, from either angle, that neither he nor Ajinabi could afford not to let it play through. Greer made sure to dangle the prospect of snapping up Ajinabi’s near-supernatural tech at the same time, of course: the combo of insider info and toys, whatever they might be, which had somehow allowed him to pose as the undeniably dead Cal Fichtner on phone and sat-cam alike.
(Amazing, really, how Fichtner’s current state had apparently given him skills Greer never knew him to possess, back when he was yet left upright. But then again, Fichtner’s best quality as an operative always was his ability to adapt to any given new environment they dropped him into, going native just as fast—and effectively—as humanly possible.)
Greer wasn’t too sure if they really believed him, or how much, or how much it mattered. But by Saturday afternoon he was walking off a transpo into bright sunlight, blinking at Mehdi’s familiar face in the unfamiliar flesh: all dolled up in a swank linen suit and a pair of custom shades, looking crisp. He towered over everyone but Greer, who only lacked a couple of the same inches—vertically, anyhow.
“Hadn’t thought to see you so soon, Agent Reizendaark, I must admit, or at all, for that matter.”
Greer shrugged. “Well, that’s U.S. initiative for you.”
“Quite. So how do you find you like it, down here on the ground?”
“Not too much, buddy. Ain’t got the build for it.”
“Hmm,” Mehdi said, yet again.
“You’re startin’ to sound like a damn bee,” Greer told him, as they headed for the SUV.
Heat like a wall, dust everywhere. The drive went on so long, following GPS cue to GPS cue, it turned afternoon to night. The meet-point, meanwhile, turned out to be a low concrete building with slit windows; same place they’d brought Fichtner, like as not. Why mess with success?
“You don’t have to come with me,” Greer told Mehdi, who hissed, and drew some tiny little snub-nosed piece out from under his arm—small enough so it didn’t not to spoil the line of his jacket, the peacock. Greer put his own empty hands up, and kicked the car door open,
But when they hauled Gullah out to meet him, with Ajinabi striding behind, Greer (who’d earned part of the military rank few remembered he had while serving in EOD) only had to look at the way Gullah’s shirt jacket sat to know he was all rigged up and ready to blow.
Time went wonky, step-printed. To his right, he saw Mehdi raise his pint-sized gun. mouth opening, as Gullah’s guards pushed him headlong towards Greer. To the left, Ajinabi, fiddling with a pocketed cell—seemed like he might be trying to detonate it remotely, but the signal was being blocked. And Greer could suddenly see Fichtner standing next to him, haloed from behind yet snapshot-clear with one hand on the phone, while the other reached to seat itself deep in the back of Ajinabi’s skull: punch, grab, twist. A five-finger aneurysm in action.
“GET DOWN!” Greer yelled, kicking Mehdi away, and threw himself into the zone, as another of Ajinabi’s goons managed to trigger the bomb’s failsafe.
Amazing how little it hurt, after, considering the ungodly mess his body had made—his, Gullah’s, Ajinabi’s. (And where exactly had that bastard gone, anyhow? Greer sure didn’t see him, except in pieces.) But then, they’d all been ready to die for their respective causes, one way or the other.
Greer “stood” next to Fichtner, watching Mehdi grub around in the wreckage for a long minute or two: concussed and reeling, his suit unsalvageable, usually dignified face streaming with tears. It was this last part which amazed Greer the most; hadn’t thought the man cared, let alone so much.
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