by Chuck Dixon
While they ate, they listened. Their eyes strayed to the three strangers speaking in Arabic now. Their ears strained to hear, to learn about these men.
What they heard was a fiction started by Levon and agreed upon by Bazît. All for the ears of the boys. Hejar remained silent. They spoke of their orders from the emir of the Nahawand. They were here on this rooftop to provide cover for traffic along Ninevah Street. It was poor theater and the boys lost interest. The youngest was soon fast asleep, belly full, in the long shadows cast by the curtain wall. The older boy remained awake, squatting on his heels, keeping a keen eye on the strangers.
“They’re brothers,” Levon said. He nodded toward the boys. One curled up asleep, the other watchful as a sentry dog.
“They are trouble,” Bazît said under his breath.
43
Nancy Valdez was trying hard to keep her growing impatience out of her voice.
“You do have a Meredith Cade in your system?” she said.
“I can confirm that. I cannot tell you any more than that.” The woman on the other end of the phone was covering her own irritation with a blanket of Southern charm. She was the public defender assigned to Merry Cade on the arson charges.
“You understand that this girl is a material witness in a major federal investigation?”
“I do understand. But you understand that, as a juvenile, the child’s records are sealed.”
“Even in an open case?”
“Especially in an open case.”
“You see, I need access to the Cade girl. Her father is a federal fugitive and I need her monitored for any contact she might have with him.”
“Is she in danger from him?”
Nancy wasn’t sure how to answer that. She decided to play on the woman’s sympathies.
“Levon Cade is a serial murderer who abducted his daughter following the murder of her maternal grandparents. They had legal guardianship of her.” It was half truth and half lie. Let Daisy Mae work it out on her own.
“That’s terrible. That poor girl.”
“You see why I need to know her current location,” Nancy said.
“But, as I already told you, I’m not at liberty to share that information.”
“Is there another way around this? I need to maintain contact. Help me out here.”
“I can give you the number of her GAL.”
“Gal? Her gal?”
“That’s her Guardian Ad Litem. A juvenile advocate assigned to Meredith by the court. She might be able to help you but I’m betting she’ll only tell you the same thing I just did.”
“Can you give me her number?” Nancy said. She heard fingers tapping a keyboard on the other end.
“Her name is Betsy Ritter. I have her cell here.”
They called it a youth study center. Merry knew it was really a jail. They gave her a room to herself for the first few nights. Just a bed and wall shelf for her belongings. A personal hygiene pack with soap, toothbrush and paste, and comb. And a change of clothes and underwear. The windows didn’t open but the door was unlocked. The bathroom was shared with the other girls on this floor. There was a television room at the end of the hall and the television was on all the time during daylight hours. Adding to the noise from the TV were the voices of other girls talking, laughing and arguing.
Merry stayed to herself except for when the matrons took them down to a dining room where they were fed meals prepared for them somewhere else. The facility didn’t have a kitchen. The food was like the meals she used to get at elementary school. Cereal and a banana for breakfast. A sandwich and apple at lunch. A meat and veggie or spaghetti at dinner with a piece of vanilla cake or pudding cup. All served in foam clamshells with plastic forks and knives.
The only difference between the YSC and Calhoun Middle was it being girls only. Merry sat alone to eat, ignored by the others. And it was boring. The view from her window was a parking lot. There was nothing to read but old magazines like People or Us. The television room wasn’t inviting. Girls talking in competition with the volume of radios turned to maximum. Sometimes she could hear them arguing over the remote in English and Spanish.
Her only welcome distraction was two visits from a new woman assigned to her from Child Services.
Betsy Ritter was as different from Miss Nussbaum as it was possible to be. She wasn’t much taller than Merry. A ninety-pound ball of energy fueled by Starbucks and two packs of Kools a day. She had a shock of white-blonde hair that looked like she combed it with her fingers once a day. And she didn’t dress like Miss Nussbaum. A black concert t-shirt of bands Merry never heard of, jeans and sneakers.
The second time they met was in a small conference room on the first floor. Betsy brought Wendy’s burgers and Cokes that they shared. Merry had told her Wendy’s was her favorite when Betsy asked at the close of their first meeting.
She also told Betsy everything that happened in the Knox house and Miss Nussbaum’s failure to act to protect her and Lisa.
“I’m going to do what I can to keep you in a single room,” Betsy said.
“Thank you.”
“I don’t think you’ll be here very long. A few more nights.”
“Okay.”
"They have you over to the courthouse for a hearing on Monday but I think charges will be dropped against you. This Blaine character is being held on statutory. Dumb son of a bitch had his eighteenth birthday last month so he's over in county. Believe me; he's having a worse time than you. Basically, the whole thing is a big fat embarrassment to the whole county."
“How is Lisa?”
“She’s in a new home. They’ve assigned her to me. I can vouch for these new folks. I’ve placed kids there before.”
“Are the Knoxes mad about their garage?”
“To hell with them, okay? They should never have been fostering anyone with that sick bastard of a son in the house. You have nothing to be sorry for, you hear?”
“I guess.”
“Tell me about what family you have. How did you wind up in foster care?”
Merry told her story, as much of it as she felt anyone outside of her and her father needed to know. Betsy took notes in a thick leather-bound pad bristling with Post-its. Betsy interrupted now and then with a question.
“And you have no idea where your father is?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You wouldn’t be telling me a story?”
“No, ma’am. I don’t know where my daddy is.”
“And your uncle is the only other family you have?”
“There’s more relatives up in Tennessee. I have an Uncle Wendell in Murfreesboro but I never met him.”
“Is Wendell’s last name Cade too?”
“I think so. He’s Uncle Fern’s cousin.”
Betsy wrote the name down in her book.
“I’ll contact them and your Uncle Fern. We’ll see if the court will let them have custody of you. Anything else, Merry?”
“Did you find out about the books I borrowed from Ms. Booth? They were her personal books. I don’t want her to think I kept them.”
“I called her like you asked me. She understands. They were just paperbacks.”
“I wish I had them here. There’s nothing to read.”
"Shit. I almost forgot." Betsy dug into the canvas boat bag that looked like it weighed half as much as she did. She came up with a pair of digest-sized magazines and handed them over.
Merry took them eagerly. Two copies of something called Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. One featured an illustration of a police officer kneeling to read the pulse of a young girl lying dead on a sidewalk. The other had a woman pulling a gun from a desk drawer as a shadowy figure loomed close.
“You said you liked mysteries, right? My mom has boxes of these in the garage.”
“These are great!” Merry was already flipping through them.
“I’ll bring more next time. It won’t be until the day after tomorrow. But you’ll be okay, right?”<
br />
The GAL left Merry already engrossed in a story.
Out on the parking lot, the cell in Betsy’s bag began buzzing from somewhere inside her voluminous bag. A ringtone of The Pixies’ Debaser. She set the bag on the hood of her Golf and dug the phone out — a two-zero-two number on the screen.
“Ritter here.”
The caller introduced herself as Nancy Valdez, Department of Treasury.
“How can I help you, Agent Valdez?”
Betsy leaned back on her eight-year-old V-dub, smoked a Kool and listened until Agent Valdez finished her story.
“Well, I hate to ruin your day, honey,” Betsy said.
But she went ahead and did it anyway.
“There’s this girl’s privacy issues. She’s a minor in custody of the county. Before that she was a ward of the county,” Betsy said.
“You understand that this is a federal criminal case and possible matter of national security. I need access to Meredith Cade in order to both protect her and apprehend her father.” This chick was all business.
“Is that why you had her placed in that sick-ass house? To protect her?”
“I had no control over where she was placed.”
“That’s not what I heard, honey.” The ‘honey’ was the sting in the tail.
“What are you implying?”
“I’m implying shit. I asked around the courthouse and there was some outside pressure to get the girl placed in the first available slot. By doing that you placed her in danger. And I’m guessing a whole hell of a lot more danger than her father represents to her.”
The voice from Washington turned steely. “I’ll get access with or without your help.”
“I’m sure you will. But you’re going to do it the hard way. Meredith is in Alabama now. You need to start at county level and find a judge to sign off on it. I hope you know what you’re up against there.”
“We’ll go through due process, believe me. We only want what’s in the best interest of the child.”
“Well, bless your heart,” Betsy said and broke the connection.
Maybe the bitch on the other end of the phone knew it or maybe she didn’t. But “bless your heart” in this instance was pure Dixie for “go fuck yourself.”
44
As the daylight died, the wind shifted westerly bringing with it the stink of the diesel fires burning to the east. It settled in the streets in a greasy funk. The last call to pray of the day brought a quiet across the city. Only the thump of distant artillery strikes could be heard against the breathless silence that cloaked the city while the invaders took to their prayer mats in robotic supplication. The heavy traffic of shells sounded like the rumble of surf from an invisible sea.
Prayers over, the sounds of Mosul returned. Radios played the overlapping scolds of imams and emirs and, here and there, snatches of music. And all punctuated by sounds of gunfire as natural now as the calls of birds.
Levon watched through the night. His right eye pressed to the cup of the 30x, he swept the hotel with his left in search of movement. The powerful lens brought the windows and balconies of the Azur close enough to touch. Men stepped out on the balconies to smoke and catch the night breeze. Their conversations echoed over the rooftops. The words were unintelligible but Levon knew the rhythm. The ball-busting and bullshitting of rough men awaiting action. It would be louder if they were allowed alcohol.
He looked for glimpses of light coming through from parted curtains as men moved in and out of the rooms. He kept a special concentration on the seventh floor. Brief glimpses showed him room interiors like any other hotel anywhere else in the world. Some of the windows glowed with the pulsing blue nimbus of light cast by television screens.
Hours into his watch, he swung the scope to a sudden spark of yellow light. A man was silhouetted as he parted a curtain to step out onto the balcony. The man halted a moment, holding the gap open. Maybe speaking to someone inside or holding the curtain open for another to follow. Levon focused through the narrow triangle of light and into the room beyond.
A female figure sat at a table inside, her back to Levon’s view. She wore a black hijab that hid the shape of her head. To his eye she looked petite when scaled against the height of the table. The curtain dropped closed, the slice of light vanishing. In the half second before the balcony went dark the girl at the table turned her head. She was young. She was speaking to someone deeper in the room and out of sight. Her nose was thin with a tiny turn at the end. Her eyes were cast down so that he could not have seen their color even if the distance allowed it.
Through the scope he swept down the building, counting the floors as he went. The girl was on the seventh floor. He couldn’t be certain of the girl’s identity. He’d only seen Bazît’s daughters in a photo that was years old. The girl he saw might be a Yazidi. If he could only see her eyes he’d be certain.
Levon stayed in place, the scope trained on the window where he’d seen the girl. The room behind the drapes went dark. He kept watch.
The moon dropped below the urban horizon. A movement behind the glass of the window. Blue shadows shifted, a flash of silver. A figure stepped onto the balcony. A small figure. It stepped forward to the curtain wall, leaning over the top to drop something that fluttered down to the street.
The focus sharpened to fix on a young girl, her head uncovered. Hair the color of wheat. She was stretching over the top of the balcony wall to release bits of paper. The paper was white and fell like petals to the street. She watched the shreds drifting away down the face of the building. She then dropped back onto the balcony.
For less than a second, she gazed in Levon’s direction. Her eyes were the color of the desert at twilight.
Just like her father’s.
The sky glowed a shimmering electric blue along the peaks to the east as dawn neared.
Three jets banked high in a cloudless morning sky. They roared overhead at intervals, invisible but for silver flashes off their wings at six thousand feet. The anti-aircraft fire pumped at them was purely symbolic. White flashes arced upward only to arrive too late and fall too short of offering any threat to the fast-moving jets. Across the city, small arms fire erupted in pops and stutters. Rifles fired either in impotent rage or to break the tedium.
Black specks tumbled down in the wake of the aircraft already thirty miles away and climbing on a triple sonic boom. The specks took on the shapes of lozenges just before dropping out of sight behind buildings. Great yellow-brown clouds blossomed where the JDAMs came to their final rest.
The roof of the apartment building shuddered even though the line of blasts was exploding more than four miles to the north. Hejar awoke with a start, bits of gravel dancing across the rooftop as the earth shook under him. He’d fallen asleep the night before while keeping a watchful eye on the two orphan boys. The pair of them slept through the tremor. One of them raised filthy fingers to scratch an itch on his neck.
Across the roof, Bazît dozed against the curtain wall. Next to him, Levon lay on a tabletop they’d dragged up to the roof the night before. It was set so the flat surface was almost level with the curtain wall. It was covered over with the tarp to provide shade and to conceal whoever lay there. Levon had his 30x in his hands and kept a close watch on the two faces of the French hotel visible to them across the other side of the block.
The call to prayer rose in a tinny voice from a hundred loudspeakers mounted on the towers of a dozen mosques. One adhan began seconds behind another until all was a rising and falling electronic buzz punctuated by piercing shrieks of feedback.
Hejar washed his face with a handful of bottled water. His eyes were crusty and his mouth was dry. He finished the water and crushed the bottle before tossing it aside. He walked to Levon’s side. The American had a scrap of paper by him weighted down with a chunk of concrete. He’d written on it in marker.
“What is this?” Hejar said.
“It’s a timeline. There was a rolling blackout last night. I checke
d the time and length. It might be a pattern,” Levon said.
“You were awake all night?”
“Most of it.”
Hejar thought back. He could not recall ever seeing the American asleep. Levon rolled off the tabletop and crouched by the nodding Bazît.
“What kind of pattern?” Hejar said.
“One section of the city goes dark for an hour or two. And then another. I could see it from here. It looked like a planned outage.”
“How does this help us?” Bazît said.
"The Azur's power went off just before oh-two-hundred. There was a ninety-second lag until the generators kicked on. That's our window." Levon snapped the top off a water bottle. He took a long pull on it, recapped it, and tossed it to one of the boys. They were awake now and watching the men with interest. The two boys shared the bottle until it was dry.
“I grow impatient,” Bazît said.
“I agree. We can position ourselves tonight to move when the power goes dark,” Levon said.
"A ninety-second window. Is it enough?"
“We could extend it.” Levon looked to Hejar who appeared puzzled.
“You will make certain the generator does not start,” Bazît said.
Hejar nodded.
“Can you do it quietly?” Levon said.
Hejar grinned. The first time Levon had seen him smile. It was not a pretty sight.
“Where is the generator?” Bazît said.
“Not sure. Somewhere out of sight. I heard it come on just before the lights. It’s a big one. Big enough to power up most of the hotel lights. It’s probably in the courtyard behind the building,” Levon said.
“We must be sure,” Bazît said.
“We will be,” Levon said. His eyes were on the pair of boys peeling open an MRE they found lying by his pack.
45
“You are not Arab,” Yasin said. He was the older of the two brothers. The youngest was Zamir.