Jihadi Read online

  Jihadi

  A Love Story

  YUSUF TOROPOV

  From the Desk of R.L. Firestone

  This is no love story, though the late author would have had it so. A sad tale, a tale of treason, Jihadi, an encrypted memoir posing as a novel, is the work of the terrorist Ali Liddell, upon whom the justice of God descended on July 3, 2006. This date marked both his forty-fifth birthday and the fourteenth anniversary of the star-cursed day that I recommended we hire him. I here seek formal immunity against prosecution for his death.

  Although my detractors never fail to note that the terrorist’s last name rhymes with ‘riddle’, the case against him could not be clearer cut. Much has been made of the imagined legal and moral dilemmas presented by Liddell’s American citizenship. Yet the three facts driving his case remain indisputable.

  First, that Liddell received briefings on classified material of the most sensitive kind on an almost daily basis.

  Second, that he suffered a nervous breakdown prior to writing Jihadi.

  And third, that he was the first and only senior staffer in our history to convert to Islam. This travesty occurred after his final overseas mission, during which a series of unpardonable security breaches resulted in his being targeted, seduced, renamed, and reprogrammed by a female jihadi, now in custody: Fatima Adara.

  We may expect more such attempts at subversion, not only from overseas operatives, but from stateside religious extremists as well – see my essay The Liddell Syndrome.

  Thelonius Liddell drafted Jihadi during his final months, in the demented script of a masochist, using an ink of water and charcoal, and occasional specks of his own blood (minute amounts of which served as some kind of thickening agent). The work is thus attributable solely to him via DNA, graphological and forensic evidence.

  The facsimiles from which I work correlate precisely with Liddell’s original pages, each now encased in Lucite and held within a temperature-controlled basement at Directorate headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The sheets were impounded by Operations only minutes after I discovered them in Liddell’s cell.

  A full embargo on this material has been set in place, and for good reason, yet my detractors – emboldened, perhaps, by the recent resignation of Mr. Unferth – now debate, with apparent seriousness, whether this should be lifted. In so doing, these misguided simpletons aid and comfort the (obvious and unseen, late and living) enemies of our nation. And enemies is indeed the proper word.

  Why does the manuscript even exist? A difficult question. Enemy combatant Liddell, under surveillance at Bright Light, a technically nonexistent resort for violent religious extremists, was, per our protocols, forbidden writing implements. He somehow obtained several reams of letterhead from an unauthorized source. Post-mortem, a syringe, repurposed to create his book, was found in his quarters. Such was his arsenal.

  To date, the manuscript has been seen by less than a half-dozen persons, all senior members of the Directorate. Some argue that we are this book’s only intended audience, or that its message is merely an extended, largely incoherent insult, not worthy of deep classification. I offer, with this commentary, my respectful dissent.

  The reasons for this dissent begin with the work’s now-infamous opening page: Liddell’s dedication. It has attracted almost as much attention as the similarly obscure reference within the work to a mythical ‘hundredth chapter’. Is the dedication a call to action – or some harmless literary ruse? Until we can answer such questions with certainty, we must not risk compromising our assets or our nation’s security. For the sake of the innocents, not to mention the ideals of democracy, free enterprise, and good sportsmanship that we are sworn to protect, Liddell’s hidden fatwas, his paranoid ravings, his absurd accusations, must never reach their intended audience: terrorists in training.

  A few more words are in order before I close this prefatory note. This commentary is not merely a personal defence, but also a labour of love. It is dedicated to the nation and the Directorate to which I have sacrificed more than can be recounted here. I hope and pray that that nation, that Directorate, may yet see fit to show me some compassion.

  It pains me to ask for this. I feel entitled to do so because I took a stand. By dedicating my expertise to the cause of freedom – I was the only official assigned to interrogate Liddell privately – I did my duty. Not always perfectly, but always out of a profound love for our country and its values.

  I saved lives. I do not deserve prosecution for having done so. Those who claim I do, those who challenge my love for America or for the Directorate because a terrorist died, are wrong.

  You who accuse me of murder and torture (hateful, hateful words!), know that I did all of this for you, too, even though positions such as yours are unlikely to be softened by appeals such as mine. Know that the terrorists count on our uncertainty, on our wasting time on debates like these before we take action.

  A question for you. You must choose between: A) flying on a plane whose route and security procedures benefit from intelligence gathered by means of ‘torture’; or B) flying on a plane whose crew have no such intelligence.

  Would you ever choose the latter? You clear your throat. You turn the page. You press the button and summon the stewardess for another coffee.

  We who cared for you, who risked our lives for you, and who occasionally erred in the service of your journey’s sacred tedium, who put your well-being before our own, we selected for you the sweet boring (A) that we knew you would select for yourself, over the potentially more eventful (B). We seek absolution now because we did our duty. Because we took care of you. Took Care Of You.

  We ask now only for the same security and respect that our detractors within the Directorate enjoy each day, and barely notice.

  A final housekeeping note: Our condition appears to have occasioned some intermittent loss of short-term memory. (Never, as far as we can tell, long-term.) This has complicated the project somewhat and necessitated multiple careful inspections of the material. We apologize for the delay in forwarding this.

  R.L Firestone

  DEDICATED TO KHADIJAH – You know I limp now, and move slower than I once did. One way or another I will get out of here. Get home.

  I am the dead guy telling you this story. Stories are all I have left. Stories will get me out of here, get me back where I belong. Once upon a time, you believed that man who said, ‘Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.’ Justice will have to do for this story, because none of what follows is true. It is all one long lie. If you come across something seemingly true in these pages, remember this: Only the Word of Allah is true. I pray that Word guides us.

  i. Khadijah.

  Bucharest, United 101 last night. Didn’t get much sleep until the layover at Kennedy. Passport viable after all. And then that exhausting drive through the desert! To the purpose: Liddell’s text is in English, as is the transcript from which I work, but readers embarking upon this text must nevertheless note two points: first, that the English phonemes KH and H are expressed by precisely the same letter in the language of the Koran; second, that the reproduction of vowels within the written text of the Muslim Holy Scripture is forbidden. KHADIJAH thus becomes an anagram for JIHAD, which Ali (aka Liddell) personifies and invokes here. Look at these swollen feet.

  This story begins with a prayer and ends with a prayer, Khadijah. I pray our destinies may yet intertwine to our benefit. I pray we may forgive each other. I pray our trials in this world may benefit us in this life and the next. And despite my falsehood, my guilt, I pray the Lord liberates us both, guides us to His Straight Path and spares us the fires of Hell.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  From the Desk of R.L. Fi
restone

  1 In Which the Terrorist Describes his Surroundings

  2 In Which Liddell Engages in Fashionable Howling

  3 In Which Liddell Hallucinates

  4 In Which Victory Is Defined

  5 In Which the American Embassy Is Very Nearly Stormed by a Mob of Terrorists and Terrorist Sympathizers

  6 In Which Liddell Provides Inappropriate Biographical Detail

  7 In Which the Reader Is Assumed to Have Access to a Track List

  8 In Which Liddell Abuses Certain Confidences

  9 In Which Liddell Turns Down the Chance of a Lifetime

  10 In Which Liddell Falls Prey to a Characteristic Fit of Blind Rage

  11 In Which Liddell Continues a Pattern of Deliberate Obfuscation

  12 In Which the White Album Cues Itself Up

  13 Does the 9/11 Thing Go Here?

  14 In Which Liddell Fabricates an Interview

  15 In Which Liddell Has a Nervous Breakdown

  16 In Which the Bitch First Encounters Liddell

  17 In Which Liddell First Covets Her

  18 In Which a National Hero Is Slandered Yet Again

  19 In Which a Sexual Motive Is Confirmed beyond All Reasonable Doubt

  20 In Which the White Album Identifies the Leader of the Oldburgh Terrorist Cell

  21 In Which the White Album Arraigns and Convicts a Murderous Oldburgh ‘Poet’

  22 In Which the White Album Unmasks Another Conspirator

  23 In Which the White Album’s Second Side Begins

  24 In Which the Guns Continue To Warm

  25 Important Reminder

  26 In Which Our Song Is Played Repeatedly, and T Spends His Days in Isolation

  27 In Which Liddell Is Strapped Up

  28 In Which the White Album Indicates a Necessity

  29 In Which I Make No Notes

  30 In Which Liddell Is Force-Fed

  31 In Which Material Related to National Security Does Not Appear, the Manuscript Becomes Quite Tedious Indeed, and the Time and Attention of My Colleagues Is Better Invested Elsewhere

  32 In Which I Interrogate Clive

  33 In Which Liddell Finally Experiences Regret

  34 In Which ‘Fajr’ Is Defined

  35 In Which I Stand with Difficulty

  36 In Which I Experience a Period of Great Restlessness

  37 In Which the Restlessness Continues, and Nothing of Consequence Appears in the Manuscript until Quite Late in the Chapter

  38 In Which I Wonder Whether I Have Finally Caught a Break

  39 In Which You Object to an Insult

  40 In Which I Wait

  41 In Which the Clock Reads 5:00

  42 5:08

  43 In Which I Do Catch a Break

  44 In Which Paul McCartney Celebrates His Birthday

  45 In Which the Bassist Steps Up

  46 In Which Ringo Starr’s Petulance Is Checked

  47 In Which I Recall Barry Goldwater’s Moment of Glory

  48 In Which a Brutal Edit Evokes a Critical Passage from the Gospel of John

  49 In Which the Band Celebrates

  50 Rishikesh

  51 Postcards from India

  52 John Triumphant

  53 Maharishi

  54 White Metal

  55 The Bottomless Pit

  56 Cold and Hot

  57 A Message to Comfort the Faithful

  58 Something about Time Running Out

  59 Certain Obscure Pronoun References in Track Twenty-Four Clarified

  60 The Third Side Concludes, the Fourth Side Begins

  61 Lennon’s Demand

  62 Hips Still Killing Me

  63 Wait a Minute

  64 Keep Typing

  65 Whatever

  66 Two Rotten Teeth

  67 Revelation 9:9

  68 all right

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  92

  93

  94

  95

  96

  97

  98

  99

  100

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1 In Which the Terrorist Describes his Surroundings

  ii. (lacuna! Almost missed my own index card on this, only saw it while reviewing materials on plane)

  The next passage of the manuscript is, my notes remind me, marked ‘Chapter One’ in parentheses set within Liddell’s ample margins. This faint but visible two-word notation, confirmed by personal evaluation of both the facsimile and the Lucite-encased originals, does not appear in the otherwise faithful official transcript compiled by the Directorate. The attentive eye of an editor has been wanting! All ninety-nine of the terrorist’s chapters are numbered, but no text from Liddell describes them.

  I have supplied, or am in the process of supplying, all of the present chapter titles.

  He tried not to write this book, but, as a dead guy, felt he had an obligation to do so. He owed her that.

  He counts as a dead guy, even though his heart beats, his blood flows, and his mind races, six out of every seven days, within a ten-metre-by-ten-metre cell in the containment unit he calls The Beige Motel. He used to live in a place called Salem, Massachusetts. Now he lives here.

  They pride themselves on consistency at The Beige Motel. They see to it that your fluorescent lights never go out. They make certain the brittle, E-flat hum of the place never varies. They follow a strict time scheme, confirmed daily by whether or not you have just been served scrambled eggs on Styrofoam. The plate of scrambled eggs is set on a tray that they place in a creaking, rotating compartment built right into your locked door. Scrambled eggs mean morning. Anything else means later.

  He supposes they could switch things up and serve him scrambled eggs at dinnertime to mess with his sense of time. If they wanted, they could. They do mess with his sense of time. So far they have never done that, though.

  He misses his wife.

  Every seventh day he hears the door groan: Sunday. It opens, and someone leads him away. He inspects a soundproofed enclosure of linoleum and echoes called the Yard. In the Yard, he discusses world affairs with the other guests and reconfirms that morning remains morning by staring at a rectangular sheet of glass set so high into one wall that the place feels, to him, ever so slightly like a church. The glass is probably bulletproof. Only sky is visible through it.

  He has concluded that this sheet of glass in the Yard’s wall happens to have exactly the same length-to-width ratio as the nineteen leaves of blank paper AbdulKarim smuggles to him each week. Sometimes, when he is writing, he imagines he can see the gold of early dawn through the window in the Yard. He imagines this sheet, on which he now writes, as that impossibly high-mounted window. He imagines it has just lowered itself and opened for him. He imagines golden light, imagines flying toward it.

  Whatever he actually sees through that big, inaccessible, rectangular window in the Yard – sleet or clouds or, lately, swirling dust – means a new week has begun. Ten hours into that week, his day has vanished, and he makes his way, escorted, back to his own little corner of the Beige Motel. There are two beds there, but no one lives in the tiny compartment with him. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t live in it, either. He died months ago, or might as well have.

  Somehow, he got on the bad side of a network of unjust institutions. These institutions interrogate people and make them disappear.

  He just wrote, ‘somehow’. But he knows how he got on their bad side, why he was interrogated when he arrived, why he will be interrogated again. It was because he spo
ke justice. When you do that, they say you are gone. When they say you are gone, you are gone; you’re simply waiting around for a muscle in the middle of your chest to stop sending spurts of freshly oxygenated blood through your arteries. You are a dead guy in an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a room, patiently waiting for scrambled eggs, strolling one day out of seven among other patient dead guys in orange jumpsuits, who are also sitting in a room waiting for scrambled eggs. All of you are dead.

  iii. patient dead guys

  Liddell, as noted above, created this manuscript while confined at Bright Light. He did his work in a remote corner of that beige cell of his, during daily six-hour periods when the video surveillance system, more primitive than the American unit one would have preferred, was set to ‘stationary’ rather than ‘scan’. This was meant to permit sleep for those who had earned it. He imagined he could elude our system of controls. Patient patient.

  The dead guy telling this story remembers Fatima, in a gold headscarf, her weeping eyes wide, begging him to tell the truth.

  iv. Fatima.

  No comment. Yet. Haven’t the energy. Need to nap. Errors likelier when tired. Note about control systems goes here?

  (Continued) I still recall with a chuckle the first active Jihadi I interrogated at Bagram Air Force Base. The dusky, defiant Habibullah, an unreliable front-line informant, proved as taciturn with me as he had with his three previous interlocutors. I administered a series of peroneal strikes as he hung by both wrists from the sturdy ceiling of his questioning room (one area of my expertise is compliance blows). I later learned that a pack of imprudent, thrill-starved Green Berets imitated my technique and took turns delivering careless strikes to the limp, increasingly exhausted Habibullah. The story goes that they kept this up for twelve or fourteen hours (a statistically ineffective application), and found his cries of ‘Allah! Allah!’ amusing. Boys will be boys. True to his own wish, Habibullah passed away in captivity. A simple duty to circulate best practices compels me to record here that my avoidance of any paperwork connected with this episode spared the Directorate involvement in the (minor) legal flap and so forth that ensued stateside. A pasting error. But retain last sentence?