Jihadi Read online

  Fatima reminded herself that Allah was ever with the patient and struck the Enter key.

  Thelonius looked at his hands, so as to avoid looking at the milk carton. Then he didn’t want to look at his hands. So he looked at the floor.

  Well. Maybe it would stop that shaking. If he just stopped and looked at it. Like what that wacko back in the Republic promised.

  No, kid. Eyes front. That’s an order. Stick with Sarge.

  Well. Suppose he just tried it. Once. To see whether that would do anything to slow down that freakish rattling noise.

  No.

  Well. He had to do something. The noise hurt his knee now. It was spreading through his body. Why not look? What was the harm in looking?

  Just no.

  The ache broadened. He grabbed his knee. As he did so, he looked at the milk carton. He didn’t know whether he meant to look or not.

  The noise stopped. The milk carton calmed itself to stillness.

  There, on the panel of the plastic jug facing him: a still colour photograph. It was clear, remarkably high in resolution. It showed his peach-and-black bathrobed wife Becky, in their kitchen.

  Becky wearing that robe. Becky in that kitchen. Becky having a conversation on that landline, its actual cord leading to Becky, stretching and bobbing as she spoke. In the photo: Becky’s pale, delicate profile and long, bare neck, exposed. Becky’s massive wave of deep-red hair, slung motionless over one angled, robed shoulder.

  The picture on the carton had to have been taken within the last minute or so. It stopped his breath.

  Look away, kid. Machine.

  Thelonius did not look away, though. He waited for the photo to vanish, as certain elements of dreams vanish upon inspection. It refused. He felt a dark tightening and buzzing in his chest.

  Thud. Then a smaller thud. What the hell?

  Of course: the sound of Becky bumping into something, then recovering.

  Her field of vision was receding.

  When Thelonius looked toward the direction of the noise, he heard the carton begin rattling again. In the kitchen, he saw only that taut, white, trembling phone cord, parallel to the floor. Becky stood, certainly, on the other end of it. She had in fact been wearing that very black-and-peach patterned satin bathrobe, his gift to her on her most recent birthday. Thelonius had seen it flash as she spun past him to answer the kitchen phone. Now he could only hear her.

  He looked back at the carton. The shivering stopped.

  The photographic image of Becky was so clear, so impossible to refute, that it made his mouth go dry. The plastic jug showed Thelonius his own kitchen in high definition, and Becky’s profile playing soft in its shadow against the green, butterfly pattern of the wallpaper, and Becky within it, on the phone, her eyes narrowed in concentration.

  ‘You can count on him,’ Thelonius heard his wife say from the next room. ‘We all know how much the banquet means.’

  Above the photograph was a headline: LOST WOMAN.

  xiii. LOST WOMAN

  Whatever. These crude personal attacks – many more follow – constitute a special category of strategic misdirection, a tactic in which Liddell specialized. We politely decline the invitation to hurl ourselves down such rabbit holes. Every war is a puzzle, an unbroken code, a kind of chaos waiting to be put in order, and this war more than most. In warfare, my distracted colleagues, victory does not come on the battlefield. Not victory that matters, anyway. Real victory comes to the side that creates and sustains the most persuasive solution to the puzzle. I raise a glass of wine. A toast. To victory.

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

  The dead guy writing this story ponders the timeline and concludes that two long, busy days after the passing of her sister Wafa and her unborn, unnamed niece, Fatima attended a big protest at the U.S. Embassy in Islamic City, one she had helped to organize.

  Islamic City was, and may still be, the capital of the Islamic Republic.

  This protest took shape quickly. It had been arranged in less than forty-eight hours by just under a dozen people. As the crowd gathered, Fatima was veiled and (she hoped) anonymous. She did not want to jeopardize her new job as a translator for the Bureau of Islamic Investigation, also known as the BII.

  The Bureau of Islamic Investigation was, and may still be, the national intelligence-gathering apparatus of the Islamic Republic. It was full of spies and military men who lacked basic English skills. Fatima’s English was perfect. She and her sister Noura had dual citizenship. They spoke English like Americans because that’s what they were: Americans.

  Fatima’s new boss, who did not speak English, wanted her to help him keep an eye on the Americans. He would probably have put her in prison if he’d known about her work organizing the protest, his own organizing principle being that no one should organize anything he didn’t know about.

  In SERGEANT USA #109, THE HERO THAT WAS (the dead guy recalls), Sarge takes down the Mutant Machines. The Mutant Machines are part of an evil plot spun by the enemies of America. Sarge disables all seven by flinging his Expand-A-Shield at them.

  PLOOF. THWOCK. KA-THOK.

  Before her promotion to translator, Fatima had been a typist for the BII. With a little help from Ummi, who worked part-time in a fabric shop, Fatima had been (barely) supporting the family for more than a year. She had to work, at least until she got married, and she didn’t feel like getting married. She was fine with work. She didn’t like Ummi working at all. Ummi’s back was giving her trouble.

  When Fatima was ten, her Baba – an obstetrician from Massachusetts who prayed all mandatory and optional prayers, who read the Koran aloud every day to his daughters, who told Fatima Paradise lay beneath the feet of her Ummi, who knew Fatima was destined by God to be a good girl and a patient woman and a true believer, and told her so every night – was in a car accident. The accident was serious, and he passed. They set him into his grave, to be questioned by angels there.

  A few months after Fatima’s Baba died, Ummi returned to the Islamic Republic, dragging her three daughters along with her, saying, ‘That’s where family is.’ Ummi had never liked Massachusetts much.

  Fatima didn’t like the Islamic Republic much.

  Fatima withdrew into herself and prayed and read the Koran.

  The guilty dead guy telling you this story does that now, too.

  In Islamic City, Fatima’s schoolyard opponents had called her the Ugly American. This was before she grew into her features. Fatima told her sister Wafa about the insults, and Wafa reminded her that what mattered was not what people called her, but what she answered to. It was something Baba would have said.

  xiv. the Ugly American

  A grim joke at our nation’s expense. But I might add that it’s quite correct concerning Fatima’s physical appearance.

  Baba had also said Fatima should take her time getting married.

  In her Koran, Fatima kept a photograph of Baba kissing the top of her little-girl head. After each evening prayer, when she was alone, she took out the photo of that kiss and studied it.

  Ummi always said she wanted her girls to get married, just not to Americans. There were a lot of American soldiers since the invasion, but Ummi considered none of them appropriate son-in-law material. These days, her mom had taken to introducing Fatima to total strangers. She brought them right in the house. Fatima waited until her mother left the room on some imaginary errand, then, whispering, threatened to pour boiling water on the man’s private area while he slept. This was something she never would have done, but lies in warfare are permitted. The man always left, never to return.

  More people now. Fatima prayed no one would die at the demonstration.

  Thelonius, who had only killed people when specifically instructed to do so by the United States of America, sipped his coffee, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then said to Becky, ‘Honey, have you seen Child?’

  xv. Child
/>   Meaning the cat. As Mother used to say: Good Gravy. We here encounter one of the subject’s favorite themes, betrayal. I am still asked, will apparently always be asked, whether Liddell’s US citizenship gave, gives, or ever will give me pause. My concise answer: no. He betrayed our nation, not vice versa. This position’s unassailability is detailed in notes xl and xlv, the latter for mature audiences only.

  Within fifteen minutes, the protest Fatima helped organize had drawn about twenty thousand people, double what she had prayed for.

  She stood chanting Allahu Akbar with everyone else. Allahu Akbar is one of those hard-to-translate phrases. You hear people saying it means ‘God is great’, but that’s wrong. In fact, it means, ‘God is greater than anything that might have ever happened, or is happening now, or could happen in the future’. That’s too long for a translation, though.

  Fatima took deep breaths each time she said it, used it to avoid crying tears of rage.

  xvi. breaths

  She breathes now only sour air, our Fatima.

  xvii. tears of rage

  The name of a Dylan composition recorded by The Band, based loosely on (I swear) King Lear. Relevant because the title inspired ‘track twenty-eight’, one of John Lennon’s endearing experiments in Carrollian wordplay, of which more in due course. Liddell wept to that track.

  More noise outside from that damn grey-haired tyrannical Brazilian. I have plugged in the CD player, donned my earbuds, and placed the earphone jack in its little black socket. This jack yields a satisfying click whenever I insert it. A powerful, indescribable sense of being in control of events can occasionally, as now, render even the insertion of a CD unnecessary.

  6 In Which Liddell Provides Inappropriate Biographical Detail

  The dead guy telling this story wants you to know Thelonius was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, California, the only child of a suspicious, hard-working, well-read, bourbon-loving, wife-beating truck driver, George, and a homemaker with low self-esteem, Irene. Back then, you called a homemaker a housewife. They moved to San Francisco. Made a home there. George said he was tired of the road.

  By 1966, Thelonius’s father, now a suspicious, hard-working alcoholic, had used the savings of five years to buy himself a small bookstore. In which he cut his wife’s throat. Thelonius happened to observe that, which wasn’t in George’s plan.

  Thelonius moved in with his grandparents Hal and Louise B. in La Pine, Oregon, right after what his grandparents agreed to refer to as The Accident, when they referred to it at all. Which wasn’t often.

  He kept asking when he would be able to go home. They always changed the subject. When they did, he read his copy of SERGEANT USA #109. THE HERO THAT WAS.

  Nine months after Thelonius arrived in Oregon, his father went to prison. Read a lot there, according to the initial, and only, letter. Didn’t write back when Thelonius responded to that letter nine times.

  In La Pine, Thelonius craved approval, created a series of alarmingly violent hand-drawn comic books, and described himself to teachers and everyone else who would listen as a ‘bright, active, and curious child’. Whoever heard that had to agree.

  At some point during the confusing years following The Accident, Thelonius established a certainty: the necessity of victory. Everything else became a blur. The more things Thelonius made happen, the dead guy recalls, the more chances there were for winning. Winning mattered.

  Two of his teachers, Miss Tokstad (Arts and Crafts) and Mr. Hess (Everything Else) described him as ‘extremely competitive’.

  He blamed others with a deep ferocity, and was always in a hurry. Preventing him from attaining goals, or being perceived as doing so, was dangerous. He devoured a book on memory techniques, with the aim of always securing the highest grades on tests. Coming in second on an exam produced an unwholesome expression on the boy’s face. One recess, during a foot race, he elbowed a much smaller, younger boy, who had scored one hundred on a math test, out of the way, causing a fall that broke the boy’s wrist.

  Thelonius insisted, with apparent seriousness, that his opponent was an android.

  Mr. Hess did not send his star pupil to see the principal – Thelonius had, after all, reported the collision – but he did suspect some kind of problem. Back in the early seventies, students with excellent grades who had extreme competitiveness issues were not referred to psychologists.

  Thelonius finished first in that race, got more A’s, made more things happen. He refused to wait for anything. He became a bright, active, curious boy scout, then a bright, active, curious class president, then a bright, active, curious high school swimming star.

  Thelonius worked out a lot, developed serious upper body strength, made All-Everything, made the Honor Society, and was extremely patriotic. His grandparents told him how proud they were about the way he’d bounced back from The Accident. Thinking his grandson was sleeping, Hal said to Louise late one night that George had no right to see how well his son was doing, that George never inspired anyone, never won anything, and never amounted to anything but a killer.

  George died in prison, trying to kill someone who’d threatened him. Thelonius was nineteen when Hal and Louise sat him down to tell him. He went to his room and reread THE HERO THAT WAS.

  A voice said, If you kill, make sure you kill for America, kid.

  Thelonius captained the winning swimming team in the 1980 Oregon State High School Championships, a special moment of triumph. It was followed by enrolment in the army in 1982, an even bigger triumph, given Hal’s status as an army veteran. That was followed by winning a spot in the Special Forces in 1983: the biggest triumph of Thelonius’s young life. That was followed by a vasectomy in 1985 by an army doctor who had been nervous about performing the procedure on a twenty-four-year-old. Thelonius said, ‘Just get started.’

  xviii. nervous

  Needlessly so. A vasectomy is reversible, with some clinics reporting a 97% fertility rate.

  Thelonius had almost gotten somebody pregnant. That was not going to happen again.

  Two years in Special Forces. Then off to school to study international relations, which the army paid for, because they saw potential in Thelonius. Then more time in school, also paid for by the army. Then, on an application form, a request that he ‘briefly summarize’ his ‘life philosophy’, which he shared and, later, framed.

  Followed by certain members of the intelligence community seeing potential in Thelonius, like the army had.

  And falling in love with Becky.

  Followed by his entry into the exciting world of espionage. Followed by a fast track at the Directorate, which he loved. Followed by various hush-hush assignments.

  Followed, in 2005, by the mess he ran into in the Islamic Republic, which got complicated both for himself and for Child the cat, a mixed-breed whose uncertain parentage Becky could never excuse.

  Followed by his murder during an interrogation session in (he predicts) the early summer of 2006.

  xix. early summer of 2006

  A sober mystery yet to be unravelled, and certainly beyond the realm of the civilian justice system. It pains me to be forced to reiterate that everything – absolutely everything – I did while interrogating T had ample operational precedent.

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

  The grey-suited man with grey hair, reduced to shouting from the hood of a black Lincoln Continental and clearly not used to this kind of duty, was a friend of Thelonius Liddell’s.

  He flicked off the bullhorn by accident, then flicked it back on. It popped, too loud, as it reawakened. The embassy, he informed everyone, had investigated the incident with the flechettes. It had been a tragic accident. People should return to their homes.

  Sorry!

  No one returned home.

  The crowd had grown to thirty thousand now. It surged with firm, unintelligible purpose against three of the four massive iron gates that surrounded the embassy compound. No one paid attention to the man
in grey. They all kept chanting Allahu Akbar.

  The earnest man on the Lincoln, having reached the limit of his effectiveness, asked if there was anyone in the crowd who could translate for him so that he could do a better job of clarifying the situation. Fatima did not even think about raising her hand.

  She found herself in a corner, pushed by the throng’s ceaseless, expanding geometry into an obscure convergence of two angles of the embassy gate. There were many such nooks surrounding the embassy. This particular nook had a locked service entry. It barricaded a dumpster.

  A heavyset woman next to Fatima jabbed her in the side.

  xx. A heavyset woman

  Ringo Starr appears dancing with such a woman on the White Album’s photo-illustrated lyric sheet. Provide White Album track sequence here for ease of reference in later chapters? (No, don’t think so, too much information, but see if this omission still makes sense on next pass.)

  8 In Which Liddell Abuses Certain Confidences

  Fatima assumed at first that the jab in her side was just an over-energetic spike in the chaotic, respectful movement of the huge crowd, but when the heavyset woman elbowed her a second, and then a third time, Fatima turned and glared. The woman’s eyebrows arched upward in alarm, and she pointed toward a segment of the immaculately manicured embassy lawn before them.

  Adjacent to that lawn was a small rectangle of concrete, right behind the dumpster: a flat place that looked like a loading area. The rectangle was cut off from the view of the rest of the crowd. There, a few feet away from them on the rectangle of cement, a U.S. marine, his back to Fatima, stood above a large, open Koran.