Jihadi Read online

  That will be Becky’s job, he predicts – aware, as he is, that each of those blanks at the beginning of a chapter will leave an opening, a gap of intention, and counting on Becky, as he does now, to fill those gaps. She fills in all the blanks as she sees fit now. And she leaves blank whatever she concludes does not or should not exist.

  The dead guy telling this story wants to make sure Becky knows why he is writing this in the way he is: illuminating people and events and thoughts by impersonating them, experiencing them, thinking them through, creating and recreating them as necessary. Lying. Referring to himself in the third person, even though he’s right here. Or, from time to time, in the second.

  Because:

  When she first took you into her arms, one of the things she did for you was lie to you and tell you stories. You knew they were lies, the things she told you to get you out of your funks, but you let her tell them anyway. She made you feel better that way. Made you feel that there could be a home for you.

  She took care of you.

  She made you feel whole for a while. You thought she made you survive. Here in the Beige Motel, you decided, it was the stories that did that. So you concluded you would take yourself into your own arms and tell yourself your own lies. Live your own stories, on paper. And maybe, just maybe, use those stories to resolve your own debts.

  THWOCK. PLOOF. KA-THOK.

  This page is full now. Maybe you wrote those sound effects too big. On to the next.

  Sometimes when you stare at a new, empty rectangle of paper you see yourself entering the gold dawn of the high-mounted window in the Yard.

  Sometimes, when you are writing, you find yourself floating there.

  Sometimes you feel like you are on your way home.

  Fatima wore a gold headscarf her first day on the job. Her new boss subjected her to an hour-long ‘orientation session’. A short, plump, mustachioed, disagreeable-looking fellow, he went by the name of Murad Murad. Thanks to family connections, he had obtained a rumpled military uniform he had no right to wear, and whenever he made the ‘I’m important’ face this attire seemed to him to demand, he looked as though he had just eaten something indigestible. He told Fatima she was to think of him from this point forward as her father. She spent much of her first day trying not to.

  After Murad Murad had led her one-on-one ‘orientation session’ – sixty-four minutes of telling Fatima how to find people she already knew how to find, how to turn on a computer she already knew how to turn on – he circled past her cubicle every forty minutes or so to ask how she was settling in.

  She told him she was settling in fine.

  Becky had earned her Master’s degree in psychology at the age of nineteen.

  She considered that the least of her achievements, though. She took greatest pride in her status as the youngest credentialed psychologist ever to be employed by the Directorate. This came about, in part, because of her insistence on prominence in any arena in which she competed, a trait she shared with Thelonius. As she admitted to anyone who asked, the distinctions she earned also had a great deal to do with family connections. Her family tree, she liked to boast, had ‘deep and twisted roots’.

  The Sharps, her mother’s family, had been wealthy segregationists on one side and founding John Birchers on the other. The Firestones, on the other hand, had been academics and diplomats and spies and heavy drinkers, sometimes all in one person.

  At her father’s personal request, and such requests from Dad were in fact orders, Becky manned, against her will, the Career Day table for the Directorate at Mt. Sinai University. She had told her father on several occasions, as Career Day approached, that she considered such an assignment beneath her.

  ‘That,’ said Dad, ‘is the problem.’

  Becky arrived early, fulfilling her father’s request (read: order) on a grey, snowy April morning in 1992. That was how she met Thelonius, who was studying international relations at Mt. Sinai. The shivering and sole Directorate representative at a recruitment table she knew herself to be surrealistically overqualified to occupy, she spotted him eyeing her, then pretending to inspect a brochure. He left the table, skittish for some reason. He pushed his way through the big glass door. She got up and followed him out, onto a little terrace, where the flurries had picked up a dense, abrupt momentum. She recruited Thelonius in a blizzard she had no business being out in.

  ‘I’m Becky Firestone. And you are?’

  A Green Beret in a hurry, working on his Master’s degree in international relations. Eyes that drilled through you. Family problems he didn’t feel like discussing, beyond mentioning that his mother had died early. (Hers had, too, but she opted to say nothing of that today.) Tough. Intense. Disciplined. Loved George Bush, the first George Bush, and all he stood for, loved how he had brought the wall down, loved what he had done in Iraq. Hated Communists with a passion. Hated Saddam with a passion. Hated many things with a passion.

  They came back indoors and brushed off the snow, careful not to touch each other yet. Becky resumed her spot at the table.

  He filled out the form.

  Thelonius watched her read his life philosophy over a second time, laugh a second time, look him in the eye.

  Becky told him she thought he might like intelligence work. Even in that moment, and for reasons that he would not understand for years to come, part of Thelonius had been tempted to find some way to tell her directly, then and there, that he was not a normal person. That he had every reason to believe he was a difficult man on a difficult trajectory, a glide path that could only disrupt, in painful ways, the orbits it happened to intersect. But she held his gaze and said, right out loud:

  ‘I’m here to help.’

  So he said nothing, in those earliest days, about his being difficult, guided by the twin theories that she had somehow already figured it out – which she had – and that she must surely have known what she was doing.

  ‘Makes a person think about things like destiny,’ she said from behind the desk, still fixing him with those wide, green eyes.

  xxxii. destiny

  Who can recall the details of such ancient discussions? Pointless anyway. We create our own fate.

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Your philosophy. The eating thing.’ She arched an eyebrow, as though she wanted him to repeat some part of it out loud.

  He looked away.

  ‘Simple,’ she said, the echoes of a faint smile shading her voice. The voice went higher when she was interested in you. ‘Maybe a little rude and obvious. Some people are afraid of that. Not me. I believe America’s great moments have always come when we offered simple solutions and then delivered them. That’s our destiny in this country. Simplicity. That’s why Communism fell, you know. Simple ideas we proposed and then stuck to. Lines we drew and then defended. No delays, no concessions, no procrastination. It will be you next time. Defending us. I can tell. Making that kind of contribution. Drawing that kind of line. It’s meant to be you.’

  Her certainty caught him by surprise. He checked again: the green eyes were still trained on him. He was supposed to say something, but nothing came.

  ‘You want to know why we won the Cold War?’

  ‘Sure,’ Thelonius said.

  ‘Because our system is better. Fairer. Theirs was neither just nor perceived as just. That’s why it collapsed. That’s why we buried them. That’s why the next century is going to be the American century. Because perceptions of justice always depend on big, shared ideas that everyone can eventually come to accept as foundational for both themselves and the community. Like enterprise and personal initiative. As you suggest.’

  He nodded as though he understood.

  ‘Personally, I think Washington is a swamp,’ she said, ‘and Langley, too, and yes, I do feel sorry for anyone who has to clear that swamp. You mention Bush. Bush is a good man, maybe a great man, but I do hope the swamp doesn’t drag him and his family down. Langley eats people, you know. It eats them alive.’
>
  ‘I’ve heard that, yes.’

  ‘But maybe it’s worth it – if you are meant to make a contribution, that is. For the country, I mean. Bush, by the way, will be re-elected. That’s meant to be, too.’

  ‘How do you know so much about what’s meant to be?’

  ‘It’s our job,’ she said, ‘to know what happens next.’

  He rushed things. She slept with him quite early on, and against her better judgement, she said, but only after assuring him that the next person she went to bed with would, according to her own personal sense of destiny, become her husband. He nodded. But he was not sure what it meant to agree to such a thing.

  Nowadays, Becky does not believe in destiny.

  All the years they were together, Becky never formally diagnosed Thelonius – no one ever did – and she never wrote any prescriptions for him, either. But she had fallen in love with him during Career Day. That was the problem.

  As a result, she pulled strings for him within the Company, got him on the fast track he craved, helped him to talk things through, usually in bed. She pointed him toward the right articles in the right journals. She also begged him to get therapy, and his stubborn refusal to do so drew her closer to him. She knew he needed help. Needed taking care of.

  Nine months into the relationship, six months into his career at the Directorate, he went silent for three brutal days of what was supposed to be their vacation, refusing to speak to her, or look at her, or touch her, sleeping in a separate room of the cottage they’d rented on the Cape. He locked her out of his room and played her mix tapes at top volume.

  When he finally emerged, on the morning of the fourth day, he begged her to forgive him for the terrible things he’d said behind the door. She hadn’t heard any of them, whatever they were, and she wondered whether he had said anything terrible at all. Regardless, he obviously regretted something. So she forgave him.

  She was always forgiving Thelonius.

  xxxiii. always forgiving

  Given the element of surprise, I can kill a man with my right thumb. Where the hell is Clive with my dinner?

  The little man seemed to believe Fatima incapable of error. He pronounced her first day excellent, mentioning the excellence of her first day at several points during his five-thirty wrap-up meeting with all his subordinates.

  At this meeting, people were supposed to review what they had accomplished over the course of the day. Fatima’s work had involved listening to recordings of conversations that American military and intelligence officials believed to be private, but weren’t. She took typed notes summarizing these conversations, then forwarded the notes to Murad Murad for review. As instructed, she was careful to transcribe with total accuracy any details identifying individuals operating within the American network of informants.

  xxxiv. believed to be private, but weren’t

  I dedicate this note to those – there are some – who doubt my objectivity in analyzing the more sensational aspects of this case. For their benefit, and for our nation’s, I here openly acknowledge that not every line penned in Liddell’s cell is demonstrably lethal to the security interests of this country. I know for a fact, for instance, that this alarming passage of Jihadi has already led to a top-to-bottom review of security protocols within the Islamic Republic and elsewhere. We may thus credit Thelonius, at least in part, with the (wholly unintentional) identification of hundreds of listening devices in dozens of outposts, with a complete overhaul of our security procedures there, and with the formal, confirmed, post-mortem identification of at least one mole under the simultaneous employ of the BII, ourselves, and Al Qaeda. That this identification took place after the mole’s destruction of both himself and much of our embassy is of course regrettable, and I will let the chorus of my detractors complete the lyrics of the rest of that forgettable little 45, which they are sure to do anyway. I have another album I would much rather listen to. It gleams in the player like the holy thing it is.

  That was not what Murad Murad wanted to discuss, though.

  Murad Murad complimented Fatima’s typing skills. He noted that her speed and accuracy were the result of her good posture while seated, which he felt was almost as remarkable as her posture while standing. Fatima was the only female in the department, which employed a total of eighteen people. She didn’t see what her posture had to do with anything, but she kept that to herself. She sighed in relief, too audibly perhaps, when six o’clock came.

  It was an accomplishment to exit that huge grey monstrosity of a building.

  As she was walking home – she, her mother, and her sister lived a quarter of an hour’s brisk walk away – Fatima heard a woman’s unfamiliar voice. It said, from right behind her and in the native tongue, ‘Follow me, please. We are expected.’

  She didn’t turn to see who it was. That would show weakness. Weakness acknowledged the importance of all interruptions. Let whoever was speaking say whatever needed to be said again.

  xxxv. interruptions

  That dreary Brazilian Polonius-by-the-Pool: interruption personified. Cigar. Alone. Singing. If one can call it that. Will no other guest complain? His penchant for archaic sub-disco irritates you. I can tell by your sudden kicking. My internet is out yet again. Damn Clive. Damn this place.

  12 In Which the White Album Cues Itself Up

  Perhaps it would be better (Thelonius suggested to Becky after they had made love in the little cottage) if they spent some time apart.

  That (Becky pointed out) could create more problems than it solved.

  A week later, they were married. Thelonius was never quite sure how it happened. The guilty dead guy he became reconstructs one possible scenario below.

  Becky was all about solving problems. She fell in love with him knowing love was a potentially serious career mistake, knowing that, having recruited him and concealed his problems, she was, technically at least, putting herself at risk of a five-to-ten-year term in a federal penitentiary. But all that penitentiary business was only if anything ever went wrong, so really, what was quite important was that nothing go wrong, and perhaps they were stuck with each other already. Perhaps marriage really was the best option, in terms of both love and damage control, so they agreed nothing would go wrong. Remarkably, nothing did, for the longest time.

  In 2005, though, in Salem, at Thelonius’s dining-room table, Sergeant USA said:

  Kid. She’s not a woman. She’s an android. Cut her head off. You’ll see.

  And the trouble was, he really felt like listening to that voice.

  ‘Keep looking at my feet, T, and keep breathing from your diaphragm.’

  He did. Puddles of milk near her feet breathed, too.

  ‘Tell me who I am, T.’

  She stood, slid off the peach-and-black bathrobe and let it fall to the hardwood floor.

  The feet disappeared. Two gentle steps and they returned, with the graceful long Toes. He always capitalized them in correspondence to her. He shut his eyes now. She was standing nude for him, her first-line prescription for calm during periods of black rage. It had worked many times. But he could not bring himself to look at her, not with that cat crated somewhere, writhing in its own filth.

  ‘Who am I?’ she demanded again, in the familiar, insistent tone, concerned for him and for the world. ‘Am I a machine or am I a woman?’

  Machine, kid.

  xxxvi. Machine, kid.

  I am not yet convinced that T actually had this specific, pseudopropagandistic hallucination. It seems unthinkable that he could have concealed such aberrations from me. That portable silver boom box emits its squalid poolside dance music. It squawks and bleats far too loud for safety. It affects you. It affects you. Unendurable. Gloves on.

  He was afraid to look away from the white puddle.

  ‘I don’t want to answer that question,’ Thelonius hissed, his eyes tight, his words black with sarcasm. ‘Put that robe back on. Hurry.’

  ‘Okay, T.’

  She did.

>   Sergeant USA, unseen, said Machine. Machine. Machine.

  Have to get out now.

  ‘Okay. Robe on, T. Keep breathing.’

  He opened his eyes, looked for hers, found them.

  Machine. Take it out of operation.

  Get Child back. Don’t lose the thread again.

  He stood, stepped forward, came to terms with the angry wave that overtook his left knee (the room faded a bit with it), limped toward the kitchen door despite that long ache, grabbed the keys. Grey skies, but at least the cold rain had cleared. The leg got better if you moved it.

  Just Get Started.

  ‘I repeat: The imam wishes to speak with both of us. He wishes to discuss what we saw at the embassy. He is waiting for us at his home.’

  Fatima refused to stop walking, refused to turn toward the source of the words, spoken far louder than necessary. The familiar figure caught her up, stepped in front of her.

  ‘Now.’

  It was, as she had already concluded, the heavyset woman. She had a harsh voice, piercing: a voice perfect, Fatima thought, for calling out orders at a busy restaurant, or shouting the names of errant schoolchildren in a playground. The voice of someone who needs to be recognized as the most important participant in any conversation she chooses to enter. A voice one wishes immediately, upon first hearing, that one had not heard.

  Thelonius gunned the minivan to life, hit the accelerator with his good leg, ground the gravel of his driveway, spun his way onto Essex, and watched as the first of twenty-one intersections between his mailbox and the Salem Abandoned Animals Facility got out of his way. The faster the car went, the more stable time became and the further away the insistent voice of Sergeant USA.