Jihadi Read online

  There were two problems.

  The first problem was Becky’s clinical inability to shut up about the whole baby thing. He had made clear from the get-go that this point would be a deal breaker in the relationship, but she had conveniently forgotten that discussion.

  xxxvii. the whole baby thing

  Poolside noise problem solved. Gloves off now.

  Pulled the curtains. You are safe and undisturbed. A fitting moment to address the ‘whole baby thing’. An eventual reversal of Thelonius’s vasectomy was implied in our marriage vows, which I shall not embarrass my readers by reproducing here. His lack of personal initiative on this subject demands close examination, as it illuminates many of the deeper strategic issues of the case. By the time he converted to Islam, Liddell had forgotten – though I swear he knew, he knew, he knew when we married! – that American citizenship carries with it both rights and responsibilities. I submit here that defaulting on the responsibilities of citizenship revokes the rights of citizenship. Despite the claims of the religionists, history has identified a citizen’s chief responsibility to this country. It is the great personal obligation of the pioneers, the astronauts, the entrepreneurs, the spies who built America: self-reliance in all circumstances. Self-reliance (that which Islam rejects, that in which track one instructs us so eloquently) trumps destiny.

  Absolutely famished. Civilian casualties and occasional cases of mistaken identity regrettable, inevitable, always part of warfare, etc. Never eliminate, only minimize. Like fighting traffic accidents. Those saved never aware. Come back and fill this in.

  Becky forgot most discussions in which she disagreed with Thelonius and didn’t get her way. The more intense the conversation, the more likely she was to forget he had won the argument. Well, that stopped now.

  So: This was something she felt strongly about. Fine. So: There were biological components to this. Fine. The cat could have served as a kind of constructive distraction for her. A perfectly legitimate channel for those parental feelings. They both had them. So why not express them? Pet the damn cat. And by the way, he had absolutely no doubt that Becky did have maternal feelings for Child. She fought them, was all. Why? Because she could not stand losing an argument. Guess what? This one she was losing. Whether she knew it or not. No baby.

  He had never promised this. Ever. But she pretended he had. Witness the minivan he was driving at this very moment. Becky had planned all the discussion points ahead of time, come into battle armed with fifteen different printouts from fifteen different consumer sites. Air bags, via Consumer Reports. Fuel economy, via Auto World. Retention of value, via some incomprehensible actuarial thing she had tracked down, printed out, and highlighted with two green, perfectly executed horizontal stripes. And an annotation, in her loose, unruly scrawl near ‘toddler seat restraint’:

  Relevant to whatever we eventually do decide to pursue with our family.

  What was that supposed to mean? What the hell did they even need a minivan for? Whatever there was to ‘pursue with our family’, here they were, already pursuing it. They had groceries delivered to the house. She avoided any and all Ryan Firestone gatherings. Guess what? There were two people in this family. Two. The Siena seated eight.

  What was this green monstrosity he was driving if not a daily message from her to him: ‘I want a baby in a car seat to buckle into this vehicle’?

  Guess what. No.

  If anyone knew about him, she did. So she knew this. Going in. If he felt in his gut that he was not suited to win at something, then it just didn’t make any sense for him to commit to it. How many dozens of times had he told her: Not A Dad, Okay? The subject was closed.

  Thelonius punched it, and made the light.

  Leave aside his short fuse and his tiny attention span and his impatience with people not knowing how he operated. Leave all that aside. Assume him to be a perfectly well-intentioned father, with something resembling the toolbox necessary to do that job. There was still the Plum to be considered. The kid had a thirteen percent chance of inheriting The Condition. But she couldn’t be told that. On Dad’s orders.

  xxxviii. The Condition

  Clive brought two turkey subs, unsliced. He had to drive across town. Pizza joint had closed early. I made him fetch a knife (grey-handled, serrated, comfortable in my hand) and used it to divide mine in a civilized manner. Ordered him to eat his out of my presence. Sad Clive. Once he was gone, I wolfed mine down. Inserting the White Album CD, a necessary distraction and our guide. Cue it to track one. Just in case. Feel a migraine coming. I may lose that sandwich.

  Thelonius felt a tightness in his chest.

  Well. Nothing to be done about that.

  If she was unhappy, it was her own damn fault.

  xxxix. If she was unhappy

  A veiled reference to his infidelity during that damnable trip. Good gravy. Barely made it to the commode in time. Can’t seem to keep food down now. My head a basketball left too long in the rain. Just a terrific peeling and throbbing. Time to bring out the heavy artillery. I shall press play and put track one on repeat.

  Right-turn here. Some sound. Sorry, civilians.

  Thelonius drummed the dashboard with the fingers of his right hand and merged onto West Essex, occupying a lane and a half for a few exhilarating seconds.

  Of course he was capable of compromise. Of course he was. Hadn’t he agreed to stay here, where she had this creepy goddamn we-mustn’t-abandon-Tara thing going via Dead Mother, instead of moving to Langley, as he’d wanted to? Of course he could compromise. What about her? Could she compromise? Not in regard to the whole baby thing, apparently. Guess what? That changed today. Right now.

  The second problem, of course, was Dick Unferth.

  Thelonius hit the gas.

  A stop sign hurtled past. Thelonius heard the ascending howl of an auto horn from what felt like three o’clock, but couldn’t have been, could it? Just in case, his right foot stomped the brake, and his left hand eased the steering wheel sufficiently leftwards to ensure complete safety. A red Fiat swerved around the front end of the Siena with several happy inches to spare.

  That idiot could have seen Thelonius coming earlier.

  He stomped the Siena to a full halt. Little screech. The Fiat, still righting itself, regained the centre of its lane and sped off. There was a long and troubled descending note as the red blur proceeded westward.

  He was within a block of the Abandoned Animals Facility. Actually a good thing he had run the stop sign. Might have driven right by without this emergency stop.

  Dick Unferth. Of all people.

  He saw, in his mind’s eye, a little girl’s hand in a spreading pool of blood.

  Stress breath CONSCIOUS.

  No driveway, this is it.

  xl. No driveway

  My husband’s all-too-brief homecoming is referenced here, as is, in hindsight, the familiar gravel strip from which he abandoned our beloved Salem foursquare.

  Which brings us to Paul McCartney.

  This masterpiece of masterpieces, track one of the White Album, this airborne allegory of espionage and self-sufficiency, this last great up-tempo offering from the world’s last great band, celebrates McCartney’s own great escape. It also celebrates an archetypal homecoming of deep relevance to our purposes.

  In 1968, as the world burned around them, they came home to London, abandoning their misguided odyssey to the foothills of the Himalayas: Messrs. McCartney, Lennon, Harrison and Starr. If they’d started their journey in search of redemption (and the evidence suggests that they had) then they concluded it by proclaiming, with this song, their insistence that redemption was not to be found at the feet of a guru, but rather in their own craft as rock-and-rollers. Again: self-reliance as homecoming.

  Let us address, then, the most obvious issue first. Their seemingly pointless sojourn to the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – in reality, a trip demanded by the White Album itself, as most of the album’s thirty songs were composed there – fo
retells a similarly bankrupt, similarly pointless pilgrimage of a certain late spouse of mine! Unlike them, however, he never truly returned.

  As the members of the band laid down take after take of this exquisite, multilayered, satirical, and, yes, psychically prescient composition, they were indeed home at last: back in the UK, back in the studio, back where they belonged. Most importantly (and this is the foundation stone of the song’s central conceptual joke): they were back in the West, title or no title, rocking out. My husband, Thelonius Liddell – hereafter simply T, as he is no longer my husband or anyone else’s – rejected such a return to Western values the moment he spun out of our driveway.

  He could so easily have embraced fatherhood. For his mistress and his twisted sleeper-cell followers, however, that was not an option. There was another, more seductive, more deadly path to pursue. This was Islam, the barren course he chose to follow as an explicit insult to me, to his Nation, and to all of Western civilization. In 1968, that tragic journey of T’s was prophesied in this song’s refrain. He had no idea how damned lucky he was.

  Of course, I do not mean to suggest here that T consciously invoked the Fabs in this manuscript. Nor do I maintain that he chose to echo the themes of self-reliance and return that propel the fierce, incomparable rhythms of track one. I only note that this song, like the twenty-nine cunningly sequenced compositions that follow it, happens to illuminate, to anticipate with extraordinary depth and clarity, key aspects of Liddell’s blind wanderings into Islam … as well as certain critical insights on the West’s looming, inevitable confrontation with the Forces of Darkness.

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my father, whom T murdered, raised me to believe that there is no such thing as coincidence. My father, whom T murdered, was correct in that! If he were with us today, my father might well join me in acknowledging that the White Album itself is the key, not only to understanding this man, treacherous as memory, but also to securing control of the global conversation that is the great struggle of our era. Control of the conversation is a necessary prerequisite of victory.

  The White Album is warning us and guiding us. It has been warning us and guiding us for decades.

  It begins with a set of lyrics that left even the Reds speechless, which was, of course, the point. Who is to say what role this magnificent, icon-busting composition played in bringing down the Wall?

  Listen, my sceptical and distracted colleagues, listen to this anthem of self-reliance. Listen. Listen to it as you have never listened to it, listen with an open mind. Hear that awakening tangle of tough guitars, watch that plane passing overhead. Feel the joyous fury of its inextinguishable engine, its nameless passenger’s energizing series of commands. Follow the homeward path of that great aircraft, Freedom, a path set out for us by our Founding Fathers, a path that Paul McCartney knew, at some mysterious, semi-conscious level, T would choose to reject. Listen.

  Also please skip to the end of this chapter. I did.

  Still on repeat. Head much better.

  A parking place.

  Okay: Child.

  The dead guy telling this story notes that Thelonius’s wife, Becky, had (and has) significant experience as both a therapist and an interrogator. She rose through the ranks with speed, not just because she had a famous last name and was ambitious, but also because she was committed with deep ferocity to the national interest.

  Rebecca Firestone was able to combine her two worlds, the worlds of psychotherapy and interrogation, on behalf of the United States of America. She became, for a time, hot – in the professional sense – for doing that.

  She instituted widely praised protocols for detecting the early signs of mental illness in field agents. After 9/11, on the strength of distinctive interviewing skills, she won a reputation as one of the Directorate’s most effective and sought-after inquisitors of captive terrorists. She produced leads that seemed promising.

  Her record as an analyst of intelligence, and as a strategic thinker, was regarded as rather thin.

  Becky built her career plan on huge aspirations, on ferocity and on the celebrated Firestone name, but all this was a precarious foundation. On one of his rare, awkward, seemingly purposeless visits to Salem, Dad said spontaneously, over a dense, garlicky ratatouille he himself had prepared, that, in order to get into the upper tier, she would probably need to develop either a more rigorous set of analytical tools, or a deeper mastery of the chess game of long-range planning. Having pronounced this opinion, Dad wouldn’t look Thelonius in the eye for the rest of the night.

  She was incapable of developing either skill set. It became apparent, in the weeks that followed, that Dad had not only felt certain about this for some time, but had helped her competitors to figure it out.

  The ferocity, the need to set the plan, remained.

  That was the last family dinner at Salem. Over a third glass of wine, after Dad left, Becky swore that he would not be permitted to return until he ‘got on the team’, and that any failure on Dad’s part to get on the team would lead to ‘serious consequences’. These remarks Thelonius reported, via a secure line, the next day, per his agreement to share with Dad any extremes of emotion or provocative behaviour.

  Dad sent her an email: ‘People must do what they’re good at doing.’

  What Becky was good at, it turned out, was looking after you in a way that disguised the fact that she was actually interrogating you. She could also, when the need arose, administer compliance blows in an unexpected, psychologically disorienting way. But that, it turned out, was not enough to get her where she wanted to be. Where she wanted, devoutly, to be, was in leadership.

  In bed, mapping out her revised career plan on a helpless, battered legal pad, she told Thelonius that she refused to spend thirty years interviewing people and making notes, even though she was very good at that.

  She wanted to set the vision. She wanted to be in control of the planning.

  A consensus arose within the Directorate that, despite her brilliance, despite her overseas experience, she was never going to be in her father’s league, either as a strategic thinker or as a builder of internal coalitions. Some of her ruder rivals claimed she couldn’t assess, or even accept the existence of, data that challenged her own assumptions.

  Becky denied all of this too loudly and too often, which, her rivals suggested, only proved the point. Jealous of her name, wary of her ambitions, secure at last in the knowledge that Dad was not out to establish a genetic dynasty, they did their best to reinforce existing negative perceptions of her and added to their list of Troubling Things a growing concern about her own potential for personal imbalance.

  Her career plateaued. She responded to Dad’s discreet efforts to find her work elsewhere in government with a series of startlingly obscene, unanswered emails, all of which she showed Thelonius. Whose star was rising.

  She became the subject of many jokes, some cruel. Among these was the nickname ‘Cleopatra’, which started out somewhere in the upper regions of the Directorate and worked its way down to the support staff. One beaming, oblivious receptionist made the mistake of saying ‘Cleopatra’ to her face, while Becky was issuing instructions to a subordinate. The next morning, the receptionist had vanished. Thelonius thought he spotted her working at a LensCrafters.

  That receptionist probably thought she was paying Becky a compliment. A lot of people thought that at first. But the people at the very top of the Directorate called Becky ‘Cleopatra’ not because she remained quite beautiful, but because they liked implying the phrase ‘Queen of Denial’ without actually coming out and saying it.

  T said ‘Cleopatra’ in this context just once in conversation, during a particularly boring meeting that needed livening up. He felt instant shame at his enjoyment of that word, spoken loud and in Becky’s absence, and deeper shame at the laughter it produced around the table.

  Dick Unferth didn’t laugh.

  She believed in herself. Should Thelonius mock that with the others?
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  Although he could not agree with the decision, he did respect her efforts to stay on at the Directorate, her resolving to ride out the storm, and he said so. One night, he suggested she begin exploring career opportunities with local or federal law enforcement. She snorted in disgust. Then, perhaps ten seconds later, made a brief hmm sound, as though she were considering the idea. She wrote something on that disintegrating yellow legal pad she always kept by the bed. Thelonius pretended to be asleep, that being one of the best ways to ensure that a point raised with Becky remained raised. The next morning, while she was in the shower, he read the top sheet on the pad.

  It said, in huge letters: ‘CONTROL = RESPECT’.

  13 Does the 9/11 Thing Go Here?

  The dead guy relating this story suggests that the imam – a man of intimidating calmness who looked to be in his late twenties but was approaching thirty-nine – sat on a cushion on the carpeted living-room floor in front of a small pot of tea set in the centre of a clean straw mat. The imam gave his salaams, received salaams in return, and gestured to the two women to take a seat before him. Each had been assigned a cushion. Fatima took the gold one, her opponent took the grey one.

  On the wall was a piece of intricate calligraphy, inscribed: Be useful in all things.

  xli. Be useful in all things

  An unlikely motto for an Islamic scholar, attributable as it is to the Japanese swordsman and tactician Miyamoto Musashi. Track one, McCartney’s ironic Cold War parody (it courses now through my brainpan, it soothes the throbbing), must not be taken as a literal rejection of American values – since those values manifestly include independence, freedom, personal mobility, homecoming, and self-sufficiency. The very subjects of the song, the very principles T rejected! Patrol car lights flashing outside. They have pulled the Brazilian from the pool.