Cold Snap (18 page)

"I'm not happy very often and I don't wish to
have it crammed down my throat."

"I see...well, orange is congenial, if you
plan on entertaining."

"Possibly."

"Pink is feminine. Red is bold, a particular
favorite with enterprising people." Joe looked back at Ari, as
though to see if he was hitting the right chord.

"We're talking about the Frenchwoman, not
me."

"Blue, then. It's very relaxing. Creates a
sense of home."

Ari thought of Madame Mumford bustling
through the Mackenzie kitchen, toting heavy serving dishes and
apparently relishing the work. "I don't think this woman relaxes
very much."

"Purple is playful. Green represents
liveliness, with lots of imagination."

"Where do you get such ideas?"

"Sir? Um..."

"It's what you have been trained to say. What
did I tell you about bad emulation?"

"There have been studies done..."

"Very well," Ari sighed. "Continue."

"Black is basic, simple. Beige is for
calmness. Brown is down to earth—"

"Appropriate."

"Gray is dependability, for practical—"

"Gray..." Ari mused.

"It's very versatile, and a perfect
foundation for other schemes you might wish to include."

"Could not gray also be bland?"

"Not at all. Let me show you..."

The other salesmen had stopped ogling Joe and
Ari and had dispersed to assail other customers. In the middle of a
sea of couches, Ari plopped into a loveseat and pointed at the
ottoman across from him.

"Let's have a little convivial talk."

"You've made up your mind?" said Joe Pine
hopefully. A man who had no intention of buying anything would fly
out the door, not sit and chat with the salesman. He propped
himself on the edge of the ottoman and leaned forward eagerly. "The
chesterfield? The davenport?"

"We'll discuss that in a moment.
Now...Othman..."

"Not that again," Joe pouted and pushed
himself back in his chair.

"You never answered my question," Ari
persisted. "How long have you been in America? You didn't learn
your English here. There's not the slightest trace of an
accent."

"Perhaps that's because I was born in New
York. I can prove it."

"I'm sure you can. "Hal tatakallam
al-'arabiya?"

"I don't understand what you're saying," Joe
Pine shrugged.

"What? You're saying you're third generation
American? That not even your parents spoke Arabic? Very ambitious.
But if you don't want to admit the truth…kool khara."

Joe straightened up.

"Ah, you do understand. That's one lie out of
the way. And I would like more details about that sofa. You said
the leather is Moroccan? That's near Siberia, isn't it?"

This last was said for the benefit of one of
Joe's fellow salesman, who was doing a poor job of disguising his
eavesdropping. The man marveled at Ari's profound geographical
ignorance and leered as he drifted away.

"You should visit my mosque one day," Joe
said in a low, surly voice. "Our Imam would wash your mouth out for
you."

"Alas, the complaints about my mouth are many
and close between. To resume, it would be of great interest to me
to know if the American authorities know of your presence here. I
know the Iraqi authorities had the usual suspicions about you."

"Why would you say that?" asked Joe, alarmed.
"Not that I'm anybody but Joe Pine."

"Being an educated man would be enough to
rouse their suspicions, especially one who refused to join the
Ba'athist Party and sing Ardulfurataini Watan. But there were other
issues..." Ari closed his eyes and reflected on this man's file,
long lost in the SSO archives. "You attended the ICCEM civil
engineering conference in Cairo and 'accidentally' ran into
survivors of the Safar Intifada. Since Iraq was at war with Iran at
the time, and a bunch of misguided souls were going over to the
Badr Brigade, it was only normal for state security to spy on
you."

Joe Pine sank deeper and deeper into his
chair, until he was little more than a chickpea buried in an
oversized napkin. "They told me there would be no trouble."

"'They'?"

"Are you from Immigration?"

"How could I be, if 'they' said there would
be no problems? And 'they' would certainly know."

It was obvious Joe would say no more about
the identity of the mysterious 'they'. This was no place to torture
the information out of him, and Ari had no desire to do so. Othman
had been a good man, so far as he was concerned. His only problem,
if he recalled correctly (and of course he did) was that Saddam
Hussein blamed him and other engineers for the dismal failure of
the berms on the Kuwaiti border during the Gulf War. He became Mr.
Congeniality. "In fact, what I wanted to talk to you about was your
experience in your new home."

"Yes?" said Joe Pine in a tone that said,
'Liar'.

"How did you end up in Richmond? It's not the
largest Arab community in the States, by any stretch."

"My...sponsors..."

"'They'?" Ari interjected.

"They recommended this area. Small city,
pleasant accommodations."

"And because you were bound to be recognized
in one of the large Arab communities."

"I never said—"

"First off..." Ari pointed at Joe. "I want
that."

After a startled pause, Joe smiled uneasily.
"You mean this chair?"

"No, that...your pendant. What is it called,
again?"

Joe Pine reached up to a small pendant
dangling on a tiny gold chain attached to his jacket. It was shaped
like a piece of furniture.

"This? It's just a little trinket we got off
a Korean importer." He preened a little. "It was my idea—the only
idea of mine that management ever agreed to. Now all the salesmen
wear one."

An alarm went off in Ari's mind, but it was
more like a ping than a gong.

"I mean, what is that piece of furniture
called? You showed me one earlier."

"You mean from the Teal Collection?"

"Yes. But that's only the beginning.
Come..."

They rose together and Ari guided Joe on a
retrogressive replay of the tour they had taken earlier, with Ari
pointing out each piece he wished to order. Joe brightened visibly
with each sale. He seemed to forget that his American identity had
been exposed as a fraud by a very questionable client. Ari found it
sad. A once prominent engineer was reduced to selling furniture—but
was Ari himself doing any better? He was, by some lights, a
traitor, and a very effective one. By his own light, he was
something even worse: a bit of a loafer.

At the customer service desk Karen pranced up
to him. "At least I bought something," she said, proudly displaying
a tiny lamp.

"Very quaint," said Ari, and showed her his
receipt.

"Oh?" She took it and began to read. Her eyes
widened. "Ari! We can't afford all of this!"

"'We' can't. 'I' can."

"Really?" she said after a moment. "Maybe you
really have been 'storelifting'. You slay me, Ari. I don't
understand—"

"And this doesn't include the delivery cost.
I need to arrange—"

"Like hell you will. I'll work out something.
I don't want you giving out your address. Why do you think we gave
you that special credit card? No one can trace it. Speaking of
which, how do you intend to pay for this? That card has a strict
limit."

Ari took out an enormous wad of bills from
his coat pocket. Karen gasped.

"Come on outside so I can take you to a dark
alley and rob you. No one told us you had an outside source of
income."

"America is very remunerative."

"If you know the right people. I didn't think
you knew anyone."

Ari shrugged.

"I notice you didn't get any bedroom
furniture."

"This is for my public face," said Ari.

"You're expecting guests?" Karen said
uneasily.

"Yes. Including yourself, I hope."

"Sure..."

Outside, Ari quickly smoked a cigarette
before getting into Karen's blue Civic. She had refused to ride in
his smoke-tainted Scion. She waited impatiently, arms crossed
against the cold.

"Ms. Deputy Marshal, I was wondering..."

"Aren't you always?" she said, her teeth
chattering.

"That little GPS you have planted in my
car..."

"I can't remove it."

"Who else has access to that
information?"

CHAPTER TEN

Fallujah

April, 2004

"Many soldiers fled here after the government
betrayed them, and the Americans..."

"Fired them," said Ghaith, still somewhat
awestruck that a nation's entire defense could be summarily
dismissed like the staff of an unprofitable restaurant. It seemed
an easy proposition to the occupiers: simply withhold pay and
entire armies vanished. It had happened innumerable times
throughout history. But the Coalition scholars must have skipped
the chapter where disgruntled veterans very often turned on their
former paymasters.

This was the role Ghaith had assumed the week
after the Blackwater contractors had been slain and put up for
display. Since then, the West had repeatedly expressed its horror
each time the networks repeated the video. The Americans had
rattled their sabers, but very little had been done in the way of
reprisals. Roads were blocked, concertina wire strung out across
lesser exits and the city had been subjected to a night of aerial
bombardment. The earth shook as giant bulldozers heaved great berms
out of the soil. Which was amusing, because the insurgents had
bulldozers of their own, and were planning to bar any enemy
incursion with great earthen walls. But that was pretty much it.
The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force fumed on the outskirts while
Washington dithered. Commentators observed that the contractors had
ignored Army advice to swing around Fallujah and had tried to
barrel their way through the center of town. Their hubris had
landed them in Hell, or wherever it was that the godless ended up.
Ghaith would no doubt have them as neighbors once he was tits
up.

He was presenting himself to the Saray
al-Jihad Group as a former captain in the dispersed Iraqi Army.
Like any true veteran of the Republican Guard, he thundered against
the Americans, the British, the French, the Poles and every other
member of the Coalition. What a blasphemous lot they were.
Cowardly, too, shielding their soft bodies behind steel and
concrete barricades.

Saray al-Jihad was small potatoes. It
answered to the Mujahideen Shura Council, which had made itself the
central authority for resistance against the invaders. Comprised of
strict Wahabists and led by Abdullah al-Janabi, they would have
spotted Ghaith's godless taint in an instant. And by all means
Ghaith had to avoid Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a certifiable nut case
who almost put Abu Nidal and bin Laden in the shade. Members of
Saray al-Jihad were devout, no mistake, but what they really wanted
to do was kill kafirs, unbelievers, preferably of the American
military persuasion. They suited Ghaith's temper and intentions. He
could keep the general apprised of events—and, after what had
happened to Rana and his boys, he was not at all averse to getting
some Yankee blood on his hands.

But the interviewers of the Saray Council
were not entirely impressed, the general feeling being that the
Iraqi Army leaned on the chickenshit side. But that was a good
thing, too, else wise the various insurgencies would have been
wiped out long before the arrival of the West.

He saw at least two men from the Hammurabi
Division hovering at the back of the mayor's office. He could not
tell if they recognized him, but none of the parties was inclined
to denounce the other as a cowardly deserter. Besides, the
insurgents' collective sneer was strictly pro forma. There must be
hundreds of ex-soldiers in Fallujah still wetting their beds at the
memory (still too fresh) of American airstrikes against their
armored columns on Highway 27. It had amounted to a second Highway
of Death.

But Ghaith claimed to have been an officer.
He carried himself like an officer. Some of interviewers seemed put
out by this captain's air of supreme composure, like someone
accustomed to being obeyed. He possessed a charisma that did not
require threats or torture or endless repetition of the patriotic
and religious platitudes that nearly destroyed clerical vocal
chords.

Ghaith presented the Saray Council with a
two-edged sword. Just down the road the 82nd Airborne, 1st MEF and
other units were booting up for a hard strike at the city. The
persistent buzz of remote surveillance aircraft overhead informed
the residents that the enemy was surveying Fullajah's intimate
alleyways and souks, mapping a sure course for their civic throat.
Officers familiar with American tactics and how to oppose them
should be a precious commodity. But the Council had had its fill of
Ba'athist know-it-alls who placed expertise (such as it was) over
holy doctrine. Those old army die-hards were universally opposed to
the often haphazard methods of the mujahideen. Put one of them in
charge, and he would usurp the authority of the true leaders.

Ghaith wanted to advise the Council that they
should not prolong this meeting. In addition to the three sitting
at the table, tilting back and forth as they consulted one another,
there were about thirty men packed in the room, a nice fat heat
signature that must have already been noted by the drones. The
powerful funk of unwashed males did not bother Ghaith, who was not
smelling particularly rosy himself at the moment. He had noted that
some Western soldiers reacted to BO as if it was a vicious sidearm
banned by all civilized nations. They would be more than happy to
snuff out this lot. Even disregarding the observers overhead, the
constant traffic of insurgents shuffling in and out of the building
would draw attention. An invisible spider sprawled across the back
of Ghaith's neck, the usual sensation whenever he felt he was being
watched by unseen foes.