Cold Snap (44 page)

"Heard what?"

"How should I know? You're a mystery to us.
Maybe someone said you like to carry nukes in your backpack. Sounds
farfetched, but it also sounds like you'd be someone worth
tagging." Karen hid her face in her cup. "Hell, maybe they just
figured out that you should have been tagged in the first
place."

She noted Fred giving Ari a bland, friendly
smile.

"Look at that," she snapped, slamming the cup
on the table.

"This is new," Ari said, giving the table a
fond brush of his palm. "Don't damage it."

"I didn't hurt your precious pine."

"Southern yellow pine," Ari amended.

"Hell, I know it's new. I helped carry it
in!"

"The cup is new, too."

"Crap." She gave Fred a kick under the table.
Karen knew exactly how to strike the tender spot on the ankle
bone.

"Yow!" shouted Fred, crossing his legs and
massaging his ankle. "Why'd you do that?"

"Because you're disgusting! You take everyone
at face value."

"Yeah. You know, until proven guilty."

"You can't go on like that," Karen continued.
"You even take him at face value."

Ari quickly dropped his smile. Too late.
Karen had noticed.

Ari was a little surprised by Fred's placid
acceptance of his innocence. It was not long ago that Ari had
harangued the young man at McDonald's regarding the suitability of
this very Karen to be a deputy marshal. Ari had gone so far as to
display his gun to him in the middle of the restaurant. Fred must
have great faith in the Iraqi after all that. Or, Ari thought
sadly, he was a bit on the stupid side.

"You have to be more suspicious of people, or
you'll be a sucker all your life," Karen concluded.

Ari, who agreed wholeheartedly, said, "But
certainly, you don't believe such a thing!"

Karen sat back, stared at Ari, and began
drumming her fingers on the southern yellow pine.

"But you're not the only one I don't trust,
Ari."

"I am most relieved," said Ari.

"We're not slaves to bureaucracy. We can
actually be useful, sometimes."

"This is a wonder."

"Shut up. I don't like this other party
tracking you any more than you do, especially when we paid for the
goddamn tracker."

"They are expensive?"

"You have to pay people to monitor the damn
thing."

"Such an investment...in me!"

"Uh, Ari, have you forgotten who's footing
the bill for this splendid house you live in?"

"A splendidly empty house," Ari noted.

"Well, it's filled out beautifully," Karen
sniffed.

"Wisconsin," said Fred suddenly.

They looked at him.

"Don't either of you watch the news? That
girl who was going to fly off to Syria and join her fiancée. He's a
mujahideen. They were going to cross the border and fight the
Coalition as a couple. You should know, Karen. It was on our OPI
brief. She's in custody, now. U.S. Marshal custody."

"And this is supposed to mean...?"

"That you can't trust anyone," Fred shrugged.
"Even good, clean-cut American girls."

Karen shot daggers.

"One last, last thing, Ari. The log for your
Scion shows that you were parked very near to an import company
called A-Zed at the time of a rather major shoot-out. How do you
explain that?"

"I was there, of course...as you know."

"And how do you explain that?"

"I wanted to purchase keychains for some of
my friends. Yes, I indeed I heard gunfire...and I immediately fled.
It was quite unnerving."

"Was it, now?" Karen gave him a long,
searching look. "Maybe tagging you isn't such a bad idea, after
all."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Ben Tolson looked like the last place he
wanted to be was in their company, and yet there was no other place
he could be if he wanted to know more about why his face had shown
up on the Chaldean Mafia's database.

Nor was he pleased that this meeting was
taking place under his own roof. His wife, Becky, had a weekend job
at a fabric store and would not be home until that evening. It
being Ben's day off, the timing was ideal.

They were meeting here at Ari's insistence.
Ben's was not the only familiar face that had shown up in the
gallery of faces Ahmad had discovered while perusing the files he
had copied. Sitting in a motel near Ashland, where Ahmad had driven
the night of the near-shootout on Jeff Davis Highway, he had come
upon images of the two Richmond bombing victims. There were also a
number of Iraqis who had met similar explosive fates in Baghdad,
Mosul, Fallujah...as well as Mogadishu, Hong Kong and Rome.
Included in the gallery was Saddam Hussein.

"That's not Saddam," growled Abu Jasim when
Ahmad showed him the image. He was still under the baleful
influence of the great god Thunderbird. "That's me."

"How can you tell?"

"You think I can't recognize myself?"

"Not when you're—"

"What?" demanded Abu Jasim, raising his
fist.

Confronting a moment tailor-made for
politesse, Ahmad said, "This is charming."

Upon which Abu Jasim had dropped on his bed
and passed out for the fourth or fifth time that evening.

On hearing this story after Abu Jasim had
picked him up again at Manchester Docks, Ari released a moan.

"What?" Abu Jasim asked, once more behind the
Sprinter's steering wheel. "You think I'm a potential bombing
victim?"

"Yes, but that's not what's bothering
me."

Abu Jasim looked at him in the rearview
mirror. "I'd like to see your face in that file."

Ari had wanted Lawson to be with them. He had
saved all their lives. The least Ari could do was keep him in the
loop. But when Ari called, Lawson gruffly informed him that he was
too busy.

"My troopers here are still hyped up. They
want to shoot up everything in sight. Including me."

A jovial lift in the last sentence told Ari
he was concocting a group caricature of his workers. It was
possible he was negotiating a bonus with them for getting their
boss and his companions out of hot water. Ari considered this
perfectly normal. After all, Abu Jasim had finessed a substantial
profit out of his association with Ari, including the Sprinter that
took them to Ben's front door that morning.

They settled into Ben's living room. Ahmad
immediately opened his laptop and connected the Simplex drive.

"You haven't really uploaded anything to this
mysterious 'cloud', have you?"

"I was bluffing," said Ahmad proudly. "There
wasn't time, even with the motel's wi-fi. I could do it now,
though. You have a router here?" He turned to Ben.

"A what?"

"I guess not. You have a computer connected
to the Net? I could email the files to myself. That would be the
same as the cloud—I guess it's pretty much the same, anyway."

"I'll have to go turn it on now," said Ben,
starting out of the room. "It takes about ten minutes to warm
up."

"Uh..." Ahmad donned the same expression
elders had worn for millennia when confronted by uncomprehending
youth. The roles had been switched worldwide, from geeks gawking at
their computer-illiterate parents to pimply fanatics holding guns
on village wise men.

"You don't have cable, at least?" Ahmad
asked, not a little amazed. Ben was thirty years old. He couldn't
be such a duffer. "What's your mpbs?"

"Hmmm?"

"Your upload speed? .71? Uh...lower? Like
down at .37 or something dorkey like that?"

"I don't know," Ben admitted. "I can get on
the internet, though. You just have to wait until all that
electronic noise finishes."

Ahmad's jaw dropped. "A dial-up? That's a box
of rocks. Forget it."

"Don't be rude to your host," Abu Jasim
warned.

"Forget it, sir," Ahmad fidgeted. "Some of
these files are pretty big, especially the ones with jpg. There's a
university near here, right? I can go in their cafeteria and use
their wireless. It would be best if we went straight back to
Chicago so I could use my own connection."

"Not yet," said Ari.

"I guess we're OK so long as I have this
backup," Ahmad shrugged with a poorly assembled show of
indifference.

Ben went back to his chair, looking a little
defeated. He had not kept up with the cybernetic Joneses. He had
not even kept up with Dick and Jane.

"What have you discovered?" Ari asked
Ahmad.

"Lots of spreadsheets. There's immigrant
names, addresses, dates of entry and payments. It looks like a lot
of them were paying this Mr. Rhee guy on the installment plan. They
probably won't be too sad now that his business has bit the
dust."

"Probably not," Ari agreed sadly. In an odd
way, he had liked Rhee. A solid, hard worker. He would have liked
him more had he succeeded in wrecking Ari's despised xB. He
wondered where he was, now. In jail?

"Here's another spreadsheet that I can't
read. In Korean."

"Show it to me."

After a minute, a smile spread across his
face.

"What? You can read that?"

"Some. It's a list of insurance companies and
what they owe various A-Zed proxies. Everything from fender benders
to whiplashes. It seems to have been a very profitable sideline for
Rhee. Over a million dollars last year alone."

"Cool. You know, I have some psychological
damage from having a gun held on me the other night. How much is
that worth?"

Abu Jasim slapped him on the back of the
head.

"Yeah, and that, too," the young man
grimaced.

Ari glanced up at Ben. "While we're looking
at this, perhaps you can conceive of a connection between yourself
and those men killed in the bombings. I cannot imagine why they
would be interested in you. It's not the business with Uday. These
people were not beloved by the Saddam regime. They would show no
sorrow for his departure."

"I've already racked my brain," said Ben
hopelessly.

"The picture of you on the laptop shows you
in uniform. Was it taken in Iraq?"

"No," said Ben. "That was taken at Fort Bliss
in Texas. My cousin posted it on something called Facebook."

"Wow," said Ahmad. "You've got a Facebook
page."

"My cousin is the super-patriot type, praise
the lord and pass the ammunition."

"That sounds like a quote from Adam
Gadahn."

"It's an American hymn. Yeah, sort of
bellicose."

"Can you see if the other pictures came from
the internet?" Ari asked Ahmad.

"Sure, I can access the net here using my
satellite data. Just don't ask me to upload or download anything,
or we'll be here all day."

Ari left the boy to the laptop and sat across
from Ben. He pressed down on the thick arm cushions approvingly. "I
have a similar chair. Obviously, my friend here appreciates fine
upholstery." He nodded at Abu Jasim, who had slumped into another
chair and fallen asleep.

"Can't hold his booze?"

"As you know, he was attacked by a
Thunderbird."

"That'll do it."

Ari made a show of surveying the living room
to prepare Ben for a question that had already formed in his
mind.

"There is no memorabilia here."

"From Iraq? No, not here or anywhere else in
the house."

"You brought back nothing at all?"

"Why do you ask? Oh, right...you're looking
for a connection. But these two bombings around Richmond...the
victims were Iraqi?"

"One of them was a naturalized American…but
yes."

"You met these fellows?" Ben asked

"No."

"Then how do you know..."

Ben knew Ari was from Iraq, and had been a
translator for the Coalition. Beyond that, Ari was pretty much a
blank—except he seemed exceptionally capable of handling himself in
a fight.

"They were well-known in the country," Ari
lied. "But the connection—"

"If there's a connection," Ben asserted.

"You have been followed."

"By a mystery woman," Ben grinned. "Kind of
flattering. Don't tell Becky I said that."

Abu Jasim snorted in his sleep and turned
sideways in his chair.

"Fuuuuuck..." said Ahmad. His head darted up.
"Sorry." Then he saw his uncle asleep and shrugged. "I got a
hit."

"But you're not smoking."

"Not weed. On the Net. This guy here...Andrew
Little. Definitely not an Iraqi. There's an article in Salon about
him. He was a contractor working for the National Mines Advisory in
Iraq."

"Yes?"

"He was killed in an explosion in some
bo-dunk town in Idaho...someone planted a bomb—"

"He is in the gallery?" Ari asked.

"Oh, yeah. And guess what?" Ahmad sat back,
looking grimly pleased.

"Well?" Ari said.

"You don't want to guess?"

"That would be infantile."

"Uh...OK. There's an 'X' by his name. As in
'crossed off the list'."

"Are there any more 'X's?"

"Didn't think of that..." He began scrolling
through the gallery.

"As you see," said Ari, turning back to Ben,
"this is a situation fraught with dementia."

"I think I know what you mean."

"Being an Iraqi is no longer the connection.
The list includes people who served in Iraq, and now we know at
least one non-Iraqi has been killed by an explosion. The only
reason I felt comfortable meeting here is because I think these
assassins are having difficulty tracing you. You moved here after
you returned from overseas, and you are listed under your wife's
name. The other victims didn't take adequate precautions to hide
themselves."

"Over a dozen," Ahmad announced. "Not
including the two in Richmond."

"All killed by bombs?"

"I don't know. I'll google them. But there a
couple of Americans with X's by their pictures."

"Military?"

"Hold on..."

"It seems quite a few people did not take
adequate precautions, Benjamin."