The Godless One (36 page)

"I don't think 'oozing' is
appropriate," Ari sniffed.

"Don't go all offended and correct on
me now. You can file a complaint tomorrow, while the rest of us are
reading about the game we fucking missed."

"Is this Super Game so very important
to you?" he inquired.

"You don't know us at all."

As they reached the outskirts of
Cumberland, Ari noted two cruisers in the Stop-N parking lot, one
belonging to the State Police and the other to the Cumberland
Sheriff. Through the glass storefront he saw Fatimah, her hands
over her face. He recalled what Joe and Fatimah had said about the
local sheriff being on Uday's payroll and prayed it wasn't true.
Perhaps, on the day Uday ranted unhindered in the shop, the officer
parked out front had been summoned away on an emergency call. A car
wreck, for instance, would take precedence over an abusive
customer.

The community center was an old,
converted school house on the other side of town. The parking lot
in the back was packed. Fred came out to greet them and ended up
playing parking lot attendant. He finally found an empty slot
between a Lenco BearCat and Peacekeeper II.

"Get ready for a war zone," he told
Karen as she got out of the car. "And I'm not talking about the
opposition." He jerked his head towards the community
center.

They entered chaos incarnate. Officers
and agents, policemen and deputies, uniformed and un-uniformed were
sprawled in a large room that must have once been a cafeteria.
Several men were near the front door, arguing about which frequency
they should be using. Another group was angrily denouncing a
shortage of night vision equipment and how it should be allotted.
One of them threw up his hands and yelled, "The night? The night?
Doesn't anyone around here own the night?"

Small islands of portable consoles
dotted the hall, like boastful displays at an electronics show. But
Officers Jackson and Mangioni were huddled around a diminutive
radio. They were seated on wood benches, away from the great morass
in the center, like small-time entrepreneurs who knew they were
completely outclassed. Ari walked over to them. They beamed when
they saw him. Standing up stiffly in their armored vests, they took
turns shaking his hand.

"What happened to you?" Mangioni
asked.

"I fell off a cliff."

"We've got them!" Jackson said with
unprecedented elation. "The bastards who killed Detective
Carrington!"

"And how much of this is your doing?"
said Mangioni, giving Ari a knowing wink. "You've got Feds here I
never heard of."

"I am sure I am ignorant of whatever I
don't know," said Ari.

The two policemen from the RPD looked a
little nonplussed, and even Ari wasn't sure of what he had just
said. All three of them jumped aside when dogs from the narcotic
canine team clashed with some tracker dogs, which almost resulted
in a fistfight between their handlers.

There were tactical teams, search and
recovery teams, explosives teams, surveillance teams and even, if
Ari's eyes didn't deceive him, a scuba team. Perhaps there was a
well that needed exploring. Ari gathered from hurried whispers that
the two teams that most concerned everyone weren't even in the
room.

"Kickoff's at 1825 Hours," a man
wearing an ATF jacket said.

"We're going in at 1825?" a man bearing
an FBI logo queried.

"No, you moron! The game starts at
1825!"

"Shit. What are we doing here, then?
Can't these bozos wait until tomorrow?"

Bozo
, Ari thought lexigraphically. He wondered if it was slang
for criminals. Or were the two talking about the men and women in
the community center?

"This is going to be straight out of
Scarface," he overheard another agent say. Ari had heard an
identical reference several years ago, when the Americans assailed
Uday in his Mosul bastion. He understood that it was a movie about
a crime lord, but had never had the chance to see it. He would have
to ask Lynn if she could obtain a copy of it for him. After he got
a television.

Karen had been silently observing this
madhouse from the main entrance. Finally, her impatience got the
better of common sense. "Hey! All of you! You're supposed to be
professionals! You're behaving like children! Let's get
organized!"

There was a momentary lull. A few
agents clapped approval. Then someone shouted "Fuck you!" and the
noise began all over again.

Shaking her head, Karen came over to
Ari. "There’s not as many here as I expected, but they’ve got every
acronym in the book. Might as well be a million, with all this
noise. Okay, Fred says they're holding the perp down the hall. Come
on. And here…" She clipped a U.S. Marshal tag on his coat. "We
don’t want anyone mixing you two up."

"I look like a perp?"

"You look like someone the County
Mounties ran down with their convention bus."

After giving Jackson and Mangioni a
congenial smile, Ari followed the Deputy Marshal out of the main
hall and into a former classroom. Although astonished by the
pandemonium he left behind, he was content. He had feared that the
operation would be quashed by an unknown force higher up in the
chain of command. But the ball was bouncing nicely, if
erratically.

They entered what had once been a
classroom. The captive was seated in a small chair once used by
elementary school students. His jacket was draped over the back of
his chair. Across from him was one of the ninjas Karen had spoken
about, his M40 as black as his combat shirt and trousers. He had
removed his helmet and goggles, which sat on a table next to him.
When he saw Ari, he nodded.

"Assalam
alaikum."

"Valaikum-salam."

The ninja remained stiffly on guard
until Karen flashed her ID.

"You are the translator?" Ari
asked.

"I
thought
I was," the man confessed.
He was in his early thirties. "Back in the Sandbox, standing in
front of an M-1 Abrams, I could get these guys to slow down when
they talked." He gauged Ari narrowly. "Are you in any shape for
this kind of thing, sir?"

"I fell on my face, not my
ears."

"He's fine," Karen testily
interjected.

"This guy talks a million miles a
minute. So do the guys on the tape. I picked out a lot of 'you
idiots' and something about pistachio ice cream, but not much else
that makes sense."

"You were in Iraq?" Ari
asked.

"Yes, sir, 1st Marines."

"Ah, a fabled division."

"Yes, sir!"

"An-Nasariyah, Baghdad,
Tikrit..."

The ninja gave Ari a curious look. "You
follow the war closely, sir?"

"I have a passing interest in
it."

"
Sssssssst
," said Karen.

"In all your extensive travels across
the Iraqi landscape, did you ever see anything like this?" Ari
reached down and pulled up the man's shirt sleeve. Ari had seen the
bottom tip of the tattoo the moment he entered the room. Fully
exposed, it revealed two rifle-holding fists clenched over a dark
mass in the background. The prisoner jerked away, almost toppling
backwards in his chair.

"Can't say that I did, sir," said the
former Marine—although Ari had heard the phrase 'once a Marine,
always a Marine' more than once. "What does it mean?"

"I think it means your people might
have bitten off more than they can masticate."

"'Chew', Ari," Karen
corrected.

"I stand miscorrected, as I have heard
at least one American say."

"Oh, I don't think we have to worry
about these people," said the ninja confidently. "We've got plenty
of men with state of the art ordnance here. Night Ops to the
gills."

"Perhaps I didn't make myself clear.
You are probably overmatched." While the ninja mulled this over,
Ari turned back to the prisoner. "This man doesn't have a mark on
his body. Hasn't anyone even begun to interrogate him?"

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean,
sir," answered the ninja.

"
What's a piece of Fatah cum fungus like you doing in the
States
?" Ari asked the prisoner in Arabic
as fast as he could speak.

The prisoner glared at him.

"Sir, I didn't understand most of what
you just said, except I think it was on the rude side. Around here,
we usually start out nice before getting nasty."

"I'll bear that in mind,"
Ari nodded. He wondered if the man had learned anything in class
beyond colloquial Arabic swear words. In an almost bored tone, he
continued the interrogation. "
How many men
are in the house? What do you know about the death of Mustafa
Zewail? How holy are you? Would you give God a rim
job
?"

The prisoner did not react. A devout
Muslim would have leapt at Ari's throat, handcuffs notwithstanding.
Meanwhile, the young ninja was frowning as he ran Ari's words
through his mental Arabic dictionary.

"Naw, I'm still not following. I know
you couldn't have said what I thought you said."

Ari straightened his back, and winced.
He snapped his fingers at Karen, pointing at a chair.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she
demanded.

"I would like to sit."

"I know you want to sit. I mean, what
do you mean snapping your fingers at me?"

"I'm sorry, was that rude?"

"And offensive."

"I apologize," said Ari,
noting the smirk on the prisoner's lips.
The bastard understands everything we're
saying
. "Bring me that chair."

She might have gone ahead and done it,
out of consideration of Ari's condition, but for the snigger from
the ninja kid. Instead, she grabbed the back of the chair and
shoved it in Ari's direction. It was an old, heavy chair and didn't
go far. With the air of a reasonable man confronting the
irrational, Ari went over and dragged the chair in front of the
prisoner. He sat and smiled at the man, who was wearing neat, crisp
jeans. Complexion aside, this clearly demarked him as a foreigner.
Americans liked to wear jeans that were as decrepit as industry
could make them. Why this was so, Ari could not fathom.

"
That's Israel in the background
," he
said, again tapping the tattoo.
"I'm sure
the Israeli security forces would open their doors wide for you if
they saw this. But you're not planning to blow yourself up in
Bethlehem, are you? You got this artwork—and very poor artwork it
is—in prison, didn't you? Is that where you met Samir
Salman
?"

The prisoner shook his head and looked
away.

"Ah, you were released
from Powhatan before Samir arrived. But you still kept your
contacts there, through that idiot Sid Overstreet, who lives just
around the corner from the prison. That led to all sorts of
interesting things."
Ari turned to the
ninja. "Did he have identification on him when he was
stopped?"

"Oh, sure." The ninja reached around
and picked up a wallet from the table. He tossed it to Ari, who
just managed to catch it. "Sorry, sir..."

Ari opened the wallet and
studied the driver's license. "
'Bill
O'Reilly'. You have a distinctively Irish look about you,
Bill
."

Ari wondered if the sneer he received
had been honed on Fatimah at the Stop-N. He turned to the ninja.
"Please let me advise you that this tattoo bears the symbol of
Fatah."

"Yeah?"

"There are several organizations
associated with Fatah. Among them is the ANO. You have heard of
this?"

The ninja shook his head.

"I am verily surprised. You have heard
of Colonel Oliver North?"

"Of course! He's a hero!
Sir."

"He was quite concerned
about the ANO, which had agents operating in your country. It was
founded by a man who went by the name of Abu Nidal. 'Abu Nidal
Organization', in your parlance. After years of creating mayhem,
they have dropped out of sight. In fact, they haven't done anything
of significance since Abu Nidal's sordid death in Baghdad several
years ago." He turned to Bill and continued in Arabic.
"Let's talk about this particular event, my
misguided friend. The events are a bit hazy...it's been awhile. But
as I recall, when I tortured him to death on Palestine Street in
Baghdad, he squealed—"

The ninja might have been a former
Marine, but his reflexes were up to Corps standards. Bill had only
made it halfway out of his seat before the ninja was on him,
thrusting him back into his chair and then, almost magically,
reaching back to prevent the chair from falling.

"I don't know what you said, sir, but
you sure riled him. I haven't seen this much action out of him
since we intercepted him on the road."

"I can't imagine why he's upset," Ari
said innocently. He sighed. What he said next hurt him as much as
anything else he had ever confessed, excluding his nightly
apologies to Rana. "You must delay this operation."