The Godless One (7 page)

Ari decided then and there that he
would have to find another way to amuse himself at his neighbors’
expense.

"If you’re in the Witness Protection
Program, you need to show a lot more care about what you say to
people."

Ari ran a finger over the stubble on
his face. He really needed to shave.

"One thing else. There was a big
gunfight out at that international food store on Broad Street not
long ago. Louis told Mangioni and me he thought you were the
shooter. He even thought you might be some sort of hero, killing
three perps and all. He also thought you might be dangerous as
hell."

Ari held out both hands
and said with perfect amazement, "
I
…?"

"You nailed him on the Riggins case.
You confronted him about it. Am I right? He was filled with grief
and remorse and all that other good stuff. But let me tell you
right now, neither Mangioni or me thinks he did what they said he
did out there in the Cumberland woods. He was the last man on earth
who would think of killing himself."

"Please, Officer Jackson. How can I
possibly—"

"You know something more than you’re
telling, because the people protecting you know more. Even if you
don’t know who the killer is, we think you can take a good guess.
Go ahead, open the pouch. Take a look at the pictures and see if
you can see anything we missed. Oh yeah, and another thing. We
couldn’t get anything from the State Police. It takes an act of God
to get anything out of them. But the local yokels in the Cumberland
Sheriff’s Department got a tidbit that even the Staties missed.
There was a van with a Quebec license plate seen near Bear Creek
the night Louis died."

"You mean…Canadian?" Ari asked, as if
he didn’t know the two were part and parcel.

"It had that screwy French motto on it:
Zhe My Souvenirs. I think it means ’Buy my souvenirs‘, if you can
believe it."

‘Je me
souviens
,’ you idiot, Ari thought, wanting
to smack the man. He was also cursing his bad luck. That plate
belonged to Abu Jasim, one of Saddam Hussein’s
fedai
, body doubles, until he
escaped to Montreal. He had worked with Ari in Iraq and was,
currently, the most valuable man in his life. How could his license
plate have been spotted? Out there, in the dark?

"Did you get the number of the plate?"
he asked. "That would lead to a solution."

"No. Stupid self-serve…"

"He was spotted at a gas
station?"

"The local Stop-N, and no
gas pump jockey. All we have is the girl selling 24-hour
barf-my-ass chicken in the mini-cafeteria. She went out for a smoke
and went gaga when she read the plate. I’ve heard of girls melting
when they hear French, but when they
read
it? She was a twit minus a
half, anyway. What was she doing smoking near the gas
pumps?"

"Ah," said Ari, so relieved he almost
melted.

"But there was something screwy going
on out there, something international."

International. Screwy by
definition.

Mangioni, silent up to now, was looking
at him earnestly. His expression said: ‘Well, go on…’

Ari unzipped the pouch. He took out
several glossy photographs. Carrington, slumped over his steering
wheel, blood dribbling out the side of his head and from his
eyes.

"Oh," Ari said, putting the pictures
aside.

"I told you," Mangioni snarled at his
partner. "He can’t take it."

Jackson pursed his lips. "Go fuck a
bunny. My guess is he’s seen worse."

Ari took up the photocopy:

Name: Louis B. Carrington

Gender: Male

Age: 48

Race: White

Location: Cumberland State Forest, Jim
Birch Fire Road

Cause of Death: Gunshot

There followed handwritten notes of the
Cumberland deputy who had responded first to the call from the
rangers from nearby Bear Creek Lake. He had found Carrington
slumped over the wheel of his car with an apparent gunshot wound to
the side of his head. The engine had run out of gas but the
headlights were still on. The ground around the car had been
disturbed, but nothing definite could be determined. It was
possible that footprints had been scuffed away
intentionally.

"I know it’s not much," said Mangioni.
"But it’s what we’ve got. And we’re hoping you can come up with
more."

"With your Fed contacts," Jackson
chimed in.

"Really, gentlemen, I don’t see how I
can help."

"Don’t ‘gentlemen’ us," said Jackson.
"Call us fucking assholes, and help. I bet you could, if you
wanted."

"I’ll see what I can do," said Ari
wanly, like a maiden asked to sacrifice her virtue. "Could you let
me out, now?"

"Since that’s all we’re going to get,"
said Jackson, getting out and opening the rear door.

Ari’s sense of the absurd stumbled on
excess. He had just been asked to help solve the killing of the man
he had murdered.

CHAPTER TWO

Ari decided to give Jack Daniels a rest
for a few days. While this helped his liver, it was catastrophic
for his psyche. Drinking heavily was not in his new job
description, but it certainly eased the pain.

Ari had become a desk jockey. He was
tasked with reviewing images from Iraq, photographs that the news
networks, whenever they came across one, declined to broadcast.
Images that, in gory detail, documented the decline and fall of
civilization.

In his past life, Ari had
committed mayhem on a fairly wide scale. But his victims had,
usually, been specific enemies of the state whom any honorable
soldier of any country would consider legitimate targets. True,
Saddam Hussein’s definition of ‘legitimate’ was broad in the
extreme. Ari considered himself fortunate not to have been present
when Ba’athist Loyalists used sarin against the rebels in Basra
during the 1991 uprising. He had seen survivors of Halabja and did
not consider them lucky. At the time, however, he was alone in the
Kurdistan highlands dealing with a formidable Peshmerga commander
who had survived the al-Anfal massacres. The officer’s demise was
unpleasant, but beyond some bruising and arm-breaking, there had
been no collateral damage. It had been an amazing performance for
the 23-year-old, though his peers mocked his protests against
the
jash
units
still operating in the area. That such a born killer could be upset
over mass rape and murder and the gassing of five thousand
civilians! It was too amusing. Chemical Ali himself laughed in his
face.

"Just keep killing, like a good
boy."

Ari was contemptuous of
the new breed of assassins whose indiscriminate butchery created
shock waves, and not much else. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (for whom he
should have had some sympathy, since he had been raised a Sunni),
the ANO (the late Abu Nidal’s organization), the al-Ahwal Brigade
(who liked to style themselves as ‘The Horrors Brigade’), the
al-Faruq Brigades (who intended to ‘rejoice in God’s triumph’), the
Fallujah Mujahideen (lots of foreigners led by a Saudi)…the list
was tragically endless, and Ari’s retentive mind contained all of
it. It was like remembering each and every clown who had ever
performed for a circus. They were no better than the blind American
ordinance that slaughtered bystanders by the scores, the
hundreds…and, ultimately, the thousands. He mocked the ‘martyrs’ of
9/11 who, in his harsh estimation, had not eliminated anyone of
importance, such as a head of state or even a deputy minister, when
they attacked New York. Even the Boeing 757 that hit the Pentagon
failed to weaken America’s military capability or resolve. So far
as he was concerned, everyone who died that day—
everyone
—died for nothing. The only
true smart weapon was the lone hunter.

It had taken Ari too long
to conclude that Saddam Hussein was a worthless piece of shit.
There had been doubts, of course. Ari’s father had criticized the
Boss’s handling of the Army during the war with Iran—though only to
his wife (dangerous enough) and without realizing his son was keen
on every word he said. But Ari had intimate confirmation of Saddam
Hussein’s ‘genius for war’ on Highway 80, when a good portion of
the Iraqi Army was stretched out like some Mesopotamian eel on the
six-lane connector, begging to have its throat cut for a
proper
anguille au vert
. And then, in the aftermath of the 1991 war, Saddam had cut
lose his sons for the counter-offensive: the youngest, Qusay, and
the supremely repulsive Uday. Ari had seen first-hand the results
of Uday’s vengeance.

Up to then, the Boss had
been, at worst, a Tikriti
fellah
with weak political skills, poor taste in
architecture and an unfortunate tendency to imitate his ancient
progenitors when it came to torture. After seeing his sons at work,
though (and from the father proceeds the sons, in every way), Ari
thought Hell was created with just these sort of creatures in
mind.

He did not rebel openly. He couldn’t.
He had a wife and three boys. When it became unavoidable, he obeyed
orders. It did not matter if God forgave him—which was doubtful. He
could never forgive himself.

The Americans did not have
much more sense than the fallen dictator. They had a track record
of kicking a dog and then begging for forgiveness, kicking the dog
again, then going back down on their knees. And when a dog finally
fought back, they demolished it with tears in their eyes.
You see? We had no choice
…. And yes, torture was part of the program.

Well, it was an old story, repeated in
every empire. It was love. It was hate. It was the world’s oldest
profession: self-extinction.

Rather than email the
ghastly images to him, his sponsors packed them into encrypted
thumb drives and sent them via the U.S. Marshals Service. Neither
of Ari’s immediate handlers, Deputies Karen Sylvester and Fred
Donzetti, knew the passcodes for these memory sticks. This bothered
Karen not at all, since she fully understood the ‘need-to-know’
nature of the business. What
did
irk her was being kept so much in the dark about
Ari’s background. She felt she was not being given the tools to do
her job properly. She was so suspicious of Ari that she had fed him
an alias, ‘Sandra’, when they first met. To her intense chagrin, he
had somehow learned her real name. The little she had learned
about
him
filled
her with loathing.

Having the pictures hand-delivered, Ari
decided, was one way for the Marshals Service to keep tabs on him.
Maybe they thought that, by staying low-tech, they were helping to
palliate any willies Ari might experience in this strange, new
culture. There was the GPS tracker in his Scion, but that only made
sense, in case he decided to fly the coop. And it went without
saying that his computer was not only monitored, but heavily
filtered. But Ari did not take their word that he was not otherwise
being spied upon. Every week he searched the safe house for remote
monitoring devices and his clothes for RFID tags. This was one
reason he did not bring in more furniture or anything else that
might make planting bugs easier for his ‘protectors’.

The morning after meeting with Jackson
and Mangioni, Ari awoke without waking. Without Sphinx, he had been
unable to sleep. There was a hangover to deal with, but this had
become integral to his daily routine.

An encrypted Aegis had been left on his
kitchen table the morning before, while he was out shopping at the
Indo-Pak on Hull Street. He had disdained the flash drive with the
air of a man who had more important things to do, although his
agenda was as slim as Romeo’s little black book. But it could not
be put off more than a day. The minds of young terrorists never
stopped churning. It was possible that Ari’s dilatory behavior
would result in a hundred un-intercepted murders. It was also
possible that the next asteroid would wipe out the whole idiotic
mess—one could only hope.

The images comprised the usual
assortment of atrocities. Ari’s strong stomach conflicted with the
sheer waste of the horrors sliding across his computer screen. He
was not a great admirer of humanity, although its artifacts could
be pretty nifty. It was the unnecessary-ness of it that appalled
him. He could have terrorized Diane into letting him keep Sphinx,
but to what purpose? He would have set into orbit yet one more
satellite of misery in the world.

The men who appeared on his computer
screen (the ones who were not victims) were not adverse to despair,
especially when they caused it in others.

Some of the pictures had been scanned,
and some of these had little handwritten comments by American
soldiers. Anything assumed offensive to Ari's sensibility was
digitally brushed away, although the censor missed "ANO dicktraps
in Sick City", which amused him. However, they had negligently let
stand scribbles they did not think he would understand:

Sine Pari.
Latin for 'without equal', the motto of the
United States Army Special Operations Command.