The young brown guy, the slightly older black guy, and the old white guy had been in the room for thirty minutes and now the sweat was running down their arms. They didn’t need to be reminded, but the black guy went and said it anyway.
“Damn, it’s hot.”
“It ain’t so hot,” the old white guy said. “Panama was hot. Somalia was hotter. Kuwait was really hot, but that was a dry heat. Now, you take your triple-canopy jungle in Laos…”
“Don’t start,” the black guy said.
The temperature in the windowless room had topped ninety degrees at ten A.M., and that was half an hour ago. The room was in a suite of unused offices in an almost vacant strip mall off Highway 12 on the western edge of the Detroit metro area. The building was deserted except for a one-room telemarketing sweatshop at the other end.
The white guy was closer to sixty than to fifty, and his shaggy white-blond hair was shot with gray, and he’d given up trying to hide the bald spot on top. Once he’d been cinched down tight all over. Now his skin and muscles were starting to look like they were a size too large. He shook his head, toed the dirty carpeting, and laughed.
“Figures. No A/C. No nothing. Lookit this place. Some op. Shows how much we rate. Where are we? Inkster? What kind of name is that?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said the black guy, who was in his late twenties. Unlike his older partner, he enjoyed looking in the mirror every morning. His skin fit him nice and tight.
They wore Nikes and faded jeans and oversized polo shirts that did not entirely conceal the holstered Berettas, the pagers, the plastic hand ties and cell phones hanging from their belts. They were obviously exhausted. They had not shaved in the last twenty-four hours.
They were not cops.
Nobody would admit who or what they were now. Only what they’d been. The old one was former Delta, former SF. The young one had also been with Special Forces. They’d been through the looking glass and now they carried nothing in their wallets or on their gear that could be traced back to the military. They were simply known by their mission name: Northern Route.
They were volunteers, totally on their own.
An hour ago they snatched a Saudi Arabian businessman off a busy street, stuffed him in a Chevy van, and brought him to this crummy little room from which the air conditioning, the desks, and the chairs had been removed. There was a touch of method in the selection of this room: the sensation of slow suffocation as an interrogation tool. For now the prisoner remained blindfolded. A little later they would take the blindfold off.
So it was just the three of them, and a lot of sweat, and the worn gray carpet, the bare walls, and the gray ceiling tiles crowded overhead with their grids of monotonous dots. And now the walls, carpet, and ceiling started closing in to form a solid block of heat.
The old guy wiped sweat from his forehead and said, “The right way to do this is we should be sitting on a runway. Three hundred thousand Arab types down the road in Dearborn for these wrongos to hide out with. And there’s not a single military base in this whole town. That’s real smart.”
“Hollywood, man-just cool it. It’s only half an hour. They’re on the way in from Willow Run to pick him up.” On him, the black guy nodded at the third man in the room.
“What would be nice, Bugs, is for Omar here to tell us something.”
Bugs shook his head. “Never happen. We can’t make deals, that’s for the suits. But my guess is this guy’s hardcore Qaeda. No way he’s gonna talk to anybody. Nah, I think he’s gonna sit out the war on the beach in Cuba.”
Hollywood nodded. “You hear that, Omar? Camp Delta. Nice eight-by-eight chain-link dog kennel. Got your little rug and your prayer arrow scribed on the concrete floor.”
The third man in the room showed lots of brown skin, as he’d been stripped down to his jockey shorts. He sat stiffly on a metal folding chair, his hands bound tightly behind his back in plastic cuffs. In contrast to his scruffy captors he was clean-shaven, his thick dark hair was styled, his fingernails and toenails looked recently manicured. He smelled of cologne rather than sweat and fatigue. In further contrast, a comfortable two inches of belly flab drooped over his waistband. According to the word, he was the renegade nephew of a Saudi prince, one of the world’s ultimate rich kids.
But right now he was seriously separated from his Rolex and his Mercedes, and he had a band of duct tape wrapped around his head, covering his eyes. The intell on him suggested he was a dilettante slumming in jihad, that he was soft, that he would crack. So far, the intell was wrong.
Hollywood scrubbed at the stubble on his chin with his knuckles, then he grimaced at the prisoner. He crossed the room in three swift strides, grabbed a handful of the prisoner’s sleek black hair, yanked him to his feet, and shouted, “We know you’re getting set to move something. So what is it, where is it, and who’s doing it?”
The prisoner hunched his shoulders and drew his chin into his chest.
Hollywood’s frustration blew on through to outright anger. He seized the prisoner with both hands and roughly spun him in a circle. “So which way’s Mecca, Omar? Take a fuckin’ guess!”
“Hey, hey, knock it off,” Bugs said, moving in quick. Their good cop/bad cop choreography was getting out of hand. It was the heat.
“Yeah, right.” Hollywood rammed the staggering prisoner’s head against the wall.
“You goddamn redneck-you’re way out of line. Back off!” Now Bugs was shouting as he stepped in between Hollywood and the prisoner, who had collapsed to his knees. They glared at each other, standing so close the sweat on their noses almost merged.
Hollywood squinted his pale blue eyes. “You young guys-you think this is some kind of extreme sporting event. Let me clue you. This is a war. This scumbag is the enemy. You better get some hate in your chest, son; ’cause if you don’t, when the time comes, you’re gonna hesitate…”
Bugs stood his ground and stared directly into Hollywood’s eyes. “You got no cause to bad-mouth his religion.”
“Wise up,” Hollywood said evenly. “This raghead wants to kill your family because he’s an intolerant Wahhabi creep, get it?”
“Fine, but I’m telling you, he ain’t going to talk, not to us.”
“Oh yeah? There’s ways.”
“Spare me.”
“When I was in Nam…”
“It’s too early in the day for the geezer hour,” Bugs said. “And it’s way too hot, besides.” Rolling his eyes, he reached down, hoisted the prisoner by the arms, and guided him back to the chair.
Hollywood walked to the corner, stooped and plucked a half-liter plastic bottle of springwater from a twelve-pack. He got up, opened the bottle, and returned to the seated prisoner. Slowly he poured several ounces of the water on the prisoner’s bare chest. The prisoner reacted to the touch of liquid, instinctively licked his lips. Thirsty.
“All you need is a gallon of water and a washcloth. Put the rag over his mouth and nose and just dribble the water. Slow suffocation. Works like a charm. Don’t leave mark one,” Hollywood said.
“They catch you doing that today you go to Leavenworth. Besides, evidence acquired through torture is not admissible in court.”
“Court? Court!” Hollywood actually shuffled his feet in a brief dance of rage. “Oh great, why don’t we read him his rights and have a seance and see if we can contact William Kunstler.”
“Maybe you could pull that shit in Afghanistan, but not here,” Bugs said.
Hollywood was quick to jab a finger at Bugs’s face. “You weren’t in Afghanistan, fresh meat.” They were back to glaring at each other. Then Hollywood relented and took a step back. “I mean, you and me, we’d never do anything like she…” He paused, let his eyes drift toward the door.
Bugs followed Hollywood’s gaze, narrowed his eyes. “You mean, give him to Pryce?”
Hollywood shrugged.
“I thought you didn’t approve of Pryce,” Bugs said.
“I don’t. Pryce is a freak of nature. But it can’t hurt to try.”
“We got less than an hour till the suits get here from D.C. Can’t be any rough stuff, not so it’d show.”
“So we agree,” Hollywood said, smiling. He now approached the prisoner with open hands to show Bugs his benign intent and removed the adhesive blindfold, pulling with steady pressure. The prisoner, still dazed from his trip into the wall, winced, losing a little hair to the tape. He blinked several times, adjusting his eyes to the light. Then he rallied, looked past the two Americans, and fixed his eyes with a disciplined stare on a bare patch of wall.
“Okay Omar, here’s the deal,” Hollywood said. “I know you got your engineering degree at the sore-fucking-bone in Paris. I know you speak French, German, and excellent English. So I know you hear what I’m saying. And I know you don’t care to talk to us infidels and all. But I feel obligated to clue you to this one important fact.” He yanked his thumb at Bugs. “Him and me, we got our differences but basically we’re guy infidels, you sprecken the comprezvous?”
The prisoner, whose name was not Omar, continued to stare at the wall.
Hollywood leaned forward and spoke into the prisoner’s ear. He dropped his voice to a low, amiable tone. “I’m just saying, guy infidels ain’t all we got.”
The prisoner shifted on the chair and then spoke in precise, un-accented English. “I would like to speak to my attorney and I would like to use the bathroom.”
Hollywood was still close to the man’s ear. He smiled a kindly smile. Conceivably he was someone’s grandfather. “Number one or number two?” he asked.
The prisoner shook his head briefly, then refocused his fatalistic gaze straight ahead on the wall.
“Fair warning,” Hollywood said as he and Bugs ambled across the room and opened the door. As they stepped into the hall, Bugs called out, “The A Team is off the court, you can bring in the bench. Oh, and he wants to go to the john.”
“Rashid, my man! The Gucci Terrorist-actually you don’t look so bad, considering how your day has gone completely to shit.”
Hearing his name, Rashid looked up and for a fraction of a second lost his concentration and fixed his gaze on Major Nina Pryce as she walked into the hotbox room. She came straight at him; no frills, no wasted motion, no bullshit. She was a rangy, athletic thirty-five years old and stood five feet nine inches tall and weighed one hundred and forty-three highly trained pounds. Dressed down for the heat, she wore cut-off Levis and a ribbed tank top.
Rashid was trying to force his stare back to its meditation on the bare patch of wall when their eyes met. Nina raised her arm and ran her fingers through her short flame-red hair. Rashid’s eyes followed the movement and became tangled in the interesting play of flesh on her bare upper arm. He noticed that the lobe of her left ear was missing, just a shrivel of scar tissue. A skull-and-crossbones tattoo grinned on her left shoulder like a memento of a wild youth. He saw the old-fashioned 1911 model Colt.45 automatic jammed into her waistband.
Finally, he yanked his eyes away from her flaunted American body. The light in the depths of Nina’s gray-green eyes adjusted as she noted the way he stared at her bare arms. Her tanned forehead, which was sprinkled with copper freckles, frowned slightly. Uh-huh. So you’re one of those guys.
Then, as Rashid looked away, she studied the collision of revulsion and lust; the way it flashed in his eyes, then resolved into contempt. She’d pulled several tours of duty in the Middle East. She knew that look from certain Arab men. It was pre-Islamic, rooted in ancient taboos of the North African tribes: contempt for the strangeness they saw in the female sex. And nothing was more alien to them than a free woman packing a.45.
But quite possibly, in this case his cultural baggage could work to her advantage. So she smiled. And not a bad smile. Ten years earlier and a bit slimmer, she would have been considered downright pretty.
Today she’d still look pretty-but no longer Starbucks-early morning-coffee pretty; more like last-call pretty in a country-and-western bar. Which was fine, because there was a lot more country than Starbucks in her chosen line of work.
Her clear, strong voice had served her well singing alto in her high school choir; but that was several lives ago, before she cut a swath through the U.S. Army: first female to command infantry in action (Desert Storm); first female to be awarded the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Now she’d wrangled her way into Northern Route via Delta. No one called her major now. Rank didn’t matter here, only the mission.
Her cut-off jeans, running shoes, and a close-fitting purple tank top were a practical choice for undercover work, given the heat this July morning. To Rashid, however, the attire was totally revealing of her upper body and lower legs. Breaking his concentration, he now stole glances at her. He averted his eyes from her bare arms and the tidy swell of breasts confined in a sports bra. Her shoulders and throat were trim, muscled, well shaped. The clean physicality of her American-woman sweat cut toward him through the stale air like a dangerously unsheathed blade.
She smiled knowingly when she saw him struggle to avert his eyes. She stepped directly in front of him so that she was in line with his point of concentration on the wall. She folded her arms.
“Let’s understand each other from the start. We have a lot in common, because this outfit I’m in is sneaky and very results-oriented. Just like you guys. It’s like…” She paused, cocked her head to the side, and gave him a thoughtful squint. “Do you have kids? Well, you know how when you talk to a little kid it’s best to stoop down, get on the same level with them and make direct eye contact?” She leaned forward from the waist, planted her hands on her knees, and looked him straight in the eyes. “What’s happened is, because of what you guys did, my government has quietly given a few of us permission to get down on your level, follow me?”
Very deliberately she extended her right hand and placed her open palm on his bare chest. The whites of Rashid’s eyes enlarged as he shied away. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Is it true that Ali, the husband of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, said that ‘God created sexual desire in ten parts; nine parts were given to women and only one to men’?” She removed her hand, straightened up, and said, “I just felt your heart speed up in your chest. I understand this is not the most comfortable setting. You almost naked, me…uncovered.”
She placed her hands on her hips. “But the fact is, we don’t have a lot of time, you and I. That’s for other people; the suits who work in offices and flirt by the watercooler and generally fuck things up.”
Rashid had turned his head away from her and now fixed his gaze on a different wall. So she reached over and gripped his thick hair in her left hand and drew his head back toward her. She gauged him carefully, the way he tensed and planted his bare feet on the carpet. An inch shorter than she, and soft in the middle, but he had powerful soccer legs.
With her right hand she shoved the heavy pistol to the side of her waistband and quickly undid the snap on her Levis. “Is it also true your imams believe the greatest insult the United States inflicted on the country of the Two Holy Places was sending female soldiers there?”
She flicked the zipper down and used the pistol to lever back a corner of denim and some panty, revealing a raised whorl and purple dent of scar tissue. The entry wound was located in the whiter skin and freckles west of her belly button.
“Kalashnikov round, from an Iraqi Republican Guard. He got me low and to the right. I got him higher, center mass. And so ended one of my several dramas in the sand dunes. Remember Desert Storm? Back when we were defending your backward medieval kingdom?” Elastic snapped, the zipper hissed back up; Nina deftly buttoned her jeans and jammed the Colt back in place. “Yeah, I been to Saudi. Back then, when we traveled off base, we had to wear the Halloween costume. You know, that black bedsheet you make your women wear?”
She released her hold on his hair. Rashid leaned back and unfocused his eyes, turning his vision inward. To Nina it looked like he was searching for his desert trance. But she noted that, while his eyes toiled to achieve calm, the BBs of sweat on his forehead were growing to the size of gumdrops.
“Rashid, let’s be candid here. You’re not the warrior type. You’re a money guy. There’s no percentage in you playing it tough. I’d check my jihad contract if I were you. Somewhere in the fine print I think it says guys like you don’t get the paradise bonus if you, ah…”-she curled her fingers, pointed her index finger between his eyes, and let her thumb fall like a hammer-“…get yourself killed by a chick in cut-offs.”
She stepped back and gave him a moment to think. Then she said, “We know you raise money through a network of businesses in the upper Midwest. DEA has you as a major smuggler of meth precursor from Canada. You’re also into identity theft and forged documents. We know you disburse funds to Al Qaeda cells. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about something coming south across the Canadian border?”
Rashid lost his composure for a few beats and bared his teeth at her in a silent snarl. Then he lapsed back into his trance.
Encouraged, Nina threw up her hands in genial exasperation. “Okay. I tried nice. But you don’t want nice. So now I’m pissed.”
With far more strength than Rashid was prepared to believe existed in her body, Nina jerked him up by hair and shoulder and thrust him toward the door. “Comin’ through,” she called out.
The door swung open. Expertly pulling Rashid off balance, she propelled him into the hall. Hollywood and Bugs stood at the ready, and several other men were positioned down the hall, screening them from the office in the front of the building.
“Now what?” Hollywood asked.
“Time to adapt and improvise,” Nina said. “He wants to go to the john, right?”
“Say again?”
“Clear that room of any civilians.” She nodded down the hall.
“Ah, that’s the women’s can,” Hollywood said.
“If you please,” Nina said, jockeying Rashid forward.
Hollywood went down the hall, rapped on the door, and sang out. “Man needs to come in-duck and cover.” Then he entered the bathroom and emerged ten seconds later. “Empty, it’s all yours.”
Nina nodded and turned to Bugs. “Duct tape. In my go-bag.”
Bugs knelt to an equipment bag, removed a roll of tape, got up, and tucked it under Nina’s arm. Hollywood gallantly opened the bathroom door.
“Now Rashid and I would like some privacy,” Nina said.
“No problem,” Bugs said as he and Hollywood took up positions on either side of the door.
Nina and Rashid careened through the door, bounced off a wall and into the row of sinks. Rashid started to fight back. He swung his elbows and shoulders and lashed out with his feet. The roll of tape went flying into a sink. But there was more desperation than training in his attempt, and Nina easily spun him, dropped her shoulder, set her stance, and drove a short, vicious right fist into his soft middle. As he sagged, gasping for breath, she maneuvered him into an open toilet stall.
Before he got his breath back, she had seated him on the toilet, retrieved the tape, and spiderwebbed his cuffed hands to the plumbing fixture with the gummy tape. More tape looped his ankles.
“Great stuff, duct tape,” she said, stepping back.
He glared at her; pure, hot desert hate. Hollywood would have admired the way she met his glare, hate for hate.
Nine spoke fast. “Listen, you. I won’t give the lecture about all the creepy shit you keep under that rock you crawled out from: the stonings, the honor killings, the clitoridectomies…Let’s just say what we got here, between you and me, goes way back. But at least you’re up front about it.” She narrowed her eyes. “Fact is, what bothers me is how many of our own guys have you inside them wanting to come out. First day I was in the Army, at the reception station they kept us girls separate. We woke up and there was this graffiti spray-painted on the barracks wall that said: ‘Never trust an animal that bleeds five days a month and doesn’t die.’ ”
She leaned forward and tapped a rectangular plastic dispenser bolted to the wall that featured a drawing of a smiling nurse and a blue cross.
“Doesn’t it make you a little nervous, being in America with all the unclean women out and about, just walking around during a certain time of month? Touching money. Preparing food.” Nina ran her finger across the raised type on the dispenser.
PERSONAL HYGIENE AND CLEANLINESS SANIBAG
For Sanitary Napkin Disposal
PLEASE DISCARD IN WASHROOM CONTAINER
Nina carefully studied his reaction. She’d judged him correctly. The wobble of pathological aversion had bumped the fatalistic desert trance from his brown eyes. She reached into the dispenser and pulled out a slender white paper bag on which a line drawing of a red vanity mirror framed the red type: For Disposal of Feminine Products. There was also a decorative red butterfly and a little red basket of flowers.
“Definitely unclean stuff going on by Wahhabi standards, I’d say.” Nina let the slim bag flutter from her fingers and fall into his lap. “This one’s empty.”
She spun, walked to the step can in the corner, by the sinks, removed the cover, and hurled the plastic container across the room so a scatter of the crumbled sanitary bags spilled into the stall at Rashid’s feet.
He hissed something in Arabic and drew back as she knelt, rummaged in the trash, and found a red-and-white bag containing a cylindrical tampon. “Nah.” She discarded it and plucked up another bag crammed with a thick overnight pad with wings.
“This is more like it,” she said.
She held it up so he could get a good look. There was a loud rip as she tore a broad strip of tape from the roll. Deftly, she taped the bag that contained the discarded pad to Rashid’s thrashing chest.
Then Nina turned and walked from the washroom, kept going past Hollywood and Bugs, proceeded down the hall and out the back door to the parking lot. Before the door closed behind her she could hear Rashid bellowing in English:
“I WANT TO SPEAK TO A MAN. I WANT TO SPEAK TO A MAN!”
Nina opened the door to the brown Chevy van, removed a pack of American Spirit filter cigarettes from the dashboard, picked up a BIC lighter off the seat, and lit the cigarette. She grimaced. This thing had put her back on the smokes.
She took a deep drag and let her eyes trail over the strip-mall clutter, west, toward Ann Arbor. She’d left her daughter, Kit, there with her aunt. Events happened so fast. Ten days ago Kit had been in second grade, in Lucca, Italy. Now they were a long way from Nina’s last duty station on the Tuscan plain.
Then Northern Route got the green light. Since they were headed for the upper Midwest, Nina brought her daughter, thinking to drop her off…
Nina looked at the cigarette smoldering in her fingers. Seven-year-old Kit would give her hell if she smelled tobacco smoke on her. Nina paced and smoked and waited. She field-stripped the remains of her cigarette and lit another one. She felt a vibration in the heat and saw clouds coiling in the western sky. She’d rigorously disciplined her mind not to let her personal life intrude on her work. But they were flying by the seat of their pants on this one. She’d have to pack Kit off to her father in Minnesota. Fast. And that would be a can of worms…
Her thought was interrupted by Hollywood’s triumphant howl as he jogged out the back door, stopped, grinned, and jerked his thumb back toward the doorway. “That lad has been seriously mind-fucked. Honor is due. You improvise well.” Hollywood inclined his head and flourished his hand in an elegant old-fashioned bow.
“What can I say. Some Wahhabi extremists tend to be phobic about us girls and our plumbing. So I took a flyer,” Nina said.
“Some flyer,” Hollywood said. “He spilled his guts. Not bad, for under thirty minutes. I take back anything I ever said about split-tails not belonging in this outfit.”
“Right. So?”
“It’s a compartmentalized operation, so he doesn’t know the target or the timing. But he bragged it’s not just any bomb…”
“You mean?” Nina came up slightly on the balls of her feet.
“I mean we might have hit the big one,” Hollywood said. He was not a man given to being sentimental. But his voice shook.
“Nuclear,” Nina said, letting the suddenly frivolous cigarette drop from her fingers and grinding it under her heel. There are different levels of adrenaline boost: there’s the surge of competition; there’s getting shot at and shooting back. But now she felt a solid jolt of very major high-end juice. A whole different order of magnitude.
“They got one, here?” The idea dried up all her spit.
Hollywood paused, licked his sweaty lips. “When we took off the cuffs, he said, ‘Hiroshima,’ and did, like…” Hollywood made the sign of a mushroom cloud in the air with his hands. “And he said it’s already in the mix. I get the impression he’s giving it up because he thinks it’s too late for us to stop it.”
They locked eyes. Nina could feel her pulse throb in a vein in her throat. “Sporty,” she said.
Not usually this dry, my voice…
“He gave us the name of a smuggler,” Hollywood said, going past her, opening the side door to the van, coming out with an AAA road atlas of the United States.
“No fooling. We got a name,” Nina said, leaning forward.
“Damn straight. And a location: Langdon, North Dakota.”
“Jesus? That’s…”
Hollywood thumbed through the atlas, held it up. “Canadian border. Wheatfields. Doesn’t get more wide open. And, Nina, they’re getting sneaky on us; it ain’t an Arab. I mean…he’s not a Middle Eastern type. Some of the new security must be working, because it sounds like they contracted the job out. It’s one of us. An American.”
Nina bit her lip, thinking. “Once Rashid talks to the suits…”
Hollywood nodded and held up his cell phone. “Yeah, we’ll lose the jump. I had to phone it in. They’re skeptical. Some desk-bound commando actually told me that interrogation was a bit over our pay grade. So fuck ’em. I say we just go with it.”
Nina narrowed her eyes. “On our own?”
“Absolutely. We can’t leave it to the headquarters pogues, not after what happened on 9/11…”
Their eyes locked, more intimate than illicit lovers: WE CAN DO THIS THING.
Hollywood said, “They put us way out on our own. So why not run with it. What do you say?”
Nina clicked her teeth, grinned. “Just grab our go-bags and hit it. Get out ahead of this thing. What’s the name?”
“Shuster.”
“We dump Rashid with the advance party. Go in hot and hard,” Nina said flatly.
“There it is. Just you, me, Bugs, and Jane. And the Hardy Boys for backup. Question is, how?”
“We’ll think of something,” Nina said.