PROFESSOR JABURI DID NOT LIKE TO WAIT, ANY more than he tolerated lateness. Two more minutes, he decided, and he would use his rental car and drive himself. He’d been in the lobby of the Palo Verde Inn for nearly five minutes beyond the appointed time before the car from the university pulled up. The professor of Islamic studies who’d been designated to serve as his host apologized, explaining that there’d been an accident in front of them that had forced them to take a detour, but Jaburi was not interested in excuses. In the car with them were two graduate students, a boy named Jonathan and a girl named Latifah, with whom he exchanged glances. They’d arranged in advance for a private meeting after his lecture, but he’d yet to meet her.
They drove down Speedway Avenue, the road as ugly as any he’d ever seen in America, lined with fast food restaurants, strip malls and strip joints, muffler shops and big box warehouses, porn shops, lawn ornament dealers and secondhand clothing stores. The American professor of Islamic studies droned on and on about how the University of Arizona had one of the highest populations of Arab students in the country due to the warm climate, blah blah blah, things any idiot tourism office guide might have been able to tell him. It took him a few minutes, once they’d arrived at the lecture hall, before he could regain his composure.
“Tonight, I will place in context for you the last thirty thousand years of human history,” he began his lecture, “and I will show you exactly how it was that the Neolithic hunter-gatherers chose the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East as the place to create modern civilization as we know it, how the seeds of social evolution first took root between the Dijla and the Furat, and how civilization continues to flow from this source; in this light, the struggle today in Iraq may be seen as merely the latest expression of a process that has ebbed and flowed literally since the beginning of recorded time, in a most fortunate and unfortunate of lands, where the forces of geology, of biology, and of history have made it an arena, much like the Coliseum in ancient Rome, within which all true and false predictors of culture must eventually do battle.”
He went on to limn the procession of powers and governments that invaded, occupied, and eventually left Iraq in defeat, starting with the Garden of Eden and moving quickly through the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Parthians, the Buwayhids, the Seljuk Turks, Genghis Khan, the Black Sheep Dynasty, the White Sheep Dynasty, the Ottomans, the British, and then the Americans. He listed the conquerors and the proxy rulers they left behind to rule in their stead, all of them eventually overthrown, assassinated, cast out, each leaving something of value behind, the Code of Hammurabi, algebra, an alphabet, and so on, and in that sense, he explained, the dialectic was a healthy one, though fraught with pain and suffering, without which there can be no growth. He spoke for two hours, citing names and dates and facts, all without notes. He closed with a note of warning, explaining that for the first time, civilization had the means with which to destroy itself many times over, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, biological, chemical, things that were themselves an unstoppable expression of culture and, as controversial as it might sound, something to be welcomed and embraced, a culmination of thirty thousand years of human progress and something that could be predicted, prepared for, and put to use.
“The fires in the forge of change have never burned as hot,” he said. “From this current conflict, a new world will emerge. A better world, in the end, a world that George Bush and the Americans will not recognize, and a world that the Iraqis will not recognize either, because this has always been the case. This has always been the historical dynamic. In great times, great changes occur, and these are indeed great times.”
He took questions afterward. He’d delivered the lecture before, and inevitably, someone asked him if he were advocating the use of weapons of mass destruction. He explained, again, that he was neither advocating nor not advocating, but that their very existence signified the powerful forces of change that were afoot, and that those forces would express themselves, whether the weapons themselves were used or not.
There was the usual reception afterward, with the usual dreary assortment of fawners and sycophants, telling him things he already knew and battering him with flattery. As soon as he could excuse himself, he found his professor host and told him he wasn’t feeling well, and that the girl Latifah had offered to drive him back to his hotel.
He regarded her in the car. She wore a veil and headscarf, but the veil was pulled up only to the bottom of her chin, as was the fashion with some girls these days. She reminded him of his wife when his wife was younger, stupid and gullible and a bit frightened of him.
“I would like to see your preparations,” he told her. “Primary, secondary, and tertiary targets.”
She drove him first to the Tucson Convention Center, where she showed him a short alley, at the end of which were located the intake vents for the convention center’s air-conditioning system. She told him the air circulated within the building every four minutes, and that she had yet to see anyone guarding the alley or the apparatus. The convention center could hold up to twenty thousand people. Next, she drove to a large hotel downtown, where she pointed out the intake vents, wide horizontal slats a mere twelve feet above the ground at the rear of the building. The hotel air-conditioning system kept the building at negative pressure, she explained, such that fresh air came in through the intake vents, moved through the hotel halls, got sucked into the rooms beneath the doors, drawn into the bathrooms, and was vented out through the bathroom exhaust fans. This was how the hotel managed to keep any smells from the rooms from entering the corridors. The air in the hotel was replaced with fresh air every five minutes. The occupancy of the hotel on an average day was about a thousand people. Her third target was the main terminal at the airport, where all the security was concentrated near the airplanes, luggage terminals, and boarding gates. The airport’s air-conditioning system, she showed him, was virtually unguarded, though security officers did occasionally drive past, usually looking the other way.
“And the rest of it?” he asked her.
“I have it here,” she said, gesturing toward a large straw bag in the back.
“What?” he said.
“I brought it,” she said. “I thought you might want to see it.”
He was furious.
He slapped her across the face with the back of his hand.
“You idiot!” he said. “You stupid stupid girl! Do you have any idea what would happen if some policeman pulled us over right now? Do you have any idea how much would be compromised? How many people are depending on us?”
He wanted to hit her again, but he was afraid the way she swerved as she drove would attract attention.
“I’m sorry,” she said, crying.
He took the bag from the backseat. Inside it, he found a uniform, gray and green, and stitched above the breast pocket, the words “Carrier Air-Conditioning.” He examined the uniform for a few minutes, then put it back in the bag.
“These are identical?”
“Identical,” she said.
“And the IDs?”
“They are perfect.”
“And your people?”
“I told them only that they have been chosen,” the girl said. “And that I will contact them. They are ready.”
“Have they met each other?”
“No, no,” she said. “They each think they are the only one. They know nothing of each other.”
“Good,” he said. “At least you’ve gotten that right.” They were at his hotel. She put the car in park and set the parking brake, turning to him, her head lowered in fear or shame. “Look at me,” he commanded. “Look.”
She looked up.
“Do you have a piece of paper and something to write with?” She nodded. “Get it.”
She reached into the glove compartment and found a pen and a small notebook.
“Take a page out and write against the palm of your hand so you do not leave an impression on the page below.” She complied. “Now write this down: 8-4-3-j-4-3-j-d-0-k-f-t-r-i-r-9-3-e-u-3-h-e-d-9-r-5-t-t-0-t-6-0-6. Show me.”
She had written: 843j43jd0kftrir93eu3hed9r5tt0t606.
“Good. Three days before ‘Id al-Fitr, the last day of Ramadan, you will open an AOL e-mail account using that number as the username. This number is not written down anywhere but here. I also have it in my head. When you get home, take this piece of paper and tear it into three parts, and hide each part in a separate place. Do not put them together again until you open the account. Do not use the account. On the day of ‘Id al-Fitr, you will receive instructions as to where you can retrieve the agent. Later that same day, you will receive the signal either to go ahead and use it or to wait. Under no circumstances are you to open the bottles or break the seals on them until you receive the signal to do so. Do you have any questions?”
“No,” she said.
“If you have any, you must ask them now. You will not see me again so you will not get another opportunity.”
“Well . . .” she said, hesitating.
“What is it?”
“This agent that we are to use for jihad,” she said. “May I know what it is? I will tell no one.”
“You may tell your people when it is time,” he said. “It is a biological weapon. It will not hurt you. It will only hurt the infidels. It cannot hurt Alf Wajeh. You must have faith.”
“I have faith,” she told him. He looked at her.
“But you want a scientific explanation,” he said. “All right. I will tell you. It was developed by our scientists from camel pox. The blood of all Arab peoples carries a natural immunity to camel pox. This has been true for a thousand years. This is not true of the blood of infidels. So the weapon will kill only infidels. You see? Now do you have faith?”
“I do,” she said.
He held his arms out to hug her. She buried her face against his chest, crying. He patted her back to soothe her.
“The world will be clean again,” he told her. “As in the story of Alf Wajeh. La ilaha ill Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah.”
“La ilaha ill Allah,” she repeated back to him. “Wa-Muhammad rasul Allah.” She looked up at him, her eyes wet with tears, a beatific smile on her face, the ecstatic face of a true believer in the presence of God himself.
“Shwaya, shwaya, ya bint Mohammed,” he told her, “rawgi.” Slowly, slowly, daughter of the Prophet, be calm.
“Thank you,” she said, still weeping. “Thank you.”
In his room, he washed the girl’s filth from his hands and turned on the television. The newsman on CNN spoke of another U.S. bombing raid in Iraq, a house in Ad-Dujayl where insurgents were believed to have been holed up, in response to a car bombing earlier in the day that had killed seven American soldiers near the front gate of the base at Balad. Such attacks were drawing away the Americans’ full attention. This was good.
He turned the channel. He saw a baseball game, a soccer game, one of those “reality” shows that, when deconstructed, said more about reality as America defined it than anybody seemed to realize, a nation of whores and pimps, spreading AIDS to the rest of the world. He surfed through the pay-per-view options on the adult channels but turned the TV off. He looked at himself in the mirror, straightened his tie, and then went down to the hotel bar. He’d had trouble sleeping of late, the excitement of what he was engaged in impossible to push from his thoughts. He sat at the bar and ordered a cognac.
He’d been there a minute before he noticed the girl at the table behind him. She was one of those pink American girls, wearing a miniskirt that sparkled and a top that revealed most of her breasts. She was blond with blue eyes, perhaps a natural blond, he thought, though such women were entirely rare. Her eyes were wet, as Latifah’s had been. He gathered that she had been crying. He watched as she frantically dialed number after number on her cell phone. She looked off, lost and forlorn.
“Is something wrong?” he asked her.
She looked up at him.
“I can’t find my friends,” she said, drunk and otherwise stupefied. “I can’t find anybody. I don’t know how I’m going to get back to my dorm. I don’t have the money for a cab.” He saw a tear roll down her cheek.
“Please,” he said. “Please do not cry. I will take you home. Please. It’s not a problem.”
She looked up at him.
“You don’t mind?” she said.
“Not at all,” he said. “Not at all. If you could wait only a minute. I didn’t expect to be driving, so I left my keys in my room. Can you wait? And then I will drive you.”
He smiled his most avuncular smile.
“Okay,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”
He fingered the car keys in his pocket as he walked back to his room, where he reached into his toiletry kit and found what he was looking for, a pocket knife with a three-inch locking blade and a sturdy handle. He grabbed his hairbrush as well. In the closet, he found two plastic bags meant for guests to use to carry their dirty laundry. He stuffed them into his coat pocket. Before he left, he found the courtesy guide the hotel left for its guests and a map of Tucson. He noted where the road he was on, Palo Verde, led out of town and into the desert and a place called Mt. Lemon, where he felt certain he’d be able to find a place deserted enough to suit his purposes. His own corruption was complete, he knew, but he also knew that the purification to come would make him clean again.
The girl was waiting at the bar, looking much more cheerful than when he’d left her.
“I so much appreciate this,” she told him. “Some friends of mine are having a party and I’ll bet they just got hammered and forgot about me. My name is Heather.”
“Heather,” he said. “Calluna vulgaris. A beautiful name. Mine is Mahmoud.”
They shook hands.
He’d nearly gotten her to his car when he heard tires screeching. A red convertible pulled up, stopping suddenly. In it were three girls, screaming through the open windows.
“Heather, we’re so sorry,” one called out. “Are you okay? We came to give you a ride. My cell died.”
“These are my friends,” Heather told Jaburi, relieved. “You guys, I was so like worried you’d forgotten me. I even had to get this old guy to give me a ride. Thank you so much, Mr. Mahmoud. I really appreciate your offer. See you later.”
The blond girl drove off with her friends.
Jaburi tossed his car keys once in the air, then pocketed them and headed back to his room. As he did, he walked past a rented white Dodge Intrepid, where Walter Ford sat, watching him.
The section Walter had assigned his students had gone well, both in his Research and Evaluation Methods class and in his Statistical Analysis class. Some students had grumbled that it seemed like a lot of busywork for nothing, but that was exactly the point. Others found exactly what he was trying to teach them, that the powerful new search and evaluation tools available to modern law enforcement were revolutionizing police work, and if it often seemed true that old forms of tedium were merely being replaced with new ones, in the end, it was worth it—that the value of patience had gone up, not down, with the advance of technologies.
They’d started from the list DeLuca’s brother-in-law, Tom, at Homeland Security had obtained for them and added another 531 names to it. They’d identified the top one hundred academics in order of frequent flier miles racked up. His students formed two-man teams and divided the subjects between them. They’d developed parameters for measuring an individual’s political leanings, using profiling guidelines developed by Homeland Security. When he brought in a political science professor from MIT who’d done a statistical analysis of revolutionary movements throughout history that proved, with an 89 percent degree of accuracy, that most radical social movements were led by men (or women) who’d been the youngest-born in their families, each team ranked their suspects in order of birth order and concentrated on the top two. When a religion professor spoke to his classes and said that the most radical believers were often converts or prodigal sons returned to the fold, the teams looked for academics whose views weren’t simply extreme or overpolitical but had changed in the last ten years. Academic writings, papers, and books were collected and assembled, scanned and entered as text files.
Ford’s interest was piqued, however, one night when one of his more gifted students, a boy named Eli, told him he’d found something interesting, a man named Mahmoud Jaburi, a highly respected professor emeritus at Princeton, currently on sabbatical. He’d been born in America, the son of an imam and Islamic scholar who’d taught at Yale until he was recalled to Baghdad to head a mosque there. The Jaburis constituted the largest of the Euphrates tribes, and the surname was the name most frequently cited when Eli ran a check of prisoners currently being held by coalition forces in Iraq. What excited Eli was genealogical research he’d done, revealing that not only was Professor Mahmoud Jaburi the twelfth of twelve sons, but his father, the imam, was thirteenth of thirteen, and his grandfather was ninth of nine. Further research indicated that while Mahmoud Jaburi’s writings were extremely liberal-minded when he was a younger man, and quite brilliant (his IQ was reported to approach 200, with a virtually photographic memory), his views had shifted 180 degrees upon the death of his father to become radically conservative.
It got Walter Ford curious, so he’d isolated Jaburi’s travel patterns and asked Tom to run a correlation for terrorist chatter. In each city where Jaburi visited, in the days after, terrorist chatter increased. The statistical probability that it would increase consistently after each and every visit was low, yet correlation did not imply causality. Jaburi was a popular, charismatic man, with several websites dedicated to him. Transcripts of his speeches were disseminated through such websites, posted by ardent followers who taped his speeches and preserved them in cyberspace. It wasn’t until Ford broke down Jaburi’s transcribed speeches that he became truly suspicious. Jaburi had used the phrase “thousand faces” more than twenty times in the last year, never in the context of explicitly identifying a terrorist group by that name, but in a more general sense. Perhaps it was just a phrase he liked, Ford thought. Or was it something in his subconscious slipping out?
Jaburi was charismatic. He was familiar with America and American customs, and he spoke English without an accent. He was trusted by the U.S. government and had often sat on government panels in the past. He was wealthy enough to travel freely, though he had a wife and two young children, rendering him less suspicious than a single man traveling alone. He had contacts and connections all over the country. And everywhere he went, the chatter increased. And in the last year or two, his message had become increasingly apocalyptic and full of doom.
That was enough for Ford to want to see him in person.
He’d flown to Tucson, using frequent flyer miles, and attended the lecture. He’d been enormously impressed by the man’s breadth of knowledge and faculty for recall, as if he had a million facts and names at his fingertips. He’d seen Jaburi get into the car with a young Arab girl after the reception. He’d followed as they drove past the convention center, past a large hotel and then the airport. It didn’t seem like a typical city tour. And then, much to his surprise, he’d seen the older man raise his hand and strike the girl, an arm flying across the front seat, clearly silhouetted in the rear window by the lights of an approaching car, even though he’d been of the impression that Jaburi and the girl had never met before.
He watched Jaburi meet the blond girl in the bar, and he watched as the blond girl got into the red sports car and drove off with her friends.
Perhaps it was nothing, but Walter Ford had a feeling that the blond girl had been very lucky. He took the digital voice recorder he carried with him at all times and made a note to call Eli in the morning and ask him if he wanted to do any work for extra credit, cross-checking Jaburi’s travel patterns against sex crimes in the FBI register.
DeLuca was happy to observe that his gas gauge was no longer dropping. They were somewhere in high country. They kept going. They crossed a ridge, the road traversing a basin and range topography, negotiated a pair of switchbacks and descended to a primitive caravansary that looked more like a cemetery than a town. DeLuca saw no electric lights, only a single kerosene lantern in the center of town, tended by an old man who looked at them, expressionless, as they approached. DeLuca stopped the car, and Evelyn Warner asked the old man if he could tell them where they might find a doctor. He pointed down the road.
“He says next village,” she told DeLuca. He looked at the gas gauge.
“Did he say how far?”
“Half a day,” she said. “But that’s by camel.”
They crossed a vast rock-strewn pediment, circled a volcanic crag, and climbed for another thirty minutes to a high pass. DeLuca had hoped, crossing the pass, to see the lights of a city below, but he saw only darkness. Soon enough, the empty gas gauge warning light lit up. They were still in the middle of nowhere. DeLuca always assumed you had another gallon of gas before you were really out, but he’d never tested that assumption. Evelyn thought that was something he ought to know, as a former police officer.
“I don’t recall telling you I used to be a cop,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to the backseat, where Khalil had either fallen asleep or passed out.
“I’m a reporter,” she told him. “I often research the people I meet. Did you know that someone put a bounty on your head?”
“I’d heard,” he said. “Ten thousand dollars. It’s nice to know what you’re worth.”
“I heard fifteen,” she said.
“It’s gone up, then,” he told her.
He saw a light in the distance, and then a town, not much bigger than the last one, with a few houses that had two stories, but again no trees. There seemed to be some kind of central village square, where they saw a dry fountain, a donkey, and a car, an old Trabant. At the far corner of the square, he saw a light above a door where he recognized the Arabic word for “police.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to the police, or answer any questions. It had to be well after midnight. No one was about.
Then he saw, down a side street, what he was looking for, a sign hanging from a pole and, on the sign, a physician’s caduceus, along with another symbol in Arabic that he didn’t recognize. With the engine off, the town was dead silent.
“You might want to keep the engine on,” the Englishwoman said.
“I might want to,” he agreed, “but we just ran out.”
The doctor was a young man, a Kurd, reed thin, with a close-cropped beard. His wife came to the door as well, tying off her bathrobe, an apprehensive expression on her face.
They brought Khalil in, laying him flat on the doctor’s examination table, and then the doctor suggested DeLuca roll the vehicle into an empty garage across the street, where he would deal with it in the morning. Ansar al-Islam controlled the village, he warned, though the people were PUK sympathizers and by and large supported coalition efforts in Iraq. The doctor was the only person in the village, other than the police, who had electricity twenty-four hours a day. The others in the village were only allowed it for four hours in the morning and four hours in the evening, at least until the hydroelectric project to the north of town was completed. The village was called Hukt. They were about five miles east of the Iraq border and twenty from Sulaymaniyeh. When DeLuca asked him if he could get any gasoline, the doctor shook his head. Getting gas could take days.
“There is a bus to the border,” the doctor said. “Once you are there, I think you could cross. I will take care of your friend.”
The next morning, the bus dropped them off at a refugee camp a short distance from the boundary dividing Iran and Iraq. There had to be somewhere between five and ten thousand people in the camp. DeLuca saw displaced people with thousand-yard stares on their faces, mothers giving their children crackers for supper, a woman with a teenage boy so sick he could hardly move, another boy using the branch of a tree for a crutch, his leg red and inflamed. In the distance, a fight broke out in the men’s section of the camp, where he was told by a Swiss aid worker that recruiters for Ansar al-Islam and Al Qaeda were at work, urging young men to join them and fight the good fight. In the women’s section, he saw four men from a white Isuzu van, examining the women closely, and occasionally, they’d tell a girl to stand up and turn around. Evelyn identified them as slave traders, telling girls they could get them work as domestic servants in rich Saudi or Kuwaiti households, and then they’d take them to brothels in Turkey instead. The camp was a scene of anguish, and fear, and most of all, chaos.
It wasn’t hard to slip back across the border into Iraq.
Two miles down the road, they found an American patrol and surrendered to them. Lacking identification, it took a few phone calls before the patrol released them.