The Mulberry Bush (7 page)

I said, “You insist on my coming home?”

“You bet your ass I do.”

He groped in a shopping bag and handed me a brand-new, presumably genuine-genuine, blue U.S. passport in my true name. Then he gave me a manila envelope stuffed with brand-new hundreds and fifties, just as Bill used to do. I signed a receipt.

“You can turn in a final expense account when you get back,” he said.

“When will that be?”

“Today, if we wanted to lose your assets, but you'll have to say good-bye to the boys and girls and hand them over to the next guys.”

“‘Guys,' plural?”

“We'll split your caseload up among the stations as soon as you tell us what's going on and who the assets really are. Stringfellow took your secrets to the grave with him. We don't want them shutting down the whole fucking network because only one guy knows who everyone is.”

“I'll be surprised if any of them will want to be handed over.”

“If they want to keep on getting the money, they'll cope. All promises made by you will be kept.”

“Am I supposed to introduce them to the new guys?”

“It's customary. They've all got your cell phone number—Stringfellow actually shared that with us. They'll call. When you answer they'll say, ‘Matt Tannenbaum gave me your number.' Response: ‘Matt the bookworm? What's he reading these days?' Response: ‘Harlequins.' Any questions?”

“What am I going to be doing from now on?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. You're the original round peg and all we've got back home is square holes.”

“So what are the possibilities?”

“I guess you could impart your wisdom to the rest of us. Sooner or later, we'll find or invent something that takes advantage of your experience and talent. You should cool off for a while. You'd make an outstanding instructor in the training division.”

“The Plantation? No thanks.”

“There's no such thing as no thanks in this business.”

“Then this is good-bye, because the Plantation is out.”

These words came from the depths. I wanted to advance my plan, to penetrate, to spoil, to humiliate. I couldn't do that by running a classroom at the Plantation and sending dewy-eyed recruits to their capture and death in the abattoir that was the Middle East. Or being reminded daily of the horseplay that had sealed Father's fate.

Amzi said, “Simmer down. Obviously you'll be working in antiterrorism. It just takes a while to figure out where and how. Islamist
nutcases are not the only terrorists in the world. New ones crawl out from under rocks every day all over the planet. You've got a gift for finding and killing the fuckers. So that's what you'll be doing. But you can't do it in Arabia anymore.”

He looked at his watch, yawned, and rose to his feet.

“We're done,” he said. “I've got to get some sleep. I leave right after breakfast. Stay out of sight. Eat in your room. You've got a month to clean up behind the elephant before you get on a plane. We'll talk again when you get home, work something out. I know it's bad taste to tell a professional like you to watch his ass, but watch your ass.”

The next morning I checked out of the hotel at six. There in the lobby, waiting and watching for who knew what, was Amzi, sprawled in an easy chair, white skin showing between his ankle socks and the cuffs of his trousers, tiny spectacles perched on his nose. He was reading, or pretending to read, the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
and did not look up.

Two weeks after my meeting with Amzi in the Bavarian Alps I found myself walking in blistering midday heat down a narrow street in Sana'a as the
dhuhr
prayer was being called from the minarets. The sun was a blister on a pallid sky. The street was crowded, but no one paid any particular attention to me. My coloring is dark, made darker by the sun, and my face, thanks to the nose, could be mistaken for one of the many typical ones seen in the Near East. I had lived in Islam long enough to have acquired the local gestures and walk, and I spoke Arabic well enough to be mistaken for someone who had learned it at his mother's knee.

I was being followed by a tall Arab in Western clothes. His reflection, which I glimpsed in shop windows, was unthreatening. The man's posture was not the usual one for this part of the world. He carried himself like an American, so I decided to consider the possibility that he probably was the station type I had come to Yemen to meet and introduce to a local asset. This was a risky supposition. He could just as well have been an assassin who had traveled all the way from Dearborn or Los Angeles or New Jersey to wage jihad and had been ordered to demonstrate his
sincerity by murdering an American on his lunch hour along with twenty other good Muslim souls who had never done anyone harm and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the next shop window—there weren't many of those in this neighborhood—I watched my shadow take a cell phone out of his pocket and punch a single key. My own phone rang. This wasn't part of the contact plan I had made with the Headquarters man who set up this meeting, but the American voice on the line was the same.

He said, “Hey, how'd the game come out last night?”

I replied, “Five–four Yankees. Walk-off double by Texeira.”

The voice said, “Great. So let's get together.”

This was shoddy tradecraft. Foreigner places call. Second foreigner, who is fifty feet away, answers on the first ring. Both speak English into their phones. At the next corner I crossed the street and plunged into a knot of jostling Yemenis. As a centipede in dishdasha they plunged into the seething traffic. I went with them. Horns blared, curses were shouted, fists were shaken. The tall Arab elbowed his way to me and passed me a canvas shopping bag containing, among other items, the carbon-black, one-of-a-kind snub-nosed .45-caliber revolver I pouched from station to station.

My firearms instructor at Moonshine Manor had sworn by the good old reliable .45: “
Shoot a man five times in the chest with a nine-millimeter popgun and the bullet goes right through him and he keeps on coming. Fire one .45 slug into his big toe and he's immobilized by pain and shock
.” He had recommended the master gunsmith in Tennessee who built my .45 to order.

In the shopping bag were other essentials: spare loads of ammunition, a first aid kit, and aerosol cans of pepper spray and wasp and hornet killer that could project a stream of poison that would blind and suffocate a human being at a distance of fifteen feet. Also an envelope stuffed with euros for the asset I was on my way to meet.

The asset, who was barely old enough to shave, awaited me in a darkened house at the end of a blind alley. The alley was the only way in—and
more importantly, the only way out. We had met here before, a foolhardy risk I countenanced because the asset was an exceptionally good source, and because he said he felt safe here as nowhere else. The empty house had belonged to his late grandparents. No one in his cell but he knew it existed. As a child he had spent happy hours playing in the streets. He knew the neighborhood's secret shortcuts, its good hiding places.

He opened the door when I knocked in a certain sequence known only to him and me and shouted in Arabic,
It's me, Aashiq Muhammad,
which means “adorer of the Prophet.” The single room was small and shadowy. It had no windows. A weak lightbulb hung on a frayed wire from the ceiling. On the floor lay a rumpled sleeping pallet and two cushions to sit upon, and between them a low table with a bottle of water. On a shelf stood a small-screen television set tuned at maximum volume to Al Jazeera. The usual anti-U.S. slogans were painted in Arabic script on one of the whitewashed walls. Against the opposite wall stood an electric hot plate for cooking, a sink with a dripping cold-water tap and beneath it, the necessary bucket, covered with a towel.

My host was a young man I called Faraj. He was a member of a terrorist cell composed of two other postadolescents and a slightly older man. Though in theory everyone in the cell was equal, the grown-up was actually in charge. Until a few months before, when I found Faraj through his ex-girlfriend, he had had three cousins in the cell. Now there were only two. The third and youngest one had been turned into a suicide bomber by a stern jihadist introduced by the older terrorist.

The jihadist had assured him that he would be made whole again by an angel after he blew himself up and would be awakened from death by houris he could pleasure without interruption for eternity, one after another or all at once. They would turn back into innocent virgins, hymens mended, ready for a new deflowering, each time he used them. The absurdity, the blasphemous cynicism of it, broke the spell of jihad for Faraj.

After greetings that involved the usual references to Allah and his Prophet—for the purposes of our relationship Faraj thought or pretended to think I was a Muslim, though I had never told him any such thing—we sat down on the cushions. As I had been advised to do at Moonshine Manor, I took the cushion that put my back to the wall. Faraj didn't like having his back to the door, but I was the one with the euros, so he sat where I asked him to sit. He leaned closer and because the television was blaring, delivered his report into my ear. His hot breath, heavy with moisture, was unpleasant.

He had something important to tell me: Faraj and his surviving cousins and another boy who had just joined the cell had been ordered to carry out simultaneous suicide bombing attacks on the American ambassador and the chief of station. They would pull up beside their cars on motorbikes and blow themselves and the Americans up. Special, very powerful suicide vests were being prepared. There would be nothing left of the Americans or of the boys, either, except in the case of the Muslims, their immortal souls, but the angels would know the boys and the houris would be waiting for them, wet between their legs.

When was this going to happen?

Faraj told me the date and hour and location.

As he uttered the last syllable of the last word of his report, the door was blown open. I had been watching the door while I listened to Faraj, and I was still listening when I saw it expand slightly and for a tiny fraction of a second become plumper, as if it were being pumped full of liquid. Then it leaped off its hinges as if weightless, flew across the tiny room, and smashed into the wall inches from my head. Had I been a little taller, it would have killed me.

A large man with a curved butcher knife in his hand rushed out of the flash and the dust made by the explosion and cut Faraj's throat. The knife was sharp, the man was strong. The cut was deep, halfway to the bone, severing the jugular and the carotid artery. Faraj's strong, young
heart pumped out plumes of blood that splashed on the wall and soaked the assassin and me.

All the time I had been listening to Faraj I had been holding the .45 in my hand inside the shopping bag. Now I lifted it, shopping bag and all, and because the man with the knife was no threat to me for the moment, shot the first man who followed him through the space where the door used to be. The .45-caliber hollow-point round hit this fellow in the center of the forehead. His skull exploded. Blood and brains splashed into the face of the man behind him, who was pointing an AK-47 at me and screaming curses. He looked a little like Faraj and I thought,
That must be one of the cousins
and shot him twice in the chest. The impact knocked him over backward.

By now the man with the knife had cut Faraj's neck all the way to the spine and was trying to twist off the head. The sound of the shots—a .45 makes a lot of noise when it goes off in a confined space—woke this psychopath from the ecstasy in which he appeared to be lost. His eyes fastened onto me. He let go of Faraj's head, which fell onto the dead man's chest where, attached by a length of neck bone and a strip of skin, it dangled upside down, mouth agape and tongue hanging out, eyes staring, as if taking one last look at the world. Could it be that Faraj's brain might not yet be dead and he could still see me? In my state of shock, I thought this was possible.

His murderer uttered a roar and lifted his knife. I shot him in the left eye—I could hardly miss because it was no more than twelve inches away. Through all this I had remained sitting on the floor. He fell on top of me. His dead weight pinned me against the wall. The Arabic graffiti, like everything else in the room, were splashed with gore. I wriggled free, subduing panic but only just. I reloaded the .45 without knowing I was doing this. I did not fear for my life. There are worse things than sudden death. Whoever came through the door, and there would be more than one attacker, would not kill me. Instead, if I didn't kill them first, they
would capture me and torture me until I told them lies they were willing to believe and the time came to decapitate me on camera.

No one came through the door. I didn't expect this state of things to endure. I could not go into the alley covered in blood. With my cell phone, as robotically as I had reloaded the .45, I took photographs of myself, of the shopping bag and its contents, of the corpses, of the knife used by Faraj's executioner, of the terrorists' weapons, of the blood-splashed walls, of the jagged hole in the wall where the door used to be. I washed the blood off my face and rinsed my hair under the tap and soaked and wrung out the black T-shirt I had been wearing until the rinse water was no longer pink, then put it back on.

I walked out into the teeming street. No one followed me. No one gave me a second look. I was breathing as if I had just run the mile, and as I walked I fought to control this. Within minutes my hair and the T-shirt were dried by the sun. It seemed unwise to return to my hotel. I had cash in my pocket and in the shopping bag along with genuine-false credit cards and the Venezuelan passport I was using for this trip. I found a taxi and went to the airport, and with Faraj's euros bought the last business-class ticket to Zurich and a new shirt with a replica of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe silk-screened on it. In the men's room I sat in a stall and, using the app supplied by Headquarters, composed and encrypted a text message describing the day's events. I wiped the .45 clean of blood and my fingerprints, and put it back into the shopping bag with everything else except the euros, then dropped it into the trash can and covered it with used paper towels.

At the gate, hoping that it would be read in time to warn the ambassador and the chief of station to stay home on the date Faraj had supplied with his final breath, I texted the encrypted message to the number in Chicago.

Through all this I fought back nausea. As the wheels of the Swissair airbus lifted, I grabbed a vomit bag, but though I heaved and choked, I brought up nothing but the sour taste of what I couldn't get rid of.