The 56th Man (37 page)

He clicked forward several files until he
came to William Riggins. Unlike his brother's, William’s bed was
almost immaculate. The boy was on his back under a crisp sheet.
Except for the bullet wound, it had all the formality of a body in
a casket. Ari zoomed in on the nose, upper lip, and mouth. He bowed
his head and offered up a silent prayer.

He had seen enough, but he continued to the
end. The last file was another shot of the back door from inside.
Having started at the beginning, Ari was puzzled by this return to
the point of entry.

02:15:17 12/24/2005. The investigator had
spent an hour and fifteen minutes plying his camera throughout the
house. What caught Ari's interest was the broken wood from the door
littering the entranceway. There was no sign of the path Ari had
assumed the police had cleared through the mess after Jackson and
Mangioni had entered the house.

He went back to the first picture of the door
taken from the back yard. Standing open, but from that angle the
floor was out of sight. He clicked on the next picture. There...the
floor completely swept clean. The next four images showed the same
assiduous housekeeping.

He switched to the directory. None of the
files had a proper title, but was listed as 100_001.JPG,
100_002.JPG and so forth. The first six files showed a (2) next to
their numerical name. None of the remaining files showed this
parenthetical footnote.

He sat back and noticed that his
pulchritudinous neighbor had departed. A moment later, the
reference librarian slipped into the vacated chair. She made a
sound of disparagement and reached for the keyboard. Then she
noticed Ari watching her.

"Oh, this." She flicked a reproachful glance
at the monitor. "I wondered why he left so soon. He managed to lock
up the computer, again. Sometimes the filters just get
overwhelmed--oh, no! You don't want--"

But Ari had already leaned over for a look. A
woman's mouth was frozen in mid-blow job.

"Ah," said Ari. "Freedom of speech."

"Is that what he told you? That's what he
always says. 'Freedom of speech' my Twinkies."

"I'm not familiar with that phrase."

A smile penetrated the librarian's frown.
"That's all right. It's an anachronism." She hit CTRL/ALT/DEL and
rebooted the system. Then she blushed and literally stifled a laugh
by clamping her hand over her mouth. "Freedom of speech!" she said
after the spasm passed. She plinked the screen. Ari smiled.

"May I inquire as to your name?" he said.

"If you tell me yours."

Ari gave her a long look. She was certainly
no great beauty. There were a few mild acne scars on her cheeks,
her hair was lifeless, and her hands were a shade too red, as
though she had been scrubbing pots. Yet he found himself
entertained by the sparkle behind her rather thick glasses. And
when she was not feeling harassed, her voice had that warm, smooth
tone that Ari prized. It was said that Cleopatra was no sizzling
sexpot--but her voice had seduced an empire.

"I would like to tell you my name. If I
showed you my driver's license, you would see Ari Ciminon, complete
with identification number. But that is not my name."

It was her turn to stretch out a stare. Her
blush reached new heights. "Mr. Ciminon...I'm not used to
this."

"Used to what?"

"To...talking like this."

"You've never told anyone your name
before?"

She smiled and took a deep breath. "Lynn
Gillespie."

"Thank you, Ms. Gillespie."

"You're very welcome, Mr. Aladdin. If you're
going to use a pseudonym, I might as well pick the one I like."

"Fair enough. I need some assistance with..."
He gestured at the monitor.

"Someone's waiting for this workstation."
Lynn glanced towards the reference desk, then shrugged. "They can
wait one minute more. What do you need?" She rolled her chair
closer. Ari felt the oatmeal warmth.

"This directory..."

"These are picture files?"

"Yes. I'd rather not show them to you."

"All right..."

"I was wondering about this..." He laid a
finger over the (2) on the directory. "Do you know what this
means?"

"It's a copy." She scrolled down the
directory. "The first six files...all copies."

"Where are the originals?"

She went to the bottom of the directory. "It
looks like they've been deleted, at least from this disk."

"Why would someone delete the originals but
leave copies?"

"You didn't create these files?" Lynn
asked.

"They were made for me."

"Okay. Well, what might have happened is that
someone tried to delete all those files at once. When they blocked
off the files they wanted to get rid of, they accidentally copied
them at the same time. It's happened to me before."

"So you don't think they meant for these
files to be here?"

"I have no idea. You're being very
mysterious. Are you sure I can't just..." She floated the cursor
over one of the files.

"No, please..." He cupped his hand over hers
and gently removed it from the mouse. He did not let go right away.
A tremendous, erotic sadness filled him. His need left a palpable
taste in his mouth. Imagine, wanting to plunge into this sad little
Plain Jane. He let go.

"Is..." Lynn caught her voice. "Um...is that
all?"

"No. I need to send an email."

"That's no problem. You have an account?
That's no problem, either. I can set one up for you in Gmail. It
just takes a second."

He closed the window and removed the
ScanDisk, then rolled out of her way.

"Which of your many names do you want on the
account?" she asked as she pulled up Google.

"You choose."

She thought a moment, then gave him a very
attractive smirk. She typed in 'Ali Baba.'

"Please...not that."

"Why--"

"That's what the American soldiers call the
enemy in Iraq."

"Oh."

"I am not the enemy."

"And I don't know Aladdin’s first name," said
Lynn sadly.

"Nor I."

She draped her hands over her knees for a
moment. "How do you spell Ciminon?"

Within minutes the account was set up--and
Lynn had learned his street address, because that was one of the
fields required to set up an account. She did not appear to make
the connection between Beach Court Lane and the Riggins family.

"One more thing," Ari said as she began to
rise from her seat.

"Really, there's someone waiting--"

"The email I need to write is in Arabic." Ari
spread his hands over the keyboard. "And as you can see..."

"Use Google's language tool," she said, a
little briskly. Obviously her job took precedence over aimless
flirtation. But when he put on his best face of unadulterated
stupidity, she lowered herself back down. "Here." She opened
another window and pulled up the Google translator. "Just type what
you want in this box in English, then pick English to Arabic. Do
you know how to copy and paste?"

Ari nodded contritely.

"Copy the translation into your email and
send it. Now, you have less than ten minutes left on your
reservation. And I really have to go..."

Ari lingered in the oatmeal for a moment,
then set about composing his message. He needed help beyond a few
basic lessons on the computer. And he knew just the man for the
job.

SEVENTEEN

Saddam Hussein had lost his heads.

It had been years since Ghaith had visited
the Karradat Mariam, where the Republican Palace was located. One
of the Great Man's interpreters had come down with a fatal disease,
and the President's German was on the far side of nonexistent.

The President had looked at him suspiciously
when he was introduced. But then Ghaith (fully aware and fully
reminded that he was a nonentity) had screwed up enough courage to
recall for the President a glorious day on Pig Island, when ‘Mr.
Deputy’ had presented Ghaith's father with a case of Jack Daniels.
Ghaith's appreciation of that moment in his childhood impressed the
President with its warmth, and almost drew a tear from the Great
Man. Yes, Ghaith was just the man he needed at that moment. In any
other country, with his multilingual talents, Ghaith would have
been ideally suited for the Akashat/Al Qaim project, which involved
contractors from all around the world: Swiss, German, Danish,
French, British, Austrian, Swedish…and American. But the Great Man
did not want anyone to know too much about his nerve gas plants,
and Ghaith was soon returned to his usual duties.

On that visit, while approaching the palace,
the giant bronze heads of Saddam Hussein as a warrior in militant
Saladin headgear had frowned down upon him from the roof. Even
then, he thought they were majestically tasteless. Soon after the
invasion, the Americans had carted the heads off to the scrapheap.
Ghaith felt a sense of loss.

Security had tightened since the double
suicide bombing that had wrecked the marketplace and the Green Zone
Café. The guards at FOB Prosperity looked askance at the driver, a
corporal from III Corps, then asked Ghaith to step out of the
Humvee for a little waltz with a metal detector before allowing
them to proceed out of the peripheral Red Zone.

They were stopped again by members of the
Florida National Guard. As the soldiers frisked Ghaith, his eyes
fell upon a trailer park on the road leading into the compound. A
sign announced that this park was known as 'The Palms'. It was
packed with Shia refugees from Sadr City. The Americans thought it
would be bad publicity to evict them. A good face was worth a
hundred lives. The embassy was breeding insurgents right under its
nose. All the T-Walls and blast walls and barbed wire didn't mean
much when the enemy shared your toilets.

Inside, the palace seemed to be falling
apart, with plaster flaking off the walls and rubble from the
columns strewn underfoot. Whether this was because Iraqis had built
it or because the Coalition had occupied it was an open question.
Ghaith recalled the huge dining hall of the South Wing, quotes from
the Koran scowling down from the walls with grim imprimaturs as one
tried to enjoy a meal. Then there were the giant murals of the
South Ballroom: a Jew-less Jerusalem, the World Trade Towers coming
down, Scuds rocketing off to kill God-knew-whom.

Ghaith was led down the Center Wing, current
home of the United States Embassy. The corporal handed him off to a
sergeant (who shrugged), the sergeant to a civilian (who shook his
head), the civilian to a colonel (who nodded). The colonel guided
him to a straight-backed chair in a small office which must have
been a broom closet under the previous regime. The colonel took up
his seat behind a small desk and began perusing a folder.

"Abu Karim Ghaith Ibrahim?"

"Close enough."

“’
Abu Karim’…isn’t that sort
of like a tribal name? Weren’t those banned by the Baath
party?”

“
Only in the
military.”

“
But aren’t you
military?”

“
I’m the father of Karim.
That’s enough.”

"Okay,” said the colonel, surrendering to
confusion. “Says here you were a registry clerk at the Baghdad
Central Confinement Facility, previously known as Abu Ghraib
Prison."

"I worked there occasionally."

"In a briefing with his commanding officer,
Captain Rodriguez said you made some comments about the Wolf
Brigade to the effect--"

"I know what I said."

The colonel looked up sharply, unaccustomed
to having his comments decapitated. Ghaith was not impressed by his
razor-sharp ACU, perfect bearing, or authoritarian demeanor. There
was something about the colonel that labeled him as a permanent
desk jockey. Perhaps he was the type the infantrymen in the field
disparaged as 'Powerpoint Commandos.'

"You do know why you're here, don't you?"

"I've been told that I might be useful,"
Ghaith answered blandly.

"That's right. And if you're very useful to
us, we can be very useful to you. However, neither of us can be
very useful to the other if you get your head shot off."

Ghaith's eyes wandered to the window behind
the colonel. He could see the top of the orange grove behind the
palace. He knew that if he looked down from this third-story office
he would see a large kidney-shaped pool.

"Your story has gone all the way up the chain
of command," said the colonel, leaning back and clasping his hands
behind his head. "We would very much like to employ you in a big
way, but..."

"If you perform a thorough background check
on me, if you start asking my neighbors and former coworkers about
me, what remains of my family will probably be assassinated."

"Then you see the problem," said the colonel.
He had invoked some kind of mental chant to relax himself and his
voice took on an almost jovial tone. "We know very little about
you, and I strongly suspect you will offer very little voluntarily.
Were you a Baathist? Are you one now?"

"I am not and have never been a member of the
Communist Party."

The colonel laughed. "You've brushed up on
your U.S. 101." He lowered his arms to the file. He closed the
manila folder and held it up. "See that? That's an awfully thin
file. I've seen bigger CV's for administrative assistants."

"I don't believe there is a man in Iraq who
would tell you the full story of his life," said Ghaith. "Of
course, I've heard of your wonderful American transparency. I'm
very happy there is one place on Earth where a man can reveal
everything about himself without fear of consequences."

"Sarcasm won't get you anywhere." The colonel
tossed the folder down and again sought reassurance in some ghostly
temple in his mind. Whatever his method of self-control, it did
wonders for his attitude. He smiled and reached into a desk drawer.
He pulled out a deck of cards. "Recognize this?"