The Architect of Revenge: A September 11th Novel (36 page)

After the prayers at sunset, the men lined up to eat. Morgan stood at the back waiting his turn. He scooped smelly cheese from an urn using hunks of coarse bread. A ladle soon poured dark broth with turnips in his bowl. White sheep eyes floated on top.

He ate everything.

With dusk a generator roared to life and a color television was lifted onto shipping crates. A DVD movie showed the Towers collapsing and the Pentagon in flames. The images energized the men. Morgan cheered with them.

Tawfik rose, adjusted his holster with a virile tug shoring up his crotch, and began to speak.

“We bring the infidels jihad…without fear. We kill Americans alone or with their families. They are not as dangerous as they think.”

The droning liturgy had to have been repeated every time there were new members in the audience.

“The day of wrath is near. Distress! Anguish! Ruin! Destruction! Thick Darkness! God has created you!” His finger swept over them. “You are a sacrifice.”

During a pause Morgan heard the radio’s crackling liturgy. The lookouts were reporting in.

“They will walk like the blind. Their blood will pour like dust when their flesh rots, and fire will consume them!”

The men cheered again, unified by the moment, then parted for their shelters. Morgan found Tawfik and offered his hand to thank him for his hospitality. He was able to steal a glance at Tawfik’s wristwatch.

Unhurried, Morgan walked slowly to a rise in an open space and stood in the darkness admiring the speckled sky. He was slightly out of breath. That had to mean the altitude was around seven thousand feet.

He found Polaris and slowly raised both arms, pretending to stretch. The angle to the star was greater, indicating he was more north than expected.

He looked for Andromeda and calculated its position based on Universal time.

He was farther west, too.

The place where he stood was close to the Durand line along the Afghanistan border.

“They think he’s hiding there,”
Jon had told him months earlier.

Morgan was in Waziristan. It was an ideal starting place.

He yawned.

The seductive voice of the heroin began whispering again from his pocket.

God, he hated that shit!

But…he wanted it!

He became paranoid. Every tree had eyes. They were staring at his perspiration, counting each drop as the whisper amplified again to screams.

“Fuck…y…”

He retched hard, the violent gagging tearing at his insides. Before he could control it, he dropped to all fours, vomiting. The sheep’s eyeball landed beneath his nose in a slush of goo. He felt diarrhea dripping.

“Oh…Cay…Help me…” he prayed.

He clawed the ground, waiting for the nausea to pass. Finally able to stand, he grabbed an oily rag from the top of a truck motor and wiped his mouth, his ass, then threw the cloth behind him.

Walking to the cabin, he inhaled a tiny amount of the white drug. Morgan knew it wasn’t going to be enough.

“Going to have to kill me to stop me…you assholes,” he uttered while his stomach churned.

Alexandria February 11, 2004

E
xhausted by another day in her new role as Assistant Director, Jericho was lost in a hypnagogic dream—standing on her destroyer’s bridge, the purifying breeze washing her face as she scoured the ocean’s horizon, joining in the game with the sailors on watch, trying to discern the first distant object on the surface at nautical dawn.

The mouse ears on her slippers wiggled. The remaining papers, resting on the blanket draped over her thighs, plunged to the floor, waking her with their irate rustle. Her tired eyes opened into the glare of the table lamp, and she took a deep breath. As her breasts rose and fell beneath the soft cotton tank top, she squinted at the digital faceplate on the stereo. It was dark. She didn’t remember the timer turning off the sound and focused on her desk clock.

“Three a.m.?”

Again the evening had blended into night, only to become early morning.

“Geez…”

She reached for the lamp and switched the three-way bulb to low, tempering her eyes until she woke up more.

When Jericho began her new role at the first of the year, her life was managed to the second and her late-night research on Ali stopped. She was just too busy. The vigil was constant and her analysts at the NGA were the obstinate custodians, searching for fresh dangers on many fronts. When she had run the Middle Eastern division, Jericho enjoyed working with her staff as they speculated and formulated. That pleasure was gone as her time was swallowed into coordinating information and directing further intelligence gathering on the expanding war in Afghanistan and the assault in Iraq. Any data now came to her in monotonous summary briefs eschewing imagination. She had become what she loathed the most—a bureaucrat, and she hated it.

Swirling the cold tea in the cup’s bowl, she got up to make fresh.

In a few leftover minutes the weekend before, she had again begun sleuthing the pig mystery. The single snip of DNA and sixty-five thousand pig farms dotting the nation’s landscape created a vexing improbability that one incomplete piece had ended up in a terrorist’s abandoned pants pocket. There was no sense to it, making clear why Fields and the others had dismissed its discovery as fallacious.

Jericho’s unwavering belief held contrary. For whatever motivation, the specimen’s livery had been around pigs and had carried the contaminant along for the ride. It was a classic
needle in a haystack, and no different in principle than anything else the NGA hunted for. With enough effort, data revealed answers—if one had enough time—and that was Jericho’s consistent obstacle. Yet when she could, she kept coming back to Ali. The deeper she delved, any residual doubt about her quest being irrational vanished. The admiral had warned her about consuming obsessions, yet the only logical solution was to pursue the information to its conclusion. Settling in as assistant director, her public persona hadn’t changed, but while at home, sleep could wait.

“Where was I?”

She scooped the papers off the floor and placed them on her desk.

Her initial attempts had produced nothing useful. The major producers in the swine industry thought she was a front for ICE and refused to reveal any employee information without a court order. That wasn’t going to happen so
Jericho tried another approach.

A call to Purdue University gave her a quick education on the glories of pig breeding. Animal size…quantity of back fat…more money per pound…The selling of donor sperm before the profligate beasts were themselves ground or sliced, fried, or baked for breakfast tables made clear the reasons to categorize the hog strains.

The hog specialist was so flattered he invited her to Lafayette to attend a lecture he was preparing. She wanted to thank him by sharing the true importance of the information.

Of course, she couldn’t do that.

He would never have believed it!

Yet after her gracious regrets, the geneticist still sent her the library of swine DNA from the last two years.

Jericho had no idea what to do with it—but Glen would.

Bringing his expertise into her fixation at this point was the consummate bad idea. Such an indiscretion would definitely end his career.

“So…Glen,” she said, pretending he was sitting in her kitchen while she went for more tea. “How would
you
figure out where the DNA came from?”

Jericho knew what he’d say: “Give me even the rawest data and I will find the answer.”

The rules never varied.

She found the stereo remote. With soothing classical jazz filling the room, she hurried to her computer. As the keyboard chattered, Jericho said to the screen, “Pigs with a tendency toward fatness….”

She downloaded a file about Hampshire inheritability estimates that predicted how often a suckling would express the desired traits.

“Tag the unlabeled gene loci…”

She was humming as she munged data—gluing together whatever information there was.

“Stir in a million or so Purdue hogs…Just like making brownies!”

The network program waited for the command.

“Hit
Enter
!
”

The software made predictions based on evolving probabilities. The satellite computers applied the principle as they examined patterns in the Afghan roads, evaluating changes that could indicate the Taliban had dug a fresh hole to hide a bomb. Searching for a subgroup of pigs with the same small gene sequence was no different than studying dirt. The information obtained might be sufficient for Jericho to trace the pig’s family tree to a sperm supplier, the farm, and the breeder—who might know Ali.

That was her hope anyway.

The icon kept spinning. Her networked computer was working on it. Covered by a blanket, Jericho lay on the sofa and fell back to sleep.

The soft light of the winter morning woke her. While more tea steeped, Jericho went back to her computer, instructing it to translate the newly refined data into a more recognizable form. When she returned from showering, she’d have the answer—maybe.

With water dripping beneath her robe, the cursor flashed the results.

There were a dozen swine farms in Texas that matched pieces of the DNA. On the floor were her two pictures of Ali. She winked at both.

“I’m going to find you,” she sang sweetly.

The redhead shook her damp tresses. The day would be notable: For the first time in her career, Captain Elaine Jericho would be late for work.

Waziristan February 18, 2004

W
ith the beast’s head toward Mecca and the bound back hooves kicking him in the groin, Morgan slammed the goat to the ground, slitting its neck with one pull of his knife. To uproarious laughter he lifted the writhing carcass by its hind legs as blood poured out. When it stopped, his blade found the highest gap in the neck bones and pushed through. Cramming the head into a leather bag, he bound the opening and heaved the sack toward the cheers. Six excited horses stomped and tugged, restrained by men struggling to hold their bridles. Morgan waved to the crowd with a big smile.

It was time for polo.

He had become their butcher, amazing them with the dexterity and speed he could slaughter and field strip anything on four hooves. The sheep and goats knew they were fair game every day and scattered when his lasso appeared. Providing the much-desired buttermilk and curd, the red-colored Sahiwal cows were always spared, so were the horses that served for sport and to ferry the lookouts to and from their posts.

In a cloud of flies, Morgan filleted and diced the goat meat, tossing pieces into a huge stewpot. When he finished, he left the entrails in a pile for the vultures and carried the pot to the outdoor kitchen, placed it on the propane-fueled stove, and added root vegetables, salt, and curry.

He scratched his crotch vigorously annoying the fleas.

Morgan looked around. All the men were in the pasture watching the game. He did two-dozen squats and push-ups, rinsed his hands in a bucket of water, and reached into his pocket.

“Goodbye, bitch,” he said to the vial, throwing it into the woods. Breaking the stranglehold of heroin had taunted his will more than his run in the desert. She would never have the pleasure of his company again. Tawfik still believed otherwise, as Morgan frequently came for refills. The deception was important; the concern of being cut off had to appear very real.

For almost three months Morgan lived and trained as an al Qaeda and Taliban disciple. Each morning, after the tired and cold hilltop sentries were exchanged for fresh, prayers at sunrise would conclude with a cross-country run in the crisp dawn on empty stomachs and a dip in a mountain stream.

They would dress in fatigues and balaclavas and line up lunging with bayoneted rifles while a video camera recorded their chants of “Butcher the Jews”
and “Death to American Satan.”

Some days included assault drills and live weapons fire with an inexhaustible supply of bullets. Morgan became so familiar with the AK-47 he could fire several hundred rounds, take it apart for cleaning, and reassemble it in less that a minute.

Other days included bomb making and test detonations. Within the thirty-five-hundred-square-mile picturesque hills was an abundance of detonators with Cyrillic stamps, oxygen cylinders, TNT, acetylene canisters, grenades, and mines. Children, often one-armed amputee victims of Russian butterfly mines, would stand on the rises in the ground and cheer in excitement as the men competed for the bragging rights of hitting the remains of a truck with a rocket launched from a speeding motorcycle.

Within the nest of pit toilets, rebar-supported clay and wood cabins, explosions, and zinging bullets, the men would drop on their knees and pray next to the weapons while the hot steel barrels crackled and cooled amid the desert flowers.

From a smorgasbord of options, techniques designed to maim and kill humans were tested and refined. Imaginations ran rampant, looking for continuous improvements in mode of delivery and destructive power.

Self-detonation had never been Morgan’s desire. As much as he could, he tried to avoid participating, yet he still joined them when they took the latest designs into the forest, pacing off the distance between denuded trees after detonation. He watched the men seal coats with ball-bearings and wire the charges to batteries. The misguided paradox was impossible to imagine, yet every activity in the camp bred a similar malevolent purpose. The beheading on Morgan’s first day made that point crystal clear. Tawfik was unambiguous about what he expected of his recruits, and he would apply any means to ensure compliance.

Sequestered out of sight from their overt ambitions, Tawfik also trafficked heroin. Poppies thrived in western Afghanistan, harvested by people who ignored their pledges to substitute corn and wheat, which suffered in the dry cold and arid heat. Morgan would see men on horseback towing mules into camp, or diesel trucks would roll through the gates. Booted footsteps would compress the rock path to Tawfik’s office. Complaining that he had to urinate again, Morgan would step outside and listen to the voices and rude laughter while Tawfik’s and his trusted collaborators exchanged crates and boxes.

Week after week Morgan eavesdropped on conversations that began to divulge trace clues about a meeting. The location was never mentioned, and names were never used. Radio traffic diminished to the point of silence protecting the information from
SIGNIT
—signals intelligence gathering technology. Smaller arms and shoulder-fired rockets accumulated, all of which were tested, cleaned and placed in the cabins. Bulk food and water arrived. Stacked alongside the weapons, space inside the cabins shrank. Trucks were repaired and tires replaced.

Morgan had to get into Tawfik’s office.

Shrouded in the shadows during dinner, Morgan first saw Nadia in the distance covered with a sheer burka that shimmered in the moon’s flush. Every man saw her. Their conversations became shortened until in collective anticipation they grew quiet and hurriedly finished the evening meal.

The generator came to life to power black lights and strobes. The music accelerated to arouse their senses, and she stepped into the single spotlight. The burka slipped away to reveal an iridescent blouse and open neckline with Omar’s necklace. In skin-tight jeans, her hips began an ecstatic sway to the music that was met with a unified gasp.

As the music grew louder, her hips gyrated more, until they began thrusting forward with each exotic beat. Above her head fluorescent fingernails fluttered like leaves in a wind, until they drifted down her chest. Appearing unable to catch her breath, with her head tipped upward in ecstasy, she bent slightly at the waist and stroked the inside of her thighs repeatedly, until the pumping of her buttocks grew so intense her eyelids fluttered and her mouth opened to orgasm. Drawing from their collective arousal, she poured back their lust.

Morgan fought his intense desire to succumb to her intoxication.

Nadia glided over to Khalil and ran her fingers through his hair. Mesmerized, his gaze locked on her face as her fingers tickled his neck. Morgan knew Khalil had to be close to ejaculating, but before he could she drifted away, abandoning the young terrorist to resolve his frustration later. His hand rose to try to stop her, but she pulled out of reach.

The performance repeated with another man called Bashra, who tried to touch her chest, but his desire met a similar retraction as she left him and came to Morgan.

He admired her face. It had healed well, likely from the assistance of a plastic surgeon. She touched Omar’s necklace, then the back of her fingers combed through Morgan’s tangled hair, walked down his cheeks, and came to rest on his shoulders. They mirrored a smile. The music quieted and the lights went dark.

She moved to stand alone beneath the moon. With a carnal shudder, her open palms reached high to present her climax as an offering to the heavens, and then she sang the soulful melody he’d heard in Lahore. When it ended, she stepped into the shadows and was gone.

Whatever was about to happen, Morgan knew he was going to be part of it.