Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Do you not think,” said Dr. Faisal, “that the boys of Palestine feel a pee drop or two dampen their trousers before they detonate? Yet they detonate, nevertheless.”

“No,” said Professor Khalid. “They are too insane. They feel nothing. Besides, their penises are probably engorged at the prospects of sexual activity in the next world, just seconds away. No pee could pass. Their dicks are hard, their pants are dry, and ka-boom, imagine the surprise when the next world turns out to be a blind walk through eternal blackness, if even that. No breasts, no cunts, no oral enticement of the members, nothing.”

“ He cannot say that !” screamed Dr. Faisal. “Apostate! Infidel! He must be beheaded, as the text states clearly! He cannot say such things!”

“Dr. Faisal, if I behead him, then the whole point of the trip is destroyed. You will not have your martyrdom, you will not have your many women.”

“He does not believe in the women thing,” said Professor Khalid. “He cannot let himself state it as such, but in his mind, he does not believe in anything any more than I do. He clings to his faith as a prop to get him through this last ordeal.”

“Is that Disneyland?” said Dr. Faisal suddenly.

“No,” said Bilal, “that is not Disneyland.”

“I would like to see Disneyland,” said Dr. Faisal.

“That is Las Vegas,” said Professor Khalid. “You can be forgiven for mixing up the two. It’s all the same America. Pleasure domes, games, stupid distractions, and the pursuit of ecstasy. No rigor or discipline anywhere. Spiritual torpor. Meanwhile, in his faith, it’s all memorizing bad poetry written seventeen hundred years ago by a psychotic charismatic high on drugs. That is what he thinks is revealed truth.”

“Tell the apostate,” said Dr. Faisal, “that his musings are pornographic. He denies the true faith and his afterlife will be a forever of torment and pain in flames on a spit. He should check 72:23 for a sense of what lies ahead.”

“Who would prepare such a dry, tough dish?” asked Khalid.

WOODLAWN

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1135 HOURS

THE NEXT MORNING

The press conference had not gone well. The pressies seemed enraged that the man the Administration was touting as the Answer to the decade-long war in Afghanistan had almost been shot to death on a Baltimore street. Who was at fault? When it turned out to be the infamous Nick Memphis, who at one controversial point in his career had seemed to utterly foul up the investigation of the death of Joan Flanders and three other martyred sixties peace demonstrators, their anger only grew. Not even Susan Okada, who represented the CIA in this issue and was, incidentally, quite beautiful, could mollify the snide hostility in the questions, even as she expressed thanks from the Agency for the superb job the Bureau had done in protecting the principal. Even the Secret Service rep’s insistence that it was one FBI agent who had foiled the hit did little to quell the emotion. “The system worked,” he maintained. Tough sell. And when the only real news that could be announced was the bland insistence that “we have some suspects and some leads, but this appears to be a very tricky, dedicated individual,” it only pissed them off further.

By contrast, the press conference that Ibrahim Zarzi held in Washington the same day was some kind of lovefest. Declared a hero by the Administration for his refusal to yield to a murder attempt against his personage, he was magnificent: generous, brave, noble, handsome, sexy, cosmopolitan. He specifically singled out the nameless agent who had foiled the attempt, wishing that this brave man would come to visit him in Kabul and see the hospitality of the Afghan people. He expressed his admiration for both the FBI and the CIA for their dedication to his safety. He said he feared nothing, as Allah had given him a destiny and he would fulfill it or die trying. What was death? When so many of the brave have died, what was death? Yes, he agreed that it was indeed ironic that once he had been called “the Beheader” and now his survival was the key point of statecraft of the United States. He promised more for our two great countries, a future of peace and prosperity and so forth. He really laid it on. They really ate it up.

“Not that it matters,” Nick told his inner circle a short while later, “but if we don’t get this guy, I am so gone it’ll make your noses bleed. I will be lucky to end up in Alaska investigating the Fairbanks garbage scandal. But enough about me.”

The overnight reports contained no breakthroughs. The only new piece of information was trashman Larry Powers’s description of the rifle he’d briefly seen in the cab of the truck, a very short bolt-action rifle with a thick barrel and a thick scope.

Bob was asked at the meeting for his opinion on the weapon.

“I’m betting it was a sort of Remington bolt-action rifle, short action, maybe in.308 or even.243 or.22-250. So I’d advise the people in South Carolina to try to find records for a transfer of that rifle in that caliber to Colonel Chambers’s shop. I’m guessing he did the work, or his smith. I’m also thinking a new barrel with an integral suppressor rather than the ‘can’ type that screws on, again for the shorter size. I see a gun that’s mostly suppressor and action, without a lot of barrel or stock. He carries it looped to his body at the shoulder, under a coat. He just reaches in, pivots it upward and it’s already set against his shoulder by the loop, goes to scope, maybe a red dot because, remember, he said it was ‘thick.’ Then he fires, slides it back under his coat, and wanders down the street. You’d never know he had it.”

“Is that legal?” asked someone, and there was laughter because some thought it was a joke, but Bob answered it anyway.

“You’d have to get ATF to clarify, but I’d say no on two counts. The suppressor is classed as a Title III item, like an automatic weapon, meaning it has to go through the legal hoops for private ownership. Did Chambers’s outfit have the legal classification to manufacture and sell such a thing? As for the rifle itself, if it’s less than eighteen inches in barrel length, it cannot have a shoulder stock.”

“Why don’t we turn the whole thing over to ATF,” somebody said, again to laughter that was simply to express the fact that the agents had very little to go on: their own law-enforcement-only distributed picture of the suspect, his habits, his background, and very little else. It looked as if the only chance for an arrest would come if he made another attempt.

“He won’t,” Bob told Nick a few minutes later in Nick’s temporary Baltimore office. Susan was there too, in the usual pantsuit, her hair unusually mussed, and of course the more it got mussed the more Swagger got mussed. She was long, tall, thin, mostly leg, with high cheekbones and some kind of mean intelligence behind her bright eyes that would always keep you from confusing her with your mama. Thirty-eight, going on twenty-five, face smooth, wise, serene, perfectly colored in nuances of lavender and off-pink, like some kind of ancient vase behind glass. She knocked him out every goddamned time.

“How do you know?” she said.

Maybe he said it because it was his job; maybe he said it just to see a flair of response in those dark eyes.

“Well,” Bob said, “because he told me so last night.”

SUITE 500

M STREET NW

WASHINGTON, DC

1300 HOURS

I’d like to follow up, sir, on the irony theme if I may,” asked David Banjax of the New York Times, recently exiled from the Newark Bureau and on a very short leash back in the Washington office, trusted only for a one-on-one setup by State Department flacks. “Do you consider it ironic to visit this city, with its monuments, its marble vistas, its statuary, as the center of a state visit in light of the fact that at one time you were sworn to destroy it?”