Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Yes, sir,” said Bob, knowing that first he had to get his car washed.

SUITE 500

M STREET NW

WASHINGTON, DC

1207 HOURS

You are so beautiful,” Zarzi said. “Your eyes, black diamonds. Your skin, the touch of satin. Your limbs, smooth and graceful as poems. Your throat a golden vase of supple nuances. But it is your mind that is remarkable, more remarkable than your beauty. It sees, it penetrates, it isolates the actual, it understands the play of history and tradition. It is the most extraordinary of your many, many gifts.”

He put his hand on her shoulder.

“Sorry, sir,” said Susan Okada, “but just out of curiosity, does that stuff ever really work?”

“You’d be surprised,” he said. “I could make you a queen.”

“Queen of Afghanistan!” she snorted. “Please, are you trying to be funny?”

“I will make you queen of Washington. I will make you queen of Bloomingdale’s.”

“Hmm. What about Saks?”

“Well, I-”

“No, not even for Saks. And anyway, you’re lying. You lie most sincerely. You’re at your best when you lie. But we both know you wouldn’t make me queen of anything. And we both know I don’t want to be a queen. I’m already a princess, why would I want all the responsibility?”

“Such wit. But you think yourself too good for me.”

“I think no such thing, sir. Thinking doesn’t enter into it. I know I am too good for you. It’s simple fact.”

The watch faces on the winders undulated all about her. Was this his seduction technique? Maybe it worked with idiots, but it just made Susan slightly nauseous and she’d arrived knowing the bastard would probably throw some moves on her. It was his nature. Ugh, he was handsome and charismatic in an extraordinarily uninteresting way. Yes, the technical aspects were all in place, but he seemed to lack a coherent center to bring it all together.

“So, I assume we’re finished with the Cary Grant-Doris Day aspects of the interview and now, if I may continue?”

“Certainly.”

“Around five P.M. that day, a hotel across from your compound explodes.”

“Most ferociously.”

“I have been tasked by the Agency to look into it. We are concerned that it represented an attempt on your life by Taliban members or even Al-Qaeda.”

“No, no,” said Zarzi. “The brotherhood would not have missed. If they decide I must die, then I will die. I happily sacrifice myself for the good of my country. I yearn for martyrdom not to get to paradise but to inspire our young to stand against the forces of evil arrayed against us. Why would I want to go to paradise? I am already in paradise.”

“Well, if being surrounded by watches is your idea of paradise.”

“And the flesh of beauties. You turn me down, that is the right of a Western woman, but I must say, not many do. I have, what do you call it, oh yes, according to Page Six, that ‘Omar Sharif-Dr. Zhivago vibe’ going. And I think a young man from the New York Times fell in love with me some days ago. Such a puppy. Why, he even fainted. We had to call a doctor.”

“Journalists,” she said. “Attention sluts, all of them.”

“You know, young lady, to return to the subject of the explosion, there is much narcotics trafficking in that area. I believe that the explosion was related to narcotics trafficking. The money in that business is capable of corrupting even the holiest of imams.”

She knew of course that he had banked about $90 million in a Swiss bank from his control of certain vast poppy field holdings, but she ignored the subject and veered off in another direction.

“It has been reported that the explosion was instrumental in your decision to envision an American future for your country, ‘our two nations entwined and facing a bright future ahead.’”

“I believe I did say that, yes. Another lie, of course. I cannot help myself, the West is so eager for another thousand or so Arabian Nights. And, as you say, I am at my best when I lie. See, that is another remarkable thing about you, your perception. So precise, so in depth.”

“Possibly we should not focus on the ethical, the psychological, the political, but merely the practical. What sort of blast was it?”

“A blast like any other blast. Ka-boom! -that is all. Rather big, I suppose. Bigger than normal, if explosions can be called normal. Rubbish and body parts rained into my courtyard for days afterward. A head dropped in on the Tuesday following. Most astonishing.”

“Heads falling from the sky are only amusing when they belong to other people.”

“My head will stay where it is until Allah calls it to be placed at his right hand,” he said, too merrily.

“If I thought you actually believed that, I’d be horrified.”

“I do sometimes exaggerate. It is my way. I’m of the impression your legs may be the most extraordinary thing about your body. They appear to be quite long for an Asian woman. Yet you hide them in pants. You should enjoy the Western freedom and wear short, tight skirts and very high heels, black leather, I think, and I am undecided as to stockings, black of course but still rather sheer, or bare, with the shine of the skin so…”

It went on, until finally she acknowledged that Ibrahim Zarzi was immune to blandishment, refusal, shame, threat, or pressure. He was a self-sealed system, utterly impenetrable by the West, hiding efficiently behind an armor of superciliousness and clichés copped from bad thirties movies. She ended the interview, endured a rather long, warm handshake, almost a sexual act in itself, gathered her stuff, and exited as graciously as possible with the vague promise of having a drink with him sometime, and knew what had to happen next. This is what she’d been playing for. She looked around, saw some Afghan Desk handlers, a few cops, and had started to think Oh, shit when a presence rushed through the door, slightly frazzled, slightly flushed, no less than Jared Dixson, assistant to the Afghan Desk. It was the only time in her life she’d ever been happy to see Jared Dixson.

“Hello, hello, hello,” he said.

“Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye,” she said.

“Susan, please, it has to be fate that I ran into you.”

“Does it? I bet when you found out I was here, you blasted off from Langley and made it in twenty minutes.”

“Susan, you overrate my love for you. I didn’t have a police escort, I drove myself. It was a full thirty-two-minute ordeal, and I only ran six reds. Look, nothing is going to happen here. He’ll sit in there among his watches and think of new lies to tell and which reporters to tell them to. That’s his job, after all, and he’s damn good at it. Let’s have lunch. I want to hear the latest manhunt news and I have some very funny stories about Jack Collins’s real war, which isn’t against international terrorism but against international Jared Dixsonism.”

“No let’s-have-an-affair bullshit. The answer on that front now and forever will be no. I don’t feel like going over it again.”

“Got it. I’ll prove to you I can play by your petty, bourgeois rules.”

“And no martinis either. Two and you’re sticking your tongue in my ear. That’s so attractive.”

“Sure, we’ll just go downstairs, talk shop, drink Pellegrino, and eat those little shrimpy things they have here that are so good.”

“If you touch my hand, I’ll stab it with a shrimp fork.”

“You’re so damned good at playing hard to get!”

95 NORTH TO BALTIMORE

1330 HOURS

Green country hurled by outside. Swagger drove, passed a town called Laurel where somebody had once tried to kill a presidential candidate, and closed the distance to Baltimore. In his pocket was an envelope. It had been delivered to the hotel suite that was his living quarters in Rosslyn that morning. He’d opened it to find nothing but an ad ripped out of a newspaper that read “Best Car Wash in Baltimore/Brushless Wash/Professional Detailing and Waxing/Howard Street Car Wash at 25th/Rain Check If the Weather Is Bad Next Day.”