Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Not an opportune place for a prayer break,” said the ever-practical Bilal. Here in the heart of the heart of the heart of America, buffeted by crowds of cowboys and farmers and their womenfolk and chubby children, the three slightly disheveled and not terribly clean pilgrims had stopped in search of soft ice cream, under threat of another tantrum from Dr. Faisal. The man may have been a genius but he certainly had to have his ice cream.

“He was swept away,” said Khalid. “Pfffft, like that.”

It was true. They had stood, somewhat overwhelmed by the sight of the mysterious festival with its squads of whirling neon machines, its pennants, its odd play of colors unseen in nature against the dark sky, its crowds of flesh-packed Americans innocent in their simple joy at existence. They were looking for soft ice cream. They were not looking for hot dogs, funnel cakes, frozen Snickers bars on sticks, fried dough, nuts in a sugar glaze, doughnuts, hamburgers, bratwursts, gingerbread men, taffy, fried chicken, anything edible other than soft ice cream. Then Faisal took a step to the right and was swept up by a current of onrushers, and off he went. They soon lost sight of him.

“Can you pray standing?” said Bilal.

“No,” said Khalid. “It is forbidden, plus I do not pray.”

“Not to Allah but to some other god. I don’t know, Jesus, Marx, Yahweh, Odin, something like that.”

“You know about Odin, Bilal? Very impressive. A hard young man like you?”

“I was once a student, and not a bad one. I will pray to Allah, standing, believing that in this case standing is allowed. You pray to Odin or Yoda or another one, I don’t care, just pray a little instead of making remarks.”

“Oh my,” said Khalid. “Another who has gotten tired of me. Oh well, it was bound to happen. I seem to estrange myself from everybody. It’s something annoying in my personality.”

The two stood there, slightly seedy men in baggy suits, unshaven and unkempt, looking a little too Levantine for the tastes of the local constabulary, unsure whether to move to hunt for the missing man or stay put and hope that he would find his way back.

“Do you see that clown?” asked Bilal. He pointed to a plastic giant with a red nose, red hair, and a red, white, and blue hat standing outside a tent that said, obscurely, B-I-N-G-O!

“Yes.”

“You go stand next to it. Don’t wander, don’t start conversations, don’t make eye contact, do not feel you have to reach out to the peasants we are pledged to destroy.”

“You see, I am not sure I agree with-”

“Just stand there. I will, in the meantime, go up this avenue, find Faisal, and drag him back. But do you see, if you wander off, then finding Faisal has no meaning because you have become lost. And I will end up with either one man lost or, catastrophically, two men lost. You will soon be arrested, your patently phony ID will be seen through, and the whole thing has gone nowhere, a failure after all our tribulations. Do you see? Tell me you see.”

“I see, I see, but if I may observe, it’s hardly my fault that-”

“The clown, the clown of bingo.”

“By the way, what would a bingo be?”

But Bilal had already set off.

He tried not to walk urgently, he tried to keep the fear off his face, he tried to emulate the loose-jointed walk of these Americans, he tried to blend in, to be invisible, a little man of no consequence. Mainly what he tried not to do was despise himself for his idiocy. Stopping at Dairy Queen: all right. Stopping at McDonald’s: manageable if tense. Stopping at Friendly’s: too intense, fraught with eye contact, demanding quick thinking in English and usually filled with suspicious white people who looked them over as if they were terrorists. Oh, wait, they were terrorists. Stopping at 39 or 41 or 57 Flavors? Marginally acceptable if during the daylight when not overcrowded. But stopping at the Williwaw County fair, just because it broadcast a rainbow of hues against the sky and weirdly reminded all of them, homesick and lonely and sticky and not unmindful of what lay ahead, of a mythical Baghdad from the old tales? Insane. He should be executed for so foolish a folly.

Would Faisal have ridden a Tilt-a-Whirl? It seemed unlikely. What about the Ferris wheel, more sedate for an elderly man-no sign of him there? Perhaps he’d gone into the so-called Fun House but then Bilal realized the stereotype swami in turban painted on the outside of the rickety canvas-and-plywood structure would keep him out. What about the Wild Mouse? Highly unlikely. It only battered you, and the point was to get Western girls and boys into squeezing distance under the pretext of fear. There was some vehicle roadway over which smallish replicas of cars from the 1910s rolled, but no, that was not-

He heard the whistle of a train.

He turned. It was a magnificent if miniaturized diesel, yellow, two engines pulling six cars just sliding into the lights of the “station,” and indeed, there sat Faisal, quite happily sucking down the remains of what had to have been a giant soft-ice-cream treat, in the very last car. His face was a portrait of pure animal bliss.

Bilal ran to him.

“Sir, you cannot leave like that. You gave me a heart attack!”

“What? Why, it was most enjoyable. Come on, Bilal, I have tickets left. Let’s go around again. This time I wish to ride near the engine. Look at the engineer. Now that is a job I would like to have.”

The engineer was a slouchy teen boy who sat in a cockpit in the rear of the second engine. Bilal knew him immediately: one of those scornful Western ironists, too good for his job, his head full of dreamy ambitions. Pimply and anguished, yearning for something better than the Big Little Train.

“No, no, we have a schedule. We must get back.”

And so Bilal dragged Dr. Faisal back through the crowds, on some kind of beeline, knowing exactly where the clown was. After all, he had navigated by starlight the forbidden zone between Jordan and Israel, dodging the lights and the radar of the Israeli border patrols, many times. What was the Williwaw County fair to that ordeal?

But when they got to the clown: no Professor Khalid.

“Agh,” said Bilal. “You two, you will be the death of me. I told him-”

“Bilal!” came the cry. “Faisal!”

It was Khalid. He held a large golden pig with bright felt eyes and two happy fabric teeth sticking out from his open snout.

“I won a bingo! I won a bingo!”

TASK FORCE ZARZI WORKING ROOM

FOURTH FLOOR

HOOVER BUILDING

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1300 HOURS

It’s a conceptual problem,” Nick said. He and Susan and Swagger sat in his glassed-in office, while outside the two dozen agents pretended not to notice, even if these meetings usually produced policy shifts.

“We see this as a conspiracy. We want the big guys. We want action, attention, success. Sorry, that’s the truth. Ms. Okada, Agency loyalist though you are, if you bring down ‘Afghan Desk’ and send somebody to prison for overstepping his authority and prevent the Agency from some major public humiliation, you’re golden.”

“I suppose I don’t deny it.”

“I want it too. It’s my job, but if I can take down a major government illegality and put the Bureau ahead of the curve instead of behind it, I win too. And if we beat those press assholes to the punch, we prevent a major investigative Pulitzer from going to some mutt from the New York Times, that’s only gravy. And what does Bob Lee Swagger get? He gets the satisfaction of being right, he gets the thrill of bringing in a marine sniper from the cold and seeing him recognized as a hero. That means more to him than our careers mean to us. So each of us, in his own way, has been seduced by pride, ambition, and greed.”