Elmore Leonard - Djibouti

Dara said, "I'll tell you how I see it if you'll get me an ashtray."

Suzanne said, "Let me have it," and walked off taking a long drag before butting the cigarette in a planter. She returned and sat down and Dara said, "The way I see it, selling guns in the desert is another way of socializing, getting along with your neighbor, the warlord. It's probably been going on at least a thousand years. Now Ethiopians come over to raise hell and the Shabaabs go around picking fights. Billy calls them 'the lads.' Billy knows the names and numbers of all the players. I won't tell you what he calls our embassies."

"Bureaucracies," Suzanne said. "Billy e-mails us from time to time. You're right, he seems to have exceptional knowledge of what's going on. He's warned us about the LNG tanker. We already have it under investigation."

"It seems too obvious," Dara said. "Terrorists discovered aboard a highly combustible tanker? One of them a well-known pyromaniac with five million on his head? But if the ship's a decoy, what's Qasim doing on it?"

"What I'm enormously curious about," Suzanne said, "is who invited the al Qaedas to the party."

"Harry," Dara said.

"Why were you trying to protect him?"

"I'm like you," Dara said, getting a girl-to-girl feeling, "I'm not a hundred percent sure about Harry. But, if he's turning in al Qaedas he deserves the reward."

"But you don't trust him."

"I think he's more Brit than Saudi."

"His mother's English, isn't she?"

"I hope I'm entirely wrong about Harry, he's a good guy and really not that much of a snob, and I'll be sorry I told you." Dara said, "But if the ship's a decoy, because it's so fucking obvious and likely to be stopped, what happens to Qasim and Jama? I mean even if they hadn't been snatched by the Gold Dust Twins."

Suzanne gave her a look but didn't interrupt.

"They'd be arrested and go to prison. I've been thinking about it," Dara said. "Why would a terrorist like Qasim, one of their heroes, agree to a phony scheme and risk going to prison? He's one of bin Laden's stars."

Suzanne said, "They didn't tell him the ship was possibly a decoy."

"Yeah, but why not? If he knew, he wouldn't have joined the crew."

"Unless he's tired of it," Suzanne said.

"A guy like that, I think he'd kill himself before he'd risk getting locked up."

"I'm not sure of that," Suzanne said.

"I've talked to enough Arabs-it seems like half my life. They'll take the virgins before prison any day," Dara said. "You know where they are now, the caravan of Toyotas?"

Suzanne touched her computer to show more satellite shots of the SUVs on the road in their own dust, evening now.

"At sundown," Suzanne said, "they were less than a hundred miles from Djibouti. A few minutes later I'm told we lost them."

"Did you find any black Toyota SUVs in Djibouti?"

"You're joking, aren't you?" Suzanne said, going to her desk. She picked up a printout of a telephone recording. "They actually called. One of them did. He asked if Rewards for Justice was still offered and I told him it was." She looked at the printout. "The caller said, 'My dear, if I cannot trust you'"-Suzanne hinting at an African speaking English-"'we will take these Qaedas into the desert and bury them.' I said, 'Come in and show us who you have.' I told him we'd already paid out thirty million in rewards."

Dara said, "That isn't much if some guys are worth twenty-five."

"You'd think they'd be breaking down the door," Suzanne said. "Try to get them to come in and rat out someone they know. It's not easy."

Dara said, "They didn't come in, did they?"

"Or phone," Suzanne said. "We put in a request to National Police, see if they can locate them. They might or might not. You never know whose side they're on. We can't nose around ourselves, search apartments in someone else's country. We do have people keeping their eyes open."

"Billy's right, you have to go by the book," Dara said. "I'll find them."

BEFORE HE WAS JAMA Raisuli or Jama al Amriki he was James Russell, pronounced Russell: picked up twice on suspicion of armed robbery and released; arrested in Miami Beach with controlled substances and sent to the Stockade to await a court date. James said to the lawyer appointed for him, "Do I look like a drug dealer to you? I'm a college student happen to have some blow on me I'm picked up, some weed for my depressed state of mind. I don't sell my medications."

The federal prosecutor asked James's lawyer, "What'd he have, a few ounces?"

The lawyer said, "A pound or so of weed. The boy has a smart mouth. I'll plead him on possession, you offer us three to five and we'll take it, skip the trial."

This was how James Russell came to Coleman FCI in the middle of inland Florida to hang with Muslims, a means of surviving in here, twenty years old doing his first fall. He told the Muslims he was a member of the Nation of Islam, having seen the movie Malcolm X and remembered how the brothers addressed one another. Have some serious Muslims around him and not get used by skinheads for their immoral purposes. Jamming a broom handle up his butt.

James caught the eye of a three-timer who talked up Allah in the Muslim part of the yard and went by the name Tariq, an African American Sunni Muslim. He said to James, "You in the Nation of what? Islam? Those people no more Islamic than the white fools call theirselves Shriners, wear a fez on their heads. The Nation say they black and play to it. All right, but me and you…are we black? We more a mellow shade of tan, like our Arab brothers the Wahhabi, spreading the word of Allah with explosive devices. You know how else we different? We don't have woolly heads. We have hair we can comb, let grow long if we want."

"I notice that," James said. "I'm looking at Islam as the way to go. But what do I get out of it?"

Tariq had to grin, showing what teeth he had. He loved this boy. He said, "You quiet, you show respect. What is it you hope to become in your life?"

"Famous," James said. "I been looking at ways."

"Become a prophet?"

"I don't tell what will happen, I do it."

"Dedicate yourself to jihad?"

"That's a way to go, yeah."

Tariq said, "Do you know what you talking about?"

"I have the gift to remember every word I read," James said. "Everything you people tell me."

"There is a verse," Tariq said, "'Oh ye who believe, fear Allah and make your utterance straightforward.'"

James said, "'He that obeys Allah and his messenger has already attained a great victory.'"

"It's 'attained the great victory.' But you close. You know the Koran?"

"I read it in the Stockade." HE KNEW THEY WERE watching him: see if he was a punk or the kind wanted his own way. He was a restless age but seemed at peace with himself. The only time he was hostile, he'd stand away from them in the yard and stare at the skinheads, James with one hand holding his package, and motion to the skins to come over and try him.

He cleaned the kitchen with one of them found stabbed to death with his own knife that said FOR NIGGERS scratched into the wood hilt.

Tariq said, "Don't the guards know you did it?"

"Me?" James said. "I don't cause commotions, I read. It's skinheads always being thrown in the hole. Musta been another skin done it." He could go back and forth from intelligence to street.

A time came Tariq said, "You don't talk much or make noise. But I see you with the one doing time for molesting boys…"

James said, "Don't worry about it."

Tariq took his time. "Listen, I ask around of my brothers, if they think you could learn to speak Arabic. I don't mean 'Can you direct me please to the Mosque,' but as we speak and swear at one another. They say no, he can't do it. They say they would always hear your American sound. Your black American sound in our words. No, he can never speak as we do."