“Didn’t you see the sign?” Ruiz asked. “It said ‘Come in if you are bleeding or if the place is burning down. Otherwise G-T-F-O.’”
“Laws is ass-deep in Chinese, trying to figure out what the SPG analysts couldn’t,” Holmes said. “If there’s an answer to be had, he’ll find it. Best we just stay out of his way.” They ate in silence for a while.
Holmes finished first and stuffed his plate into a plastic bag. “Yaya, what do you think about all this?”
“Great food. Do you do this after every run?” he asked.
“Not that, the team.”
“Ah, that. I kind of dug the homunculus. Little fuckers were easy to kill once you got a hold of them, but they’re ferociously strong.”
Holmes nodded. “The Triads like using them as servants for all sorts of things. They’re good at stealing things, but even better at sweeping and cleaning the floors.”
“Supernatural janitors,” Walker said, laughing around a piece of cantaloupe. “Just crazy.”
“You seem to be taking all of this in stride,” Ruiz said to Yaya.
“Supernatural has always been a heavy part of Islam,” Yaya said. “Not that we ever saw anything, but it was always understood that it could exist. Djinns have been around since time immemorial. I’m just sad I wasn’t able to help you with that one.”
Holmes shook his head. “You mean the mission from 2007? I see you’ve been reading the mission log. That wasn’t a true Djinn. An oil executive was possessed by one that had become attached to a knife he’d been given by some Bedouins.”
“You gave credit to SEAL Team 6 for that one.”
Holmes shrugged at Yaya’s comment. “We had to. We don’t exist.”
“And the other SEALs? What do I tell them when they ask me?”
“It’s a SAP, plain and simple.”
“Plain and simple?” Yaya drank his beer and shook his head. Doubt showed in his eyes.
“What about you?” Ruiz asked. “Did you know about us before you were asked to join?”
Yaya considered a moment. “I knew there was something going on. I knew there was no pest control service. I also knew that Holmes was involved in a SAP.”
“And you never asked?” Ruiz raised an eyebrow.
“I never asked. Okay, I see your point.”
“What about family?” Walker asked.
“What about them?”
“I mean do you have one?”
“A family?” Yaya laughed. “Sure, doesn’t everyone?”
Ruiz and Holmes glanced at Walker. The look wasn’t missed by Yaya. “What? Did I say something wrong?”
“They’re worried about me,” Walker said. “I don’t really have any family.”
Yaya’s eyes widened.
“Long story,” Walker continued. “I was asking you about your family.”
“I have the usual—I mean, a mother, father, two sisters. They live in Philly. My father’s a doctor there.”
“What about a wife?” Walker asked.
“I had one of those. She didn’t work out.”
“Isn’t that always the case?”
“Wasn’t like that. She didn’t care how much I deployed. She just wanted me to be more devout.”
“How devout did she want you to be?” Walker asked.
Yaya held up the half-empty beer bottle. “None of this, for sure.” Seeing their expressions, he shrugged and added, “Listen, there’s devout and then there’s crazy. My father raised us as American Muslims.”
Walker crinkled his eyebrows. He’d never heard the phrase.
“Think of me as a Methodist Muslim,” Yaya said. He downed his beer, tossed it into the trash, and grabbed a new one. He twisted the top off and leaned back to rest against the picnic table so he could stare at the ocean.
“Okay. Now you have me interested. What the heck is a Methodist Muslim?” Holmes asked.
“Someone who believes in Allah and the Pillars of Islam. I pray. I fast. I give. I travel to the holy places. I believe that Allah is the one God. All the rest,” he said, waving his beer absently to the universe, “is fashion.”
Ruiz snorted. “What? You mean the burkas?”
Yaya nodded and got to his feet. “Absolutely. Ever look at the robes worn by a Catholic priest and an Aram mullah? Same damn thing except one is made from satin and the other from wool. It’s all a circus after the word of Allah. A Pee-Wee Herman doodle time for the fashionistas to get us involved in pomp and circumstance of worshipping the right god the right way.”
41
Pain lanced through Laws’s brain from the sheer amount of concentration he’d exerted over the last twenty hours. Operating on energy drinks, espresso, and a secret stash of Jolt Cola, he was as wired as any meth addict. Still, he’d made progress. At first he hadn’t seen it. There’d been so much data, he’d felt like the first IBM computer getting stuffed with the grammar rules of the Chinese language. Because it was about grammar. It was about grammar and the differences between characters as they appear in modern standard and the more ancient usages.
He’d started out by plastering every available surface with pages upon pages of Chinese characters. He’d walked back and forth, staring at them, looking for a pattern, reading here and there. Some of the documents were technical schematics of different pieces of ship’s equipment. Once he discovered these, he ripped them free and threw them into a corner, only to replace them with new pages. He repeated this over and over until the entire floor and underside of the conference table was a graveyard of ship’s schematics and maintenance logs.
This allowed him to concentrate on the remainder. One thing he couldn’t do was read them. His ability to speak so far outweighed his ability to read that it might as well have been two different languages—which it was. It was no joke that the average high-school graduate in China couldn’t read the newspaper. This wasn’t an indictment of the education system. Chinese kids and young adults were smart and driven. No, this was an indictment of a language that after three thousand years of use had failed to create that single essential element that allowed the progress of communication: the alphabet.
Of course, he realized that their lack of an alphabet probably had little to do with their ability to create one. If the Chinese had wanted to create an alphabet, they could have created a dozen. But that wouldn’t satisfy their needs. Chinese leaders had always been sensitive to the need to control one of the largest populations on the planet. Informing the populace would have kept the leadership at a continual disadvantage. By controlling the way their written language was represented, they’d been able to maintain a vise grip on the flow of information for thirty centuries.
None of this had anything to do with the problem at hand, but railing against the ineptness of Chinese characters kept him from going insane as he paced the conference room, ate anchovy pizza, guzzled caffeinated beverages, and tried desperately to see what kept eluding him.
Around midnight he changed tactics. Realizing he couldn’t read everything and he wasn’t succeeding in finding any relevant patterns, he began to search for characters applicable to the mission at hand.
He began flipping through his radical dictionary, which contained more than ninety thousand characters, expressed by the numeration of the strokes on the left-hand side of the character.
First he looked for “tattoo.” This required the use of two characters, wen shen. The first character, wen, meant “to write,” and had to do with language and literacy and contained four strokes. The second character, shen, meant “body” or “life,” and had eight strokes.