That final night they ate a simple meal, grilled lamb and diced cucumber and tomato. They prayed together. Mohammed fell asleep in front of the television. He was dreaming of World of Warcraft when a heavy hand shook him awake. Bin Zari, holding a pistol.
“Can you use this?”
Mohammed nodded. At the madrassa, he’d learned the basics of handling pistols. Bin Zari shoved the gun into Mohammed’s hand.
“They’re coming,” bin Zari said.
“Who?”
Bin Zari slapped Mohammed’s face. “Stupid. The police. And the Americans.” He ran out, and Mohammed heard his heavy steps headed to the roof. Mohammed peeked outside the window and saw a Nissan and a van rolling into the front yard. Men jumped out of the van and ran for the house. Then the shooting started.
He hardly remembered what happened next. Somehow, he got to the big room at the back of the house. But it was filled with fog that burned Mohammed’s eyes and nose and mouth. He tried not to breathe, but he couldn’t help himself.
He hid under a crate and put his T-shirt over his mouth and waited. An American, a black one wearing a strange black mask, came in. Mohammed lifted the pistol and pulled the trigger. He could hardly see, but he knew he’d hit the black man, because the man fell down. The floor shook when he hit it. Then another man in a mask came in. Mohammed fired the rest of his bullets, but by then he was so blind he could have been two meters away and he would have missed. He threw the pistol away and raised his hands and stood.
The Americans took him and put a hood over his head and gave him to the Pakistani police. He knew they were Pakistani because they smelled like his dad and they yelled at him in Pashto. They put him in a truck and told him he was stupid, a stupid jihadi, and that he’d killed an American and that he was going to a very bad place. And then they hit him. They hit him in the arms and the legs and the stomach with sticks. Two of his ribs came loose and wagged in his belly. He asked them to take the hood off, but they laughed, and with the laughing he was back in the alley with the Jaish, not remembering it but actually back in the alley. Only this time he was wearing a hood.
Later, the truck stopped. They took him out and took the hood off him. They were at an airport, planes all around and a sweet smell. Mohammed had never seen an airplane up close. They were bigger than he imagined, and not as smooth, metal bits sticking from the wings. Bin Zari was there, too. The police took off his clothes and put the hood back on. And then someone stuck him with a needle. The poison ran through his body and into his head and got stuck there. Then they put him on an airplane. Even with his hood on, he could tell when the plane took off.
He wanted to sleep, but he couldn’t, and if he closed his eyes he couldn’t move at all, like he was inside a box, only the box was made of his own skin. And the scars on his legs itched and itched, but he couldn’t touch them because his hands were locked together and it was all happening at once and when he opened his eyes he couldn’t see and—
But when he banged his head against the floor, he felt better. So, he banged his head. Finally, the men took off the hood. Bin Zari was next to him in the plane, and he told Mohammed to calm down, that the Americans had them now and they needed to be strong, be soldiers for Allah. The poison would wear off eventually, he said. Mohammed didn’t trust bin Zari anymore, but he bit his lip and held himself steady until the plane landed.
THE DAY AFTER HE ARRIVED, they wrapped his ribs up with cloth. Since then they’d mostly left him alone. They were supposed to be human. They looked like people. Two were black, and the rest were white. One was a woman, and the rest were men. One of them, the one who said his name was Jim, could talk to him in Pashto. The others talked only in English or other languages he didn’t understand.
But they all had something in common. They held themselves straight when they walked. Too straight.
In the night now, the djinns came for him and told him that real people didn’t walk so straight. These men, the captors, weren’t human at all. They were devils, and he was in hell. Mohammed argued with the djinns. He told them he wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead, because he was supposed to die when the belt around him blew up, and the Americans had caught him before he could put on the belt. He told them he knew what dead people looked like. In Peshawar, people died all the time. Mohammed had seen plenty of them. He told them that the Americans were people. They hadn’t hurt him since he’d been here. They fed him. They gave him a blanket and the Quran to read.
Sometimes Mohammed could convince the djinns to stay away for a day or two. Then he could eat his food and look around and wonder about Haji Camp, if his friends still played World of Warcraft or if they had a new game. He could almost believe that he might get out.
But the djinns came back. Always. At first they spoke quietly, calmly, and they came only in the night, when he was trying to sleep. But now they stayed all day. They didn’t leave when he asked. They told him that if he wouldn’t listen, they would put the hood back on and make him drink the poison, nothing but poison, and leave him here forever. He would never die, because he was dead already, never escape this place.
LUCKY FOR HIM, the djinns promised a way out.
18
Wells heard Tonka’s barking even before he opened the door of Shafer’s house. When he walked in, she put her paws to his chest and licked his unshaven chin joyously.
“Yes. It’s good to see you, too.”
“You inspire loyalty in one creature, at least,” Shafer said from the top of the stairs. His ripped cotton undershirt and plain white briefs somehow managed to be both baggy and revealing. “I’d ask how your flight was, but I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, it’s totally binary. You land, it was fine.”
“You know what I like about you, Ellis? You make such great small talk.”
“We have that in common.” Shafer stepped down the stairs, headed for the kitchen. “Come. I need some coffee, and you need to tell me about Steve Callar.”
“I’d really prefer you put some pants on.”
“My house, my rules.”
OVER COFFEE, Wells recounted his conversation with Callar, the darkness inside the house and the man.
“He’s crazy enough to be the killer. If only we could find the tele-porter he used to get back from Phoenix.”
“And the FBI checked the airline records to see if he flew to D.C. when Karp was killed or Louisiana when Jerry Williams disappeared. They didn’t see anything.”
“Don’t they need a warrant for that?”
“Where have you been? It’s a matter of national security. So they send out NSLs”—national security letters—“asking the airlines for help. It’s not a demand, it’s a request.”
“But nobody says no.”
“Not in our brave new world.”
“When did you turn into a libertarian, Ellis?”
“I just want to be able to get on a plane without being felt up.”
“At your age you ought to be happy about it.”
“Anyway, the FBI didn’t find Callar’s name in the records.”
“Maybe he drove.”
“Maybe. Meantime, we have nothing on him. Or anyone else.”
“Have the Feds talked to Terreri and Hank Poteat?” The other two surviving members of 673.
“They’re trying to send a team to Afghanistan to interview Terreri, but the army isn’t cooperating. Says he’s planning an op and can’t be interrupted, even for this. They have talked to Poteat in Korea, but he didn’t give them much. Like Murphy told us, he wasn’t in Poland long. They’d barely started the interrogations when he left.”