After the Rain pb-5 Read online

  “Now what?” Hollywood asked.

  “Time to adapt and improvise,” Nina said. “He wants to go to the john, right?”

  “Say again?”

  “Clear that room of any civilians.” She nodded down the hall.

  “Ah, that’s the women’s can,” Hollywood said.

  “If you please,” Nina said, jockeying Rashid forward.

  Hollywood went down the hall, rapped on the door, and sang out. “Man needs to come in-duck and cover.” Then he entered the bathroom and emerged ten seconds later. “Empty, it’s all yours.”

  Nina nodded and turned to Bugs. “Duct tape. In my go-bag.”

  Bugs knelt to an equipment bag, removed a roll of tape, got up, and tucked it under Nina’s arm. Hollywood gallantly opened the bathroom door.

  “Now Rashid and I would like some privacy,” Nina said.

  “No problem,” Bugs said as he and Hollywood took up positions on either side of the door.

  Nina and Rashid careened through the door, bounced off a wall and into the row of sinks. Rashid started to fight back. He swung his elbows and shoulders and lashed out with his feet. The roll of tape went flying into a sink. But there was more desperation than training in his attempt, and Nina easily spun him, dropped her shoulder, set her stance, and drove a short, vicious right fist into his soft middle. As he sagged, gasping for breath, she maneuvered him into an open toilet stall.

  Before he got his breath back, she had seated him on the toilet, retrieved the tape, and spiderwebbed his cuffed hands to the plumbing fixture with the gummy tape. More tape looped his ankles.

  “Great stuff, duct tape,” she said, stepping back.

  He glared at her; pure, hot desert hate. Hollywood would have admired the way she met his glare, hate for hate.

  Nine spoke fast. “Listen, you. I won’t give the lecture about all the creepy shit you keep under that rock you crawled out from: the stonings, the honor killings, the clitoridectomies…Let’s just say what we got here, between you and me, goes way back. But at least you’re up front about it.” She narrowed her eyes. “Fact is, what bothers me is how many of our own guys have you inside them wanting to come out. First day I was in the Army, at the reception station they kept us girls separate. We woke up and there was this graffiti spray-painted on the barracks wall that said: ‘Never trust an animal that bleeds five days a month and doesn’t die.’ ”

  She leaned forward and tapped a rectangular plastic dispenser bolted to the wall that featured a drawing of a smiling nurse and a blue cross.

  “Doesn’t it make you a little nervous, being in America with all the unclean women out and about, just walking around during a certain time of month? Touching money. Preparing food.” Nina ran her finger across the raised type on the dispenser.

  PERSONAL HYGIENE AND CLEANLINESS SANIBAG

  For Sanitary Napkin Disposal

  PLEASE DISCARD IN WASHROOM CONTAINER

  Nina carefully studied his reaction. She’d judged him correctly. The wobble of pathological aversion had bumped the fatalistic desert trance from his brown eyes. She reached into the dispenser and pulled out a slender white paper bag on which a line drawing of a red vanity mirror framed the red type: For Disposal of Feminine Products. There was also a decorative red butterfly and a little red basket of flowers.

  “Definitely unclean stuff going on by Wahhabi standards, I’d say.” Nina let the slim bag flutter from her fingers and fall into his lap. “This one’s empty.”

  She spun, walked to the step can in the corner, by the sinks, removed the cover, and hurled the plastic container across the room so a scatter of the crumbled sanitary bags spilled into the stall at Rashid’s feet.

  He hissed something in Arabic and drew back as she knelt, rummaged in the trash, and found a red-and-white bag containing a cylindrical tampon. “Nah.” She discarded it and plucked up another bag crammed with a thick overnight pad with wings.

  “This is more like it,” she said.

  She held it up so he could get a good look. There was a loud rip as she tore a broad strip of tape from the roll. Deftly, she taped the bag that contained the discarded pad to Rashid’s thrashing chest.

  Then Nina turned and walked from the washroom, kept going past Hollywood and Bugs, proceeded down the hall and out the back door to the parking lot. Before the door closed behind her she could hear Rashid bellowing in English:

  “I WANT TO SPEAK TO A MAN. I WANT TO SPEAK TO A MAN!”

  Nina opened the door to the brown Chevy van, removed a pack of American Spirit filter cigarettes from the dashboard, picked up a BIC lighter off the seat, and lit the cigarette. She grimaced. This thing had put her back on the smokes.

  She took a deep drag and let her eyes trail over the strip-mall clutter, west, toward Ann Arbor. She’d left her daughter, Kit, there with her aunt. Events happened so fast. Ten days ago Kit had been in second grade, in Lucca, Italy. Now they were a long way from Nina’s last duty station on the Tuscan plain.

  Then Northern Route got the green light. Since they were headed for the upper Midwest, Nina brought her daughter, thinking to drop her off…

  Nina looked at the cigarette smoldering in her fingers. Seven-year-old Kit would give her hell if she smelled tobacco smoke on her. Nina paced and smoked and waited. She field-stripped the remains of her cigarette and lit another one. She felt a vibration in the heat and saw clouds coiling in the western sky. She’d rigorously disciplined her mind not to let her personal life intrude on her work. But they were flying by the seat of their pants on this one. She’d have to pack Kit off to her father in Minnesota. Fast. And that would be a can of worms…

  Her thought was interrupted by Hollywood’s triumphant howl as he jogged out the back door, stopped, grinned, and jerked his thumb back toward the doorway. “That lad has been seriously mind-fucked. Honor is due. You improvise well.” Hollywood inclined his head and flourished his hand in an elegant old-fashioned bow.

  “What can I say. Some Wahhabi extremists tend to be phobic about us girls and our plumbing. So I took a flyer,” Nina said.

  “Some flyer,” Hollywood said. “He spilled his guts. Not bad, for under thirty minutes. I take back anything I ever said about split-tails not belonging in this outfit.”

  “Right. So?”

  “It’s a compartmentalized operation, so he doesn’t know the target or the timing. But he bragged it’s not just any bomb…”

  “You mean?” Nina came up slightly on the balls of her feet.

  “I mean we might have hit the big one,” Hollywood said. He was not a man given to being sentimental. But his voice shook.

  “Nuclear,” Nina said, letting the suddenly frivolous cigarette drop from her fingers and grinding it under her heel. There are different levels of adrenaline boost: there’s the surge of competition; there’s getting shot at and shooting back. But now she felt a solid jolt of very major high-end juice. A whole different order of magnitude.

  “They got one, here?” The idea dried up all her spit.

  Hollywood paused, licked his sweaty lips. “When we took off the cuffs, he said, ‘Hiroshima,’ and did, like…” Hollywood made the sign of a mushroom cloud in the air with his hands. “And he said it’s already in the mix. I get the impression he’s giving it up because he thinks it’s too late for us to stop it.”

  They locked eyes. Nina could feel her pulse throb in a vein in her throat. “Sporty,” she said.

  Not usually this dry, my voice…

  “He gave us the name of a smuggler,” Hollywood said, going past her, opening the side door to the van, coming out with an AAA road atlas of the United States.

  “No fooling. We got a name,” Nina said, leaning forward.

  “Damn straight. And a location: Langdon, North Dakota.”

  “Jesus? That’s…”

  Hollywood thumbed through the atlas, held it up. “Canadian border. Wheatfields. Doesn’t get more wide open. And, Nina, they’re getting sneaky on us; it ain’t an Arab. I mean�
��he’s not a Middle Eastern type. Some of the new security must be working, because it sounds like they contracted the job out. It’s one of us. An American.”

  Nina bit her lip, thinking. “Once Rashid talks to the suits…”

  Hollywood nodded and held up his cell phone. “Yeah, we’ll lose the jump. I had to phone it in. They’re skeptical. Some desk-bound commando actually told me that interrogation was a bit over our pay grade. So fuck ’em. I say we just go with it.”

  Nina narrowed her eyes. “On our own?”

  “Absolutely. We can’t leave it to the headquarters pogues, not after what happened on 9/11…”

  Their eyes locked, more intimate than illicit lovers: WE CAN DO THIS THING.

  Hollywood said, “They put us way out on our own. So why not run with it. What do you say?”

  Nina clicked her teeth, grinned. “Just grab our go-bags and hit it. Get out ahead of this thing. What’s the name?”

  “Shuster.”

  “We dump Rashid with the advance party. Go in hot and hard,” Nina said flatly.

  “There it is. Just you, me, Bugs, and Jane. And the Hardy Boys for backup. Question is, how?”

  “We’ll think of something,” Nina said.

  Chapter Two

  He sat in his car, a silly smile on his face because he was staring at a wrecked phone booth. The door was off. The side panels splintered. Weeds grew in the cracked concrete floor. A phone booth in the middle of nowhere. But it still worked. And there he was, on the empty prairie waiting for an Arab terrorist to call.

  In just a few months his life had turned into a movie. It happened like this: these Arabs were sneaking some explosives across the border, and, by accident, he had stumbled onto their smuggling operation.

  At first they were going to kill him. Just step on him, like a bug. On his knees-staring up into the barrel of a pistol-he talked fast to save his life. What had been a private fantasy became his salvation. His would-be killer had listened, then he’d lowered the pistol. He’d invited him to sit down, drink some coffee, talk some more.

  He showed them how he could provide access for an attack that would be deadlier than 9/11. And how it couldn’t be done without him. But he wanted something in return. To prove their sincerity, he demanded they help him settle one old score. It was the beginning of the plan.

  It wasn’t just the million dollars they were going to pay him. Now that his potential had been revealed, he wanted a new identity. A new life.

  Soon, maybe tomorrow, he would leave this desolate flat land. He looked around. The rest of the country liked to laugh about how this was nowhere. Well, all the smug fuckers out there with their Fargo jokes better get ready for a big surprise. All his life he’d been taken for granted. No one had a clue that he was changing.

  The idea jolted through him.

  Sugar rush.

  Charon drained the can of Coke and tossed it into the passenger-seat foot well, where it clattered on seven other empty cans.

  Charon was his future name. Billy Charon. William Samuel Charon, exact future address as yet unknown. He’d had to come up with a name fast for the new identification they were providing him. He smiled broadly.

  His new afterlife…as it were. There’d be a lot of talk about afterlife when the time came. His would be much more pleasant than a lot of other people’s.

  The Mole was not real happy with the name. It was unusual and would draw attention. But Charon insisted on it. People from North Dakota weren’t dumb, after all. They had the highest high school graduation rate in the country. So he’d read a few books, even Greek mythology and some stuff about comparative religion. He’d picked Charon, not just because it was apt, but because he liked the antique implications. Specifically, as pertains to this project, he enjoyed the irony of how the name preceded, and so trumped, the current intermural fuss between the Christians and Islam.

  But he believed in giving credit where it was due. He did take comfort from a line of the Koran. The one about he who kills one innocent person kills the whole world. Now that he had killed his first person, it helped him get over the problem of magnitude.

  As he waited he turned the Pearl Jam CD up so loud the drums and guitars made the inside of the car jump. Too much, too loud. Back off. Remain calm. Like the Mole always said, don’t draw attention to yourself. He tapped off the stereo.

  In the sudden quiet he stared out the windshield at the panorama of sky. Far to the south two white pencil-thin contrails streaked across a solitary patch of blue: F-16s heading home to the Air Force base at Grand Forks. The rest of the sky was massive, stonelike. Endless piles of veined marble clouds. Far to the north, he could make out the dark ribbons of a rainstorm.

  He was parked on the cracked concrete apron of an abandoned roadside attraction called Camp’s Paradise Country Club: a miniature golf course, gas station, and general store some optimist had created back during the Missile Time. A few hundred yards away, next to an overgrown railroad siding, a collapsing grain elevator tilted against the sky like a North Dakota tombstone. All his life he’d been hemmed in by this horizon; blue and green bands of monotony in the summer, gray and white in the winter. Now he was going to be free.

  And rich.

  He’d go somewhere that wasn’t flat, somewhere that wasn’t so hot or so cold. Somewhere with an ocean.

  Charon checked the digital clock on the dashboard, put the air conditioner fan down from four to one, and cracked the window so he could hear the pay phone ring in the booth several feet away. In fact, someone had used it already today because Charon saw their tire tracks in the orange mud and also saw that they’d dropped a jelly doughnut on the booth’s damp concrete pad, in front of the broken door.

  Dropped it and left it and now a mob of big sturdy black ants swarmed on it.

  He wondered how long that doughnut had been out there. Probably only an hour or so, it didn’t look that old. Self-consciously, he looked around. The urge started in his eyes and descended into his mouth, and he felt the saliva start at the back of his tongue.

  He licked his lips and stared at the pastry.

  The insect activity seemed to burst from a bulge of jelly on the side of the pastry. He squinted. The way the thin light hit the jelly made it look almost voluptuous, like a naughty fat lady’s red titty nipple.

  He pulled his eyes away. He had to control himself. Like the Mole said. Concentrate on the Big Picture. Charon grinned, remembering an old line from that TV show, where David Carradine played Kane, the kung fu pilgrim. The greatest compliment a student can pay his teacher is to surpass him. The man he called the Mole had admitted that Charon had surpassed all his expectations.

  The phone rang, right on time. The Mole was punctual, as usual. Charon got out of the car, carefully stepped over the jelly doughnut, entered the booth, and picked up the receiver.

  “This is Charon,” he said.

  “Listen, we have a problem,” the Mole said.

  “You mean the rain; I know. We got it to the site. But we’ll have to wait for the rain to stop to get it in position.”

  “I mean in addition to the rain.”

  “Okay, what kind of problem?” Charon asked.

  “Remember Rashid? You met him in Winnipeg for the demonstration.”

  “Sure. Rashid.” The Saudi prick. “He didn’t particularly like me, but he liked what I had to sell.”

  “Listen. He was taken in Detroit…”

  “Taken?”

  “Captured, arrested. He knows a lot.”

  “He doesn’t know where. And he doesn’t know when.”

  “But he knows about the weapon and the kind of target. He met us. He gave us an advance. He was trained in the camps, he should be tough. But it’s been my experience they start to go soft once they get over here.”

  “Unlike you,” Charon said.

  “That’s right. I’m a student of history, not the Koran. History tells me that one out of three talk during interrogation. And remember, we’re no
t among the faithful, we’re just the hired help. He may give them something; a place, a name, to protect his other operations.”

  “If he talks, how much time have we got?” Charon asked.

  “No telling.”

  Charon’s breath came more rapidly. The idea of the government sending agents after him increased his heartbeat. Looking down, he saw that the black ants had started climbing over his boots. Methodically, he stomped on them. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Then he said, “Are you getting scared?”

  “This isn’t funny. You should leave now, get in position near the target. Just meet me on the road,” the Mole said.

  “Okay, okay. But I get to do another one. That was the deal.”

  “That was the deal,” the Mole said with an audible sigh.

  “You don’t sound real sincere. I can still pull the plug on all this. One phone call and it’s all over,” Charon said.

  “A deal’s a deal,” the Mole said more firmly.

  “Okay. So when we go do it, I want to take another one along.” Charon’s voice sped up. “To celebrate.”

  On the other end of the phone connection, the Mole marveled at the total imbalance, the complete lack of proportion. Giving credit to a Jew had never been his style, but Hannah Arendt certainly summed it up when she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” In his youth, he had killed out of political conviction. But now his former Marxism and Arab nationalism were seen as just another infidel pose. Jihad was the new battle cry back in the region of his birth. He had become a contract man. In the eyes of the jihadists he was a contemptible, but useful, smuggler of Western poisons: drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.

  In turn, he held the jihadists in contempt: primitive fools, like the cleric in Egypt who urged his followers to go out and tear down the pyramids. But beneath the guise of his U.S. citizenship, he was still an Arab radical and was not opposed to killing Americans for money.

  A lot of money.

  But not for pleasure. He’d thought he’d seen it all. But he’d never believed in monsters, until now. And he had basically created this one.