It took all the will and self-control she had been developing during the last week and a half not to lose control of herself. The only thing that prevented it was a kind of instinctive awareness that this was probably just what the guy wanted; he was trying to say the most provocative thing he could think of. Circling around and poking at her, trying to learn what she was made of. Your family is very nice. She couldn’t believe he’d said that. What an asshole.
But she had opened the door to this by her improvisation, a few days ago, just after the jet crash, when she had revealed her full name to Jones. Of course, the first thing he would have done upon getting access to the Internet would be to learn everything about her, her uncle, her larger family. And he had probably left a trail of bookmarks on the laptop for this guy to follow. Maybe even set up a Zula wiki where jihadists all over the world were posting every piece of data they could find.
So that was the situation. Zula chained by the ankle, out of the laptop’s reach. The man in the driver’s seat looking, she had to guess, at her cousins’ Facebook pages, their Flickr albums, the websites they must have put up during the last week in an effort to figure out what had become of her.
Ten seconds with her hands on that laptop and she could bring the wrath of God down on these people and end the whole thing. A fact that they understood perfectly well. Hence the chain. One padlock at her ankle, the other on the grab bar in the shower stall.
The latter was special in that Zula happened to have a key to it in her pocket.
She could take the key out at any time and be free within seconds. Free to move about within the RV, that is. But there was always someone awake, someone watching her. The key was her one chance. She had to use it wisely. Her first move had to be a success.
The man with the laptop stared at her for a while, waiting for a reaction. Then his attention drifted back to the laptop. He poked it and stroked it for a few moments, then glanced up to see Zula looking at him. He spread his hands apart and gripped the machine by its edges, spun it around, and picked it up to aim the screen toward Zula. From almost the other end of the RV she could not see very well, but she could make out several pictures of herself, which she recognized as having been taken during the re-u or other family get-togethers. Above them were words in block letters, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN? and a telephone number with a 712 area code: western Iowa.
The mere sight of this from thirty feet away brought up a welter of emotions. Joy and fierce pride that her family was on the case. Extreme sadness that it had happened at all. Rage that this man was now trying to use it to manipulate her emotional state. Embarrassment that he was, to some extent, succeeding.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“You may address me as Zakir,” he answered.
The man who was willing to be addressed as Zakir was big and doughy compared to all the other jihadists Zula had encountered lately. Probably a cubicle dweller in his professional life. A member of an IT support group for an insurance company, she decided. Bored with his job, unable to get a girlfriend, feeling conflicted about the way he had sold himself out to the Western system, he had somehow made contact with a group of al-Qaeda-affiliated wack jobs during a family visit to Pakistan and ended up on a list of guys to call in Vancouver if ever the global movement needed some assistance on the ground there. And now here he was and loving it. No doubt shocked to have been rumbled at three in the morning and put in a car to this Walmart rendezvous, he was killing some time doing the one thing he was indubitably good at, which was screwing around with computers.
The shoppers began to come back in shifts. Apparently they had split up inside the Walmart, each with his own list. Aziz came back with half a dozen plastic grocery bags dangling from each hand. Women’s work. Mostly these contained food, but he had also purchased a cheap webcam, shaped like a little eyeball, in a blister pack, and an extension cord for its USB cable. The feminine hygiene supplies were in there too; these were hurled disgustedly back down the length of the RV and ricocheted against the bedroom walls and came to rest, on the bed, somewhat dented around the corners. Sharjeel came with even more camping equipment: sleeping bags, tents, tarps, ropes, and various fleece garments. He tossed the clothing back to Zula, then went back into the store. Fifteen minutes later he and Jones came back, each pushing a big flatbed cart. They brought in a Skilsaw, a cordless drill, construction screws, insulation, two-by-fours, plywood. A full four-by-eight-foot sheet would have been awkward in the RV’s confines and so they had presawn them into four-by-four pieces. Aziz was sent back into the Walmart and came back with a roll of black roofing paper and a white plastic package, about the size of a well-stuffed garbage bag, with a Pink Panther cartoon on it: fiberglass insulation.
The group now divided up, the lovers Mahir and Sharif going out and getting into the car along with the miserable Aziz, while fat Zakir and weaselly, efficient Sharjeel remained in the RV. At a command from Jones, Zakir spun his chair around and fired up the RV’s engine, then pulled the great land yacht out onto the open road. Jones unboxed the Skilsaw. The RV had a generator that would produce wall power. He figured out how to get it started. Then he began to take measurements in the back bedroom, scooting politely past Zula each time he went in or out. With a fat Walmart contractor’s pencil he stroked out long lines on the plywood panels, then fired up the Skilsaw and cut them to shape, two at a time, suffusing the RV’s confines with sawdust, smoke, and a screeching din. He carried these back into the bedroom as they were completed, pushed them up against the windows, and then used the cordless drill, with a screwdriver attachment, to screw them into the RV’s walls. This was all done with the curtains closed so that anyone outside would see only curtains, drawn for privacy.
In only a few minutes’ time, he was able to screw plywood over all the windows. He deputized Sharjeel to put in more screws while he planned out the next phase of the operation. Sharjeel went to it with a will, driving the screws in at intervals of no more than two inches. It was a statement. Those panels were not coming off.
In the meantime, Jones had been cutting two-by-fours into lengths. He tossed these in through the door, flying right over Zula’s head like spears, and directed Sharjeel to screw them down on their edges to the plywood underlayment. This he did miserably. The procedure, as Zula could have told him, was called toenailing, and it was tricky.
Abdallah Jones slashed open the package of fiberglass and it began to expand uncontrollably, threatening to completely fill the interior of the RV. Wrestling and stomping and cursing, he cut off batts of it and passed them back to Sharjeel who stuck them up against the plywood with duct tape.
When all of the plywood had been thus insulated, they pulled over to the side of the road where Jones vindictively kicked all of the insulation, save one six-foot batt of it, out onto the shoulder. Once they were back under way, he busied himself again with plywood. When he had cut the first set of panels, he had always worked with double sheets, making two copies of each shape, and keeping half of them in reserve. Now he and Sharjeel put these spares up over the insulation and screwed them down into the studs. The Colorado School of Mines didn’t raise no dummies.
So the whole three-sided bay of the bedroom was now a completely opaque arrangement of insulated plywood walls. Presently it became even darker as Jones and Sharjeel unrolled long strips of black roofing paper and staple-gunned them over the plywood, covering the entire interior surface of the room, including the ceiling, with monochrome black, relieved only by the sporadic glint of staples. A few moments’ work with a box cutter removed a disk of tar paper from around the overhead light fixture, so that some dingy yellow light was shed into the space.