“Well?”
“He says he understands. Lawless roads and all that. He thanks us for sending someone back to help them.”
“And you believe him?”
Jibril hesitated. “If I’d shot him, we’d be in a war. We’ve only got one gun.”
Just before reaching his friends, the man turned toward them again and raised a fist in the air, shouting proudly.
“Tell me,” John said, though he recognized the slogan.
“He says, God, Muammar, Libya—nothing but!”
“Give me that rifle, will you?”
Jibril stared a moment, then shifted his knees to pass over the Kalashnikov. John took it and got out, the chill wind buffeting him. One of the other men shouted something, waving his own rifle like an old Hollywood Comanche. Again, John didn’t need a translation. He walked around the back of the car and climbed onto the hot, filthy trunk. He lay so that his stomach was pressed against the rear windshield and his elbows were on the roof. As he took aim, trying to gauge wind resistance, he saw how fast the darkness was falling, which didn’t make him feel any better.
Someone shouted something, and the men scattered. Two to the right, two to the left, jumping behind their truck. John fired once, knocking down the man who had come to talk to them as he bent to retrieve his gun. The man rolled into the sandy road and didn’t get up again.
Bursts of automatic gunfire filled the whistling air, and he took aim at the Toyota and waited. Two bullets pinged off the Peugeot. One of the men stood up from behind the truck to fire. Though John aimed for the head, the shot entered the man’s chest before he disappeared behind the truck.
John saw sparks of muzzle-flash beneath the truck, then heard the Peugeot’s windshield crack, but couldn’t get a bead on the shooter. So he swiveled his sight to the other side of the road, where a gunman had settled in a ditch. He waited. This time he hit the head he aimed for, a flash of red and pink.
He took a moment to refocus in the fading light. There were only two of them now. One under the truck, the other hiding behind a lump in the sand. “Jibril,” he called as calmly as he could manage, for his nerves were shot through, and he had to hold back screaming everything that came out of him. “Jibril, tell them to walk out into the desert and we won’t kill them.” Jibril didn’t answer. “Hey!” John called. “You hear me?”
There was a flash in the desert, then another ping against the car. He aimed at the spot. One more muzzle-flash, but the man didn’t rise to aim. He was just there to distract. John turned back to the truck where, beside the rear wheel, there was movement in the shadows—a rifle, then a body snaking out to get a better shot. A head wrapped in green fabric appeared, and he shot twice. The movement ceased. John turned back to the lump of sand and shouted, “Do you speak English?”
He got two shots in reply.
“English?”
“Fuck you English!”
“Everyone is dead!” John shouted, trying to enunciate clearly. “If you want to live, drop your gun and walk away! Do you understand?”
The man made no sign that he understood a thing, but he didn’t fire, either. John slid off the car on the passenger’s side, opened the door for protection, and saw that Jibril was still in his seat, eyes open above a black pit where his nose should have been. His shirt was soaked through and his lap was full of blood. He was staring at the blood-speckled windshield, directly at the small hole in the glass that had materialized an instant before his death.
John closed the passenger door, walked around the rear of the car to his door, then sat behind the wheel. Despite a couple of holes in the hood, the car started without trouble. He put it in reverse and backed away until the Toyota was only a twinkle in the darkness, then turned the car around. He lugged Jibril’s body to the trunk, wrapped in some old blankets. Settling him in that small space, folding his knees to his chin, John wasn’t sure he was going to be able to do it. He thought he might be sick. But he managed the chore, aching arms trembling, slammed the trunk, then drove back to where they had come from.
He got no phone signal in Al `Adam, so he continued north toward the coast, the only lights coming from drivers heading back out into the desert. It was well after ten when he reached the low, dry outskirts of Tubruq, and he pulled onto the cracked earth on the side of the road and called Washington. While his direct superiors, Stan and Harry, were in Cairo, Cy Gallagher in the D.C. headquarters of Global Security outranked everyone because he had hired John, he signed his checks, and he was the only person John could assume was looking out for his interests. “You let him go through the desert?” Cy asked.
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Jesus, we don’t need these kinds of fuckups. Do you know how many contracts are up for review?”
“Just tell me what to do with the body.”
“You’ve still got it?”
“Won’t they want it?”
Cy paused. “Let me ask. I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, get yourself back to Cairo.”
“With a corpse.”
“Right. Okay. I’ll call you back.”
John closed his eyes, and as the cold quickly seeped into the car he tried to put the afternoon out of his mind, but that was impossible. He’d known people who could do that, could silence their heads and zero out, find Zen in the middle of war zones, but he was stuck with the endless internal chatter, most of it not worth listening to, and from the jumble of words came lines of verse half-forgotten:
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers
He pressed his dirty fingers into his eye sockets, but couldn’t remember what that was from. So familiar, yet his mind had gone blank. Some long-dead poet.
After ten minutes, Cy called to ask his coordinates and told him to wait. John waited for a while, then got out and walked to the trunk. He held his breath as he searched Jibril’s pockets, coming up with a passport, phone, and wallet, but no keys. His clothes, John noticed, had no tags on them. He brought the items back to the front and switched on the interior lamp. The wallet was filled with cash in a variety of denominations, but empty of credit cards or anything that used a name. The passport, as he had seen at the border, was Libyan, and the name inside it was Akram Haddad. It was full of stamps and visas, a long record of travels through North Africa and the Middle East up to 2005, and then one more stamp from today. John pocketed the cash, took the battery out of the cell phone, then placed the wallet and passport and phone in the glove compartment. That was when he noticed the leather book that Jibril had picked up in Al `Adam.
He took it out and opened it. Names, just as Jibril had said, but they were all in Arabic script, handwritten. Names with addresses and phone numbers and notations that he couldn’t decipher, many of the pages X’d over—these, perhaps, were contacts who hadn’t survived Jibril’s mistake six years ago. He extinguished the interior lamp and gazed off to the right, where the nighttime desert lay. Just a matter of walking out there and setting it on fire, and a part of him wanted to do this for the dead man. Another part didn’t want to, and this was the part that said, How are you going to light a fire? For he didn’t smoke, and he had stupidly brought no lighter with him into the desert.
So he put it back and closed the glove compartment, thinking that he would burn it in Cairo, while the disloyal part of him knew that he wouldn’t.
Nearly an hour later, a filthy, tarp-covered truck parked in front of his Peugeot, and a small man with a fat mustache got out, asking in English after Akram Haddad. “Well, you can see for yourself,” John told him as he walked to the trunk and opened it. The man sighed loudly. Together, they moved the body to the truck, where a large Persian rug was waiting. They rolled him up. Then the man smiled and opened his hand. John reached to shake it, but the man waved an index finger. “Payment, yes?”