“Rashid, let’s be candid here. You’re not the warrior type. You’re a money guy. There’s no percentage in you playing it tough. I’d check my jihad contract if I were you. Somewhere in the fine print I think it says guys like you don’t get the paradise bonus if you, ah…”-she curled her fingers, pointed her index finger between his eyes, and let her thumb fall like a hammer-“…get yourself killed by a chick in cut-offs.”
She stepped back and gave him a moment to think. Then she said, “We know you raise money through a network of businesses in the upper Midwest. DEA has you as a major smuggler of meth precursor from Canada. You’re also into identity theft and forged documents. We know you disburse funds to Al Qaeda cells. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about something coming south across the Canadian border?”
Rashid lost his composure for a few beats and bared his teeth at her in a silent snarl. Then he lapsed back into his trance.
Encouraged, Nina threw up her hands in genial exasperation. “Okay. I tried nice. But you don’t want nice. So now I’m pissed.”
With far more strength than Rashid was prepared to believe existed in her body, Nina jerked him up by hair and shoulder and thrust him toward the door. “Comin’ through,” she called out.
The door swung open. Expertly pulling Rashid off balance, she propelled him into the hall. Hollywood and Bugs stood at the ready, and several other men were positioned down the hall, screening them from the office in the front of the building.
“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
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:
“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.
