As the first hours of light brought no wind, only a deepening quiet, Paxton hoped for some telltale to confirm that more than one of the terrorists resided in the shuttered house. At 8:47, his satellite phone vibrated.
Perry called from his position, with Gibb, on the roof of a two-story building east of the target house. He spoke in hardly more than a murmur. “One male. Not the smoker. Backyard. Two buckets.”
“Say again—buckets?”
“Carrying buckets.” After a pause, Perry said, “Back gate. Into the street. Moving south.”
“Weapon?” Paxton asked.
“Drop-leg holster.”
If the terrorist hadn’t been armed, and if he had ventured far enough from the target house, they might have tried to capture him for interrogation. But one shot would alert the other bad guys—and, if intel was correct, bad girls.
“Probably night soil,” Perry said.
He was a fan of historical fiction, especially novels of war and seafaring set in the eighteenth century. Occasionally he used antiquated words, not pretentiously, not even consciously, but because they had become part of his vocabulary.
“Clarify—night soil,” Paxton said.
“Shit,” Perry replied, which was pretty much what Pax thought he’d meant.
Like most small-to medium-size settlements in this blighted country, the town was in some respects medieval. No sewage system. No septic tanks. No indoor plumbing except, in a few cases, a hand pump in the kitchen sink, tapping a private well. There would be an open-air communal latrine just beyond the last buildings, basically ditches and a series of baffles, where people relieved themselves or to which they carried their products. It would be situated to ensure that the prevailing winds more often than not carried the stink away from the town, which meant in this case to the south and west.
Perhaps the personal-hygiene standards of Abdullah al-Ghazali forbade the dumping of their waste in a far corner of the backyard. More likely, they periodically disposed of it in the communal latrine because the stench it produced and the cloud of flies it drew would identify their hideout as surely as if they had raised over the house one of their black-and-red flags.
Into his phone, Pax said, “One bucket for men, one for women?”
“Honorable modesty,” Perry agreed, and he terminated the call.
Short of knocking on Abdullah’s door and pretending to be from the Census Bureau, they were not going to get any better confirmation that all seven terrorists were in the house. The buckets were superb intel.
In the deep shadows, just inside the doorway of the building that faced the terrorists’ haven, Paxton and Danny began quietly to set up the Carl Gustav M4 recoilless rifle, an antitank weapon that was also effective as a bunker-buster.
Bibi was wired. Not on chardonnay. Wired on the weirdness of it all. Cranked up by a feeling of impending violence. Like the air pressure before the first lightning flash of a storm so strong that it might spawn the mother of all tornadoes.
Apparently some weird guy lurked in the parking lot, obsessing over the meaning of the vanity plates on Nancy’s sedan. And evidently a nameless presence stalked the kitchen, because the smell of rotting roses had become a stink, because the candle flames were undulating three or four inches above the lips of the cups that contained them, and because the room had suddenly grown chilly. The wall clock and her wristwatch had stopped, their sweep hands no longer wiping away the seconds, and the digital clock on the microwave had gone dark, as if something that lived outside of time had stepped into this world and brought its clockless ambience with it. Perhaps the psychic-wave detectors, a.k.a. “the wrong people”—whoever or whatever they might be—were already on their way to Bibi’s apartment to beat her to death or suck her blood, or steal her soul, whatever the hell they did to those cretins who were foolish enough to think that a little divination session over the kitchen table would be harmless, gosh, perhaps even fun.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Bibi would not have taken any of this seriously, for she had been a highly efficient, driven autodidact who had taught herself at least two college degrees’ worth of knowledge, a levelheaded realist who enjoyed fantasizing, yes, but who always knew precisely where the borderline was between the real world and false interpretations of it. She’d had a keen eye for the too-bright, too-fuzzy worlds of idealists and for the too-dark, too-complicated versions of reality concocted by paranoids. Now the borders seemed to have been erased or at least blurred, and for the first time in her life, she felt that among things a modern woman needed, a gun was no less essential than a smartphone.
“I need a gun,” she declared, and though the words sounded alien to her nature, she knew that she spoke the truth.
Calida’s pistol lay on the table, but she pulled it closer to her, beyond Bibi’s reach, as if she didn’t rule out the possibility that her client meant to shoot her, the messenger.