The voice of George Bush came out of the dashboard. Clyde and Fazoul listened to him as they drove through the Iowa night. He was giving a speech somewhere, explaining the situation in Kuwait City right now, telling some awful stories about what was being done to the people there, saying how it was just like Nazi-occupied Europe under the heel of the SS. Clyde saw no reason to disagree with the comparison; but he resisted it anyway, because he knew where the President was going with it.
“That’s a clear-channel station—it bounces off the ionosphere,” Fazoul suddenly said. “But it is an exception. Most radio transmissions are line-of-sight affairs. Radio doesn’t bend around corners very effectively.”
Clyde turned down the volume. He checked the mirror again and saw that the red lights had dropped below the horizon.
Fazoul opened up his crinkly plastic grocery bag and pulled out a tangle of wires. Somewhere in the midst of it was an off-white plastic rectangle about the size of a business envelope, riddled with small holes in a grid pattern. Numerous electronic components were stuck into those holes and hooked together with a bird’s nest of tiny colored wires. A long wire trailed out of the tangle with a plug on it; Fazoul shoved this into the Murder Car’s cigarette-lighter socket. Red and green LEDs came to life on the circuit board. Fazoul pressed buttons and watched LED bar graphs surge up and down on the thing.
“Someone has bugged your car,” Fazoul announced.
Clyde nearly drove off the road.
“But the bug does not include a tape recorder. Only a transmitter. They can’t hear us now, unless they are trailing us with airplanes or helicopters.” Fazoul looked up through the sun roof. Clyde resisted the temptation to do the same.
“Who would bug me? Sheriff Mullowney?” Clyde said. He was embarrassed by the stupidity of this question as soon as the words came out of his mouth. Fazoul chuckled quietly and did not make a big deal out of it.
“If we ripped the bug out of your car and examined it, I could tell you exactly. We have the fingerprints of all the local Iraqi agents on file. But it’s safe to say that it was either the Iraqis, the Israelis, or FBI counterintelligence. Probably the FBI—we have no reason to think that the Iraqis or the Israelis are aware of your prowess as a counterspy.”
“What the heck is going on?” Clyde said.
“You know as much about that as anyone, Khalid. All you lack is context.”
“Context?”
“You have figured out some very interesting things about Iraqi activities in Forks County.”
“But I never actually believed any of it was for real.”
“Imagine that it is for real. Imagine that you are right. Then try to imagine all the ramifications.”
“I’ve done nothing but, Fazoul. I have nightmares about Desiree.”
“That’s not precisely what I mean. Those are personal ramifications. I’m talking about the realm of politics. I’m talking about repercussions in places like Washington and Baghdad and Tel Aviv.”
“I don’t know anything about Washington and Baghdad and Tel Aviv.”
“That,” Fazoul said, “is your biggest problem at the moment.”
They drove on in silence for a while. Clyde laughed hollowly as he worked something out in his head: “They didn’t put a tape recorder in my car because they knew I was a local yokel who’d never, ever drive out of sight of home.”
Fazoul did not contradict him.
They were driving down a long, straight stretch of interstate with nothing in the median strip except tall grass that had withered with the first hard frost. An oncoming semitrailer rig roared northward, doing a good eighty or ninety miles an hour, and its running lights receded into the darkness.
Clyde angled sharply across the passing lane and the shoulder. The big wagon rolled sharply to the left as the wheels plunged off the edge of the shoulder and into the median. “Clyde!” Fazoul blurted, reaching out with one of his mangled claws to brace himself against the dashboard. Clyde sent the wagon plunging down into the median like a diving B-52, braked hard, and swung the wheel around. The massive back end of the car swung around of its own momentum, neatly reversing their direction. Clyde punched the gas, and the mighty 460 hauled them up out of the ditch and onto the shoulder of the northbound lanes. The entire operation took just a few seconds, and then they were headed back into town again at a comfortable sixty miles per hour. Maggie murmured, shifted in her car seat, and went back to sleep.
“First in my class at the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy,” Clyde said. “They taught us stuff like that.”
“Very impressive,” Fazoul said, sincerely enough.
“But the FBI, or whoever, is exactly right. I’m just a local yokel,” Clyde continued. “Iowa Law Enforcement Academy didn’t teach me anything about Baghdad.”
“Well, would you take it the wrong way if I offered a suggestion?” Fazoul said gingerly.
“’Course not.”
“Come clean to the FBI. They probably know most of what you’ve learned anyway. If you didn’t approach them with this, it just looks like you’re hiding something.”