4
mocha
AFTER DECIDING HOW FRANCO SALAZAR would die, Alejo’s team took the rest of the day off. Alejo spent most of the time wandering the crooked lanes of the Peshawar bazaar, staring at gold jewelry to die for and reams of cloth embroidered with a river of color.
If he were Gabriel and in love with a girl with amazing sapphire eyes, would he buy her that one gold necklace with wreaths of fairy-tale leaves and bottomless blue stones? Alejo blinked at the shop window, realizing he had no idea what he would do. During high school back in Bolivia, the girls were more interested in his whiter, richer friends. Since then he’d been too busy trying to save the world.
Stalin found him sweltering under the sun in front of the jewelry shop, clapped him on the shoulder and steered him towards a coffee shop, one of the few modern one in this city.
“Don’t tell me, I can already see it in your eyes,” Stalin said when they’d taken a seat on the sleek red benches. “You’ve been reading that book again. And that means questions, big life and death questions. Go ahead. Ask them all. I am an expert on the document in question, after all.”
Alejo glanced behind them, checking that they were still alone here in the corner. A young couple sat at the opposite extreme of the coffee shop, he wearing jeans and she a short white kameez top, wide-bottom black pants, and a leopard print veil. They both giggled at each other and sipped something fruity from glasses with paper-maiche umbrellas. The drinks Stalin had ordered for them arrived, something with a ridiculous amount of whipped cream and caramel on top.
“Does this even have coffee?” Alejo frowned at the stuff suspiciously.
“You don’t like caramel mochas?” Stalin grinned.
Whatever. Couldn’t be worse than that luke-warm fermented mare’s milk he’d choked down on assignment in Uzbekistan a few years ago. “I don’t think I do have more questions,” Alejo narrowed his eyes at Stalin. “And that’s the scary part. We both know you love to be right, and I’m giving this one to you. Your arguments convinced me: the texts are authentic. He really said it. And if I believe that, I can’t be Muslim anymore.”
Alejo felt his brow lower saying it out loud.
Stalin swore under his breath across the table. “You seriously believe it?” A bead of sweat popped out of his forehead and he slurped caramel and cream. “This time, I’m not sure if I should have allowed my extreme intellect to be so convincing.”
“I do,” Alejo crossed his legs and leaned back. “I can’t help it, I just do. I believe Jesus is the son of God.”
“And that means you can’t be a Muslim anymore,” Stalin conceded glumly. “It’s just not possible. Allah has no son. If Gabriel finds out, he’s going to have a cow.”
Yeah, Gabriel was really religious, more than anyone else on Alejo’s team. But the one Alejo really dreaded telling was Ishmael Khan. The Khan loved Alejo like a son, and in the Pashto culture that kind of love should never be broken. He was going to take it hard that Alejo had to leave Islam…and the Prism, besides.
“But it’s just not right for me to stay where I am,” Alejo told Stalin, “if I’m not a Muslim. I’ll have to tell them.”
Alejo felt relieved it was all decided. But Stalin’s eyes had gone all buggy behind his tiny round glasses. He chewed on one chapped lip and stirred the mess of coffee and cream left in his cup with the straw. “Alejo, I don’t think you can just tell them,” he said worriedly. Stalin licked a film of whipped cream off his upper lip and sighed. “Don’t you remember what happened to Marco?”
Marco, until a year ago, was the Prism leader for Colombia and Venezuela. The poor guy was murdered in a horrible break-in, along with his sister and some young nieces; the whole thing had been really hard for Alejo and his team.
Stalin was watching the memory cross Alejo’s face and he nodded grimly. “It happened right after he retired. Didn’t it? I mean, Alejo, you are the best of us, always busy exercising, studying other languages. But the lazier of us have time to sit around and listen to rumors. Marco leaves the Prism to take up agriculture. Or pottery. Or something, I don’t know. Then weeks later, he’s murdered, along with his entire family. The scary thing is, the 964 didn’t seem the least bit surprised.”
The 964 was the group of incredibly wealthy people who financed the Prism. And why wouldn’t the 964 be surprised? Because they were behind the whole thing, that’s why.
Frost crept into Alejo’s veins as it all came together. The picture shoved under the door of his house in Bolivia, a bunch of little kids arriving home from school in uniforms and overstuffed backpacks. A house number clearly visible over the door. Stalin had also gotten a really weird picture of his parents wearing matching lime green t-shirts at a rally for world peace.
Alejo had been so obsessed with Salazar he’d paid no attention to the Prism funders’ reaction to Marco’s death. He’d felt the surprise at seeing that picture show up but never figured out the hint.
“They’re telling us they know where our families are,” he stated the obvious. Alejo’s tone turned bitter. “If we leave, people we care about die.”
Four o’clock came early the next morning, when the Khan came to pick him up for the trip to the countryside Tribal Area. A sleek black Hummer glided to a stop in front of the apartment, purring in the early morning chill. A man in a shalwar kameez that was cotton candy pink held the Hummer’s rear door for Alejo: Mateen, an employee of the Khan that a guy would be wise not to mess with, despite the pink clothes. Mateen nodded wordlessly at Alejo and deferentially closed the Hummer door behind him.
The leather seats were freezing. Alejo crossed his arms across his chest and greeted two of the Khan’s burly body guards, wearing the round woolen caps that were traditional Pashto garb. Each held a well-cared for automatic weapon very comfortably between their knees. “Asalaam Aleikum,” they grinned back at him over thick, unkempt beards.
“Ishmael,” Alejo nodded at his boss, who, eerily, was impeccably dressed even at this ungodly hour of the morning.
Ishmael Khan was a philanthropist, giving away a lot of his wealth to build hospitals and schools here in Pakistan as well as in Bolivia. The broken hand of two-year old Jamila was what Ishmael Khan fought for. This was what Alejo’s handler saw every time he heard about another child killed by the Americans in Afghanistan: the tiny, coffee-colored hand of his niece, protruding from the rubble of her home in the mountains. She’d been crushed by a stray American missile back in 2008, massacred in the same day as her five siblings.
The Americans had apologized. The Khan hadn’t accepted.
Now Ishmael Khan was Alejo’s handler in the Prism, this Muslim organization dedicated to fighting against injustice for Allah. Alejo was the Prism leader for all of South America, excluding Colombia and Venezuela, where Marco’s replacement now worked.
The chill from his conversation with Stalin yesterday still sat in Alejo’s bones. The Khan was a strict Muslim, but would he really react so strongly to Alejo’s moving on as Stalin had implied? Maybe only the 964 really cared, because they were the ones who invested all the money in training Alejo.
Or maybe Stalin and Alejo were just painting themselves scary pictures from nothing, like campfire ghost stories under the moon.
Gabriel cleared his throat from the third row of seats behind Alejo. The rest of Alejo’s team had stayed behind in Peshawar. “I thought we might have to drag your butt out of bed,” he chuckled. “For the first time ever. You were looking pretty down yesterday.”
Alejo was irritated. They didn’t know why he personally hated Salazar so much. To them he was just another scumbag who was about to be offed. And, except for Stalin, they absolutely didn’t know a thing about the decision Alejo was trying to make.
The roads outside of Peshawar were cut into dry, dusty mountain faces, and incredibly sheer drop-offs framed their narrow edges. Eventually the Hummer left the peaks and jolted across a stony field where the rutted tracks were barely visible in the weak light of dawn. Everywhere, mud-brick houses sprung up out of the rocky dust; most were shattered from missiles, empty shells of the family life that must once have filled them. Small children sometimes lined the road, staring with huge, kohl-lined eyes as the impressive Hummer roared past, clouding their ragged bodies in billows of thick dust.
Sometime around noon, the armored Hummer arrived at a run-down village, consisting of a cluster of houses around a stone well. Mangy, skeletal donkeys wandered about, tethered to fraying ropes. Scrawny chickens had free range of the dusty central courtyard. A baby cried franticly from inside one of the single-room homes. A piece of burlap hung over the small window stirred, a dark form peered out, and the baby was immediately hushed.
Somewhere in the near distance, the dull echo of a missile launcher pounded against the surrounding mountains.
Alejo started, and realized they were near the current battle zone.
With a cool hiss, the metallic doors of the Hummer unlocked and opened. Mateen took a long drink from a two-liter bottle of luke-warm Coca-Cola. The Pashtun guards leapt out of the car, weapons gripped tightly in their rough hands.
“Settle down, settle down,” the Khan barked in Pashto, appearing amused. “There’s nothing to be afraid of right here, in this village. It’s still ours. Our commander is in constant contact with me, by sat phone.” Ishmael patted the pocket of his gray wool jacket from a posh London shop.
“You all stay here and guard the car,” Ishmael instructed his guards and driver. “Keeping a sharp eye out towards us, of course, as a precaution.” The Khan cleared his throat, spit a wad of hashish on the ground and turned towards Alejo, all smiles. “And as for you, your hour has come. Did I not tell you I had a surprise for you? Forgot to mention it, eh? Well, I have a little something I want to show you, and I think you will be very surprised. Pleasantly.”
Alejo hid his displeasure behind a passive mask. Yeah, he was surprised. What could be here, so near the battle zone, that the Khan wanted him to see? There was nothing here but run-down huts. And people who needed help.
“Come on, Alejo,” the Khan was saying, heading towards a larger, low-slung mud building that was on the close side of the courtyard. Alejo’s leather sandals sucked at the mud as he followed Ishmael. A thin plume of smoke snaked from the chimney of the building into the slate gray of the sky.
Alejo halted impatiently outside the splintered wooden door as the Khan called into the building in Pashto, A curt answer came back to him, and the Khan motioned happily for Alejo to open the door. Features impassive, Alejo pushed his way cautiously into the darkened building and found, more or less, what he had expected: a room tightly packed with mud-caked, exhausted mujahedeen, taking an early-morning snooze by the fire before heading out to fight the enemy combatants.
Most wore grimy shalwar kameezs and the traditional Pashtun hats, with a ring around the bottom, bulging like a wool muffin on the top. The men looked thin and under-fed and much too young to be here. Many had body parts wrapped up in dirt-encrusted, ratty bandages mottled with dried blood. Around one hundred pairs of brown, battle-weary eyes stared back at Alejo as his vision adjusted to the dim lighting. He felt the Khan push past him, forcing him further inside the room.
“Well, come see your surprise!”
Alejo was confused, but didn’t let it show, only cocking an eyebrow at Ishmael. He wasn’t interested in radical fighters and all their petty battles over slight differences in religion or generational blood feuds. What was he doing here?
“Asalaam alaikum!” Ishmael greeted the men enthusiastically, and they, obviously knowing who he was, made an effort to sit up straighter with respect and returned the Pashto greeting. “This is the man I told you about, the man I told your commander I would bring to you.” The Khan motioned widely towards Alejo, as pleased as a kindergartner presenting his newest coloring page to his favorite teacher. “Please greet our visitor.”
Alejo was perplexed to see grins spreading across the chapped faces of many of the men in the room. An unexplained feeling of dread crept across his chest as he watched them.
And then the men opened their mouths and spoke.