Dead on Arrival

18

He had spent every day with the boy for the last five days. The boy would come to his motel in the morning and they would pray together and read the Koran for an hour — and then they would begin to talk. He soon found out that he didn’t need to fan the boy’s hatred. What he did instead was provide a structure for his beliefs, some perspective, and, of course, the history that the boy lacked. Having spent his whole life in America, the boy’s concept of reality, of what was happening in the rest of the world, was completely distorted. So he told the boy about his own people, how they’d suffered, how they’d died, how they’d been exploited — and how they would continue to be exploited if good men didn’t act. He spoke a lot about how the world would be a better place if everyone followed the true path. And the boy soaked it all up, like he’d been waiting his whole life to have someone explain the things to him that he already felt in his heart but didn’t know how to put into words.

The boy was like a nearly finished sculpture. Only a few deft chisel strokes were needed for it to become precisely the form the artist desired.

This boy was different from the young men he had recruited in Baltimore. There was nothing frivolous about him. He paid attention, he didn’t fidget, he didn’t get bored; he was focused, intensely focused. And he had no doubts about the boy’s faith. He had never been certain, but he had thought from the very beginning that the two from Baltimore had agreed to help him only because of the money he had promised them — and that was why he’d set the detonator to kill them as soon as they armed the bomb. But this boy was different. He reminded him very much of another boy, one in Indonesia whom he had trained, a boy who had walked onto a bus and praised God as he detonated the bomb strapped to his narrow chest.

Yes, he knew this boy’s heart. It was time to take the next step.

‘Come with me,’ he said, and they took a city bus to a used-car lot. He wanted a pickup truck. He could put things in the back of a truck: old furniture, boxes, maybe grass clippings and a lawn mower — things that would make it look as if he and the boy were just a couple of immigrants engaged in menial manual labor. But the trucks on the lot were either too big — he didn’t feel comfortable driving a large vehicle in the city — or too new and expensive. He said this to the salesman, a man whose teeth were so white he must have gargled with bleach.

‘I think I have just what you’re looking for,’ the salesman said, and showed them a type of automobile he’d never seen before. The front part of the vehicle looked like a sedan but the back was a truck. ‘It’s called an El Camino,’ the salesman said. ‘It’s made by Chevy. Ford used to make one just like it called the Ranchero. It rides like a car, looks classy, good horsepower, and you can haul stuff in it. This one’s an ’eighty-six and only has ninety thousand miles on it. I can let you have it for twenty-five hundred.’

El Camino. Silly name, he thought, but typical of foolish Americans and their obsession with automobiles. It was an odd color too — a pale green — but the price was acceptable and he liked that it had a low profile and wasn’t so big he’d feel uncomfortable driving it. He would have preferred one of the more conventional-looking trucks made by Toyota or Honda, but this — this El Camino — would do.

Then, for the first time, he and the boy made the 120-mile journey to a city that sat on the western edge of Lake Erie. He stopped the car on a hill and pointed. He pointed at the refinery — and at the tanks inside the refinery that contained the chemical.