Jihad

CHAPTER 74

Relatives and limo drivers crowded the door near the exit from customs at John F. Kennedy Airport, clamoring for loved ones and clients in a patter that mixed New York verve with tender pleading. Dr. Ramil dodged to the left, avoiding a happy young wife as she rushed to greet a husband just back from overseas. Her overflowing emotions encouraged him, as if happiness were not only contagious but a cure for the unsettled panic he’d been fighting against since Istanbul.

It had been some time since he’d been in New York City, and he wasn’t quite sure how best to get to Baltimore. He’d decided on the plane that he would call for advice, but now he changed his mind; perhaps staying the night in New York would soothe him further. Besides, he didn’t feel like talking to Rubens and the others just yet.

“Doctor. I hope your trip was a good one.”

Ramil spun around. Kevin Montblanc was standing at the end of the line, his walruslike moustache twitching as he spoke.

“Come on this way. Is that your only bag?”

“I hadn’t expected you,” Ramil told Montblanc. Montblanc was Desk Three’s operations personnel director, a kind of glorified den mother who looked after the Desk Three operatives. He was a psychologist, overly fond — in Ramil’s opinion — of touchy-feely phrases and open-ended questions.

“Thought you could use a lift. And I was in the neighborhood.” This was obviously meant as a joke, for Montblanc laughed. He wore a wrinkled linen suit; on the portly side, he waddled just a bit as he led Ramil to the door and then across to the short-term parking garage, pointing him to a green GMC Jimmy.

The car was hot. Ramil lowered the window, as much to stare at the sights as suck in oxygen.

By the time they hit the highway and the local traffic, the air conditioner had lowered the temperature to a comfortable sixty-nine degrees. Montblanc turned off the radio — it had been playing Chopin — and raised the windows.

“Feel like talking?” he asked.

Ramil didn’t, but saying that to Montblanc would only make things more difficult later on.

“I was exhausted,” Ramil told him, trying to make his voice sound matter-of-fact. “And then, my hands shook. I just froze.”

“Ever happen to you before?”

“No.”

“How much sleep had you gotten?”

“None.”

Montblanc nodded solemnly. Ramil wondered what the psychologist would say if he told him about the voice he’d heard.

He’d nod and say “hmmm.” He would ask a few more questions, then give him some “diagnostic tool”—they were never called tests or grillings — when they got back to Fort Meade, or Crypto City as most of the NSA workers called their headquarters. The “tool” would let him slot Ramil into some numbered spot in the manual of mental disorders, a witchcraft’s miscellany.

What if God truly had spoken to him? What then?

What then? Where would that fit in his manual?

Probably on the page between extreme panic attacks and schizophrenia, which was where Ramil figured he belonged.

“I apologized to Mr. Dean,” said Ramil. “I just wasn’t myself that day.”

“Did you feel palpitations?” asked Montblanc.

“Nothing physical, just — very tired.”

“You were breathing pretty heavily.”

“Hyperventilating, you mean?”

“Were you?”

“I had to climb several flights of stairs. I’m afraid I’m no longer in great shape.”

Montblanc began asking a series of questions that Ramil realized were designed to see if he was suffering post-traumatic stress — as if one could figure that out from a few questions asked in a car. Ramil answered them honestly — except for the one about whether he’d ever had an auditory hallucination.

“I don’t believe I’ m Joan of Arc,” Ramil replied sharply.

“That would be interesting,” said Montblanc, his tone light. “A Muslim thinking he was a Christian saint.”

Even though he knew he should just keep quiet, there was something about the other man’s flipness that annoyed Ramil. And so he asked, “Do you think God talks to people?”

Montblanc, clearly disturbed by the question, took his eyes off the road to look at him.

“Not to me,” said Ramil, his voice steady. “To people like Joan of Arc.”

“I would think she displayed the classic signs of schizophrenia,” said Montblanc, returning his attention to the road. “Onset of adolescence, stress, and all that.”

“God spoke to the Prophet Muhammad, may peace be unto him,” said Ramil.

“Well, yes. To some people, God must speak,” said Montblanc, obviously not wanting to contradict one of the main tenets of Ramil’s religion. “It must be quite a burden for them. I’m sure others would think they were crazy.”

“They’d probably think so themselves,” said Ramil, reaching to turn the music back on.