The Godless One by J. Clayton Rogers Page B

all, since she fully understood the ‘need-to-know’
nature of the business. What did irk her was being kept so much in the dark about
Ari’s background. She felt she was not being given the tools to do
her job properly. She was so suspicious of Ari that she had fed him
an alias, ‘Sandra’, when they first met. To her intense chagrin, he
had somehow learned her real name. The little she had learned
about him filled
her with loathing.
    Having the pictures hand-delivered, Ari
decided, was one way for the Marshals Service to keep tabs on him.
Maybe they thought that, by staying low-tech, they were helping to
palliate any willies Ari might experience in this strange, new
culture. There was the GPS tracker in his Scion, but that only made
sense, in case he decided to fly the coop. And it went without
saying that his computer was not only monitored, but heavily
filtered. But Ari did not take their word that he was not otherwise
being spied upon. Every week he searched the safe house for remote
monitoring devices and his clothes for RFID tags. This was one
reason he did not bring in more furniture or anything else that
might make planting bugs easier for his ‘protectors’.
    The morning after meeting with Jackson
and Mangioni, Ari awoke without waking. Without Sphinx, he had been
unable to sleep. There was a hangover to deal with, but this had
become integral to his daily routine.
    An encrypted Aegis had been left on his
kitchen table the morning before, while he was out shopping at the
Indo-Pak on Hull Street. He had disdained the flash drive with the
air of a man who had more important things to do, although his
agenda was as slim as Romeo’s little black book. But it could not
be put off more than a day. The minds of young terrorists never
stopped churning. It was possible that Ari’s dilatory behavior
would result in a hundred un-intercepted murders. It was also
possible that the next asteroid would wipe out the whole idiotic
mess—one could only hope.
    The images comprised the usual
assortment of atrocities. Ari’s strong stomach conflicted with the
sheer waste of the horrors sliding across his computer screen. He
was not a great admirer of humanity, although its artifacts could
be pretty nifty. It was the unnecessary-ness of it that appalled
him. He could have terrorized Diane into letting him keep Sphinx,
but to what purpose? He would have set into orbit yet one more
satellite of misery in the world.
    The men who appeared on his computer
screen (the ones who were not victims) were not adverse to despair,
especially when they caused it in others.
    Some of the pictures had been scanned,
and some of these had little handwritten comments by American
soldiers. Anything assumed offensive to Ari's sensibility was
digitally brushed away, although the censor missed "ANO dicktraps
in Sick City", which amused him. However, they had negligently let
stand scribbles they did not think he would understand:
    Sine Pari. Latin for 'without equal', the motto of the
United States Army Special Operations Command.
    Night Stalkers Don’t
Quit . Motto for the
160 th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
    DEVGRU. Acronym for the Naval Special
Warfare Development Group, and which Ari could plainly see was
referring to Seal Team Six.
    Had they realized that he comprehended
these references and could make uncanny inroads into American
strategy, they would have taken their job more
seriously.
    When he first arrived, Ari would make
morbid quips about the terrorists that he recognized in the
pictures. These were like comic mnemonics that booted his mental
database. He used to pass along some of these self-addressed
comments in his email reports. CENTCOM did not admonish him,
because it did not want to alienate him—not only because ‘Mr.
Ibrahim’ had been, over a two year period, in charge of the
registry clerks at Abu Ghraib Prison…but also because Ari had a
phenomenal memory for faces. It was not perfectly eidetic—even if
such a thing