Cryptocurrency is Deek’s last chance to succeed in life, and he will not stop, no matter what.

Previous Chapters: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

“Were the world the possession of a single man, it would not make him rich … because it is passing away.”
– Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah

Who Are You?

Deek dreamed that he was walking through the Al-Hajarah desert of his native Iraq. It was a forbidding land, with a mosaic of stony plains, wadis, ridges, and gullies. He’d heard a rumor that the the Half-Buried Ziggurat of Šar-Ḫadīdu, part of the ancient kingdom of Ur, held a huge hidden cache of silver drachmas. He wanted that money, and would stop at nothing to get it.

He had drunk the last of his water and his throat was parched, but he must have that treasure.

As he trudged through the sweltering landscape, he passed a knot of Bādū shepherds, tending their sheep in the arid washlands. They called to him, offering to share water and flatbread with a weary traveler, but Deek did not trust them. What if they only wanted the secret of the treasure? Licking his cracked lips, he walked on.

He dropped behind a stone to hide from a group of shadowy men driving battered 4×4s and carrying rifles.

He encountered a woman praying on a rug in the shadow of a crumbling watchtower. Her abaya was drawn across her face, but she seemed young. He was about to pass her by when she ended the prayer and spoke his name.

“Deek Saghir, son of my sons.”

Deek cleared his throat. “Yes?”

“I am Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah.”

Deek knew her. She was an Iraqi poet and ascetic who had lived in the 8th century. She was famous for her deep piety. Deek cast his gaze at the ground so as not to offend the holy woman’s modesty.

“My father,” he said, “often told me that you were our ancestor. But our village shaykh said that he was wrong, that you never married, and spent your life in worship.”

“Child Deek,” she replied. “Who are you?”

Deek was confused. If she knew his name, why was she asking?

“I’m looking for a hidden treasure of silver,” he explained. “It’s near here.”

“I did not ask what you are doing. I asked, ‘who are you?’”

Deek’s eyebrows knitted together. “This is me. I am determined to be rich. It’s my destiny.”

“If that is all you are, then you are nothing.” Rabiah turned away and began to recite the Quran, her soft voice carrying clearly across the desert sand.

Deek walked on. The sun was high in the sky and beginning to burn. His waterskin was bone-dry, and each breath tasted like dust. He wasn’t going to make it. It had been folly to come out here. He was wounded by Shaykha Rabiah’s words. What did she mean that he was nothing? He had struggled mightily to find this treasure, and was still struggling. He was determined and focused. That was more than 99% of people could say.

His legs gave out. With the words, “Who are you?” echoing in his mind, he fell on the hot sand and lay prostrate.

Clear Mind

Deek’s face was hot. He waved a hand beside his cheek, mumbling, “I’m me, that’s all. I’m just me. That’s something, not nothing.” He opened his eyes to find himself in a small bed that just barely fit him, covered with a geometric-patterned quilt. The sun beamed through the window, shining on his face.

He didn’t like the way Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah had turned away from him at the end. Was she disappointed in him? She was a saint, and he was an ordinary man. What did she want from him?

Wait… that wasn’t real. That was a dream. He blinked several times, trying to understand where he was. Sitting up, he felt a twinge of pain in his ribs. He was dressed in blue flannel pajamas that he did not recognize. Lifting the shirt, he saw that his entire torso was bandaged.

He remembered. The kidnapping, the terrible beating they’d given him, and Zaid Karim blazing in like the angel of death, killing the kidnappers and saving him. The pain in his ribs was not nearly as bad as it had been last night. He opened and closed his mouth. His jaw was sore, but worked just fine. He touched his nose and found it also bandaged.

He was not worried. In fact, now that the morning brain fog had cleared, his mind was sharp and clear. He didn’t feel much of anything, emotionally. Instead, he was like a machine that had been designed to observe, calculate, and strategize. He still remembered Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah’s probing questions and comments. He understood that she expected more from him spiritually. But at the moment, this did not disturb him.

The room in which he sat was made of white painted brick. On the walls were shelves that held colorful woven baskets, a stone axe and obsidian knife, and other objects that might have been tools or weapons; as well as abalone shells, something that looked like a rattle, and a feathered headdress mounted on the wall. It was as if he was in a Native American museum.

His two suitcases stood in one corner. Zaid must have gone back to the Moon Walk motel to retrieve them.

He was desperately thirsty. Rising slowly, he put on a pair of slippers he found beside the bed, went through a door and found himself in the bathroom. The mirror above the sink showed a face that did not look as bad as he expected. His eyes were slightly bruised and swollen, and his nose was bandaged, but on the whole he felt much better than he should, based on his memory of what the thugs had done to him.

The Namer’s House

The small sink operated with a foot pedal, of all things. Pumping the pedal, Deek drank greedily and washed up, then went to find someone to talk to.

He discovered that he was alone in the small house. There was another bedroom, decorated similarly to his own. The modest living room, sparsely furnished with a sofa, table, and chairs all hewn from natural oak, also had shelves on the walls, but these held glass jars and bottles that were filled with herbs, spices, and colored liquids. There was no television, phone, or any electronics that Deek could see. Not even a refrigerator in the little kitchen, though there was an ancient-looking oven and stove. There were unlit candles everywhere, most of them in votive glasses.

His phone sat on a little table in the kitchen, beside a candle, a box of matches, and an ashtray. In addition,n there was an assortment of foodstuffs, including a loaf of bread, a few tins of sardines, a small block of cheese wrapped in cloth, jars of peanut butter and jelly, a basket of tomatoes, a bowl of oranges, and a bag of dry cat food.

Beneath the phone was a note:

“Akhi Deek: You are in the Namer’s house. It’s a safe place where you can recuperate. She treated your wounds and gave you healing medicine, so you should feel better. She’s gone to the coast for a day, but help yourself to the food. You can use your phone, but don’t make any calls for now, and remember there’s no electricity. Do NOT talk about last night’s events to anyone! I need to get to the bottom of what happened. I’ll see you later tonight, inshaAllah. Burn this note. – Zaid.”

Wealth for Wealth’s Sake

Deek read the note over again, then crumpled it, lit it on fire with a match, and set it in the ashtray to burn. No electricity? Sinks with foot pumps? Shelves with axes and potions? He couldn’t tell if he was in a Western movie, a Grimm’s fairy tale, or a spy thriller. In any case, he was alive, so alhamdulillah for that.

Compulsively, he turned on the phone. There were text messages and missed calls from his wife and both of his daughters, and voicemails from numbers he did not recognize. He would read and listen to them later.

He checked his crypto balance. The altcoin rally he’d been waiting for the last two years was in full swing. His portfolio was up to 90 million.

This was what Rania, Lubna, and others had not understood about crypto. It was extraordinarily volatile, but it was cyclical, and it was a waiting game. You had to have the knowledge to know what to buy, but after that, it was all about being patient and waiting for the next parabolic bull rally. Crypto bull cycles could be insanely profitable, to a degree unimaginable in any other asset class.

Deek had been through one such euphoric rally before – that was when he’d made the $200K – but he’d held the tokens too long and lost it all in the inevitable bear market collapse. After that, he’d waited three years for the next bull cycle, and it was finally here. His knowledge and patience had paid off. All he had to do was recognize when this monster run was peaking, and get out in time.

If he played his cards right, he could hit a net worth of half a billion dollars before this bull cycle ended. The thought was mind-boggling. He had no idea what he would do with the wealth he already possessed, let alone half a billion dollars. But it wasn’t about that anymore.

His friend Marco had multiple college degrees. He’d once told Deek that receiving the first diploma had been a thrill – as it was for everyone- but that after that, each successive degree meant less. For Marco, studying wasn’t about the degrees anymore, but the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. It had occurred to Deek more than once that Marco, who was not Muslim, was following with great dedication Allah’s command to “Read!” – But was missing the second part: “In the Name of your Lord Who Created…”

The point was that Deek felt the same way about growing his cryptocurrency hoard. Now that he was at almost a hundred million, it was no longer about securing a better future for himself and his family, but about perfecting the investment process itself. Making the right choices, timing the market, seeing the numbers grow. Excellence and wealth for the sake of excellence and wealth.

As he thought this, he heard a distant echo of Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah’s voice saying, “If that is all you are, then you are nothing.” But he pushed it aside.

Urban Wasteland Oasis

There was no lock on the front door. How was he supposed to be safe in a house with an unlocked door? He opened it and stepped outside to find himself looking at a garden in the middle of a wasteland. The house’s small front yard was gorgeous, filled with flowers and herbs. Bees buzzed resourcefully, and butterflies flitted from rose to bird of paradise to carnation. There was a narrow driveway, but no garage.

Beyond this house, however, the neighborhood consisted of crumbling homes with bare earth yards, junked cars, empty lots strewn with trash, a house that had burned to the ground, and an abandoned house that was boosted up on pillars of bricks for some reason.

What city was this? Was this even Fresno? He’d never seen anything like this in Fresno.

He went inside and explored further. There was a back door that exited off the kitchen.

Stepping out, he found himself in an earthly imitation of Paradise. The backyard was huge, many times larger than the house, and enclosed by a wooden fence. The entire space was filled with fruit trees and herbs, rows of vegetables, and bird feeders. Everywhere he looked, he saw birds hopping, darting, and feeding, including hummingbirds. There was a covered patio with chairs and a glass table, and several empty food bowls. As Deek stood there, four cats of various colors trotted up to him, meowing and rubbing against his legs. He retrieved the bag of cat food and filled their bowls, and watched them munch happily.

The Namer’s backyard

He considered. Based on the poverty-stricken neighborhood, the lack of a lock on the front door, and the herbs and potions in the house, he concluded that the Namer must be some sort of neighborhood medicine woman. She treated the people here, and they respected and protected her. Or perhaps they feared her. Or both.

Also, based on his own physical condition, which was better than he had any right to expect, and on his strangely clear state of mind, he deduced that the Namer had given him some sort of healing potion. The woman was clearly a genius. She could market these potions and make a fortune.

Money Management

Speaking of fortunes, it was time to manage his assets. He must not fail to make the most of this opportunity. First, he changed the settings on his Coinbase account, linking it to his own personal account instead of the joint account. Then he sold $5K worth of Solana and sent it to his bank account.

Using Phantom, Solflare, Trust Wallet, and Coinbase wallet, he created multiple sub-wallets and began to distribute the assets. For each wallet he created, he wrote the secret phrase – a list of 12 or 24 random words – on an encrypted text file on his phone. Later, he would save the phrases on an encrypted thumb drive and store it in a safe deposit box.

He sold the five dozen or so nearly valueless meme coins that he still held, and began to invest in blue chip cryptos like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Cardano, and Chainlink. He also bought a number of large-cap utilities on the Solana chain, including DEXes (decentralized exchanges) like Orca and Raydium, a launchpad, a streaming audio service, and a few popular games. Lastly, he put about $10 million in more experimental tokens, not tiny microcaps this time, but mid-cap AI tokens similar to the Alpha101 that had made him a fortune.

When this was done, he did a search for asset management firms that specialized in crypto. There were many in the USA, including in San Francisco, and others in London, Switzerland, and Germany. Several in Singapore and Hong Kong, and three in the Caymans. He called all three of the Caymans firms and got voicemail each time. Apparently they didn’t work on Saturdays down there. Too busy relaxing at the beach. He left messages explaining that he had earned a lot of money in crypto and needed guidance.

For a long time, he lost himself in these tasks, as he always did with crypto. Cryptocurrency fascinated him, and he never grew bored of it. The cats lounged at his feet, and occasionally he reached out to pet one. At some point, he realized he was hungry. He went inside and made a sandwich of sardines and tomatoes of all things – not something he would normally choose. He had no craving for chips or sweets. What had the Namer done to him? She could seriously be rich if she wanted.

His body needed more rest, so he returned to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

Shake the Earth

Zaid needed to confront Bandar Tzan’ani, but he wasn’t interested in assaulting the man’s fortified compound in south Fresno. Killing those three men yesterday had shaken him and left his soul as turbulent as a thunderstorm. He’d gone home, parked the car, and wept. They had not been the first men he’d killed, nor even the last since Panama. But taking a human life was an enormity that should quake the earth itself and make the heavens weep. It was not to be done and forgotten.

To make matters worse, he’d made no attempt to negotiate and delivered no warning. He’d cut the men down in cold blood. Tactically, it had been the sound choice. There really had been no other option, and one could say the men deserved it. Without a doubt, this had not been their first crime. Zaid wouldn’t be surprised if collectively, those three men had a river of blood on their hands.

But it didn’t matter. Who was he to say who deserved what? The experience left him feeling like an assassin.

Nevertheless, he had a job to do. He’d made some calls, and learned that Bandar had a certain ritual that he repeated every Saturday night. That was perfect, as it would allow Zaid to confront the man in a public setting, which would force them both to behave. Hopefully.

Zaid had two goals: one, he had to make it clear to Tzan’ani that Deek Saghir was off limits. Two, to take responsibility for the killing of Tzan’ani’s men. If the Yemeni king of liquor and dope was determined to pursue this conflict, then Zaid wanted to make himself the target of the man’s wrath, rather than Deek.

Saturday Night at the Movies

It was Saturday night, and Bandar Tzan’ani settled into a middle seat at the River Park Regal cinema. He always reserved his seat in advance, and he always reserved the seats on either side and directly in front, to make sure that he had plenty of private space and an unobstructed view. His hulking bodyguard was seated in the row behind him and a few seats over. Bandar had a large bucket of popcorn, a soda, and a box of red liquorice. His wife would not let him eat such things, but in this theater he was king.

The previews had just begun, and he was already smiling. He cherished these weekly movie excursions. In fact, he lived for them.

About a year ago, he’d begun experiencing pains in his abdomen. He had not gone to the doctor, as he was afraid of what they might say. He told himself it was stress. The only pleasure he had anymore was his Saturday night movie outing. He changed up the cinema regularly for security purposes, but he had to admit that the River Park Regency, with its huge screens and surrounding restaurants in the mall, got more attention than all the others.

Here at the movie house, he could forget the world for a solid three hours. And if it was an action movie or a western, so much the better.

Hollywood hardly ever made westerns anymore. Why was that? Bandar absolutely adored movies like Open Range, True Grit, Red Hill (though it was modern and Australian), Django Unchained (though not a true western), and above all, 3:10 To Yuma. Though, as for The Revenant, the director should be thrown off a high cliff for making that depressing abomination.

He’d thought about building a private cinema in his compound, but it wouldn’t be the same. He liked the excitement of seeing new releases, hearing people laugh or cheer, and the feeling of losing himself in the crowd.

So it was a bit of a downer, to say the least, when the movie had begun and the lights dimmed, and a lean young man with a scarred face and wearing a brimmed hat sat in the seat next to Bandar and casually planted the barrel of a gun in his side.

“How’s tricks, Bandar?” the man said. “Do you know who I am?”

***

[Part 9 will be published next week inshaAllah]

 

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

 

Related:

Kill the Courier |Part 1 – Hiding in Plain Sight

The Albatross and the Quran: A Short Story

 

The post Moonshot [Part 8] – The Namer’s House appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

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Cryptocurrency is Deek’s last chance to succeed in life, and he will not stop, no matter what.

Previous Chapters: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

“He who sows winds, reaps storms.” – Spanish proverb

“If you stare into an abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

On Alert

Zaid Karim pulled into the motel parking lot and parked in a dark corner. Rania had said that Deek bought a black Porsche, and there it was, parked in front of room 9, looking like a black diamond in a hayfield among the twenty or so dented sedans, aging Japanese cars, and dirty trucks in this lot. The lights in room 9 were still on, but the curtains were firmly closed. A white van with tinted windows idled in the center of the lot, dirty exhaust pouring from its tailpipe into the chill night air. That was suspicious, and it put his senses on alert. He decided to remain in place and monitor the van before making any move.

Kidnap

Manuel “Manny” Cesar wasn’t sure whether he believed in God or fate, but both were great when they put food on your plate. As it turned out, there was no need to lure the target, a man named Deek, out of the room, as the car thief exited room number 9 entirely on his own. Shujaa had given a description of the guy, and it matched exactly. He was built like Oscar, tall and overweight, but with a mass of curly hair and a short beard. He carried the car keys in one hand.

Manny gunned the van and pulled up next to the Porsche. Oscar leaped out and shot Deek with a high-voltage, military-grade taser. The big man crashed to the ground like a tree, and Manny and his vatos were on him like killer bees, dragging him by the knees, no time for wait or please. They hauled him into the van. The kid snatched the car keys, jumped in the Porsche, and peeled out. Manny was only a few seconds behind. The whole thing went down smoother than mantequilla on a hot tortilla.

They’d already laid out a tarp on the floor of the van to prevent bloodstains. As Manny drove, Oscar and Poison taped Deek’s hands, feet, and mouth, then proceeded to beat and kick him as they cursed, calling him a filthy Arab and a fat slob. The thief screamed in pain and terror, but the tape muffled his cries.

Pursuit

Zaid had hardly shut the engine off and settled back in the seat to study the scene, when the door to room 9 opened, and Deek walked out. Zaid opened his car door to get out, but immediately the white van sped forward, men poured out and tased Deek, then threw him into the van, which sped away. Zaid leaped out of the car with his gun drawn, but the whole thing happened so fast. He didn’t think the kidnappers had even seen him. He jumped back into the car and started in pursuit.

The van drove southeast, skirting the edge of the warehouse district. Zaid followed from a distance, not wanting to be spotted. At night, this area was all shuttered warehouses, dark train yards, and empty streets. He was afraid they might take Deek into one of the warehouses. Depending on the level of security, it could make it hard to help him. A moving target was always easier.

When the van turned west on Altura Street, Zaid saw his chance. Altura was a rutted road with a railroad crossing that had a steep incline. You couldn’t speed down this road, it was impossible. There was nothing around but a railroad yard on the left, and a milk factory on the right. A half mile down, Altura exited onto Amsterdam Street, an extremely dark street that ran under the freeway. There was nothing at all on that stretch of Amsterdam, just empty lots filled with illegally dumped trash.

There was a shortcut to get around Altura, which Zaid only knew about because he’d taken a case involving the abandoned milk factory that rose now on the right. Someone had been sabotaging the factory, shutting down production two or three times a week. The lady who owned it hired Zaid to find out who was responsible. It turned out to be the owner’s husband, who was VP of production. He was having an affair with his secretary, and wanted to drive his wife to despair so she would sell the factory. He would then divorce her, take half the money in the settlement, and move to Brazil with the secretary. All very cliched, and perhaps obvious to an outsider, but the wife hadn’t seen it coming.

The husband went to prison, and the wife did indeed sell the factory, but so far, the new owners had done nothing with it. It had been sitting idle for a year.

The factory was gated, but the security road that encircled it was not. On the other side of the factory, there was a short, unpaved road that led to Amsterdam Street. It was a longer route than Altura, but the security road was well paved. He could circle around and enter Altura from the other side, cutting the van off.

Zaid turned onto the security road and hit the accelerator. The tires squealed as he took the curve like a stock car racer. He circled the factory in record time, shot down the dirt road, and bumped out onto Amsterdam, which was deserted. He sped on the wrong side of Amsterdam for a hundred meters, then turned onto Altura.

Sure enough, here came the van, still working its way slowly around the potholes, heading right toward him. Zaid parked his car behind a telephone pole, stepped out onto the road, and drew his gun.

Fourth Degree

Manny cursed. It had been a stupid idea to turn onto Altura. He’d forgotten that it was under construction. He was just trying to get to that deserted stretch of Amsterdam, where they could dump this fat car thief amid the piles of old mattresses, broken washing machines, and rotting garbage.

They’d beaten the man badly. He lay on the tarpaulin, moaning, covered in blood. Served him right. Poison wanted to kill Deek, but Poison wanted to kill everyone. They hadn’t been hired to kill him. Just to send the message that if you messed with Mr. Z you got the fourth degree, and it wouldn’t be fun, son.

Manny was watching the road carefully, trying to steer around the potholes, and glanced up to see a man standing not twenty feet in front of the van, pointing a gun directly at him. The man was lean and muscular-looking, with black hair to his shoulders and a nasty scar on the upper part of his face. He wore jeans, black boots, a red and blue windbreaker, and a fedora, of all things.

“What the -”

Targets In the Dark

Zaid opened his eyes wide and narrowed his focus. The front seat of the van held a driver and a passenger. Behind them, there appeared to be a partition. Zaid sighted, and shot the driver through the windshield, then shot him again. The van careened off the road, narrowly missing him. As it passed, he fired quickly, barely aiming, not expecting to hit his target. Yet he did. He saw the passenger’s head jerk violently to the side as a bullet smashed through his skull. The van crashed into the security fence around the milk factory, then stalled, coming to a stop. Zaid dashed toward it.

Who Would Have Guessed?

Manny heard a flat, sharp sound. A small, neat hole appeared in the windshield, surrounded by emanating cracks. He felt like he’d been punched in the chest. He looked down and saw blood seeping through his shirt. The man had shot him in the chest, who would have guessed?

His first thought was that he’d known this would happen one day. He’d hurt a lot of people in his lifetime. His grandmother, Abuela Anita, used to say, “Quien siembra vientos, recoge tempestades.” He who sows winds, reaps storms. The evil you put into the world always came back to you. He’d convinced himself that he wasn’t an evil man, but his heart knew better. If only he’d listened to it.

This reminded him of Sunday mornings at Abuela’s table, when she made chilaquiles, tamales, huevos rancheros, atole, pan dulce, and coffee. All his surviving family – those who weren’t in prison or the grave – would gather around to feast, talk and laugh. He hadn’t been to Sunday breakfast lately, why was that? He’d been slippin’ and trippin’, and now he was done.

The next bullet entered his chest from the side, clipping the edge of the left atrium of the heart that Manny had refused to listen to. He had a sudden vision of his Tio Ramirez, who’d spent half a lifetime incarcerated at San Quentin before committing suicide. Manny had visited Ramirez a few months before he killed himself. Ramirez’s eyes were hollow and tired that day, full of pain and regret. Speaking on a phone from the other side of a glass partition, Ramirez quoted some philosopher named Nietsche: “If you stare into an abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you.”

As he died, Manny stared into the abyss, and the abyss stared back with wet black eyes that neither rhymed nor reasoned, but bored remorselessly into his soul.

A Universe of Pain

Deek drifted in a universe made entirely of pain. He didn’t know who these men were, but the two tattooed Mexicans who were with him in the rear of the van had been insulting and cursing him as they beat him, calling him car thief and other things. “Never mess with Mr. Z,” one of them said. Deek had no idea who that was. He would have told them that he was no car thief, that he paid for the car fair and square, but his mouth was taped shut.

His nose and mouth were full of blood, and he swallowed a mouthful of it so he wouldn’t choke. His jaw felt crooked, and the sides of his torso felt liquid and broken. Blood ran into one eye, stinging and blinding him, and he blinked rapidly, trying to clear it.

Patience is at the first blow, Imam Saleh had said. This thought ran through Deek’s head like a mantra as he mumbled, “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oon,” again and again.

The two men had quit beating him at least, and now sat on the side seat against the wall of the van.

He heard a sharp sound like a firecracker, then another, and he was thrown against the partition that separated the front seats from the rear cargo area. The two kidnappers were thrown to the floor as well, one of them landing atop Deek. The man they called Poison rose with a curse, drew a large handgun from his waistband and opened the rear door of the van. An instant later a gunshot rang out and Poison tumbled back into the van with a bullet hole in his forehead.

The man who’d been thrown atop Deek – Oscar – shouted, “Chingada!” and scrambled to his feet. Yanking Deek to a sitting position, Oscar kneeled behind him and put a knife to his throat.

Showdown

A moment later a man wearing a brown fedora stepped into the van, gun in hand. Even with all his pain, Deek grinned, making the tape pull against the corners of his mouth. Tears sprung to his eyes as he wept with relief. It was Zaid Karim Al-Husayni. The man, the hero, the legend.

Because of his indirect familial relationship to the Palestinian-American private investigator, Deek knew more than most people about the dangers Zaid had faced and overcome. The man was a juggernaut, a one-man avalanche. As a youth he’d robbed banks all up and down California, spent six years in a maximum security federal penitentiary, been pardoned by the president of the USA after he saved a woman’s life in a prison riot, had survived innumerable assaults in the course of his job, and had killed a Panamanian drug kingpin in hand-to-hand combat. All that and more.

Deek didn’t know how Zaid had known of his predicament, or how he’d found him, but thank God. Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah. Patience was at the first blow! If you showed sabr, Allah would make a way.

Death was written in Zaid’s eyes as plain as a newspaper headline, and Oscar must have seen it, because panic infused the kidnapper’s voice as he shouted, “Stop! Drop your gun or I’ll cut this pendejo’s throat!”

Far from dropping the gun, Zaid raised it and sighted on the kidnapper’s head. “You kill him,” he said grimly, “and it will be the last thing you ever do in this world.”

“We work for Bandar Tzan’ani! You can’t mess with him.”

Deek saw the flash of recognition in Zaid’s eyes. But the legendary P.I. was as focused as a laser beam. He breathed slowly and deeply. His knees were slightly bent, his shoulders relaxed. He looked like a lion about to pounce.

“We can make a deal!” Oscar shouted as he kneeled behind Deek, hiding his face behind Deek’s head. “I let him go, you let me go.”

“I’ll make a different deal,” Zaid replied calmly. “What do you say, Deek?” He winked at Deek, and Deek thought he understood.

Deek winked back. An instant later he flung his head backward, smashing the back of his skull into the kidnapper’s nose. Oscar dropped the knife as his hands flew out in shock. Deek pitched himself sideways. Two shots rang out as Zaid put one bullet in Oscar’s face, and another in his chest.

“I shoot you and you die,” Zaid said, holstering his gun. “That’s the deal.”

Death Is Good Enough

Zaid cut Deek’s bonds and removed the tape from his mouth.

“The man of the hour!” Deek shouted, or tried to. The pain in his jaw was terrible, and he winced as he gripped it.

“Are there any more of them?” Zaid asked seriously. “Another car?”

Deek climbed slowly to his feet. Even with all his injuries, and with the coppery taste of blood still coating his mouth, he felt exhilarated. He and Zaid had shown these guys what was what! What a rush! “No,” he mumbled, for his jaw would not work properly. “Just this piece of garbage.” He punctuated the last word with a kick to the dead kidnapper’s face, but the movement caused a massive wave of pain in his side, and he groaned.

“Come on,” Zaid said, taking him by the arm. “Death is good enough. They are facing worse trials now than what we can give them.”

Oscar had confiscated Deek’s phone when they kidnapped him. He needed that back, as it held his crypto wallets and the protected file with the secret keys. He shook off Zaid’s arm, went through the dead man’s pockets and found the phone.

The Namer

Deek didn’t realize that Oscar had cut him until Zaid pressed a cloth against the side of his neck and said, “Keep pressure on this.” The hard-bitten detective put an arm around Deek and helped him to Zaid’s car. The pain of Deek’s wounds, especially his jaw and hand, filled his eyes with tears, and he watched blearily as Zaid shut the van’s doors, opened the gas cap, stuffed a rag into the fuel neck, and lit it. Zaid then hurried to the car, and they took off.

In the movies people always set something to blow then depart coolly, not looking back. But Deek was not that cool. He turned his head just in time to see the van jump into the air as it exploded in a fireball.

“I need to go to the hospital,” he tried to say, but the words sounded more like a moan than anything intelligible. The wave of energy he’d felt when Zaid had freed him was receding, leaving behind a glittering shoreline of pain.

“Don’t try to talk. I think your jaw is dislocated. I could try to reset it but I’m not experienced at that, so I’ll leave it to the Namer. Your nose is definitely broken as well.”

“Hospital,” Deek moaned.

“Can’t take you to the hospital. I just killed three men. In defense of my life and yours, but you never know how the cops will see it. Trust me, the Namer will take good care of you.”

Deek didn’t understand what Zaid was saying. The what? The Namer? He sat back in the seat, still pressing the cloth to his neck, and closed his eyes. Rain was falling again, and the rhythmic snick-snick of the wipers snagged at Deek’s mind and eased him into another state of consciousness. The pain of his wounds blissfully receded.

Human After All

He found himself remembering a night from when he was twelve years old. He was in the car with his parents and Lubna, returning from eating at the Old Spaghetti Factory. It was raining, and the wipers were on, and Baba began to sing a traditional Iraqi song called Hayatna, matching it to the rhythm of the wipers.

Mama joined in, and Lubna as well, but Deek refused to sing. He was too cool for that, and he cared more about American rock music than old Iraqi ballads. He mocked Lubna, telling her she sang like a crow.

Why had he been such a horrible punk? No wonder she hated him. He’d been nothing but a bully to her growing up.

What if he bled to death right here in this car seat? He would never get a chance to tell Lubna how sorry he was, and that she was actually a great singer, and that he had only been jealous at how much closer to their parents she was back then.

He snapped out of the reverie. The full intensity of his wounds hit him like another booted kick. He felt in his pockets for his phone, and took it out. The screen was cracked, but alhamdulillah it still worked.

He called Lubna. As it began to ring, Zaid snatched the phone away.

“I told you not to talk. Calling your family right now is not a good idea. You’ll scare them. You’re not dying. The cut on your neck is superficial. If it had been a little deeper you’d be dead now, but you were fortunate, alhamdulillah. We’ll get you patched up, I promise.”

Deek nodded and sank into the seat. Glancing at Zaid, he noticed that the detective’s arms were trembling on the steering wheel, and the man’s face was as pale as a high moon. What was wrong with him? As his mind slipped into darkness, it dawned on Deek that maybe the rescue had not been as easy for Zaid as it had seemed. Maybe he’d been frightened, or maybe the act of killing had shaken him up. Maybe Zaid, in spite of all the legends and stories about him, was human after all.

***

[Part 8 will be published next week inshaAllah]

 

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

 

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Trust Fund And A Yellow Lamborghini: A Short Story

As Light As Birdsong: A Ramadan Story

The post Moonshot [Part 7] – The Abyss Stares Back appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

The Madleen, en route to Gaza

Last week I heard the introduction to a BBC debate on whether war crimes are taking place in Gaza, featuring Today presenter Anna Foster and a panel of “expert guests”. She introduced it by saying that the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had changed his view, having defended the campaign until recently, and stating his opinion that Israel had perpetrated war crimes in Gaza in an article for Haaretz. I switched off after a few minutes, having heard Foster’s lecture on why we shouldn’t call it genocide:

The decision of whether someone is guilty of war crimes will always be made in a court, not a radio studio; words like ‘genocide’ are a legal definition of a specific crime, rather than an emotive description of events that upset us, the latter use — incorrect until a judge decides — is increasing. 

I will concede that spurious accusations of genocide happen; we hear it used to refer to actual examples of oppression, such as by Israelis of Palestinians before the actual genocide began, and by racists, such as those who claim “race-mixing is genocide” or that a “white genocide” is taking place in South Africa right now. However, the use of ‘genocide’ to refer to Israel’s actions are not a mere emotional reaction and nor have they increased recently. Rather, they increased when genocidal actions accompanied by genocidal rhetoric started being relayed to us by Palestinian witnesses in Gaza from October 2023 onwards. I have previously heard someone on the radio tell us we mustn’t use the term ‘genocide’ because the matter is before the International Criminal Court and we might prejudice the outcome! This completely overlooks the point of why there is an anti-genocide movement at all: people want it stopped. They want action.

First, it’s not illegal to talk about genocide in regard to Israel’s onslaught against the people of Gaza. It’s illegal in the UK to cover a situation that is the subject of active proceedings in a British court which is going to be tried by a jury in a way that might prejudice or unduly influence it (e.g. disclose information or claims about a victim or a witness). This is not the case with matters which will be heard by judges only, such as civil cases or appeals, and it is not the case when the matter is not being heard by a British court, jury or no jury. The ICC is an international court, located in the Netherlands, so it is in no sense a British court, and does not use juries. Second, any word for a crime is a legal term, and when a crime is discovered — say, a body is found of someone who was obviously killed by someone else — words like murder are freely used. For example, after the killing of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in London in 1992, headlines called it murder and one headline read “Boy found clinging to sex murder mum”. After an innocent man was accused of the crime and acquitted after it turned out that a ‘confession’ was made to impress a ‘girlfriend’ who turned out to be an undercover police officer, it was later traced to a serial rapist and double murderer from south-east London, Robert Napper, who pled guilty to manslaughter and was sent to Broadmoor.

Third, and most importantly, the standard of evidence required to act to prevent or stop a crime taking place is much less than what is required to convict someone of a crime and send them to prison or the gallows. You cannot try people for anything without taking such action; you cannot put a concentration camp guard on trial for torture, murder, genocide or whatever while he is still in post. This applies to ordinary people as well as to the state. When the police are made aware of a household or institution in which children are being abused, they raid the house to rescue the children. They do not wait until an individual is proven guilty. If two strong men are walking together and discover a man raping a woman, they disturb the man and if he does not run away, they pull him off. They do not have a debate about it or go and try to convince a panel of experts that what they were seeing really was rape; by that time, the woman might be dead. When atrocities were being clearly reported from the war in the former Yugoslavia, military action was demanded and (albeit three years late) delivered; we did not wait for anyone to be convicted or for a court to rule on what legal terms applied. It took many more years for that to happen.

History shows that genocides only stop when they are stopped. The Holocaust stopped when Nazi Germany was occupied by the victorious allied powers and the concentration camps liberated; the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda stopped when the Rwandan Patriotic Front occupied the country and forced the Interahamwe out. When the genocidal campaign of the Bosnian Serbs (the Chetniks) was raging in the early 1990s, western radio talk shows and newspaper letters pages were full of calls for military action — the deployment of troops and use of bombs — to stop it; today, the campaign has for much of the last two years been too timid, too afraid of being arrested for “supporting terrorism” or accusations of antisemitism (and also, after the wars of 20 years ago, distrustful of western military intervention) to demand anything more than a ceasefire, or at most the cessation of arms supply and for their governments to take a “tough stance” on Israel. 

But it’s soul-destroying to regularly see footage of atrocities on social media and then hear both radio presenters and politicians falling over themselves not to offend the perpetrators or their supporters by calling this what it is, to insist that Israel, a reprobate state with a human rights record far worse than many third-world dictatorships, “has a right to defend itself” from an internal rebellion from natives it has incarcerated and oppressed in numerous ways for the past half century. Last month when our politicians started to concede that our government’s close relationship with Israel might be too much of an embarrassment to continue with, David Lammy’s speech did not mention the words crime, atrocity or genocide once and was laden with appeals to his own support for Israel, his condemnation of Hamas, his desire for “a strong friendship with you based on shared values, with flourishing ties between our people and societies”, Britain’s bilateral relationship with Israel and a whole lot of other cant aimed at Israel’s “better nature” and its presumed concern for “the image of the state of Israel in the eyes of the world”. (Let’s not forget, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Labour party in the 2019 election, when a senior female Labour politician was asked if she considered it antisemitic to even talk of Israeli atrocities, she hurriedly agreed that it was.)

Yet, the censorship continues in the mainstream media; we continue to watch our friends and their children being murdered in plain view while the media debate whether crimes are even taking place (and cutting off people who say they are) and politicians continue to placate both Israel and its apologists in London and New York. Enough. It is absurd to talk of waiting for the ICC to rule before we can call it genocide. It is like waiting for the outcome of the Nuremberg Trials before Auschwitz has even been liberated, and those who silence and censor talk of genocide are collaborators, and we must entertain the possibility that they are willing collaborators.

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