The Girl in Green by Derek B. Miller

Author:Derek B. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC030000, FIC032000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2016-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

23

‘Who makes these?’Arwood asks, regarding the black hood on the floor. He’s sitting on the mattress and playing with it on the end of his foot.

‘What?’ Benton replies.

‘Who makes them?’ he repeats. ‘I’ve never seen one for sale in London, New York, Milan, or Cape Town. I’ve never looked in a shop window and seen one over the head of a mannequin. No Christmas sales at Bloomingdale’s. No pop-up ads on the Internet.’

‘I don’t know, Arwood.’

‘These are not repurposed items. They’re useless for anything other than covering or carrying heads. How do supply and demand find each other? And for real … how much do they cost?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Has anyone considered that if we simply raided the factories that make these and grabbed hold of their mailing lists, we’d probably have the entire global terrorist network by the balls? Even knowing where the orders have been placed, and for how many, would wrap up the entire intelligence game. Am I the only one who has this figured out?’

Adar starts to cry again. Benton looks at the fourteen-year-old child who is traumatised, isolated, and under continued stress. If she even survives this, he knows, she’ll never be the same, or whatever she might have otherwise been.

‘Is something wrong?’ Benton asks Jamal, in the hope it is something specific.

‘She knows one of them,’ says Jamal, who is still standing in the corner as though he’s ready to go at any time.

‘One of them was in the convoy attack?’ Arwood asks.

‘No. One of them is from Shaddad. South of al-Hasakah. West of here and near her village. It is Sunni. She says the village has a dark history. They have been treated very badly by the Shiites. Very bad. She does not know his name, but she knows his family. She says she has heard that the father was murdered by the Shabiha. This is Assad’s secret militia. His death squads. They are Alawite tribe. They are Shiite. They hate the Sunni. Adar is Sunni. So she runs away to Iraq to hide.’

Arwood pulls up his knees and leans back against the wall. ‘If he’s all disgruntled, he should be off killing government troops with the rebels. Not blowing up civilians in traffic or murdering cops. This doesn’t help us.’

‘No, no,’ Jamal says. ‘That’s not what happened. She said he came from a good family. Everyone knows their family. Mother is very nice. Boys are nice. But he became very angry. And then he met someone who explained that these people are heretics. They are infidels, and they are the reason the Muslim people are weak. She says that the boy is like all the others. No one wants to be weak anymore. They are tired of being weak. They want to return to a time when they were strong and united. They cannot stand the humiliation anymore. The West does not understand our humiliation.’

‘The fourteen-year-old said all this?’

‘No, I say all this.’

‘You’re not much of a translator,’ Arwood says.

‘I am a driver.’

‘And

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