Hellblazer 1 - War Lord Read Online Free Page A

Zainab.”
    “I know you borrowed it, but—”
    “This is . . . it belongs to a friend of mine. And it is quite fragile; things are mostly broken in it and I don’t want to make it worse. Do not touch anything. Not anything.”
    “Yes, Uncle . . . did your friend loan you that cellphone? You never had a cellphone—”
    “Yes!” Sabbah interrupted. “Yes, he loaned it to me. Be quiet now!”
    They stopped at a corner where a traffic policeman held up a sign. A group of women in scarves and long dresses passed together in front of the car, going to their left, and Zainab turned her head to watch them, admiring their scarves, and that’s when—out of the corners of her eyes—she seemed to see a man sitting very quietly in the backseat of the car, beside Ali.
    Startled, she turned to look—but he was gone. It must have been a reflection in the back window, she decided.
    Sabbah let out a long breath and looked at his watch.
    “Does the zoo close soon?” Ali asked, leaning forward anxiously. “You are looking at your watch.”
    “No, no, it does not close soon,” Sabbah murmured, chewing his lip.
    He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, shook it, lipped one out of the pack, reached toward the car’s cigarette lighter—then froze, staring at it. Slowly, he drew his hand back. He took the cigarette from his mouth and tried to tamp it back into the pack, but his hands were shaking and it wouldn’t go in straight; it crimped up, until finally he threw it into the street.
    The traffic policeman waved them through, and they went on, approaching the Tigris. Zainab remembered a story she had heard one of her father’s friends tell, of how American soldiers had taken a car from some young Iraqi men traveling through the city, and how they’d made the young men jump into the Tigris, and one of them had drowned; and a week later an American military truck had gone into the Trigris, off a bridge, and trapped men had shouted for help as the truck settled, but the people on the bank, remembering the young men forced to jump into the Tigris, simply watched the soldiers drown.
    She became aware of something strange: her heart was beating loudly in her chest, though she was just sitting there quietly. It was as if her heart sensed something that she couldn’t see.
    “He is not Iraqi, really,” said a voice she did not know. She turned and glimpsed the man in the backseat again. He was a white-bearded man, who looked rather like her father, but he wore a robe, and he had faded blue eyes and a nose almost as prominent as the beak of a bird. The car moved through an intersection and the light shifted as they drove from a shadowy block onto a brightly lit one, and the man vanished when sunlight glanced through the window.
    “What’s the matter, Zainab?” Ali asked, almost laughing at her expression.
    She turned back, her heart thudding. She heard the man’s voice again, soft and low pitched. “He comes from the Jordanian side of the family, and he has been in Pakistan until recently. He came here with a Pakistani company to work. And why?” She looked in the backseat again and saw the old man’s eyes, floating against the rear window, then they were gone. “Why?” asked the voice again. She turned sharply to the front of the car. She’d been ill with a fever a few days before. She must still have something, giving her delirium, she decided.
    Her heart jumped like a frightened animal as the strange tinny song came again from Sabbah’s coat.
    Sabbah chewed his lip, and looked at his watch, and reached for the cellphone.
    ~
    As Private Paul Gatewood walked up, Lance Corporal Binsdale and Specialist Vintara were standing together on the overpass, their assault rifles in hand, watching as the driver of the supplies truck, an Arab guy subcontracted by Halliburton, tinkered with the engine. Gatewood stood with them, looking at the Arab. The man wore glasses and a turban; he tugged at his clipped white beard as he