TOE-FAT COUNTRYSIDE: Session Eight

When Jim and Taylor left the Abu-Ghraib prison complex, they had a message waiting for them: there's another Khawla sitting in a Baghdad police station. The two sped off to snatch her up before, in their case officer's words, it "ends up on the front page of Al-Jazeera."

The police officer raised an eyebrow upon seeing Jim exit the car in his nice suit. Then his second eyebrow rose to match it once Taylor stepped out in tactical khakis and a baseball cap. An outfit practically screaming "I'm not CIA, I swear." Assuming the Americans were dumb monoglots, the cops frantically discussed what the hell they were going to do about them. Until Jim asked in perfect Arabic, "We'd like to see Khawla." One of the cops dropped the tea tray he was carrying in surprise. Another asked his boss whether they could or should turn her over. The captain shrugged. 

    "The Americans want to take this issue off our hands? We should let them. I thought they'd stopped doing that."

After confirming it was Khawla, the Agents signed her out of police custody and walked her to their car. She was dressed in more conservative garb than Khawla was known to wear, and the two tried to ignore the name-tag around her neck proclaiming her to be a professor of medical studies. After calming her down, Jim and Taylor were able to learn that just after Khawla felt Ali snap her hyoid bone, she woke up in the trunk of Kamal's car listening to him rant about how he'd saved her, and how he'd shown "that bitch" who got him kicked out of university. This was when it really set in that her existence meant that someone else had effectively died.

    "This is all my fault, he did this for me," Khawla mumbled.

    "Nuh uh," Taylor said, "he did this for himself. That's how these guys work. You're the victim here, not him." Die Young by Kesha came on the radio and Taylor quickly changed the channel. "Do you have any idea where he might be?"

    "I don't know him very well. He just stalked me for a semester and I woke up in his car!"

    "Yeah, and then you kicked him in the balls," Taylor said, extending his hand for a fist bump. 

    "We have reason to think that there's someone else involved, manipulating him," Jim said from the back seat. "Any idea of who that could be?"

    "Oh, that's obvious. There was this Iranian guy. He was obsessed. Hung off him like Mohamed. Called him Ostad Shabab, I think. I didn't know him well either, but most of his students would cheer if they heard he was dead."

After dropping Khawla off at the American safehouse, Jim and Taylor headed to a property Kamal had inherited. The place was a mess, littered with fast-food wrappers and smelling like a cross between a witch's cauldron and a surgery wing. Taylor found a lab notebook and two vials of faintly glowing orange liquid in a secure carrying case. They skimmed the notebook, confirming their suspicions that Kamal was using some medical dark magic to turn living people into Khawla Rahim, essentially killing them. They decided to split up. Jim would check out the Iranians who were attending the conference were staying at, while Taylor would check a residence known to belong to Ostad Shabab. 

With a few well placed bribes to the hotel staff, Jim determined that Shabab had booked a room, but never actually shown up. He also checked the room belonging to the professor responsible for Kamal's initial expulsion. The door had been kicked in, and there were signs of a struggle inside. Unfortunately, there was no sign of Kamal or where he could be, so Jim ducked out the back entrance of the hotel and hailed a cab. 

Meanwhile, Taylor pulled up outside Shabab's appartment complex. He strapped on his plate carrier and NVGs, and clipped his rifle to a sling, ready to do battle with god knows what. A few kids poked their heads out of their doors to see what the strange man was doing, only to be yanked inside by their parents. Taylor carefully climbed the stairs, sweeping every angle, before kicking in Shabab's door and tossing in a flashbang. Nothing happened. The apartment appeared to be completely deserted. The only items of interest were a bronze disk and a book on a lectern. Taylor stuffed the book in his pack and wheeled out the disk, cursing as he lifted it into the bed of his truck and strapped it down.

The case officer called the Agents to tell them that a SIGINT intercept had just dropped a lead in their metaphorical lap: someone had just kidnapped a teenage girl outside of soccer practice, towards the outskirts of the city. Taylor got to the crime scene first. The visual description matched Kamal, as did the MO: forcing the girl at gunpoint into his trunk. The cops told Taylor that witnesses reported seeing a second man in the back of the vehicle, and that the car was headed towards the outer belts. Taylor got back in his car and drove off. The only thing in that direction was the Iranian border. Kamal and his mentor were obviously trying to make a break for it.

While in the back of a speeding taxi, Jim got a call from the case officer. Khawla couldn't remember Kamal's number, but it was still blocked in her phone. With the power of GPS triangulation and signals intelligence, they could call his phone and remotely activate it to track it. Jim gave the go-ahead, telling his taxi driver he had a new destination in mind. With every bill passed over from the back seat, the speedometer jerked up by five miles. 

Unsurprisingly, Taylor got there first. Kamal was stuck at a checkpoint. Taylor pulled his truck to a stop a safe distance away, and climbed out of the car. He could hear the Iraqis telling Kamal to step out of the car. Then the distinctive chatter of fully automatic fire cut through the quiet of the night. One of the border guards collapsed, the others sprinting for cover. Not wanting to risk anything, Taylor took a second to aim before firing a 40 mm grenade from an underslung launcher. Kamal was obliterated, and one of the Iraqis almost got his head taken off by a flying car door. Taylor squinted at the wreckage. There was a twitch of motion in the driver's seat. Another grenade.

Satisfied that he had dispatched the two "wizards," Taylor rushed forward, shouting that he was an American. With the Iraqis' help, he pulled a mangled, but still living, body out of the trunk. He was too late. Even with all the blood and shrapnel, this was clearly another Khawla, and not the young girl who had just been playing soccer an hour ago.

Jim arrived a few minutes later. He drove his fellow Agent and Khawla 5.0 back to the safehouse. Using the bronze disk as a makeshift surgery table, Taylor was able to save Khawla's life. Then, thanks to the trauma bonding rules, he later married her and broke off the engagement with his current fiancé.