One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [81]
“Sure. I’m hungry.”
We practically ran to the first taco stand Jennifer could find, where I watched her suck down fish tacos like she was in some kind of competition. We finished in fifteen minutes, with Jennifer tapping her foot while I paid the bill. A little later, we found a tourist store with two ancient computers in the back. For the small price of twelve U.S. dollars per five minutes, we were allowed access. Sitting down, Jennifer went to the first e-mail account listed, at Yahoo.com. Putting in the password, we saw that the account was empty. Looking in the sent file, Jennifer saw one entry. She clicked on it, pulling it up.
“Look! It’s in Arabic! This account is used by the guys staying at Miguel’s.”
“Great. We already know they’re Arabs. All this proves is that they’re e-mailing their family to tell them what they bought as tourists.”
“Hang on, let me check the other accounts.”
She did so but found nothing else. Every other account was empty. Okay. Maybe she’ll let this go now.
She began typing on the computer, pulling up the Google search engine.
“What’re you doing now?”
“I’m going to try and translate the Arabic. I have to do this kind of research all the time at school. I’ve never translated anything before, but trust me, there’s a Web site that’ll tell us what this says.”
Jesus Christ. Stick a fork in it and call it done. “Come on. This is getting ridiculous.”
“Just a second. We paid for five minutes. Let’s use it.”
She found a dozen translation sites and clicked on the first one that came up. Copying the Arabic from the Yahoo! mail, she pasted it into the translation box, then clicked on the “GO” button. We sat and waited for the slow Internet connection to work. Eventually, it timed out. She went back to the Google search page and clicked on the next one, trying again. Before this one timed out, it presented the translation of the Arabic text.
Jennifer, clearly disappointed, said, “Looks like you’re right. A drunk must’ve sent this message. Let’s go.”
The pasted Arabic had turned into a translation in English, reading:
Praise be to Allah, peace and prayers be upon the Prophet of God. Trip took our rotary [for good]. We have sight to the enemy hits far in country his. We established weapon that the Zionist inside the searching will wipe the poison he causes the enemy far to the Persians destroy. In Allah’s name, the Merciful, the Compassionate, we will rejoice in the destruction from all [[‘iynfydls]], Hope responds with blessing to new task, or says us the path to takes.
I stared at the screen. I’ll be damned. She found something.
49
Jennifer said, “What? What’re you looking at?”
“We need to print this and the original Arabic. Don’t say anything else in here. We’ll talk back at the room.”
Jennifer was about to respond when I cut her off, looking at the woman manning the trinket counter. “Please, I know it sounds paranoid, but I’d rather do this somewhere else.”
She printed both pages and we left, returning to the hotel. Along the way, I told Jennifer what I thought.
“It looked like a drunk had written the passage because it’s a free Internet translation. Basically, it’s a cheap-ass computer giving you exactly what it sees. The point of those things is to get you to buy a better translation. It’s like you said, ‘Last one home is a rotten egg,’ and that was translated into Arabic as ‘The long dead dropping from the bird is owned by the man who has the last house.’ We don’t know what idioms they used that the computer doesn’t understand, but the direct translation says some things that support the fact that those guys are up to no good.”
“Really?” Jennifer looked at me in surprise. “What did you see?”
“Let’s get back to the hotel and I’ll show you.”
Twenty minutes later we sat at the cheap desk in our room, the translated printout in front of us. I pointed at what I had seen. “Look, ignoring the bad grammar, you find the following words: weapon, Zionist, Persians, destroy, and infidels.