The Believer

by Joakim Zander

  She widens the opening in the bag to see it better. It’s a Kalashnikov. Also old and scuffed, with a worn, wooden butt and bent magazine.

  Her head is spinning. What are these weapons doing here, in their room, in her room? What is Fadi up to? What has he turned into?

  She sinks down onto the floor now, her head on the bed, and she feels the tears finally come, there’s no way to hold them back any longer. She cries for Fadi. For the rifle in the bed, the cat on the lamppost, for every blow dealt inside these walls. Cries because she and Fadi were never good enough, so escape was all they had. But most of all she cries because she abandoned him, because she betrayed him. Because she didn’t take him with her, away from this.

  She allows herself to sink into self-pity and regret, allows herself to wish the story were different, that she were different. But when she opens her eyes, the room is the same. She is the same. She can’t change the story.

  Gently, she gets to her feet and picks up the rifle.

  This ends now, she thinks. This ends here.

  The rifle feels surprisingly good on her shoulder, and she wraps her hand around the handle.

  “Fadi,” she whispers quietly. “No matter what you’re mixed up with, no matter what happens, I will find you.”

  23. LONDON—WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2015

  KLARA WALKS INTO the Library a little after seven, straight from the office. The place is buzzing and murmuring against the background of an unsteady beat from invisible speakers. Pete stands behind the bar, flirting with a girl with long, brown legs and an even longer, thick red braid. She bends her head back and laughs at something Pete says, but he excuses himself and waves to Klara instead.

  “Hey, Pete,” she says, leaning over the counter, both so he’ll hear her, but also because it gives her some kind of superficial satisfaction to see the braid struggle to keep from glancing at her.

  Pete leans over the bar, and Klara kisses him lightly on the cheek. The braid makes a point of turning away and slurps her beer.

  “What was that for?” Pete says.

  “Because you found the computer,” Klara says. “Where was it?”

  Pete holds up a bottle of red and looks questioningly at her, but she shakes her head.

  “Chardonnay,” she says.

  Pete bends down under the bar and takes out a bottle of white wine. He fills her glass almost to the brim.

  “You obviously left it hanging there on the side,” Pete says and gestures toward the bar’s short side.

  She walks over to where he pointed, and sure enough there are hooks there for hanging jackets hidden under the protruding bar.

  “I didn’t hang it there,” she says when she returns to Pete again.

  She takes a sip of wine, and immediately things feel easier, the world opens up slightly, releasing some of its claustrophobic pressure. Pete shrugs and smiles at her.

  “Maybe some customer hung it there after you left? Who knows?”

  She looks at him, at his tousled blond hair, his sinewy muscles under his green tank top, his laid-back surfer attitude, and his whole fucking leisurely, positive way of being. It makes her want to throw her wine in his face, but she gets a hold of herself and takes a deep sip instead.

  “Did you find it?” she says.

  “Nah, a customer found it and turned it in.”

  She puts the glass down and bends over the counter, catches his eyes.

  “A customer turned it in?” she says incredulously. “Who?”

  Pete shrugs again and smiles, puts his head to the side, taking a sip of the kale smoothie he’s always sipping on behind the bar.

  “How should I know? Somebody. Not a regular.”

  She takes calming breaths and another big gulp of wine. Like a child, she thinks. He’s like a fucking child, and she’s filled with disgust at the thought that they actually had sex, or anything resembling sex, several times in the past month. How old is he? Twenty-two?

  “What did he look like?” she says. “Do you think you could try to remember, do you think you’re capable of that, Pete?”

  Pete holds his hands up and takes a theatrical step backward.

  “Hey, hey! Is this an interrogation? I’m not the one who drank my computer away, right?”

  He sucks on his stupid smoothie again.

  “What did he look like, Pete?”

  Now he really seems to be thinking, glances up at the ceiling and nods quietly.

  “A little nerdy. Like a heavy metal geek, you know?” he says. “Skinny, kinda scrawny? Pale. T-shirt with a monster on it or some bollocks like that. Jeans. And wait . . .”

  He closes his eyes and seems to really search his memory.

  “He had a tattoo on his hand,” he says at last. “Text, not that unusual. You know, like old typewriter text?”

  “OK, OK,” she says impatiently. “But what did it say?”

  “Just two words. Remember, remember and then three dots after that, like it was supposed to continue, you know?”

  She freezes and sits down on the barstool. The hair on her arms rises. The dream she had last night. The shadow, the silhouette, arms pulling at her. Those fleeting images that she tries to hold on to. That rough voice whispering in her ear while she’s lying on the ground in the alley, close to losing consciousness.

  Pete leans toward her again.

  “Is everything all right?” he says.

  She shakes her head to rid herself of a terrible feeling of helplessness that suddenly runs through her. Then she gets up, takes the computer bag from the bar, hangs it over her shoulder.

  Remember, remember, the fifth of November.

  Someone whispered it as they pulled the computer from her arms.

  “See you later?” Pete says.

  She takes the wine from the bar and swallows the last of it, before turning toward the door.

  “No, Pete,” she says over her shoulder. “You won’t.”

  Outside the bar she avoids the alley and presses the computer more tightly to her chest. On Shoreditch High Street, she goes into Tesco and buys a bottle of Australian Chardonnay and a new mobile phone with a prepaid card. While she pays, she quietly rattles off a phone number she never wrote down, just memorized. She’d hoped to avoid having to call Blitzie for much longer than this—they’d agreed to be in touch only in the case of an emergency. But if anyone understands cryptic messages and missing computers, it’s her. And this is definitely starting to resemble an emergency.

  24. TURKEY—FEBRUARY–MARCH 2015

  THEY’RE SPRAYING SOMETHING on the wings in the pitch darkness outside the little round window, and I guess that’s what the captain or whoever was just on the intercom was talking about. The water bounces and sputters against the metal, and I silently recite verses from the Qur’an that I memorized with brother al-Amin, praying with all my heart that this is normal.

  The only other time I’ve been on a plane is when we moved to Sweden fifteen years ago, but I don’t remember that. I only remember that it was dark then too, that I felt cold in the bus on the way from the airport, and that you were sitting next to me. You took my hand and smiled. Sweden smelled like diesel and newly waxed floors, and I was so relieved that you were with me, even if it was so quiet and dark that I thought I’d died.

  That memory overcomes me now. It crowds out everything else, that memory. It pushes out yesterday, my hands around his neck, her howling, my feet walking out the door. It replaces my memorized Arabic phrases and my dream of the Caliphate. It pushes out Bergort and my brothers. It drives away God.

  I close my eyes as we accelerate and take off from the frozen tarmac, and I don’t open them until I’m sitting in the backseat of a taxi in Istanbul next to a small, round man in a gray shirt with a long beard who calls himself Ali—and the whole world slows down, stops, and starts over. I lean back against the vinyl seat and look out through the dirty windows at all the small dusty cars. Somewhere behind the Turkish pop streaming out of the taxi’s cracked speake
rs, I hear the muezzin. Only then do I make the switch from our past to my future. Only then do I let go of you and fall headlong into my own destiny.

  How long am I in Istanbul? Long enough to stop counting days and learn where Ali’s wife buys their tomatoes and eggplant. Long enough that I no longer feel wide-eyed and frightened like a child caught in traffic or among the raised voices in cafés; long enough for my Arabic to improve enough so that I can discern outlines of what Ali and his family talk about around the table. Every day I ask if we should go soon. Every day Ali responds in the same way.

  “Bukra, inshallah —Tomorrow, God willing.”

  I help Ali with his job delivering boxes of what appear to be office supplies across this endless, winding city and pray in his mosque, where men hold my hands hard and tell me the favor Allah has granted me by giving me the opportunity to die for my beliefs.

  And then one day, in the middle of a rainy spring, it’s tomorrow.

  A minibus picks me up one humid dawn. Ali wakes me up and holds the door open, while his wife presses into my hand a paper sack filled with hard plastic boxes of cold chicken, tabbouleh, and hummus. I’m on my way before I even have time to open my eyes.

  When I finally do, I realize I’m not alone on this bus, there are five of us around the same age scattered among the seats. I look at them and see myself. We are five young men from different parts of Europe, but we all have the same studied indifference in our eyes, the same memories of police batons and empty apartments. We shoplifted the same jeans, burned the same cars, dreamed the same dreams. We’re from different cities, but the same economically depressed suburb, the same Ort.

  It takes two full days to drive through Turkey, and we barely speak, still unsure of our Arabic, our common language. It’s late evening when one of the drivers turns to us, points through the window at the gray silhouettes of sandbags and Turkish military vehicles. I can feel my temples vibrating as he opens his mouth. For a second, I think I might throw up from the tension.

  “Al-Dawla,” he says. “The Caliphate. There, on the other side of those sandbags.”

  25. LONDON—THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2015

  IT’S STILL DARK outside when the ringing prepaid phone wakes her. She rolls over on her side, her mouth dry and bitter, and reaches for it. No number on the display. She grabs hold of the glass of water standing on the floor beside the bed and washes the aftertaste of wine from her mouth. Barely any headache, even though she drank two-thirds of a bottle last night. She takes a deep breath and looks at the ringing phone. Finally, she presses “answer.”

  “Two hundred euros,” she says into the phone.

  “Three hundred euros,” the metallic voice answers. This was the code they’d agreed on.

  Three hundred euros, the price Blitzie, a teenage hacker, had demanded in order to help her with another computer—which sometimes seems like an eternity ago and sometimes last week. The events of a year and a half ago had left Blitzie in charge of information that could topple governments and start revolutions.

  Afterward, they’d agreed to stay out of touch, to become invisible from each other, in order not to attract any attention from the powerful forces they’d stirred at the time. So Blitzie created a system that consisted of two anonymous email accounts. If one of them really needed to contact the other, you could email the number of a new prepaid phone. Then the other one could call you, also from a new prepaid phone. According to Blitzie it wasn’t 100 percent secure, but close enough.

  Klara feels stuck after the code is completed. Where to begin?

  “How . . . how are you?” she says at last.

  “Good,” Blitzie says. “But you didn’t get a hold of me to ask how I was doing, I hope?”

  Klara smiles at the memory of Blitzie’s complete lack of social skills.

  “No,” she says. “Something happened. Where are you?”

  “Come on.”

  “OK, OK.” She backs down. “Sorry.”

  “Go ahead. We can exchange small talk some other time. What happened?”

  She takes a deep breath.

  “Somebody stole my computer. Then they gave it back to me.”

  She hears Blitzie take a deep breath on the other end. She’s smoking a spliff, Klara thinks. Without a doubt.

  “You smoking?” she asks.

  It sounds like Blitzie giggles.

  “Fuck that now. So what? Someone stole your computer?”

  “The circumstances were suspicious. At first I thought I lost it.”

  “OK,” Blitzie says on an inhalation. “Have you been installing what you were supposed to on your computers?”

  Klara goes out into her darkened kitchen. It’s already hot, oppressively so, as if there’s a thunderstorm in the air. She sits at the kitchen table and opens her old computer.

  “Of course,” she says. “After what happened how could I be anything but paranoid?”

  “Paranoia is good,” Blitzie says. “It saves lives. Open the program. It should be hidden in your documents folder and not with your other programs. It looks like a spreadsheet program. Quarter Q3 2013. Can you find it?”

  Klara scrolls through the programs in the documents folder until she locates it. She double clicks on the program, and a spreadsheet opens on the screen, filled with incomprehensible number and letter combinations.

  “Double click cell G 17,” Blitzie instructs.

  Klara obeys and a dialog box appears. She inputs her access code and a small program opens in another window.

  “Then double click on Threat,” Blitzie says.

  A file name appears in the small search box.

  “Something that seems to be an .exe file comes up. There’s a date and time after that. What is that?”

  “It’s a fishing program and the time stamp of when it was installed. If it was during the period when the computer was gone, you can be pretty sure it was infected then. Unless you picked it up surfing porn.”

  Klara smiles, checks the date, August 17. She counts backward. Three days ago. That was when the computer was lost. She shudders. She wasn’t just drunk. It’s no longer possible to ignore the reality that someone actually stole her bag from her in order to access her computer.

  “Yep,” she says. “Somebody has installed something.”

  She takes a sip of water and finds an aspirin in a box next to the computer.

  “What did you get yourself mixed up with now?” Blitzie says.

  Her voice sounds thick—maybe from marijuana—but also genuinely worried.

  “I really don’t know,” Klara says. “I have no clue. Maybe nothing. I don’t know.”

  “How did it disappear?” Blitzie says on an inhalation. “You were mugged?”

  The blurred memory fragments run through Klara’s consciousness.

  “Yes,” she says. “Or, I think so anyway.”

  “You don’t know if you were mugged?”

  “I’d been drinking,” she says quietly. “I kind of blacked out. Lost consciousness. And then the computer was gone.”

  Blitzie is silent for a moment.

  “That doesn’t sound like you,” she says. “Not that I know you that well, but you seem a little too stiff to drink yourself into oblivion.”

  “A lot has happened since then,” Klara says quietly.

  “But why would anyone want your computer? Is it something you’re working on?”

  Klara takes a sip of water and gently massages her forehead.

  “I’m writing a report for the EU. With my boss. On privatization basically. It’s supposed to be a kind of foundation for the EU justice ministers to base their decisions on, but my part isn’t particularly controversial. And I haven’t even seen my boss’s part yet and don’t have any documents stored on my computer.”

  “You don’t think . . .” Blitzie begins. “You don’t think somebody’s looking for those documents that we . . . You know, from last year?”

  She falls silent. The same thing has occurred to Klara, b
ut she hadn’t wanted to admit it. What else could it be?

  “I don’t know,” she says quietly. “But I don’t have anything. You’re the only one who has access to those documents. That was the deal. And if they want to check my computer, couldn’t they have hacked it from outside?”

  “Maybe they’re clumsy?” Blitzie says. “Plus the program I gave you has a pretty hefty firewall built in. They might have tried to get into your computer from outside but didn’t succeed, so they had to install that shit manually instead. By the way, that program has a function you’re gonna like. Click on Location.”

  She obeys and a map of northern Europe opens up. There are dots marking what appears to be London, but also the Swedish east coast.

  “The program has a GPS tracker. You can enter a time, and it tells you where the computer was at that moment. It’s good for theft protection. But you can also check where the computer’s been while it was gone.”

  “Thank you,” Klara says. “At least now I know something really weird is going on.”

  “You seem to attract trouble. Hope it resolves itself. Be careful and contact me later, OK?”

  “Sure, I’ll take it easy. Wait! Don’t hang up. One more thing. Remember, remember, the fifth of November. Do you know what that means?”

  “V for Vendetta,” Blitzie says. “You know that movie about some futuristic Guy Fawkes? Patron saint of all hackers. Anonymous and some anarchists use it as a sort of motto. The Internet is full of people talking about the revolution. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” she says. “Just something I saw somewhere. I’ll be in touch, Blitzie.”

  A hacker slogan tattooed on the robber’s arm? What the hell is this all about?

  After Blitzie’s voice disappears, she feels completely alone. Despite the early morning heat, she’s freezing, crawls back into bed again, and pulls the covers over her. The headache slowly recedes as she clicks on Location in Blitzie’s programs. A map opens immediately and a red pin is dropped in west London. She zooms in as close as possible.