I was thinking about that visit with my brother back in 2000. Haroun had been older and more worldly, having served in the army with C Company when Operation Uphold Democracy got rid of the military regime in Haiti, and after 9/11 he reenlisted for two tours in Afghanistan. But during those in-between years he’d fallen into a funk. He’d had trouble finding work and spent his free time reading political news and growing cynical. The idea of a trip to Western Sahara had been mine, casually tossed out over drinks, but it had given him something to work toward. He took it and ran. “Look, Abdul—before you disappear into some hole at Harvard, you need to see the world.” I saw how energized the idea made him, and so I let him take control of the trip. He struck up conversations with strangers using our desert Arabic that, more often than not, earned us replies in English. To the cosmopolitan citizens of Rabat, I imagined, our slurred dialect made us sound like drug addicts. But that never slowed Haroun, and even after getting mugged and deciding to cut the trip short, not even having laid eyes on our ancestral homeland, he was already making plans for future trips.
My phone bleeped—Rashid was nexting me. Though I’d resisted, Laura had pushed for Rashid to have a phone. It was a way for her to always know where he was, which, in an age of school shootings, felt like a necessity. He wrote:
When are you getting home dad?
Soon, Monster. Late tomorrow or Friday. Everything ok?
Had a test. I was shook.
“Shook” was Rashid’s word for describing any little trauma at school.
Did you do well on it?
Ok.
I suddenly realized what time it was in DC.
Wait. You’re not allowed to use your phone in class!
Haha gotta go.
An hour before my connecting flight was scheduled to take off, over the speakers I heard the muezzin’s call to prayer. Most travelers, including the grizzled patriarch, stayed where they were, but a few men got up and followed signs to the prayer rooms. After a moment’s hesitation, I took my bag and joined them.
While that long-ago trip to Rabat had blunted my desire for adventure in the wider world, Haroun’s was only enhanced. He became a student of Africa and after returning from Afghanistan went to work for Global Partners, advising Western corporations on the potential benefits and downsides of investing in the region. He traveled extensively, writing reports and sending me emails full of passion and excitement, littered with photos of camels and locals, tourist shots all. He got to know so much of West Africa that even after I started with CIA I sometimes quizzed him about on-the-ground knowledge our files sometimes got wrong. Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia—he knew these hot spots like the back of his hand. And he was, in a way, the inverse of me. Where I needed silence and study to comprehend the world, he required noise and stink and human contact. Haroun was having the time of his life before it ended.
In August 2009, he was in Mauritania, working up an analysis of the feasibility of petroleum exploration in Taoudeni Basin, when he returned from the field to meet with his French clients. Nouakchott was one of his favorite capitals, an assessment I’d never understood. With Dakar to the south and Marrakesh to the north, why love a city so crushed by poverty that it couldn’t even keep its harbor in working condition? But he found things to love, even choosing to rent rooms from locals rather than hide away in the air-conditioned modernity of the Semiramis or Le Diplomate. So on that day he took a taxi from run-down Sebkha to reach the French embassy.
August 8 was a hot day, though I suppose he was used to it. Outside the embassy, I understand, there was only a little foot traffic. A couple of gendarmes out jogging, a few passersby, and a young man, a jihadi, in a traditional boubou robe that hid his suicide belt.
The gendarmes and one passerby were injured. Only the terrorist and my brother were killed. That was ten years ago, and when I thought of West Africa I still pictured Haroun outside the French embassy, under the hot Mauritanian sun. I suppose I always will.
Beside strangers in the prayer room of Mohammed V International, I bowed and prostrated myself before God and, for the first time in many years, prayed.
4
Unlike Casablanca’s international hub, Laayoune’s tiny Hassan I, from above, looked ready to be swallowed by the Sahara. Despite the long-ago name change from Spanish to Western Sahara, the Arabic sign over the passenger terminal also read AEROPUERTO DE EL AAIÚN. Beyond, the flat, hard desert and dusty sky were ominous, and I wondered again why I had been picked for this particular mission.
The late-afternoon heat outside the airport was stifling, but I soon found a free driver smoking against a beaten-up Peugeot with functioning air-conditioning. He seemed surprised when I spoke the Hassānīya my parents had always insisted we use at home. He asked a lot of questions, wondering if I was part of the UN peacekeeping force, but I deflected with questions of my own, asking where the best meat pies could be had, the best markets, and the best cafés—subjects taxi drivers the world over can’t help but elucidate on.
Outside the car, a desert wind was picking up, but the crowded salmon-pink buildings protected the streets from sand and sun. Locals filled the sidewalks, the colors of their robes touching something in my DNA. I felt a desire to call home and describe everything I saw to Rashid, to Laura. The feeling swelled so quickly that I even took out my phone before stopping myself. Paul had made clear that this wasn’t allowed at the destination. And besides, I thought as I pocketed the phone again, the separation was probably good for us. Laura and I weren’t trapped together in a small suburban house, walking on eggshells. We could breathe again, and perhaps with a couple of days’ reprieve we would remember again why we’d chosen this life together.
That charmed feeling evaporated inside the sand-colored Hotel Parador, where the lobby was full of dozing foreigners who gave me weary looks. The MINURSO peacekeepers had brought with them the regular assortment of diplomats and carpetbaggers, and it looked like most of them had taken up residence in the Parador. Cynics and small-timers all—I’d spent a lot of my career reading reports from people like these, for whom the world was so much smaller than it really was, and I found their petty braggadocio tedious. Most analysts I knew felt this way, which was inevitable, I suppose, given our illusion of grander knowledge.
The hot water only lasted half my shower, and after washing I ate an energy bar while examining a map of the city, charting a route to the address Sally and Mel had given me before Paul sent me off to my cubicle to absorb whatever was still legible in that decimated file.
“A simple interview,” they had told me. “Just the questions on the list.”
“And if he doesn’t want to talk?”
“Find out if it’s just us he doesn’t want to talk to, or if he’s locking out the whole world.”
So why not a phone call? Why not send these questions to someone already on location? Why send me, who had spent the last fourteen years behind a desk? Their answers had been equivocal, but the sad truth was the one I had suspected from the moment I first looked into their faces: They simply had no one else who could blend in as well as Abdul Ghali, their deskbound African.
I jumped at a knock at the door. “Na-rħam?” I called, folding the map.
“It’s Collins,” said an American voice.
Collins—yes, our local friend, very loosely attached to the UN mission. Paul had explained that Collins would set me up with anything I needed, which again raised the question: Why not just ask Collins to walk across town and do the interview? No one seemed to have a good answer for that.
I let in a balding man in knee-length shorts, tennis shoes, a Texas Tech baseball cap, and a dusty, sweat-stained jacket. We shook hands, and Collins looked around the room, sniffing. “Should’ve asked for a back-facing room. Gets noisy as hell here.”
“I won’t be here long enough for it to matter.”
Collins grinned in a way I didn’t like, then reached into the cargo pockets of his shorts. “We live in hope, ma
n.” He took out a flip phone and held it out to me. “My number’s the only one in it.” From his other pocket he took out a small semiautomatic pistol, checked the safety, and tossed it on the bed. “Colt 2000. Nine-millimeter, fifteen rounds. It’ll get you where you’re going.”
I stared at it. “What’s this for?”
“You’re going into the slums, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but I don’t … I mean, I’m not—”
“Look, kid. It’s there to make you feel better. You take that out, and whoever’s giving you trouble is going to think twice. I hope to hell you don’t pull the trigger—I don’t need that kind of paperwork. But take it. Okay?”
I nodded even though my brain was saying no. After a day of traveling in solitude, this sudden bluster was disconcerting, and the addition of a pistol made me think again of 2009, and my brother. It shouldn’t have—he’d died in another country and had only sung the praises of Laayoune—but it did. Maybe because we’d never been able to bury him ourselves. His body, we were told, lay on the outskirts of Bissau, in a cemetery only our father had had the heart to visit.
Still not touching the gun, I said, “You’re the one who found him?”
“No. And it doesn’t exactly reflect well on me that after two years in this dump I didn’t notice our little newcomer. I mean, him of all people. He apparently made a phone call to the States. Stupid slip.”
I wondered about that.
Collins furrowed his brow, eyeballing me. “Look, all you have to worry about is your twenty questions. Okay?”
“And you?”
“Me? Don’t worry about me.”
It wasn’t him I was worried about. “You’re not coming?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m coming. But you’re not going to see me. You see me, they see me. And we don’t want to scare anyone off. HQ’s been looking months for this bastard. Let’s not lose him.”
“But if I need—”
“That,” he said, pointing to the flip phone still in my hand. “You call, I come. No more than a minute or two. And unlike you, I don’t have a problem carrying.” To prove his point, he opened his sweat-stained jacket to reveal a shoulder holster and a worn pistol grip. Then he considered me a moment, judgment all over him, and said, “You don’t need to be scared, okay? Things they say about this guy? He probably made them up himself. His dad was KGB; making up shit is in his blood.”
“What do they say about him?”
Collins opened his mouth, then shut it. “How much are you read in on?”
“Not a lot. Ties to the Massive Brigade.”
“That’s it?”
I shrugged.
He cursed under his breath and stepped away, toward the windows, flexing his fists. “They send you here without…” He shook his head, unwilling to finish the sentence, then turned back to me. Made a smile that filled me with unease. “Maybe it’s better you don’t know. Why fuck with your nerves, right? Keep your calm.”
At no point during this conversation had I felt calm about anything, but now Collins had pushed it to the emotional equivalent of nails scratching a chalkboard. So I took a baby step closer, looked him square in the eyes, and said, “Collins, I need you to tell me exactly what the hell I’m walking into here.”
5
The sun was almost gone when I finally faced the busy evening streets. A few vendors approached, and in hard-edged Arabic I sent them away. My face and speech might have helped me blend in, but no one had given me a new set of clothes, so the best impression I gave was of a local boy who had grown rich in the West. And why else would I have returned but to spread the wealth? I was a magnet.
The western wind, coming off the Atlantic and pushing inland from Foum el-Oued across twenty-five miles of desert, had cleaned some of the dust from the air, and as I passed teahouses and fruit vendors I felt another urge to call home. At the very least, I could take the same kinds of tourist shots my brother had once taken, so that I could show them off to my family later. But no—if Collins, who I assumed was tailing me at a distance, saw me pulling out my phone, there was no telling what would happen.
I chose to walk the entire distance, about an hour’s stroll. I wasn’t worried about taxi drivers asking questions or collecting records of my time here; I simply wanted to breathe in the culture that I’d always held at arm’s length. I might have spoken my parents’ language at home, but as soon as I was out the front door I’d tried to become like my friends, a child of McDonald’s and MTV, of fads and convenience. To my younger self, American culture was superior simply because my friends knew of no other, and there was no way I was going to draw them into mine by dragging them home to our bi-level shrine to West Africa. My mother’s Daraa robes and dishes of goat meifrisa would only scare them.
Even as a child I was painfully aware of my limits.
Now I was in a land that I knew but did not know, and I pressed on, thinking of my destination.
“So you know about the Library,” Collins said, and when I shook my head I thought he was going to punch a hole in the hotel’s stucco wall. “Okay,” he said, calming himself. “Tell me they at least told you he works for the UN.”
My nod provoked a happy sigh.
“Small favors, right? Well, remember what I said—Weaver’s dad used to work for the Russians. But then the old man moved to the UN, where he created this thing called the Library. His thinking, we gather, was that the intelligence agencies of the first world countries have a monopoly on what is known and not known in the world. And we work together—us and Israel and the UK, Russia and China, all of us together—to filter and alter intelligence to suit our own ends. So he put together his own outfit, the Library, and hid it deep inside the United Nations. Inside UNESCO.”
I tried to picture it but couldn’t. “The UN can barely fund its central air-conditioning, much less an intelligence agency.”
Collins shrugged. “That part’s a mystery. But however they did it, it functioned. And when the old man died back in oh-eight, his boy took it over. Been running it ever since. And from all accounts it worked well, completely under the radar, until it was blown back in October. Same time he disappeared.”
“Blown?”
“Wide open,” Collins said.
“Then why haven’t I heard about it?”
Collins wagged a dirty fingernail at me. “Not to the plebes, man. That’s seventh-floor knowledge. Don’t know who uncovered it first, but soon everyone knew—us, the Europeans, the Chinese … hell, even the Iranians got word of it. And do you know why it was blown?”
I didn’t.
“The Library stopped collecting intelligence; it started creating intelligence. It became an agency of active measures. Liquidating people. Remember Lou Braxton?”
I did. Braxton had been a Silicon Valley darling, founder of Where4, Nexus’s only serious competitor in the encrypted communications sector, until a couple of years ago when he died on a Beijing–San Francisco flight. “He died of cardiac arrest,” I said.
“With a full gram of sodium fluoroacetate in his system.” Off my ignorant look, he said, “Compound 1080—it’s used to kill pests. The company kept that quiet, but it didn’t help. A year later Where4 was bankrupt.”
“The Library murdered him? Why?”
Collins asked. “Who’s to say? They’re global. You hear of Joseph Keller?”
“He’s in the questions. Number eight—explain the circumstances of his death.”
Collins looked disappointed. “That’s all? Well, he was a British accountant. Worked for the Russians—MirGaz. We heard he had a side-gig laundering money for the Massive Brigade, so we put out a Red Notice on him. Then in October, when everything was blowing up, Paris cops found him buried in a park out in the burbs. The Library killing off its weak link. That’s the theory.”
“Jesus.”
“They’re even connected to piracy.”
Though I felt stupid saying it, I couldn’t help but blurt, “Piracy? That make
s no sense.”
“Not to me either,” Collins said. “But all that? Someone was bound to notice. Us, the Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese. Everyone noticed. And everyone tried to take it down.”
“Did they succeed?”
“I suppose so—why else would the Library’s director be hiding out in this hellhole?”
“And the Massive Brigade?” I asked.
Collins opened his hands. “Weaver protected them in the past—that’s documented. Whatever you do, don’t underestimate him, okay? He’s hard as shit.”
There was no discernible change when I entered the slums of what Collins called a hellhole. The old Spanish architecture remained, and the dilapidated windows and shallow terraces and crumbling façades lining the narrow streets were just as they had been a few blocks back. But now there were more children running around columns and through alleys, slipping in and out of shadows, while others sat on steps and stared at me as I passed. It was unnerving, but when the fear crept up I thought of Haroun, who had for years traversed places far more ominous than this without anything more than a scratch. He hadn’t been killed by the greed of the world’s poor but by a blind religious fury that could have found him in Paris or London or New York.
I’ve always had a head for geography, and I reached the three-story walkup on Boulevard Al Hizam Al Kabir without a misstep. Like many other buildings I’d passed, it was dead looking, and I gazed up at the shuttered windows, thinking about the children around me, watching from a safe distance. I thought of Collins, watching from among them, and I thought of the uncomfortable gun in my waistband at the base of my back. And I thought that this truly was not part of my job description. I looked at data, and I interpreted it. I did not go searching for the data; that was what people like Collins were paid to do.
The Last Tourist Page 2