A World I Never Made

by James Lepore

  “Did he mention anything specific about Megan Nolan or her father?” This question came from the bad cop, André Orlofsky, Dionne’s superior. Small, wiry, his eyes unreadable, his voice carrying a hint of menace, Orlofsky’s intensity permeated the room, touching a chord of fear in LeGrand that she did not know was there.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Did Catherine Laurence come up?”

  “No.”

  “Rahman al-Zahra?”

  “No.”

  “Anything besides what you’ve told us?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know a man named Mustafa al-Siddiq?” asked the third interrogator, the young American in jeans and a rumpled corduroy jacket. Aside from Bonjour, enchanté, spoken in perfect, nearly unaccented French when he was introduced by Orlofsky, this was the first time the FBI agent with the improbable name of Max French had spoken.

  “No.”

  “How did you know Raimondi?” French asked.

  “We met at a conference some years ago and our paths crossed occasionally since. We were acquaintances;” LeGrand replied and then paused, waiting for the next question. When none came, she added, ”That is all:”

  “Why the flowers?” French asked.

  “He was wooing me:”

  “Why?”

  “I thought it was because of my great beauty, but I believe now I was wrong:”

  French, Geneviève noticed, did not smile at this answer, but a certain light flashed in his eyes which she read as an acknowledgment that he had been forced to insult her and that she had been forced to accept it gracefully, given her behavior. Perhaps they will believe me, and perhaps—just perhaps—I will not only keep my job but be able to be of some assistance.

  “We are going to tell you what we know, Inspector LeGrand;” said Orlofsky, ”because we are hoping that you will then be able to give us some insight, once your blinders, shall we say, have been removed. But first tell us again about your unauthorized investigation into the false suicide of Megan Nolan:”

  LeGrand had just finished showering when the knock had come on her door. In a thick terrycloth hotel robe, with a towel folded on her head, she had scrutinized three somber faces and three sets of impeccable credentials and known immediately that something was wrong. She had asked the men to wait outside the room while she dressed, but they would have none of it, entering swiftly and going so far as to check her person and the entire room for cell phones and weapons before allowing her to pick out her clothes and change in the lavatory. They had gotten right to the point, or rather Orlofsky had. Daniel Peletier was dead. Thrown off a cliff by two Arab men. His computer bad led them to Catherine Laurence. Laurence bad asked Peletier to run the prints of a known terrorist and bad inquired about one Megan Nolan. Laurence had called Charles Raimondi and bad lunch with him three days ago. Raimondi was killed execution-style last night. Earlier he had called LeGrand on her cell phone. Laurence works for LeGrand. Talk to us. These sentences, delivered staccato-like by Orlofsky, were blows. Peletier dead. Raimondi dead. Deceived by Catherine Laurence—the young and beautiful and desirable Catherine Laurence.

  But LeGrand was a professional. She was on their side. She gathered herself and quickly recounted the history of the Megan Nolan affair, starting with Charles Raimondi’s visit to her office on January 2 and ending with his request two days later for Laurence’s cell phone number and address, which he was given. Did she think it odd that Laurence would go on leave in the middle of the case? We both thought the case was solved. Did she know Daniel Peletier? Yes. Did she know he was Catherine’s uncle? Yes. Did she have any reason to believe there was a link between his death and Catherine Laurence or Patrick Nolan? No, of course not.

  Geneviève composed herself once more before repeating her story, amazed in retrospect at its brevity and sparsity of detail. And disgusted with herself for having permitted Charles Raimondi to dictate procedure to her, and worse, to keep the case secret from her superiors. She was sitting on the edge of the room’s large bed. When she was done, she stared at the three men, who stared back at her. French had remained standing, but Dionne and Orlofsky had taken chairs and sat in them facing her. She had put on the chic business suit and silk blouse she had worn to her seminar that day, but no makeup, and her hair was simply drying as they spoke. Vanity had vanished from her thoughts.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Until yesterday,” Orlofsky replied, “no one at DST had ever heard of Megan Nolan or her faux suicide:”

  “But Raimondi was the liaison to the DST from the Foreign Ministry, was he not?” said LeGrand.

  “He was;” said Dionne, ”but he had no authority to initiate an operation. He was a professional diplomat who was part of our intelligence interface with foreign governments, that is all. He did this completely on his own:”

  “Mustafa al-Siddiq is the number two man at Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry,” said Orlofsky.“Among other things, he is in charge of their secret police, the Mabahith. He and Raimondi spoke several times over the last week. There was also a fax from Raimondi to al-Siddiq, five pages, contents unknown. Three dead bodies were found at Daniel Peletier’s farm. All were carrying Mabahith credentials:”

  “So Raimondi was cooperating with the Saudis in an unauthorized Saudi operation on French soil,” said LeGrand.

  “Yes,” said Dionne, “to find Megan Nolan, who he claimed—or believed—was a terrorist. We don’t know which:”

  “Do you have leads on his murder?”

  “None:”

  “There was a photograph of Megan Nolan in my file,” said LeGrand. “I never thought to ask her father for a current picture:”

  “We have your file,” said Orlofsky.“We have seen the picture. It is her, and it looks to have been taken in a souk—a small market—in a Moroccan slum called Sidi Moumim:”

  “Is al-Zahra known to you?” LeGrand asked.

  “We picked up an intercept after Casa that mentioned the Falcon,” French said.“There is an historical figure known as the Falcon of Andalus, a great Muslim caliph in Spain in the eighth century. Real name: Abdur-Rahman al-Zahra. That’s all we know.”

  “Someone has taken a nom de terror,” said LeGrand.

  “Yes, that’s how we see it,” French replied.

  “Have you spoken to al-Siddiq?” LeGrand asked.

  “Yes. He said he was talking to Raimondi about a conference they planned on attending together in the spring. They had formed a friendship, apparently.”

  “And the fax?”

  “He said it was a conference schedule:”

  “Did you check?”

  “Yes. The conference is on the issue of enhancing cooperation between law enforcement and embassies in handling visa applications. We called the organizers. There is no five-page schedule:”

  “What about the Saudi agents?”

  “Al-Siddiq says the credentials must have been forged:”

  “Is Megan Nolan a terrorist?”

  “We don’t know,” Orlofsky answered. “She is an expatriate, a writer. Her agent in New York hasn’t heard from her in two years. She wrote for women’s magazines for ten years or so, but lately has been writing about the Arab problem in Europe. She was in Morocco from January until May, then in Spain, then of course in Paris to fake her suicide. That’s all we know. We are looking for friends and other relatives, but for now that’s it:”

  “What about the woman who actually did kill herself?” Geneviève asked.

  “Nothing,” Orlofsky answered.“Her prints were not on record. She had Megan Nolan’s ID. No one’s reported anyone matching her description missing. Nothing:”

  “What is your next step?”

  “We have put a Europol bulletin out for Laurence’s car. We are going through airline manifests for entries from Morocco and Saudi Arabia in the last ten days. We may get lucky.”

  “Is there a target? Any intelligence about a terrorist operation?”

  “Not
hing;” said Orlofsky. ”We are looking and listening. We have people in Muslim communities all over France and we are monitoring telephone and e-mail traffic to the top of our capacity.”

  “Can I help?” Geneviève asked.

  “Yes,” said Orlofsky.“You can call Catherine Laurence on her cell phone. We have brought a phone for you to use. If she answers, it will triangulate nearly instantly. We will know where she is:”

  “Anyone could answer.”

  “Yes, of course. But if someone has her cell phone, we will very much want to talk to that person:”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  “What shall I say?”

  “Anything. Just keep her talking for fifteen seconds or so.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then you will return to Paris, Inspector LeGrand, and speak to your chief and to the interior minister, who will tell you if you still have a job, and if you do what it might be:”

  Geneviève LeGrand looked at the men confronting her. There were no smiles on their faces, no satisfaction in their eyes, only grim determination. And something else, something she recognized as fear, fear of the consequences of their failure. They were trying to stop, with little in the way of leads, a terrorist attack inside France. An attack that it appeared she had unwittingly, stupidly, helped facilitate. Reaching for the phone, which Dionne had already dialed, she prayed that Catherine Laurence would answer, and that whether or not she lost her job or her reputation, she would not go down as a footnote in the history of mass murder.

  ~25~

  MOROCCO, MAY 15-16, 2003

  Casablanca’s French colonial quarter was within walking distance of the city”s modern center. As a result, the explosions Megan heard while she was eating dinner in her room at the Porte Rouge seemed to have occurred right outside her door. One nearly did, in the cemetery around the block, where earlier the neighborhood boys had been playing. Looking out her fourth-floor window, she could see over the rooftops to the chaos that was once the pleasant and orderly burial ground: the tops of trees burning like giant torches, the doors blown off charred mausoleums that glowed like furnaces on the inside, and smoke everywhere, rising into the night. There were no televisions in the rooms, so she joined the handful of Porte Rouge’s other guests in the lobby to watch CNN’s local French language station. The others, two middle-aged couples and a female lawyer, all French, were swift to blame America’s adventure in Iraq for the bombings. They spoke openly in their native tongue, not seeming to care whether Megan, an obvious American, could understand them or not. They soon left to go out for dinner, but Megan stayed for several hours, watching and listening and smoking. Five suicide bombings had been staged simultaneously around the city, two at Jewish restaurants, one at the Jewish cemetery in the old quarter (she could hear the fire trucks outside all night), one at the Farah Hotel, and one at a Spanish social club. Speculation as to the Farah centered around a conference held there some months ago that included a delegation from Israel. Commentators could not understand the targeting of the Casa de España, the popular Spanish gathering place, but Megan knew of the burning hatred in the hearts of some jihadists for Christian Spain. She was not surprised to hear Salafist Jihad mentioned along with al-Qaeda as possible responsible parties.

  Two of the fourteen suicide bombers had survived. One was badly injured and said to be hospitalized under police guard. The detonator of the second survivor’s bomb pack had failed and he had crashed his car into a pillar at the Farah, apparently hoping the impact would arm the bomb. At least two bombers had attacked each site, either on foot or by car, and it was the second bomber who did the damage, very extensive, at the Farah. The lobby, where he set off his bomb, was completely gutted and fully aflame, and the first five floors above it were bombed out, their furniture, accoutrements, and occupants now either strewn about the street or among the burning debris of what used to be the lobby. Megan’s room had been on the third floor, above the lobby.

  Around midnight, the second surviving bomber’s picture was flashed on the screen. He was Moroccan, in his early twenties, with a scraggly beard and a shaved head, his eyes dull and unfocused. Megan recognized him immediately as Sirhan al-Majid, the young man with the toothache who had come barging into Abdullah’s shop and who she later saw talking with Mohammed in the rear courtyard. That conversation, she now recalled, she had both photographed and taped. She stubbed out what she promised herself would be her last cigarette—she forgot for long stretches that she was pregnant—and left the remainder of the pack on the lobby coffee table. In her room, she found the Mohammed/toothache-man and the Lahani/Mohammed tapes and put them in her bag. Outside, she walked in the opposite direction from all the police and firefighting activity until she was able to hail a cab, which she took to the Carrières Thomas market. Thick clouds covered the moon, and when she exited the cab, she was plunged into near-total darkness. She made her way as swiftly as she could through the souk’s maze of streets, praying she would not make a wrong turn in the dark. She knew that Abdullah slept most nights on a cot in the rear room of his shop. When she arrived at his door, she knocked hard, anxious to talk to him, anxious to be out of sight of the robbers and rapists who were said to roam the entire Sidi Moumim slum at night.

  Abdullah peered at her through the bead curtain and then swiftly let her in. Except for one candle on the counter, the shop was dark. She could hear a television’s peculiarly insistent noise coming from the back room.

  “You have seen his picture?” Abdullah asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You should not have come here. It is not safe:”

  “I need a favor.”

  “Of course:”

  “It may put you in danger.”

  Megan knew that she was not herself and that she looked it. She thought she had actually recognized her bombed-out room at the Farah on television earlier. This image, coupled with the highly suspect coincidence of her being asked to leave that morning and the constantly surprising thought of her pregnancy, had, together, finally unnerved her. She had decided to have the baby, but if what she was thinking was true, then what would she do? She did not know. Abdullah took both of her hands in his and drew her into the back room. “Sit,” he said, pointing to a stuffed chair next to the cot. Megan sat while the pharmacist poured her mint tea from the clay pot he always kept on a warm electric burner. She could see the Coptic cross tattooed on his wrist as he extended his arm to pour the tea. He turned off the television and sat on the edge of the cot.“Drink,” he said, and Megan did, finding the ubiquitous thick sweet tea delicious for once.

  “What is it?” Abdullah asked when Megan finished.

  “I have two tapes that I would like you to listen to and translate for me:”

  “Arabic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Child’s play.”

  Abdullah watched as Megan fumbled in her bag for the tapes and the tiny recorder/player on which they could be heard.

  “I thought you had come to talk about our friend with the toothache;” he said.

  “No.”

  “He will be tortured and killed:”

  “Yes. That sounds about right to me,” Megan said.“Here it is.” She had found what she was looking for and inserted the first tape into the machine. She pushed the play button and turned the volume up, pointing the small device in Abdullah’s direction. He listened intently as it spit out guttural Arab for about ten minutes.

  “It is al-Majid and his two friends, and one other man,” said Abdullah. “The fourth is older. Who is he?”

  “His name is Mohammed,” Megan replied.“I don’t know his last name.”

  “Do you know this man?”

  “Yes. He works for the man I have been dating, Abdel al-Lahani.”

  “What does Lahani do?”

  “He is a Saudi businessman:”

  “How did you come to tape this?” Abdullah asked, tapping the tape player with his finger.

&nb
sp; “They were in the courtyard behind the shop. You were out. I recognized Mohammed. If you recall, I wanted to interview al-Majid. I just turned the recorder on:”

  “It is a marvelous recorder:”

  “Yes. Very expensive. What are they saying?”

  “Your Mohammed has recruited the boys as suicide bombers. He is telling them that the day is soon coming when they will be in paradise. He is assigning them targets. Our boy Sirhan is to have the Farah Hotel, made foul, says Mohammed, by the stench of Jews.”The Falcon; he says, ‘is aloft and has reached his hunting weight, and you are his wings, his sinews, his talons:”’