Khattak understood at once. Two agents walked off the elevator, nodding as they recognized him. He waited for the passage to clear, then pressed the button to send the elevator back to the ground floor. He crossed to the door Chan had indicated and slipped inside.
Chan preferred to work in a closed cubicle with the pleasant scent of a vanilla candle.
His computer was encrypted, connected to a series of monitors, all of which were dark. To one side of his desk was a copier, a printer, and a security-coded shredder. The desk was a study in organized chaos, dozens of file folders stacked in an order that made sense only to Chan. Placed on top of these was a time-coded memorandum.
The memo from Martine Killiam was addressed to Ciprian Coale, disclosing the name of the agents who were responsible for delivery of the fertilizer to a man named Rahman Aziz.
Khattak frowned. He took it as a personal affront when members of a terrorist cell ascribed the names of God to themselves. Rahman meant the “Most Compassionate,” Aziz the “Most Honorable.” Neither was a fitting choice for a would-be bomb-maker.
He scanned the rest of the memo. The delivery date of the materials was unspecified, a fact that set him on edge. He knew the INSET team was highly competent. It didn’t stop him from worrying that Hassan Ashkouri had discovered a way of moving ahead with his plans.
He heard voices in the corridor outside. The ping of the elevator, a whoosh of doors. Footsteps came closer, then the voices moved away.
He sorted quickly through the folders, scanning dates, times, locations for anything connected to Ruksh. Gavin had been right. It was too much raw data, and he had no means of prioritizing the information he sought. But one folder at the bottom of the pile caught his attention. It was a dossier on Ashkouri.
Amid the papers and photographs was a biography appended to Ashkouri’s immigration file. A senior construction engineer, Ashkouri had been accepted as a skilled worker into Canada, where he’d rapidly found employment before branching off to form his own consultancy. At his thriving engineering firm, he’d hired three of the congregants at the mosque. Rahman Aziz’s name was also on the list as one of Ashkouri’s employees.
There was no information about Ashkouri’s abandoned course of studies as an Islamic scholar, where he had planned to study, or whether he’d been denied entry or exit visas that would have allowed him to follow his chosen course.
The Ashkouri family was from Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad. They had moved to Baghdad to flee the fighting between American and Iraqi forces. In 2013, they had returned to Baqouba to face additional tragedy with the bombing of the al-Sariya mosque.
Khattak felt the shock of memory. The attack on Sunni worshippers had followed the bombing of Shia neighborhoods and sites of worship, in a cycle of sectarian violence that had spread throughout the country.
His fingers held up a document. Ashkouri’s parents and brothers had been killed in the al-Sariya attack. He had never been married, he had no children. Immediately after the attack, his immigration to Canada had been approved.
But there was nothing that connected Ashkouri to Ruksh. Frustrated, he tried Gavin’s desk drawer, convinced that his ex-colleague had walked him to the elevator for a reason.
On the top of a pile was a blue folder similar to the one Martine Killiam had given Khattak. He flicked it open.
It was the same collection of photographs that were in the file in his possession.
Members of the training camp were cross-referenced with congregants at the mosque.
He was about to close the folder when he noticed a discrepancy.
He paged through the numbered photographs again.
Buried at the back were two additional photographs.
One was of himself. The other was a photograph of his sister.
Paper-clipped to the back of the folder was a typed list of names associated with the numbered photos. And beside the names a provisional status: Cell 1, Cell 2.
The space beside Khattak’s name was blank.
But under his name was his sister’s.
Rukshanda Khattak: Cell 1.
* * *
He closed the door to Gavin Chan’s cubicle, heading for the stairs.
Laine Stoicheva was at the elevator as he turned.
She looked from Esa to Gavin’s door, her eyebrows drawn together. The elevator doors opened and Gavin stepped out, holding a cup of coffee.
There was no time for Esa to warn him.
None of the three moved.
Then Laine stepped into the elevator, turning her face away.
The doors closed on anything Khattak might have said.
6
If it had been cold the day before, it was nothing compared with the experience of loading boxes onto a dolly and trundling them into the building that housed Rachel’s new condominium. Her hands were red and rough with cold, while her body was sweating beneath her down jacket. She’d given up attempting to protect her face from the mid-December windchill. Her long Maple Leafs scarf caught under her feet, tripping her up as she struggled to yank the wheels of the dolly through the snow. The sidewalks were clear but the ramp to the service elevator wasn’t.
She had no intention of complaining, though. It was the first day of her new life and “disgruntled neighbor” wasn’t the impression she wanted to make on the cheery young couples who inhabited the building. Thankfully, it was her last trip up the ramp. She’d cheated by using her police ID. No one would tag or tow the van she had left in the loading zone, so she could take a few minutes to unwrap herself from the cold, then drink her first cup of coffee in her brand-new kitchen.
Appraising her new kingdom, Rachel took a moment to absorb it all.
She was free, she was alone, she was blessed, and she was happy. Happier than she could ever remember being. She caught sight of her face in the mirror that hung over the console. Her chapped lips and puffy cheeks were red. An ember had caught her dull brown eyes and set them alight. Her face was set in an expression of lively good humor. Even the ponytail that had been trapped under her blue-and-white toque seemed bouncier than usual.
It was a great day to be Rachel Getty of Community Policing, Toronto. She gave herself a jaunty salute in the mirror just as the intercom buzzed.
“Hello?” she asked, pressing the button. Maybe the van was attracting more notice than she’d expected.
“May I come up, Rachel?”
It was Khattak, her boss. She cast a frantic look around her condo, seeing it with new eyes. Despite the two bedrooms, wasn’t it terribly small and cramped? Didn’t the boxes that were scattered everywhere diminish both its size and its charm? Why hadn’t she dumped them all in her bedroom, instead of taking the trouble to ensure that each clearly labeled box had been placed in the room that its contents were destined for?
She buzzed Khattak in, scrambling to close her bedroom door and to clear the boxes from the comfortable leather couches she had bought for the living room. In the catalogue she had purchased them from, they’d been described as “distressed.” She shook her head. She’d been aiming for the rustic elegance of Pottery Barn without wanting to spend quite that much money. Now she wondered if instead of good taste, her condo reflected a kind of slovenliness and corner-cutting.
Khattak knocked on the door.
She answered it with a reckless gaiety that made Khattak consider her closely before yielding his expensive overcoat and gloves to her. The understated elegance of his manner of dress was something she could only hope to emulate.
But when she thought about it, she knew she was happy to see him, and happy to have him in her new home, regardless of his opinion of it. And why should she assume his opinion would be negative?
For some time now, Khattak had been trying to expand their relationship from partners in policing to a genuine friendship. He had asked to meet her family and invited her to meet his, requests Rachel had denied by means of trumped-up excuses. Now, in her own home, a place she could be proud of, and witho
ut the constant fug of the Getty family drama hanging over her head, she felt she could begin to reciprocate Esa Khattak’s overtures.
“Have a seat, sir. It’s freezing outside. I’ll bring us some coffee.”
You could never second-guess the Canadian winter. You could have a cold snap one week and balmy temperatures the next. You could have snow up to your armpits from Halloween onward, or you could get it all in a relentless blast from January to early May. Once, in a gesture that had elicited ridicule from the rest of the country, the mayor of Toronto had called in the army to dig out the city.
The snow-removal system was one of the best in the world. It had to be. The city alone had two hundred salt trucks and six hundred snowplows waiting on standby. From the look of things, this wasn’t going to be one of those winters mitigated by global warming. Instead, they’d been told to expect heavy snowfall now, massive flooding in parts of the country later.
Khattak took his coffee black; it was tea that he drank milky and sweet, a fact that Rachel was proud she remembered. He thanked her with a nod, engrossed in Rachel’s new surroundings. Rachel had unpacked a few boxes in the living room, scattering her knickknacks against the backdrop of leather couches and creamy white walls. She had also introduced touches of pale blue, with a narrow Indian runner on the floor and small pieces of Caithness glass that reflected the blue-gray of Highland lakes. On the small table beside Khattak was a picture of Rachel with her brother, Zachary, both dressed in Maple Leafs jerseys. The young Zachary was beaming up at his older sister, his skinny arms slung around her neck from behind. Rachel was beaming too, revealing the gap where one of her front teeth had been knocked out in a game.
“Your home is lovely, Rachel,” Khattak said, studying the photograph. “It suits you.”
Rachel’s face lit up with pleasure.
“Thank you, sir. When I’ve had a chance to settle in, I’ll give you a proper tour. We didn’t have anything else on for today, did we? Did I leave too early?”
Her schedule at CPS was flexible. When they were working a case, she worked for days on end without a break. At other times she was able to get away early. Not quite as secretive about her personal life as she had been in the past, she had told Khattak about her move, and about her upcoming all-star game.
“Nothing like that. And I’m sorry to encroach upon your personal time. But I needed to give you this.”
He handed Rachel an unsealed envelope taken from his inside jacket pocket. He had placed a much thicker folder on the table between them.
Rachel read the letter and then looked up at Khattak, puzzled. It was confirmation of a security clearance. Her security clearance.
“Why do I need this, sir?”
The letter was a pretext, she realized. Khattak could have given it to her tomorrow at the office. There was something premonitory about his manner, like a finger shoved into a leaky dike, or a hand held up to ward off a falling sky.
He told her about Mohsin Dar, passed the folder to her, showed her several photographs.
Rachel read through the file, taking her time, not quite able to believe what she was seeing.
“This isn’t a joke? Or a farce of some kind? Someone reenacting the Toronto 18 on a grander scale? Weren’t those boys just idiots in the woods?”
Some years ago, a similar plot had been attempted by a group of Muslim men scattered throughout the GTA. Their home base had been a mosque in Meadowvale.
“It came down to eleven convictions in the end. Two of them were life sentences. Hardly a joke.”
Rachel looked up from the file. “They’re treading the same ground, except it’s Algonquin instead of Washago—and yes, they’ve expanded the number of targets: Queen’s Park wasn’t part of it before. Are they nuts? Do they have any idea what the traffic is like with the construction? How are they planning to get down there?” Another thought occurred to her. “Is there a connection between the two plots? Between the past and the present?”
Or for that matter between the past, the present, and the recent attack upon Parliament Hill, seat of the federal government?
As she asked her questions, Rachel noticed that some of the tension seemed to be seeping from Khattak. He was more at ease, sitting back on the sofa. This was a system and a routine that he was familiar with, a comfortable back-and-forth that was not so comfortable as to have lost its edge.
“I wouldn’t know. We’re not meant to know. We’re meant to give the appearance of investigating Dar’s death.”
“Which means we’re really investigating it,” Rachel cut in.
“Of course.” He looked surprised that she’d felt the need to say it. “What’s the point of going in at all, if we don’t care that an innocent man is dead? A man who chose a dangerous means of serving his country?”
Rachel ducked the question. Like most Canadians, she found overt displays of patriotism embarrassing, unless it came in the form of rooting for Team Canada. She took her vacation days during the World Hockey Championships, and demonstrated her national pride by painting a maple leaf on her face. This was something else, it was deeper. Rachel, who was an agnostic about everything except crime, found herself uncomfortable.
“Going in?”
She knew it was the right question when Khattak’s hands relaxed on his knees.
“My task is to recite the Community Policing mantra at the mosque; you’ll appear a day or so ahead of me with a cover story. You won’t be Rachel Getty, police officer. And we won’t know each other.”
Rachel eyed him, suspicious. “Then who will I be?”
“A new recruit. Not to the active cell,” he corrected, when he saw her reaction. “To the Masjid un-Nur. You’re there because you live in the area and you’re thinking about a conversion to Islam.”
“I don’t live in the area,” Rachel said, panicking.
Khattak was patient in response. “That’s why it’s a cover. And you’ll talk to these people.” He nodded at the file. “About Mohsin and the mosque, nothing more. But somehow or other, you’ve got to get yourself invited to one of Hassan Ashkouri’s halaqas.”
“Without tipping him off? What if I blow the whole thing? Isn’t that just what we need with everything that’s happened at Justice? They’ll crucify you, sir.”
A clumsy choice of words to direct at a practicing Muslim. She realized as much as soon as the words left her mouth.
Khattak didn’t notice. He reached across the table for the folder, gathered up the photographs to place them inside.
“You don’t have to do this, Rachel; of course I can’t compel you. It’s just—I owe Mohsin Dar something more than what he’ll get from our colleagues at INSET.”
“You don’t trust them?”
“I trust they have the right priorities. I understand that Mohsin can’t be one of them.”
Rachel watched the heaviness settle back upon Khattak’s shoulders, much like the light edging from the room, leaving the shadow of loss behind. Khattak was upset, and it wasn’t just over the death of Mohsin Dar, a man he had known. Or the terrorist plot, as much as it had jolted her, as fantastic as it seemed.
She switched on the lamp beside her brother’s photograph.
Things had changed; they were better. She was seeing Zach again, though much more infrequently than she wanted, and always on his terms. He wasn’t ready to trust her with everything—his address, his friends, the girl he’d been dating for the past two years. They talked, but never about their parents, and Rachel was careful not to push him too hard.
But when she’d bought the condo, she’d made sure it had an extra bedroom, in case Zach ever felt like he needed a home—or needed her. She hadn’t said it, but Zach had known. And for a fleeting moment, she’d glimpsed the young Zach again, the unmitigated faith in his eyes. Then he’d ducked his head and it was gone.
Always be as happy, Zach, she had thought, gazing at her brother’s face in the photograph. She’d forgotten to wish the same for herself.
; She’d backed Khattak all the way in the aftermath of what had happened with Drayton. She wouldn’t do less now. Not when Ciprian Coale had left him isolated.
She thought of Khattak’s friend, Nathan Clare, the famous writer. She had met him during the Drayton investigation. He was someone Khattak could talk to—and then from Nathan, her thoughts made a lightning connection.
“Who did you speak to at INSET, sir? Who briefed you?”
“We won’t be working with her, Rachel. And if you do see her at the Nur mosque, you’re not to engage with her. Keep your cover intact.”
He meant Laine Stoicheva, his terrifying ex-colleague.
Not so much a relic of the past as an unexploded ordnance. Still waiting to go off.
No wonder Khattak was wearied by the day. First Drayton, now this. And to have known the murdered man …
With an effort, Rachel kept her face from showing her sympathy.
“You said I’m to go in first, right away. Why is that, sir?”
“I’ll be dealing with Andy Dar.” He made a dismissive gesture with his left hand, but Rachel caught the flare of hope in his eyes. “And I’ve some things I need to manage at home.”
Rachel ordered pizza. It was her way of saying yes. And of getting Khattak to prepare her. She’d learned a great deal at CPS, from Khattak and the Muslim communities they’d worked with, but there were still a million things she could get wrong, a million ways she could land them both in further trouble.
“Do I need a headscarf, sir?”
Khattak gave her the glimmer of a smile.
The folder between them, they talked late into the night.
7
Khattak met Andy Dar at his home in Rosedale, an old and affluent neighborhood situated between three ravines. Its charm lay in the abundance of roses that grew at the edges of the Jarvis estate, the historic homestead that had given rise to the neighborhood more than a century ago.
The silent weight of snow gave a sameness to the landscape, bearing down upon the spruce and pine trees, snaking over the branches of elms. Khattak drove south from the railway tracks that formed the neighborhood’s northern boundary, navigating the slick roads with care, until he found Dar’s house across from the old stone church. The windows of a beautifully crafted brick house fronted the small triangle of Whitney Park.
The Language of Secrets Page 4