The Language of Secrets

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  The hot chocolate bubbled in Rachel’s mouth. She snorted. “You sound surprised. No one in my family ever tells me what they’re doing or where they’re going to be.”

  And was pleased she’d said it, when Khattak shot her a look of gratitude.

  “Despite what she says to my face, I don’t think Ruksh will sabotage our work.”

  “But it’s dangerous, right, sir? Your sister doesn’t have any experience in this. Suppose Ashkouri asks her about me, flat out? She may not know how to lie. And if Ashkouri figures out what she knows—” Rachel stabbed at the air with a French fry. “You need to get her out of this.”

  “I’m trying, Rachel.” He looked rueful. “The women of my family don’t spend a great deal of time listening to my advice.”

  “What’s she like, your sister?”

  Khattak took a long, slow sip of his coffee.

  “Smart, funny, kind, impatient. And ‘headstrong’ doesn’t begin to cover it. She has a sense that she’s invincible.”

  “Maybe life hasn’t taught her otherwise,” Rachel said.

  “Yet.”

  Rachel nodded. She knew what invincibility felt like, at least when it came to her work. She had confidence in herself when it came to two things: her skills as a detective, and her force-of-nature presence on the ice. Her personal life was another matter—a mess of chaotic events that she was seldom prepared for, including the ups and downs of her interactions with her brother. So if anything would teach Ruksh caution, it would be the outcome of this case. When Ashkouri and his associates were arrested on terrorism charges and sent to prison for life.

  She thought of Paula and Grace, sadness sinking into her bones.

  “What about the women, sir? You think they’re part of this?”

  Khattak called for the bill.

  “You tell me,” he said, studying Rachel. The winter weather had served her well. Her eyes were bright and clear, her skin radiant with good health. The hair she usually wore in a ponytail had fallen around her face, providing a little cover for her ears, a look that suited her.

  Rachel paused over her plate of quesadillas and French fries. Her healthy appetite was something else Khattak liked about her.

  “I’d like to think not, but I don’t see how it could be otherwise. INSET says they were at Algonquin to train, right? For the Nakba attack. So if that’s true, how would the others hide that from the women? Especially if weapons were involved. Were weapons involved?”

  “I’m afraid so. Laine told me they were practicing their skills with hunting rifles. But testing at the scene indicates no gunpowder residue on the hands of any members of the training camp. Maybe they wore gloves and disposed of them later. Along with the murder weapon.” He grimaced. “We have to believe that if there was forensic evidence relevant to the murder investigation, it would have been shared with us.”

  “Do you believe that, sir?”

  “I hope to. Once I’ve acquired a little more information.”

  Rachel hated being kept in the dark. It was a fruitless means of conducting an inquiry.

  “So what did you ask them? Jamshed and Dinaase and the others?” She pushed her plate away, disgruntled by the thought of wasted life, wasted youth. “Grace and Din, sir. They’re just a couple of stupid kids. This goes through, they’re going away for life.”

  “The lamps of youth have been extinguished,” Khattak quoted, his voice soft. And then cleared his throat, embarrassed. “With regard to weapons, I asked what they knew about the gun that was used to kill Mohsin Dar. They denied any knowledge of it. I don’t know that I believe them. Beyond that, I corroborated the statements they’d given at the scene. Who they were with, what they were doing when they heard the shots, how long it took them to find Mohsin.”

  Rachel thought about Khattak’s friend. Waiting for death in the woods, wondering if anyone would come. A terrible way to die, regardless of the beauty of Algonquin in winter.

  And Alia Dar the only one to mourn his death.

  “Something doesn’t strike me as right, sir. Paula thought Mohsin was into her. She said he wouldn’t leave her alone. Kind of a stupid thing to do when he was working undercover.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Maybe he was doing that for a reason.”

  “Perhaps it’s not that strange,” Khattak said. “Din Abdi told me that he loved Mohsin. That he and Mohsin were inseparable. Maybe Mohsin was trying to connect with each member of the cell. Trying to figure out what role each one of them was to play in the attack. Or which one of them was responsible for communication with the other cell. And how that communication was taking place.”

  “Not the other boys, or Grace,” Rachel countered. “No one’s said he was hanging about them. Although at the halaqa, Grace did say he was one of the few people who made her feel welcome.”

  But why focus on Paula and not Grace? Despite the piercings and the terrifying tattoo, Grace was the one whose company Rachel preferred. At least the girl had a sense of humor.

  Or was she construing the situation the wrong way around? Maybe it was Grace who hadn’t had much use for Mohsin. If he was taking up Din’s time and attention. If he had driven a wedge between the young people.

  Then she remembered Jamshed Ali’s heavy-lidded gaze. He was the one who found Grace objectionable, and who wanted her gone from the mosque.

  “Sir, I don’t mean to be offensive with this, but can I just ask—is it possible that Mohsin Dar was thinking of Paula as a second wife? That his interest in her had nothing to do with the Nakba? She’s a bit overzealous, but otherwise I haven’t seen any indication of the nihilistic worldview it would take to perpetrate this attack.”

  Khattak laughed out loud.

  It was a very attractive laugh. It made Rachel smile.

  “One, there are the bigamy laws in this country. And two, there are Mohsin’s own views on the subject. He used to joke that he couldn’t handle one woman, let alone two.”

  Rachel was just glad that her boss had such a thick skin.

  “So then why? She’s not dangerous, she’s not a femme fatale. What did he want with her? What does his wife think?”

  Straightaway, Khattak became serious.

  “Alia’s hurt. She’s wondering. She thinks he was pushing her away.”

  “You haven’t set her straight?”

  “How can I? I can’t reveal Mohsin’s role as a police agent. And I don’t know the truth of his interest in Paula. But here’s something. He told Alia the only way she could come to Algonquin was if she began to wear the niqab.”

  “The face veil? Why would he do that?”

  Khattak settled the bill. They both shrugged back into their winter jackets. Rachel stuffed her headscarf into one of her many pockets.

  “I can only think of one reason. The same reason I don’t want Ruksh anywhere near Ashkouri. He wanted to keep his wife safe. So he imposed the condition he knew was most calculated to keep Alia far away.”

  But there was another possibility as well, Rachel reflected. Perhaps his relationship with Alia was more troubled than Alia had described. Perhaps Mohsin had had reason to fear his wife.

  It was a puzzle, and Rachel excelled at puzzles. She stayed behind to give Khattak enough time to leave without being spotted in her company. And so she’d have another opportunity to visit the Old Firehall Confectionery.

  There was something to this.

  Something that Khattak had mentioned—the significance of which she hadn’t understood until this moment. As she cast her mind back over their discussion, the answers to her questions resolved themselves into certainty.

  It was too late to call Khattak back.

  And she wondered why her boss hadn’t seen it himself.

  The answer to Dar’s death lay not with the Nakba plot, but in Mohsin Dar’s own problematic actions.

  She began to understand just how complex a task Dar had set for himself by infiltrating the Nakba group.

  And she wa
s astonished at the RCMP.

  They had trained Mohsin Dar and placed him in the field, but how poorly they had understood the double game their agent had been playing.

  A game that had led Mohsin Dar to his death.

  15

  “I want you here first thing in the morning, Khattak.”

  Ciprian Coale made the demand with an edge to his voice, and a lack of civility that was becoming familiar.

  Khattak rubbed his fingers between his eyebrows, pressing down hard. He muttered his acceptance, set his phone aside on the counter, and lifted his head to study his face. And witnessed the worry in his eyes, the secret fear.

  Because he was looking into a mirror that could never fully capture his duality, a duality he had never chosen to articulate.

  He knew what he was, what his community was. So different from what he saw on the news nightly—the lone wolves, the well-armed gunmen, the rabid mobs, the blistering flags, the overturned tanks, the rocket launchers, the blood-doomed faces, the cries in the street, the slogans of death chanted by those with nothing to lose. The cities to fall, under the guise of liberation, the angry clerics cheering their forces onward.

  There was the damage they did to themselves, lost in the fog of an all-pervasive ignorance. Of history—their own history, their scripture, their traditions, their prophetic example—taken, twisted, besmirched, betrayed. The kinder and wiser voices silenced. The still, small voice unheard.

  And then there was the state apparatus.

  The fruit seller’s self-immolation—cracked by the Tunisian republic, the boot on his neck, the whip at his throat. And Neda bleeding to death in the streets of Tehran.

  A green death on a brutal pavement, unleashing the freshly reaped carnage of spring.

  And Khaled Saeed of Alexandria—learning that death could find you in the most ordinary places, shattered against a wall, a door, setting in a bright field a judgment of stone.

  An act that brought a government down.

  The Arab Spring, the Green Revolution, the Freedom Charter of Syria. The daily discourse of the hollow and war-ravaged. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Myanmar, the Central African Republic, now—but then it had been the democracy movement in Iran, and the toppling of the parliamentarian Mossadegh, it had been Stalin’s mass deportation and purge of the Chechen people, it had been the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it had been the independence movements that stretched from Africa to the Levant, when tyrants had come to power and stayed and stayed, until the people had risen up, to be crushed.

  Struggles for self-determination had been snuffed out like little candles, the lights of the global south going dark.

  The war of independence from France had left more than a million Algerians dead. The tally was still being taken. On the new wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, silence.

  This was the missing context for the spreading scourge of enmity and hate, the broken and sprawling politics of the Middle East.

  The generations mislaid by decades of war, by centuries of struggle.

  The splintered past, the crippled future, nothing to gain, less to give.

  A bruised carnation planted in a cup.

  A rose exchanged for a rifle.

  And the round of bread traded for both, in a fleeting moment of innocence.

  Crimson coffee is the morning cup.

  These Lebanese children are wreaths on bits of firebomb debris.

  A lexicon learned each day by every member of Esa’s faith.

  A hope of belonging that vanished into itself, diminished by every new act of violence.

  A knotting of sinews and bone because you were never disconnected from what the ummah suffered, any more than you could understand the madmen who claimed to speak or kill or die in their name.

  On the one side.

  On the other, there was more.

  The manufactured anger that fed the machine. Terror plots, jihadist cells, the enemy within, the national threat, the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay, the no-fly list, the torture report, the secret rooms, the shadow prisons, the burning Qur’an, the vandalized mosques, the permits denied, the headscarves torn from girls in the street, the venomous ads on the sides of the bus. The cartoon contests, the Muslim students murdered at school.

  The rallies in Germany, the rise of Le Pen, the minarets of Switzerland, the discriminatory laws, the Charter of Values, the hallowed ground. The divulgation of Maher Arar.

  And the never-quite-innocent unindicted co-conspirators.

  A phrase that had amassed the heft of judgment.

  The condemnations and dissociations were variations on a theme.

  To prove oneself, remove one’s self, make amends for untenable, globalized crimes.

  Conceiving of history not as a sliding scale or a recurring interchange, but as a denunciatory finger pointing in one direction.

  How unreal it all seemed compared with the lives they actually led. Work, family, love, kindness, charity, yes—and faith. Soccer games. Music lessons. Birthday parties. Small altercations. Dinner with friends. Sailboats on the lake. The ferry to the island. The fields of white snow. The blue fog. The tender mist. The green land. The Friday sermon. The evening prayers of Ramadan.

  Bayram, Norouz, the festival days. The rites of Muharrem. The sacrificed lamb.

  The green thread tied at the gates of the shrine, the kiss at the wrist, the whirling dance.

  The wheel of time. The gift of love.

  And at the bottom of it all, a faith that touched every corner of their lives—not in Delphic gestures or monolithic laws, but in humble moments—giving courage and comfort, resolution, hope. And of all the virtues, of the things most asked of the faithful—the patience to suffer adversity.

  Seek help.

  Help shall be given.

  Not in the manner and at the time sought, but in ways that crept into the human heart and plugged up the empty places where blood and light and solace leaked away.

  Esa needed help now, needed shoring up. He needed peace from the ferment of his thoughts, from Ciprian Coale, from Laine Stoicheva, even from Rachel.

  He began the steady process of his ablutions.

  Hands washed, face wetted, hair brushed, feet cleansed. The cleansing an internal thing, the discipline personal.

  Then he rolled out the prayer rug, his father’s prayer rug, the well-worn red and gold. A gift Esa would have shared with his sisters had they ever asked that of him. They seemed to know it as something rare and tangible that linked father to son through loss, and a long-borne loneliness.

  He had lost his father and his wife in the same year.

  Seek help.

  Help shall be given.

  He took his place upon the ja-namaz. His hands, his lips, his body observed the ritual of centuries. His forehead touched the floor. Once. Twice. And then again in the second and third rak’ahs. He found the pattern. He whispered to an unseen presence. He placed his right hand on his right thigh, and raised his forefinger.

  I bear witness.

  The dusk prayer that broke his heart anew each night.

  The first prayer he had learned to pray with his father, the last also, his father’s green eyes glancing back over his shoulder, the gentle, confiding smile, the warm words of reassurance, the hands that had held him so tenderly, all these years.

  Each time he raised his head from the ja-namaz, he expected to see the kindly face looking back at him, offering encouragement, assaying love.

  And after ending each dua, the first thing his father said was the same.

  “How light we both feel! Can you feel the peace of it, Esa?”

  Without his father, he couldn’t feel the peace.

  Seek help.

  Help shall be given.

  Bless my father, he thought. Give him the peace that being Your witness has always denied to me.

  * * *

  Coale had called a team-wide meeting. He’d given Khattak the option to bring Rachel. Esa had chosen not to do so becaus
e he knew what was in store. For an amateur, Rachel was doing excellent work. There was no reason to subject her to Coale’s particular brand of humiliation.

  He already knew there was nothing that he and Rachel could do that would win Coale’s approval. He didn’t care. About Coale or the men like Coale, whose sense of their authority derived from the satisfaction of pushing others down, like school-yard bullies.

  But for Coale to have come out into the open, Khattak must have done something to increase his feeling of superiority. And security.

  The INSET team was gathered in the center of the room. Khattak joined the others as they listened to Coale give the rundown. Laine Stoicheva stepped forward, in her new incarnation of ice-cold goddess, to provide the current operational status. They still hadn’t discovered the means of communication between the two splinter cells. But they were getting closer. Something had happened.

  Clusters formed around Laine. A website was projected onto a massive screen that blocked the view of the blizzard outside. The lights were dimmed.

  Khattak read the banner that framed the interactive site. His heart sank.

  THE ROSE OF DARKNESS.

  FIGHTING THE NEW CRUSADES.

  There was a drop-down menu to the right of the screen with a list of buttons. The questions were staggered on the buttons, one after the other, each with a link to a video.

  Are you one of us?

  Are you ready to fight?

  Do you have the tools?

  Do you know your enemy?

  Will you do your part in the global jihad?

  The questions and links were superimposed upon a colorful background—a repeating Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, of a drone attack. The GIF was spliced in two: The first image was that of the explosion over the largest house in a village. The second image captured the devastation of the survivors.

  The chorus of a popular song played in the background of the video.

  If I had a rocket launcher.

  Links on the right-hand side of the screen led to a second series of videos, each with a single word between them, each the image of a violent bombing attack or its consequences.

  Gaza. Beirut. Qana. Hamdani. Haditha. Fallujah. Baghdad.

  The song was linked to images of Fallujah.