by Alex Carr
“Sister!” they called in unison. Their halos were evidently newly acquired; they were wired on paint fumes, their eyes four wild disks bobbing frenetically in the darkness.
Thinking they were as willing and able as any potential guides she would find at this hour, Kat slipped each of the boys a euro coin. “I'm looking for an older boy,” she said. “Much older. I saw him here today. He was in blue jeans and a leather jacket.” She pantomimed the look for them, trying to convey the young man's attitude, the aggressive stance.
The boys laughed at her attempt—they were still children, after all. But they must have understood something. They looked at each other and declared in unison, “Mahjoub!”
“He stays here?” Kat asked.
The boys giggled again. “Yes,” the taller of the two replied.
Kat reached into her pocket, pulled out two more coins, and showed them to the boys. “Take me to him,” she said, closing her fist on the money. This payment they would have to earn.
They glanced at each other again, silently communicating their agreement, then scampered forward, stopping to look back at Kat, beckoning her forward.
Kat paused. Just a few meters in and already she could not see the gate behind her. If she went any farther, she would not be able to find her way out without help.
“This way, sister,” the smaller boy called. She could see nothing but the aureole of his mouth flaring in the darkness, the white of his teeth and eyes. “Come! Come!” In English now.
She would be at their mercy, she thought, as she started after them.
It was not easy for Kat to keep up with the pair. Not only were the boys fast; they were skilled navigators, leaping gracefully over the slum's various obstacles in their cheap plastic sandals while Kat struggled along behind, slipping in sewage and rot.
It was a dizzying chase, but one that, thankfully, did not last long. After what couldn't have been more than five minutes, the pair stopped abruptly at the entrance to a short alleyway.
“There, sister.” The older boy motioned to a relatively nice shanty several yards away, in front of which a fire was still burning. “There is where Mahjoub stays.”
“You're sure?” Kat asked, holding out her still-closed fist.
Both boys nodded.
“Wait here,” she began, then she saw the look in their eyes, the craving, and realized the futility of baiting them to stay and guide her out. They had reached their fill of her and her money and were hungry for something else now, not food but the sustenance of escape, in whatever form they could get it. When she opened her fist, they snatched the coins and were gone.
Alone, Kat made her way toward the dwelling the boys had indicated. In comparison to many of its counterparts, it was a solid structure, with a look of near-permanency. The walls were salvaged plywood, the roof sheets of corrugated tin. Even the fire pit was well constructed, fashioned from the bottom half of a large metal drum, topped with a rebar grill.
Everything used and used and used again, Kat thought, remembering the Afghans who'd combed the base dump at Kandahar—how they had carefully collected and washed the Americans' used MRE containers, salvaging the sturdy black plastic as weatherproofing material.
As Kat drew closer to the shanty, she could hear male voices punctuated by frequent, raucous laughter. It was the sound of abandon, of stories tempered by time from bleakness to humor. Listening, Kat realized that she had never once heard Jamal laugh, that there had been no reason to at Bagram. And yet she knew, knew in her bones before she saw him, that his was among the voices she heard. She stood there for some time, alone in the darkness, listening.
After a while, the plywood door banged open and a figure appeared. It was Jamal. He paused for a moment on the threshold, then stepped away from the structure, unzipped his fly, and pissed into open gutter.
It was not until he was finished that he saw her there, watching him. As he was turning to go back inside, his eyes met hers and the look on his face was not one of relief but of terror.
ANOTHER HOUSE, nicer than Irene's though not as much as one might have thought. Another well-kept yard. Brick and boxwoods. Fireflies flashing in the bushes like out-of-sequence Christmas lights. Behind the living-room curtains a stout figure—a woman, but certainly not Susan. A woman who, even in shadow, managed to evoke a sense of wrathful authority.
A mistake, Harry thought as he watched the figure, whoever she was, disappear into the depths of the house. A mistake to have come, but then he knew that, had known it all along. When he left Irene's, two hours earlier, it had been with the best of intentions. A burger and a beer at the questionable diner next to his equally questionable motel, then a half hour of free cable and sleep. Dead sleep. But five beers later here he was.
He had been inside Dick Morrow's house once, for a Christmas party, and he still remembered every rich detail—the giant Afghan carpets, the carved African fetishes with their genitals on display, the wood, so much wood, and every inch of it burnished and shining like silver for the altar. It was not long after he'd come back from his Kinshasa posting, back when people still considered him a good bet and invited him to things like Christmas parties. He and Irene were engaged at the time, and they had come together.
It was the first time he'd seen Susan since Vietnam, the first time they'd spoken since that evening in Cam Ranh, and Harry, genuinely believing in his affection for Irene, had worked hard to be on his best behavior around Susan. But Irene, perhaps sensing Harry's nervousness, had known nonetheless. In the car on the way home she'd been uncharacteristically quiet, as if contemplating the scope of her future life.
For some time after that, Harry had thought she would leave him. It was when she didn't that he lost all pity for her.
A large SUV turned onto the narrow street. Harry, thinking it might be Morrow, hunkered down in his seat. But the vehicle drove past him and kept going.
When Harry looked back at Morrow's house, he saw the garage door open and the stout figure step out. She had a garbage can, one of those big ones with wheels, but she had picked it up and was carrying it down the driveway with all the graceless dexterity one might use to lift a side of beef or a dead man. When she got to the curb, she set the thing down with a satisfied grunt.
A Russian, Harry thought, a goddamned Russkie in Mor-row's house. He was so caught up in the idea of it that he didn't notice the woman look across the street toward his rental car, or the disapproving glance she cast upon him, until it was too late.
They stared at each other for a moment, then she shook her head in that quintessentially Soviet way—two parts resignation and three parts disgust.
MORROW GOT UP FROM HIS DESK and opened his closet door, took out the spare pillow and blanket he kept for overnights. It was one in the morning and he could not bring himself to go home, could not face another night like the previous one. Susan raging below and Marina on the prowl. They were right, both of them: he was not man enough for what was to come.
Kicking his shoes off, he made a bed for himself on the couch, then opened the liquor cabinet and poured himself a drink. Bourbon and bourbon. From out in the hall came the low whine of a floor polisher, the janitorial crew busy at work.
He was on his second drink when the phone rang, and he almost didn't answer it. He'd never once gotten good news at this time of night, and he wasn't expecting any now. It was the thought that something might have happened to Susan that made him pick up the receiver, and he was both relieved and irritated to hear David Kurtz on the other end of the line.
“She's gone,” Kurtz said.
Morrow was still thinking of Susan. It took him a moment to understand what the man meant. The woman was gone, the interrogator. “When?” he asked.
“Sometime last night,” Kurtz answered. “But she can't get far. I've got her passport.”
“Doesn't make me feel a whole hell of a lot better,” Morrow snapped. “Any leads on the boy?”
“Not yet.”
Morrow shook his head. There
was no use indulging in second thoughts now. “Just find her,” he told Kurtz. “Find them both.”
“I need you to tell me what happened in Madrid. It's important, Jamal. For both of us.”
The others had gone just after dawn, leaving Kat and Jamal alone in the shanty. Alone, as they had been so many times in the booth at Bagram. Though this time there was no getting around the fact that Kat needed the boy much more than he needed her.
“You're in trouble, Jamal. But you know that, don't you? It's why you're here.”
Jamal nodded. “They killed Mr. Justin.”
Kat shook her head. “Justin?”
“In Madrid,” Jamal explained. “My American.”
“Your handler, you mean? The man you reported to?”
“Yes. The ones who killed him were Americans, too.”
“They'll kill you. And me now as well,” she told him, wondering to herself just who “they” were. There were so many possibilities. She couldn't even say for sure who Kurtz was working for. Or Morrow, for that matter. That he was from Defense meant almost nothing. “I can help you, but I need to know what happened.”
Jamal leaned back against a wooden vegetable crate and closed his eyes, lifting his face to the ceiling. It was a gesture, Kat knew, that could mean one of two things: he was preparing for something, and would either unburden himself and speak or retrench further and refuse to tell her anything.
“Please.” The one thing she'd been taught never to say to a prisoner. “Please, Jamal, you have to trust me.”
He lowered his head and opened his eyes, looked unblinkingly back at her, a sign of resignation to the truth. “But there is nothing to tell,” he said.
THE LIE HADN'T COME to Jamal right away. When he'd first seen Bagheri's picture on the television in the butcher shop, he'd recognized the man immediately—the large pock on his right cheek and the close-set eyes, the mouth that had never once smiled—but it had not even occurred to him to use this knowledge to his advantage. There was no doubt in his mind that this was the same man he'd met in Peshawar, who had helped him flee from the guesthouse owner to whom he'd been offered as payment on a debt by the men who'd brought him from Spain. Bagheri had promised Jamal something better, but had delivered the same as all the others.
Until then, Jamal had known nothing about Bagheri's escape, or the death of the other man, and he had watched the story with interest. He remembered the British soldiers well from the night of his capture. They had not been unkind to him—it was not until he arrived at the American facility that he had been thrown in with the others—and he was surprised to hear that they had been involved in the man's death.
It wasn't until his meeting with Mr. Justin, two days later, that it had occurred to Jamal to lie. Even then the decision to tell the American about Bagheri had not been so much a decision as a reaction. He had offered Mr. Justin Bagheri's name in the same way one might offer a ravenous dog a piece of meat, hoping to preserve his own life with the gesture, or at least put off the inevitable.
The first lie, so small, yet so reckless, not thinking of the lies that would follow, but only of what had to be done in that moment: Hamid Bagheri is here in Madrid.
And the look on the American's face when Jamal said this, a depth of greed the boy knew well. The same insatiability Jamal had recognized so many times before, in the face of that first man in Tangier, in Abdullah's face, and Bagheri's.
You have seen him?
Another scrap. Twice now. At the mosque on the Calle Espino.
You're certain, Jamal? You're absolutely certain?
Yes. In the name of the Prophet, yes.
He was alone?
The first time, yes. The second time there was another man as well. Thinking: details, one must have details to be believed. A Saudi. The lie now unfolding as if of its own free will. Already too late to take anything back.
And, just like that, the American was hooked.
“INEVER MEANT for anyone to get hurt,” Jamal said when he had finished with his story. “But Mr. Justin, he was always pressing and pressing. Jamal, what do you see? Jamal, what do you hear? He said he was going to stop giving me money if I didn't tell him something.”
Still and always the pleaser, Kat thought, not for one moment doubting the boy. She had seen the same thing happen more than once in the booth, had experienced it firsthand: that dangerous moment when the prisoner's need to confess and the interrogator's need to hear that confession threaten to overwhelm logic and reason, when the two parties, normally enemies, become willing partners in a deception that is often only nominally about the facts at hand, and sometimes not at all.
Kat and the others had been warned about this over and over, had had their own vulnerabilities constantly drummed into them. No doubt Jamal's American had been taught the same lessons. But it is one thing to understand our shortcomings and quite another to correct them.
The times Kat had been drawn in by false confessions, the shift from disclosure to fabrication had occurred with such simultaneous force and subtlety that neither she nor her prisoner had been aware of what was happening. And in each case, by the time she realized her mistake, neither could tell where the lies ended and the truth began.
“It's okay,” she told Jamal. “I understand.”
But it was not okay. Not at all. Where she had before seen the narrowest possibility for escape, Kat now saw none.
Jamal's face brightened. “We can explain everything, yes? You will help me.”
Kat thought about this for a moment. She did not want to deceive him any further; there had been too much of this already. But she could not bring herself to tell him the truth, either—that his lie had outgrown itself, that no explanation would change that fact.
Kat still did not understand exactly what had happened, what it was about Bagheri's presence in Madrid that could have set the events of the last week in motion. But, whatever the reason, Colin and Stuart were both dead because of it. She thought it unlikely that she and Jamal would be allowed to simply walk away, knowing what they knew.
Perhaps Bagheri knew something about what had happened out at the salt pit. Perhaps the same thing Colin and Stuart both knew. Perhaps the SBS team really had been behind Bagheri's escape, as Hariri had suggested. But none of this explained Morrow's interest in Bagheri, or Kurtz's, or why they would have waited until now to get rid of the two SBS men.
No, she told herself, remembering how she'd found Colin waiting for Kurtz at the Special Forces camp, and the next night in the ICE, Kurtz's face when the SBS team had taken fire, there was something more, something she was missing.
Shaking her head, she looked back at Jamal. “I'm sorry,” she said, “but this isn't something I can explain away. We're in trouble, Jamal. Serious trouble.”
“But there is no Bagheri,” Jamal insisted. “Don't you understand?”
“I do understand, but it's not that simple.”
Jamal said nothing.
“Look,” Kat told him, “I'll figure something out, but we can't stay here. This is the first place Kurtz will look.”
At the mention of Kurtz's name, Jamal's face grew pale.
Kat rose and extended her arm to Jamal to help him up, but Jamal didn't stand. Instead, he reached into the pocket of his pants, pulled out a scrap of paper, and offered it to Kat.
“What is this?” she asked, taking the paper, unfolding it. It appeared to have been torn from a book. There were eight letters in bold type: es kepler. And, below the letters, a hastily scrawled U.S. phone number.
“Mr. Harry,” Jamal said. “He will help us. He said so.”
Kat contemplated the northern Virginia area code. “Who's Mr. Harry?”
“From Madrid,” Jamal explained. “Before Mr. Justin.” He made an encouraging motion with his hands. “We can call him.”
Kat shook her head. “No, Jamal. I don't think that's a good idea.”
But it was clear from the look on Jamal's face that the matter was not up for d
iscussion. “We call Mr. Harry,” he said, with uncharacteristic resolve. “Or you go without me.” And then, throwing Kat's own words back at her: “You must trust me.”
AFTER SIX UNBEARABLE MONTHS back in the States, Harry had finally been posted to Kinshasa. Back to the night-soil circuit, and he'd been happy to go. Relieved to be anywhere besides a desk at Langley.
Irene had been the anti-Susan. A southern girl with a genteel Virginia accent and a sorority pin. Kappa Kappa Gamma, Sweetbriar chapter. A congressman's daughter indulging her diminutive wild streak with a foreign-service job before settling down. She hadn't been a virgin when they met, but close, still uncomfortable with the lights on, still discreetly absenting herself once a month. Always freshly showered and perfectly made up, smelling of lilies and lilacs.
When they were first introduced at the embassy Halloween party, Harry had mistaken her pink twinset and pleated skirt for a cleverly ironic costume. It wasn't until a few days later, when he ran into her in the cafeteria, that he realized this was they way she always dressed.
When Harry was with her, it was as if the last decade—Vietnam and the mess at home—had never happened, as if what had brought them to Africa was not another of Kissinger's dirty wars but a college mixer.
This was what he had fallen in love with: not Irene but the illusion of himself she offered, the person she was not.
IT WAS NEARLY THREE IN THE MORNING when the phone next to Harry's bed rang, jolting him out of an unusually pleasant dream in which he and Char had moved from the Tamarack Pines into a rambling villa in the Kona Hills and were diligently exploring their new home, stopping to have sex in each of the many rooms.
The reality of waking wouldn't have been nearly so painful if it hadn't been for the hangover that accompanied it. On his way back to the motel from Morrow's house, Harry had stopped at a package store and bought a fifth of cheap vodka. It was a decision he'd known he would regret in the morning, and he hadn't been wrong. Though, to be fair, it was hardly morning.
He reached for the phone in the darkness, groping the unfamiliar bedside table, knocking the vodka bottle to the floor as he did so and spilling what little was left of the contents. The smell of the liquor made him gag.