I thought about it. I needed someone to call on my behalf. Someone who would sound persuasive, someone good at getting people to do what he wanted.
I slid my own phone out of my pocket and dialed.
He answered on the fourth ring.
“Hello?” said Lucien Sly.
LUCIEN AGREED TO MEET ME at the hotel only after extracting promises that I would have a cold drink waiting and that I would be wearing a disgracefully short skirt.
I stopped at a liquor store named Oddbins on the walk back from the gym and picked up white wine and a bottle of gin. He would have to live with the knee-length dress I’d had on since this morning. Miniskirts and sexy lingerie hadn’t exactly been high on my packing list when I was throwing clothes into my suitcase at home last Thursday. Not that I would have tarted myself up just because he’d asked me to. Not that I had any intention of sleeping with him again.
Lucien showed up at my hotel half an hour later. He strolled in and poured us each a glass of the wine. He didn’t ask why I’d returned to Cambridge for another night. Instead he looked increasingly amused as I explained my predicament.
“So essentially, you’ve no idea who will answer the phone at this Habibi Farms place, or what exactly you’re trying to find out, or how this relates in any way to your alleged assignment, but you want me to weasel as much detail out of them as possible? Is that the gist?”
I frowned. He sounded like Hyde. “Anything we can get about why Siddiqui was calling before. And if they know how to reach him now.”
“And if they ask who I am and why I need to know about this Mr. Siddiqui’s fruit orders?”
“Well, you could leave the vague impression that you’re some sort of business associate of his. And sound a little intimidating. Haughty. As though you’re quite important and pressed for time.”
He flopped into an armchair. “You want me to pose as a self-important prick? Can’t do it. Obviously. Too much of a stretch.” He smirked.
I rolled my eyes. “Can we just get on with this, please?”
“All right, all right. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. But you do know that it’s got to be something like two in the morning there? Shouldn’t we wait till morning? No one’s going to answer now anyway.”
I paused. That would of course be the sensible thing to do. But I only had a day until Hyde was going to yank me off the story, and I wanted to keep going.
I held up the phone. “Let’s just try,” I pleaded. “Someone might be there.”
He sighed. “Fine. Hand it here.”
I highlighted the second number on the phone and pressed redial. Then I leaned in so I could hear.
Sure enough, it was a recording. “You have reached the office of Mr. Aziz at Habibi Produce and Shipping,” said a female voice. “Please leave a message and he will return your call.” She repeated the message in a foreign language. Urdu? Pashto? What did they speak in Karachi?
I hung up and slumped onto the bed. “Well, that was a waste of time. Sorry for dragging you over here. I’m on deadline for tomorrow and now I can’t get anything done until the whole damn country of Pakistan wakes up in the morning.”
“Mmm. Luckily I have quite a good idea for what we could do to pass the time.” Lucien leaned over and topped up my glass. “Let’s get trollied and go to bed again.”
I threw a pillow at him.
He started tickling me.
I tried to kick him and missed.
“That old-ninny dress you’re wearing must be restricting your movements. Shall I loosen it and liberate those legs? Then you can kick all you want.” He bit my ear, hard.
And you can probably guess what happened after that.
22
Thirty-three thousand feet above the Atlantic, Nadeem Siddiqui was squirming, trying to get comfortable in his seat. He was a compact man, five feet six inches and lean. But this was his third transatlantic flight in a week. His leg muscles flinched at being crammed under yet another reclining seat back and tray table. He stretched his neck and shoulders and then gave up, settling back against the greasy headrest.
What a disaster of a week it had been. To have topped it off by running into the girl yesterday was a stroke of such preposterously bad luck that it almost defied belief. He had frozen when he heard the lock turn and the door open. And then to find Petronella Black standing there . . . As usual, he could think of nothing to say to her. She intimidated him. Most Western women did, but Thomas Carlyle’s girlfriend especially so. She was beautiful. Bewitchingly so. The embodiment of everything he desired and despised about the West, wrapped up in one slender, silky package.
Luckily she had seemed as uninterested in him as ever yesterday, despite the odd circumstances of their meeting. He thought he had pulled it off, just. He had learned to keep quiet. Never say more than required in a situation. It would only come back to trip you up. So with Petronella, once he had recovered his wits sufficiently to speak, he had murmured his sympathies, and then a flimsy excuse about losing something. Ironically, this was the truth, and she had seemed to buy it. She had actually looked bored.
The British often were, in Nadeem’s experience. The chattering classes who thrived at Cambridge were so thoroughly self-absorbed, so focused on their lager-soaked ambitions, that a quiet Pakistani man could move among them as a shadow. This was an advantage. He had been able to keep to himself. He focused on his own ambitions.
Still, he had hated his months in Cambridge. He hated the cobbles, the courts, the chapels, the colleges. He hated the cheery little tea shops, the medieval streets now clogged with belching tour buses. He hated the students whizzing past on bicycles, threatening to knock him down, their bright, stripy scarves flying behind. Most of all he hated the damp. It seemed to seep from everywhere—from his sheets and blankets, from underneath the floorboards of the room he rented near the train station. Every day he choked down the limp tuna-mayonnaise sandwiches that passed for a meal in that wretched country and counted the days until his escape. The only person who had shown him kindness was his ridiculous, plump little landlady, tutting over her loaves of banana bread. Nadeem snorted. He looked forward to never eating another banana as long as he lived.
He shifted position again and rubbed his leg where it had fallen asleep. He closed his eyes. He was still uncomfortable, but now another, unfamiliar sensation was creeping over him. Calm. England was receding behind him. He would not be going back. The most important work still lay ahead, but he was back on the right track. The lost phone was a distraction, nothing more.
The whole episode with Thomas Carlyle . . . well, he had taken care of it. There were bound to be hiccups in an operation such as this. Of course, it looked bad for him. His handlers had not been pleased. No, it was worse than that: they had threatened to delay the whole operation, to replace him and start again. He was compromised. They asked, over and over, what had Carlyle heard? Whom could he have told? How—exactly—had he died?
And Nadeem had assured them, over and over, it was nothing. Carlyle had told no one. There were no traces.
23
TUESDAY, JUNE 29
I was jolted from sleep at five in the morning when my cell phone rang.
I groped around for it in the dark. “Hello?” I answered groggily.
“Hello? Hello? Who is this?” a man demanded. He had a strong accent.
“What? Who is this? You called me.” I dragged myself into a sitting position and turned on the light.
“I— Yes. Excuse me. This is Dr. Syed Qureshi. My telephone shows I missed two calls yesterday from this number. But there was no message. To whom am I speaking?”
Syed Qureshi. The name sounded familiar. I was still half-asleep. Then it clicked. The exchange coordinator in Pakistan. The man Gitta Juette had told me to contact. I had tried him a couple of times yesterday, but he never answered.
“Of course, yes. My name is Alexandra James.”
“And you are calling from America?”
“Well, no, actually. I’m in England. In Cambridge. I was hoping you might be able to put me in touch with Nadeem Siddiqui.”
“Nadeem!” the man sounded relieved. “He is with you? We have been very worried.”
“No, no. I am looking for him. The lab—Cavendish Laboratory—gave me your phone number. They said you could put me in touch.”
“I do not understand.”
I was getting frustrated. “I need to speak with Mr. Siddiqui for some . . . some research I’m working on. He’s finished his program here, as I’m sure you know, and I wondered if you could help me contact him.”
Qureshi was quiet for a moment. “But I was hoping you could do the same. You work at Cavendish, did you say?”
“No. But Dr. Juette there gave me your number. Listen, I just need to speak with him briefly—”
“But he is not here. I thought—I thought he might have stayed on in Cambridge a bit longer. His feedback from there was excellent. But he was expected back at work here last week. And he has not appeared. It is most irregular, Miss James. It reflects most poorly on my program.” He sounded huffy, as though I were responsible in some way for Nadeem Siddiqui’s truancy.
I was thinking fast, trying to recall the trade-journal blurb that had mentioned where Siddiqui worked. “So he was expected back at—um—back in Karachi last week?”
“No, at Kahuta,” Qureshi said impatiently. “They will revoke his clearance, you know. They will do that. Even with his seniority now. An unexplained absence will not be tolerated. And I am really very worried this will endanger future funding for my—”
“If you could just give me his e-mail address, Dr. Qureshi. Perhaps I could speak with him.”
“No,” he said sadly. “No. I have tried that. Several times. He is not responding.”
THAT LAST CONVERSATION MIGHT HAVE been the tipping point for me. The tipping point where I became irrevocably interested in the story of Nadeem Siddiqui, whether or not he had anything to do with the death of Thomas Carlyle.
But I think actually it was this next one that did it.
After I hung up with Dr. Qureshi, I nudged Lucien awake.
“Holy mother of God,” he moaned. He opened one eye. “Unless you’re in the market for another shag, it can’t possibly be time to wake up.”
“Time to call Pakistan.”
He shifted his eyes to the clock on the nightstand. “Or we could call them at eight. Or nine even.” He held out his arms to me. “Come back to bed.”
“Lucien. Please. It will take five minutes. And then I will tuck you back in and you can sleep as late as you want.”
“And you can’t do this yourself, because . . . ?”
“Because they might recognize my voice. I told you that.”
“Right. I’d forgotten you were so thick with the Pakistani fruit-export community.”
But he rolled over and held out his hand for the phone. I think he could tell there was no use arguing. I reminded him what he should say. He groaned in a can-we-just-get-on-with-this kind of way, and then I hit the redial button.
This time someone answered right away.
“Mr. Malik? Good morning. Is everything all right?” It was a man. He sounded worried.
Lucien and I looked at each other. That name again. Malik. Who was Malik? And why did everyone who took calls from Nadeem Siddiqui expect to speak to him?
“Hello, Mr. Aziz,” Lucien said crisply. Well done, remembering the name we’d heard on the voice mail yesterday. “Just calling to check in.”
“Mr. Malik? Is that you?”
Mr. Aziz, whoever he was, must have caller ID. Either that, or else only one person ever used the number we’d just dialed. From the way he’d answered, Aziz was clearly expecting a specific caller.
Lucien raised his eyebrows at me questioningly, then pressed on. “This is Lucien Sly. I am an associate of his. He asked me to check on the status.”
Lucien was good. His wording was perfect. The status could refer to anything, after all. He was fishing.
But the voice on the other end sounded uncertain. “I don’t know you. I deal with Mr. Malik.”
“Of course,” Lucien said soothingly. “But Mr. Malik is—is traveling right now, as I’m sure you know. That is why he gave me your name and number. And why he asked me to use this phone, his phone. So I could check the status.”
Aziz hesitated. Then he cleared his throat. “But the status is the same as when I last spoke to Mr. Malik. We shipped on the twenty-first.”
“Yes, yes, the twenty-first,” said Lucien, still winging it. “Do you have any update though on the arrival date?”
“I believe it’s still due to arrive later today.”
“Splendid! Mr. Malik will be pleased. Yes. But he did also ask me to reconfirm the delivery address. Could you just read it back to me?”
“But it’s the same address as I discussed with Mr. Malik,” protested Aziz. “He said he would be there to meet it.”
He would be there to meet it? I had no idea who this Mr. Malik was, or what shipment we were talking about, but it suddenly seemed urgent to find out where it was headed. I made frantic little hand gestures at Lucien. He batted me away.
“I’m well aware that you and Mr. Malik have discussed this,” he said sternly into the phone. “But you will appreciate the importance of confirming these details? It is in everyone’s interest, certainly yours I would remind you, to ensure that everything goes smoothly. Now let’s go over this again.”
When Aziz spoke again, he sounded rattled. He read Lucien a tracking number. And an address. An address in the United States. An address just outside Washington, DC.
I WENT FOR A LONG run that morning, or a long run by my standards—the reverse of my Sunday loop, sprinting out across Parker’s Piece and then several slow miles tracing the banks of the Cam.
I was trying to collect my thoughts. What did I actually know at this point? Often it helps if I try to write the news story in my head—figure out what my lede is, and what evidence and quotes I have to support it. Right now I had nothing remotely worthy of filing for the paper. My assignment was to investigate the death of Thomas Carlyle, and since last week I’d managed to accomplish very little on that front. I’d met his girlfriend. I’d seen where he lived. And I had learned that a man who had no reason to be in his room had possibly broken in and rifled through Thom’s things, five days after he’d died.
But so what? That might have absolutely nothing to do with Thom’s death. And it hardly made Siddiqui a murderer. Maybe Siddiqui really had left something in Thom’s room. Maybe Petronella had been mistaken about the door’s being locked. And maybe Siddiqui—a respectable Oxbridge lecturer, after all—had decided to take a spur-of-the-moment-vacation, and that’s why no one could track him down just now. Again, no crime there.
It did seem strange that he’d bumped into Petronella in Emmanuel College two days ago, when his landlady was under the impression that he’d left Cambridge. And I couldn’t think of how this Malik character fit into the picture. Who was he? A friend of Siddiqui’s? A workout buddy? Maybe an American, since he was having deliveries shipped to Washington.
Lots of things didn’t make sense. But nothing seemed overtly illegal.
I sighed. Hyde was right. I didn’t have anything, really. Only . . . how had he put it? A half-baked conspiracy about a Pakistani banana fiend.
24
Elias was already up and on the treadmill when I called. Eleven in the morning my time, 6:00 a.m. for him in Washington.
Elias and I started at the Chronicle the same week. We were summer interns together, competing over stories like shark sightings on the Cape and the sinkhole that swallowed a professor’s car in the MIT parking lot. A few times over that long, sticky summer we would buy cheap seats for Red Sox games and bike over to Fenway after work, to drink beer and eat hot dogs and complain about the metro editor. There was never anything remotely romantic about our friendship. That was why it worked, and
why it has lasted. And why now, when I had no idea what to do next, and Hyde was probably preparing to scalp me alive, I called Elias.
Around the same time I finally got promoted to cover the universities, he got the chance to fill in for a few months down in the Washington bureau, while the regular White House reporter, Nora Cooke, took maternity leave. He thrived. He filed stories nearly every day, often for the front page. He even managed to scoop the Washington Post and the New York Times a couple of times. The news managers noticed. When Nora came back from leave in a huff two weeks early, to reassert her seniority, they kept finding excuses to keep Elias in Washington. He managed to secure a Pentagon hard pass and became a fixture at the Defense and State Department briefings. He somehow weaseled an interview with the head of the CIA, a man who rarely gave interviews. After a year, management bowed to the inevitable and named him national security correspondent. Elias says the secret is to get to the newsroom first and then work harder all day than anyone else. That, and always to have an important-sounding but vague series in the works, the better to dodge dull daily assignments.
“Hi, Ginger,” he panted now, picking up on the third ring.
“Good grief. Only you would already be in the gym. Or at least I hope that’s why you’re panting. How many miles?”
“Two to go. What’s up?”
I smiled. Leave it to Elias to have already accomplished as much as I had today, when thanks to the time difference I had a five-hour head start on him.
“It’s the Thom Carlyle story. I’m still in England.”
“I know. That didn’t go down so well yesterday on the three p.m. call.”
The three p.m. call would be the daily conference call among editors planning the next day’s front page. “It didn’t? How do you know?”
“Because the Washington bureau got dragged into figuring out how to cover the funeral today when it turned out you weren’t going to be there. I think they’re going to leave it as a White House story.”
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