Hassan came back and resumed his seat. “Expiate.”
“Ah, Jesus,” Calvin said. His coffee cup rattled on its saucer. “Will you shut the fuck up? It’s my language.”
* * *
Hassan watched the giant Tariq, who now stood at the door of the inner room, surveying the street.
“Go after that boy,” Calvin said, speaking of Tariq, “you better be loaded for bear.”
Hassan finished a bowl of nuts and dried fruit. With his mouth full of smoked almonds, he said, “We are all mortal. In any body, hollow points make a hole.”
Shawn imagined that Calvin these days had his own mortality in mind. His vital signs were not good. He guessed this was probably not known to those who might want the job Calvin himself had taken when Shawn was eased out of the Agency. To his own surprise he felt a moment of sympathy for this man who would struggle all his life to emerge from the shadow of his five-star father. He waved to Danielle, who emerged from the inner room holding the arm of her dwarfish godfather. The giant bodyguard followed them.
Leaving a bunch of dirham notes on the table, Shawn joined the group. They walked down the shaded side of avenue Abdelkrim al Khattabi, toward the New Town. The sidewalk was less crowded now, men, women, and animals retreating from the heat.
“You know I am here as bodyguard,” said Tariq. “They will never let me in the jail.”
Back in the café, Calvin watched the group around Shawn. “Off your ass, boy,” he said to Hassan. “Someone needs to see where those guys are going.”
Hassan didn’t move. “We know where they are going.”
Calvin picked up his phone, checked that he had a signal, and called an officer in Morocco’s Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. The DST contact was a man you could trust—silent and efficient, trilingual. He was a ranking member of Mossad, though neither Israelis nor Moroccans acknowledged the fact.
“It’s that time again, my friend,” Calvin told Levi. “We have us a body to move.”
21
DIRECTION DE LA SURVEILLANCE DU TERRITOIRE JAIL, FES, MOROCCO, 27 MAY 2004
The stone-carved gateway in its outer wall was old and ornate, but, within that wall, the jail on the outskirts of Fes looked like a concrete office building. One in bad repair. Only metal shutters and machine gun–mounted watchtowers set it apart.
On the gate was a sign in three languages, forbidding photography.
“Old,” Tariq said, referring to the gateway and its carvings. “Well worked. Marinid architecture.”
From the desert came a warm wind, bearing sand.
“Which is what?” Shawn asked. He kept his distance from the giant bodyguard.
“Marinids ruled this place,” said Younis, who, in hours he had free, studied the city’s history. “This was up to the fifteenth century. They had unusual customs, these kings. Among them, burying men and women alive at each of the gates, to protect the city. Gates guarded by the living dead. Which, in the end, like all systems, failed to work. Death does have dominion. End of the Marinids.” He stopped for a moment, considering the jail. “The building, of course, is a modern facade. Behind, all is old. Your people financed it. The facade, I mean, and the cells inside.”
“My people? Americans?” Shawn considered Danielle, pale today in the African sun. “Why not her people? She has a blue passport. Why’s it always my people when something bad goes down?”
“You can imagine,” Danielle said, “there might be reasons.”
Around the building, within the outer wall, was bare, packed earth. Not even weeds grew. A single twisted fig tree, heavy with fruit, stood on the eastern perimeter. Two men in uniform waited on either side of the jail’s main door. Both were young and awkward; both carried submachine guns.
Shawn watched them closely. He distrusted nervous young men with automatic weapons. He’d known a few.
“There is also Israeli money,” Younis said. “We owe a debt to Mossad. They train our people, when they are not killing them.”
“Who interrogates these days?”
“Your military intelligence,” Younis said. “At times, OGA.”
Danielle divided her attention between Younis and the guards, “Excuse me?” she asked.
“OGA. Other government agencies.”
“Basically, Brits,” Shawn said. “They’re not like us. Kind of shy of being name-checked, places like this.”
Tariq, smiling, said to Younis, “Sir, I shall wait here. We know they will not let me in.” Holding his son in his arms, he moved to a patch of shade beneath the solitary fig. Set down, the boy searched the ground for the green-black fruit, split with pink, that birds had missed. His father watched as Younis showed identification to one of the soldiers. Moving back a little, still uneasy, fingering his weapon, the man gestured toward the metal door. Younis beckoned Shawn and Danielle. All three entered the building. Moving slowly in the midday heat, the second soldier closed the door behind them. He turned a bored, expressionless gaze on Tariq. One burst of fire, he thought, would stop a man, even of that size.
* * *
The jail entrance gave onto a vast stone-floored courtyard. In the middle stood an Apache helicopter whose markings, if they ever existed, had been erased.
Opening off the courtyard was a stone-walled room, buzzing with flies. It was unfurnished except for a plastic desk, two broken chairs, and three filing cabinets, only one of which had drawers. On the desk stood a black dial telephone and a blank-screened, finger-marked computer, beige in color.
Shawn noticed steel hooks in the ceiling.
Behind the desk were two young men in uniform, about the age of the pair outside. They played cards. One had the insignia of a sergeant. Both wore dark glasses and, despite the heat, black gloves.
Pointing at Shawn, Younis said to the sergeant, “This man has worked with your people, in Rabat. In Temara. With Colonel Qasim Behari. You see he has a pass. A nine-zero passport. American.”
The officers laid down their cards the better to examine Shawn’s security pass and the documents Younis placed before them. They passed papers between them. One man switched on the computer, slapping its flank without apparent hope, and without result.
Moving with unexpected speed, the sergeant captured a passing blowfly. With an audible crunch, he crushed it in the palm of his glove. He said in French, “The men. Not the woman.”
Danielle shrugged. “Ça va.” She moved toward the exit. “Je vais rester au dehors, à côté de Tariq.” To Shawn she said, “I’ll be outside. You take care.”
“Why?” asked the sergeant, in English. “What is she meaning?”
“If anyone offers you a ride back to town,” Younis told Danielle, “refuse. We shall go together.”
The sergeant said something in French to Younis, and both men laughed.
“What was that?” Shawn asked.
“He says that the woman has very beautiful green eyes, and breasts you could eat, like a mango,” Younis replied. “He says you are a lucky old man, if you take such a chicken to bed.”
“I wish,” Shawn said in English.
“Now,” said Younis, “he brings us down to the cells.”
* * *
The sergeant led the way out of the stone-walled office, along a corridor, down timeworn steps to a basement. Here the air was damp, the walls gray-green and, surprisingly, wet. Low-wattage bulbs were trapped overhead in wire-mesh cages. Most were dead. Smells of piss and shit hung on stagnant air.
On each side of the passage, cells were numbered down one side and up the other, the numbers both Hindu and Arabic. Each metal door had an inspection window; all the grilles were unshuttered. From where he stood, Shawn saw that the cells had loudspeakers, and in each, he guessed, was a single, high-powered light in a ceiling recess: standard procedure, he knew, for disorientation. Noise and light to banish sleep.
Through the first inspection window, he saw a naked man, squatting above a pisshole in the floor. Flesh hung loose on the pri
soner’s bones; his penis drooped. He watched the doorway with the gaze of a trapped animal.
In the next two cells, diaper-clad men hung by their arms, one spread-eagled, as if crucified. From links on their wrist shackles, shining chains ran to bolts in the cell’s stone roof. Though weak, the first man was pulling himself up, Shawn guessed, to ease the pressure on his wrists. He’d seen detainees who’d lost their hands when circulation ceased. These two, though, seemed physically intact.
Shawn recalled the hooks in the stone roof of the office above. Perhaps, he thought, there were times when the young, black-gloved solders filled in forms, or fought their lifeless computer, while the prisoners swung above them, turning in the breeze of the ceiling fan.
In the third and fourth cells, two more men hung from hooks. To Shawn, they seemed lifeless, though he knew it was unlikely. The CIA book of rules—standard operating procedure—recommends that dead bodies should be promptly removed, preferably for incineration. Absent crematoria, burial in lime.
The prisoners made no noise. Two were dressed in off-white women’s panties that came from God knows where. Otherwise, they were naked. Their unwashed skin made it hard to tell whether or not they were Arabic. All—even the hanging men—were chained by their ankles to wall bolts. Drainage gutters ran across the cell floors.
From somewhere, a sound of machinery.
Shawn leaned against a damp-stained wall. He felt nauseous. He was too old for this. Across the corridor, Younis systematically checked odd-numbered cells. Motionless, the Moroccan sergeant watched, his weapon loosely held in a black-gloved hand.
From above came a louder sound Shawn could not, for the moment, identify.
Several minutes later, Younis returned. “Not on this side, your man.” He held a handkerchief to his nose, against the stink. His eye still wept. He spoke in French to the sergeant, then in English to Shawn. “Sadly, my client has died and been buried. Once again, sudden death, it seems. Aneurism, hemorrhage of the brain.”
Shawn was at the last inspection window. “Our guy’s not on this side.” He pointed. “That door there. The one without a window.”
“La sépulture,” said Younis. “Do you say, sepulcher?”
“What’s inside?”
Younis translated the question for the sergeant, then translated the answer. “They call that the grave. There is a human in there. He will never come out. Not walking. But he is not your man.”
Shawn knew then what he was hearing: rotation of blades. Above them in the courtyard, he guessed, the unmarked helicopter was taking off.
To Younis he said, “I think we just missed our guy.” He pointed upward. “Sounds like the chopper’s gone.”
Younis thought for a moment. Dabbing his eye, he led the way toward the stairs. “Frequent flyers.” He shook his head. “Always hard. So hard to trace. You should take your woman, my Danielle, you should take her home to England, to France, wherever. She will not find her man.”
Shawn shook his head. “I’ll maybe take her home,” he said, “but she’s not my woman. And Younis, I’ll tell you this—she’ll keep looking.”
* * *
When Shawn arrived back at his hotel room, his laptop was missing. Not a serious loss. Shawn had learned something from his last night with Ellen: from losing his laptop, his job, and her. Now secure data dwelled, encrypted, on a server somewhere near Amarillo. The FBI could, if they wished, crack the encryption. They’d gotten good at that. First, though, they’d have to find the server.
For form’s sake, Shawn reported his loss to the local police. In broken English, he was told by a gray-haired uniformed sergeant, sorting papers, to come back during office hours.
“Which are what?”
“After ten in the morning,’ the policeman said. “Not holidays, or religious festivals. Both of which occur, as it happens, tomorrow.”
“If I leave Fes tomorrow?” Shawn asked.
The man behind the desk shrugged. What, he said, could anyone do about that? He advised Sean to forget the loss. “Go back to your hotel,” he said. “Get drunk. Is that not what Christians do?”
Shawn did go back to his hotel, but not to drink. Pausing outside the door of his room, he heard sounds he hadn’t heard since the last weeks of Martha’s life—racking, choking sobs, then a cry, hardly human. Opening the door, he saw Danielle, half naked, on the floor, rocking, between the beds. She seemed not to hear Shawn close the door and softly leave. He’d known some weeping women; he never knew what to do, or what to say.
22
FES, MOROCCO, 28 MAY 2004
On the last day in Fes, Shawn was depressed, uneasy; a feeling that lay in his gut, without a cause he’d put a name to. In part, it was foreboding: a sense of something evil gestating, something ominous in the air. In part, it had to do with his feeling for Danielle—desire might presage disaster, even death. He sensed she was dangerous: He knew he should forget her, and doubted he could.
On that evening, their last evening, Danielle said she’d take Shawn to supper. Now she was beautiful. When Shawn asked, she said she’d wept awhile for Darius and was through with tears. Calmer, she said she’d find where her husband had gone, and follow him there.
One way or another, she said, they were through with this town.
* * *
Danielle led Shawn through crowded streets—to him, more like lanes—in the city’s medina. From somewhere came a sound of quarter-toned music, a slower, sadder music than they’d yet heard. It matched Shawn’s mood of unease.
From byways, doors opened to unlikely courtyards, carnations planted with pink-flowered trees, fan palms, cacti, set around fountains. In one water-haunted garden was a raucous party, a family celebration: tables set with food, women slow-dancing to a plaintive tune, fireworks punctuating the sound of argument and laughter. Shawn thought of the last time he’d partied in palm-shaded gardens: years back, it was. They’d been in Andalusia, celebrating Martha’s birthday. A child of the Deep South, she’d fallen in love with southern Spain: cognac in the sun at breakfast above the blue and shimmer of the sea.
Another life. Since then, with Martha gone, there hadn’t been much to celebrate.
* * *
Danielle walked faster now, threading her way through crowded streets. Taller than the men and women around her, she was easy to follow. Shops here were small and shadowy, cavelike metal-lined recesses where legs of lamb hung from hooks, the meat gray with age. There were dishes of offal, intestines like softened hosepipe; baskets piled with fresh-cut herbs; odors of sweat, grilled meat, and roasting spice.
Shawn’s mind was on the prisoners he’d seen; on the nameless hanging men, their unseen inquisitors. He’d done it himself, such interrogation, and seen it done by others.
Captors and captives, both now invaded his dreams.
Here, in the souk, Shawn had the feeling he was being followed, but—looking back along the lanes—he saw no one out of place in those densely peopled streets. At his feet, he found a child: a little boy, crying in the dirt, chubby arms protecting his head.
Shawn stopped, blocking traffic. Like water around a rock, crowds flowed about him. He bent to lift the kid. The boy rested a small dark head on Shawn’s shoulder.
Danielle made her way back to where they stood. She nodded at the child. “What are you doing with him?”
“Least I can do,” Shawn said, “is put him someplace he won’t get stepped on.”
“Come,” she said. “We can do that.”
Minutes later, Shawn, holding the boy, followed her into what seemed to be a grocer’s store. Shelves filled with jars of spice and herbs and preserved fruit reached to the ceiling. The floor was stacked with floury sacks.
Danielle spoke in brief Arabic to an apron-clad Moroccan behind a wooden counter. To Shawn, she said, “This man will take the boy. He knows the family.”
Shawn set the child down. “You sure about this?”
“Of course I am sure. Here, they care about childre
n.”
The apron-clad man lifted the child and placed him on a high chair behind the counter.
“Could’ve fooled me,” Shawn said. “Kid was on the ground, folks walking over him.”
“It’s a side of you I haven’t seen,” she said. “The good father.”
“Didn’t work so great with my daughter.” He waved good-bye to the boy as Danielle thanked the storekeeper and set off toward the back of the shop. “This is where we eat?”
Danielle led Shawn to a narrow room, poorly lit, its walls hung with calligraphic tablets. In this claustrophobic cell, it seemed, food was served.
“My father,” Danielle said, “Benoit, my surrogate father—he used to bring me here, when I was a child.”
“This is the lawyer you talked about? Radical?”
“One of them. Sometimes I came with Younis—sometimes it was Benoit and me. Daughter and daddy, we were so close.”
“You were lovers? You and him?”
Danielle nodded. “Of course. My introduction. It was part of the excitement. The city, too. The food, the music, the market—it all seemed strange. So different from what I knew in France. So sexy.” Dramatically, she shivered. “Dangerous, I thought. I wanted to be a lawyer, then. Working for prisoners.”
Shawn thought that over. He turned back toward the shop, trying to see what had become of the child.
A young man with the look of a Koranic student set out plates on the only uncluttered table. Above it hung an old-fashioned ceiling fan from which descended four metallic lights: iron molded in the shape of tulips. There was no menu. Danielle ordered in French, which made Shawn uneasy.
“Danielle,” he said, “don’t give me a hard time, but what the hell did you ask for? I should tell you, I’m not good with third-world chow.”
She put her fingers over his, leaving them a little longer than she needed to. He could count on one hand the times she’d touched him.
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