“What’s the personal business?”
“My friend—his body is still in Aleppo.” She hated referring to Brian as a body. “His parents are having trouble getting him processed out. I said I’d try to help.”
“Oh, sorry.”
Olivia produced her phone. Three bars. In eastern Aleppo’s patchwork cell coverage, the Beit Wakil stood a few blocks from a tower in the western half of the city. She tried the number of a Marine captain in her “reliable sources: military” directory.
“Who are you calling?” Dee asked.
“This captain I know. He might be able to help.”
The call rang in weird fits and starts. Olivia was about to kill the sketchy connection and try again when a man’s voice said:
“Burnley.”
“Hey, it’s me, Liv.”
“I thought you went home.”
“I did, but I’m back. Ted, I need your help.”
“Of course you do,” the captain said.
Olivia liked Burnley, and he liked her—but not in the same way. Hers was professional and his aspired to be more personal. When she first met him, the possibility of a personal connection hadn’t been out of the question. Then she met Brian, and he got his foot in her door. Probably Olivia should have found a different Marine to help her track the body. But Ted Burnley was so good. If there was red tape, he had the scissors. But Olivia never stopped beating herself up for using the captain’s attraction to keep him interested in helping her with stuff like expediting corpses out of Syria.
“This one is painless,” Olivia said. “I hope.”
She quickly outlined the problem.
“I’ll make some calls and get back to you. Give me a half hour.”
“Thanks, Ted.”
They drank coffee and ate breakfast while they waited. Cucumbers, goat’s milk yogurt, and khubz—a round Arabic bread, very chewy.
It was closer to an hour before Captain Burnley called back. “You’re gonna have to go to the morgue.”
“Shit.” Olivia closed her eyes, rubbed her temple.
“So the deal is: face-to-face and have your bribe money ready. Only way to get anything done in this place. Anyhow, I greased the skids, but they still want you to personally ID the corpse.”
The world grayed out a little, and black spots floated across her vision. For a few moments she couldn’t speak. Dee looked worried.
“You still with me?” Burnley said.
Olivia pulled it together. “Yeah.”
“Goddamn phones around here, you never know.”
“Why do I have to identify him?” She didn’t want to say Brian’s name. “Don’t they already know it’s him?”
“It’s an excuse. Some hospital bureaucrat wants you to hand him money. They might not make you actually look at your friend.”
Olivia drank some coffee. Her throat felt almost too tight to swallow. “Which morgue?”
“There’s only one,” Burnley said. “This goddamn war, both sides bombed the hell out of each other’s hospitals. Never saw anything like it. Now, your boy’s an American citizen. That’s the only reason he’s got a cold locker.” He gave her the hospital’s name and address.
“Thanks, Ted.”
“You going to be in-country for a while?”
“Possibly.”
“Give me a call.”
“Sure. Thanks again.” She hung up and reached for her coffee. Noticing the tremor in her hand, she made a fist and clenched it tightly.
“What’s going on?” Dee asked.
“I have to go look at my friend’s body and bribe somebody. I mean, maybe I won’t have to look at it. I don’t know.”
Dee studied her. “Are you up for that?”
“I don’t know. Yes. I have to be.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I’m coming. You look like you could use some moral support.”
* * *
As arranged the previous night, Toria pulled up in the BBC van at 9 A.M. Olivia and Dee got in.
“You guys still look like shit,” Toria said.
Olivia smiled briefly, woodenly. “Thanks. Lousy sleep.”
“The kid’s place is about twenty minutes from here.”
“Uh, we need to go someplace else first.”
Toria looked at the ceiling, as if beseeching the gods for succor. “You’re not going to believe this, but I have a job I’m supposed to be doing.”
“This is part of it. The bioweapon story. This side trip is just something personal I have to do first.”
Toria tapped the steering wheel with her nails, which were red and chipped. “Okay, where are the Three Musketeers going this morning?”
“The morgue.”
* * *
An hour after talking to Captain Burnley from the dining room of the Beit Wakil, Olivia and Dee were following a harried orderly, or at least an orderly who affected being harried, into a large, starkly lit room lined with green tiles. Human meat lockers filled one whole wall, maybe thirty in all. A gurney with an empty body bag hanging sloppily over the edge stood in the middle of the room. There was a strong, almost overpowering smell of industrial disinfectant.
“We are very busy here,” the orderly said, clearly put out by having to escort two foreigners.
“We understand,” Olivia said. “Thank you for taking the time.”
Unmollified, the orderly said, “I have a busy job.”
“Why don’t you try doing it with a little less talking,” Dee said.
“Do not disrespect.” The orderly consulted his tablet, scrolled. “Okay, this one.” He strode to a locker, opened it, and slid out the tray, the casters rolling loudly in their steel channels. Green sheeting covered the body
“Brian Anker,” the orderly said. He folded back the sheeting. “Miss?”
Olivia hadn’t wanted to look at Brian’s body, but suddenly she needed to.
Dee squeezed her arm. “You want to be alone?”
“Yes.”
“No alone in this room,” the orderly said.
“For fuck’s sake,” Dee said.
“Rules.”
“Okay. There’s a body I want to see,” Dee said. “A different body. Another American. This is where the Americans are, right?”
“What body?”
“Jacob Shaw.”
Making a big show of being put out, the orderly consulted his tablet again. “Over here.”
He led Dee to a locker on the other side of the room. “Why you wish to see this body, I have no understanding. It will be necessary to update the log. Very expensive.”
“What a surprise.” Dee reached for her wallet. “How expensive?”
Olivia approached the open drawer containing Brian. Of course, she had seen many dead bodies, some the bodies of people she knew well, friends and colleagues. And she had seen Brian’s body in the torture cell under the madrassa. But that time was part of an entanglement of memory scaffolds, like overlapping dreams.
What lay in that drawer was the final reality.
Brian’s face seemed carved in wax. She whispered, barely able to get the words out. “Bri, I’m so sorry.”
“Hey!”
Olivia looked up. Dee waved her over.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Dee said.
“Believe what?”
Olivia walked over to the other drawer. Dee stood beside it, looking outraged. The orderly stood at the foot of the tray, holding his tablet. Jacob’s body was covered with green sheeting, just like Brian’s. But above the shoulders, the sheeting lay flat.
Someone had taken his head.
Olivia rubbed her eyes. God, she was tired. “Are we sure this is Jacob’s body?”
The orderly waved his tablet. “It says here. Please respect our efficiency.”
Both women glanced at him, then walked away from the drawer, out of earshot, if they kept their voices low.
�
�Somebody thought Jacob might still have the link,” Dee said. “Emilio?”
“Maybe. You said the Society was desperate to find it. If the link hadn’t been able to migrate to anyone, it’s logical to think it might have stayed in Jacob’s head.”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
“When they took me out of the torture cell, Jacob’s head was still attached. Something happened between there and the morgue. We need to establish provenance.”
“Is it important? We know where the link is. So does Emilio.”
“It might be important. We won’t know until we find out what happened.”
She dug out her phone. No bars.
“Hey.” She raised her voice to the orderly. “Is there a landline in this hospital I can use?”
“First there is payment for the log work.”
“Naturally.”
A few minutes later, at a nurses’ station, Olivia dialed Captain Burnley’s Green Zone landline. A subordinate answered. Olivia identified herself and left a message. She wanted to talk to whoever it was who had taken Jacob’s body out of the torture cell. It wasn’t a sure bet that Burnley would know who that person was, but Olivia didn’t know who else to ask. The subordinate said he would relay the message.
“Okay,” Olivia said, handing the phone back to the nurse, “let’s go talk to this kid Toria found.”
* * *
At first, the boy’s mother was suspicious.
“What has Rashid done?” Her English was excellent.
For the third time, Olivia said, “He hasn’t done anything. I just want to ask him a couple of questions.”
“But why? He’s only a boy. He’s a good son.”
“I promise he won’t get in any trouble for talking to me.”
Should she promise that? It didn’t matter; she just did promise it. Olivia looked around the kitchen. Peeling linoleum floor, clean counters, neatly organized cabinets without doors. The inevitable dust of Syrian destruction filmed the windowpanes. This widow and her “good son” lived in the heart of the Disaster. War had eaten her husband, the boy’s father. But they still made a home. A more typical disaster had eaten Olivia’s mother and father. Olivia had responded by constructing barricades and declaring that disasters did not affect her anymore. Shayma’s kitchen still felt like a home. All Olivia had was a dead man’s apartment on the other side of the world and a stepmother who had tried to be a real mother even after Olivia had placed her firmly on the other side of her barricades.
The door opened and a mop-haired boy of fifteen or so walked in with a cloth bag of groceries. Olivia recognized him instantly. He saw Olivia and stopped dead, though there was no way he could possibly know her.
“This woman wants to ask you questions,” Shayma said. “She is a reporter.”
Rashid put the grocery bag on the counter. Without looking at either of them, he said, “Okay.”
“I will make tea.” Shayma turned and filled the kettle with tap water.
Olivia cleared her throat. “Rashid, do you know a military man named Baki Abboud?”
Shayma dropped the kettle in the sink, making a loud noise. Without a word, she picked the kettle up and resumed filling it.
Rashid said, “No.”
“A few days ago,” Olivia said, “you were going to drive through Abboud’s checkpoint out of the city. Can you tell me why?”
Mother and son turned toward Olivia, as if their heads were attached to synchronized swivels. Shayma looked scared. Rashid looked like he wanted to be someplace else.
“It’s not true. How do you know this?” Shayma said.
If it wasn’t true, what was there to know? Olivia reached for every reporter’s magic card: “I have a source. Anonymous. Rashid, you aren’t in trouble. But I need to know why you decided to leave by that checkpoint.”
“He’s a good son,” Shayma said.
“I know,” Olivia said, knowing no such thing, though she suspected he was. Didn’t he just go out into the Disaster to buy groceries for his mother? What would Shayma think if she knew that in another probability Olivia had directed her son’s death?
“A man told me to go,” Rashid said.
Shayma said, “What? Who, what man?”
Rashid shrugged. “Just a man, someone I know.”
“That’s no answer,” Shayma said.
Rashid looked at the floor.
Olivia said, “It’s important.” She tried to think of something to threaten the boy with, immediately felt shame, and was glad when nothing occurred to her. “Please, Rashid. It will save lives. And no one will know you told me. I promise. You won’t be implicated.”
“What is ‘implicated’?” Shayma asked.
“Associated,” Olivia said, “maybe criminally associated.”
Shayma put the kettle down like she was using it to squash a scorpion. “You can go. My son has nothing more to say.”
“Many lives,” Olivia said to the boy. “Very many lives.”
The boy crossed his arms tightly, as if he was holding the secret against his chest.
“Well.” Olivia turned to the door. “Thank you for talking to—”
Rashid’s chin came up. “Mahdi. That’s all I know. Mahdi.”
“This man. Mahdi. Does he have a scar, here?” Olivia pointed at her eyebrow and traced a crooked line upward. “A jagged scar?”
Rashid nodded.
It fell into place. Mahdi was the linchpin of the crisis point. He had been there when the shooting started outside the madrassa, when Brian and Jodee were hit, and he had stopped the gunman from shooting Olivia. That’s why he couldn’t be in the torture cell earlier to intervene with Jacob, not until Olivia placed him there in her alternate probability stream when she wanted to bring Brian back. In that altered probability, the kid who fired on the French peacekeepers and Olivia’s party was alone. He wounded Brian and Jodee, but not critically, and the soldiers took him down before he could kill Olivia. Mahdi wasn’t there that time, in Olivia’s probability. But he was in Jacob’s—he was there to be killed by one of the wounded soldiers, and therefore prevented from later playing a part in the smuggling of variola.
“What did Mahdi tell you?” Olivia asked. “Specifically.”
“Only that I should drive out of the city and that I must go by the Omar ibn al-Khattab road.”
Shayma, sounding disappointed, said, “Last week you told me you wished to visit Mansura.”
“Mansura is a destination I made up by myself. I lied, Mother. I’m sorry.” He looked at his shoes.
“Oh, Rash.” Shayma pulled him in and hugged him. “Why did you do this thing?”
“I don’t know. Mahdi is a hero. A hero asks me to do something, I have to do it.”
“Mahdi is not a hero,” Shayma said. “He fought in a confusing time and lived. Others did not live. And now he is dead, too.”
“I know. But it didn’t seem like a bad thing to do. Mahdi only wanted me to drive into the desert. It wasn’t hard to say yes.”
Olivia said, “He didn’t say anything about what to do after you got out of the city?”
“No. Only that I must go by way of Omar ibn al-Khattab.”
Yes, Olivia thought. The way that would force Rashid to pass through Baki Abboud’s checkpoint.
Mother stood apart from son, her hands on his shoulders. “Look at me.”
He raised his chin, but it was plain he didn’t want to, that he was ashamed.
“Tell this woman the truth,” Shayma said.
“I did. It’s—”
“All of the truth, Rash.”
Jesus. Olivia was glad Shayma wasn’t prosecuting her in a courtroom.
Rashid sighed. “I was to drive two kilometers and stop. Someone was to approach me.”
“Who?” Olivia said.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Mahdi was supposed to give me the final word to go, but he got killed and never did it. So I did not go.”
This time, she believed him
.
Thirty-Four
A block away, Dee and Toria waited in the shade of a crumbling wall next to the BBC van, drinking bottles of water.
Toria saw Olivia approaching and stepped away from the wall. “What happened?”
“Water.” Olivia reached out, and Toria handed her the Arwa bottle. The heat was brutal. Olivia wondered how she had endured it for so long. In the cauldron of the Disaster, she had been like a slow-cooking crab. Well, she was done. Almost.
She tilted her head back, chugged the warm water, and wiped her lips.
“Baki Abboud.”
Toria said, “What about him?”
“During the uprising, he tried to use a civilian to transport something out of the city. Not the biological itself, but something connected, maybe some kind of code or instruction. I don’t know. Something.”
“You mean the kid you just talked to?”
“Rashid. Yes. But I don’t think the boy knew what was going on. Whatever it was must have been time-sensitive. It couldn’t wait for the new checkpoints to come down, and Abboud wasn’t willing to expose himself. This guy Mahdi, he recruits Rashid to drive through a particular checkpoint and out of the city. When the vehicle is searched, there’s nothing to find, because the commander planned to plant whatever it is after the vehicle had been examined.”
“Plant what?” Toria asked.
“I don’t know. But somebody was going to stop the kid once he got away from the city, so this could still go down. We could be on the brink again next month, or tomorrow.”
Toria looked at her strangely. “What do you mean, on the brink again? Tell me what’s going on.”
Olivia said, “I can’t tell you anything else right now.”
“You know what?” Toria said. “You’re a real tosser sometimes.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Look into Baki Abboud, the checkpoint commander. He’s dirty and dangerous. If we can bring it to the attention of the coalition authority, maybe that will help.”
“You want to go see this guy now, this Abboud?”
“No.” Olivia handed back the water bottle. “You do that. It’s a major story, trust me. You just have to dig a little.”
“You’re giving it to me? Why?”
The Chaos Function Page 28