Flashback

TWENTY

We took the back way from the hotel, out a service entrance and into the pitch-dark hive of the medina, groping our way up one long flight of stairs and into a wider alleyway. There was a light rain falling, a fine mist that sifted down over the rambling stage set of the Old City, the crooked streets and houses like some child’s nightmare backdrop. A breeze blew in from the strait, carrying with it the stench of low tide, seaweed and sewage and exposed dock timbers.

A friend, I thought. It was the same thing I’d told Abdesselom. We ricocheted around a corner, and I slipped the Beretta from my waistband, then grabbed the woman’s arm and shoved her against the damp wall.

“Who are you?” I asked, jamming the gun up into the soft space below her chin.

She reached for her pocketed gun, and I nudged her harder with the Beretta. “Leave it,” I told her.

Her face was wet, her breath hot on my face.

“Who do you work for?” I asked.

“The Americans.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “That’s what Brian told me.”

She turned her face upward and blinked against the rain. “Same team, different players. Brawn versus brain. We’re the quiet ones.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

The woman swallowed hard, the muscles in her neck tensing against the barrel of the Beretta. “NSA,” she said.

The National Security Agency, I thought, remembering Sister Claire’s videos, the various incarnations of American might. “Bullshit,” I told her. “The NSA’s a bunch of computer geeks. They don’t have people in the field.”

“You’re right,” she said calmly. “Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you I’m not here.”

I shook my head. “Who am I?”

“You don’t remember. You call yourself Eve, but your passport says you’re Marie Lenoir. You entered the country just over a week ago on the Algeciras ferry, a feat that would seem virtually impossible considering Marie’s corpse lies six feet under in a churchyard in Burgundy. You spent the last year in a Benedictine convent.”

“And before that?”

“Before that you were Hannah Boyle.”

“And before Hannah?”

“That’s where things get tricky. We know a woman named Leila Brightman did contract work for American intelligence. European work mostly, Amsterdam, Vienna, the arms pipeline. But you were here in North Africa as well. That was a few years ago. We have some other names: Michelle Harding, Sylvie Allain.”

“And Hannah, did she work for the Americans, too?”

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Hannah herself, for starters. It’s a civilian alias, something you most likely got on your own. Hannah Boyle died over a decade ago in a car wreck outside of Bratislava. The agency doesn’t use dead girls. They don’t have to.”

I eased my safety back on and lowered the Beretta just an inch. “Why should I believe you?”

“You shouldn’t, not any more than we should believe you’ve lost track of three decades of your life. Come on,” she said. “There’s a safe house not far from here.”

I lowered the gun to my side.

“I saved your life,” she reminded me. “That’s got to count for something.”

“What’s your name?” I asked, taking a step back.

She peeled herself off the wall. “Helen,” she said. “You can call me Helen.”

Helen hit a switch on the wall, and a single bulb flickered on, illuminating a narrow corridor and, beyond it, a larger, windowless room. “It’s one of our old listening posts,” she explained. She stepped forward into the main space, and I followed behind.

The room was sparsely furnished. Dusty boxes were stacked in the corner. A wooden crate turned into a makeshift table held a grimy coffeemaker and an electric hot plate. In the middle of the room was an old wooden desk and chair, and behind them, an army cot and sleeping bag. A curtain half covered a door in the far wall, through which I could see the partial outline of a toilet.

Helen got down on her knees, slipped a penknife from her pocket, pried one of the old plank floorboards free, and pulled a laptop from the space in the subfloor. There was something mercurial about her, shape shifting. Here, in the room’s tired light, she seemed older than she had at the hotel, her face and body a blank canvas.

“At the Mamounia,” I said, remembering the tall blonde with the overdone breasts. “That was you in the casino?”

“Yes,” she said. She stood and carried the computer to the little desk.

“And at customs in Algeciras? You had them let me through, didn’t you?”

“We needed you to get on that ferry,” she explained, drawing the pen drive from her pocket, sliding it into the laptop’s USB port.

“Why?”

“What did Brian tell you?” she asked.

I hesitated a moment, unable to let myself trust her.

“He didn’t know, Eve,” she said. It was strange to hear that name in her mouth. “He didn’t know he was lying to you. He didn’t even know who he was working for.”

“I told you, he said he was working for the CIA.”

“Well, he wasn’t, not this time. Someone in the CIA, yes, but not the agency itself. Same story with your old friend Patrick Haverman.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What did he say was on the drive?”

“Documents from old Soviet files,” I told her, finally deciding I had nothing to lose.

“What kind of files?”

“Municipal plans for U.S. cities, full specs on American nuclear power plants. Bruns Werner was selling it all to someone named Al-Marwan.”

Helen shook her head. “He said Al-Marwan was the buyer?”

“Yes.”

“And how do you fit into all of this?”

“I stole the files off Werner’s computer,” I explained. “Brian said I was working for someone, someone who wanted the information for himself.”

“Did he tell you who?”

“No.”

“And you believed him?”

I thought about the question for a moment. “I don’t know,” I told her finally.

Helen crossed to the overturned crate that held the coffeemaker and hot plate. She blew dust off a rust-speckled coffee can, opened the lid, and sniffed the contents. “You willing to chance it?”

“Sure.” I shrugged, watching her spoon the dry grounds into a filter. “What did you mean when you said Brian didn’t know?”

Taking the glass decanter with her, Helen crossed to the tiny bathroom. She turned the tap on and let it run for some time. I sat down in the desk chair and perused the utilitarian contents of the room. It was a place stripped down to its essentials, sleep and waking, and the work that filled the hours in between. A listening post, Helen had said, but for listening to what? In Claire’s movies these places were always futuristic, filled with shelves of complicated electronics. There was always a woman, too young and pretty for the job, or a man with long hair and strange taste in music. The rooms were nothing like this one, which was worn and tired and, even after years of disuse, still conjured up the creeping pace of boredom.

“I mean he didn’t know,” Helen said, emerging from behind the curtain. “I’m sure he believed everything he told you. I’m sure he thought he was working for the good guys, just like always.”

“And who was he working for?”

Helen started the coffee machine, then pulled a folding chair from behind a pile of boxes. “Let me start at the beginning,” she began. “Last September we intercepted a satellite call coming out of southern Algeria.” She set the chair down next to mine and took a seat.

“The deal between Werner and Al-Marwan,” I said.

“That’s what Brian told you.”

I nodded.

“According to our information, Werner wasn’t the one selling.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Werner was the buyer,” Helen explained.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” I protested, trying to get a handle on what she was saying. “Why would a terrorist be selling something like that to an arms dealer?”

“You’re right,” she agreed. “It doesn’t make sense.”

I looked at the monitor in front of us, the screen patiently awaiting a command to read the pen drive. “What’s really on there?”

“The call Al-Marwan made to Bruns Werner wasn’t the only call we intercepted,” Helen said. “Al-Marwan was definitely shopping his wares around, looking for the highest bidder. One of the other communications we intercepted was between him and someone in the States, another prospective buyer.”

“My mystery employer?” I guessed.

“Not yours, Brian’s. These communications were with someone in the CIA.”

“Do you know who?”

Helen shook her head. “For about a year before all this happened we were tracking a leak coming from somewhere in the agency.”

“What do you mean, a leak?”

“Someone on the inside, someone the agency didn’t even know about, was passing information to Al-Marwan.”

“What kind of information?”

“One of Al-Marwan’s buddies is a guy named Naser Jibril.”

“I know that name.”

“Jibril’s the founder of a group that calls itself the Islamic Revolutionary Army.”

“They’re the ones who shot up that synagogue in Turkey last year,” I said, remembering the news footage of the carnage.

“Among other things. Two years before that they bombed the El Al ticket counter in Rome. The year before that they hijacked a passenger flight out of Karachi.”

“They’re based in Egypt, right?”

Helen nodded. “They were our friends during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, part of the waves of Arabs who joined up to fight with the mujahideen. But Jibril’s been on the run for almost a decade now, since he was sentenced to death for his part in the assassination of a Jordanian diplomat. He was holed up in the Sudan for a while, then spent some time in Libya and Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s got about a half dozen countries on his tail, including us, but he’s always managed to stay one step ahead of everyone.”

“And you think your CIA mystery man was helping him out?”

“There’s no doubt someone on the inside was tipping him off.”

“Why?” I asked. I was thinking about what Brian had said in Ourzazate. There are so many reasons.

Helen got up and walked to the coffeemaker. Taking two Styrofoam cups from a dusty sheath, she poured us each a cup of the hot, brown liquid, then crossed back toward the desk and sat down.

“I’m hoping we’re about to find out,” she said, leaning toward the laptop, typing in a command.

The screen went black, then flashed on again, the colorful display replaced by a grainy black-and-white image. The shot had been taken from a rooftop, the camera perched near the edge. In the front of the frame was a slice of a gutter, and below, a patchwork of rooftops, a semi-urban landscape, but a non-Western one, closer to the aimless, industrial suburbs of Rabat or Casablanca than Paris or Lyon. Off in the distance a mosque poked up from the grimy skyline, a domed roof capped by a sickle moon. The sky was a bright, monochrome gray above it all, cloudless or fully overcast, it was impossible to tell. In the distance, a flock of birds, black and stark as punctuation marks on a white page, rose skyward, then winged from view.

“It looks like a video that’s been transferred to digital,” Helen remarked. “The quality’s pretty poor.”

“Any idea where it was taken?” I asked.

Helen squinted, taking in the view as the lens panned to the left. “It’s hard to say. I’m pretty sure it’s Peshawar. It’s definitely Pakistan, though.”

The camera tilted upward, jostling, then came to rest, as if the operator had lifted it to his or her shoulder. We could see the rooftop in its entirety now, a flat tarred surface, and several yards away, a hutlike protrusion that I assumed held the building’s stairwell.

In the foreground, just a few feet from the camera, was a woman. She was a Westerner, her face obviously European, her hair, or at least what was visible of it, was dark. Her head and torso were draped and wrapped in long folds of fabric, and in her hand was a microphone. She was talking easily with the cameraperson, smiling, the microphone down by her side. With the woman’s clothes so carefully covered, it was hard to date the scene, but there was something about the microphone, the size of it, or even its presence, that told me the film we were watching had been made some years earlier. And then there were the woman’s boots, a style some fifteen or twenty years past their prime.

“Is there sound?” I asked.

Helen shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Suddenly, the woman’s demeanor changed. She snapped to attention, motioning to something behind the camera operator. The lens panned violently around and swept downward, catching the blurred sky, the fractured cityscape, coming finally to rest at the edge of the roof again. We were looking downward now, at the alleyway below, and a battered box truck.

The truck’s back door opened, and a pair of men jumped out, each with an automatic rifle on his shoulder. They were in civilian dress, loose-fitting pants and shifts. Several other similarly clad figures emerged from a nearby doorway, and the whole crew set to work unloading a cargo of long, coffinlike wooden crates. They made short work of what was in the truck, and when they had emptied it, they began filling it again with the same type of crates they’d just unloaded.

Helen paused the video as the second crate was carried from the building.

“Here,” she said, touching her finger to the screen.

The side of the box had tilted briefly upward toward the camera, revealing black letters.

“SA-7s,” Helen said.

“What does it mean?” I asked, squinting to read the grainy, Cyrillic text.

“They’re Soviet shoulder-fired missiles,” she explained, starting the video again.

As the crate continued on its journey to the truck, two newcomers stepped out of the building and stood watching. The camera angle and the film quality made it impossible to see their faces, but the first man, the shorter of the two, stood out in Western garb, tan fatigues, light pants and a short-sleeved collared shirt. The second man was dressed as the men unloading the trucks were, though even in his baggy pants and long shirt, he was unquestionably an authority figure.

“Any idea who they are?” I asked.

“No,” she said, pointing to the first man, “but I’d give you a hundred-to-one odds this guy’s CIA.”

“Our mystery man?”

“Maybe.”

“What do you think was in those boxes they took off the truck?”

“Heroin, most likely.”

“All transported courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency,” I remarked.

“No use letting those trucks come back to Pakistan empty,” she said, a slight hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“You think what we were doing was wrong?” I asked.

“It’s not my place to think,” she countered.

“Is that the kind of secret someone would want to keep?”

“At the time, maybe, but this is all pretty much common knowledge now.”

“The drugs?”

Helen shrugged. “Everyone knows that’s how the mujahideen financed their war.”

“But why the Soviet weapons?”

“Most of the weapons we fed into Afghanistan were either replicas of the Soviet stuff or real foreign matériel bought on the black market. Stuff the mujahideen could have picked up on the battlefield. A lot easier to explain than a truckload of American Stingers.”

Two more crates had emerged from the building while we spoke. As the second was being hoisted into the truck’s bed, one of the men holding it fumbled momentarily and lost his grip. The wooden box tilted sideways, its base striking the ground, its top sliding ajar. There was a moment of harried activity as the two men scrambled to right their load. The lid was put back on, and the crate slid into the truck and out of our view.

“Did you see that?” Helen asked, running the video backward.

“See what?” I asked, watching the crate fall again.

“There’s nothing in there,” she said, pausing the film as the top opened and slid away. “There’s nothing in the box.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, looking into the bare crate. She was right, there seemed to be nothing inside, but I didn’t see why that mattered.

“No SA-7s,” she said. She ran the video backward again, back to the moment when the men had stepped out of the building with the first crate. “Look at how they’re carrying them,” she noted, moving her face closer to the monitor.

I shrugged. Whatever she saw was lost on me.

“A shoulder-fired missile is a pretty weighty thing, but look at these guys.”

I followed her gaze to the screen. What I had missed the first time seemed obvious now. The men carrying the crates moved easily, too easily for men with even moderate burdens. “There’s nothing in any of them!” I exclaimed.

“But why the empty crates?” The question was meant for herself, not me, but I answered anyway.

“Maybe someone wanted it to look like there were SA-7s in there,” I offered.

Helen didn’t say anything. Her eyes were glued to the monitor. We watched the tape roll on past what we’d already seen. Several more crates were loaded into the truck. Then, suddenly, something rattled the men on the ground. One of the pair with the automatic rifles pointed upward, in the camera’s direction, and all the other heads followed, faces moving in unison toward our rooftop vantage point.

“C’mon,” Helen murmured, talking to the two observers, the Westerner and the other man. “This way. Look this way.”

And then, as if by a miracle, the two men turned to look up.

“Jibril,” Helen said, touching her finger to the image of the taller man.

“And the other one?” I asked. “The American?”

Helen paused, scanning the face. “I don’t know,” she said.

Jibril gestured frantically, and the gunmen sprinted across the alley. The camera followed as they barged through a door directly below and disappeared.

“They’re coming up,” I said, my heart beating as if I were on the roof with them.

What followed was a flurry of confusion, two sets of feet, one male, one female, the legs and blurred torsos of the cameraman and the woman with the microphone. The camera sped across the roof, bumping dizzyingly against the man’s hip, then plunged into a dim stairwell. The lens caught a nauseating jumble: a pile of filthy rags, a line of metal railing flaring light, a rat fleeing the commotion, a broken window.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, leaning in closer to the monitor, transfixed by the familiar setting, this panicked descent I’d made so many times in my dreams.

“What?” Helen asked. “What is it?”

“I’ve seen this before,” I told her.

The couple reached a landing and hesitated. The cameraman pivoted, searching for something, another way out, perhaps. Then he leaned forward, and we saw what he saw: figures moving in the semidarkness below, a man with a gun climbing the stairs, and behind him a second man.

The cameraman ducked through a doorway off the stairs and the woman followed. Here was the same room I knew so well, the cathedral-like ceiling and grimy windows. In the paltry light I caught my first full glimpse of the woman since I’d seen her earlier on the roof. The wrap had slipped from her head, and her hair was wild and disheveled, slick with sweat where it fell around her face.

“This woman,” Helen said, as the camera swung down again, catching dusty floorboards and feet.

“What?”

“I know her. I think I know her.”

As if in response the lens pitched upward suddenly and caught her face again, the angles of it exaggerated by the room’s shadows, by the grainy tape. She was terrified, that much was certain, afraid of what she knew was to come. I could, I thought, feel the moment as she felt it, the cold slant of the light, the abandoned smell of the place, the sound of the man next to me struggling to get his breath back.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I was in Islamabad from ’eighty-seven to ’eighty-nine,” Helen explained. “It was my first foreign gig, the tail end of the war. God, I can’t remember her name.”

“But you knew her?”

“I knew who she was. She was with CNN, I think. It’s been so long. I used to see her around, you know, the local watering holes.”

We both watched as a hand reached into the frame and grabbed the woman’s hair.

“They’re going to kill her,” I said, my knowledge of what was about to happen as certain as if I had been there. And hadn’t I? Hadn’t I felt the knife against my own throat?

Something winked in the dim light, a flash of metal. The scythe of a blade crossed the woman’s neck, carving a single dark line across her throat. Not me, I thought, but her, and yet the realization brought little relief.

“It was my second summer there,” Helen said as we watched the monitor in silence, waiting for something else, anything that would tell us we were wrong. But there was nothing more to see. “It would have been ’eighty-eight. July, I think. None of us knew what had happened. They dumped her body onto Aga Khan Road, right outside the Marriott.”

As the tape went black, I thought of Heloise, and of the other sisters, and Inspector Lelu, the way the word massacre had spilled from his mouth.

“Jibril was blackmailing him,” Helen said, pointing to the unknown figure. She had run the tape back to the moment when the two men lifted their faces to the camera.

“With the murder of the journalist?” I asked.

Helen shook her head. “It’s more than that. If this had been a CIA operation, our friend wouldn’t have had anything to hide, at least not from the agency. They wouldn’t have been happy, but they would have covered for him. No, this was a private deal, a one-on-one arrangement between Jibril and our man. That’s why there were no missiles in the crates.”

I puzzled through what she was saying. “These guys were moving heroin out of Afghanistan under the guise of American intelligence and pocketing the cash themselves.”

“I doubt a single penny was going to the war effort. The boys at Langley would not have been pleased.”

“But why would Jibril sell the tape if it had bought him an ally inside the agency for all these years?”

“Jibril didn’t sell it,” Helen said. “We had several uncomfirmed reports that he died the summer before last in Algeria. I’ll take this as confirmation. With Jibril dead, Al-Marwan must have decided the tape was worth more to him on the open market.”

“Where do you think Werner fits into all of this?” I asked.

“Honestly, I don’t know. A little personal dirt can go a long way in the arms business. Werner could have had a deal working with our friend from the street. Maybe he needed a little leverage. Or maybe he was just looking to buy himself some insurance. You know, for a rainy day.”

“Maybe,” I said, but I wasn’t satisfied. “Brian said it was Werner who came for me at the abbey. Do you think he was right?”

Helen took a sip of her now-cold coffee and made a face. “It wasn’t Werner,” she said.

“Al-Marwan.”

“We don’t think so.”

Neither of us said what we were both thinking, that this left only one possibility.

Helen rubbed her eyes, glanced at the room’s single cot. “Maybe things will make more sense in the morning,” she said.

“What about the pen drive?” I asked.

“Normally, I’d upload everything on there and send it home to the geeks in Maryland, but this is too sensitive to put out into the ether. I’ll have to hand-deliver it.”

“I’m coming with you,” I told her.

She looked over at me, her face open, almost expectant. “You don’t even know where I’m going.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m going. I need to know who I am.”

She nodded. “I’ve got a friend in the Petit Socco we can see tomorrow about getting out of here. It’s not safe to take you through immigration right now. In the meantime you should try to get some rest.”

I looked at the cot. As tired as I was, I doubted I’d manage any sleep that night. “Why don’t you take it?” I said. “I know I should be tired, but I’m not.”

She hesitated a moment, then got up. “There should be some spare blankets in one of these boxes if you change your mind.”

“Thanks,” I told her, watching her slide in under the sleeping bag without taking her boots off.

I sat there for a few minutes and listened to the silence of the room, the distant hiss of water in a pipe somewhere, the sound of Helen’s body shifting. What about me? I wondered, my gaze drawn to the two men on the monitor, Jibril’s hollow features and the somehow boyish face of the other man. What was my place in all of this?

Brian had been wrong about what was on the pen drive, but as far as I could tell he’d been right about who I was, at least who I had been. Helen had said it herself. We know a woman named Leila Brightman did contract work for American intelligence. Couldn’t my employer and Brian’s have been one and the same? Couldn’t he have been the one who’d sent me to Werner’s Casbah?

I started the video again, as I’d watched Helen do, and reran the last horrible moments of the tape. The final panicked seconds of the woman’s life. Something in me said I knew her, though perhaps it was just the intimacy of the tape, the intensity of her fear. Yes, that was it, for how could I know her, a woman most likely dead all these years, dead when I would have been little more than a child? But still, I couldn’t let her go.

I ran the footage back once more, this time pausing it on her frightened face. Yes, I thought, I knew her, only a younger her, and smiling. She was the woman from Les Trois Singes, the blurred face in Werner’s photograph. My memory at the Casbah had not been faulty. There was another print, a picture captured just before Werner’s, before the girl in the white shift had stepped into the frame, before the woman in the center had moved her head to speak or laugh.

I had seen that photograph, not just once but many times. I was certain of it. I had known this woman, just as Werner had known her, just as the man on the video had. For it was him in the picture as well, the handsome one, the swimmer, so at ease in his white cotton shirt, the same man who stood with Naser Jibril while her throat was slit. No, I told myself. I hadn’t been working for anyone. I’d known all along what was on the video, and it was to solve her murder that I’d come to Morocco.

I put my hand to the computer’s screen and touched her face, the tear forming in her right eye. My mother, I thought, the knowledge as certain as my own presence in the world.