About midway down the Moroccan west coast, Agadir was something of a budget beach destination for young European tourists during the winter. During the summer, however, it was relatively quiet, an easy place to strategize.
The hotel clerk returned, handing him the passport as well as a key.
“Free internet,” said the man. His Moroccan-flavored Arabic was hard for Ghadab to decipher. “Type Guest as the password.”
Ghadab thanked the man politely. Even if he’d had a computer or other device with him, he wasn’t so foolish as to use a hotel’s internet for anything beyond looking up the weather.
Upstairs, he checked the room for bugs. His search was crude — he looked for alterations, wires even, knowing that he would miss anything sophisticated. But the discipline was what was necessary; to rebound, one had to return to basics. And at least a search would detect anything the locals could manage.
Satisfied, Ghadab washed up. The porcelain in the sink was cracked and the water warm rather than cold; neither was unexpected. Refreshed if not restored after his long trip, he went out for a walk. The hotel was far uphill from the beaches and the large, ultramodern resorts that hugged the water, but even here the buildings were not very old; an earthquake in the 1960s had eradicated much of the town, and for the most part the cement-faced structures he passed were less than thirty years old.
It helped, too, that war had not visited the city for many years. The creases in the faces of the people he passed came from age, not constant fear; if there were marks in the facades of the buildings, they were from shoddy workmanship rather than gun battles.
Ghadab had shorn his head and beard before leaving Syria, and he doubted even his own mother, God rest her soul, could have recognized him. He wore Western clothes — black jeans and a soccer jersey with the number of Lionel Messi, the Argentine player so famous even here that the shirt was as anonymous as a paper bag. Ghadab had left all of his belongings at the border with Turkey when he fled.
The only item he regretted leaving was the knife. But he couldn’t have taken it on the airplane, and in any event the symbolism of the sacrifice was important; to continue he needed to strip himself of all.
Making his way through the crowded streets, Ghadab recognized many of the small shops. It had been two years since he’d been here, and his memory of the place had faded, dimmed by hundreds of other cities and towns, large and small, which to varying degrees had similar qualities. Finally, he found what he was looking for — a secondhand computer store. Halfway between a pawnshop and a discount retailer, it featured everything from point-and-shoot cameras to the latest Macintosh computers, insisting in semiliterate Arabic that all were “new out of box” while at the same time noting that “all sale final no warrants.”
After a bit of haggling, Ghadab bought an old tablet computer for fifty euros; down the street, at a coffee shop that offered Wi-Fi, he created an account and began surfing the web, randomly moving from page to page, watching a few YouTube videos of car races, then checking the news, then a travel site for flights to Athens.
He’d landed on Google News when a headline caught his eye: Les victimes du terrorisme honorés à Boston.
Terror victims honored in Boston.
It was about his Boston triumph. Apparently there had been a ceremony in the city.
His French was too rusty to read the entire story reliably, so he had it translated to English; when the page came into focus, he realized the woman in the photo that accompanied it looked familiar.
He couldn’t place her at first. There was a video with the story. He clicked it and watched as an older man talked about how his city couldn’t be defeated.
“Louis Massina,” declared the caption.
Oh, yes, he knew who he was. But the woman…
Ghadab stopped and replayed the video. The announcer said two employees had been honored. A photo showed the woman and a man, and Massina. He was their boss, a business owner in Boston.
The woman… the same one on the video from the hotel, the one who’d gone up to the room with Shadaa.
Was it?
It seemed far-fetched and yet…
No, of course. It made complete sense. This Massina had sought revenge for his city. That was what he wanted.
And he had achieved it.
More.
Boston.
Boston.
That would have to be the final target. Honor demanded it.
79
Johnny felt a little light-headed as he closed the door to change. He’d had only two drinks, so it wasn’t the booze. And though the doctors had changed his medicine as soon as he got back to accelerate his healing after the bangs and bruises, he couldn’t blame that either — they’d made it clear that the drugs didn’t interact with alcohol.
So it had to be Chelsea, who was changing a few feet away, slipping out of the formfitting gown she’d been wearing.
There was a wall between them, so he couldn’t see her. But he certainly could imagine. He’d thought she was beautiful before tonight, but in the gown she was stunning.
Beyond stunning.
Maybe that was an exaggeration. Maybe she didn’t quite look like a model. Probably she wasn’t the perfect woman, every young man’s wet dream.
But she was close. Certainly to him.
There was a knock on the door.
“Ready?” Chelsea asked.
“Just a minute,” he said.
“And they say women are slow.” Chelsea laughed. “Meet you downstairs in the lobby.”
Halligan’s was farther than Chelsea thought, but the night was warm without being hot, and walking with Johnny felt incredibly right. They talked about the ceremony, how goofy it had been; they talked about the reporters, how little they knew; they talked about the interviews, how little they could say.
Finally, they talked about Syria itself.
“Were you scared in town?” Johnny asked.
“Very. Were you?”
“The first time we went in, I was a little nervous at different points. But we trained so much, I was kind of confident. Except for the language.”
“I know what you mean. Using the translator was kind of weird. I have a couple of ideas for fixing it.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
They walked a half block without saying anything. Johnny broke the silence.
“I was worried about you. That last mission. I wasn’t scared for myself at all, but I was worried that something would happen to you. Maybe focusing on that makes you forget to be scared about yourself.”
“Ukraine was like that for me,” said Chelsea. “I was too dumb to know to be scared.”
“That’s a funny word to use.”
“What?”
“Dumb. You’re the opposite of dumb. Like, a genius.”
“I’m not a genius. I know some geniuses.”
“There are people smarter than you?”
She smacked him on the arm.
“Hey, that was a serious question. I wasn’t making fun.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Really.”
Johnny suddenly stopped. “I feel like a robot.”
“What?”
“Like I’m not human. Because of my legs.”
“Jesus — they’re better than your real ones. And they keep improving them and with the drugs—”
“That’s just it,” said Johnny. “I don’t — it’s not totally me.”
“I think you’re still you,” insisted Chelsea. “Your legs are just part of you, not the entire thing of who you are.”