“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.