“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.
TWENTY-ONE
I had fallen asleep, arms crossed on the desk, head cradled in them. When the knock came, it slapped me awake and I sat up, eyes wide open, heart frantic. Helen was up, too, her feet rolling from the cot to the floor in one swift motion. Her gun was drawn, her finger to her lips in a warning for silence.
The knock came again, a heavy fist rattling the thick wood.
“You expecting anyone?” I whispered.
Helen shook her head, then paused for a moment, her knuckles white on the stock of the gun, her feet deciding which way to move.
“Police,” a man’s voice called from the other side of the door. “Open the door.”
Stepping in my direction, Helen reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a rumpled business card.
“Anything happens to me,” she whispered, “you go to the Café Becerra in the Petit Socco. Ask for Ishaq. Give him this.” She handed me the card. “He’ll get you to Spain. From there you’ll need to get yourself and the pen drive to Paris. Can you do that?”
I nodded.
“Good. When you get to Paris, go to the American church. Post a note on the bulletin board, the one outside. It should read: Uncle Bill, In town for the weekend. Ring me at the George V. Katy. Tell me what the note says.”
I swallowed hard. “Uncle Bill,” I repeated, “In town for the weekend. Ring me at the George V. Katy.”
“Okay. There’s a tearoom across from St.-Julien-le-Pauvre. Go there the next day at four in the afternoon. Take a table alone and order a pot of Darjeeling. Can you remember this?”
“Yes.”
“St.-Julien-le-Pauvre,” she said.
“A pot of Darjeeling,” I repeated.
She pointed to the card in my hand. “Café Becerra. Ishaq,” she said. Then she started for the door, motioning toward the bathroom as she went.
I nodded and slid off my chair, pulling the pen drive from the laptop, slipping it and the business card into my pocket as I made my way to the bathroom.
I drew the curtain closed and made a careful survey of my surroundings. The room was the size of a small closet, the only fixtures an old pull-chain toilet and a tiny sink. On the opposite wall, next to the sink, was a small window. Barred, I noted, though the metal grate was fastened directly into the plaster outer wall. The screws that held it in place were corroded and rusty.
I heard Helen undo the latch on the front door’s iron porthole. The tiny hinges creaked open; then a pop sounded, the muffled thump of a silenced gunshot. Helen let out a strangled cry, her body thudding against the wall, her gun clattering to the floor.
I leaped upward, grabbing for the old pipe that ran across the bathroom ceiling. Gripping the metal, I swung forward and hit the grate feet first. The plaster loosened, and I felt the screws wrench partway free. I swung back and kicked again. I could hear commotion in the room now, a man’s voice speaking Arabic. Salim, I thought, the old vasopressin memories coming back to me.