Whether they had been told to expect an outsider, or whether they recognized me for what I was, someone, like themselves, simply looking for a way out, I don’t know. But they shifted without hesitation, making a space for me in the soft sand near the fire’s warm glow. Someone touched my arm, and I looked over to see a steaming cup of tea. I nodded my thanks and lifted the drink to my lips. The liquid was miraculously hot and sweet.
There were some two dozen men in all, all like the trio I’d seen earlier at the Café Becerra. And on other beaches? Doubtless there were more fires like this. What had Brian said that first night in Joshi’s apartment? You know how many Africans disappear into the Strait of Gibraltar each year?
I finished the tea and handed the cup back to the man beside me. I would make it, I told myself, looking out past the fire to the dark water. We would all make it. And then what? I would go to Paris. I would do what Helen had asked. This man would help me. Someone had to know me. And if not? The threads I had to follow seemed even thinner than the ones that had brought me to Morocco. My mother’s face on a video, a man I didn’t know. And there was Hannah Boyle as well, dead some ten years earlier. I had chosen her. Perhaps I had known her.
Someone started singing, and a handful of other voices joined in, the tune melancholy as a hymn or a lullaby. I closed my eyes, and I could feel the child, the shape of its body in my arms, the unsteady weight of its head.
It was very early in the morning when the boat came. At first it was just a single light, a spot blinking in and out of the chop. Then, slowly, the outline of the craft appeared, the boxy cabin, the prow and stern. The boat pulled up in the surf and weighed anchor.
I scrambled to my feet with the rest of the group, shaking the cold from my legs, stumbling across the sand and into the water.
“Quickly!” a voice called, and I felt a hand on each shoulder, two men lifting me onto the deck. I lay there for a moment, heart pounding, chest heaving, like a fish fighting the air. By the time I gathered myself enough to stand, we had hauled anchor and were moving. I looked back to the shore, but there was nothing to see. The moon had long since set, and the cliffs of Ghandouri beach were invisible in the darkness, the lighthouse at Cap Malabata only a memory.
When I turned to face northward again, the deck was clear, the open hatch my fellow passengers had disappeared through gaping like a dark maw. The captain stood silhouetted in the dim lights of the cabin’s instrument panel, his hands on the wheel, his gaze firm on the invisible Spanish shore.
Beside the captain was a second man, his body tall and graceful, his hands crossed over his chest. He was turned in my direction, his face in shadow, but still I knew him without question. He started forward, surefooted on the pitching deck.
“Nebesky,” he called out, raising his voice to make himself heard above the noise of the engine.
I shook my head and took a step back, contemplating the dark waves, the distance to the shore, the beach receding farther from swimming distance each second.
“Nebesky,” he said again, coming closer. “You wanted to know my name. It’s Brian Nebesky. My grandparents were Czech immigrants.”
The top buttons of his shirt were undone, and in the boat’s pale running lights I could see the dark shape of a bruise on his throat.
“You were right,” he said. “I want to know.”
“They’ll kill us both,” I told him.
Brian grinned, showing a row of perfect white teeth. “I’ll take my chances.”
TWENTY-THREE
“How did you find me?” I asked.
It was too cold to stay on deck, and our presence seemed to be making the Spanish captain nervous, so we’d climbed down into the hold with the rest of the passengers. The cramped space reeked, of seawater and sweat born of fear, but it was warm and dry. A small propane lamp hung in one corner, shining on the tired faces of our shipmates.
“I figured you’d be trying to get out of the country, so I did some asking around. The Café Becerra was my second stop. Believe it or not, there aren’t too many European women looking for illegal rides across the strait. I hadn’t counted on you being alone, though.”
I swallowed hard, thinking of Helen.
“Who was she?” Brian asked.
“NSA,” I said, lowering my voice. We were the only ones speaking, and even at a whisper we seemed profanely loud.
“What happened?”
“Werner’s men,” I told him.
“She’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get a chance to look at the pen drive?”
I nodded. “Whoever hired you lied to you, Brian. It’s not what you think.”
I told him everything, about Helen, the old videotape, the warehouse in Peshawar, and the empty crates. I told him about the woman, my mother, and the photograph in Werner’s office, about the five missing years and why I’d come back, why I thought Pat had helped me at the Casbah, how I was taking the pen drive to Paris.
“Do you know who he is?” I asked when I had finished. “Whoever it is you’re working for?”
Brian shook his head.
“There must be someone who contacts you,” I insisted.
“Everything is arranged on-line,” he said. “There’s a chat room I go to. The times are agreed on in advance.”
“How do they pay you?”
“I’ve got an account, through a bank in Geneva; the money goes there.”
“When are you supposed to make your next contact?”
“Last night,” Brian said. “They’ll know by now something’s gone wrong.”
I wrapped my arms around my damp shins and set my head on my knees.
“Eve?” Brian asked.
“Yes.”
“You said Helen thought there was a leak in the agency, someone passing information.”
I nodded. “Why?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, “but if I had to guess, I’d say this was more than one person.”
“How many?”
Brian shrugged. “I don’t know, but there’s money here.” He hesitated a moment, letting his words gather weight. “Lots of it.”
The little boat took a wave across the port side and pitched uncomfortably. A collective shudder ran through the hold; then the craft found its equilibrium once more, bobbing upright like a cork.
I was suddenly exhausted, too tired to reason through the implications of what Brian had just said. “Helen’s contact in Paris,” I told him. “He’ll know what to do.”
Brian leaned back against the hold and closed his eyes. “I hope so,” he said.
Once, on a cold spring morning, I happened upon a freshly hatched swarm of baby spiders in the back of the abbey’s henhouse. At first all I could see was a single dark stain and the ruptured puff of white gauze at its core. When I looked closer, each tiny creature resolved itself, legs scrambling purposefully across the rough wood boards, black arachnid body glistening in the coop’s filtered light.
I stood there for some time, shivering in my thin sweater, and watched the swarm disintegrate, till each hatchling was gone and only the wispy shell of their abandoned home remained. Their disappearance seemed the greatest of miracles to me, the purpose with which they entered the world, their determination toward some unknown point. What a boon, I’d thought, watching the last body scuttle through a crack in the wall. What a thing to know, without thinking, the direction of your life.
When our boat weighed anchor off the wind-scarred Spanish coast and my fellow passengers leaped into the surf, I was immediately reminded of that spring morning in the henhouse. It was early, the dark sky broken only by a bloody smear of daylight on the eastern horizon. Brian and I stood together on the deck and watched the men start across the black gulf between us and the shore.