After a while John noticed the engine temperature rising, so he turned on the heater, which seemed to help. Jibril opened the glove compartment and took out the Bedouin’s book. It was a journal, primitive-looking with hand-sewn binding. “Can you do something for me, John?” The judgement was gone from his voice.
“Shoot.”
Jibril tapped the book with an index finger. “If I die, I’d like you to destroy this.”
“If you die, I’ll give that to the embassy.”
“No. I need a promise from you, or you can drop me off right here. If I die, then you will take this out into the desert and burn it.”
John gave him a look. He was serious. “What is it?”
“Just names. But if this gets into the wrong hands, all of these people are dead.”
“What’s the wrong hands?”
“Anybody’s except mine.”
“Including the Agency’s?”
“Just burn the papers and pretend you never saw them. Can you promise?”
There seemed no point denying him this, so John made the promise. If Jibril died, then it was a dying man’s final wish. If he survived, then John could console himself with the knowledge that he’d lied. If they both died, then it wouldn’t matter.
“On your mother’s life,” Jibril said.
“My mother’s dead.”
A pause. “On your children’s lives. You have children?”
“I’ve promised, Jibril. That’s enough.”
Jibril he waited a moment before nodding and putting the book back into the glove compartment. “It’s not just intelligence,” he said.
“Of course it isn’t,” John agreed, though once again he wasn’t entirely sure what the man was talking about.
Jibril said, “In 1993, my father was part of an attempted coup by the Libyan army. Beforehand, he sent me, my sister, and our mother to Florida to stay with relatives. Next time we heard from him, it was by phone, and he told us the Revolutionary Guard was at the door. He wasn’t striking some metaphor—we heard them banging against his office door as he screamed good-bye to us down the line. I was fifteen. With outside assistance, that coup might have succeeded, but it didn’t, and the outcome was that my father was tortured and beheaded in a basement in Tripoli. We know this because an agent of the Libyan Intelligence Service showed up in Florida to share photographs of my father—before, during, and after the beheading.”
There wasn’t anything to say to that, so John only watched the unchanging landscape.
“In that situation,” Jibil said, “we might have been able to do some good, because the coup was doomed to failure. Every year since then, the Agency could have helped the opposition topple Gadhafi. But this year the situation is different. This year, the people are rising en masse. Nothing can stop them. We can supply them with weapons; we can send in food. But this year the revolution is theirs, and theirs alone. They deserve it.”
“Sounds like you’re splitting hairs,” John said before realizing that Jibril wasn’t interested in his opinion. This was a lecture, not a conversation. A hard silence followed, and when he finally glanced over, he saw the back of Jibril’s head as he stared out his dirty window. He said something John couldn’t hear. “What?”
Jibril turned back, but there was no anger in his face. “I told you it’d been six years since I was here. It didn’t end well. I was blown, and some of the people in this book ended up as dead as my father. I made mistakes, and those mistakes killed good people. I don’t want that to happen again.” He paused. “You’ll burn it, right?”
“I said I would.”
“Good.” Jibril blinked and rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. Anxiety, or frustration. After another moment, Jibril said, “Sorry. You didn’t need to hear all that.”
“No problem.”
“It was lousy security.”
It had been, but so had most of this trip. Case in point: He hadn’t needed to know Aziz’s real name. Harry had only given him a description and pass-phrase, but Jibril, perhaps taken by the excitement of the road, had handed over his name the moment they shook hands outside his hotel. At the border, as if remembering something of his long-ago field training, Aziz had demanded that John give him his passport so that he could deal with the border guards, and when they were handed back John saw that Aziz had used a Libyan passport. John didn’t know Aziz’s cover name, but if he was captured on the way back from Ajdabiya that would be small consolation. John said, “Look. By tomorrow I’ll be back in Cairo. I’ll be busy forgetting this entire conversation. I’ll be busy forgetting you.”
Jibril smiled. “Good man.” Then, despite the apology, he opened up further, but not about the mystery of his trek into the desert. He asked about John’s family, and once he’d heard a few sketchy details that did not include the divorce, Jibril talked mistily about his wife, Inaya, whom he’d met in Baltimore. Her family had been Berbers, he told John, “a hard people.” She was seven months pregnant with their first child, a boy.
This really was too much. Jibril Aziz was throwing security to the wind, as if preparing to die.
By then, the sun was flickering on and off against the horizon, and when it disappeared they saw a yellow Toyota pickup stopped up ahead on the opposite lane. Around it stood five men, all of them toting rifles, with green bandannas around their skulls. Green. As John slowed the Peugeot, the men wandered into their lane, raising rifles high. John stopped less than a hundred yards away.
“What do you think?” Jibril asked.
“I told you not to take this road.”
“Shit.”
Two of the men stepped forward, waving them closer, smiling to show how friendly they were. One was shouting something. “What’s he saying?” John asked.
“Oil for Libyans.”
“Can’t they see our Egyptian plates?”
“Yeah. I think they can.”
John scanned the desert, not liking what he saw. The patch of sand around them wasn’t solid enough to trust with the car, and if they got stuck they were finished. It was an ideal spot to corner someone. “We have to go forward, or back.”
“Can we plow through them?”
It was a shockingly naive thing for an Agency man to say, but John controlled his surprise as, up ahead, the man who’d been shouting placed his rifle on the road and started walking toward them. “We can’t risk it,” John explained slowly. “If they blow a tire, we’re dead.”
“Don’t tell me we have to go back.”
“You’ve got the Kalashnikov.”
Jibril raised it from between his legs.
“Can you shoot well?” John asked.
“Well enough.”
“I trained as a sniper,” he said, letting his own security slip. But Jibril did nothing—he simply held on to the Kalashnikov. “Well, then,” said John. “Go to it.”
The man in the green bandanna was close enough that they could read his eyes, which were full of smiles and welcome. His skin was tough and prune-dark. Jibril got out of the car and stood behind the open door for protection and translated for John: “He says they ran out of gas.”
“Tell him we don’t have enough. Tell him we’ll send someone for them.”
“He’ll just ask for a lift.”
“Then kill him.”
The man raised his hands to show how empty they were, then continued talking. Jibril spoke briefly, and the man smiled, pointing at their car as he talked. John understood enough—he wanted a ride.
“What I said, Jibril. Shoot him now.”
Jibril lifted the rifle to his hip, pointing it around the side of the door at the stranger, and said something John could barely hear over the rising wind whistling through the car. The man stopped, his smile faltering. A little more conversation, then the man shrugged elaborately, turned around, and walked back to his friends. Jibril got back into the car and closed the door.