I felt a surge of irritation seeing Aya’s number on my screen. It was as if the teen had been spying on Izabel and me, and was calling to catch me out. It was stupid to feel that way. But I did.
“What?” I snapped.
She sounded hurt. “Why are you so grouchy, Joe?”
“Sorry. Bad night. What’s up, Aya?”
“I found something funny.”
I halted, and so did Izabel. This morning she wore white, tight jeans and a tight-fitting V-necked white T-shirt, and she carried a V-necked cobalt-blue cashmere sweater over her arm, against air-conditioning. Her hair was pulled tightly in a bun. The earrings were gold studs. She smelled of coconut body lotion. The Nikes would allow her to move quickly in an emergency. If she had a gun, like Eddie believed, it would be in the drawstring leather bucket bag, which could easily hide a pistol.
“What?” I asked Aya. Her words ran together in excitement as she answered.
“I didn’t go home last night. There’s cots set up on the fourth floor here. Agents use them. I found an extra. Mom’s in Newark and she said I could stay.”
“And?”
“They gave us dinner at eleven: roast beef and beets, which I usually hate. But these were pretty good.”
I sighed.
“You’d think the FBI would have better food, but it was like the high school cafeteria. Then I was talking to Clara? She’s the girl next to me? She used to work in a shop that sold souvenirs at the mall?”
“Aya, get to what you found.”
“I am! You asked me to go through Customs lists, stuff coming in from Brazil. But a lot of other people are doing the same thing. So I thought, after Clara was talking about shops and how they work, why not do something extra?”
“And?” But I gave the kid time now, because she was good. And she got to things her own way.
“So I got the list? There’s like thousands of items there? Like, in a million years, you could never open all the crates and boxes. Like, there’s a billion dollars’ worth of all kinds of stuff.”
“So what did you do, Aya?”
“I worked it backward. I went online and made lists of places in New York, Philadelphia, and Newark selling stuff from Brazil. Advertising online. Like, I wasn’t just looking at Customs forms for incoming. Like, I tried to match shipments and destinations, backward and forward.”
“Don’t say like all the time.”
“Anyway, I found this funny thing? Like this one shop? In Brooklyn? That advertises Indian stuff from Brazil? But Customs has no record of anything going there from Brazil. So how can they sell stuff if they never get it?”
I felt my breathing slow. “What’s the name of the shop?”
“It’s like a chain? There’s a bunch of them around the United States? It’s called Nizhoni Yee. That means beautiful in Navajo. Because the first shop sold Southwest stuff, then they branched out. Your voice is different this morning, Joe. Are you all right?”
“It’s just the connection.”
“Can you use this information?”
“It’s definitely something to look into. Worth a shot.”
“I did good?” she asked eagerly, like any sixteen-year-old.
“You did great, Aya, as always.”
I felt her grin. “Will you tell Mom that? So she isn’t mad because I stayed here all night?”
“I thought you said you had her permission.”
Silence. “Kind of. Well, I thought I did.”
I sighed. Considering what we could have been fighting over, this was easy. “Sure. And you find out everything you can about that shop. The owner. Contact information. But don’t call the shop. Don’t call anyone. Do it all online.”
“Why not? I found the place!”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“All right, but you should visit there.”
“I will. Today if I can. I’ll head out, take a look.”
And I would have that morning, I really would have gone out to Brooklyn to scout the place, except when Izabel and I got to the office, the man from Washington had shown up. He said he’d been trying to reach us for days, but that his phone messages had gone unanswered. This made sense, since we got hundreds of them each day, and lacked support staff to sift through them. He showed us ID identifying him as a Deputy Assistant National Security Advisor. He was in his early thirties and seemed smart and lacked the demanding aspect that I had found marked too many men and women once they received high-level designations. He seemed more burdened than self-important, and I liked him immediately. He’d taken the 6 A.M. train up from D.C. this morning, in order to reach New York when our office opened.
“I want to tell you a story, Colonel.”
Kyle Utley said that he wanted to ask us about the island in the jungle.
“Did anyone ever mention a place called Tol-e-Khomri when you were there?” he asked.
NINETEEN
“Why did he come to me?” Kyle Utley said.
He’d walked in without official fanfare; no demand for a briefing, no black car pulling up outside. Just a lone figure arriving hat in hand on a private mission. Kyle Utley regarded me with fatigue-reddened eyes from a steel-backed chair as steam spiraled from disposable cups of coffee that Eddie had fetched from the diner below. On the sides, Greek warriors from the time of the Iliad wielded spears, fearsome weapons in the Bronze Age, useless in the age of AK-47s, satellite surveillance, bacterial war.
The man from Washington had dressed in a casual style that conflicted with the agony on his face; pressed khakis and a dark blue jacket, open-necked collared shirt, rubber-soled Bass shoes. He laid a thin manila folder on my desk. The edge of a black-and-white photo protruded from the edge, but there wasn’t enough visible to know what it showed. The label on the folder said TOL-E-KHOMRI.
Utley said, “I keep asking myself, is there a crossover point? Did I ever meet him? Or even see him before? It was like he was gloating at me… like it was personal with him.”
Eddie leaned forward on his desktop, weight on his palms, palms on his blotter. I’d pulled my chair up close, and Izabel stood, arms folded, staring at Utley as if he were a suspect, which is what he was to his own people, he said.
“Everyone at the office treats me differently since it started,” Utley said. “I guess I’d do the same if he had approached them. The FBI’s interviewed my wife, parents, neighbors. Staff meetings? I’m out. And the questions! Did I ever meet the guy before? Have I had previous dealings with Jihadists? Did anyone approach me and I kept quiet about it? They’re in my computer. They ask about college. Did I attend certain meetings at Princeton? Was there something I didn’t say when I was vetted for the job?”
“Was there?” Izabel asked coldly.
“No.”
“Nothing like sympathy from your own side,” Eddie said.
First impression, he was candid. And burdened, fast aging; the thick brushed hair tinged with gray at the tips, the crow’s feet by the brown eyes deepening. He mentioned that he was fifth-generation government service with diplomat ancestors going back to the Spanish-American War. If his career ended, so would that chain of proud family history.
Utley said, “I would have been one of the people you’d have briefed had you come to Washington. So I figured I’d come to you. Maybe you saw something in Brazil, something that may help.”
“Have a Danish,” Eddie said. “There’s cheese and blueberry. You look like you could use some energy. Then let’s go over Tol-e-Khomri again. And see your pictures.”