Brian's knuckles were white on the grip of his pistol, his forearms tensed and taut. “I'm sorry,” he said.
“Think about it,” I pleaded. “I didn't kill him. Don't you want to know what happened? You have to want to know.”
Brian shook his head, but I could see him wavering, fighting to push back the part of himself that knew I was right. “Just give me the pen drive, Eve. Don't make me do this.”
The grandfather clock in the lobby rang out, three long chimes, and Brian turned slightly, his head moving over his shoulder, not to the sound of the clock but to something else, something moving in the dark hallway. A figure slipped past the archway, a swath of golden hair catching the light.
I ducked, watching the gun swing away, and Brian's arm with it. Now, I told myself, everything in me leaping toward this moment of distraction. I thrust the heel of my right palm against Brian's throat and brought my left hand down on his right wrist. He doubled over, struggling for breath, his grip faltering.
“Get the gun,” a voice said behind me as the pistol clattered to the ground. I bent down and lunged for the Browning, glancing back to see a woman in the doorway, her feet planted firmly in place, a pistol in her right hand.
“Down on the ground,” she said to Brian, motioning with her gun. “Face down.” She took a step forward into the light, and her mercurial features resolved themselves.
The American, I thought, the solo traveler with the fanny pack and the sensible boots, the woman I'd seen in the bathroom at the El Minzah that night. I'd seen her somewhere else as well. I blinked and tried to remember. Was she the one who'd come looking for me at the Hotel Ali? A blonde, Ilham had said.
Still gulping for air, Brian lowered himself onto the carpeted floor.
“Hands on the back of your head,” the woman commanded.
Brian stretched himself out and interlaced his fingers behind his neck, wincing as he did so.
The woman turned to me. “C'mon!” she said. There were voices in the hallway, someone ringing the bell at the front desk, getting no answer.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“A friend,” she said. “Now come on!”
TWENTY
We took the back way from the hotel, out a service entrance and into the pitch-dark hive of the medina, groping our way up one long flight of stairs and into a wider alleyway. There was a light rain falling, a fine mist that sifted down over the rambling stage set of the Old City, the crooked streets and houses like some child's nightmare backdrop. A breeze blew in from the strait, carrying with it the stench of low tide, seaweed and sewage and exposed dock timbers.
A friend,
I thought. It was the same thing I'd told Abdesselom. We ricocheted around a corner, and I slipped the Beretta from my waistband, then grabbed the woman's arm and shoved her against the damp wall.
“Who are you?” I asked, jamming the gun up into the soft space below her chin.
She reached for her pocketed gun, and I nudged her harder with the Beretta. “Leave it,” I told her.
Her face was wet, her breath hot on my face.
“Who do you work for?” I asked.
“The Americans.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “That's what Brian told me.”
She turned her face upward and blinked against the rain. “Same team, different players. Brawn versus brain. We're the quiet ones.”
“You'll have to do better than that.”
The woman swallowed hard, the muscles in her neck tensing against the barrel of the Beretta. “NSA,” she said.
The National Security Agency, I thought, remembering Sister Claire's videos, the various incarnations of American might. “Bullshit,” I told her. “The NSA's a bunch of computer geeks. They don't have people in the field.”
“You're right,” she said calmly. “Ask anyone, and they'll tell you I'm not here.”
I shook my head. “Who am I?”
“You don't remember. You call yourself Eve, but your passport says you're Marie Lenoir. You entered the country just over a week ago on the Algeciras ferry, a feat that would seem virtually impossible considering Marie's corpse lies six feet under in a churchyard in Burgundy. You spent the last year in a Benedictine convent.”
“And before that?”
“Before that you were Hannah Boyle.”
“And before Hannah?”
“That's where things get tricky. We know a woman named Leila Brightman did contract work for American intelligence. European work mostly, Amsterdam, Vienna, the arms pipeline. But you were here in North Africa as well. That was a few years ago. We have some other names: Michelle Harding, Sylvie Allain.”
“And Hannah, did she work for the Americans, too?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Hannah herself, for starters. It's a civilian alias, something you most likely got on your own. Hannah Boyle died over a decade ago in a car wreck outside of Bratislava. The agency doesn't use dead girls. They don't have to.”
I eased my safety back on and lowered the Beretta just an inch. “Why should I believe you?”
“You shouldn't, not any more than we should believe you've lost track of three decades of your life. Come on,” she said. “There's a safe house not far from here.”
I lowered the gun to my side.
“I saved your life,” she reminded me. “That's got to count for something.”
“What's your name?” I asked, taking a step back.
She peeled herself off the wall. “Helen,” she said. “You can call me Helen.”
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Helen hit a switch on the wall, and a single bulb flickered on, illuminating a narrow corridor and, beyond it, a larger, windowless room. “It's one of our old listening posts,” she explained. She stepped forward into the main space, and I followed behind.
The room was sparsely furnished. Dusty boxes were stacked in the corner. A wooden crate turned into a makeshift table held a grimy coffeemaker and an electric hot plate. In the middle of the room was an old wooden desk and chair, and behind them, an army cot and sleeping bag. A curtain half covered a door in the far wall, through which I could see the partial outline of a toilet.
Helen got down on her knees, slipped a penknife from her pocket, pried one of the old plank floorboards free, and pulled a laptop from the space in the subfloor. There was something mercurial about her, shape shifting. Here, in the room's tired light, she seemed older than she had at the hotel, her face and body a blank canvas.
“At the Mamounia,” I said, remembering the tall blonde with the overdone breasts. “That was you in the casino?”
“Yes,” she said. She stood and carried the computer to the little desk.
“And at customs in Algeciras? You had them let me through, didn't you?”
“We needed you to get on that ferry,” she explained, drawing the pen drive from her pocket, sliding it into the laptop's USB port.
“Why?”
“What did Brian tell you?” she asked.
I hesitated a moment, unable to let myself trust her.
“He didn't know, Eve,” she said. It was strange to hear that name in her mouth. “He didn't know he was lying to you. He didn't even know who he was working for.”
“I told you, he said he was working for the CIA.”
“Well, he wasn't, not this time. Someone in the CIA, yes, but not the agency itself. Same story with your old friend Patrick Haverman.”
“I don't understand.”
“What did he say was on the drive?”
“Documents from old Soviet files,” I told her, finally deciding I had nothing to lose.
“What kind of files?”
“Municipal plans for U.S. cities, full specs on American nuclear power plants. Bruns Werner was selling it all to someone named Al-Marwan.”
Helen shook her head. “He said Al-Marwan was the buyer?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you fit into all of this?”
“I stole the files off Werner's computer,” I explained. “Brian said I was working for someone, someone who wanted the information for himself.”
“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.