He said vehemently: “Freedom and safety have a price tag.” He would have preferred calm. He would have preferred ironic disdain. He would have preferred not to have sounded so furious. “That’s the meaning of Bonbec. Bonbec is where traitors were induced to confess before they undermined the public good.”
“
Induced
to confess. That’s one way of describing torture.”
“I take it that the rash of recent incidents and civilian deaths don’t bother you.”
“They horrify me.”
“But you don’t believe atrocities require strong measures.”
“I
do
believe atrocities require strong measures.”
“That’s what we’re engaged in at Bonbec. Taking strong preventative measures.”
“Strong measures are one thing. Torture is quite another. If I were you, I wouldn’t call an interrogation room Bonbec. That’s pretty sick. Not to mention bad PR for democracy and civil rights.”
“There are people who put themselves outside the pale. You’ve been brought to Bonbec for good reason.”
“I see,” she said, shaken. “And of course mistakes are never made.”
“No one is brought in without substantial cause. Interrogation determines what comes next.”
“I see.” She put her elbows on the table and leaned her chin on her interlaced hands. She flexed her fingers so that her fingernails and the backs of her digits touched her cheeks. She took in a long deep breath and released it slowly. She studied his eyes. She nodded with the air of a puzzle solved mournfully. “You like making people afraid.” Her body relaxed. “That’s what this is about.”
“It is about national security,” he said.
“Oh right. I forgot.”
It was the dismissiveness which got to him. He thumped his fist on the table. “Why aren’t you scared?”
Her eyebrows shot upwards. “What have I got to be scared about
here
? I’m scared of suicide bombers, but I don’t know the slightest thing about the Park Street incident, so I know this is all a big mistake.” She frowned. “But of course I’ve been assuming all this is legitimate and therefore rational.
Do you mean why aren’t I scared of
you
?” She pondered the question, taking it seriously. “I think I might be now, as a matter of fact. At least a bit. I think you are scary, and that makes you interesting, because when weird things happen, I get curious. I can’t help myself. The unexpected turns me on, the way scaring people does you. Why is that? I mean, why do you enjoy trying to make other people frightened? Is it just the power?”
“No,” he said. He could see a wall of high-school lockers behind her. She was extremely interested in his answer. She was waiting. “I want to know what happens when other people believe they’ve done nothing wrong, but sense they’ll be penalized anyway. When they realize deep down they are powerless.” He had not meant to say this. He had not meant to say anything at all.
“Fascinating. But we are never without power,” Leela said. “Especially when we know we’ve done no wrong.”
Agitated, he raked the gloved fingers of his left hand over his head, a reflex, expecting to feel the soft stubble of his hair. He had forgotten the mask. He fumbled with the photographs in the folder—they were all eight by ten, black and white, with a matte finish—and extracted one. “Do you know this person?” he asked.
Leela was surprised. “That’s Berg. He was my PhD supervisor and now he’s supervising my post-doc. What’s he got to do with anything?”
“You meet with him regularly.”
“Of course I meet with him regularly. We’re working on a grant proposal together.”
“Are you aware of the nature of his work?”
“I just told you. We’re working on a joint project. We’re in the same field: the mathematics of sound, vibration patterns,
harmonics. It’s not exactly rocket science. It’s not exactly national security either, for that matter, unless you happen to think Bach or the history of violin construction is of interest to the CIA.”
“The mathematics of vibration patterns is of considerable interest to the CIA.”
“Come again?”
“Don’t be disingenuous, Dr. Moore. It doesn’t wash. Intelligence agencies employ mathematicians for codes and code-breaking.”
“So professors and post-docs in math are a security threat?”
“The following recruiters have approached you—”
“Okay, okay,” Leela admitted. “They trawl all the Ivy League schools. Like most of my colleagues I’ve been approached, and I’m sure you know I turned them down. So did Berg, I happen to know. Turn them down, I mean. Is that why I’ve been brought in?”
“Why does Berg stalk you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Cobb placed another photograph on the table: an urban street scene. In the foreground, at a table in a sidewalk coffee shop, Leela was lifting a tiny cup of Turkish coffee to her lips. Across from her, his back to the camera, was a man.
“That’s Café Marrakesh,” she said. “So? And speaking of stalking, who’s taking pictures of me?”
Cobb extracted a magnifying glass from the drawer on his side of the table. He handed it to her. “Examine the reflection in the coffee-shop window at the extreme right edge of the photograph,” he said.
Leela focused through the curved lens. She could see a shadowy doorway: the entrance to a small shoe-repair store on
the other side of the street. In the doorway, half-hidden, was a man. She squinted. She moved the lens closer to the image then further away. The man was Berg.
“This means absolutely nothing,” she said. “This is Central Square, for God’s sake. Hundreds of MIT students and faculty are there every day. So Berg took his shoes to be repaired while I happened to be across the street. He probably never even saw me. And what if he did?”
Cobb put another photograph on the table.
The shot was an aerial one. It appeared to have been taken at dusk: a deserted street, store fronts, huddled three-decker houses, an empty lot. There were only two figures in the street. One was walking down the middle of the roadway itself, level with the empty lot; the other was two blocks behind, on the sidewalk, a shadow that clung to the houses.
“And now the close-ups from this aerial shot,” Cobb said. “First of you, in front. You recognize yourself, I’m sure. And then of your follower, Berg.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Leela said. “What proof do you have that these close-ups are of the figures in the other photo? Those blobs could be anyone.”
“You remember this street? What’s the name of this street?”
“I have no idea.”
“You remember that you walked there alone?”
“I often walk in the evening. I like walking. I’m getting exercise. I’m thinking. I’m solving equations in my head. I’m not reading street signs.”
Cobb reached for the magnifying glass and handed it to her. “Look at the aerial shot. Look at the second figure. Look at the doorway of that house he’s huddling against. Look at the length of the man’s shadow. Now look at the doorway and the shadow in the close-up.”
Leela’s concentration was intense. She studied each image in turn. She held the glass at varying heights.
“Well?” he prodded. “Do they match?”
“They match,” she said quietly. “I don’t understand why he’d be following me. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You were both going to the same place,” Cobb said.
“When I’m walking, I’m just walking for the exercise. I’m not going anywhere.”
“This is a back street a few blocks north of the T stop in Central Square,” Cobb said. “You were going somewhere that night. You were going to the mosque on Prospect Street.”
Leela stared at him and in the flicker of surprise and unease that crossed her eyes, he knew the seesaw had begun to tip. He had an odd and intense sensation of water swirling about his ankles: the switch-flow tide on the rise.
Leela said quietly, “I didn’t
know
that’s where I was going. I was—” she skipped two beats; he could practically see the quick editing inside her head—“meeting a friend.”
“You were following someone who was going to the mosque and Berg was following you.”
Leela met his eyes steadily; or rather, she stared at the eye holes in his mask, unblinking. She said nothing.
Cobb drew another photograph from his folder and placed it in front of her. “You were following this man,” he said. “Who is he?”
Leela seemed reluctant to look. Instead, she gazed at the wall above her interrogator’s head but her focus was clearly not in the room. Cobb noted the tic at the corner of one eye, the twitching nerve in her lip. He picked up the photograph—a view of the back of a walking man—and held it in front of her face. The man’s hair was thick and dark, as Cobb’s used to be, though the hair of the man in the photograph was dense with loose
curls. He wore jeans and a white shirt. There was nothing to give a sense of scale. There was no way to tell if the man was tall or short.
“Who is he?” Cobb demanded.
“I haven’t a clue,” she said. “He could be you.”
“You were following him. Who is he?”
Leela looked at Cobb through half-closed eyes as though she were succumbing to a drug. “How can I tell? I can’t see the face.”
“We both know his name,” Cobb said.
“Do we indeed?”
“Unless you don’t know the name of the man you’ve been living with for the past few years.”
Leela put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers and leaned on her interlaced hands. Cobb observed a slight tremor at her fingertips. “I had no idea my private life was so important,” she said. “Do tell me the name of the man I’m living with.”
“Mikael Abukir.”
“What?” She burst into involuntary laughter.
“Though it’s possible you know him by a different name.”
Cobb had her now. Certainty was leaving her like air from a punctured balloon. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to watch confidence ebb from the supremely self-assured.
“What name do you know him by?” he asked.
She tapped the photograph. “This is a picture of the back of a man who could be anyone. I can’t see the remotest connection with the man I live with.”
“Hmm,” he said. He extracted two more photographs from the folder. “Here is a frontal view of the man you were following to the mosque. And here’s yet another view in which I would have said you were intimate.” He saw the flash in her eyes: the shock of invasion and violation. “But perhaps they all look the same to you,” he said. He could feel
a power surge beginning at the soles of his feet. “You could have been a porn star,” he added lightly. He was electric with switch-flow. His nerves sucked energy from the air. He placed more photographs of intertwined bodies before her. “You know him as Mishka Bartok,” he said. “You’ve been living with him for several years, but he has a tendency to disappear from time to time. To be absent for an entire night or even longer.”
“He’s a musician. He plays at the Marrakesh.”
“He has another life. He’s involved with a Muslim Youth Association which has ties to Hamas and to assorted extremist groups.”
“That is impossible,” she said. “That is absolutely ridiculous. He’s Jewish!”
Cobb produced another photograph. “Then it’s very strange, don’t you think, that he’s so warmly received by this group of young men?”
“Who are we kidding? Anyone can engineer that sort of photograph these days, on a computer. Mishka’s not in the least religious, and he’s not political. He’s a composer. He’s a violinist. He plays the oud.”
“An Islamic instrument.”
“He has a scholarly interest in the difference between Western and Eastern music. He has a post-doc at Harvard and teaches there, for heaven’s sake.”
“That is his cover.”
“His
cover
?” She stood abruptly and knocked over her chair. She laughed nervously. “I feel as though I’ve been kidnapped by Cloud Cuckoo Land. Music is Mishka’s passion. It’s his whole life. I have never known anyone less political. I have never known anyone less connected to the real world at all. Mishka’s not like ordinary mortals.”
“No, he’s not like ordinary mortals.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“He keeps disappearing for hours and days at a stretch, doesn’t he? Which is why you followed him. And now you know he goes to the mosque off Central Square. Which, by the way, was behind yesterday’s incident at Park Street.”
“It’s the
music
he’s interested in.”
“The bomber’s body has been identified. He’s another Harvard graduate student named Jamil Haddad. Haddad is an engineering student, but strangely enough, he’s auditing the same course in Persian Classical Music that your lover is auditing, and Jamil Haddad’s involvement with the Prospect Street mosque is well documented.”
Leela, agitated, gathered up the spread of photographs as though they were contaminated and turned them face down. She slammed the palm of her hand on the white backs of photographic paper. “Who took these? Did you take these?”
“No,” he said. “I receive and interpret the data. I don’t gather it.”
“Who gathers it? Who took these? Who’s been following me?”
Cobb leafed through yet more photographs in his folder.
“Answer me,” Leela demanded. “Who’s spying on me?”
“Your Dr. Berg is obviously spying on you.” Cobb smiled. “Which interests us greatly. We’ve got him under surveillance too.”
He watched the impact of this information.
“Your hands are shaking,” he said. Leela was flustered; but he had yet to make her afraid. “The question that troubles me is this,” he said. “How much of your affecting ignorance of Mikael Abukir’s true identity is real and how much is fake? How much of it is your cover?”
“My—?” She began to laugh but the sound turned into something like a hiccup and she seemed on the point of choking. He had, for an instant, rendered her speechless.
She recovered. “I guess you’ll just have to keep stalking me to find out,” she said tartly. “You’ll have to keep paying your goons to take photos with a telescopic lens.”
“Oh, we have been,” he said quietly. “We’ve been making inquiries. We have quite a list of former lovers. You really could have been a porn star.”
“Those relationships are far in my past.”
“We’re well aware that your proclivities for sexual cruising changed quite suddenly once you picked up Abukir and bedded him.” He smiled. “I could, of course, post the recent erotic scenes on the net. Or I could mail them to MIT to demonstrate, let’s say for a tenure committee, how truly multi-talented you are.”