The Imam of Tawi-Tawi

by Ian Hamilton

  “He’s the one.”

  “I didn’t mention his name to the others,” Dulles said, “but I would appreciate it if you could find a way to hook me up with him at some point. I’m going to need some allies when this is done, and he’d be a useful man for me to know.”

  “I can do that,” Ava said.

  Dulles stood up and looked across the lobby. “Here they come,” he said.

  She and Dulles left the alcove. He walked towards the others while she hung back, quite certain that she wasn’t welcome. Bentley and Gilmour glanced in her direction, and even from a distance she felt their hostility.

  Dulles moved to join his colleagues, but when he got close, Harrison slipped past him and went over to Ava. She felt herself tense.

  “I need to say something before I go,” Harrison said.

  “Yes?”

  He reached out, grasped her arms, and pulled her closer.

  “Uncle would have been proud of you today,” he whispered.

  ( 47 )

  Ava slept badly. She kept replaying her conversation with Harrison in her mind. She didn’t doubt that she’d done the right thing. In fact, it was the only thing she could have done and still live with herself. But his final whispered remark about Uncle had touched her. Despite Dulles’s praise of him, Ava had lumped in Harrison with the other Americans in the boardroom. Now she felt she should tell him how much she respected the calm and graceful way he had received the news that she had done the exact opposite of what he had asked of her.

  Whenever she managed to put aside her thoughts about Harrison, the space was immediately filled with speculation about how the meeting with the Philippine government had gone. What kind of deal had been struck? Would anyone involved actually be held accountable? Or would the truth about Zakat College and the imam become victim of a convenient collective amnesia?

  She woke three or four times after shorts bursts of sleep and finally got up at seven. She went to the bathroom, made a coffee, and sat at her computer to figure out her day. All she knew for certain was that she was going to leave Manila, but for the rest of it she would have no idea until she talked to Fai. She hit her number and prayed she’d answer.

  “Good morning, baby,” Fai answered.

  “I was hoping I’d catch you.”

  “I’ve been up for half an hour and I’m almost ready to leave. We’re starting a bit earlier today.”

  “I’ve completely finished what I had to do in Manila, and I was thinking about what you said last night about meeting you along the way.”

  “Do you mean in the next day or two?”

  “I can leave here today if that works.”

  “It’s perfect,” Fai said. “We’ll be in Qujing tonight and are staying there for close to a week. It’s a big enough city that we can have some privacy. The crew is staying at the Guanfang Hotel. You should find a different one for us.”

  “I know this sounds silly, but where is Qujing?”

  “About 150 kilometres east from Kunming. The best thing to do is fly into Kunming and take a train.”

  “There aren’t any direct fights to Kunming from Manila. I’ll have to go through Hong Kong, and with the connection it’s about a six-hour flight in total. Add on the train ride and I won’t get to Qujing until sometime this evening.”

  “Whenever you get there will be wonderful,” Fai said. “Text me when you confirm your travel plans and have a hotel. This day won’t go by fast enough.”

  Ava ended the call and felt herself flushing at the thought of being in bed with Fai that night. She immediately went online and found a late-morning Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong and a late-afternoon China Air flight from Hong Kong to Kunming. She booked business-class seats on both. Her search for a hotel was slightly more problematic. Qujing didn’t have enough tourist attractions to warrant an upscale international hotel. It did have one that rated five stars, but it was called Fairyland. The name was off-putting but the hotel was adjacent to an attractive park, and all its reviews were laudatory. She reserved a suite and then sent a text and an email to Fai.

  She turned her attention to other people on her mind. Harrison was at the top of the list, but she didn’t know how to reach him. She called Dulles.

  “Hello?” he said, sounding tired.

  “This is Ava. I hope I’m not waking you.”

  “I haven’t slept yet. The Filipinos didn’t want us to leave the meeting until they’d all taken turns verbally lacerating us. When I got back here, Harrison and I had to deal with Washington, and that wasn’t much easier. “

  “I’m sorry for contributing to that. I was actually phoning to say that I hope you both understand why I did what I did. I particularly want to thank Harrison for the considerate and professional way he handled it. Can you give me his phone number?”

  “He’s already on his way back to Washington. They went directly to the airport from the meeting,” Dulles said. “But I can tell you that he does understand. In fact, it was one of the things that he specifically asked that I mention to you. He said it’s the kind of thing he might have done thirty years ago, before the system swallowed him.”

  “One of the things he asked you to mention?”

  “Yes. He also wanted to tell you that before he left he made a phone call,” Dulles said. “Wallace Murdoch won’t be taking any more contracts from Tom Allison or anyone else.”

  Ava’s pulse skipped a beat and she felt her grip on the phone tighten. “Did Bentley and Gilmour agree to that?”

  “He didn’t ask them. It was his decision and he made it. He wanted me to tell you that Murdoch was the very worst of us, and he asked you not to judge the rest of us even though we were once colleagues.”

  “Aside from telling him I’d never do that, I don’t know what else I can say.”

  “Brad expects that will you say nothing at all, not a single word. This is ultimately between you and him. I’m just a go-between.”

  “When did he —” she began and then stopped. “Was there anything else he wanted to pass along?”

  “No, that’s it.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me how it went last night?” Ava said.

  “About as well as could have been expected. The new president is no friend of America, but he appears to dislike and mistrust Muslims even more than us. There was no sympathy expressed for the dead men at the college, and only the most grudging acknowledgement that the Brotherhood — for all the right reasons — played a key role in exposing the danger we all thought the college represented.”

  “Was the president actually at the meeting?”

  “No, but one of his key aides was, and he was communicating with him by phone during the meeting.”

  “So you cut a deal?”

  “Yes. But, Ava, I can’t give you any details.”

  “Just tell me, will the Brotherhood suffer as a result?”

  “They should be okay, and by that I mean left alone. If you want details, you’ll have to ask your friend Ramirez. He was at the meeting.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Good. Now I really have to go. I need to catch some sleep.”

  “I’m leaving Manila today, so we probably won’t have a chance to talk again,” she said. “Please pass along my thanks to Harrison, and I want to say that I enjoyed working with you. We made a good team.”

  “I feel the same. Who knows, maybe we’ll get a chance to work together some other time.”

  “I sure hope not,” Ava said. She heard Dulles laugh before saying goodbye.

  Ava stared at her phone and was debating if she should call Ramirez when a call came in from a private number. “Ava Lee.”

  “This is Chang.”

  “Good morning, Uncle.”

  “I just spoke to Ramirez. He told me that your project has ended,” he said.

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sp; “It has.”

  “He was most complimentary about your contribution. He’s grateful in the extreme. Favours will be owed.”

  “Owed to you or to me?” Ava said.

  Chang laughed. “We should be able to manipulate it so that he owes both of us.”

  “I don’t need any favours from him. You can have my proxy.”

  “Don’t be rash. You never know what position he might hold in the future.”

  “Yes, Uncle,” she said. “Tell me, did Ramirez mention how the Brotherhood will be treated in the aftermath?”

  “He wouldn’t be so grateful if they hadn’t emerged relatively unscathed.”

  “That’s good to hear. When I talked to him last night, he thought that was how things might end.”

  “How will they end for you?”

  “I have an eleven-o’clock flight out of Manila this morning.”

  “I’ll send my car.”

  “That isn’t necessary.”

  “I’m sending the car anyway. It will be there at nine.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Ava, you have to excuse me now,” he said. “I have a call scheduled with Tommy in a few minutes, and you know what he’s like about punctuality. You and I can talk later this morning.”

  Ava put down her phone, thought about calling Ramirez, and then wondered to what end. Nothing seemed to have changed from the night before. She decided to shower and start packing.

  She left the room at eight, checked her bag at the front desk, and went to the Lobby restaurant. She picked up copies of the Manila Bulletin and the Manila Times and carried them to her table. The headline TERRORIST THREAT dominated both front pages. Before Ava could read how each paper had added its own spin, a waitress arrived at the table. She ordered black coffee and smoked salmon on a bagel with cream cheese.

  She began reading the articles. According to both papers, the combined efforts of the Philippine security service and the SAF had uncovered the illicit activities at Zakat College and brought them to an end. There was a vague passing reference to co-operation from the Muslim Brotherhood.

  When she had finished her breakfast, she got up, collected her bag, and stood outside the hotel entrance. Ten minutes later a black BMW pulled up. Rodrigo, the driver who’d met her at Aquino Airport, sprang out, reached for her bag, and opened the back door.

  “I thought I’d ride with you to the airport,” Chang said from the back seat.

  Ava smiled. “Uncle, this really isn’t necessary,” she said as she slid in next to him.

  “I didn’t get the opportunity to thank you properly for that previous job you did for us. I thought I should make up for it.”

  “The first time was a job. This was a favour.”

  “A point well made,” he said. “But will you treat the favour owed in return as casually as you treated Ramirez’s?”

  “Not a chance.”

  He smiled. “Tommy sends his thanks as well. And although we never discussed money, he authorized me to offer you two million dollars in payment for your services.”

  “I’d rather you and Tommy owed me a favour.”

  Chang reached for her hand and squeezed it gently. “Uncle would have been really proud of that reply.”

  “That’s the second time in less than twenty-four hours that I’ve been told Uncle would be proud of me.”

  “It won’t be the last,” Chang said.

  Coming Soon

  From House of Anansi Press

  In January 2019

  Read on for a preview of the next thrilling Ava Lee novel, The Goddess of Yantai.

  ( 1 )

  Ava Lee sat near the rear of the packed Beijing cinema. She was there to watch the premiere of Mao’s Daughter. The film was set in Yunnan province in 1959, a year after the launch of the Great Leap Forward — Mao Zedong’s disastrous attempt to impose industrialization and collectivization on Chinese agrarian society. Many farms stopped producing crops, and more than twenty million people had died in the famine that resulted from Mao’s misguided effort.

  A fictional drama, the film followed a young woman who would defy Chairman Mao. The woman was the mother of one child, the wife of a rice farmer, and the caregiver for her aging parents. The land had been in her husband’s family for generations before Mao’s Great Leap Forward prohibited the private ownership of farms. When her husband resisted turning the land over to a collective, he was prosecuted, labelled as a counter-revolutionary, and sent hundreds of kilometres away to do forced labour. His wife was allowed to stay in their modest home, but any means she had to support her child and her parents was stripped away.

  As the family’s situation steadily deteriorated, the young woman’s reaction morphed from submissiveness to fear, then to anger, and finally to an unbending determination to fight against the government. She confronted local Communist officials and they turned her away. Undeterred, she walked several hundred kilometres to the provincial capital of Kunming to petition senior officials for return of the farm, only to be turned away again. Those rejections strengthened her resolve, and she decided to take her case all the way to Beijing. She walked the entire distance, nearly 2,700 kilometres. To make her cause known, she hung a piece of cardboard around her neck that read I AM A DAUGHTER OF MAO. this is my long march for justice.

  As the film ended, a heavy silence filled the theatre. Ava took a deep breath, overcome by emotion. Pang Fai — her friend, her lover, the actress who portrayed “Mao’s daughter” — had been luminescent. Her body language, her facial expressions, and her penetrating eyes had strikingly conveyed the woman’s emotional and physical journey.

  Fai was regarded as the finest actress in Chinese cinema and was building an international audience. Ava’s involvement with her had started as a business venture — Fai was the public face of the PÖ fashion line, which Ava owned with her partners in Three Sisters Investments — and then had evolved into a full-blown romance.

  “Pang Fai!” a man shouted as he rose to his feet several rows ahead. His voice seemed to liberate the rest of the crowd, and more than a thousand people stood as one, clapping and calling her name.

  A man in a tuxedo walked onto the stage in front of the screen. He held up an arm in an attempt to quiet the crowd, but the cheering didn’t die down. Finally he shrugged and spoke into a microphone. He was almost yelling, but Ava could still barely hear him. He looked into the wings and motioned for some people to come forward. Two men joined him; the only one Ava recognized was Tsang Min, the film’s director.

  When Tsang took the microphone, the crowd quieted. He introduced the other person on the stage as the film’s producer. Then he spoke for a few minutes about how difficult it had been to shoot in so many parts of China, and how they’d felt at times like a travelling circus, putting up their tents in a different town or city every night. “But the truth is, if we had been rooted in one place or had even been limited to one room, as long as our cameras were capturing Fai’s performance, the story could still have been told,” he said.

  He looked off to the right and nodded. Pang Fai stepped into view and glided towards him. She was wearing a pale blue cheongsam with a high slit that exposed her long legs. She was tall, about five foot ten, and in three-inch heels she towered over everyone else on stage. The audience erupted. She kissed Tsang and the others on each cheek and then turned to face the audience. She placed her palms together, raised them to just below her chin, lowered her head, and bowed. She held that position for at least a minute, and then for another as the cheering continued.

  Tsang stepped beside her and handed her the microphone. She held it against her chest and said, “I want to thank you all for coming, for your support and your generosity. Without you, films like this could not be made.” The audience exploded. Pang Fai bowed one more time and then left the stage. The others followed and the house lights came on.
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  Ava stood up, feeling something approaching awe. It was the first premiere she’d ever attended, and she’d had no idea what to expect. She saw Chen Jie, Fai’s agent, standing in the aisle about twenty rows ahead. He was about sixty and had the rotund physique of a man who’d enjoyed a lifetime of good food and liquor. He had been Fai’s agent since her early days in the business. He knew her intimately, including her true sexual orientation, which he had managed to keep secret. Public knowledge of it would severely damage, if not destroy, Fai’s film career in China.

  Her affair with Ava was the first real relationship that Fai had had with a woman, and Ava knew Fai had shared that information with Chen. He hadn’t taken it well, and whenever Ava had met him at lunch or dinner, he made his dislike of her and the reason for it quite plain. Now, as she made her way down the aisle towards him, she wondered what kind of reception she would get. She thought he had seen her when she was ten metres away, but he either didn’t recognize her or chose to ignore her. He was speaking to another man when she finally reached his side. He acknowledged her with a quick glance and then resumed his conversation.

  Ava waited, her anger at his rudeness slowly building. Finally he turned to her. “You weren’t supposed to be here,” he said.

  “I was invited,” Ava said. “Besides, I was with Fai in Kunming the day before she started making this film. That was a year ago. I thought it fitting that I see the end product.”

  “I was told you couldn’t make it.”

  “My plans changed.”

  “Does Fai know?”

  “No. I thought I’d surprise her.”

  “She doesn’t like surprises. And neither do I, where her career is concerned.”

  “I’m hardly a factor in her career.”

  “You are in her life, and the two things are not easily separated.”

  “Chen, will you take me to her?” Ava said sharply. “Or do I have to find her myself?”

  He sighed. “Come with me.”

  He walked to the front of the theatre and turned right, to a small door that was blocked by two security guards. The guards moved to either side when they saw Chen, and one of them opened it for him. She felt the guards eyeing her. “She’s with me,” Chen said.