“As-salaam alaikum.”
“Alaikum salaam.”
“I’m Raouf. My real name, in case you’re wondering. I lead the believers here.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
Now Kassani understood the precautions. “If I’m meeting you, Paris must be my last stop.”
“There’s something I want you to see.”
—
L’ÉGLISE NOTRE-DAME DE BONNE-NOUVELLE—the Church of Our Lady of Good News—was a wide, squat stone building at the top end of Paris’s 2nd Arrondissement, a mile or so northeast of the Louvre. Bonne-Nouvelle had been erected in the 1820s to replace an older church that had been wrecked during the French Revolution.
In a nod to that angry history, the church had been rebuilt sturdy and solid. Easily defensible. It had none of the flourishes that marked its famous medieval namesake. No towers topped with gargoyles. No big stained glass windows. In fact, its front wall had no windows at all. The columns that supported its central pediment were its only ornamentation. It could have been a bank, a courthouse, even a jail. And though it faced north into a pocket park, Bonne-Nouvelle had no real estate of its own. Narrow single-lane streets, glorified alleys, encircled it on three sides. Its eastern wall merged with an apartment building.
Inside, Bonne-Nouvelle had been built in what architects called neoclassical style. Arches and simple stone pillars separated the central nave from the side aisles. Its ceilings stood thirty feet above the aisles, forty above the nave. The lack of ornamentation and high ceilings gave the church an open, airy feel and made it seem larger than it was. In reality, Bonne-Nouvelle was no larger than a big hotel ballroom.
Still, the church was never crowded. Surveys showed that fewer than a quarter of French Catholics considered religion important to their lives. The percentage was even smaller in Paris, where God had to compete with the city’s pleasures. Bonne-Nouvelle’s regular Sunday services drew fewer than twenty worshippers, mostly women past sixty, white-haired and stooped. Yet the church’s priests tried their best. They officiated at baptisms, communions, weddings, and funerals. They sat for confession every day in case anyone showed up.
So Raouf and Kassani found the church’s front gate unlocked this afternoon, its tall front door cracked open. Inside, narrow wooden chairs were arranged around a long table in the center of the nave. On either side of the table, fat candles burned dimly, streaking smoke into the hall. At the end of the main aisle, the ceiling rose into a dome painted with eye-catching dark hexagons. Clear glass in the dome’s center sprayed the church with sunlight. Along the walls were paintings of scenes that Kassani imagined came from the Christian Bible.
Mosques were austere and simple. Houses of prayer, nothing more. This place was—
“Pretty.”
“A pretty place for their pretty god. A museum where they can see how they used to believe.” Raouf spoke in a whisper. “I don’t know if you’ll see it again, so take a good look. I have photos and a plan of the inside, but your own eyes are always best.”
“What am I looking for?”
Raouf opened his hands—Don’t make me say it. Kassani was embarrassed. He looked again at the space. Imagining it as pure geometry, nothing more than an open room. Imagining it as a target.
The lack of windows would help. As would the fact that the windows the church did have were high in the walls. Sarin was a big molecule, heavier than air. It tended to fall rather than rise.
Kassani circled the walls, pretending he was interested in the Christian frippery. He was checking the ventilation system. Air-conditioning hadn’t existed when Bonne-Nouvelle was built. Its architects had counted on stone walls and high ceilings to keep the church cool. For winter, the building had a primitive heating system, grilles scattered across its stone floors. The lazy drift of the smoke from the candles showed how slowly the air was moving.
The lack of modern vents meant that the poison wouldn’t clear easily once it became airborne. But it also would need time to spread from wherever they hid it. Kassini wondered if they’d have access to the heating vents or the ductwork under them.
Kassani believed seventeen liters of sarin would be enough to kill most of the people inside this space. If they couldn’t run out. Though there, too, the church’s age might give them an advantage. Bonne-Nouvelle had been built long before building codes required emergency exits. As far as Kassani could tell, the church had only one secondary exit, a little door tucked in the back right corner. A panicked rush to escape could jam it. If Raouf could somehow block the front door.
If, if, if. Lots of questions. Including the most important. Out of all the churches in Paris, why this one? He’d have to ask later. As Kassani finished his circle and came back to the center table, a fiftyish man in a dark blue sweater walked toward him. The priest, no doubt. He wore a puzzled smile as he chattered at Kassani. Kassani froze. He understood only basic French, hardly enough to handle a conversation. How would he explain his wanderings?
Suddenly Raouf was beside him, speaking as smoothly as the priest. After a minute, the priest nodded, smiled, pointed to the church’s back right corner.
“He says he understands your difficulty,” Raouf said. “The toilet’s over there.”
“Ahh, merci. Merci beaucoup.”
—
RAOUF AND KASSANI walked toward the Gare du Nord, the big train station that connected Paris with its northern suburbs and points beyond.
“Impressive, how you handled the priest.”
“I’ve lived here a long time. And these French, they’re all the same. They imagine there’s a certain way of doing things. The right way. The French way. To speak, to buy groceries, to dress. They’re not afraid to tell you if you’re doing it the wrong way. In fact, they like to tell you. They’re so proud of themselves, of their country.”
“It sounds tiresome.”
“The Americans, they blow us up, but at least they don’t order us around. Tell us how to speak English.”
“But I don’t see, how does that help you with them?”
“I know what they want. I let them give their speeches—priests, mayors, everyone. I nod, listen—”
“Promise you’ll do it their way.”
Raouf shook his head. “Too obvious. And they don’t think an Arab can be French—not exactly. But without saying so, I admit that their way is better.”
“That’s what they want?”
“That’s all they want. From us anyway. So?”
“You mean the church?”
“Of course.”
“The stuff is here already?”
“Some coming today. The rest tomorrow.”
“Adnan—”
“Yes, Adnan. What do you think?”
Kassani saw that for all his protests, Raouf had internalized the French attitude about correction. We’re not talking about Adnan now. We’re talking about the church. “For that space? We have enough. I think.”
“Come, let’s sit a minute.” Raouf led Kassani into an empty café. A waiter brought them lemonades in the Parisian style, fresh-pressed lemon juice, a cool pitcher of water, and another, smaller pitcher with simple syrup. “A tiresome country, oui, but they do know how to eat.”
“We can talk here?”
“These are the best places. A couple of Arabs talking about our mistresses. Just keep your voice low. Now, what’s wrong?”
“This stuff, it’s not what you imagine. You don’t just pour out a few drops and poof—” Kassani lifted his hands. “I’ll have to premix it.”
“Like this.” Raouf poured a dollop of lemon juice into his glass, mixed it with a long silver rod, added the sugar.
Watching the juice turn to a cloud in the glass brought Kassani back to the caliph’s backyard. “You can’t imagine how dangerous it is. Unless you want me
to get killed while I’m mixing, I need the right gear and plenty of space. With its own ventilation.”
“I have that.”
“Then, once I’m done, I have to seal it tight. If it leaks, it’ll kill anyone it touches. So let’s say that works—the mixing. I assume you’re planning to leave it under the grates. In that case, we need a way to puncture the plastic and release it. A needle or a knife, with a mechanism to make it stab.”
“Is that all?”
“No. The stuff, it starts as liquid. It aerosolizes at room temperatures, but we have to blow it up into the vents.”
“How much space will it take?”
“For the liquid alone, imagine a box half a meter square.” Kassani outlined the shape. “Heavy, too. Twenty kilos, not counting the container. Or the knife. Or the fan, or whatever we’re using to blow it. And—”
“There’s more?”
“It would be better if we had it coming from at least two or three places. With the doors closed, the air doesn’t move fast in there.”
Raouf nodded. “But if we get inside and set the boxes in place, underneath, in the heating.”
“If, sure. But all of that takes time, and I saw the front door has an alarm.”
“Let me take care of that.”
“Magic again.”
Raouf leaned in. “The French can’t be bothered to clean their own sewers, water pipes, the cables underground. They like Arabs for that work.”
“But where the sewer meets the church, it must be an alarm—”
“We’ve checked. A locked gate, that’s all. That place is two hundred years old, and no one cares about those Jesus paintings anymore. My men go in the basement, leave the boxes, get out—”
“Paint the boxes black, too, so no one can see them from above, they can stay until we’re ready.”
Raouf sipped his lemonade. “Once the boxes are in place, could dogs find them?”
“Do the sewers in Paris have dogs?”
“I mean, trained dogs, like the ones they use to sniff for bombs.”
Kassani considered. “It’s possible. But I can promise they wouldn’t be nearly as good as the kind that find explosives. These chemicals are rare. No one’s going to spend a lot of time training dogs to find them. And they couldn’t possibly train them with sarin, so they’d have to teach them to find what’s called a precursor.”
“Something the dogs can smell without getting killed.”
“Yes. But we’ll load actual sarin in those containers. Even if they do pick that up, they won’t know what it is.” Kassani hesitated. “I don’t understand why you’re expecting dogs. At that church.”
Raouf took one last long sip of lemonade. “Last question. After the gas starts flowing, will anyone have any advance warning?”
Kassani could answer this one with absolute assurance. “No. It doesn’t smell, it doesn’t taste, you can’t see it, you can’t feel it. Until it gets inside you. But if we want to be sure it’s lethal, we have to be sure no one gets out for at least a minute. Two would be better.”
“That long?”
“When they used it in Tokyo, in the subways, they killed twenty people, but hundreds more took a few breaths and didn’t die. They got to fresh air in time. Ours is more dangerous, but one or two breaths won’t be enough. People can run for a few seconds after they feel the effects. The longer we can pin them, the better.”
Kassani waited, but Raouf didn’t say anything more. “I understand, there’s only the one big door at the front of the church. Are you expecting people will jam it in the panic?”
“Insh’allah, they won’t go for the door at all. They’ll stay right where they are. Until too late.”
19
THE CASTLE
ORCHIDECTOMY.
Strange word. Wells would always remember the first time he’d heard it.
Eighth grade. Starting to play football seriously. His talent was already obvious, his speed and strength and most of all his slipperiness. Fast feet, the coaches said. A single tackler could rarely stop him. He was there, then he wasn’t. The trait would serve him well in the years to come.
In his memory he lay in bed, reading Sports Illustrated, boxing, a beast of a heavyweight named Mike Tyson, only a few years older than Wells himself. Or maybe Time. Hard to imagine now, but back in the pre-Internet era, in Hamilton, Montana, weekly magazines and the nightly news broadcasts were the primary sources of information. His parents subscribed to Time and Newsweek, encouraged him to read both. It’s a big world. You need to know what’s going on, John.
Wells didn’t believe the past had been better or worse. People had always been people, cruel, kind, or both at once. But he was pretty sure it had been simpler. More contained.
That night, he heard the front door creak, his dad shout greetings upstairs. Herbert was a doctor, a surgeon. They’d expected him for dinner, but a nurse called, said he was stuck in the operating room, an emergency. It happened.
Wells heard the rattle of ice in a glass as Herbert poured himself a drink. After a minute or two, more rattling. Slow steps upstairs. The second drink and Herbert’s heavy tread meant the surgery had been rough. Though not that it had failed. Herbert gave himself completely to his patients, win or lose.
Herbert tapped lightly on Wells’s door. “Awake?”
“Hi, Dad.”
The door opened a crack. “Promise me something. Every time you play ball, you’ll wear a cup.”
“Of course—”
“Not of course. Make sure it really fits. Don’t be embarrassed, get the right one, one that doesn’t slip—”
“This is why you’re home so late?” Though Wells hardly needed to ask. His father wasn’t a talkative man. The surgery must have been ugly.
“Ever heard of an orchidectomy?” Herbert closed the door without waiting for an answer. Wells found it in his dictionary. Orchidectomy, also spelled orchiectomy: surgical removal of one or both testes.
—
THE WORD came back to Wells on the afternoon after his encounter with the guard commander. His scrotum swelled to the size of a baseball and turned so tender that the slightest touch jumped tears from his eyes. Blood, fire-engine red, flavored his urine.
That night, Wells lay on his side, pants pulled to his knees, lips sucked against his teeth. The fire radiated down his legs, some accident of nerves. The pain heightened his senses. He picked up a faint stink of diesel fuel, a radio playing Bulgarian pop, a horse neighing outside the Castle’s walls.
He didn’t know the sun would ever rise. But it did, and when he stood for attention for the dawn count, the guards smirked.
“Gorilla balls,” the cellblock’s head guard said. Playing to his men. “Too bad the rest of it didn’t grow the same way.”
“I need a doctor.” Wells had wondered about asking, but why not? He did. Even a Qaeda detainee wouldn’t want to endure this.
“Needs a doctor. Poor baby.”
Wells realized a sentence too late that he should have begged, not demanded.
“Today’s Saturday. Doctor’s not here today. Or tomorrow.”
“Even a bag of ice, then. Please.”
“Next, he’ll want us to make him a cozy fire. Cook him breakfast.” The guards walked off.
An hour later, one came back with a garbage bag of ice, a quart of milk, a bag of oranges, and a chocolate bar. Wells hadn’t known food like that existed in here. The kindness was proof that he looked as bad as he felt. He covered himself in ice, closed his eyes, imagined his high school cheerleaders trying a new routine: Gimme an O! Gimme an R! Gimme a C! Gimme a . . .
What’s it spell?
Eunuch!
—
THE ICE HELPED. The swelling subsided, slowly. His urine faded from red to brown. The pain barely budged, but Wells was used to pain.
He sent her away, but she returned the next night. And the next. Until now, he hadn’t truly understood the hold his daughter would have. Another distraction, another danger. He had to push her aside, even if doing so left pain his only companion.
Friday came, and Wells readied himself to meet Hani. But the guards told him and the others that they had canceled prayers. “Next week, if you roaches behave.” Already a month had passed since Wells had arrived at the Castle. Now he was losing another week. He knew he ought to protest, but he couldn’t find the energy. Not just because the guards wouldn’t care. Under the circumstances, having seven more days to recuperate was a relief.
—
HE KNEW he’d healed, or healed enough, when he woke up on Monday ready for push-ups and tricep exercises. No sit-ups, though. He would let that part of his body be. Along with his strength, his impatience came back. He needed a way to talk to Hani. But his imagination failed him. In a jailhouse movie, he would have figured out a clever trick for the prisoners on the other side of the block to run messages. Morse code through the walls. In reality, he would have had to shout even more loudly to talk to them than to Hani.
He gave up, focused instead on his next conversation. How could he lure Hani into revealing more about the commander in Paris? Or the mole? What if Samir told Hani about his own fights against the Americans? Would Hani brag in return?
Then another idea came to him. A long shot, but maybe it would get Hani talking . . .
The week dragged until the wheel turned Friday. The morning passed with no word. Wells wondered if he could afford to wait another week. But, just before noon, he heard the echoing steps of the guards. The prisoners on the other side murmured as their cells clanked open. Finally, they came for him. Once again, the pimpled commander led them. His skin seemed worse today. A full-on boil crested his nose. Wells pitied him, and then he saw the baton.
The Prisoner Page 27
