The Language of Secrets

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  Khattak checked his watch, feeling the winter chill settle into his bones. He was waiting for Rachel to help him go through the locker. He hadn’t called Coale, a deliberate choice. If he mentioned the storage locker, Coale would block his attempts to investigate. Time enough to tell Coale after the initial search.

  Rachel pulled into the parking lot of the warehouse with a cheerful blast of her horn.

  She was carrying a tray of Tim Hortons coffees in one hand and polishing off a maple donut with the other. Stuffed between the coffee cups was a bag that Khattak suspected held another donut. Rachel was always hungry, though he had no idea where she put away the food.

  He was glad she was here now—a part of the investigation where she could openly partner with him, away from prying eyes.

  They walked over to the storage unit together, Khattak holding the tray while Rachel dug out her camera. The first of the three keys Alia had given Khattak unlocked the main door of one section of the warehouse. Khattak read out numbers until they came to the locker marked “114.”

  “What is it, sir?” Rachel asked when he paused by the locker number.

  “Mohsin had a taste for symbolism; it must be why he chose this locker. There are one hundred and fourteen chapters in the Qur’an.”

  Setting down the cardboard tray, Khattak tried each of the two remaining keys. The second one turned in the lock. He rolled up the orange door of the locker.

  And then it occurred to him, too late, to check for security cameras. What if Ashkouri or someone from his camp was watching the locker? Or Ciprian Coale?

  He scanned possible locations for a camera. Nothing seemed out of place, and there was no laptop or desktop computer inside the locker, a possible precaution Mohsin had taken, preventing access through a webcam.

  The locker housed an office chair, a desk, and a vintage manual typewriter.

  A small lamp on the desk was plugged into the unit’s electric socket by means of an extension cord. Behind the desk were metal bookshelves crammed with technical manuals, the rows numbered 1 to 20.

  Khattak examined the desk without touching anything, listening to the click of Rachel’s camera. They were wearing gloves, careful not to disturb the scene any more than necessary.

  Khattak flicked on the lamp, flooding the desk with a halo of light.

  There was a sheet of paper in the typewriter.

  Two short sentences had been typed in faded ink.

  We are men in the sun. We will show you the proof of it.

  * * *

  “Is that a threat of some kind, sir? A warning about the bomb plot?”

  “I don’t think so, Rachel.”

  Khattak looked at her for long minutes, his mind following several tracks at once. Rachel waited without speaking. She retrieved her cooling coffee and sipped it, puzzling over the sheet of paper in the typewriter. Absentmindedly, she ate the second donut, this one a chocolate dip.

  When she’d finished her coffee, she asked, “Why not?”

  Khattak studied Alia’s keys, taking note of the desk’s locked drawers. He touched the keys of the typewriter with his gloved hands, a finger pressed to the letter “M.”

  “Because I think it’s a message for me.”

  * * *

  Rachel watched him try Alia Dar’s keys in the drawers, unaccountably nervous. She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone knew of their presence at the locker. She glanced around, but the passageway was empty. She moved closer to Khattak, peering over his shoulder.

  There was a stack of unused paper in the top drawer. The second held a plain envelope that contained a single item: a penciled-in list of math problems, with many of the equations crossed out and begun again. There were small notations beside the penciled ratios.

  ANFO.

  ANNM.

  Rachel’s heart thumped with excitement. She crumpled up the Tim Hortons bag.

  “I know what this is, sir.”

  Khattak nodded.

  ANFO, or AN/FO, was something they both knew well.

  Ammonium nitrate mixed with fuel oil.

  The key component in a fertilizer bomb.

  * * *

  Khattak drank his coffee, reading the list of calculations.

  If ANFO was ammonium nitrate/fuel oil, ANNM was its more sophisticated variant, with nitromethane as the fuel ingredient. The explosive properties of ammonium nitrate were realized by adding fuel in a precisely measured ratio. A detonator that generated sufficient energy completed the necessary components of the bomb.

  Mohsin—or one of his partners—had scrawled six words at the end of the list, words that filled Khattak with worry.

  It’s time to switch it up.

  Switch what up? The date of the strike, or the bomb-making ingredients?

  Rachel asked the question at the forefront of both their minds.

  “Just whose side was Mohsin Dar on?”

  * * *

  Khattak looked around the storage locker.

  “This can’t be everything,” he said. “There has to be something else.”

  He examined one of the metal bookshelves, Rachel took the other, checking each of the numbered binders carefully. Everything confirmed what Alia Dar had described—Mohsin’s interest in computer programming, his dabbling.

  “This is like another language,” Rachel said, paging through the manuals. “Besides, if there was anything here, INSET probably already has it.”

  Khattak shook his head. The typewritten message meant something; so did the number of the locker. He looked at the rows of binders, taking out the fourteenth binder in the first row again: 1–14. He read each page closely, in case Mohsin had left a coded message.

  “I thought the number might mean something,” he said, passing the binder to Rachel. She checked it as well. The page numbered 114 was a set of instructions on programming in Java that continued from the preceding pages.

  She shoved the binder back into place, and as she did so she heard a small click. With a frown, she retrieved the binder, this time setting it down on the desk with a thud. The click sounded again. Moving the typewriter aside, she opened the binder and laid it flat on the desk. Then she tilted it up and checked the metal spine. There was a tiny gap between the metal spine and the plastic cover of the binder. She shook it and heard a slipping sound.

  “There’s something there, sir, you were right. But I can’t quite reach it with my fingers.”

  She passed the binder back to him, and this time Esa tried. By a combination of shaking the spine and sliding his fingers through the tiny opening, he was just able to touch the outline of a plastic square.

  He tipped the binder upside down, and the square slid into his fingers.

  He held it up in the dim light of the storage locker.

  It was the memory card from a digital camera.

  * * *

  Rachel stared at it, thrilled. It wasn’t the most sophisticated hiding place, but it had taken Khattak’s insight into Mohsin to find it.

  “My laptop’s in the car.”

  When she’d brought it to the locker and booted it up, the screen saver flared to life. It was a photograph of Zachary taken with friends in the Austrian Alps. He was making a peace sign, not quite able to disguise his sense of awe at his surroundings. Rachel cleared the screen before Khattak could say anything. She slid the memory card into her laptop’s SD slot and clicked to open the files on the card. The files were password-protected.

  They tried a few different options. Mohsin’s name, Alia’s name, the two names together, Mohsin’s name and birth date. Finally, Khattak typed in Mohsin’s initials, followed by the number of the locker: MD114.

  A dozen photographs sprang up on Rachel’s screen.

  Each one showed a dwelling destroyed by a bomb attack, the street and neighborhood in ruins: mangled vehicles, gaping brick walls, craters in the tarmac, blood running into gutters.

  “What is this?” Rachel asked. “Where is this?”

  Khattak point
ed to the last photograph. Rachel pulled it up on her screen.

  It was a photograph taken at Baghdad International Airport. Two men were hugging each other in an emotional greeting or farewell. The man whose face was to the camera was elderly, tears streaming down his face into a grizzled beard.

  The other man’s back was to the camera.

  “That may be Hassan Ashkouri.”

  * * *

  When they had replaced the binder without finding anything more, Khattak called Coale to tell him of the discovery. Coale dismissed it in a few succinct phrases.

  “We know about it, it doesn’t matter. Leave the scene as it is.”

  What Coale didn’t share was whether Ashkouri or other members of his cell knew about the locker or its contents, or who the message in the typewriter may have been directed at. Khattak sounded a note of caution about the interception of the fertilizer.

  “Maybe Ashkouri is onto you. You should let the superintendent know.”

  “Of course I missed that, Khattak.” Coale’s tone was derisive. “Now stay the hell away from my operation, because I won’t tell you again.”

  He shut off the call without giving Esa a chance to respond.

  In the background, Rachel cleared her throat.

  “You told him about the photographs but you didn’t tell him you think the message is for you.”

  “Coale doesn’t want to know.”

  Rachel looked at him hopefully. “But I do, sir.”

  * * *

  The storage locker was colder than the parking lot outside. They walked back to their cars, Rachel sliding into Khattak’s BMW with a flutter of anxiety. She didn’t like the effect that the call to Coale had had on Khattak—she hadn’t seen him speak so carefully before, each word measured, holding his opinions in check, not meeting her eyes as he spoke.

  “So what do you know that I don’t?” she asked without preamble. “What can you tell me about the photographs?”

  “The typewritten message is more important. It tells us why the photographs matter.”

  Khattak searched for a name on his phone, then passed the results over to Rachel. He waited until she had read the screen.

  “Men in the Sun is the name of perhaps the most well-known Palestinian novel of all time. It’s a story about the harshness of exile. The protagonists are desperate to earn their livelihood in Kuwait. They pay a smuggler to take them across the desert inside an empty water tank. By the time their transport crosses the border, the men in the tank are dead—defeated by petty bureaucracy and a lack of human compassion.”

  Rachel passed back the phone.

  “That’s not a happy story.”

  Khattak stared out the window, thinking.

  “Mohsin used to say that the story of Palestinian exile was the most tragic one of our times—dispossession, statelessness, the denial of the right to return. An endless cycle of suffering and violence, the diary of a Palestinian wound, the diary of a Nakba.”

  The way Khattak said it reminded Rachel of their work on the Drayton investigation. He was quoting Mohsin Dar, but he sounded as if his sympathies were engaged.

  She wondered if she would ever understand the complex nature of Esa Khattak’s identity.

  She didn’t have the nerve to raise the issue in his car.

  “So this ties in to the Nakba plot?” she asked instead. “Mohsin and his group want revenge for Palestinian suffering? Then how is this message for you?”

  Khattak pondered the search result on his phone.

  “I think he wrote the message in such a way that it could be read as his commitment to the Nakba plot. But he knew it would have a different meaning for me.” His voice was somber. “When we were at university together, Mohsin and I participated in a theater production. We mounted Men in the Sun as a play.”

  The idea of a young Esa Khattak playing a part on stage fascinated Rachel.

  But she drew a different conclusion from the message than he did.

  We will show you the proof of it.

  What if Mohsin had fallen for the plot?

  “Where do the photos fit in? Why did Mohsin leave them for you?”

  Khattak reached over to remove a bit of chocolate from Rachel’s hair. Flustered, she fumbled in her pockets for a napkin.

  “Sorry, sir. I eat like I breathe—like it’s my last chance.”

  If she was hoping to make him smile, it didn’t work.

  “People suffer, people die,” he answered. “I think Mohsin wanted me to understand how personally Ashkouri was affected by the destruction of Baghdad. He may have gotten these photos from Ashkouri—Ashkouri might have been using them for recruitment purposes. They’re powerful, because they tell his story in a way that anyone would sympathize with. But Mohsin would have seen something else. The pictures tell us about Ashkouri’s pain, and perhaps they tell us how determined he is to inflict that pain on someone else.”

  “What do you mean?” Rachel asked.

  “‘We are men in the sun’,” Khattak quoted. “‘We will show you the proof in time.’”

  9

  Rachel drove down the charming Main Street of the village of Unionville, a part of the greater Toronto area she rarely visited. Founded in 1794, with quaint signposts at regular intervals, the village had been settled well before Confederation, and was older than the nation of Canada itself. It reminded her of the township of Waverley, where she and Khattak had worked their first case, the murder of a young woman named Miraj Siddiqui. Old Unionville had the same small-town charm, with the sense of having receded from winter.

  The little shops huddled together in the cold, a cascade of snow gilding the flanks of the pretty town gazebo. As Rachel’s car bumped over the railway tracks near the planing mill, she stopped before the Old Firehall Confectionery. With her instinctive habit of observation, she noticed that people were carrying their steaming-hot cups of coffee into the confectionery from the coffee shop next door to it, rather than the other way around.

  Ice cream instead of coffee, she mused. That wouldn’t sell in December. Gourmet fudge and tartlets might, however. Everyone who came out of the red-brick building was carrying a small cardboard box tied with a gold ribbon. Rachel’s stomach began to protest in response. A quick stop wouldn’t hurt, but it would mean she’d miss the afternoon prayer, and her chance to observe and blend in without drawing too much attention to herself. She’d have to satisfy her cravings another time.

  She drove past the Frederick Horsman Varley Art Gallery, with its single narrow steeple, and made the turnoff to Toogood Pond. The pond was frozen over. Young skaters raced one another over its rutted surface, small bits of color against the white glass, a perfect mirror of winter snowfall.

  Rachel sighed with pleasure. It was going to be a wonderful season.

  And there at the far end of the pond was a large two-story house in daffodil yellow with freshly painted gables in blue. She parked on the road and trudged through the snow to the front door. A discreet notice above the door identified the building as the Masjid un-Nur. Otherwise, it looked much the same as the other houses gathered around the pond.

  When she tried the door, she found it unlocked. She entered into an overheated space, and immediately her breath began to steam. She divested herself of coat, scarf, and gloves and dumped her boots on a nearby rack.

  The foyer had been transformed into a reception area, with a desk, shoe caddies, coatracks, and several portable bulletin boards. The room was empty save for a woman of indeterminate age seated behind the desk. Her smooth round face was settled in folds of fat. Her striking blue eyes were sunk beneath a pair of heavy eyebrows that if left to themselves would have met in the middle. An expression of permanent dissatisfaction marred what would otherwise have been a pleasant face. The woman was dressed in a long beige gown that matched the headscarf wound tightly about her skull, sealing off her cheeks and forehead.

  Rachel toyed with the headscarf in her hands. Her uncertain manner was only partly a pro
jection of the role she had come here to play. She felt uncertain, and more than a little anxious that no action she undertook at the Nur mosque should undermine the INSET operation. She recognized the woman seated at the desk from the photographs Khattak had shown her. The woman’s name was Paula Kyriakou. She was one of the two women who had attended the winter camp with Mohsin Dar. From her surly expression, she did not appear to be grieving.

  “Did I miss the prayer?” Rachel asked, checking her watch.

  “Prayer should never be rushed,” the other woman said repressively. “Head to the landing upstairs.” And then as if Rachel had offered a criticism, she said, “We don’t need a bigger space for the sisters. Hardly anyone comes midweek. If there’s a crowd, of course we share the downstairs space.”

  Rachel was quick to appease her. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.” She tried a smile. “I’m new and I’m kind of—just figuring things out. I’m a bit lost, so don’t mind if I get a few things wrong.”

  So much for dawah. Paula eyed her with an expression that Rachel found decidedly unwelcoming.

  “New to the mosque, or new to Islam?” she demanded.

  “Both.”

  Rachel held up the headscarf. “I’m not even sure how to wear this.”

  Paula came around the desk and seized the scarf from Rachel. Without asking permission, she tied it deftly around Rachel’s face, tight enough that it bit into Rachel’s chin and forehead. It was stifling.

  “Next time, make sure you are wearing it before you enter the mosque.” And then she recognized the pattern on Rachel’s scarf as the blue-and-white logo of the Maple Leafs, Rachel’s favorite hockey team. “When you pray to God, you should not be distracted by the presence of worldly idols.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel said. “I didn’t know that.”

  She wondered at Paula’s attitude. Had she genuinely been a newcomer to Islam, she would have found the restrictive rules and the receptionist’s hostile approach enough to make her turn around and walk back out the door.