The Language of Secrets

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  She glanced across at Khattak, who was dressed so formally that he would not have been out of place at a wedding. Or a funeral. Rachel had dressed for the underground club, not the appointment with Khattak’s friend, the Crown prosecutor Sehr Ghilzai. Rachel’s blue jeans were faded and tighter-fitting than usual. She’d found the H&M version of a kaffiyeh in gray and blue and had wound it around her neck. Under the scarf she wore a band jersey that had seen better days, though her taste in music ran more to The Police than alt-punk rock, a choice that was entirely without irony. The words “Regatta de Blanc” trailed down one arm. The other arm read “The Bed’s Too Big Without You.” She saw Khattak read the words before he glanced away.

  “Sting fan?” he asked her.

  Rachel snorted. “With that Elizabethan lute?” She didn’t want to admit how deep her obsession with the front man of the band ran, so she added, “Stewart Copeland’s more my style, sir. He was always a bit crazy behind those drums. I found that endearing.”

  Khattak grinned in response.

  They discussed the case as Khattak’s BMW wove through the traffic. Union Station was still under construction for the Pan Am Games. Front Street was a gnarl of stops and starts, as frozen pedestrians attempted to reach safety through a maze of improvised crosswalks. Christmas stars glittered at the intersections.

  He suggested a new line of questioning to pursue with Grace and Din, whose alibis for Mohsin’s murder he wanted to pin down. He didn’t trust Ashkouri’s rendition of events. He wasn’t sure that he trusted Din’s either.

  Rachel asked a few questions about Paula. Her obsession with Ashkouri was well documented by now. And Rachel had witnessed her animosity toward Ruksh firsthand. What if there had been a similar animosity directed at Mohsin, whom Ashkouri had taken into his confidence?

  They talked companionably as they drove past the assorted buildings of the University of Toronto and rounded Queen’s Park. The prosecutor had said she would meet them at a café behind the observatory. Not at the Department of Justice, Rachel noted. Which was sensible, considering what they hoped to discuss with her. None of them needed to be seen in one another’s company.

  “How do you know Ms. Ghilzai, sir?”

  Khattak slid the BMW into a nearby parking spot and switched off the ignition.

  “You asked me if I felt set apart at INSET.”

  Rachel perked up. Because it sounded like Khattak was on the verge of a personal confession.

  “I did ask you that, yes.”

  His green eyes were candid upon her face.

  “I am set apart, Rachel. I’ve always been. Because of who I am and because that’s been conflated with what I do. On both sides. But Sehr belongs to the same network of friends as I do, doing the same kind of work, facing the same unspoken challenges. We can be honest with each other, without worrying about keeping up our guard. If Sehr can tell us something useful, I know that she will.”

  Rachel noted the pronunciation of the other woman’s name with care. It was two syllables, not one, with the emphasis on the first syllable. Se-her. She asked Khattak what it meant.

  “Awakening. The dawn.”

  * * *

  They met in the sunroom of the Café des Artistes. It was located inside a large Victorian house that had been built as a private residence in 1875. The new owner had refurbished it with a slate stone roof and the copper eaves and downspouts that had enhanced its original character. The stairs that led to the café were carved of cut stone. The café seating dwelt in the light of a dozen soft windows, under a rounded cupola. Khattak and Rachel swept past a massive oak staircase to enter the picturesque room.

  Seated at a round wood table under the unsparing light was a well-dressed woman whose russet-gold hair fell around her shoulders in a style of simple elegance. She wore a fitted dress in a deep shade of caramel, a matching leather briefcase set on the floor beside her. Her light brown eyes were wide-set in a thin, intelligent face. Her jewelry was muted: braided gold earrings, a bangle on her wrist, an understated watch. She wore no rings on her fingers. Unmarried, then, and not as young as Rachel had expected. Probably in her mid-thirties, with surface lines deepening the character of her eyes and mouth.

  The woman hadn’t seen them yet. Her head was tipped to one side, light from the windows striking sparks off her hair. She was listening to the music that played in the background as she jotted something in her notebook. Rachel recognized the music from her mother’s recordings. Liebestraum #3—Dream of Love—composed by Franz Liszt, a piano work of enduring popularity. It was like a painting of solitude. And something in the music and the sight of the woman writing in her notebook, the wood table captured in a shaft of light, caught at Rachel. And at Khattak, too. He looked sad.

  Sehr Ghilzai rose to greet him. Rachel noticed that he didn’t embrace Sehr, nor did she move to embrace him. They clasped hands briefly, and then Khattak introduced Rachel.

  He held Rachel’s chair, choosing a seat for himself with his back to the window.

  “Still?” Sehr asked Esa, a question that Rachel didn’t understand.

  “For now,” he answered, deepening the mystery.

  They ordered coffee and sandwiches, the room redolent of the scent of apple pie.

  “What’s happening at Justice is ridiculous,” Sehr told them, her warm gaze encompassing them both. “It’s nothing more than sound and fury. I hope you haven’t been worried.”

  Rachel grimaced. “It’s a lot of sound—at least. It doesn’t seem like CPS can come out of this unscathed.”

  She didn’t add what she really thought—that thanks to Khattak’s insistence on keeping Rachel in the background, he alone was taking the brunt of the nasty allegations of corruption and incompetence. Rachel’s career would survive. She wasn’t so sure about her boss’s.

  Sehr Ghilzai seemed to know as much without being told.

  Was this what Khattak had meant by not being on guard?

  Rachel hadn’t realized that her boss felt that way about his professional environment, and she supposed it was because he not only seemed at ease wherever he found himself, but because he made others feel at ease as well. Including herself.

  “We’ve other things to worry us at present.”

  “You mean the operation.”

  Rachel was startled that Sehr knew about this. Khattak hadn’t briefed her in the car, even though there’d been time.

  “You’ve been tapped on the case,” Khattak confirmed. “You’ve been working with INSET for months. I’ve just come on board.”

  Their drinks and sandwiches were served, and Rachel took the opportunity to eat, trying to remain in the background. She was hungry, but she ate with restraint; no need for a Crown prosecutor to think of her as a barbarian. But as was always the case with her boss, the restraint would have been a lot easier if he’d remembered that Rachel was an athlete whose body required a regular supply of fuel. Or that she was a normal human being.

  On most occasions she drank her coffee black. But tempted by a neighboring table’s order, she’d succumbed to the craving for a French vanilla latte. Its taste was as sublime as its aroma. She eased back in her chair, better able to focus.

  “I’m not lead prosecutor, by any means,” Sehr was saying. “But even in my role as senior counsel, I can’t advise you on matters related to the case we’ve been building. I can’t even discuss the case. You know that, Esa.”

  Her tone was chiding rather than critical.

  “Both of our security clearances are current.”

  Rachel couldn’t decide how Khattak regarded the woman. Was Sehr a friend, or merely a colleague? His language was formal, but there was an undercurrent of warmth.

  “I’ve been made aware of that,” Sehr said with care. “Just as I’ve been made aware that the INSET operation is off limits to you both. Your purview is the murder investigation. There’s not meant to be any overlap.”

  “How can that be, Sehr?” The name sounded beautiful in Khattak’s
rich voice. “When one must have determined the other. You must have gone over Mohsin’s testimony. You must have some idea of how his death is related to the role he played for the RCMP. Don’t you want justice for him?”

  Sehr’s hands tightened around her coffee cup. She didn’t seem to notice that it was scalding hot. Until Esa reached around and unlaced her hands from it.

  Startled, she glanced up at him, the light from the windows rendering her eyes the same shade of gold as her dress. She gathered her thoughts and answered him.

  “Of course I want justice for Mohsin. But I’m not involved in the murder investigation, and I’m not likely to be. My role has been to advise on the legality of the surveillance and to establish the elements of the offense. My job is to make sure the terrorism charges stick. The lead prosecutor was responsible for preparing Mohsin to testify. I was nowhere near Mohsin.”

  “For this moment, I need you to be. I need you to tell me anything you might have known about Mohsin’s interaction with the members of Hassan Ashkouri’s cell.”

  “I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation, not even to you. Either of you. Isn’t that what you tell the public when the hounds are at your door?”

  Khattak sighed. He had yet to touch his coffee, searching for a way to get through to Sehr. An army of clouds had massed outside the café’s windows, leaving behind striations of sky, turning the mood in the café somber. It was unfair what Khattak was asking of Sehr. Rachel hoped he knew that.

  “Could you do this much, then? Don’t say anything. Rachel and I will fill in some of the details. Things we can’t yet prove, but hope to. If we’re on the right track, say nothing. If we’re off base, tell Rachel to order the apple pie. She hasn’t been here before.”

  Sehr wanted to help; Rachel could see it in her face. But the woman still had her doubts.

  “I’m guessing the lead prosecutor had a difficult time preparing Mo as a witness. What the RCMP had groomed Mo to do once he infiltrated Ashkouri’s Nakba cell was not necessarily what Mo intended to carry out.”

  Sehr’s eyes widened. She stirred the spoon in her coffee cup without speaking.

  “You were expecting Mohsin to deliver Ashkouri, Jamshed Ali, Dinaase Abdi, Zaki Aboud, and Sami Dardas, and possibly the two women who were at the training camp as well.” Khattak watched Sehr closely. “But Mo would only confirm the activities of Ashkouri and Jamshed. He left you hanging when it came to the others. Do you know why?”

  Against her better judgment, Sehr admitted that she didn’t.

  “Rachel and I think it’s because he didn’t intend to deliver them to you. He was trying to get them out before they could be implicated in the plot. Din and the other boys are underage. Grace was only there because of Din. And Mohsin must have believed that Paula’s conversion was sincere, and that she just happened to stumble upon this particular mosque. He probably saw that as a terrible misfortune. And one that Paula shouldn’t have had to trade her freedom for. Because Paula would be tried as an adult.”

  Rachel could see that Sehr had suspected something of the kind. Mohsin Dar must have been cagey in his dealings with the Crown prosecutors. Yet Sehr was nonetheless shocked to hear her suspicions confirmed.

  Sehr took a sip from her cup, buying herself some time.

  Then she asked a question that made Rachel appreciate why Sehr Ghilzai had achieved the rank of senior counsel so early in her career.

  “Even if what you’re saying is true—and I cannot confirm any of it—that doesn’t exonerate them from the possibility of murder. They were closely connected to Mohsin. They were with him at the camp. Any one of them could have killed him, isn’t that true?”

  Khattak listed the alibis each member of the group had provided.

  “It would help to know something more about the gun. Whose gun? Where did it come from? It wasn’t registered to any of them. It’s not a hunting rifle, although we know there were rifles on site.” He made a quick, dismissive gesture. “Mohsin was killed by a nine-millimeter pistol at close range. And we don’t know anything about that gun. Or about the training, for that matter. What was it supposed to consist of?”

  He drummed his fingers over the cover of the notebook that Sehr had been writing in when they entered the café. She pushed it to one side, out of Esa’s reach. In exchange, she offered one small bit of information.

  “They were rank amateurs. I think the idea of weapons training was some kind of fantasy. God knows what they were doing up there. They were supposed to sleep in tents, but they were so poorly prepared for the winter at Algonquin they had to switch over to a site with cabins. Mo was the only one who could get a fire going. And they don’t have the rifles anymore. They’re in the hands of the second cell.”

  Rachel’s blood thrummed. But not at the mention of the rifles.

  There was something else.

  Sehr Ghilzai might not understand, but Rachel knew it was something.

  A breakthrough in the case.

  A group of amateurs running around in the woods.

  No one with survivalist training, except for Mohsin himself.

  Ashkouri attempting to enforce a martial discipline by having his team camp out in tents in temperatures well below freezing, then retreating to the cabins instead. A last-minute change.

  But had it been a retreat? Or had Ashkouri deliberately led Mohsin to unfamiliar ground? Separating him from the others by using cabins. Placing Mohsin with Jamshed.

  Rachel went over the witness statements in her mind.

  It wasn’t that Ashkouri couldn’t alibi Dinaase Abdi at the time the gunshots were heard.

  It was that Din Abdi wasn’t around to provide an alibi for Ashkouri.

  To confirm that Ashkouri had been in his cabin alone, and had wandered into the clearing with the others.

  Rachel ventured a question of her own.

  “Can you just confirm that neither Ashkouri nor Jamshed Ali had discovered that Mohsin was working for you?”

  Sehr signaled the waiter.

  “Three pieces of apple pie, please.”

  * * *

  The pie was as good as the coffee had been. Not too sweet, a little salty with its dusting of cinnamon, the apples piled high under a golden-brown crust. And a crème anglaise drizzled to one side, to complement its taste and texture.

  Rachel was relieved to see Khattak pick up his fork. He needed to eat. He needed to remember that the outcome of the case wasn’t predetermined. Rachel had never believed that she was destined to fail at anything, including the search for her brother. She was given to a hopeful optimism that was at odds with her training and that stood in sharp contradiction to her experience of life. Nothing was hopeless. CPS wasn’t doomed to self-destruct. There was a good chance they would find the killer of Mohsin Dar, despite the restrictions imposed by the INSET operation. They just needed to catch a break. And now they had one, she was convinced of it.

  Ashkouri had changed the campsite for a reason.

  And the reason could only have been to expose a vulnerability in Mohsin Dar.

  Either Ashkouri had killed him …

  Or he’d had Din Abdi kill him.

  Rachel frowned, a moderate amount of pie teetering on her fork.

  If Din had killed Mohsin, how did that explain Grace?

  Din had claimed to have been preoccupied with Grace in an intimate encounter.

  But Rachel knew very well that Grace would provide Din with any alibi that he required. Din was the only solid thing in Grace’s life. She wouldn’t give him up; she wouldn’t turn her back on him. Because then Grace herself would be lost.

  “What?” Khattak asked her. “Rachel, what is it?”

  Setting down her fork, Rachel explained her theory.

  Khattak took his time before responding, finishing the slice of pie on his plate.

  “Maybe,” he said, as both women waited. “But that’s not all. You’re missing the bigger picture.”

  He described his own suspicions at l
ength. When he was finished, Rachel nodded. He’d reached the same conclusion as she had about Ashkouri’s alibi. She grinned at Sehr.

  “See what we can do when you help us just a little?”

  A quick frown marred the smooth skin of Sehr’s forehead.

  “I didn’t help you.” Her tone was firm. “You learned nothing from me, although I’ve learned more than I expected from you.” She looked up into Khattak’s eyes. Rachel didn’t know how her boss could resist the genuine empathy in Sehr’s face. But he held himself aloof and apart, even when Sehr went on to confide, “Andy Dar is brewing trouble. The press conference was just his first salvo. Don’t believe him if he’s offered you cooperation.”

  “What does he want?” Khattak asked. This, at least, they could talk about.

  “You’ve heard his broadcast, I’m sure. ‘Tough Talk with Andy Dar.’ He wants what he’s always wanted—an audience for whatever’s on his mind. A vindication of whatever he chooses to support or attack on any given day. This week it’s CPS.” Her eyes were warm with concern. “You shouldn’t dismiss him as a crank. He’s much more influential than you may realize, and among people that matter.”

  “CPS has the support of the Minister of Justice. And of the commissioner.”

  “True.” Sehr smiled her encouragement. “There may be a way that I can help you.” And when they both perked up, she clarified, “Unrelated to the prosecution’s case. Andy Dar has an interview at CBC News tonight. They’ve given him a full half hour to elaborate upon his allegations of bias and incompetence.” Rachel’s face fell. “You didn’t know? They didn’t offer you the opportunity of rebuttal?”

  Khattak answered her.

  “They did, but what can we say at this point? The Drayton case may be heading to an inquiry, so we can’t speak to those allegations. And the current investigation is so sensitive that any mistake we make could damage the operation on the ground. Putting my face in front of the cameras is not the solution to CPS’s public relations problem.”

  “It’s such a nice face,” Sehr teased.

  When Khattak didn’t respond, Sehr looked a little lost. She continued in a more serious vein. “Andy Dar is sensitive about the reputation of his family. Half of his credibility as a right-wing blowhard comes from his ability to project a front of personal infallibility.”