I limped to the counter and used it slowly to pry the tire off me, my hands and arms shaking, my whole body shaking now beyond my power to control. In the back room near the neatly folded jeans she’d left on a chair, I found her purse and spilled out the contents. Her identity card, Maria Pilar Seco de Shami, showed a brunette, and gave her home address. Stumbling, I gathered up my own pants from the floor and took them into the back to wash them as best as I could, and as fast as I could, in the sink. I wore them wet into the heat of the Granada night.
The police who came to the hospital didn’t believe me when I told them I was just a backpacker who’d been mugged. But this was a tourist town. If the victim didn’t want to push it, the cops weren’t going to press the question. They didn’t ask me anything about Pilar. I don’t think they found her until days later, when the stink of the corpse overpowered the smell of the spices.
I went to her apartment the afternoon after she died. I had the keys from her purse. From across the street, I watched the place for about two hours before I made my move. It was in a block that was square and modern but already run-down. There were not many people around in the early afternoon, a few women, fewer men. None had a limp, none could show me the doctor’s face that, I realized now, I’d only imagined.
The inside of the apartment was almost sterile. The computer was in a little bedroom just off the front hall. The hard drive was gone. There were no floppies, no CDs anywhere. All cleared out.
I started rooting through the closets, the cabinets, under the beds. But this was a strange kind of home. There were no wedding pictures, no albums. There had never been any children here, I thought.
On the wall in the living room was an embroidered plaque with the Arabic script for “Allah.” I looked behind it. Nothing.
Nothing.
A television with a box of cheap videos next to it, mostly kung-fu movies I’d never heard of.
I checked the answering machine. No messages. I looked in the trash cans for some scrap of paper, some receipt, anything to give me a clue. But they were clean and empty.
The shred of paper from my pocket, the one Pilar gave me, seemed to puzzle the taxi driver. “Albaicín?” he said. I nodded. He looked closely at me, like he was trying to read the bruises on my face. We drove up a hill into tiny, winding streets. At the entrance to an alley he couldn’t enter, he stopped and declared, “Aljibe del Gato. Is not long. You find number four.”
There was no number four.
I looked around the corners to see if there was a tourist shop, or any kind of shop right there that might sell souvenir letter openers. I checked the street signs again. Calle Aljibe del Gato. At one end was Calle María de la Miel. At the other was Calle Pilar Seco. Less than nothing.
“Jump Start Restaurant, best burgers in Kansas, what can we do for you?”
“Hey, Sugar.”
“Hey, Stranger.”
“How’s everybody?”
“ ‘Everybody,’ is fine. My little girl’s not so good.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she misses her daddy.”
“He misses her. He misses her so much you can’t believe it. And her mommy, too.”
There was a long silence.
“You get a package?”
“I picked up a package yesterday.”
“Good. Good. But, you know, some folks might stop paying their bills.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? What are you talking about?”
“I mean—I mean, that was a good package, wasn’t it?” It was twenty-five thousand dollars.
“Very good, but I don’t understand what’s going on. What are you talking about? Quit playing this damn game.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t care about the damn money. I want you back here.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you think the President and the army and the whole U.S. government can do this without you?”
“No. I—I can’t have this conversation right now. I have to go, Sugar.”
“Coward,” she said. “You fucking coward.”
All I wanted to do was sleep, and for an hour or two I did, but the painkillers were wearing off and the aches in my legs, my shoulders, and along my ribs were excruciating. I popped 800 milligrams of ibuprofen. “Ranger candy,” we used to call it. Short of morphine, it was the best you could do. Next door there was another American, so drunk that he knocked from one side of the hall to the other every time he went to the bathroom to get sick, which was a lot. Once he leaned in my door and I thought he was going to heave right there. I turned on the light and got ready for a fight. All he had on were his jockey shorts. He stared at me with glassy blue pupils that jumped out of red nests of veins. I don’t think he really even saw me. Then he managed to choke back the puke and stagger away.
The room in the hostel was like a cell. The air was still and hot. There was nothing to stop my mind from spinning, and when I was completely awake in the dark, thinking of Betsy, I felt my heart turn to dust.
I could not give up, I thought—and I thought I could not go on. Could anything be more important than going back to Kansas? If I don’t go home, I might lose everyone I am trying to protect. But how can I protect them from my past? And when the second wave of terror comes, what then? I hoped Griffin and the Agency and even the fucking Feds were doing a better job than I was. I hoped to hell they were. Maybe it was time to pray, I thought, and then hated myself for thinking it.
After Bosnia, and after the terror that I almost unleashed, I realized men were better off not asking God for help, because the answers they thought they heard were too horrible. I stared at the ceiling. Yes. About that much I was right. It was better to look for God than to find Him. I had searched, and while I was searching I was as good a man as I could be. It was when I thought I’d found Him that I was the worst.
What you need right now, Kurt, is not prayers, it’s reasoning. There are explanations for what you’ve seen. Al-Shami may be many things—doctor, terrorist, torturer—but he is also a businessman. Import-Export. He trades in spices and foods. Where does he get them? I couldn’t begin to think. But I could begin to work.
The drunk was heaving his guts out down the hall. I looked in the open door of his room. His passport had fallen on the floor beside the bed.
The little hole-in-the-wall cybercafé near the center of Granada was still open and I could hear the sounds of gunfire, explosions, and the groans of death even out on the street. A bunch of teenage boys were on half the terminals playing Quake III or Counter-Strike, interactive shoot-outs in dark passages among mystical enemies and imaginary terrorists. The noise distracted me, rattled me. A couple of other kids were playing interactive American football and every so often I found myself staring blankly at their screens. I felt like a player running downfield waiting for a long pass: I was way out in front of everybody else, but I didn’t know the pattern, didn’t have any blockers, didn’t even know what the quarterback looked like.
Concentrate. Read. It’s just over two weeks since the attacks on New York and Washington and there is a tremendous amount of information available from public sources: newspaper articles, court documents, endless opinions by instant analysts. At home, Americans are still mourning, still sifting through what they thought they knew about the men in the suicide planes. And it isn’t just the death and destruction that makes them grieve, and it isn’t just revenge that they want. There is a question at the center of their sadness and anger that only Americans would ask: “How did it happen that those nineteen men lived and worked and ate and drank and laughed among us, right here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and they didn’t learn to love us?”
Overseas, President Bush is focusing everyone’s attention on Afghanistan: Osama, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and all those “evil doers” in Kabul and Kandahar. Meanwhile the Europeans are rounding up the usual suspects—people they’ve been watching for years. But there is a big problem
, and you can see it just from reading the papers. The teams that hijacked flights AA077, AA011, UA175, and UA093 didn’t operate out of Afghanistan. They operated out of Europe. And America. And they never were the usual suspects. Now their operation is over. Their lives are over. Their trail is a dead end.
A lot of the information that was coming out as news was really years old and a lot came from an Algerian caught at the Canadian border in late 1999 with a bomb he was going to use to blow up L.A. International Airport. He turned state’s evidence and testified in court about Osama’s operations. He said the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan were organized by nationality. He said he’d seen Swedes and Germans there. He said he’d seen dogs killed with cyanide gas, and had been told you could use gas like that near the air intakes of big buildings to kill hundreds of people. He also talked about the gatekeeper, a man who received the holy war’s volunteers when they came, and told them where to go when they went out. Abu Zubayr. The recruits were sent to him in Pakistan, where he looked them over with his one good eye.
Abu Zubayr was the man who finally separated the minnows from the sharks. But in 1999 Abu Zubayr dropped out of sight. Nobody seemed to know what happened to him. Maybe he was in Afghanistan. Maybe he was in some Pakistani dungeon. Or maybe he disappeared because he was the one man who knew every fish in the sea, and he had a new assignment: to prepare the second wave.
What interested me most was Abu Zubayr’s cover. He was a honey merchant. In Abu Seif’s address book there were addresses for several different import and export companies. To the extent that I could cross-check what they traded, they all seemed to have one product in common whether they were in New York, Granada, Aden, Peshawar, or Nairobi, whether they were called Shami Goods and Services or Asl Sweets. They all sold honey.
I left the cybercafé at about three in the morning. The guns, groans, and splashes of gore were still echoing down the street. Above me I could see the Alhambra. Maybe it was the greatest achievement of Islam. I don’t know. I didn’t see it up close. But from where I was it looked like my idea of Alamut, the city where the Old Man of the Mountain lived in the Crusades, the place where he built a paradise and convinced his followers he held the key to it before sending them to spread terror all over the world and down through history.
The apartment blocks where Pilar and Bassam al-Shami had lived were brutally lonely late at night. One or two lights were on, but the main street and the alleys that led off it were dead silent. The only footsteps in the stairwell were mine. The turning of the key in the door echoed down the hall.
I was not sure what I was looking for on this second trip. Nothing had changed in the apartment since I left it. The curtains were still drawn. The little oriental carpet in the front hall was still crooked. The mess in the computer room was the same.
The box by the TV had a dozen or so videos in it, some in the cases, some not. I started popping them in the machine and fast forwarding. They weren’t even from Hong Kong. Most looked like they were made in the Philippines. The only Bruce Lee was Enter the Dragon. But when I opened the case, the tape had no label.
A home movie: The first scene was a street scene where most of the people in the street were black. Men were dressed in short-sleeved shirts and, some of them, in ties. The camera seemed to be shooting aimlessly, like it was left on by accident. A couple of shop signs had the word “Nairobi” in them, so I guessed that’s where we were. A blonde woman in a safari hat and shirt and khaki slacks was standing in a busy square. Behind her were a couple of skyscrapers and a low building. Africans walked in front of her and behind her and took no notice at all. Now she was standing across the street in front of a craft shop, with a bunch of carved giraffes on each side of her, waving. Now she was in another city street, waving again. I could see the same skyscraper again. Black glass front, white stone sides. A parking lot with a guard at the entrance. Another low building. Lots of cars. Lots of traffic noise. Lots of Africans in short-sleeved shirts with ties. A street vendor passes with a cart full of brilliantly colored fruit. The blonde woman in the safari hat is waving again. Same skyscraper and same low building in the background. She turns and looks at it and looks back at the camera and waves.
I rewound that section of the videotape. The woman waves, and turns, and behind her, flying above the low building, is the American flag. I rewound the whole tape and started it again. Every scene except the one with the giraffes shows the same low building. Now I see the guards around it more clearly. There is another scene of the parking lot, another shot of the guardhouse in front of it. In all of them, the blonde in the safari hat is laughing and waving. You can’t hear what she’s saying over the noise of the buses and cars, but she thinks the person behind the camera, who is saying nothing, is just the funniest person on earth. There was no time and date on the video. But I knew it must have been taken before August 1998. The building in the background was the American Embassy in Nairobi. On August 7, 1998, it was blown up by a hit team from Al-Qaeda.
The image turned to gray snow and I got up to look for a pen and some paper to make some notes. In the room with the computer I finally found the stub of a pencil and a yellowing envelope.
“Más lento. Muy, muy lentamente.” The voice was coming from the living room. The doctor’s voice. “El cinturón.” I could feel the hackles rise on the back of my bruised neck. The voice was on the tape. “Primero, el cinturón.”
Chapter 10
The video was still rolling. The blonde was in what looked like a big hotel room. The white curtains were drawn, but there was still a lot of light. She still wore her safari hat, and she was looking down at her waist, unbuttoning her safari shirt. Underneath she had a short, thin T-shirt that showed her navel and was tight against her heavy breasts. Something was written on it. Her stomach was flat, and she flexed the muscles a little for the camera. She unfastened the canvas belt, the cinturón.
The woman was standing at the end of a bed and in the foreground I could see a man’s naked legs. The right one was scarred and withered. “Give me the belt.” His hand reached out and she looked into the lens as she dangled it in front of him. Only then did I recognize her as Pilar.
She took off the safari shirt and dropped her pants to the floor, standing before the camera with her hands on her hips, wearing nothing but a thong, the hat, and the T-shirt. The logo across the front read “friendlyboy.” Now the hat came off. She shook her head. Her dyed blonde hair, thick and heavy as a mane, cascaded over her shoulders.
This was the woman who had shaken my hand so warmly, swung a steel bar so painfully, and died so quickly. The tape kept rolling.
She pulled off the T-shirt and the thong, and stood completely nude in front of the camera. There was not much tease, because there was no sense of modesty. She had the same kind of matter-of-fact confidence stark naked as she seemed to have when she was covered from head to foot. The muscles in her arms and stomach were all softly outlined. There was no hair on her body at all.
In a mirror behind her, I glimpsed the man who was filming. He had his shirt open, and no shorts and he was clearly aroused. But the camera blocked his face. Apart from his graying hair and trim salt-and-pepper beard, I couldn’t tell much about his features.
“Put the camera on the desk,” he said. She took it from him, still running. Now I could see the whole bed, but the light from the picture windows behind it turned the man into a silhouette.
Pilar straddled him, rubbing herself against his groin even as she slid the belt around his waist and his hands and strapped down his arms. She rose up on her knees and he twisted himself beneath her until he was on his stomach. She kissed and bit his shoulders, the small of his back, working her way down his body. As she got nearer his ass, she put her hand between his legs and reached under him. Now her tongue was between his cheeks, lingering there. She was kissing his legs, running her tongue along the scars. She climbed down off the bed and began to run her tongue up and down his feet, his instep, his t
oes—and the tape ended.
“Wow,” I said to the empty apartment. “You are one sick son of a bitch. What the hell do you look like?”
I went over the parts of the tape again, where I thought I might be able to get a better look at his face. I played with the color and contrast. But the best image I had of him, when he was prostrate on the bed looking at the lens of the camera, was so badly shadowed and so full of ecstasy or horror or both that it was hard to know if I would ever be able to recognize it again.
The next morning I addressed the tape to Marcus Griffin, Government Office Building No. 2A, Langley, Virginia, with an unsigned note: “You’re going to love this. Be sure you run the tape to the end. The woman is Pilar al-Shami, and she is dead. I think the man is Dr. Bassam al-Shami. He did ten years in Syria’s Tadmor Prison. Probably part of the Islamic resistance. Now he sells honey. I am sure he knows where the sharks are swimming.”
I sent the cassette regular mail. That would give me some time.
East Africa
October–November 2001
Chapter 11
Flies with red eyes the color of matchheads crawled across the map of Kenya on the wall of the Summit Vision Development Agency. The chart was covered with tiny brown spots, and near Lake Victoria in the west you couldn’t really tell where the villages ended and the flyspecks began, but the danger zones in the east were clearly marked: entire provinces along the Somali border were shaded in black.
The Sleeper Page 6
