Most are probably pirate-related. He had worked all weekend on the pirate situation, much to Miranda’s dismay. Friday, a British Royal Navy ship picked up a Mazrooqi dhow that had been boarded by Somali pirates and was attacking a Finnish vessel. In the confrontation with the Brits, three Somalis and two Mazrooqis were killed. But even with the pirates all either dead or in captivity, Finn’s work was just beginning. It was the embassy’s responsibility to figure out what to do with the boat, the crew, and the corpses. First, he wants to repatriate the Mazrooqi corpses, which requires getting diplomatic clearance to send them in a British helicopter over Mazrooqi waters. Then he needs to figure out what to do with the Somali bodies. Both Mazrooq and Somalia refuse to accept the pirates’ bodies. Not a lot of countries clamoring for decomposing criminals, actually. So Finn then has to figure out how the navy could give the Somalis a proper Muslim burial at sea. Merely tossing them overboard could trigger a diplomatic crisis with unpredictable consequences.
After the dead are taken care of, Finn needs to decide what to do with the living. The surviving Mazrooqis must be brought home. He has sought assurances from the Mazrooqi Foreign Minister that the surviving Somalis would not be put to death if they were brought to trial here; the UK forbids the death penalty. The Foreign Minister has thus far refused to guarantee this, saying that to do so would undermine the independence of the justice system. So then where are the Somalis to be sent? Maybe Kenya? Finn reminds himself to put in a call to the British High Commissioner in Nairobi later this afternoon, to see if he can sort out a way to get the prisoners tried there.
The Defense Attaché is waiting in his office when Finn gets back from the staff meeting, legs crossed, reading a dog-eared copy of Hisham Matar’s Anatomy of a Disappearance. “How did you get here so fast? Didn’t we just come from the same meeting?”
“Teleported. A new stealth technology we’re trying out in the navy.” Leo closes his book without marking his place. He memorizes the page numbers, he’d told Finn. A shared love of order was one of the many things that bonded the two men.
“Glad to hear it. Might come in handy with the pirate situation.”
“Figured if that kid Harry Potter can do it, why not the world’s best military?”
“I think he apparated, actually.”
“Same thing, from a technical standpoint. Good to know you’re keeping up with contemporary literature though.”
“I do my best. So?”
“Well, the good news is that we have permission for the helicopters. They’ll bring the Mazrooqi bodies back here later this afternoon.”
“And the living?”
“Them too.”
“I’ve got a call in to the president’s imam to find out how to bury the Somalis at sea.” Finn flips open his pocket-size calendar. Paper. He’s endlessly mocked for his old-fashioned tastes, but he’s sure that if his entire schedule were on something electronic, he’d accidentally drop it in the toilet. At least paper dries out. “At three p.m. If he actually rings then, and you know how unlikely that is, I’ll let you know our instructions.”
“Do we need to get ahold of a Quran?”
“Probably. But I don’t know. Ever been to a Muslim funeral?”
“Seen them go by my house. With the corpse on a stretcher under a rug. Not sure where they go with it though.”
“Find out. Could be useful someday. Not with the Somalis, of course. They’re off to make a whole lot of fish happy.”
“A pleasing role reversal.” Leo is the only military man Finn knows who is also a devout vegetarian. And he isn’t a small man. At six foot seven, with glossy flaxen hair, a rosy complexion, and thickly muscled torso, Leo is a poster boy for the vegetarian lifestyle. Must blow the Mazrooqis’ minds, a vegetarian DA. “I see enough death at work,” he’d said simply. “I don’t need to see it on my dinner plate.”
When Leo heads off to organize the helicopters, Finn turns to his e-mails, now numbering 379. Lyle brings him a cup of Earl Grey and he opens the first one, an update on a water project down south. If only he could do his job without e-mails. He is a slow, methodical thinker and he types with two fingers. E-mails that would take Mira ten minutes to write take him two hours. His talents lie elsewhere, in negotiating agreements with the president and his men, arguing politics with tribal sheikhs, and encouraging consensus among disparate groups, which is why the other European ambassadors chose him to lead mediation efforts to head off open hostilities. And while he is typically self-deprecating when speaking of his linguistic abilities, he is secretly proud of his Arabic. When the president meets with Finn, he dismisses his translator in favor of Finn’s superior ear for nuance.
When Finn has cleared 170 e-mails (mostly by hitting the ever-handy Delete button), he allows himself to ring Miranda. The sound of her voice, cheery and warm, soothes him. Reassured of her continual presence on the planet, he opens his lunch bag. He never has time for lunch out unless it’s official, so Negasi packs him sandwiches. He’s halfway through the first one when Dax, First Secretary Political and their resident spook, sticks his head in the door.
“Got a minute? Oh, sorry, you’re eating.”
“I can listen and chew at the same time. If you don’t mind. Come in.” Finn waves a hand at his leather sofa.
“It’s about the kidnappings up north.” Dax comes in, closing the door behind him. “We may need the police back, to do some forensics.”
“Oh, Dax, no.” Feeling suddenly queasy, Finn drops the remains of his sandwich back into the aluminum foil.
“I’m afraid so.”
“All of them?”
“All except one. The Dutch boy is still missing.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.”
The two men sit in silence for a moment.
“Anyone claim responsibility?”
“Not yet. A few hallmarks of AQ, but could be Zajnoon’s people. They can be pretty brutal. But we don’t know.”
“I’ll ring the families,” says Finn.
“They’re still here, at the InterContinental.”
“I’ll go over then. Brief me.”
Dax unfolds the particulars of the horror, the search that led to the row of headless corpses found in a mass grave up north. The heads were buried several feet away.
“The Dutch and the French know? And the Germans?”
“Their guys were with us.”
When Dax leaves, Finn rings the other ambassadors to offer his condolences and vow to collaborate further on the search for the killers. And then all four of them head off to strip the frantic families of their last remaining shreds of hope.
—
IN THE CAR, a new dread leaps onto his shoulders. Miranda is out walking today. She wouldn’t have heard of the killings, no one would have. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office had managed to keep the disappearances out of the papers entirely. It had surprised him when he began his career, just how much the FCO managed to withhold from the press, how many missing people. But this was critical; publicity was disastrous for hostage negotiations. Not only did it give violent men the spotlight they craved but it gave them an exaggerated idea of their victims’ importance, often resulting in astronomical ransom requests. The media were also all too frequently stupid enough to disclose details about a hostage—that he was Jewish or gay or American—that put his or her life in further danger. Finn was all for freedom of the press, but not at the expense of a life.
Struggling with the seat belt, he extracts his mobile from his pocket and rings her. It goes straight to voice mail. She’s probably just out of range. He rings Tucker. “They’re nowhere near up north, Finn,” he says. “It’s a totally safe area. Never been an incident. It’s Sharaq, where the president comes from. Just a forty-five-minute drive.”
Somewhat more at ease, Finn flips his phone shut. He has got to stop being so paranoid. She’ll be fine. She always is.
—
IT’S NEARLY 5:00 p.m. by the time Finn gets ba
ck to his office, having left two disintegrating families in his wake. The father of one of the British women wouldn’t even look at him, just sat on the beige leather sofa with his face in his hands, tears running through his fingers and soaking the cuffs of his shirt. His wife had sat rocking beside him. “No,” she’d said over and over. “No no no no no.” The other couple had raged at him for not throwing their daughter out of the country. “How could you have let her stay in a country like this? Why didn’t you warn her?” Finn had explained that the website of the Foreign Office did, in fact, warn against nonessential travel to the region, but that people ultimately had responsibility for their own safety. Muslim Mercy isn’t ordinarily targeted, he’d added, so she may have felt she was safe with them. “She was doing good work, important work.” He’d paused, searching his memory for something to ameliorate their devastation. “She saved a lot of little children from starving. Where she was, the babies under one were all dying of malnutrition before Muslim Mercy arrived.”
The room had been silent save for the creak of the sofa under the rocking woman. The crying man had finally looked up from his sodden fingers. “She should have let them die.”
His words had hung in the air for several minutes. The angry couple had wilted, sinking together into a sofa across from the others, their hands falling limply into their laps. The rocking woman had stopped and looked up at her husband. Finn had pulled himself clumsily to his feet. “I am so, so very sorry about your daughters.”
The four parents had sat silently staring at the floor. Apologizing several more times for the tragedy he had been powerless to prevent, Finn had left.
He’s going to have to hurry to get home in time for dinner. Miranda is remarkably talented at entertaining diplomats over cocktails when he’s running late, but it’s very poor form to show up after one’s guests. He has no time to switch gears. The tentacles of the families’ grief still cling to his rib cage. The whole afternoon has hollowed him out, left him enervated and despairing. And now he must get home to discuss how the EU countries can collaborate more effectively on various development projects. Over the years he has had to learn how to seal off parts of his psyche, but it’s never easy. Compartmentalization does not come naturally to him. When he cries during a movie he doesn’t just cry about the movie, he cries about everything.
As he stuffs a stack of papers into his briefcase, he notices the light flashing on his phone and picks up the receiver. Seven messages. The first three are from various government officials wanting him to personally fast-track UK visas for their children. A downside of working in this tinderbox of a country is the incessant demands for visas. The Mazrooqis simply refuse to understand that there is truly nothing Finn can do to ease their way into his country. Several have offered him money. “Look,” Finn often repeats, patience ebbing. “If you really want a visa then I would start by filling out the forms properly.” The elite seem to think they can bypass the paperwork, leaving most of it blank or incorrectly marked. This disregard for process drives him mad. He hangs up the phone before the fourth message begins and takes one last look at his computer. Four hundred and one e-mails. He’ll have to get back to work after dinner. Again. He’d work from home if he could, but he can access classified work e-mails only from the embassy.
He’s locking the door of his office when the phone rings. Cursing under his breath, he turns the key back and lunges toward his desk. It’s Miranda, breathless and panicked, not sounding very much like Miranda.
“Sweetheart,” she says. “We’re in trouble.”
AUGUST 9, 2010
Miranda
An hour after leaving the crenellated towers of the Residence behind, Miranda is in the mountains. It’s a forty-five-minute drive to a village just outside the city where they turn off the road and rattle over a series of long dirt tracks before leaving their cars in a dusty patch of earth. The others rode together, but Miranda had to come separately with her driver and guard. There are just three of them today—Doortje; Kaia, the Norwegian wife of a French banker; and Miranda. And of course Mukhtar, who is Miranda’s guard for the day. None of the other women have guards. Usually it’s just the diplomats who have close protection. Close protection. She had never heard the phrase before she became an ambassador’s wife. It sounded like a euphemism for birth control. No, Finn had joked. More like death control.
Few of the other ambassadors’ wives are keen on hiking. The athletic American ambassador’s wife had wanted to get to the mountains but was evacuated after the most recent attack on the embassy. Not that she would have been allowed out anyway. Only the American embassy has stricter security regulations and more bodyguards than the British. The few Americans Miranda meets complain that they hardly ever get to leave the compound. None of them have trekked across the western mountains, swum in the sea off the southern coast, or traveled over the desert heartland to mud-brick cities resembling children’s crude sand castles baked in the sun. Presuming that one becomes a diplomat in order to experience other cultures, this posting must be a disappointment to them.
Other diplomats—the Omanis, Egyptians, Qataris, Turks, and Saudis—have no need for such restrictions, having made fewer enemies in the Arab world. Yet the Arab wives, in Miranda’s experience, do not hike. A few times Miranda has convinced Marguerite, the French ambassador’s wife, to come along, but none of the others.
Miranda feels self-conscious about Mukhtar, as if his presence suggests her life is somehow more important, more valuable than the others’. Still, she has no choice, and the other women know that. She had felt much safer living with Vícenta in the Old City than she does living with Finn, surrounded by gates, guards, and security procedures. For nearly three years she walked the streets alone every day, shopped the markets, met friends at tea stalls, explored the mountains, and chatted with strangers, unmolested. She and Vícenta even freely held hands on the street, as it was not uncommon for people of the same sex to do here. Then she fell in love with Finn and the cage descended around her.
The day has grown uncommonly hot, the sun blazing drily down. Miranda pulls her Mariners baseball cap low on her forehead. As they set off across the parched ground, Mukhtar stays just ahead. Miranda hurries after him, her limbs rejoicing in the freedom. It is wonderful to be outside; the new security restrictions mean that too many days are spent cloistered at home. In the wake of the attack on the US embassy, a series of attacks on oil companies, and the kidnappings up north, embassy employees (and their spouses) are banned from anywhere Westerners might gather: the souqs, coffee shops, hotels, certain restaurants. The British Club, one of the only bars in town, has been closed. And recently even the weekly hiking trips have been canceled. Despite the tragedies, the restrictions feel slightly absurd to Miranda. She has been hiking in this country for three years without incident, and no one she has encountered on her journeys has ever been less than hospitable. In fact, she is treated more royally in this country than she has been anywhere else in the world. The kidnappings up north were unusual; they happened in a rebel-controlled area beset by periodic violence and regularly bombed by the government. It was also an area ruled by Sheikh Zajnoon, perhaps the most formidable sheikh in the country. He terrorized his people, confiscated land and money, and claimed it was all in the interest of the antigovernment cause. More than one of his tribesmen has accused him of beatings and sodomy, after having reached the relative safety of the capital. But none of those complaints ever came to trial. No prosecutor would dare take the case.
Foreigners rarely venture into Zajnoon’s lands. It would certainly never have occurred to Miranda to go there. She is perfectly happy to hike within recommended areas. These were the arguments she presented to Finn when she asked if she could resume her hikes after Cressie turned one and she could leave her for a bit longer. “If I don’t get out of this house and stretch my legs, I’m going to have to be taken out in a straitjacket.”
“There are worse places to be kept prisoner,” he’d said wryl
y.
“I know, I know. But do you honestly, really, truly think I would be in danger?” If he had said yes, she would not have gone. But he did not say yes. Finn hadn’t seemed worried last night, though he never does. Finn is constitutionally calm (a helpful quality in his line of work). “If I thought you were going to be attacked I’d lock you in the safe room and never let you out,” he’d reassured her. Adjoining their bedroom and the bath was a tiny room with double-reinforced doors, a radio, and a week’s supply of water. This was where they were to hide if the house came under attack. And this was where, in the tall, locked mahogany cupboard, the secret paintings lived. Not even Finn had a key.
—
THE WOMEN TAKE turns in the lead, chatting with each other in French, their one common language. Kaia, in her sixties, is a strong walker. Her close-cropped hair is still blond and her face bears only faint lines. Her slender form is all the more remarkable given that she has four grown daughters. When she married Stéphane, she didn’t speak a word of French, she says. But when they moved to France just after the birth of her first daughter, a desperate loneliness made her quickly fluent.
“It was Siri who saved me. When she was born she gave me the excuse to talk to people. I needed other mothers. My best friend was a woman I met at my local crèche, and unsurprisingly she didn’t speak any Norwegian. So I learned fast.”
Many of the women Miranda meets have more than three children. She wonders if it’s because their line of work has allowed them to live in places where child care is cheap. She hadn’t thought she would want more than one child, but she and Finn have already started talking about a second. Watching Cressida evolve has been more thrilling than Miranda had ever imagined. From a purely scientific point of view, observing the process by which Cressie discovered her hands, learned how to clap, and put simple words together was riveting. It was like living with the greatest science experiment ever. However, at thirty-nine, Miranda isn’t sure she could get pregnant again. Conceiving Cressie had taken sustained and concentrated effort. Pleasurable effort, to be sure, but effort nonetheless. “Could we adopt a Chinese baby?” she’d asked Finn once. “A baby girl?” She’d become obsessed with news reports from China about baby girls murdered at birth, dismissed as less than human because of their sex. It made Miranda want to adopt every girl in the entire country. She cannot imagine anything more wonderful than a baby girl.
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