On the Lisbon Disaster

by Olen Steinhauer

  Surprising us all, Fiona questions this. “How can you call it shattered? It held onto most of its territories. Brazil didn’t become independent until 1822. They kept the bulk of their colonies through to the seventies.”

  “They’re stopping,” says Andy.

  Mohammed tells Fiona, “True. Yet if you look at the political shifts in Lisbon, and the development of independence movements in the colonies, post-earthquake Portugal is an injured beast, dying slowly. But still, dying.”

  “They’re moving again.”

  “Well,” Fiona says, “I did warn you I wasn’t your cleverest student.”

  “I doubt that,” Mohammed says.

  “You guys are ready,” says Andy.

  Jake and I are crouched at the back doors, Jake’s hand on the latch. Sam, glancing in the rearview, says, “They are.”

  Fiona: “It’s a timely study.”

  Mohammed: “Precisely. Given the environmental changes we’re facing now, this kind of study is crucial to understanding the present.”

  “Three,” says Andy.

  “Of course it is,” says Fiona.

  “Two,” says Andy.

  A laugh from Mohammed. “Tell that to the principal.”

  “One,” says Andy.

  “Don’t tell me,” says Fiona.

  “There has been resistance,” says Mohammed.

  Andy says, “Go,” and Jake pushes open the door. Light nearly blinds us, but we hardly need our eyes; Mohammed has been guided by Fiona’s deft touch. He’s right in front of us, barely two feet away, and Andy is there, too, pushing him toward us. Jake and I grapple an arm apiece and pull.

  Within five seconds, he’s inside, on the floor, no breath in him. Andy and Fiona climb in, pulling the doors shut behind them, as Jake injects Mohammed with a syringe. Sam drives. Mohammed begins to find his breath, but all that come out are non sequiturs: “What,” “hey,” “Allah,” “Lauren.” By the time we reach the next intersection, he’s asleep. Jake and I take off our masks.

  6

  It is, without a doubt, easy. Given the crowded streets, the guesses we were making about which direction Mohammed would walk, and the enormous holes in our (or, my) knowledge, I spent most of the morning waiting for a last-minute abort or, less appealingly, some huge mistake. I expected Mohammed to end up injured or dead, or for our van to be chased by screaming passersby who’d witnessed the abduction. Yet there’s nothing. As we drive quietly down a steady procession of left-rights until we reach Avenida Infante Dom Henrique, which takes us north along the Tagus River, it occurs to me that I am, and have for a very long time been, a pessimist. When something as solid as a family turns out to be a failure, it’s only reasonable that less stable things will fail as well, and fail more spectacularly. In this instance, at least, I’m wrong.

  Squatting beside Mohammed’s limp form, Andy checks his pulse, his eyeballs, and his mouth, then reaches into Mohammed’s light jacket to take out his cell phone. He disassembles it and pockets the pieces, saying, “Clockwork. Ops like this are why I get up in the morning.”

  “This is why I get up in the morning,” Fiona says as she takes out a cigarette.

  “In here?” Jake grumbles. “Can’t you wait?”

  “Go to hell,” she says, then lights up.

  “Where’s Peter?” I ask.

  Fiona looks at me. I’m asking too much again, I suppose, but Andy says, “Off to tell Carl what a fine job we’ve all done.”

  As the van fills with smoke, I watch Mohammed’s sleeping form. He’s an attractive man, gaunt in a stylish way, his beard short and sculpted and salted here and there. I imagine he makes an impression on his students. Asleep, his mouth hangs open, lips dry already, and cracked. At this moment, we can do absolutely anything to this vulnerable man. We’ve made him vanish from the face of the earth, and with a needle we’ve assured that he can’t even consider fighting back.

  This thought disturbs me, so I crawl around Jake to get a look at the road over Sam’s shoulder. City to the left; low scrub and water to the right. Then the road curves, bringing us inland, where we pass between apartment buildings and the unfinished shells of megamarts and car dealerships, construction stalled by the financial crisis. We pass through the Moscavide neighborhood, just beyond the Lisbon city limits, the traffic light and leisurely. At the junction, we transfer to the A1 heading north toward Santarém. I come back and squat with the others. Andy has turned on the overhead lamp. Mohammed, now better resembling a corpse, is still laid out on the floor. He isn’t going to come around anytime soon.

  Jake winks at me, grinning. Fiona, finishing her cigarette, looks angry, but at no one in particular.

  I say, “How long to the safe house?”

  “Hour?” Andy guesses, then raises his voice. “That about right, Sam? An hour?”

  “Thereabouts,” says Sam.

  “Don’t worry, John,” Andy says. “We’re on time. You don’t even need to go the safe house with us. We’ll drop you off in Alverca, and you can catch a train home. Sound all right?”

  I half expected this. Andy’s a good enough officer to sense my revulsion, and if he can cut loose his one contractor a few hours early, then it’s a win-win. “Sounds fine.”

  “If you’re bored,” Andy suggests, “you can break Mohammed’s leg.”

  “What?”

  Jake laughs. Andy says, “We don’t want those muscles going to waste. Go ahead. Break his right leg. He won’t need it where he’s going.” Even Fiona finds it in herself to dredge up a macabre grin.

  While I’ve grown accustomed to the ribbing I’ve endured over the last year, in that moment my feeling of exclusion explodes, and I feel the urge—whether justified or not—to reach over and break Andy’s leg. Two things stop me. First, I learned to control such impulses long ago, after a dishonorable discharge from the army, and I believe that experience has made me a better man. Second, Andy’s the only one of us who is armed.

  “Nothing recedes like progress,” I say.

  Andy frowns.

  Jake shakes his head, grinning.

  Sam, hands still on the wheel, turns to look at us. “I heard that before. Isn’t that from—”

  Fiona, whose eyes are directed straight ahead, through the windshield, screams.

  Then everything goes black.

  7

  At least, it goes black in my memories, and no matter how hard I work at it in the coming days and weeks, the details of the crash will simply not come. Hindsight, in my experience, is seldom 20/20.

  What I know, however, is this: In that instant of recognition, Sam’s college education having touched one day on the writings of E. E. Cummings, he blindly drives us at 75 miles per hour into the rear end of an incapacitated Continente hypermarket tractor trailer loaded down with frozen meat. We hit at an angle, ricocheting off of it, and by then Sam is already hemorrhaging from glass shards in his face and neck. Our van spins and slams into the concrete guardrail, rolling over it, and we tumble down a hill leading to the Trancão River. We settle, roof down, by the bank.

  By the time my memory reengages, Sam has bled out, all over the inside of the windshield. I’m crumpled against the roof, the pain and the blood all over my hands making me think that I’m bleeding out, too. A quick check tells me otherwise—it’s Andy’s blood. My hands, gripping instinctively, settled against his soft head, which had cracked open during our tumble.

  It’s difficult to use my neck, but I manage to look around. Fiona’s against the front seats, moaning, feet out in front of her. Her left leg is bent at a sharp sideways angle, the bone clearly visible, red and white. At first, I can’t see Jake, and it isn’t until I move toward Fiona that I notice his feet sticking out from the other side of the passenger seat. His head is shoved into the footwell, neck bent entirely the wrong way. He makes no sound. Mohammed, muscles relaxed from the dose Jake gave him, is snoring, fetal, against the rear doors.

  I rip off my belt and use it to tie Fiona’s broken
leg above the knee. She screams and curses but does not fight me, and once I’ve tightened the tourniquet she sags, exhausted, and nearly passes out. I slap her twice. She blinks, bloodshot and teary, and says, “Fucker.”

  “I’m going to move you.”

  “The others?”

  “Just you and me. And Mohammed.”

  She squeezes her eyes shut. “Andy?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” I say, and reach out for her, but she pushes my hand away.

  “Mohammed?” she asks.

  “Sleeping.”

  “Get him out of here.”

  “You first.”

  “No.” She grimaces again, pain rising, and once it passes she says, “They can’t find him with us. Take him now.”

  “Where?”

  “Now.” She slaps my hand away. “Safe house. Now.”

  I can hear sirens in the distance.

  “We should abort.”

  Her eyes open, glassy and fierce. “Don’t you fucking abort. Not after this.”

  “I’ll call it in.”

  “Don’t.”

  I’m not sure how to answer that. I don’t have a phone anyway.

  She says, “You know the address. You know the flight. Go.”

  8

  Mohammed is not a heavy man, just the skin and bones of an English thinker, even though he’s not English. But I’m sore all over, and despite the muscles Andy made fun of it’s a difficult thing to manage. I carry him over my left shoulder, like a sack, climbing over the rough, grassy hillside toward the one place from which we might be able to make an escape: an enormous parking lot outside a factory or office building of some sort, full of hundreds of employees’ cars. I stumble through shrubs and brown grass. Behind me, up on the highway, police cars begin to gather. Voices are shouting, and in a way it’s a blessing that my Portuguese is so bad. I do not look back.

  I’m woozy from the accident and the sudden change in plans, and the only way to keep my focus is to think of the next step, and then the next. Get Mohammed to the parking lot. Steal a car. Change it for a new one. Drive to the safe house in Santarém. Wait for the morning flight.

  There are things I don’t think about, because I can’t do anything about them. Has Mohammed suffered internal injuries? Is he filling up with blood as he dozes on my shoulder? What did Jake inject him with? How long will it last, and what kind of fight will I be in for once he wakes? How far will I get before the Portuguese ID me? Even if I get Mohammed all the way to his plane, what will I return to in Lisbon? Am I blown? What kind of a future awaits me?

  Is Fiona dying?

  As I say, though, I hold these questions at bay as I tromp through the underbrush, gradually lowering myself into a half-crouch as I reach the first of the cars. Between two SUVs I turn back to get my first look at what I’ve escaped. The overturned van, the scattering of uniformed police sliding down the hillside to reach it, the police cars on the highway with lights still flashing. That’s when it occurs to me that none of them are heading in my direction. Unlikely as it seems, I’ve escaped unnoticed.

  Hope is as much a boon as it is a killer. I find an old Citroën with its rear window down. I say to Mohammed, “Let me get the door.”

  9

  Suffering through the silence of unshared panic, I leave the A1 to avoid cameras and tolls, and stick to the smaller N10. At the far end of a Modelo hypermarket parking lot, where the employees park, I switch to an old Mercedes with a nearly empty tank, but—and this bit of luck is a joy to discover—a set of keys in the glove compartment. I wait for the right moment to transfer Mohammed’s sleeping form.

  I make plans: Once we’ve gotten far enough away to breathe, I’ll find a pay phone and call in. No matter what Fiona says, without the embassy’s okay I have no real idea what I’m supposed to do.

  A half hour into it, as we’re passing a lovely park in Alverca, Mohammed groans. I haven’t bothered to tie him up, because that won’t work for the story I have in mind.

  I pull onto the access road and idle near some recycling bins. He’s getting up as I turn to look at him. His face is pale, the dark rings around his eyes pronounced. I worry about his health. “How are you feeling?”

  He doesn’t answer. He looks out the windows, blinking rapidly.

  “Don’t worry,” I say lamely, smiling to cover up the anxiety that, I’m sure, is turning my face into a shivering wreck. “You’re safe now. I just want to be sure you weren’t hurt.”

  He frowns, thinking, then touches his lower back. “Hurts here.”

  “You were knocked around.”

  “Who knocked me around? You?”

  I shake my head. “They tried to kidnap you. You’re lucky they had an accident back there.”

  “They?”

  “Friends of your brother’s. Salih.”

  “Friends of …” Again, that frown. There’s something of the intellectual in that expression, and I worry that the story I’ve put together in haste isn’t going to stand up to his examinations.

  I say, “Maybe not friends. I don’t know. But they’re his people, and they had you targeted from the moment you arrived in Lisbon.”

  “And you?” he asks pointedly.

  I stick out a hand for him to shake. He doesn’t touch it. “Bill Whittaker. Interpol.” After a long second, I take back my hand. “Like I said, don’t worry. You’re off their radar now. Tonight we get some rest, and in the morning you fly back home.”

  “Why would my brother’s friends want to kidnap me?”

  “You tell me, Mohammed.”

  He thinks about that, turning possibilities over in his head. Instead of answering, though, he says, “How did you find me?”

  “I was following them. I witnessed the accident.”

  “What happened to the girl? Did they take her, too?”

  “She was one of them.”

  He stares at me hard, then rubs his forehead, trying to take this in. Then something occurs to him.

  “Alone?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “You were following them alone?”

  I hesitate in the way a rogue Interpol agent might hesitate. “I wasn’t supposed to be doing surveillance. It’s not what we do. But sometimes you have to bend the rules. I hope you’ll put in a good word for me once my boss tries to fire me.” A grin, the grin of a slightly seedy Interpol agent who has a tendency to do things his own way.

  “I imagine you have a badge,” Mohammed says.

  “You imagine correctly, but it’s in my apartment back in Lisbon. My number is five-oh-nine-six. In case you need it later.”

  I have no idea what an Interpol badge number looks like, but neither does he. I watch him peer out the window.

  “Alverca,” I tell him. “We’re heading to Santarém. Safe house and a small airport. Private plane.”

  “Whose private plane?”

  More hesitation. “Look, I don’t want to get her in trouble, but I’ve got a friend in the U.K. embassy. She’s arranging it.”

  Mohammed thinks a moment longer. He’s a thinker, after all. Finally, he says, “Well, I’m thirsty.”

  “You and me both.”

  10

  I pull into a gas station to refuel and, after thinking through it a moment, I ask if he wants to come inside with me. He declines, so I go alone to pick up drinks and snacks. I don’t know what else to do. Is Mohammed’s compliance just a mask? Does he believe my hastily thrown-together story? Or is he just biding his time for a moment to flee? I don’t know anything about him. What if Langley’s right to be suspicious of his visit to Lisbon? What if he is waiting to contact Salih? Whatever the truth, I have no other option if I want to maintain the pretense of being his protector. So, pausing constantly by the window to peer out at him, I collect waters and Coke, chips and sandwiches and sweets, and I use cash to pay for everything. The cashier gives me a seriously suspicious look but says nothing.


  When I return to the Mercedes, Mohammed is still there, frowning into space. I pass him the bag of food, then walk over to a pay phone beside the front door. I call the emergency number, give my identification code, and ask to speak to Quentin. Quentin is the name for CIA station chief Carl Jaspers. I’m patched through, and when Carl picks up his first words are “Hold on.” I wait in silence until, after about ten seconds, he speaks to me in a whisper: “Where are you?”

  “Alverca. This is the first phone I could find.”

  “You couldn’t reach in your pocket?”

  “We were told to leave them behind.”

  Silence. “Is the target with you?”

  “I’m taking him to the safe house. Is that right?”

  More silence. He says, “They’re dead, you know.”

  “Yes, sir. But is she all right?”

  “She’ll make it,” he says. “The rest, not so lucky.”

  I lean against the wall of the gas station and peer at Mohammed, who is calmly eating potato chips in the passenger seat. Only now does the magnitude of what’s happened really hit me. Three dead, just like that. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “And there are questions,” he tells me. “The police are sniffing around. They’re wondering what our people were doing on the road.”

  “Do they know about me and the target?”

  “They haven’t said anything. Not yet. The whole thing has fallen apart.”

  “So I’m aborting?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then I need to know what to do. Now.”

  “Sure,” he says, but he doesn’t follow up with anything useful. “How did it happen?”

  “Bad luck. He looked away from the wheel. Split second, and that was it.” I don’t bother telling him that Sam was looking back at me, distracted by something I said. “The worst luck.”

  “One glance, and I’ve lost my core team?”