Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  “Not to help identify someone who was killed?” I said it as gently as I could. “So his family won’t have to keep wondering what happened to him? Never knowing, always wondering?”

  “Yes, sir. I started thinking about my parents, and how upset they’d be if I disappeared. And what it would be like for them, if they never knew . . . that I . . .”

  “Who do you think it might be, Hassim? And how do I find his parents?”

  “His name is Shafiq. Shafiq Mustafah. His parents are in Egypt. Cairo, I think. He was here on a student visa, studying at UT. Engineering or computer science—I’m not sure which. But he had a problem with his passport.”

  “What kind of problem, Hassim?”

  “His parents were dissidents—they were part of the pro-democracy protests a few years ago, in the Arab Spring—and when the military took control, they got arrested, and Shafiq’s passport got canceled.”

  I thought—or hoped—I was following him. “You’re saying his passport got revoked, or canceled, by the Egyptian government? Because his parents were pro-democracy dissidents?”

  “Yes, sir. At least, that’s what I think happened.”

  “But didn’t that mean he had to go back to Egypt?”

  “That’s the thing. He was supposed to go, but he didn’t want to go. His parents were already in prison, and he was afraid he’d be arrested, too. He wanted to apply for political asylum here, but he had a hard time finding anyone to help him, and he was afraid he was about to be deported. I thought maybe he had been deported. And maybe he was. Maybe he’s not the one who was killed.”

  “But maybe he went into hiding? So he wouldn’t be sent back to Egypt?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know. I just don’t know.” He sounded miserable.

  “Hassim, this is very helpful,” I said. “I appreciate it, and I won’t tell anyone you called.”

  “Thank you. I . . . I hope it’s not him. But if it is, I appreciate what you’re doing.”

  After I hung up, I thought—fretted—about what to do if case number 16–17 turned out to be UT student Shafiq Mustafah. How would I even go about contacting his parents, somewhere in an Egyptian prison? How would they be able to bear it, these parents who had entrusted their son to America—the nation that held itself up as the world’s shining beacon of democratic enlightenment and decency—when they learned that his fate had turned out to be far worse than theirs?

  Most of the time I loved my job, but as I contemplated the conversations that might lie ahead, I hated this piece of it. Can’t be helped, I thought. Won’t be easy, but has to be done.

  Opening my desk drawer, I took out the UT Directory and flipped to the listing for the Center for International Education, the office that dealt with foreign students and the mountains of paperwork they brought and generated during their studies here. My eye was caught by a familiar name: Deborah Dwyer, the center’s assistant director, had been Kathleen’s secretary many years before. Kathleen had always praised the young woman’s abilities, predicting that she would go on to bigger and better things than secretarial work. It pleased me to see that Kathleen had been right.

  I dialed Debbie’s extension, and she answered on the second ring. “International Education, Deborah Dwyer.”

  “Hello, Deborah Dwyer. It’s Bill Brockton, in Anthropology. How in the world are you?”

  “I’m doing well, Dr. Brockton. How are you? It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “I’m hanging in,” I said, then—to my own surprise—added, “I still miss her, Debbie. After all these years, I do.”

  There was a pause, and when she spoke again, her voice sounded thick. “I know. So do I. She was such a fine woman. Very special.”

  “She was. Thank you. She always spoke so highly of you. I know she’d be proud of how you’re doing.” I cleared my throat. “But listen, I didn’t call to make you and me cry. I called to ask a favor.”

  “Sure. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m wondering what sort of information you have on a student from Egypt—a young man named Shafiq Mustafah.”

  She didn’t answer right away, so I went on, “He’s studying engineering or computer science or some other STEM field. Or was, I think. Maybe not now.”

  “Is this the name of someone who’s taking a class from you?” Her voice had gone guarded. A bad sign, I thought.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Do you have a records release? Signed by the student?”

  “No, why—do I need one?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “But he’s a student at a public university. I’m a faculty member. Why can’t I see the file of any student I need to?”

  “Same reason students can’t see your file. It’s personal information, subject to strict privacy protections. Takes a court order, a request from the Department of Homeland Security. Unless you can get a release from—what did you say his name is?”

  “Shafiq. I can’t get a release from Shafiq, Debbie, because Shafiq is dead.” I heard a soft gasp, but I barged ahead. “That’s what I’m afraid of, anyhow. I’ve got the skeletal remains of a twenty-year-old Middle Eastern male here, and I’m trying to identify him, but I’m having a hell of a time. I’ve just learned that Shafiq Mustafah went missing about six months ago. At this moment, he’s my only lead. But so far all I have is a name.”

  “God in heaven,” she said, then I heard her draw a deep breath. “Dr. Brockton, I don’t think we should be talking about this on the phone. Can you come see me?”

  “If you can’t give me any information, I don’t see any point,” I said. It came out sounding more sulky than I intended. Or maybe it came out exactly as sulky as I intended.

  “The privacy protections are very clear,” she said. “All the same, I wish you’d come see me. Please?”

  “Well, since you put it that way. When should I come?”

  “Are you free now?”

  “Well . . .” I checked my calendar. “I’ve got a meeting with the provost in an hour, but if you think we can be done in time for me to make that?”

  “Come on over,” she said. “It’ll be good to see you.”

  THE CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION WAS housed in an aging building on Melrose Avenue, just in back of Hodges Library. The building’s old bones were attractive enough; it was a typical academic building from the 1940s or 1950s, a four-story brick edifice whose doors and windows were trimmed in stone. But any scrap of elegance or dignity it had once possessed was shredded by the air-conditioning units jutting from windows on every floor. The air conditioners gave the building a sort of third world look, which was sad yet somehow appropriate, I supposed. The sign at the entrance read INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION in large letters, and, in smaller letters below, INTERNATIONAL STUDENT AND SCHOLAR SERVICES. Beside the latter label, someone had spray-painted the letters “ISIS.”

  Debbie Dwyer’s office was on the second floor; her window—one of the few that was unobstructed by an air conditioner—looked out on a courtyard where maple trees blazed red and orange. When I knocked and entered, she stood and walked around the desk to hug me. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “You have,” I said. “You look a lot more . . . important now.” She was wearing a power suit—fitted gray skirt and gray jacket, softened by a white silk blouse—but something else was different, too, although I couldn’t quite tell what it was.

  “It’s the hair,” she said. “The impression of power is inversely proportional to the length.” I looked at her hair, not quite shoulder length, puzzled by the comment. “For years I wore it long,” she explained, and I nodded, remembering. “Got compliments galore. But respect and responsibility? Not so much.” She said it with a smile, but it was clear that she wasn’t entirely joking, and I felt bad about the workplace complexities she’d had to confront and overcome. She pointed to a pair of armchairs in a corner of the office. “Please, have a seat,” she said, taking one of
the chairs for herself. “I am sorry about the rules,” she said. “They’re really quite specific.”

  Before I even had a chance to answer, there was a knock on her door. “Excuse me, Debbie,” said an attractive young woman. Her hair was long and lovely: compliment-worthy, I thought ironically. “We’ve got a . . . situation. Could I borrow you for a few minutes?”

  Debbie gave me an apologetic glance. “I’m so sorry. Can you wait right here? This shouldn’t take long. I’ll be back in five minutes.” She gave me an odd look as she said it—a look that felt rather like a nudge in the ribs—and then she was gone, the door clicking shut behind her, before I had a chance to say or ask anything that might clarify whether I should wait or simply give up and go.

  I glanced around the office, and then I laughed, suddenly and softly. “You rascal,” I murmured. At my elbow was a small round table between the two armchairs, and on the table were two things: a lamp, and a manila file folder labeled MUSTAFAH, SHAFIQ.

  I checked my watch. Five minutes, I told myself. Better move fast, Brockton. First I pressed the button in the door handle to lock the door—I didn’t want anyone walking in and seeing me breaking a federal law—then I laid the folder on Debbie’s desk and flipped it open. The first thing I saw, on the folder’s inside cover, was a young man’s face staring at me, wide-eyed, from a copied photograph. It was a passport photo—small and washed out and bad, embodying the special, egregious badness of every passport ever taken—and I nearly shouted with astonishment. Staring at me, from the bad photocopied photo, was a familiar face. The face Joanna Hughes had just re-created on the skull of my Cooke County victim, 16–17. But something wasn’t right. This was a kid—way younger than twenty.

  The entire passport had been photocopied, I realized as I continued staring. I checked the passport’s date of issue and understood why the face staring back at me looked too young: the passport had been issued three years before, in 2013. Then I saw the birth date—July 1995—and a wave of sorrow washed over me. Shafiq Mustafah had turned twenty-one all alone and stark naked, chained to a tree like an abused dog, as death lumbered toward him from the dark woods of Cooke County and the dark heart of a hate-filled man.

  The file was a half inch thick, and I wasn’t sure how best to mine it for other useful information. For an insane moment I considered simply taking it, but taking it, I realized, could put Debbie in a very bad spot. If the file were requested while I had it, she would be held responsible for its loss. Even if the disappearance went undetected by anyone else, there would be the awkward matter of how to return it. Last but not least, if I borrowed the file, Debbie would no longer have plausible deniability, whereas if I simply scanned it here and kept my mouth shut, she could honestly say she didn’t know that I had seen it.

  Scan it here. The words echoed in my mind, and I checked the credenza behind Debbie’s desk, desperately seeking a scanner or copier. No such luck. Suddenly I thought of my phone, with its built-in camera. I could count on one hand the number of times I had actually used my cell phone’s camera, but I did know how. Or so I hoped.

  The first photo I snapped made me jump—the phone made a noise like a camera shutter, but at a volume that seemed earsplitting to my paranoid ears. I flipped the toggle to silence the phone and began again, feeling a bit like a Cold War spy as I flipped pages and took photos. It wasn’t as easy as I’d expected it to be; at such close range, the focus was tricky, and I ended up taking two or three shots of most pages in order to get legible images. But soon I got into a groove, snapping swiftly, keeping time to the theme music from Mission: Impossible, which I heard playing in my head.

  I had made it halfway through the file when I heard voices approaching in the hall outside. “By the way,” I heard Debbie saying, in a surprisingly loud voice, “don’t forget the tailgate party we’re putting together for next Saturday’s game. Are you coming?” I heard a low, indistinct reply, then Debbie resumed, at bullhorn volume. “Great! Could you bring some plastic cups? And some napkins? Terrific—thank you!”

  I flipped the folder closed, whirled, and placed it on the end table in its original spot, and then lunged for the door handle, just as I saw it begin to move. I gave the handle a quick twist to pop the lock button, then swung the door inward, so abruptly that Debbie, still holding the outside handle, stumbled forward with a yelp of surprise.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!” I said. “I didn’t know you were there. I realized I need to get going—can’t keep the provost waiting, you know.”

  “Never a good idea,” she said. “But what a shame—we didn’t even get a chance to talk!” Methinks thou dost protest too much, I thought, wondering if her assistant could see through our little charade; wondering, on second thought, if her assistant had actually played a supporting-actress role in our charade. “Call me and let’s have lunch sometime,” Debbie said, taking my elbow and steering me toward the exit, just in case I had any doubt what my next move should be. “I’d love to get caught up on your work, and the family, and . . . everything.”

  “I will,” I said. “Soon as the dust settles. Or the smoke clears.”

  “Take care, Dr. Brockton.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “Thank you. Very much.”

  “You are most welcome.”

  MY SPY MISSION AT INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION HAD been so brief that I showed up at the provost’s office thirty minutes ahead of schedule. His door was closed, which I took to mean one of two things: either he wasn’t in, or he was in but didn’t want to be disturbed. “I can come back,” I told his secretary. “My office is only a football field away.”

  “Hang on just a minute, if you don’t mind,” she said. “He should be finishing up this meeting any second, and maybe you could slip in before his next one. He told me he only needs five minutes with you.”

  I sat down in one of those wingbacked leather armchairs that administrators high up the academic food chain seem required to own. The leather was glossy and supple, trimmed with domed brass nails along the fronts of the arms and the wings. The chair was impressive, but it wasn’t actually comfortable. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t meant to be comfortable.

  The provost’s door opened, and a young assistant professor emerged. I vaguely recognized him—English, perhaps?—but his face was ashen and drooping and his gaze downcast. As he passed, I looked up into his eyes, and I was startled to see that he’d been crying.

  The provost appeared in his office, looking hale and hearty. He, clearly, had not just been crying. “Come in, come in,” he boomed.

  “I’m afraid to,” I said, “after seeing what you did to that last guy.”

  He grimaced slightly. “Not everyone’s cut out to be a professor,” he said. He cocked his head toward another massive chair, this one in his plush inner sanctum, and settled into his own thronelike seat. “I sometimes think we should try to turn out fewer Ph.D.s, not more, so we don’t flood the market with overeducated, underemployed french-fry cooks. But then I see the financials, and I tell my overworked, underpaid professors to put more butts in more seats.” He gave me an ironic smile, then tented his fingers in a way that I suspected he had practiced, to make him look Solomonic. “How long have you been here at UT, Bill?”

  “Twenty-five years,” I said. “No—twenty-six.”

  “You’ve had a really good run.”

  “Uh-oh. You make it sound like it’s over.”

  “Over? Lord, no! I’m just saying, you’ve done remarkable things here. Built the Anthropology Department into one of the best in the country. Created a forensic facility that’s known around the world. Just when I think you’ve topped out, you go and prove me wrong.”

  He reached down and opened a manila file on his desk—a near-identical twin to the one I’d just illegally photographed—and took out a piece of stationery, thick and crisp and never folded. He made a show of reading it, then stood—at this point, he’d been sitting for all of sixty seconds—and strode toward me, the paper in his left hand,
his right arm outstretched. “By golly, I just want to be the first person to shake hands with the Professor of the Year!”

  I shook his hand and stood, a move made awkward and slightly perilous by the vigorous shaking he was giving my arm. “Well, thank you. I’m honored. UT has plenty of great professors, so it means a lot to be singled out by my students.”

  His brow furrowed. “UT? Students? What are you talking about?”

  My brow furrowed. “Well, you just said I’m UT’s Professor of the Year, so—”

  “UT, hell!” he all but shouted. “U.S.! You’ve just been named National Professor of the Year! For the whole damn country!”

  “Me? Are you sure?”

  “Good God, man, of course I’m sure. Here, read it for yourself.”

  He handed me the letter. The stationery felt even richer than it looked—thick and stiff, with a soft texture that was closer to fabric than to paper. CASE, read the logo at the top. COUNCIL FOR THE ADVANCEMENT AND SUPPORT OF EDUCATION. The letter was actually addressed to UT’s president, not the provost. “It gives me great pleasure to inform you that Dr. William Brockton has been chosen as U.S. Professor of the Year,” the letter began. “This is a great honor, not just for Dr. Brockton, but for the University of Tennessee as well—a tribute to the outstanding climate the university provides for teaching, research, and academic service.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” I said. “This is a nice surprise. Like I said, I’m honored—even more, now.”

  “We’d like to make a big deal of this,” he said. “Put you on the front page of the News-Sentinel. Get you on ‘Alive at Five’ on WBIR.”

  I shrugged. “Fine with me,” I said. “I always have a good time with those folks.”

  “But I think we ought to go bigger,” he said, holding a hand in the air in front of us, as if to conjure the image. “Picture this. Neyland Stadium. Halftime at the Homecoming game. A stage at the center of the field, the fifty-yard line. One hundred thousand people watching as I hang a medal around your neck.” I nearly smiled at his phrasing and intonation—had he actually emphasized the word “I”?—but suddenly a dark cloud cast a pall on the glowing scene as I remembered: Satterfield. With Satterfield gunning for me, I’d be a sitting duck at a halftime ceremony. Immobilized at midfield, I’d be a human bull’s-eye, smack at the center of a huge, oval target.