“I’ll do that, Lucy. But I need something.”
“Anything.”
“Really.”
“No. Not even close to anything.”
“It would be very helpful to me if you could freshen up. As they say in Texas and other such genteel places.”
She put a finger on the letter. “You can’t have it, Ellis.”
“It’ll be right here when you get back.”
“You’re very fortunate to have that clearance.” She stretched her arms over her head. “Well. I do believe I need to freshen up,” she said. “Be right back.”
She disappeared. And Shafer thumbed twelve ten-digit numbers into his BlackBerry:
3185304876—3184690284—4007986133—4013337810—4042991331—4041179553—4192578423—5567208212—6501740917—6500415280—7298472436—7297786130
The letter was just where she’d left it when she got back. Ellis wasn’t. He stood, examining the L.B.J. poster.
“What’s this about, Lucy? Texas pride or something deeper?”
“Wish I could tell you, but it’s a secret I never share,” she said.
“We seem to be heavy on those.”
10
An ocean and a continent away, Wells woke to cool water trickling down his neck. He lay on a mud floor, his hands bound behind his back, shoes and camera bag gone. His head throbbed, and the base of his skull had grown a soft sticky lump. Two identical imams sat on two identical chairs above him, pouring water onto him from two identically cracked pitchers.
Wells closed his eyes and counted slowly to ten in Arabic: “Wahid, itnayn. ” When he opened his eyes, he found that the two imams had merged into one. He moved his head carefully, taking in the room. It wasn’t much, a ten-foot square with smooth, windowless walls and a single naked bulb above. He saw only the imam and Ihab, not Hani.
“Kuwaiti,” the imam said.
“My name is Nadeem,” Wells said. His voice was low and cracked. “And it wasn’t necessary to hit me.”
“You woke up quickly.”
“I have a hard head. Inshallah. May I ask, sheikh? How did the boy find me? How did you know I’d come that way?”
The imam smiled. “He wasn’t the only boy, Kuwaiti. All over the cemetery they watched for you.”
“Where’s Hani?”
The imam set down the pitcher, knelt beside Wells, squeezed Wells’s cheeks between his fingers. “Why do you care? You miss him?”
Wells hesitated. Should he speak badly of the imam’s right-hand man? For all Wells knew, they’d been friends from birth and insulting Hani would cost him his shot at Alaa. But he didn’t see any other move. “I don’t trust him, your friend Hani.”
The imam’s eyes flicked to Ihab, then back to Wells.
“I don’t know how long you’ve known him, but I fear he’s one of the pharaoh’s men. I almost didn’t come tonight.”
“Why would you say such things about my good friend?”
“I’ve dealt with muk before.”
“Dealt with, Kuwaiti? Or worked with?”
Wells pushed himself against the wall, forcing himself into a sitting position before nausea overtook him. “I risked my life to come to you. And I’ve done what you’ve asked, everything. So, please, if you still don’t trust me, let’s end this charade.” He turned to Ihab. “In the truck, you asked me why I’d chosen your son. Don’t you see? I didn’t choose him. The Americans did. Do you want him to tell his story? Because if you do, I need to speak to him tonight. I can’t stay longer.”
The imam squeezed Wells’s shoulder. “Close your eyes, Kuwaiti. Sleep a bit.” The two men turned off the light and left.
WELLS WOKE to find his hands free. A third man had entered the room. Deep-set eyes, a soft chin, close-cropped black hair, a gentle face. Alaa Zumari. He didn’t look like a man who could have ordered a half-dozen murders.
The imam pulled a chair beside Wells. “Can you sit?”
Wells pushed himself up, took the chair. His stomach turned a somersault. He touched his skull, found his fingertips wet. He was still leaking.
“Salaam alekeim,” Alaa said.
“Alekeim salaam. You’re Alaa Zumari? I’m Nadeem.”
His camera bag and shoes had materialized at his feet. He pulled out the camera, mounted it on the tripod. He turned on the camera, then turned it off.
“First, you tell me your story without the camera, Alaa. Then we do it again, on tape. It will go more smoothly.”
“I understand,” Alaa said. He was his father’s son, quiet and collected. Wells wondered if his interrogators had misunderstood his composure as arrogance.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five. I was born in Alex”—Alexandria. “We moved to Cairo when I was six.”
“Are you very religious?”
“Not so much. He”—Alaa glanced at his father—“always told me to study the Quran, study, study, but I didn’t like it.”
“How did you end up in Baghdad?”
“Four years ago, when I was twenty-one, I was a waiter in the Sofitel.” The Sofitel was one of the bigger Cairo hotels, a tall, cylindrical building on an island in the Nile. “Sometimes I drove a Mercedes for a rich man who visited there with his girlfriends. A very rich man.”
“An Egyptian?”
“Yes. I worked hard. I wanted to save money, to get married. I drove for this man a lot. After a year, his son, at the time he was nineteen, he came to me and said, ‘Alaa. My father likes you. He trusts you. I trust you, too. I want you to go to Baghdad and start a mobile-phone business with me.’ He said, ‘You carry in the phones, and when you get there, you do an agreement with the Iraqicom’ ”—the biggest mobile-phone company in Iraq. “ ‘You buy minutes from them, a lot, millions. They give you a discount. Then you sell the phones with the time attached. If it works, we make a lot of money.’ That’s what he said.”
“But he didn’t want to go to Baghdad himself?”
“He’s not a fool. Unlike me.”
“So you said yes.”
“It’s a risk, okay, but I need the money. I said yes. He gave in fifty thousand U.S. and I gave in five thousand pounds.” Five thousand Egyptian pounds, about one thousand dollars. “All my money. We bought five hundred cell phones, cheap ones, in Qatar. The rest of the money was to buy the minutes.”
“And you went to Baghdad.”
“Yes. Over the border through Jordan. Very dangerous. I didn’t know how dangerous until too late. We drive in a convoy. Six cars, GMCs. Halfway through, the middle of the desert, one of the GMCs, it gets hijacked, the driver shot. The passengers kidnapped. Killed, probably. I don’t know. But we were lucky, we made it to Baghdad. And my rich friend, he has found a place for me to stay, because the hotels are too dangerous. He has a second cousin there. Named Amr.”
Alaa paused, hunched back against the wall, as if reliving his arrival in Baghdad.
“Have you ever been to Iraq?”
“Iraqis don’t like Kuwaitis.”
“Right. So. Baghdad. At first it seems okay. For a few days, I try to get an appointment with Iraqicom. But I can’t. Then one night two men come to the house where I’m staying. Jihadis. Fighting the Americans. They heard about my cell phones. They say, you must pay us a tax.”
“They heard. Who told them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe Amr. Maybe your partner.”
“I don’t know!” For the first time, Alaa raised his voice. “So, they say, a tax. They take a hundred of the phones. And ten thousand of the money.”
“Did you argue with them?”