The boy blinks slowly, his expression suggesting he’ll never win any science prizes. When he speaks, it’s as if he’s reading off a cue card: “I’m transporting fruit.”
“Right.” Another agent has boarded the boat and is prodding a pile of boxes whose labeling indicates they contain bananas. Hearing a telltale clink, he jokes: “It must have been very cold out on the water this morning.” He tears open a box at the top of the pile and extracts a glass container. “Look at that, frozen in the shape of a wine bottle. What are the odds?”
The boat pilot blinks a bit faster and switches to his fallback story: “It’s for the Jews. To use in the main synagogue.”
Samir laughs. “You hear that, Isaac?” he says to the agent in the boat. “Your grand rabbi’s smuggling Sabbath wine again.”
“Ah, I hate it when he does that.”
Samir turns his attention back to the boy: “Why would Jews smuggle wine when they can import it legally?”
“To, to save on the taxes . . .”
“What, they’re going to risk jail for a few riyals?”
“They’re Jews!”
All of the agents laugh at this. On the boat, Isaac breaks the seal on the “wine” bottle and extracts the cork. He sniffs, then sips, the contents.
“Well?” Samir says.
“A fine Scottish vintage.” Isaac takes a more substantial swallow from the bottle. “Around eighty proof, I’d say.”
“ ‘Proof?’ ” The boat pilot is beyond his prepared script now. “What’s ‘proof’?”
“Hard liquor, asshole,” Samir tells him. “That’s a class-A felony charge. Multiple felony charges, if we decide to count each box as a separate shipment. How many boxes, Isaac?”
“At least forty. And it looks like there are two dozen bottles per box, so if you really want to be a hard-ass you could count them double.”
Samir whistles. “Eighty felony charges . . . And that’s with a mandatory five-year sentence per charge. I know you’re probably no good at math, but do you understand how fucked that makes you?”
“No! It’s wine! They told me—”
“ ‘They’ who? Hey!” Samir grabs him by the chin. “Look at me. Who hired you?”
“No one . . . The Jews.”
“The Jews!” Samir snorts in disgust. Still gripping the boy’s chin, he leans in close: “Eighty felony charges. That’s as good as a life sentence, you get that?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“Oh, that’s good, start crying. That’ll really help, where you’re going . . .” Leaning in even closer, as if for a kiss, his voice dropping to a seductive whisper: “You have beautiful eyes, you know that? The other prisoners at Abu Ghraib—I bet they’ll love those eyes . . .”
8:23. At Baghdad International Airport, a pair of ABI agents have set up a surveillance post on the roof of the air traffic control tower. The object of their interest is a palatial estate to the east, located on an island in the middle of an artificial lake. A causeway lined with other, lesser mansions links the island to the lakeshore, and the control tower offers an excellent vantage for recording the license plates of vehicles on the causeway.
While the male agent, Rafi, peers through a camera-equipped telescope at the estate, the woman, Amal, chats with an airport manager who’s followed them up here. Ostensibly the conversation is about a baggage-theft ring the manager claims to have knowledge of, but Amal suspects what he’s really after is her phone number.
“. . . Persians with forged work visas,” the manager is saying. “They sneak across the border through the marshlands and pay the local riffraff to provide them with fake papers.”
“Persians.” Amal grasps the subtext readily enough. The manager’s southern accent and dialect mark him as a native of the Gulf peninsula, and because Amal and Rafi are federal agents, he has apparently concluded that they are at least honorary Riyadhis—and Sunnis. As opposed to the no-good Persians and Iraqi marshlanders, who are Shia. “You know, we’re pretty familiar with the local riffraff,” she says, gesturing towards the lake estate, “and I have to tell you, he’s not so fond of Persians. Or the people of the marshes.”
“Ah, that’s not the riffraff I’m talking about. He’s a wicked man, it’s true, but the criminals you should be investigating are the ones in city hall.”
Amal feigns astonishment. “You’re saying the Baghdad mayor’s office is corrupt?”
“Are you kidding? That incompetent woman comes from the same swamp that the Persians are always sneaking through, so what does that tell you?” The manager pauses, momentarily entranced as the breeze stirs a loose strand of Amal’s hair. “You know,” he continues, “you look a bit like her.”
“Well, that’s flattering!”
The manager smiles. “I said she was corrupt and incompetent, not ugly! And of course you’re much younger than she is.”
“Yes,” Amal says. “Young enough to be her daughter, in fact.” Behind her she hears a sound that she at first takes to be Rafi snickering, but it’s actually the camera shutter. “Something happening?”
“One of the sons is on the move,” Rafi says. “Uday, I think.”
Amal takes a look. A yellow sports car has just exited the front gate of the estate and is racing down the causeway. “That’s Uday all right. Qusay drives the red one.” She turns back to the manager, who’s still smiling in a way that makes her wish she’d worn a bigger headscarf. “Anyway . . .”
“Please.” The manager stops her. “I can see you’re busy. Perhaps . . . we could talk more later?”
Amal has to make an effort not to roll her eyes. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you give me your card, and I’ll see if—”
He’s already reaching for his wallet. But before he can fumble out a business card, his cell phone rings. “Yes . . . ?” As he listens to the caller, his smile fades.
“What is it?” Amal asks, after he hangs up. His face gone grave, he ignores the question, reaching past Amal to tug at Rafi’s sleeve.
“Excuse me . . .”
“What?” says Rafi, annoyed.
“I’m afraid there’s a problem.”
“Yes, we know. Give Amal your card, like she said, and we’ll—”
“No,” the manager says. “This is something else. Something serious. An Arabian Airlines flight out of Kuwait City has been—”
His phone rings again. More bad news.
“What’s going on?” says Amal. “Has the plane been hijacked?”
No response. It’s like she’s suddenly invisible. The manager stares at Rafi, but Rafi stares right back, waiting for the guy to answer Amal’s question.
“Two,” he finally says. “Two planes . . . At least two.”
8:41. Another Halal agent, a thin, wiry man with a mustache, arrives at the riverbank. The agents already on scene have opened up additional bottles of “evidence,” and the gathering now seems less like an arrest and more like a party, with everyone except the handcuffed guest of honor in a festive mood.
“Hey, Mustafa!” Samir calls to the new arrival. “About time you got here!”
“What do we have?”
“Another Jewish wine-smuggling conspiracy.” Samir laughs and offers him an open bottle, but Mustafa waves it away.
“What is it really? More Scotch whiskey?”
“A mixed assortment. Whiskey mostly, looks like, but also some vodka, and some horrible cherry concoction.”
“This one tastes like coffee!” Isaac calls from the boat.
“I’m hoping for a nice arak, myself,” Samir says.
“Just the thing, with Ramadan coming up,” says Mustafa, his tone more than his words causing Samir to raise an eyebrow. Mustafa nods at the weeping boat pilot. “This is our smuggler?”
“Yes,” Samir says, still reacting to the Ramadan comment. “A real hard case, as you can see.”
“I suppose you didn’t wait to see if anyone would show up to meet him.”