Flashback (24 page)

In the foreground, just a few feet from the camera, was a woman. She was a Westerner, her face obviously European, her hair, or at least what was visible of it, was dark. Her head and torso were draped and wrapped in long folds of fabric, and in her hand was a microphone. She was talking easily with the cameraperson, smiling, the microphone down by her side. With the woman's clothes so carefully covered, it was hard to date the scene, but there was something about the microphone, the size of it, or even its presence, that told me the film we were watching had been made some years earlier. And then there were the woman's boots, a style some fifteen or twenty years past their prime.

“Is there sound?” I asked.

Helen shook her head. “I don't think so.”

Suddenly, the woman's demeanor changed. She snapped to attention, motioning to something behind the camera operator. The lens panned violently around and swept downward, catching the blurred sky, the fractured cityscape, coming finally to rest at the edge of the roof again. We were looking downward now, at the alleyway below, and a battered box truck.

The truck's back door opened, and a pair of men jumped out, each with an automatic rifle on his shoulder. They were in civilian dress, loose-fitting pants and shifts. Several other similarly clad figures emerged from a nearby doorway, and the whole crew set to work unloading a cargo of long, coffinlike wooden crates. They made short work of what was in the truck, and when they had emptied it, they began filling it again with the same type of crates they'd just unloaded.

Helen paused the video as the second crate was carried from the building.

“Here,” she said, touching her finger to the screen.

The side of the box had tilted briefly upward toward the camera, revealing black letters.

“SA-7s,” Helen said.

“What does it mean?” I asked, squinting to read the grainy, Cyrillic text.

“They're Soviet shoulder-fired missiles,” she explained, starting the video again.

As the crate continued on its journey to the truck, two newcomers stepped out of the building and stood watching. The camera angle and the film quality made it impossible to see their faces, but the first man, the shorter of the two, stood out in Western garb, tan fatigues, light pants and a short-sleeved collared shirt. The second man was dressed as the men unloading the trucks were, though even in his baggy pants and long shirt, he was unquestionably an authority figure.

“Any idea who they are?” I asked.

“No,” she said, pointing to the first man, “but I'd give you a hundred–to–one odds this guy's CIA.”

“Our mystery man?”

“Maybe.”

“What do you think was in those boxes they took off the truck?”

“Heroin, most likely.”

“All transported courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency,” I remarked.

“No use letting those trucks come back to Pakistan empty,” she said, a slight hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“You think what we were doing was wrong?” I asked.

“It's not my place to think,” she countered.

“Is that the kind of secret someone would want to keep?”

“At the time, maybe, but this is all pretty much common knowledge now.”

“The drugs?”

Helen shrugged. “Everyone knows that's how the mujahideen financed their war.”

“But why the Soviet weapons?”

“Most of the weapons we fed into Afghanistan were either replicas of the Soviet stuff or real foreign matériel bought on the black market. Stuff the mujahideen could have picked up on the battlefield. A lot easier to explain than a truckload of American Stingers.”

Two more crates had emerged from the building while we spoke. As the second was being hoisted into the truck's bed, one of the men holding it fumbled momentarily and lost his grip. The wooden box tilted sideways, its base striking the ground, its top sliding ajar. There was a moment of harried activity as the two men scrambled to right their load. The lid was put back on, and the crate slid into the truck and out of our view.

“Did you see that?” Helen asked, running the video backward.

“See what?” I asked, watching the crate fall again.

“There's nothing in there,” she said, pausing the film as the top opened and slid away. “There's nothing in the box.”

“I don't understand,” I said, looking into the bare crate. She was right, there seemed to be nothing inside, but I didn't see why that mattered.

“No SA-7s,” she said. She ran the video backward again, back to the moment when the men had stepped out of the building with the first crate. “Look at how they're carrying them,” she noted, moving her face closer to the monitor.

I shrugged. Whatever she saw was lost on me.

“A shoulder-fired missile is a pretty weighty thing, but look at these guys.”

I followed her gaze to the screen. What I had missed the first time seemed obvious now. The men carrying the crates moved easily, too easily for men with even moderate burdens. “There's nothing in any of them!” I exclaimed.

“But why the empty crates?” The question was meant for herself, not me, but I answered anyway.

“Maybe someone wanted it to look like there were SA-7s in there,” I offered.

Helen didn't say anything. Her eyes were glued to the monitor. We watched the tape roll on past what we'd already seen. Several more crates were loaded into the truck. Then, suddenly, something rattled the men on the ground. One of the pair with the automatic rifles pointed upward, in the camera's direction, and all the other heads followed, faces moving in unison toward our rooftop vantage point.

“C'mon,” Helen murmured, talking to the two observers, the Westerner and the other man. “This way. Look this way.”

And then, as if by a miracle, the two men turned to look up.

“Jibril,” Helen said, touching her finger to the image of the taller man.

“And the other one?” I asked. “The American?”

Helen paused, scanning the face. “I don't know,” she said.

Jibril gestured frantically, and the gunmen sprinted across the alley. The camera followed as they barged through a door directly below and disappeared.

“They're coming up,” I said, my heart beating as if I were on the roof with them.

What followed was a flurry of confusion, two sets of feet, one male, one female, the legs and blurred torsos of the cameraman and the woman with the microphone. The camera sped across the roof, bumping dizzyingly against the man's hip, then plunged into a dim stairwell. The lens caught a nauseating jumble: a pile of filthy rags, a line of metal railing flaring light, a rat fleeing the commotion, a broken window.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, leaning in closer to the monitor, transfixed by the familiar setting, this panicked descent I'd made so many times in my dreams.

“What?” Helen asked. “What is it?”

“I've seen this before,” I told her.

The couple reached a landing and hesitated. The cameraman pivoted, searching for something, another way out, perhaps. Then he leaned forward, and we saw what he saw: figures moving in the semidarkness below, a man with a gun climbing the stairs, and behind him a second man.

The cameraman ducked through a doorway off the stairs and the woman followed. Here was the same room I knew so well, the cathedral-like ceiling and grimy windows. In the paltry light I caught my first full glimpse of the woman since I'd seen her earlier on the roof. The wrap had slipped from her head, and her hair was wild and disheveled, slick with sweat where it fell around her face.

“This woman,” Helen said, as the camera swung down again, catching dusty floorboards and feet.

“What?”

“I know her. I think I know her.”

As if in response the lens pitched upward suddenly and caught her face again, the angles of it exaggerated by the room's shadows, by the grainy tape. She was terrified, that much was certain, afraid of what she knew was to come. I could, I thought, feel the moment as she felt it, the cold slant of the light, the abandoned smell of the place, the sound of the man next to me struggling to get his breath back.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I was in Islamabad from 'eighty-seven to 'eighty-nine,” Helen explained. “It was my first foreign gig, the tail end of the war. God, I can't remember her name.”

“But you knew her?”

“I knew who she was. She was with CNN, I think. It's been so long. I used to see her around, you know, the local watering holes.”

We both watched as a hand reached into the frame and grabbed the woman's hair.

“They're going to kill her,” I said, my knowledge of what was about to happen as certain as if I had been there. And hadn't I? Hadn't I felt the knife against my own throat?

Something winked in the dim light, a flash of metal. The scythe of a blade crossed the woman's neck, carving a single dark line across her throat. Not me, I thought, but her, and yet the realization brought little relief.

“It was my second summer there,” Helen said as we watched the monitor in silence, waiting for something else, anything that would tell us we were wrong. But there was nothing more to see. “It would have been 'eighty-eight. July, I think. None of us knew what had happened. They dumped her body onto Aga Khan Road, right outside the Marriott.”

As the tape went black, I thought of Heloise, and of the other sisters, and Inspector Lelu, the way the word
massacre
had spilled from his mouth.

*   *   *

“Jibril was blackmailing him,” Helen said, pointing to the unknown figure. She had run the tape back to the moment when the two men lifted their faces to the camera.

“With the murder of the journalist?” I asked.

Helen shook her head. “It's more than that. If this had been a CIA operation, our friend wouldn't have had anything to hide, at least not from the agency. They wouldn't have been happy, but they would have covered for him. No, this was a private deal, a one-on-one arrangement between Jibril and our man. That's why there were no missiles in the crates.”

I puzzled through what she was saying. “These guys were moving heroin out of Afghanistan under the guise of American intelligence and pocketing the cash themselves.”

“I doubt a single penny was going to the war effort. The boys at Langley would not have been pleased.”

“But why would Jibril sell the tape if it had bought him an ally inside the agency for all these years?”

“Jibril didn't sell it,” Helen said. “We had several uncomfirmed reports that he died the summer before last in Algeria. I'll take this as confirmation. With Jibril dead, Al-Marwan must have decided the tape was worth more to him on the open market.”

“Where do you think Werner fits into all of this?” I asked.

“Honestly, I don't know. A little personal dirt can go a long way in the arms business. Werner could have had a deal working with our friend from the street. Maybe he needed a little leverage. Or maybe he was just looking to buy himself some insurance. You know, for a rainy day.”

“Maybe,” I said, but I wasn't satisfied. “Brian said it was Werner who came for me at the abbey. Do you think he was right?”

Helen took a sip of her now-cold coffee and made a face. “It wasn't Werner,” she said.

“Al-Marwan.”

“We don't think so.”

Neither of us said what we were both thinking, that this left only one possibility.

Helen rubbed her eyes, glanced at the room's single cot. “Maybe things will make more sense in the morning,” she said.

“What about the pen drive?” I asked.

“Normally, I'd upload everything on there and send it home to the geeks in Maryland, but this is too sensitive to put out into the ether. I'll have to hand-deliver it.”

“I'm coming with you,” I told her.

She looked over at me, her face open, almost expectant. “You don't even know where I'm going.”

“I don't care,” I said. “I'm going. I need to know who I am.”

She nodded. “I've got a friend in the Petit Socco we can see tomorrow about getting out of here. It's not safe to take you through immigration right now. In the meantime you should try to get some rest.”

I looked at the cot. As tired as I was, I doubted I'd manage any sleep that night. “Why don't you take it?” I said. “I know I should be tired, but I'm not.”

She hesitated a moment, then got up. “There should be some spare blankets in one of these boxes if you change your mind.”

“Thanks,” I told her, watching her slide in under the sleeping bag without taking her boots off.

I sat there for a few minutes and listened to the silence of the room, the distant hiss of water in a pipe somewhere, the sound of Helen's body shifting. What about me? I wondered, my gaze drawn to the two men on the monitor, Jibril's hollow features and the somehow boyish face of the other man. What was my place in all of this?

Brian had been wrong about what was on the pen drive, but as far as I could tell he'd been right about who I was, at least who I had been. Helen had said it herself.
We know a woman named Leila Brightman did contract work for American intelligence
. Couldn't my employer and Brian's have been one and the same? Couldn't he have been the one who'd sent me to Werner's Casbah?

I started the video again, as I'd watched Helen do, and reran the last horrible moments of the tape. The final panicked seconds of the woman's life. Something in me said I knew her, though perhaps it was just the intimacy of the tape, the intensity of her fear. Yes, that was it, for how could I know her, a woman most likely dead all these years, dead when I would have been little more than a child? But still, I couldn't let her go.

I ran the footage back once more, this time pausing it on her frightened face. Yes, I thought, I knew her, only a younger her, and smiling. She was the woman from Les Trois Singes, the blurred face in Werner's photograph. My memory at the Casbah had not been faulty. There was another print, a picture captured just before Werner's, before the girl in the white shift had stepped into the frame, before the woman in the center had moved her head to speak or laugh.