The Language of Secrets (32 page)

“You want to drive with me?” Rachel nodded at Din. “Both of you?”

She'd stashed her siren and anything else that could identify her as police.

A glance passed between them—Din stuffed into a duffel coat that enveloped his rangy body, the kaffiyeh wrapped around his head in a new style that suited him as well as the scarf's previous incarnations, Grace with her leggings tucked into a pair of ragged mid-calf boots and an equally threadbare coat in navy blue that skimmed the tops of her thighs.

Grace wasn't dressed for winter camping.

She wouldn't survive the night in a tent.

But there were no tents stowed with the gear that was assembled by the car.

Din began to pack the SUV, leaving Grace to deal with Rachel.

“Din won't let Jamshed drive alone. He'll want to give him company.”

The wind blew a blade of scarlet hair into Grace's eyes. She fished it out with an impatient gesture. It flicked against her mouth instead.

“That's okay,” Rachel said. “You can keep me company, then. There's plenty of room in my car.”

Grace cast a skeptical glance at Rachel's tiny Neon.

“No offense, but that's not a great vehicle to drive to the park. The roads aren't usually plowed up there.”

“You're back again, Miss Ellison,” a voice said from behind Rachel's shoulder. She couldn't help her instinctive flinch, any more than she could help herself from stealing a glance at Jamshed Ali's boots.

Not steel-toed, but thick-soled and solid.

He had the grubby look of a man who'd been up most of the night, yet his eyes were clear and alert. Did he suspect Rachel of knowing about the early morning attack on Esa Khattak? She couldn't tell.

“I'm back,” she agreed. “I'm looking forward to teaching these two to skate. What about this weather, though?”

He made the same demurral that Grace had.

“I'll follow behind you, then,” Rachel said. “You coming, Grace?”

Grace shook her head.

“I'm gonna go with Din. He likes it when I'm around.”

From the heavy scowl that marked Jamshed's forehead, he didn't agree. But nor did he want Grace to accompany Rachel.

“Where's Paula?” Rachel asked. “Maybe she could come with me.”

She was puzzling over Grace's response.

It wasn't that Grace wanted to go with Din, she thought. It was that Grace didn't want him alone in Jamshed's company, any more than Jamshed wanted Grace to travel with Rachel.

Did Grace know more about the Nakba plot than any of them had suspected? Was she, like Mohsin, trying to get Din out? If so, Rachel didn't want to leave Grace with Jamshed Ali, even with Din there

“Paula left with Hassan.” Jamshed didn't volunteer anything other than that, which left Rachel wondering where Zakaria and Sami were, and whether she would find them at the camp.

“That's too bad,” Rachel said. “I enjoy talking to her.”

“Do you?”

Jamshed wasn't fooled, Rachel realized. Perhaps that had been a stupid thing to say, given Paula's abrasive demeanor. On the other hand, Grace was just as abrasive, in her own way.

Din finished packing the car. He pulled down the rear door, stamping his feet in the cold. He was more sensibly dressed for the weather than Grace. And that made Rachel wonder why he didn't see that Grace was shivering beside him in the snowfall? Was he blind to everything except his mission?

“Coming, Gracie?”

“I don't think you need to follow us,” Jamshed spoke to Rachel. “We can take one more, if you're determined to come, as no one else is coming with us. But perhaps you should reconsider the weather, Miss Ellison.”

Rachel considered her options. Should she go in the SUV with Jamshed and Din Abdi? She'd have no recourse to backup, and no way of getting herself out of the park—or anywhere else, if they decided to strand her on an empty stretch of highway in the dark.

And Rachel's gun was locked away in her glove compartment, with no easy means of removing it privately to stuff it into her duffel bag.

She saw a flicker of hope flit across Grace's face.

And decided.

“If you're sure you don't mind.” She waved a hand at Din. “Could you open the back again? I'll load my gear.”

“What gear do you have, Miss Ellison?”

“Won't you call me Rachel?” She smiled blandly into Jamshed Ali's face. “My duffel bag, and the skates.” She moved to her passenger door. “And I'll just grab my phone charger.”

“You won't have any use for that,” Jamshed told her. “There's no cell phone reception at our campsite.”

He was watching Rachel, weighing her. And possibly trying to scare her off.

Or just as probable, calculating what to do with her once they were en route to the park.

And like Khattak, she asked herself the same question.

Why was Ashkouri's Nakba cell returning to Algonquin, the day before the attack?

*   *   *

The Lake of Two Rivers Campground was officially closed for the winter. Jamshed drove the SUV off the main road to a twisty, snow-covered dirt track that ran parallel to the tree line.

The vehicle bumped over ruts in the track, jostling its buckled-in passengers. Much to Rachel's surprise, she had slept on the drive north, Grace a sullen presence beside her in the backseat. From time to time, there would be murmurs from the front seat, the low, masculine voices of Dinaase and Jamshed, their conversation muted and private.

Rachel had listened for her name or Khattak's before drifting into an uneasy rest. The long night and the worry over Khattak had taken its toll on her stamina.

When she woke, it was with the refreshed air of a police officer accustomed to grabbing snatches of sleep where and when the opportunity arose.

She found herself gazing out upon a wonderland of snow.

Canyons of snow, caverns of snow, great polished pastures of snow, the imperial majesty of the pines perched high above them on the rise.

The campground wasn't part of the old-growth Algonquin forest, with its increasingly scarce hemlock and birch. The ancient trees were part of an ongoing logging dispute. Logging was legal in sections of the park, under cautiously managed five-year plans. But modern forestry plans were premised on hundred-year rotations, without taking into account the forest's irreplaceable great age. The park was one of the last refuges of sugar maples, yellow birch, and hemlock. Logging in the recreation-utilization zone of Algonquin was a subject that had sorely exercised Rachel's father, police superintendent Don Getty.

Don Getty had spent the summers of his childhood canoeing and camping in Algonquin's pristine wilderness. Rachel's grandfather had been a conservationist who had taught his son early lessons in the destructive nature of the human footprint. Rachel's father had passed the lessons on to Rachel and her brother.

“There are three things that don't belong together,” Don Getty was fond of saying. “The call of the loon, the tracks of a moose, and the harvesters of loggers. It's our oldest provincial park; if we don't protect it, who will?”

Gazing upon the undiminished hinterland, Rachel understood the lesson better than she had as a child. She recollected Ashkouri's fixation with poetry, and she thought, the park was a genuine, truthful poem. You could measure yourself against its beauty. And you would know what kind of a person you were from the imprint you left behind.

As she stepped from the car to feel the satisfying crunch of the snow beneath her boots, the air held an unforeseen sweetness, soft and kind against her cheeks. She was struck at once by the crisp tang of the jack pines. The campground was deserted, the campsite office closed. Firewood was stacked in neat bundles at its rear. The Lake of Two Rivers, partially frozen over, was to the west, the Old Railway bike trail to the east. There were no tents or cabins at the site.

“We have to go around,” Jamshed explained. “The river is to the north. There are some abandoned cabins on its banks.”

Which didn't sound right to Rachel.

The park was meticulously managed and maintained. They were trespassing if Two Rivers was closed. Ashkouri must have chosen it for that reason. The Mew Lake Campground was open year-round, and could be counted on to be populated, even in winter.

But the two campgrounds were less than a mile apart, just off the highway, at the heart of a system of lakes with beautiful names like Littledoe, Longspur, Misty Lake, and Burnt Island. The park encompassed some twenty-four hundred lakes altogether, and more than seven hundred miles of lake-fed rivers and streams. The Lake of Two Rivers was its most popular campground.

Jamshed motioned Rachel to the car. He had stopped to collect two bundles of firewood.

Now they traveled deeper into the park's interior, away from the highway, away from the long, deep trough of the lake, past the wide spread of its wings, toward the muffled roar of the Madawaska River. It was snow-crusted, dipping well below its banks. Rachel took note of the river's narrow margin of winter frost. The river was beginning to thaw. It wasn't safe for skating on. And she realized that any evidence that might have connected members of the camp to Mohsin Dar's murder was probably long gone—either buried in the snow or thrown into the river.

Jamshed drove them through the wild backcountry, where the track was now forged by the wheels of the SUV. The blue sky of night was in retreat, the pallor of dawn creeping into its place. A lusterless gold limned the pines and the undressed maples.

Rachel was losing her bearings. She hadn't thought to bring a compass, but the GPS tracker in her phone was active. She cast a surreptitious glance at it. They couldn't have traveled as far into the wilds as she'd thought; her phone was still receiving service.

She texted her last known location to Khattak, and as an afterthought, to Sehr Ghilzai.

And in case she didn't get another chance, she added the words,
Haven't found Ruksh, but think I'm close.

Their car pounded the snow for another mile until they reached a clearing of jack pine and spruce, mantled beneath slow-forming ice. Just beyond the clearing, Rachel made out the murky outline of a series of cabins. They had lost the river, a cottony thread that wound beyond the trees into the crackling distance. A black SUV was stationed east of the cabins. Jamshed parked his vehicle beside it.

They tumbled out of the car, eager to stretch their legs—and in Rachel's case, more than eager to find Ruksh Khattak, her mind running through various scenarios. She'd have to steal the keys to one of the cars, somehow coerce Ruksh and Grace into it, and get herself to Huntsville, twenty minutes away, to liaise with the local police.

She'd figured out what to tell Ruksh.

She had no idea at all how to convince Grace, or whether she should bother.

Grace was in no immediate danger.

She couldn't say the same for Ruksh.

Ashkouri must have brought Ruksh with him for one reason. If he was identified in connection with the Nakba plot, he must have thought he'd need a hostage to fight his way out.

Not much suicidal inclination there, Rachel thought. Nor any particular desire for an immediate ascension to paradise.

Ashkouri had sacrificed younger men to that end, and in that he followed the pattern of jihadist commanders, who preached the glories of martyrdom without partaking of those glories themselves.

The young were sent to die, their mentors exempt from the same prescribed sacrifice.

Rachel didn't know the identity of the members of the second cell. She reckoned, however, that it would be a bunch of kids not much older than her brother Zach. Stupid, gullible, alienated kids looking for something to hold on to, something to believe in, and ending up in the clutches of Ashkouri and Jamshed. And then rationalizing the violence as if it were a video game with a tally of kills in the right-hand column.

If I had a rocket launcher.

If they had a rocket launcher, she knew what they would do.

It wasn't enough to say that the same faith that had produced Hassan Ashkouri had also produced Esa Khattak, good and evil sketched out in broad strokes

It wasn't easy and two-dimensional like that. It was nuanced, complex, difficult—it required an understanding of history, of the power vacuum that erupted in the aftermath of invasions, of the
longue durée
outcomes of occupations and looted capitals, of bombs that leveled the infrastructure of cities, of drones that did their killing without accuracy or due process, of those who rose to fill the vacuum of the deposed and despised, of the dialogue between civilizations, of the decades-long struggles for rights and democracy, of the stultification of independent thought by those who were steeped in authoritarian traditions.

Like Hassan Ashkouri.

With her limited knowledge, Rachel thought of all those things, and she didn't see Esa Khattak.

And she wouldn't reduce it or him by saying,
He must be one of the good ones.

What else was Community Policing about, if not seeking a greater understanding of diversity? And respecting those who themselves respected a nation of communities, bound together by the things they held in common. All the things, so many things.

Ashkouri had chosen a different path, a different means of addressing his anger and grievances, his choices vindicated by his reading of history. Something could be beautiful, humane, encompassing. Or it could be made ugly. And maybe that was the lesson. We bring to a tradition what is already within ourselves, however our moral compass is designed, whatever our ethical training is. And then the tradition speaks.

It was on that basis that Ashkouri had set his plan in motion.

The New Year Nakba.

And there was an evil in that that Rachel wasn't sure Esa Khattak recognized.

She couldn't accuse her boss of having been partisan about anything connected to Mohsin Dar's death, setting aside his reasonable concern for his sister. And she hadn't expected that he would be. Khattak was the counterterrorism expert, not Rachel.