Anonymous Sources (16 page)

“So essentially, you've no idea who will answer the phone at this Habibi Farms place, or what exactly you're trying to find out, or how this relates in any way to your alleged assignment, but you want me to weasel as much detail out of them as possible? Is that the gist?”

I frowned. He sounded like Hyde. “Anything we can get about why Siddiqui was calling before. And if they know how to reach him now.”

“And if they ask who I am and why I need to know about this Mr. Siddiqui's fruit orders?”

“Well, you could leave the vague impression that you're some sort of business associate of his. And sound a little intimidating. Haughty. As though you're quite important and pressed for time.”

He flopped into an armchair. “You want me to pose as a self-important prick? Can't do it. Obviously. Too much of a stretch.” He smirked.

I rolled my eyes. “Can we just get on with this, please?”

“All right, all right. Don't get your knickers in a twist. But you do know that it's got to be something like two in the morning there? Shouldn't we wait till morning? No one's going to answer now anyway.”

I paused. That would of course be the sensible thing to do. But I only
had a day until Hyde was going to yank me off the story, and I wanted to keep going.

I held up the phone. “Let's just try,” I pleaded. “Someone might be there.”

He sighed. “Fine. Hand it here.”

I highlighted the second number on the phone and pressed redial. Then I leaned in so I could hear.

Sure enough, it was a recording. “You have reached the office of Mr. Aziz at Habibi Produce and Shipping,” said a female voice. “Please leave a message and he will return your call.” She repeated the message in a foreign language. Urdu? Pashto? What did they speak in Karachi?

I hung up and slumped onto the bed. “Well, that was a waste of time. Sorry for dragging you over here. I'm on deadline for tomorrow and now I can't get anything done until the whole damn country of Pakistan wakes up in the morning.”

“Mmm. Luckily I have quite a good idea for what we could do to pass the time.” Lucien leaned over and topped up my glass. “Let's get trollied and go to bed again.”

I threw a pillow at him.

He started tickling me.

I tried to kick him and missed.

“That old-ninny dress you're wearing must be restricting your movements. Shall I loosen it and liberate those legs? Then you can kick all you want.” He bit my ear, hard.

And you can probably guess what happened after that.

    

    

T
hirty-three thousand feet above the Atlantic, Nadeem Siddiqui was squirming, trying to get comfortable in his seat. He was a compact man, five feet six inches and lean. But this was his third transatlantic flight in a week. His leg muscles flinched at being crammed under yet another reclining seat back and tray table. He stretched his neck and shoulders and then gave up, settling back against the greasy headrest.

What a disaster of a week it had been. To have topped it off by running into the girl yesterday was a stroke of such preposterously bad luck that it almost defied belief. He had frozen when he heard the lock turn and the door open. And then to find Petronella Black standing there . . .
As usual, he could think of nothing to say to her. She intimidated him. Most Western women did, but Thomas Carlyle's girlfriend especially so. She was beautiful. Bewitchingly so. The embodiment of everything he desired and despised about the West, wrapped up in one slender, silky package.

Luckily she had seemed as uninterested in him as ever yesterday, despite the odd circumstances of their meeting. He thought he had pulled it off, just. He had learned to keep quiet. Never say more than required in a situation. It would only come back to trip you up. So with Petronella, once he had recovered his wits sufficiently to speak, he had murmured his sympathies, and then a flimsy excuse about losing something. Ironically, this was the truth, and she had seemed to buy it. She had actually looked bored.

The British often were, in Nadeem's experience. The chattering classes who thrived at Cambridge were so thoroughly self-absorbed, so focused on their lager-soaked ambitions, that a quiet Pakistani man could move among them as a shadow. This was an advantage. He had been able to keep to himself. He focused on his own ambitions.

Still, he had hated his months in Cambridge. He hated the cobbles, the courts, the chapels, the colleges. He hated the cheery little tea shops, the medieval streets now clogged with belching tour buses. He hated the students whizzing past on bicycles, threatening to knock him down, their bright, stripy scarves flying behind. Most of all he hated the damp. It seemed to seep from everywhere—from his sheets and blankets, from underneath the floorboards of the room he rented near the train station. Every day he choked down the limp tuna-mayonnaise sandwiches that passed for a meal in that wretched country and counted the days until his escape. The only person who had shown him kindness was his ridiculous, plump little landlady, tutting over her loaves of banana bread. Nadeem snorted. He looked forward to never eating another banana as long as he lived.

He shifted position again and rubbed his leg where it had fallen
asleep. He closed his eyes. He was still uncomfortable, but now another, unfamiliar sensation was creeping over him. Calm. England was receding behind him. He would not be going back. The most important work still lay ahead, but he was back on the right track. The lost phone was a distraction, nothing more.

The whole episode with Thomas Carlyle . . . well, he had taken care of it. There were bound to be hiccups in an operation such as this. Of course, it looked bad for him. His handlers had not been pleased. No, it was worse than that: they had threatened to delay the whole operation, to replace him and start again. He was compromised. They asked, over and over, what had Carlyle heard? Whom could he have told? How—exactly—had he died?

And Nadeem had assured them, over and over, it was nothing. Carlyle had told no one. There were no traces.

    

    

TUESDAY, JUNE 29

I
was jolted from sleep at five in the morning when my cell phone rang.

I groped around for it in the dark. “Hello?” I answered groggily.

“Hello? Hello? Who is this?” a man demanded. He had a strong accent.

“What? Who is
this
? You called
me
.” I dragged myself into a sitting position and turned on the light.

“I— Yes. Excuse me. This is Dr. Syed Qureshi. My telephone shows I missed two calls yesterday from this number. But there was no message. To whom am I speaking?”

Syed Qureshi. The name sounded familiar. I was still half-asleep. Then it clicked. The exchange coordinator in Pakistan. The man Gitta Juette had told me to contact. I had tried him a couple of times yesterday, but he never answered.

“Of course, yes. My name is Alexandra James.”

“And you are calling from America?”

“Well, no, actually. I'm in England. In Cambridge. I was hoping you might be able to put me in touch with Nadeem Siddiqui.”

“Nadeem!” the man sounded relieved. “He is with you? We have been very worried.”

“No, no. I am looking for him. The lab—Cavendish Laboratory—gave me your phone number. They said you could put me in touch.”

“I do not understand.”

I was getting frustrated. “I need to speak with Mr. Siddiqui for some . . . some research I'm working on. He's finished his program here, as I'm sure you know, and I wondered if you could help me contact him.”

Qureshi was quiet for a moment. “But I was hoping you could do the same. You work at Cavendish, did you say?”

“No. But Dr. Juette there gave me your number. Listen, I just need to speak with him briefly—”

“But he is not here. I thought—I thought he might have stayed on in Cambridge a bit longer. His feedback from there was excellent. But he was expected back at work here last week. And he has not appeared. It is most irregular, Miss James. It reflects most poorly on my program.” He sounded huffy, as though I were responsible in some way for Nadeem Siddiqui's truancy.

I was thinking fast, trying to recall the trade-journal blurb that had mentioned where Siddiqui worked. “So he was expected back at—um—back in Karachi last week?”

“No, at Kahuta,” Qureshi said impatiently. “They will revoke his clearance, you know. They will do that. Even with his seniority now. An
unexplained absence will not be tolerated. And I am really very worried this will endanger future funding for my—”

“If you could just give me his e-mail address, Dr. Qureshi. Perhaps I could speak with him.”

“No,” he said sadly. “No. I have tried that. Several times. He is not responding.”

THAT LAST CONVERSATION MIGHT HAVE
been the tipping point for me. The tipping point where I became irrevocably interested in the story of Nadeem Siddiqui, whether or not he had anything to do with the death of Thomas Carlyle.

But I think actually it was this next one that did it.

After I hung up with Dr. Qureshi, I nudged Lucien awake.

“Holy mother of God,” he moaned. He opened one eye. “Unless you're in the market for another shag, it can't possibly be time to wake up.”

“Time to call Pakistan.”

He shifted his eyes to the clock on the nightstand. “Or we could call them at eight. Or nine even.” He held out his arms to me. “Come back to bed.”

“Lucien. Please. It will take five minutes. And then I will tuck you back in and you can sleep as late as you want.”

“And you can't do this yourself, because . . . ?”

“Because they might recognize my voice. I told you that.”

“Right. I'd forgotten you were so thick with the Pakistani fruit-export community.”

But he rolled over and held out his hand for the phone. I think he could tell there was no use arguing. I reminded him what he should say. He groaned in a can-we-just-get-on-with-this kind of way, and then I hit the redial button.