Children of War (23 page)

Introductions were made and the Brigadier handed Gilles a press statement that would be released once the new issue of
Paris Match
was published. His eyes skimmed over it and then he passed it to Bruno. It was a bland summary of the facts. There was something mind-numbing about official prose that could turn a profound human drama into lifeless bureaucratic verbiage, thought Bruno, but perhaps that was the point.

‘How long do we have with Sami?’ Gilles asked. Freddy already had one camera in hand and another slung around his neck.

‘About an hour,’ the Brigadier replied. ‘We don’t want to take too much time from the tribunal. He’s in the garden with his parents, if you’d care to follow me.’

‘Here, take the dog,’ said Nancy, handing Balzac to Gilles. ‘Now Sami will know you’re a friend.’

‘Doubly so,’ said Fabiola, slipping her hand under Gilles’s arm as they went through a stone archway. It led into a walled garden with a stretch of lawn, fruit trees espaliered against the stone, a long wooden bench and some chairs around a large table of sun-bleached wood laden with coffee and bottles of mineral water. Momu and Dillah looked up at their approach and Sami bounded toward the new arrivals, beaming and calling out, ‘Fabiola.’

Balzac squirmed from Gilles’s arms, made the perilous leap to the ground and sprang up to meet Sami’s outstretched arms and start lapping at his neck. Bruno heard the mechanical clicking as Freddy fired off photo after photo. Nancy and the Brigadier were moving quickly toward the flight of stone steps
that led up to the balcony, where Bruno saw Deutz standing, his arms crossed, glaring at them all. Nancy reached him first and put a hand on his arm and the Brigadier tried to steer him back inside the building, but Deutz shook them off and Bruno heard angry voices.

‘Who in hell are all these people?’ he heard Deutz bark, before the Brigadier’s voice cut him off. By now others had noticed the confrontation and Bruno heard Fabiola’s sharp intake of breath, as if bracing herself for something. Sami, intent on Balzac, was oblivious to it all, but Bruno moved at once to block Freddy’s camera, which was now turning toward the balcony scene.

‘That’s not what you’re here to photograph,’ he said, keeping his voice low and friendly but taking a firm grip on Freddy’s arm. ‘The deal is you photograph Sami and his family. The American woman and the Brigadier are off limits or I’ll confiscate your camera gear.’

Gilles, putting his small tape recorder on the table while trying to talk to Sami, seemed not to have noticed this by-play, but Fabiola looked stunned. She stood a moment with her hand to her face, watching as the scene on the balcony went quiet and the Brigadier led Deutz back inside.

‘Are you alright?’ Bruno asked quietly.

‘Fine,’ she said harshly, turning away to open her medical bag. She took out a stethoscope and asked Dillah if Sami had been taking the pills she’d given him. Briskly, she donned some surgical gloves, took his pulse, blood pressure and a small sample of blood. Then she asked him to slip off the tracksuit top and used her stethoscope on his chest and back, the occasion for Freddy to photograph the scars on Sami’s
back. When Freddy nodded that he was done, Fabiola patted Sami’s shoulder, helped him dress again and sat down again close to Gilles.

Sami seemed more settled and more open to conversation than when Bruno had last seen him. He responded to Gilles’s questions with whole phrases, even a few complete sentences, rather than in the monosyllables he had used when he first returned. Perhaps the questions, about the whippings and how he had managed his escape and his motives for leaving Toulouse, had become familiar.

Some of the answers Bruno had not heard before. Sami said he had been woken at night in the Toulouse mosque by his friends, Hamid and Khaled, and taken by car to a bus station. He gave the registration number of the bus and the towns it passed on the way to Germany. Gilles asked if he knew where he was going. Sami said no, but he was happy to be with his friends and he’d been excited to hear that he would be going on a plane.

What happened to his friends? He had not seen Hamid since Pakistan. Khaled had died after being wounded in Helmand, when an ambush had been prepared using one of Sami’s roadside bombs but the British troops had some kind of radio beam that exploded the bomb before their convoy reached it. Sami said he’d been starved until he devised something that could neutralize the anti-bomb device. He took Gilles’s notepad and made a quick but careful sketch of an electrical circuit to show what he had developed. Then he drew another sketch to show how he used a mobile phone to detonate a bomb.

No, he had not lived in a cave, Sami said. He only slept in a cave a few times, when crossing from Pakistan. Usually they
stayed in villages, never more than a few days at a time. Once he went to Kabul, and he described the mobile phone shop where he’d stayed while adapting mobile phones to become detonators and going through catalogues of electrical goods, marking the ones he would need. Sami gave the shop’s address, the manager’s name and the catalogue numbers of the items he’d ordered. Gilles whistled softly as he began to realize just how much intelligence Sami’s extraordinary memory could provide.

‘Don’t use that,’ Bruno said. ‘It’s operational intelligence.’

Gilles nodded and asked, ‘What do you want to do now, Sami?’

‘Play with Balzac and Fabiola, swim with Bruno and run with Nancy,’ Sami said, and opened his arms as if to embrace them all. ‘Live with Momu and Dillah and Karim, fix things and hear Mozart.’

‘Tell me about Mozart,’ said Gilles. ‘Where did you first hear his music?’

‘In Pakistan, always Mozart on the playlists. Mozart like maths, only liquid. You know what’s coming, until you get surprised.’ He laughed happily. ‘And always messages on playlists.’

‘Messages?’ Bruno asked, suddenly alert.

‘On playlists they send by Internet, iTunes, Spotify, it doesn’t matter,’ Sami replied innocently. ‘Just run acoustics programme, see the thick bar, copy it, slow it down, decompress and there’s the message. All encrypted, very secure.’

Bruno nodded reassuringly and realized Gilles was looking at him fixedly. He must have picked up on the revelation that the jihadists were using playlists to hide their communications.
Bruno shook his head at Gilles. This could be too important to be shared with the readers of
Paris Match
.

‘Can you fix this?’ Bruno asked, handing Sami a dead laptop from the sports bag he’d brought. It was a cheap Taiwan-made model that looked very like the one Bruno had bought on special offer at the supermarket for four hundred euros.

Sami opened it and found it dead when he tried to turn it on. He rummaged in Bruno’s bag until he found a connecting cord that fitted and looked around for a power point. His eyes scanned the garden and saw a small stone outbuilding, its door open and what looked like a lawnmower inside. Sami trotted to it, looked inside and came out with an extension cord wrapped around a wheel. He plugged the power cable into the back of the computer and waited briefly. Then he turned it over and neatly removed the battery and the power plug and pressed the On button for a count of perhaps thirty seconds. He replaced the battery, switched it on again and was rewarded with a momentary flare of tiny green and orange lights above the keyboard before they faded and died.

‘It’s OK, only needs new battery,’ he said casually, and looked hopefully at Bruno. ‘You have more? And tools?’

*

The rules for Gilles’s interview with Nancy were no photos, and he had to agree to refer to her simply as an American diplomat. Freddy was told to put his cameras back in his bag. Fabiola had left quickly after Sami had gone back with Momu for another session with the tribunal. Bruno had passed on to the Brigadier Sami’s sketches and his revelation about the Mozart playlists. Nancy was delayed by relaying the information to Washington. Gilles kept checking his watch.

Nancy finally emerged, having changed into a blue linen skirt and a plain white shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, flat-heeled leather boots. Bruno thought he detected a touch of eye make-up and she was wearing a soft red lipstick and silver stud earrings. Again he had the sense of having seen that face somewhere before, but still could not place it. As she sat, Bruno was aware of a subtle hint of perfume. No longer needing to look comfortably rumpled for Sami, she seemed more at ease in this relatively formal dress. She gave a polite smile with the aplomb of a woman who had handled or chaired many such meetings.

No one asked Bruno to leave, so he listened to Gilles’s questions, and was interested to note the careful courtesy with which Nancy treated them, although she answered either briefly or with diplomatic caution. Her remarks disappointed Bruno. So far she’d given the verbal equivalent of the Brigadier’s press release, and Bruno wondered what Gilles could do with it.

‘You seem very comfortable with Sami,’ Gilles said suddenly. ‘Have you come to like him?’

‘I think anyone would sympathize with what he’s been through and it must have taken guts and initiative to escape from the terrorists,’ she said, with a smile that added something human and convincing to the words.

‘So you believe his story?’

‘We’ll have to see what the medical tribunal says, but so far everything he says checks out and he is being very helpful.’ Again, her body language and facial expression added emphasis. Bruno was aware that she was deliberately setting out to charm Gilles, even while a transcript of her words would read blandly on a page. He decided to intervene.

‘I’m not sure our American friend has yet been briefed on the traumatic events of Sami’s childhood,’ Bruno said. ‘It wasn’t part of the initial diagnosis, but we heard it from his adoptive father. And it helps explain his problems today.’

Briefly, he outlined Sami’s experience in the Algerian civil war, watching the rape and slaughter of his family while tied to a table for two days and two nights as he stared at their severed heads while their blood dried on his legs.

Nancy’s eyes went wide in horror and she brought her hand to her mouth. For a moment Bruno thought she was going to be sick.

‘That’s incredible, except that I believe it,’ she said, her voice hoarse, as if her throat was dry. ‘I’d better make sure Washington knows; it’s important context for everything else about Sami.’ She shook her head and stared at Bruno. ‘Kind of hard to see him as a ruthless terrorist after learning that. How old was he?’

‘About five, I believe. You might want to ask Momu about it.’

‘Was that on the record?’ Gilles asked. ‘Hard to see him as a terrorist once you know that?’

Nancy looked at him in silence, considering, and then shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s what I think. I can’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t be shattered by it. And with that memory of his …’ Her voice trailed off.

‘Do you think Sami should be sent back to the United States to face justice?’

‘We and French officials are still trying to establish exactly what happened to him in Afghanistan, before we start considering judicial issues.’ She rose. ‘OK, I think we’re done here.
You have a deadline and I guess you’ll want to see Momu as well, to get some details about this terrible incident in Sami’s childhood.’

She shook Gilles’s hand, nodded to Bruno and said, ‘We need to talk.’ She led the way out of the walled garden in silence and into the park where they usually went for their jogs. Bruno restrained his curiosity and waited for her to begin.

‘I gather you’ve seen Deutz’s report on jihadists in prison,’ she began once they were in the fringe of the trees. ‘What did you think?’

‘Impressive but unsettling,’ he said. Parts of the report had sickened him. ‘Heaven knows what a human rights lawyer would do with it.’

Deutz had used a wing at the top-security prison where the cells had been wired for sound and video. In the first phase, he had simply monitored the recruiting techniques deployed on the new arrivals. But then he had started using standard prison management tools, inserting stool pigeons and then hardened trusties sent in to challenge the jihadists’ power. One of them ended dead in the showers, hanging from a pipe. It was listed as a suicide, with a note that the video had not been functioning that day. Deutz tried using tame Imams, but the prisoners simply refused to talk to them. His best results had come from inserting homosexual prisoners into the wing and using the resulting photographs to blackmail the jihadists into cooperating with threats to send still photos of the resulting encounters to their families. Once that first moment of cooperation was on film, Deutz could threaten to expose the man to his fellow jihadists as an informer.

‘It’s not something we’d get away with in Guantanamo,’
Nancy said drily. ‘Not after those photos came out from Abu Ghraib.’

‘I didn’t think we could get away with it in France,’ Bruno replied. ‘And I’m not sure what Deutz means when he talks of success. Getting them to inform on one another is one thing, but they’re still jihadists and they’ll hate us all the more.’

‘That’s what I think. I’m sick of us being seen as the bad guys.’

‘Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?’ he asked.

‘In a way, but there’s also Deutz’s claim that the scars might not have been punishment. He could be right. Maybe Sami was not whipped into obedience.’

‘Sometimes I wonder about that,’ Bruno replied. ‘There are occasional flashes in Sami’s eyes, I don’t know whether it’s intelligence, or if he’s slyly observing us to see how we react to him. Maybe it’s a survival mechanism he developed in Afghanistan, watching to see what he has to do to win approval. I think Sami knows his bombs killed people, you remember how he reacted to that card he thought looked like a bomb.’

Nancy swept her hand through her hair impatiently. ‘You mean he did what he had to do to stay alive?’

‘Yes, but he’s still an autistic kid. I don’t know what goes in in his head. That’s what Deutz and the tribunal are for.’

‘Deutz sees himself playing devil’s advocate, I guess. But it’s not just that, it’s the methods he describes using in that paper. They worry the hell out of me. Do you think they might backfire on us if that paper of his leaks? We could pay for it down the road when details start to come out.’