The Prisoner's Wife (21 page)

Danielle left money on the table. She followed the two men out. The shop was empty, the child gone. They emerged in a still-crowded street through the souk. Shawn spoke quietly. “You know this town, hon. Remember what way we go. We could be in a hurry, getting back.” He crouched against a wall as a young man on a motorbike rode at dangerous speed through the thronged market. He looked after the disappearing youth. “Son of a bitch. I hope he has life insurance.”

Tariq said, “The person we are about to see had none.”

Five minutes later, the bodyguard turned into an alley between two warehouses. There was a smell of something musty here—dry, decaying, not unpleasant. Flour-coated sacks of grain were stacked against each wall, leaving a narrow central path.

A wooden door opened into blackness. Shawn thought back to where he'd met Ayub Abbasi. Could this be the same cellar? The air here was cold and still. He saw no sign of computer or server. Somewhere in darkness, water dripped.

“What the hell's in here?”

Tariq produced a tiny flashlight, ridiculously small in his giant hand. “No one who can harm you.”

Danielle followed Shawn along the cellar. Pillars—some wooden, some brick—supported its ceiling. Shards of stone lay about the floor. It was cold. Tariq closed the door behind them. He pulled aside a sacking curtain and shone his light. In the pencil beam lay what had been a young man: the body of a man who would never be old. He lay in pools of water, oil, and blood. Part of his shirt was gone. Part of his belly was gone. From the body cavity, guts flopped fatly to the floor.

Danielle turned away, choking, then walked into darkness. Shawn heard her retch, or maybe try not to vomit.

Shawn had a sudden sense that Danielle had recognized the body before him, although—given the dead man's identity—he saw no way that she could have. Considering the corpse, he remembered a tale Martha told him days before she died. To her, it was significant in some way he didn't understand. “In a busy Arab market,” she'd said, “a merchant looking for his servant meets the figure of Death. Terrified, the man turns and runs. Later he tells his servant he will go into hiding, as far away as possible, in the distant town of Samarra. The next day, it is the servant who meets Death in the market. As frightened as his master had been, the servant drops to his knees. Death reassures him. ‘Don't worry,' Death says to the servant. ‘It is not you I seek. I am needed elsewhere. Today I have an appointment in Samarra.'”

*   *   *

The man in the cellar, who had kept his own appointment with death, was missing his hands. The stump of an arm stretched toward the stones of the cellar's eastern wall. Before death took him, he'd written in blood, with the amputated end of that arm, two Arabic words.

Danielle came from darkness, back to the body. She stood close to Shawn, holding him.

Tariq held his flashlight beam on the blood-daubed words.

“Meaning what?” Shawn asked.

“La ilaha illallah.”
Danielle said. She spoke with difficulty. “There is no God but One. The man died before he finished the phrase.”

Tariq turned his huge head toward her. “How would you know that, madame?”

Shawn was moving away. He had a bad feeling about this place, and a sudden crazy notion—which he knew to be impossible—that Danielle might have murdered this man.

“Never mind how she knows,” he told Tariq. “This feels like a setup. We're out of here.”

Shawn groped his way across the uneven floor, toward the door. He was shaking, stumbling a little. At the steps, he told Tariq, “The dead guy's Massood Omar Sheikh, but I think you knew that—you didn't need me to tell you.”

“We do need to know if you listed him.”

“We did. Number four on the most wanted, last time I looked.” Shawn was back in the alley. “What we hear, he's been selling Qadir Khan's technology—this Islamic bomb you mentioned. I guess you know that, too.”

At the far end of the alley, four car lights switched on to high beam. Heading away from them, Shawn grabbed Danielle's hand and broke into a half run. Moving easily, Tariq kept pace.

“Who opened the guy up?”

“We think it might have been your friend, Mr. McCord,” Tariq said. “Or his colleague, Mr. Tarkani. You can see, it was a heavy weapon Mr. McCord used.”

“If it was him.”

“If, indeed. The range was close,” Tariq said. “To make up, perhaps, for his tremor.”

Danielle, ahead of them, turned. “Why the amputation?”

“Who knows? Fingerprints?”

“You have DNA,” Shawn said.

“In this place? You think?”

Now they were back in the market.

“Tell me,” Shawn asked Tariq, “whose side are you on? You bring me to a dead body—terrorist, al Qaeda operative, gut cut open, no hands. Why am I here? Where are the cops?”

“We believe they agreed not to discover the body until Mr. McCord and Mr. Tarkani are out of the country.” Tariq pointed back the way they had come. “But you see them there—those lights—those are security police.”

“Move,” Shawn said, tightening his grip on Danielle's hand. “This is a setup.” To Tariq, he said, “I'm telling you—stay back.”

Danielle found a path through the crowd in the market, brushing past bearded men, apologizing in French.

“Shawn? What is happening here?”

“That guy in the cellar,” Shawn said, “was maybe shot by an American agent. I'm an American agent, or I was. I don't want cops confusing us.”

As Shawn spoke he divided his attention between Tariq and a young man watching from the side of the alley. Shawn wondered where the hell he'd seen this kid, then remembered. It was the biker who'd nearly killed him, coming at high speed down a crowded lane, driving right at him and Danielle. Now the boy was watching something, someone, behind Shawn—who, by reflex, moved, bending his body, shifting sideways, away from the white-robed figure who swung out a hand holding something short and black—and Danielle, a pace ahead, heard a blow, a sound both soft and dull. Moments later she turned to see Shawn go down, stumbling, crawling, on hands and knees—the attacker with a short, wide-bladed knife—Shawn feeling the close heat of the man—seeing in his mind the youth in the cellar, disemboweled—and then heard the robed man screaming—bending, kicking at Shawn's protective arms, seeking a home for his curve-bladed kris. As Danielle, too, screamed, fearing Shawn's death, the crowd parted: She saw the robed assassin stare upward, wide-eyed, at Tariq, who hauled the man high in the air, tossing him like a paper dart to the wall of the alley. Hitting stone, he slid to the ground and lay there, unmoving.

Bending again, the bodyguard gently lifted Shawn, bearing him through the crowd as lightly as a mother dandling her child.

 

23

RUE TALAA KEBIRA, FES, MOROCCO, 28 MAY 2004

In the hotel room on rue Talaa Kebira, Danielle sat on the edge of Shawn's bed, unbuttoning his ripped and bloody shirt. She set a hand behind his neck, lifted his upper body inches from the mattress, and eased the shirt from under him. The skin of his ribs was scarified: broken and bleeding, a crosshatch of dark and oozing cuts.

She soaked a sponge in a bowl of warm water, squeezed it, then cleaned the wounds, easing out dirt.

Shawn said, “What was it?” His mouth damaged, his voice was not his voice.

Looking down at him, she said, “Don't move. I'm putting you back together. Best I can.”

He was surprised by the tenderness of her touch. “What the hell was it? What hit me?”

She unbuckled his belt.

“The boy on the bike—the one who nearly killed us. He found you again. Then a man in a white robe—a galibaya—I didn't see his face. He had something in his hand—you must have—I mean, you must have felt it coming—”

He was quiet awhile, thinking back to the scene on the street. Some of it he recalled. “What did I do?”

“You moved away from him. You were turning in his direction, then you—you sensed something, I guess. You went the other away, fast, and down”—she was thinking back—“that is maybe why he did not hit you as hard as he could have. Then, he had a knife—”

She put a hand under the small of his back. “Lift your hips?”

He tried. She slid his khakis down his bruised thighs.

He winced. “This is kind of intimate.” She began disinfecting the cuts on his groin. “What then?”

“He hit you again.” She fingered the side of his neck. He thought not even his mother in her best days had touched him as tenderly as this. “Hit you here. The knife—you know, that scared me. He would kill. I tried to hold him back. He kicked—” She touched a bruise with her sponge. “That's where this came. You maybe cracked a rib.”

She eased down his shorts to clean the wound on his hip. Despite the pain, his sex swelled. Amused, she touched his cock, then covered him again. “Looks like you'll live.”

“Doesn't feel like that, inside my head. Feels like I was sapped.”

“Which is?”

He tried to think what it was. “A sap—you know, it's like a blackjack. Leather and metal. Soft and heavy. You hit the guy in the right place, it's a killer.” He touched his neck. “Few inches more, around here, could've snapped my spine.”

She touched his forehead. It might have been a caress. “I believe you'll survive.”

“Wonder why they went for me—I mean, in this place. What the hell have I done?”

She covered his body with a blanket and went to work on his battered face. “Maybe it's what you're doing. Not what you've done.” She sponged his check.

“Easy,” he said. “Just take it easy.”

Blood had dried on his forehead, and in the darkness of his brows. She tried sponging it out.

“You can't place the guy who hit me?”

She shook her head. “All I know is—I told you—he wore white robes. His skin wasn't so dark—more like mine—I'd guess he's not Maghrebi. I never saw his face.”

He was speaking more to himself than to her. “Hassan Tarkani, maybe. Or the English guy—what's his name? Alfred.” Though he couldn't imagine Alfred Burke in Arab dress. “Is it tomorrow we fly?”

She put a gentle hand on his forehead to hold him still. “I made a booking. It's okay. I know you're short of cash. You pay the hotel, I'll do the flight.” She cleaned dirt from the wound on his jaw. “Can you get on a plane?”

“No idea. Doesn't feel like it right now. Not even sure I could stand.”

“Don't try. Don't move.”

He ran his tongue around his mouth, checking his teeth. They were there, all of them. One of the incisors was loose. “How did you get me back here?”

“Tariq carried you. What do you weigh?”

He thought about it. “Hundred ninety-six. Something like that.”

“Looked like you weighed ten pounds, twenty maybe, the way he lifted you. Like a child.
Petit môme.
You are fortunate he was there.”

“And you,” he said. Then, after a pause, “It's always me, right? Don't you ever have bad things happen?”

“Of course.
Comme tous.
Like everyone.”

“For instance?”

For a moment, she hesitated, then said, “A few months ago—I was on that train in Madrid—the one the terrorists—”

“Bombed.”

“Exactly. I was not in that part of the train. I was only bruised. The worst was—police thought I was one of the bombers. Here I was—cut, and bleeding—they lock me up.”

He wondered about that. “Locked up for long?”

She laughed. “Not so long. All the same—you have been in a bombing, an attack, and then—”

He tried turning on his side, and gave up the attempt.

She went around the bed to rearrange the pillows and the duvet, then began to shed her clothes. “I'm sleeping here tonight. Is that okay? Don't even consider sex.”

He tried to make himself comfortable on his side of the bed. Scraps of a dream came back. “Please,” he said. “Forget you said that word. Even thinking about it is painful.”

*   *   *

Late in the night, Shawn lay with his back to Danielle, feeling her warmth, looking toward the window, seeing the city's glow in the night sky. The honking of horns was quieter now. Somewhere, a donkey brayed.

She held him loosely, one arm across his flank, across the side of him that wasn't bruised. “Are you awake?”

He didn't move, except his head. She felt him nod. “Can't sleep.”

“Tell me something,” she said. “Would you ever think of having another child?”

For a while he thought that through. Then he said, “With you?”

“Just answer the question.”

“You're married,” he said. “Why wouldn't you have a child with Darius?”

“He doesn't want children.”

In the darkness he waited, then turned his head toward her. “If I had another child, I'd want to be involved, bringing her up. I wasn't there, you know—not for my daughter. Won't make that mistake again.”

“One can work out such things.”

He waited, listening to her even breathing; waited to see if she would say more. Drowsy, scarcely awake, he told her, “It's okay. I decided. If I can walk, I'll come with you.”

“To where?” she asked, after a time.

He said, “To Cairo.”

 

24

CAIRO, EGYPT, 29 MAY 2004

Eighteen hours after leaving Morocco, Shawn lay, still hurting, in another darkened hotel bedroom, this one in the Bulaq district of Cairo. Once again, sleepless in an airless night, he tried, and tried again, to catch his breath. Since his beating in Fes he could never seem to find the air to fill his lungs. He ran fingers over his body, checking the state of his wounds. Scattered and various pain; it was hard to breathe deeply. Maybe that was the kicking, maybe a lead-loaded sap—he'd never know. Danielle could be right—it might be, like Martha, he'd cracked a rib. Maybe it was the ambience of this vast city that made him breathless. He'd read somewhere that Cairo's population was touching eighteen million: an endless urban mass, stretching into darkness on either side of the Nile. Eighteen million mouths, gulping the city's polluted air.