The Language of Secrets (7 page)

Dar glared at Khattak, his arms crossed in front of him.

“Suppose tonight you were to announce Mohsin's death on your program without mentioning the manner of his death. You could suggest that those who knew Mohsin attend a memorial for your son at a local mosque. In fact, the Nur mosque would be best.” Khattak said this as if he had just thought of it. “That would give me the excuse I need to conduct interviews at the mosque, narrowing down the list of suspects, and speeding my way to an arrest. Once we made the arrest, you could announce it on your broadcast.”

It was a ploy that depended on Andy Dar's obsession with his ratings.

“You should be up at Algonquin, investigating.” Dar was beginning to lose steam. “Not here, and not at the mosque.”

“The scene has been thoroughly documented.” Khattak allowed a note of genuine compassion to enter his voice. “Do you believe that Mohsin's killer is still at Algonquin Park?” And when Dar didn't speak, unwilling to make concessions, Khattak continued, “I would be grateful for your help with this, sir. Mohsin's killer won't be expecting us to work together. I'd like to prove him wrong, wouldn't you?”

“He was my son,” Dar said, rallying a little. “No one wants justice more than I do.”

Khattak thought of the pain that haunted Alia's eyes. He bowed his head and said, “I'm sure that's true, sir.”

Alia walked out of the room.

“I will broadcast the news of the memorial on my program.” Dar frowned at the French doors Alia had closed behind her. “I'll need time to sort out arrangements at the mosque.”

That was exactly what Khattak had counted on.

“And the announcement of the arrest will air first on my program, is that clear?”

“Very clear. Thank you.”

Khattak's hand was on the door. His thoughts had followed Alia from the room.

“One more thing, Khattak.”

Khattak turned back to face him. It shocked him to see that Dar's deep-set eyes were wet, though his voice was steady enough.

“He was my only child, my boy. If your efforts to find his killer do not succeed, I will use my program to take you down.”

*   *   *

Alia Dar was waiting for him on the front steps, a heavy bag of salt in her arms. Khattak took it from her, scattering the salt on the steps, spreading several more handfuls over the driveway.

He put the bag away inside the garage, the cold nipping at his bare face. Alia seemed oblivious to it. Her coat was unbuttoned, her hands free of gloves.

“I'd like to speak with you about Mohsin.”

Alia glanced at the windows to the den, where Andy Dar's silhouette appeared.

“We could take a walk,” she said. “Chorley Park's not far from here. There are some nice trails. Unless you think it's too cold?”

“Don't you feel the cold?”

Alia Dar shrugged, her face blank.

Khattak suppressed a pang of pity.

“Get your gloves,” he said gently. “And button up your coat. Then I'll walk with you.”

*   *   *

When she was dressed more sensibly for the weather, he let her lead the way to Chorley Park. The main pathway through the park had been shoveled, a bombast of white on either side of the cobbled walk. They trudged past sheltered butternut trees until Khattak called a halt at a small enclosure. A bench was set before a scenic outlook of shimmering trees that disappeared at the edge of the horizon against a crumbling erasure of sky.

He took a seat at the opposite end of the bench from Alia.

“You said Mohsin spoke of me.”

What Khattak wanted to know was whether Mohsin had wanted to speak to a contact at CPS, a contact he trusted, particularly if Mohsin had felt himself constrained in the role of a police agent under surveillance.

“He admired you. I know you haven't spoken much recently, but Mohsin followed your career. He called it ‘a spectacular ascent.'” She raised her gloved hands to her mouth and blew on her fingers. “And he didn't mean it as an insult, as Baba would have. He believed you would do some good. He said no one but you could take on such a role and succeed.”

Khattak felt a stab of regret. He hadn't spoken to Mohsin in years. He should have reached out, should have made Mohsin understand his decision, his choices. They had been friends in those promising years of youth, when everything seemed possible, destiny a series of choices, nothing set in stone, the years stretching ahead to a generous horizon.

They had plumbed the shape of the future through the silhouette of their dreams. They had never been as far apart as either man had later believed.

And then he realized.

Publicly, Mohsin had shunned Esa for taking up the appointment to head CPS. Yet he'd told Alia that he applauded Khattak's choice.

“I wish he had come to see me at CPS.”

“The mosque took up most of his time.”

“What about his regular work?”

“You know Mohsin. He was always a dabbler. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Lately, he'd taken up work as a computer consultant. It was work he said he could do anywhere.”

The dabbling had included skills that had made Mohsin Dar invaluable to INSET. He was a former army cadet with a firearms license and extensive military and martial arts training. He had acquired the possession and acquisition license in order to work as an armored car security guard. The leap to computers was something Khattak would need to discuss with Ciprian Coale. Unless Alia could give him access to Mohsin's work space.

“Where did he do his work? At his father's house?”

“Mostly at home, sometimes at Nur.” She hesitated. “When the police came to tell me of Mohsin's death, they searched the house and took away his computer.” She seemed to be weighing a dilemma—whether to trust Esa or not.

“I'll help you in any way I can,” he said.

She reached into her pocket for a set of keys. After a moment, she gave them to Khattak.

“I didn't give the police the keys to Mohsin's storage locker. I'm the only one who knows about it; it's registered under my name.”

Khattak felt a leap of excitement.

Here was something he could use, something INSET might have missed.

“Have you been to the locker?” he asked. “Do you know what Mohsin keeps there?”

Alia shook her head. “It would have made him angry. And he already had reasons to be angry with me. He was pushing me away. He didn't want me anywhere near Nur.”

“Why was that?”

“He said he was doing
dawah
, extending the invitation to Islam. He said that converts might be put off by my presence, because gender politics were hard to explain to newcomers.”

“And what did you say to that?”

She gave him a level glance.

“I'm not stupid. The converts were women, and Mohsin was the big man on campus. His personality attracted a lot of people. I think it went to his head, the way he was able to dazzle the people at Nur. I didn't want my husband spending time with other women. So I pressed him about going to Algonquin with him. He found his own way to stop me.”

She crossed the path to the fir tree. Standing under its heavy branches, she braced herself against the trunk and shook it. Snow floated down onto her head and shoulders like dandruff. A pair of kinglets singing above her head faltered into silence.

“I'm trying to feel something,” she said, before Khattak could ask. “It's been a long time since I've felt anything.”

He didn't think she was referring just to Mohsin's death. What had this somber, capable woman suspected her husband of? Why that margin of pain in her eyes?

“How did he stop you from going to the camp?”

There was a long silence before she answered him. Covered in snow, she let the branches of the fir support her weight, buoying her up against the currents of wind.

“He said he would only take me if I began to wear the niqab.” Tears slid down her face, catching on the snowflakes. “I'm a fifth-grade schoolteacher, I can't wear a veil across my face. Of course, I said no.” She came to sit on the bench again, this time closer to Khattak. “He'd never tried to coerce me in matters of religion before. Yes, he talked wildly sometimes when he was younger. He said he would go for jihad in Chechnya or Afghanistan. But the imams at Jame Masjid always talked him out of these plans. This time, he told me I could quit my job because he was earning plenty of money. That was when I knew.”

“I'm not sure I understand.”

But her words were taking Khattak down a familiar road, through conversations with members of the mosque, through regrets and choices made, through countless lost opportunities. Times he should have spoken up, questions he should have asked, challenging others to an ethical reading of scripture in lieu of the tropes of dogma.

It had seemed like a burden that someone else should carry, yet he realized it belonged to him, just as it belonged to each of his coreligionists, this personal quest for an ethical life—and it couldn't be put down by choice, not without abandoning the field to the hardened and hidebound, whose rigid conservatism and eschewal of modernity contained within it the seeds of jihadist ideology. The one so dangerously close to the other, with the danger entirely unheeded.

Whatever the RCMP's picture of Mohsin was, it was dismally incomplete. They had been able to use him, but they had missed the depth of his commitment to the
ummah
. How that commitment had played itself out was something Khattak still needed to explore.

“Mohsin was in over his head. He'd fallen for someone, but it wasn't one of the women.”

“Then who?”

But he knew what Alia Dar was going to say before she said it.

“He was under the spell of Hassan Ashkouri.”

The man engaged to Khattak's younger sister.

 

8

The locker was in a self-storage warehouse in North York, halfway between Mohsin's home in the West End and the Nur mosque in the north. Its setting in an industrial park far from the highway indicated that Mohsin had had need of secrecy—whether the secrecy was designed for his RCMP handlers or for members of Ashkouri's cell, Khattak couldn't say. What was evident was that Mohsin Dar must have trusted his wife enough to let her know of the locker's existence.

Khattak checked his watch, feeling the winter chill settle into his bones. He was waiting for Rachel to help him go through the locker. He hadn't called Coale, a deliberate choice. If he mentioned the storage locker, Coale would block his attempts to investigate. Time enough to tell Coale after the initial search.

Rachel pulled into the parking lot of the warehouse with a cheerful blast of her horn.

She was carrying a tray of Tim Hortons coffees in one hand and polishing off a maple donut with the other. Stuffed between the coffee cups was a bag that Khattak suspected held another donut. Rachel was always hungry, though he had no idea where she put away the food.

He was glad she was here now—a part of the investigation where she could openly partner with him, away from prying eyes.

They walked over to the storage unit together, Khattak holding the tray while Rachel dug out her camera. The first of the three keys Alia had given Khattak unlocked the main door of one section of the warehouse. Khattak read out numbers until they came to the locker marked “114.”

“What is it, sir?” Rachel asked when he paused by the locker number.

“Mohsin had a taste for symbolism; it must be why he chose this locker. There are one hundred and fourteen chapters in the Qur'an.”

Setting down the cardboard tray, Khattak tried each of the two remaining keys. The second one turned in the lock. He rolled up the orange door of the locker.

And then it occurred to him, too late, to check for security cameras. What if Ashkouri or someone from his camp was watching the locker? Or Ciprian Coale?

He scanned possible locations for a camera. Nothing seemed out of place, and there was no laptop or desktop computer inside the locker, a possible precaution Mohsin had taken, preventing access through a webcam.

The locker housed an office chair, a desk, and a vintage manual typewriter.

A small lamp on the desk was plugged into the unit's electric socket by means of an extension cord. Behind the desk were metal bookshelves crammed with technical manuals, the rows numbered 1 to 20.

Khattak examined the desk without touching anything, listening to the click of Rachel's camera. They were wearing gloves, careful not to disturb the scene any more than necessary.

Khattak flicked on the lamp, flooding the desk with a halo of light.

There was a sheet of paper in the typewriter.

Two short sentences had been typed in faded ink.

We are men in the sun. We will show you the proof of it.

*   *   *

“Is that a threat of some kind, sir? A warning about the bomb plot?”

“I don't think so, Rachel.”

Khattak looked at her for long minutes, his mind following several tracks at once. Rachel waited without speaking. She retrieved her cooling coffee and sipped it, puzzling over the sheet of paper in the typewriter. Absentmindedly, she ate the second donut, this one a chocolate dip.

When she'd finished her coffee, she asked, “Why not?”

Khattak studied Alia's keys, taking note of the desk's locked drawers. He touched the keys of the typewriter with his gloved hands, a finger pressed to the letter “M.”

“Because I think it's a message for me.”

*   *   *

Rachel watched him try Alia Dar's keys in the drawers, unaccountably nervous. She couldn't shake the feeling that someone knew of their presence at the locker. She glanced around, but the passageway was empty. She moved closer to Khattak, peering over his shoulder.

There was a stack of unused paper in the top drawer. The second held a plain envelope that contained a single item: a penciled-in list of math problems, with many of the equations crossed out and begun again. There were small notations beside the penciled ratios.