Beloved Enemy (26 page)

He stood stock-still. “Is there something you’re trying to prove? Some female thing?”

“That’s the typical male response, isn’t it, to try and defuse difficult questions by framing them in terms of gender.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“How long have you and your wife been sleeping in separate bedrooms?”

“None of your business.”

“That’s not entirely true.”

He pulled a face. “I snore.”

“Mmmm.”

“If you’re on a fishing expedition, Midwood, you’re bound to be disappointed.”

“I’m not looking for mistresses in your closet.”

“Then what are you looking for?”

Turning, she opened a file, slipped out a sheet of paper, part of the intel Ripley had sent her, and handed it over.

“What the hell’s this?” he said, glancing down.

“You tell me.”

“How did you even find this account? I made sure it was a double-blind.” When she made no reply, he said, slowly and grudgingly, “I didn’t make these withdrawals.”

“I know you didn’t,” Jonatha said, taking back the sheet and returning to the chair behind Paull’s desk. “Your wife did.”

“She’s a profligate woman,” Marshall said stiffly.

“In fact, she’s quite frugal.” Jonatha put the sheet away. “But your son-in-law is another matter entirely.” She studied the director’s face. “He’s an inveterate gambler.”

Something crumbled behind Marshall’s stony facade. He suddenly looked ten years older. “My daughter’s family wouldn’t get by without our help. That’s what the account was for.”

“Your son-in-law wouldn’t be able to continue gambling without your help, either.”

Marshall turned, stepped to the window closest to him. “He got in over his head. He was desperate—and unbelievably foolish.”

“He borrowed from the wrong people. It’s such a cliché, but people still do it. That’s why those people still exist.”

“Not those particular people,” Marshall said with some vehemence. “I wiped them off the face of the earth.”

“That must’ve made you feel good.”

“What if it did?”

“Did it stop your son-in-law from gambling?”

“I should’ve locked him up years ago.” Marshall stared blindly into the darkness. “I was going to, but my wife—she said it would break my daughter’s heart.… How she could love that deadbeat…” He shook his head.

“It would’ve broken your wife’s heart, too.”

“There was a time,” Marshall said, as if to himself, “when that would’ve stopped me.”

“But not now.”

“Things have changed.” He shook his head slowly. “My son-in-law wouldn’t stop, so I had to do it for him. The night I had him put away my wife moved into the guest bedroom, but the fact is she’s never there. These days she prefers to stay with our daughter and grandkids.”

“All part of a soldier’s lot in life.”

Marshall squinted at her. “Are you mocking me?”

“Your current situation is too sad to mock.”

Marshall studied her for some time. “You’re a strange creature.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Take it any way you want,” he said.

It was clear to her the wound she had explored was still open. She sat with her elbows on the desktop, her hands clasped in front of her. She looked at him, wondering whether she could afford to empathize with him. She knew that whatever happened next would tell her which way to proceed.

“It occurs to me that Paull sat just that way when he was at this desk,” Marshall said in a softened tone.

“Really? Tell me about him.”

Marshall spread his hands. “What could I tell you that you don’t already know?”

“I never met him,” Jonatha said.

Marshall nodded. “He was a good man. Smart, insightful, a good administrator.”

Jonatha picked up on his hesitation at once. “But?”

Marshall sighed. “He liked to get out into the field, but he was too old for that. And he had his blind spots, I think Jack McClure was one of them.”

“Is that what you think—or believe?”

Marshall raised his eyebrows. “What? Is there a question?”

“There’s always a question,” Jonatha said, “when you don’t find the killer standing over his victim with a smoking gun or a bloody knife in his hand.”

Marshall laughed. “If we went by that criterion no one would be prosecuted.”

“Not without a proper investigation, anyway.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m positing the question: What if Jack McClure didn’t kill his boss?”

Marshall looked at her for a long, silent moment. “Funny, I’ve had the same thought.”

“Really.”

Marshall nodded. “Odd, isn’t it, since we’ve all been given the same facts.”

“Which means,” she said, “we’re missing something.”

*   *   *

Fez was a city of red walls and closed doors. Waves of war immigrants from Tunisia and Córdoba, in the south of Spain, had for centuries leant the city a distinctly Arabic aspect. Nowadays, it clung to its historical character far better than Morocco’s other imperial cities, Marrakech, Rabat, and Meknes.

When Annika and Namazi arrived in Fez, they went straight to his house, a large, rambling structure with a fountain-cooled courtyard. During the Ottoman Empire it had been a prison. Even now, there were corners dark as night, even when sunlight flooded the rooms, where layers of blood had built up like plaster, impossible to scrape off. The history of Fez resided in every room, like a guest who never leaves, recounting silent stories of the past at all hours of the day and night.

Namazi had said not a word throughout their journey. Annika could feel the electric current coming off him, like a storm of tiny needles pricking her flesh. Several times, she had tried to engage him, without success. She had seen him like this only once before, in the smoking aftermath of the disastrous terrorist raid in Aleppo, and she did not like the implications.

The house smelled musty, though his men had been living in it during their absence. Though it was raining, he called for the windows to be thrown wide open. The floors and shutters, even some furniture, were soon soaked, but he did not appear to notice.

Instead, he strode through the house, shouting orders that to Annika seemed petty and, at times, contradictory. When they weren’t carried out immediately and to the letter, mayhem ensued—shrieks, curses, and, once, Namazi’s fist connecting with a confused man’s jaw.

However, nothing that came before prepared her for what ensued when he reached the small room, crammed with computers and other electronic equipment. It stank of hot metal, silicon components, and male sweat. Two heavily bearded men sat hunched over their workstations, toiling away, trying to break Caro’s labyrinthine algorithm. Heavy metal shutters closed off the windows; the room was illuminated only by LED task lamps, blue-white spots penetrating the gloom like bullet holes.

“What progress have you made?” Namazi demanded of his operators.

At first they were silent, and Annika could feel the tension pressing inward like a constrictor coiled about its prey. When, at length, they admitted that they had made little or no progress, Namazi grabbed one, lifted him bodily out of his seat, and slammed him against the wall. Then he began the real beat down. Annika waited until he had buried half a dozen punches and the blood began to flow before hauling him off the half-unconscious man.

As the victim slid down the wall, Annika said to the other cryptographer, “Now you see what will happen to you if you fail to solve that algorithm.”

Namazi shook free of her and was about to turn on the second cryptographer when one of his armed men entered the room and handed him a note. Peering over his shoulder, Annika read: “Isaam dead. Caroline no longer in Paris.”

“Iraj—” she began, but he shot her such a fierce look that she bit her lip in order to keep her own counsel.

Namazi turned to the armed man. “You may go.”

“Yes,
sidi
,” the man said in a low voice.

When he was halfway to the door, Namazi called out, “Your sidearm. Is it clean?”

The armed man turned. “It is,
sidi
. I clean it every morning.”

Namazi snapped his fingers. “Let me see.”

The man retraced his steps, then pulled the handgun from its polished holster and handed it butt first to Namazi.

“Is it loaded?” the Syrian said.

“It is,
sidi
.”

Namazi thumbed off the safety, aimed the weapon at the man’s chest, and pulled the trigger. The resulting report was deafening. Shot at close range, the man was catapulted across the room before he slammed into a wall of electronic equipment. The Syrian walked over to him and shot him three more times.

Dropping the gun, he strode out of the room, shouting for someone to clean up the mess.

For a long moment, Annika stared at the two men—one dead, the other badly beaten. Then she, too, left the room. She could not bear to remain in the house a moment longer, so she left the Syrian to the remainder of his rageful frustration and went out into the delicious chaos of the medina, where she was sure to clear her head.

It was times like these when she hated her grandfather more than she could ever imagine hating a human being. She was trapped in his vast, decades-long plot, his queen’s gambit, as he liked to call it.

Colors, sounds, and the scents of exotic spices and oils slowly dissipated her black thoughts. The rainstorm had passed, lamps had been lit, their flames casting dancing shadows between the milling shoppers in every direction. She passed myriad stalls selling everything and anything the heart desired. From one, she bought a patterned silk scarf, which she tied around her head. From another, she bought six blood oranges. She stopped to look at several gold necklaces. The many gold shops were modern-day reminders that Fez had once been the northern terminus of the ancient gold route that began in Timbuktu.

At the far edge of the medina, she caught a taxi, which took her out of the old walled city to Fez Jdid, home to the
mellah
, the old Jewish ghetto. The Jewish population in Morocco had steadily dwindled following the establishment of Israel and, in the last two decades, the growing animosity of Moroccan Muslims against their Jewish brethren. While she stared out at the passing city, she peeled a blood orange, used her nails to separate the sections, then popped them into her mouth, one by one. She savored the bittersweet taste, which brought to mind memories of sun-soaked Mediterranean coasts and verdigris-green Venetian canals.

At the iron gates to the Cementiri Jueu, Annika had the taxi stop. She handed the driver enough money to ensure he would wait for her. Stepping out of the cab into the starlit golden evening, she felt a furtive breeze stir against her bare calves. She had had enough experience entering the cemetery at night that the lock provided no problem.

Soon enough, she was surrounded by a surf of low, white markers, as ugly as they were efficient. They stretched away from her in ordered ranks, like waves rolling onto a flat sandy beach. Apart from the names engraved on them, they all appeared identical, sadly anonymous, almost an afterthought of lives lived in Fez’s ghetto and the deaths that had overtaken them.

To any outsider or even casual visitor, finding your way would seem impossible, but Annika was an old hand here. She knew precisely where she was going. She stopped in front of Rolan’s father’s marker. Kneeling down, she placed four of the blood oranges in a square, then topped it with the fifth one. When she whispered parts of the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead, her lips barely moved. The wind took the words away from life into death, where the old man dwelled with his God. Annika was not a believer in any organized religion, and neither was Rolan. But his father had been devout, and Rolan had been a bitter disappointment to him. Rolan had never visited his father’s grave, but Annika did every year, more often since Namazi had made Fez his new headquarters.

The old man had died before she had met Rolan; nevertheless he loomed large in her life. Whether Rolan liked it or not, parts of the old man remained inside him, had changed him, for better or for worse. His father had been a scholar. Annika had realized that the more quickly she familiarized herself with the old man’s letters and papers, the better equipped she’d be to deal with Rolan. Soon after they had married, she had realized that Rolan was like two people in one, and his father’s rejection of him had sundered those two parts of him irrevocably. Her solution was to try and placate the ghost of his father. Of course, Jews didn’t believe in ghosts, but they believed in golems—in the undead—which was what both she and Rolan imagined his psychically powerful father to be.

She stared down at the blood oranges, arranged in a three-dimensional quincunx, an ancient design thought to have magically curative powers.
“Oseh Shalom—rest in peace
,
”
she whispered, in conclusion, only dimly aware that it was an order, not a request.

Something flew by her ear, a beetle or a moth, and she batted at it. A hand slammed down on her shoulder, pinning her in place as an arm wrapped around her neck and throat, cutting off her breathing.

*   *   *

“Why me?” Marshall said.

Jonatha shrugged. “It no longer matters.”

“I think I deserve to know.”

“Ideology, sex masquerading as love, money—these are the reasons people betray their country. I ruled out the first two fairly quickly; you’re not that kind of man.”

“I’m not the kind of man to betray my country, period.”

“But the third—well, the withdrawals, the trouble your son-in-law was in, these were markers—red flags, if you like.”

“Must we return to this?” Marshall growled.

“I’m simply doing my job,” Jonatha said. “Just following orders.”

He smiled grimly. “I understand. I do.”

“Then help me,” Jonatha said.

“What?”

“That was what Dennis Paull must have said to Jack McClure, at, yes, just about this time of the night.”

Marshall’s eyes opened wide, as if at that very moment he realized why she had chosen this place, this time for their interview.

“Why do you need my help?” he said. “Hasn’t Krofft given you all the tools you need?”