Without Mercy (23 page)

Scan it here
. The words echoed in my mind, and I checked the credenza behind Debbie's desk, desperately seeking a scanner or copier. No such luck. Suddenly I thought of my phone, with its built-in camera. I could count on one hand the number of times I had actually used my cell phone's camera, but I did know how. Or so I hoped.

The first photo I snapped made me jump—the phone made a noise like a camera shutter, but at a volume that seemed earsplitting to my paranoid ears. I flipped the toggle to silence the phone and began again, feeling a bit like a Cold War spy as I flipped pages and took photos. It wasn't as easy as I'd expected it to be; at such close range, the focus was tricky, and I ended up taking two or three shots of most pages in order to get legible images. But soon I got into a groove, snapping swiftly, keeping time to the theme music from
Mission: Impossible
, which I heard playing in my head.

I had made it halfway through the file when I heard voices approaching in the hall outside. “By the way,” I heard Debbie saying, in a surprisingly loud voice, “don't forget the tailgate party we're putting together for next Saturday's game. Are you coming?” I heard a low, indistinct reply, then Debbie resumed, at bullhorn volume. “Great! Could you bring some plastic cups? And some napkins? Terrific—thank you!”

I flipped the folder closed, whirled, and placed it on the end table in its original spot, and then lunged for the door handle, just as I saw it begin to move. I gave the handle a quick twist to pop the lock button, then swung the door inward, so abruptly that Debbie, still holding the outside handle, stumbled forward with a yelp of surprise.

“Oh, I'm so sorry!” I said. “I didn't know you were there. I realized I need to get going—can't keep the provost waiting, you know.”

“Never a good idea,” she said. “But what a shame—we didn't even get a chance to talk!”
Methinks thou dost protest too much
, I thought, wondering if her assistant could see through our little charade; wondering, on second thought, if her assistant had actually played a supporting-actress role in our charade. “Call me and let's have lunch sometime,” Debbie said, taking my elbow and steering me toward the exit, just in case I had any doubt what my next move should be. “I'd love to get caught up on your work, and the family, and . . . everything.”

“I will,” I said. “Soon as the dust settles. Or the smoke clears.”

“Take care, Dr. Brockton.”

“I'll try,” I said. “Thank you.
Very
much.”

“You are
most
welcome.”

MY SPY MISSION AT INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION HAD
been so brief that I showed up at the provost's office thirty minutes ahead of schedule. His door was closed, which I took to mean one of two things: either he wasn't in, or he
was
in but didn't want to be disturbed. “I can come back,” I told his secretary. “My office is only a football field away.”

“Hang on just a minute, if you don't mind,” she said. “He should be finishing up this meeting any second, and maybe you could slip in before his next one. He told me he only needs five minutes with you.”

I sat down in one of those wingbacked leather armchairs that administrators high up the academic food chain seem required to own. The leather was glossy and supple, trimmed with domed brass nails along the fronts of the arms and the wings. The chair was impressive, but it wasn't actually comfortable. Then again, perhaps it wasn't meant to be comfortable.

The provost's door opened, and a young assistant professor emerged. I vaguely recognized him—English, perhaps?—but his face was ashen and drooping and his gaze downcast. As he passed, I looked up into his eyes, and I was startled to see that he'd been crying.

The provost appeared in his office, looking hale and hearty. He, clearly, had not just been crying. “Come in, come in,” he boomed.

“I'm afraid to,” I said, “after seeing what you did to that last guy.”

He grimaced slightly. “Not everyone's cut out to be a professor,” he said. He cocked his head toward another massive chair, this one in his plush inner sanctum, and settled into his own thronelike seat. “I sometimes think we should try to turn
out fewer Ph.D.s, not more, so we don't flood the market with overeducated, underemployed french-fry cooks. But then I see the financials, and I tell my overworked, underpaid professors to put more butts in more seats.” He gave me an ironic smile, then tented his fingers in a way that I suspected he had practiced, to make him look Solomonic. “How long have you been here at UT, Bill?”

“Twenty-five years,” I said. “No—twenty-six.”

“You've had a really good run.”

“Uh-oh. You make it sound like it's over.”

“Over? Lord, no! I'm just saying, you've done remarkable things here. Built the Anthropology Department into one of the best in the country. Created a forensic facility that's known around the world. Just when I think you've topped out, you go and prove me wrong.”

He reached down and opened a manila file on his desk—a near-identical twin to the one I'd just illegally photographed—and took out a piece of stationery, thick and crisp and never folded. He made a show of reading it, then stood—at this point, he'd been sitting for all of sixty seconds—and strode toward me, the paper in his left hand, his right arm outstretched. “By golly, I just want to be the first person to shake hands with the Professor of the Year!”

I shook his hand and stood, a move made awkward and slightly perilous by the vigorous shaking he was giving my arm. “Well, thank you. I'm honored. UT has plenty of great professors, so it means a lot to be singled out by my students.”

His brow furrowed. “UT? Students? What are you talking about?”

My brow furrowed. “Well, you just said I'm UT's Professor of the Year, so—”

“UT, hell!” he all but shouted. “U.S.! You've just been
named National Professor of the Year! For the whole damn country!”

“Me? Are you sure?”

“Good God, man, of
course
I'm sure. Here, read it for yourself.”

He handed me the letter. The stationery felt even richer than it looked—thick and stiff, with a soft texture that was closer to fabric than to paper.
CASE
, read the logo at the top.
COUNCIL FOR THE ADVANCEMENT AND SUPPORT OF EDUCATION
. The letter was actually addressed to UT's president, not the provost. “It gives me great pleasure to inform you that Dr. William Brockton has been chosen as U.S. Professor of the Year,” the letter began. “This is a great honor, not just for Dr. Brockton, but for the University of Tennessee as well—a tribute to the outstanding climate the university provides for teaching, research, and academic service.”

“Well, I'll be,” I said. “This is a nice surprise. Like I said, I'm honored—even more, now.”

“We'd like to make a big deal of this,” he said. “Put you on the front page of the
News-Sentinel
. Get you on ‘Alive at Five' on WBIR.”

I shrugged. “Fine with me,” I said. “I always have a good time with those folks.”

“But I think we ought to go bigger,” he said, holding a hand in the air in front of us, as if to conjure the image. “Picture this. Neyland Stadium. Halftime at the Homecoming game. A stage at the center of the field, the fifty-yard line.
One hundred thousand
people watching as I hang a medal around your neck.” I nearly smiled at his phrasing and intonation—had he actually emphasized the word “I”?—but suddenly a dark cloud cast a pall on the glowing scene as I remembered:
Satterfield
. With Satterfield gunning for me,
I'd be a sitting duck at a halftime ceremony. Immobilized at midfield, I'd be a human bull's-eye, smack at the center of a huge, oval target.

“That's a really nice offer,” I said, “but I don't think I'd feel comfortable with that.”

“But . . . of
course
you would,” he said. “This is your big moment, Bill. Yours and UT's. You can't possibly pass it up.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, “but I can. And I do. Like I say, I'm deeply honored, and I'm very grateful to UT for providing such a supportive place for me all these years. But standing there in the middle of the stadium, in the glare of the spotlight? Can't do it.”

“Oh, come on,” he said, his tone somewhere between cajoling and scolding. But I was already on the way out, one hand raised in the air to wave good-bye and, in the process, to snatch away his glittering fantasy.

PEGGY FIXED ME WITH AN ODD, INTENSE STARE WHEN
I walked into the departmental office a few minutes later. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Ish,” I said. “Okay-ish. It's been a strange morning.”

She raised her eyebrows, inviting me to elaborate, but I didn't want to go into it. “Tell you later,” I said. “Hold my calls, would you?” And with that, I retreated—from her office, and from the interaction—leaving her looking hurt and rejected as I began the hundred-yard run the length of the football field, to my sanctuary. My hideaway. My self-imposed exile. Was it my imagination, or did she mutter
Yeah, right
as I started down the hall?

IT WAS A DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE SORT OF DAY. ON
the sunny Dr. Jekyll side of the street, a prestigious national educational group had just decided I was the best professor in the entire United States. In the dark alley of Mr. Hyde, a sadistic serial killer wanted to destroy me, and probably my family, too, in the most painful way his twisted brain could devise. Like a Ping-Pong ball, I ricocheted back and forth, back and forth, from best to worst, from elation to despair. Finally, on the millionth bounce, I said, “Enough!” I desperately needed to reboot.

Suddenly, stunned, I remembered:
Shafiq! 16–17!
Were they indeed one and the same? Was it possible that, digitized within the phone clipped to my belt, was another nugget of information that could answer the question once and for all?

I opened the phone's camera application and began scrolling through the images I had taken. There were more than a hundred of them—some crisp, some blurred, all maddeningly, illegibly tiny. I would die of eyestrain, I realized, before I made it halfway through the documents I had photographed.

Miranda picked up the intercom on the second beep. “Hey,” I said, not bothering with a greeting. “You're pretty savvy with a cell phone, right?”

“Compared to the average twelve-year-old, I'm a dolt. Compared to you, I'm Stephen Hawking.”

“Then come be brilliant,” I said. “I took a bunch of pictures with my phone, but they're tiny. Is there a way to see them on a computer screen, lots bigger?”

“There is,” she said, “but it would take a genius. I'll be right there.”

MIRANDA LOADED THE PICTURES—ALL 127 OF
them—onto her laptop, which she'd brought from the bone lab. “I've got Photoshop and iPhoto on this machine,” she said. “You're probably still running Hieroglyph 1.0. Here, give me your phone.” She connected a short cable and pressed a few keys. As if by magic, photos began flashing across her laptop screen. “First thing, let's get rid of the ones that aren't in focus. That'll cut out the number in half, at least.” She began scrolling through the photos at a blistering pace, hitting the delete key with a staccato speed that put me in mind of an old-time telegrapher.

“How do you even know the ones you're deleting aren't good?” I said. “They're only on the screen for a nanosecond before you get rid of them.”

“Trust me, they're bad,” she said. “If they look like a Weather Channel satellite photo, we're not going to be able to read the words, no matter how long we stare at them. Here, I'll show you.” She went into the trash file and pulled out one of the deleted pictures. Everything was a swirling blur.

“Looks like Hurricane Miranda,” I acknowledged grudgingly. “Okay, carry on. Sorry I doubted you.”

“Never do it again,” she said, quoting one of her favorite lines from
The Princess Bride
. Once she had separated the fuzzy chaff from the crisp wheat, she went back to the beginning, starting with the passport images. The first one showed the document's two-page spread, but the next one was a close-up, zoomed in on the young man's face. “Wow,” said Miranda. “Joanna really nailed it, didn't she? I mean, the only thing she missed is that mole on his left cheek.” She shook her head. “Poor kid.”

Filling the screen, the image was more poignant than it
had been as a thumbnail. The boy's face was slender, his brown eyes large and frightened. Was he afraid of traveling to an unknown land, or afraid because he lived in a country ruled by military tyrants his parents despised? Or was he afraid—was it possible?—because he possessed, somehow, some uncanny, sixth-sense premonition about the terrible darkness that lay in wait for him in the not-too-distant future?

After the passport came contact information: the address of the apartment where he was living; the name and number of his landlord and roommates; the address and telephone number, back in Egypt, of his parents—before they were arrested, I assumed, not in the hellhole where they were probably now being beaten and “interrogated.”

Miranda had been overly generous when she estimated that half my images might be usable; as it turned out, only 31 of the original 127 had survived her merciless culling, and it was number 31 that made me jump to my feet. “Look,” I said, tapping the screen with one hand and grabbing Miranda's arm with the other. “Look!”

“
Oww
,” she said. “Use your words, not your painful viselike grip. What?”

“Sorry. It's a letter from a doctor. He says Shafiq needs a reduced course load because he's been injured in a car accident.”

“So it does. ‘Orthopedic surgery on the right humerus and right femur.' Golly.” Miranda read more, her tone becoming as excited as mine. “‘Bones repaired with plates and screws'—my God, it really
is
him!”