while tea and coffee and pastries and other items were being consumed, at each table there were computers and computer screens, lined up, row after row. He took in the sight, jaw agape, at the men (and women!) sitting before the computers. A young man came over to him, frowning, wearing the foreign costume of a white shirt and necktie, and blue jeans, and said in a sharp voice, ‘Yes?’
‘I… I wish to rent a computer.’
The man sneered at him. ‘You have the money?’
Amil fumbled in his robe, took out the American money, which he passed over to the man who grunted, held it up to the light, felt it with his fingers, and nodded, walking back to a counter. Amil followed and the man, with some papers and a small black object in his hand, said, ‘All right, then, you can—’
Amil blushed with shame, remembered his instructions. ‘I… must have a computer with a drive… a disk drive.’
The man shook his head. ‘Very well. Come with me.’
Amil followed the man to one end of the place — a cafe, such an odd name — and he felt himself recoil as he saw two Western women — dressed like whores in T-shirts and shorts, their knapsacks resting against their booted feet — giggling and whispering to each other as they examined a shared computer screen.
They came to an empty booth in the corner, and Amil saw crumpled-up papers and napkins littering the floor and the table where the computer was, but the man made no attempt to clean it up. Amil sat down and the man presented a paper to him and said some long sentences that he had a hard time understanding, but even this had been part of his training. He just nodded and scrawled his signature at the bottom of the paper. The man took the paper away and put the small black object on top of the computer. It was a timer, with blood-red numerals, and it was set at 60, and as Amil watched it switched to 59.
The manager sneered again. ‘Do you need any help, boy? If so, that will cost you more.’
Amil shook his head, now feeling anger at how the man was humiliating him. ‘No, I do not need your help. I am quite able to do what must be done.’
The manager laughed. ‘Maybe so, but it will be your fault if you do something wrong over the next hour. Not mine. The time is paid for. Not anything else.’
Amil watched as the man walked away, and when Amil felt like he was no longer being observed he went to work.
From his inside pocket again, Amil took out his directions, put the paper down next to the keyboard, smoothed it out. With fingers now seeming as thick as tree, trunks, he started tapping at the keyboard, following the directions, feeling the twisted feeling in his guts ease away as the Sudanese’s directions worked with no difficulty, as he set up the computer to do what had to be done. He remembered, during one of the sessions, asking the Sudanese why he was being sent to do what seemed to be a simple task, and the Sudanese had replied, ‘Some of us are well known. We need to stay in the villages, in the forests, in the mountains. A young man such as yourself… with no history, no record, he can do much.’
And of course, that had made much sense.
There. It was time.
He took out the black rectangular piece of plastic, remembered what the Sudanese had called it. A disk. But weren’t disks round? And this one was square! And was it true what the Sudanese had said, that so much information, so many words — and even pictures! — could be stored on such a thing?
He looked around the computer, found the slot that the disk went in, and inserted it. And as the Sudanese had predicted, there was a humming and a clicking noise, and when that noise ended, Amil continued, his fingers no longer seeming so thick and awkward.
On the screen something was now displayed and, reading with some difficulty, he saw that, again, the Sudanese was telling the truth. There were little cartoons on the screen, each with a number, from one to twenty, and the Sudanese had said that each little cartoon meant a photograph. And Amil had said, what kind of photographs? And the Sudanese had said, ‘Of flowers. Trees. Mountains.’
Amil had been disappointed. Pictures? That was all he had to do? Send pictures to some other computer in some other part of the world?
And the Sudanese had laughed with delight. ‘Not to worry, my son. You see, there is an infidel trick we have learned. Like a game or a puzzle. Even in a photo of a flower, an innocent-looking flower, there can be an important message hidden.’
In a picture? he had asked. How?
The Sudanese had shaken his head. ‘Not for you to worry. It is enough that you know that these pictures are much more than pictures. They are messages to our brethren, important messages that must be sent.’
Now Amil went to work again, setting up e-mail messages, with an address that meant nothing to him — a string of numbers and letters — and he laboriously went through the instructions, somehow setting up a way where a message sent across the computer lines or wires or whatever they were would also carry the pictures that were represented by the little cartoons. The Sudanese had earlier led him through this process, over and over again, and it reminded him of the long days at the madrassa, sitting cross-legged on the floor, chanting the verses from the Koran. Amil was not sure of how the Prophet, God bless His Name, would think of these complicated machines, but Amil hoped that his work today would find favor.
There. One message sent out. One of twenty.
Nineteen more to go.
He flexed his fingers, surprised at how tired they seemed, for the work was not physical yet was hard enough. Strange how that would be.
Time for another message.
He went back to work.
And later Amil looked up at the timer. Eight minutes to go, and only three messages left. It had gone smoothly and there was plenty of time left to do the last messages, and as he bent over the keyboard — his fingers now quite stiff — he heard some raised voices and the opening of the door. He looked up at the cafe’s entrance.
Two uniformed policemen were there.
He stopped, hands frozen over the keyboard.
And he could not believe it, but they were the two same policemen he had seen earlier, with the fierce mustaches and the wooden staves. He felt something gurgling at the back of his throat. Caught! But how? Did the policemen follow him here, did they know what he had been doing, how he had been contacted by the Sudanese?
And was his work here a failure? Before he could even finish it?
The policemen were now looking in his direction, talking to the cafe manager who was frowning. Amil tried to swallow, found his tongue was as dry as the dust outside his home. He forced himself to look away, to get back to what he was doing.
He looked up at the clock.
Just six minutes left.
Back to the keyboard, don’t look up at the clock. Send out the e-mail message.
Two left.
The voices of the policemen seemed louder. They seemed to be walking towards him.
Time. Four minutes left.
God is great, he said over and over again to himself, God is great, God is great, God is great.
The policemen’s voices were louder, there was no doubt.
They were coming closer to him.
Another e-mail successfully sent.
One left.
A glance up at the clock.
One minute.
His fingers typed out the e-mail address, and he cursed himself.
A mistake.
