“Nothing like that.”
“You’ve remained in regular contact?”
“Emails a couple of times a week.”
“He hasn’t mentioned any problems related to his current role?”
“Alex loves his work. He lives for it.” Marc fingered the woman’s file. “How did you come up with an intel work-up on a missing civilian?”
Walton looked uncomfortable for the first time. “I never left.”
This was news. “Did Alex know?”
Walton shrugged that away. “Officially I’m gone. But I was asked to remain on as a consultant.”
“To whom?”
“I’ll tell you on the way to the airport.” Walton’s gaze was the only part of him that had not softened with the passing years. “I’m not even going to bother with asking if you’re in. Go pack. You’re wheels up in three hours.”
– – Marc’s house was a Colonial-era brownstone overlooking one of the city’s miniature parks. The green was rimmed by ancient oaks, so tall they could reach across the street and shelter his bedroom window. Marc’s father had bought the house from the city back when the neighborhood had been a drug-infested war zone. The city had condemned the abandoned hulks, cleared out the drug paraphernalia, and sold them for a song. The renovations had taken five years and carried his father through grieving over the loss of Marc’s mother. After his father’s death, Marc had bought the place from his stepmother, who had wanted to return to her family in Spartanburg. Marc often wondered what his father would have thought, knowing the beautiful old place had comforted two grieving generations.
Ambassador Walton remained downstairs. He claimed his heart condition no longer permitted him the luxury of climbing stairs. Marc was grateful for the momentary solitude. As he tossed his gear into a bag, his gaze remained held by the photograph on his bedside table. Marc zipped up the case and sat down on the side of the bed. Walton’s querulous voice called from downstairs. Marc did not respond. He was too caught up in a conversation that had lasted three long years.
The photograph had been taken on just another sunlit afternoon. The brownstone did not possess much of a yard. So like most of their new neighbors, he and Lisbeth had claimed the park as their own. That day, they had taken an impromptu picnic across the street to watch a lazy springtime sunset. Marc had been going off somewhere the next morning. Such outings had been Lisbeth’s way to slow him down, force him to turn away from the coming pressures and pay attention to her.
Marc had taken her picture in a moment when the veils of normal life had fallen away, and Lisbeth shone with love. The photograph had resided in an album until the week after the funeral, when he had awakened in the night and realized that not only was she gone, but he would someday forget her ability to perfume almost any moment.
Marc studied the picture, wishing there was some way to formally acknowledge the fact that the time had come to move on. He had not felt this close to Lisbeth for a long time. The sense that she again filled his room and his heart left him certain that she wanted him to go. Do this thing.
A man, Marc silently told the photograph in his hands, could overdose on stability and quiet. Recently his most fervent prayer had contained no words at all, just a silent secret hunger. If he had been able to name his yearning, it would have been for pandemonium. Something to lift his life from boredom and sameness.
He remained there, staring at the best part of his past, until Walton’s voice drew him into the unknown.
Chapter Two
Sameh climbed the courthouse stairs, burdened by far more than the day’s heat. His name meant “he who is benevolent.” A more ancient interpretation was “he who is elevated,” in a spiritual sense. This particular morning, Sameh felt neither.
Nine o’clock in the morning and already the temperature approached thirty degrees Celsius, ninety degrees Fahrenheit. It was the twenty-third day of Ramadan. Muslim festivals were calculated on the twenty-eight-day lunar cycle, and this year Ramadan fell in May. During this festival, devout Muslims neither ate nor drank from sunrise to sunset.
Sameh was a lawyer and a member of the Syrian Christian Church, the majority church for Iraqi Christians- those who had not either fled or been decimated under Saddam. Out of general respect for the Muslim culture, Sameh did not eat or drink in public during Ramadan. But he was not a man accustomed to fasting. And he detested the way life ground to a halt for this entire month. Working hours were shortened and almost nothing got done. People grew increasingly irritable, and the heat only made things worse.
Sameh put off anything he possibly could until after Ramadan ended. But this day’s task could not wait. A child’s life was at stake.
He entered the Al-Rashid courthouse in the center of Baghdad. The place had not been swept since the festival began. All the custodial staff could be seen seated in the shade of a courtyard palm, smoking cigarettes and muttering in sullen tones.
The courthouse had originally been an Ottoman palace. Now it was stripped and battered and left with nothing but false pride and glorified memories. What had once been four formal chambers were now filled with papers and hostile employees and yellow dust. The air-conditioning had been out of commission for months. Most of the computers dotting the tables had shorted out. Documents were tied with twine and bundled like bricks, forming barriers between the office workers and their getting anything done.
Sameh waited his turn before a desk midway down the second hall. Omar was the senior clerk of court. He had been appointed to his position during the old regime. Under Saddam Hussein, every university graduate like Omar had been guaranteed a government job for life. He had been doing this job for twenty-three years and knew nothing else.
Life for people like Omar was not pleasant. Since Saddam’s fall, salaries had shot up two thousand percent. Even so, they had not kept up with inflation. Omar considered himself a member of the lost generation. While in his twenties, he had endured the last months of the Iran-Iraq war. As a loyal veteran, he had been rewarded with a job in the courthouse. Which he hated. Then he had endured ten years of international embargo, followed by the wars that ousted Saddam. Whatever came now, whatever promise might evolve for the new Iraq, it would never touch him. As far as Omar was concerned, his life was over. He was forty-eight.
Normally, the only way to obtain anything from Omar was by having a senior judge order it. But most judges treated Ramadan as a holiday. Fasting made the judges who remained grumpy and impatient, which meant lawyers used any pretext possible to postpone trials. Heaven protect any criminal forced to enter a courtroom during Ramadan.
Sameh watched the man refuse one entreaty after another, and knew he had one slim chance. When his turn came, he decided to risk telling Omar the truth.
“I come to you as a supplicant,” he began. “As a beggar seeking bread only you can grant me.”
A faint spark ignited deep in the clerk’s bored gaze.
“My client is a businessman. His youngest child has been abducted.”
Omar had the decency to wince. “When?”
“Two afternoons ago.”
A dozen others with courthouse business stood close behind Sameh, waiting their turn to make their entreaties. They moaned in unison at the news.
“Tragic,” one said.
“An epidemic,” said another.
Nowadays adults who saw children playing in the street threatened to punish them unless they went back indoors. Which of course the children hated. But a child who escaped into the hot Ramadan sunlight was a child under grave threat. Thieves had taken to cruising the streets of wealthy neighborhoods, snatching any child who happened to be alone.
This was what had happened to the son of Sameh’s client.
