Dark Zone

He’d seen it as a compliment then. Now he wasn’t so sure.

“Semper fi,” the lieutenant said as he left Dean and Karr in a waiting room upstairs in the embassy. “Good luck, sir.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Dean. “Semper fi.”

“Nice furniture, huh?” said Karr. He dropped back into a frail-looking antique chair against the wall.

“What are we going to do now?” Dean asked.

Karr shrugged. “We give the Art Room time to sort this all out, Charlie. Relax. You’re too wound up.”

“I should be more like you, right? Water off a duck’s back.”

Karr chuckled. Dean knew by now that the op actually was much more serious, much more focused, than he appeared. Under his “What, me worry?” veneer and his corny sense of humor, he was calculating several steps ahead. He was a sharp, truly bright kid who also happened to be immensely big. Dean thought Karr had learned to pretend to be goofy as a boy growing up. Bright kids usually didn’t fit in by showing how smart they were; they had to adopt some sort of act, like class clown. And yet nonchalance was definitely part of Karr’s personality. The op would laugh in the face of a hurricane and probably honestly think getting soaked was interesting.

The door opened. A man in his early thirties stuck his head out into the hallway. “Karr, what are you doing in London?”

“Stephens, you Anglophile you.” Karr jumped up and walked to the man. As he came close, he reared back and started to throw a punch with such force that Dean thought he would knock the man through the wall. But he pulled his fist back at the last second, stopping it a half inch from Stephens’ shoulder.

“I knew you weren’t going to hit me,” said Stephens, whose posture and closed eyes suggested the exact opposite.

“You’re awful trusting for a spook,” said Karr.

“You’re awful obnoxious for an NSA clown.” The man turned to Dean. “You’re Charles Dean?”

“Yes.”

“Nice to meet you. I feel sorry for you, if you have to work with Tommy Karr. He ever tell you how he came to be called Tommy?”

“I’ve never asked.”

“Don’t. Come on inside. I have a million questions for you, though I’m sure you won’t answer most of them.”

Just then there were footsteps on the nearby staircase; Dean and Karr turned to see a young woman and an older man descending. Dean recognized the woman’s skirt before her face came into view — it was the girl they had helped in the street.

“You,” she said as she came into view.

“Well, hey, hello,” said Karr.

“Oh my God. These are the people I told you about, Daddy.” The girl came over to them. “What are you doing in the embassy?”

“Lost my passport,” said Karr, patting his pockets. “Would you believe it? Dumb of me, huh? Lose my head if it wasn’t attached.”

The girl frowned, clearly not believing him. She looked to Dean. He nodded solemnly, but her frown only deepened.

“Thank you for helping my daughter,” said the ambassador.

“Anytime,” said Karr. “Pleasure was mine.”

Stephens stood awkwardly to the side. The ambassador nodded at him, then tapped his daughter’s arm to get her to follow as he went back to the stairs.

“Whoa,” said Stephens inside. “You know the ambassador’s daughter?”

“I know her purse better,” said Karr. He recounted what had happened.

“Wow. I wish I’d saved her purse,” said Stephens.

“Start out with something like her keys, then work your way up,” said Karr. “Now where’s the encrypted phone? I think we’re supposed to call home and get yelled at.”

8

Mussa Duoar smiled at the waiter as he placed the large cup of coffee down on the small table at the cafe on boulevard Saint-Germain near the heart of Paris.

“Merci,” he told the man, thanking him in French. “How long would it take me to get to the Seine from here?”

The accent in the reply, though clipped, cinched it for him.

“You are from Algiers, yes?” Mussa asked, this time in Arabic.

The man stared at him for a moment. “Oui,” he said. The French word was followed by a flood of Arabic, asking Mussa how he knew and if he was Algerian as well.

“No,” said Mussa, speaking again in French. “I came from Egypt many years ago, probably before you were born.”

Mussa was barely thirty and the waiter twenty at least, but he liked to play the old man. It was not so much of an act, he calculated; his experiences had aged him in many ways. He began telling the man about Cairo — a very beautiful city, he claimed, and one he longed to return to.

Perhaps it was beautiful, but Mussa had no claim to it; he had been born in Algeria just as the man had. Mussa’s father had worked against the French and been executed, rather cruelly, nearly a decade after the struggle for independence — a revenge killing ordered by a member of the foreign service, Mussa had learned nearly five years before. Though an infant at the time, his father’s death had shaped Mussa’s life in many ways.

Soon it would be avenged. But there were other matters to deal with now.

“Tell me about yourself,” he told the waiter. “Have you been in France long?”

The man nodded. Something about his gesture — the way his head drooped at first, perhaps — told Mussa more about his attitude toward his adopted land than his words. As the waiter related how he had come to the country several years before, where he lived, how he studied, Mussa watched his face and gestures for the unspoken story — the disappointment and emptiness in his new life, the missing core of connectedness to the community, the doubts about himself and who he truly was. Mussa knew this story very well; it was his business to know.

He did not ask the man outright if he was an observant Muslim. Instead, Mussa mentioned a place in his arrondissement, or quarter of the city.

“Yes, I know that place. It is right across from the mosque,” said the man.

A few more questions and Mussa learned the man’s attitude toward the local teacher at the mosque. As the waiter spoke, his spiritual thirst began to betray itself. His words came more quickly; there was tension and yearning in his voice. Here was a soul in search of salvation.

“A bright young man like you,” said Mussa finally, “should mix with others of potential.” He took a business card from his pocket — it belonged to a pharmacist in a town twenty kilometers away, pinched from the counter — and wrote an address on the back. “The mosque here has a very good set of such people.”

The waiter took the card eagerly, stuffing it into his pocket, then went back to the kitchen to get another order. Mussa took a sip of the coffee, then glanced at his watch. Paris was an hour behind London; the job there would be done by now.

He took another sip of coffee, then left some change in the plate along with the euros for the bill. He got up and got into his car, trolling slowly through the narrow streets as he made his way to his next appointment in the Marais.

Driving through the Jewish quarter of Paris amused Mussa. He found the small plaques dedicated to the dead killed by the Nazis — and the few who resisted them — quaint in a way. As a devout Muslim it could not be said that he liked Jews; on the contrary, he hated them quite probably as much as the thugs who had planted the bomb in the synagogue he was just passing soon after the Germans took over the city. But he did not find them much of a threat, surely not in France. In Israel it was certainly a different story, but here in France it was more sensible —