The first time Khafaji was handed a deskful of informants’ reports, he was at a complete loss.
“Here’s the Baghdad ‘B’ Set,” is all the Colonel told him. “Get to work. I’ve got meetings in Tashree all afternoon. I want you to brief me on them first thing tomorrow. We’ve got problems we need to identify.”
“Yes, sir,” Khafaji replied. “Would you like me to look for anything in particular?”
The man squinted at Khafaji while putting on his jacket and cap. “You’re supposed to be one of the smart ones.”
“Yes, sir. Is this a complete set?”
“Should be. All I want is for you to tell me what they mean.” He looked at his watch and added, “You’ve got fourteen hours.”
Khafaji sat reading for the next four hours before he reached the bottom of the pile. He got up and found another pack of cigarettes in his jacket, and sat thinking about what he had just read. The reports were from all over the city, and filled with miscellaneous accounts of treachery, fraud and betrayal. It seemed as if the whole of society needed to be put under watch. But still, there was something wrong. These reports contained only information, but no system and no intelligence. As his colleagues went home for the day, Khafaji sat circling names and words and phrases that recurred, but still it meant nothing. He called Suheir to explain and she was forgiving. “That’s OK, I’ll go over to Nidal’s. You get your work done and I’ll see you as soon as you can come home.”
As Khafaji was saying goodbye, Suheir interrupted him. “So be content with what God has divided amongst us, for verily, He who allocated the qualities amongst us also knows them better than anyone else / And when righteousness was apportioned amongst the people, He gave us more than our fair…”
Khafaji didn’t have to think about it at all. “Fair share. And when righteousness was apportioned amongst the people, He gave us more than our fair share. Labid. I love you, Suheir. I’ll be home as soon as I can get there.”
Khafaji sat down with the rest of the reports, determined to go through all of them until he found their pattern. Their rhyme. Their meter.
By the time the Colonel reappeared in the morning, Khafaji was able to show that the importance of the reports wasn’t to be found in what they contained, but rather in the way they shed light on how the network was functioning. There were clusters of supposedly disconnected informants producing remarkably similar claims, and others who were connected, but producing disparate reports.
“The latest attempt hit the networks hard, and now they’re full of holes.”
“Explain,” the Colonel merely said.
“The holes are like lines of poetry that are missing feet. And then there are entire lines that are missing too, and we need to find out where they’ve gone.”
The Colonel looked at Khafaji, puzzled.
“What I mean, sir, is that it is not a complete set at all – and that’s what’s so interesting about it. And we can’t know what they mean until we put them back together.” Khafaji had drawn a chart of the informants, their chains of reporting, and the places in the structure where information was missing or duplicated, or where it had been corrupted.
“I can’t tell you what information belongs in the empty spaces. I can only point out that they’re there. It’s patterns, sir. In poetry, if you know the rhyme and you know the meter, you can make intelligent guesses about pieces that go missing. Each report in this set is like a line, but they were out of order and missing all sorts of feet. First I had to put the lines back into their right order, and then I had to figure out where they were missing pieces. Then I…”
The Colonel stared as Khafaji talked.