It was still dark when we pulled into Arrecife, and up on the hill the lights from flat-faced houses twinkled down at us. The Moroccan went to speak with the harbormaster while the three of us found an all-night café along the stone harbor. In Spanish, Kanni ordered a round of espressos, and we sat at a plastic table on plastic chairs and looked out at the water. When the Moroccan arrived, he gave Weaver a nod, swallowed his coffee, and headed off again.
“Ferry doesn’t leave until morning,” Weaver told me. “I need to go talk to someone.”
“Okay…”
“Kanni will stay with you.”
She kept staring out at the sea, as if she hadn’t heard a thing. When Weaver finished his coffee, he stood and stretched, suppressing a yawn. “Maybe you’ll want to get her story while I’m gone. It’s very interesting.”
I gave her a look, but she still wasn’t looking at me, so I said, “I’d like that.”
“Good,” Weaver said, then walked off, hands in his pockets, casual, up toward the town.
“Would you like to tell me your story?” I asked.
Kanni ran a tongue over her teeth behind her lips and finally looked in my direction. “No.”
I finished my coffee and tried to get as comfortable as possible in the uncooperative chair. What I wanted, more than Kanni’s story, was a phone to call home. Home, not headquarters—I was suddenly unsure about them. Did I believe I was expendable, as Weaver had said? That I had been sent on such an unlikely mission to keep Weaver occupied until the wet works team showed up? No. There was no way I was going to take Weaver’s word over the Agency’s. But he’d planted a seed of doubt, and that was enough to make me hesitant. Which, of course, was precisely what he’d intended.
The jet lag was returning with a vengeance, and when I closed my eyes for a moment’s rest I dreamed of a day when Rashid was a baby. During an afternoon nap, he rolled off our bed and hit the floor. He woke, crying, then vomited a little, and fearing a concussion I scooped him up in my arms and with Laura sped the ten blocks to the hospital. Along with fear for my son’s health, I’d feared that this new thing, parenthood, was something I was particularly unsuited for. I feared that eventually I was going to kill the poor child.
When I woke, back aching, the sun was high over the African horizon, and in the golden light I could finally get a good look at Arrecife’s harbor and the houses in the distance. Kanni was gone, and Weaver was sitting in her place, a phone to his ear, listening somberly to someone. When I sat up, I felt the weight of Collins’s pistol in the pocket of my jacket. How had they trusted me with it?
On the table was a plastic bowl filled with some kind of paste. It turned out to be bienmesabe, a sweet almond pudding that would have been delicious even if I hadn’t been famished.
As he listened to the phone, his bleak expression deepening, I thought of his child, Stephanie, who according to the file had been born, curiously enough, on September 11, 2001. Seventeen years old. Almost a legal adult.
Sometimes your inabilities take time to show themselves, and just when you think you’ve made it, when you’ve muddled your way through parenthood and are ready to release your child into the world, you screw up in the homestretch. Now his child was in hiding. His wife, too. His actions had led to their exile from the world, which in itself was a kind of death. I wondered how that made him feel.
“That’s our boat,” Weaver said as he hung up, nodding in the direction of a large ferry that hadn’t been in the harbor when we arrived. Birds circled it and cawed loudly. The bleakness in his face dissipated, but only a little. “Like your breakfast?”
“It’s sweet.”
“Everything here is sweet,” he said, then pushed himself into a standing position. “Let’s move.”
I followed him down to the harbor, and we found Kanni waiting among tired-looking European tourists and fishermen drinking beer. She, too, had a phone to her ear, and when we approached she hung up and said to Weaver, “You heard about Griffon?”
He nodded, that miserable look returning. “Let’s make sure his family’s safe.”
“On it,” she said, and headed toward the ferry, making another call.
When I asked what that was about, he rocked his head, considering whether or not to answer, and finally made his decision: “The guy who threw you in the water. Griffon. He drove on to Ben Khlil, but didn’t make it. He was found in the truck outside town.”
I remembered how, for a moment there, I’d wanted to kill Griffon. “Dead?”
“I suspect they wanted him alive,” Weaver said somberly, “but he made that impossible for them.” He eyed me as we walked. “Griffon was one of our best. Smart and loyal and airtight ethics. It’s a rare and wonderful combination.”
“And you’ll take care of his family?”
Weaver squinted because behind me the sun was bright. Ahead of us, people were climbing the gangplank and driving cars onto the ferry. “As soon as they ID’d him, his wife and two children became visible. We have no choice.”
Weaver’s family wasn’t the only one to suffer because of his actions. “How long can you hide them?”
“You’d be surprised,” Weaver said, then opened his hand to usher me onto the gangplank first.
Unlike the other travelers, Kanni, Weaver, and I were taken by an old sailor with a limp to a locked room near the bridge. Inside was a modest cabin: two cots, a cabinet of drinks, and a tiny bathroom. I excused myself and peed like a racehorse, then washed up and settled in one of the cots. Kanni stepped outside, and Weaver took the other cot and told me to take out the recorder.
“This ferry takes thirty hours to reach Spain,” he said. “That should be enough time.”
“For absolutely everything?”
He leaned back in the cot, cupping his hands behind his head. “No one knows absolutely everything, but the things I don’t have direct knowledge of I can make educated guesses about.”
“And then?” I asked. “Once you finish telling me absolutely everything?”
“You report to headquarters, just like you planned. And get back home.”
I sighed involuntarily. It was the best news I’d heard in a while.
“And if everything works out,” he added, “I’ll finally get back to mine.”