The sun was almost gone when I finally faced the busy evening streets. A few vendors approached, and in hard-edged Arabic I sent them away. My face and speech might have helped me blend in, but no one had given me a new set of clothes, so the best impression I gave was of a local boy who had grown rich in the West. And why else would I have returned but to spread the wealth? I was a magnet.
The western wind, coming off the Atlantic and pushing inland from Foum el-Oued across twenty-five miles of desert, had cleaned some of the dust from the air, and as I passed teahouses and fruit vendors I felt another urge to call home. At the very least, I could take the same kinds of tourist shots my brother had once taken, so that I could show them off to my family later. But no—if Collins, who I assumed was tailing me at a distance, saw me pulling out my phone, there was no telling what would happen.
I chose to walk the entire distance, about an hour’s stroll. I wasn’t worried about taxi drivers asking questions or collecting records of my time here; I simply wanted to breathe in the culture that I’d always held at arm’s length. I might have spoken my parents’ language at home, but as soon as I was out the front door I’d tried to become like my friends, a child of McDonald’s and MTV, of fads and convenience. To my younger self, American culture was superior simply because my friends knew of no other, and there was no way I was going to draw them into mine by dragging them home to our bi-level shrine to West Africa. My mother’s Daraa robes and dishes of goat meifrisa would only scare them.
Even as a child I was painfully aware of my limits.
Now I was in a land that I knew but did not know, and I pressed on, thinking of my destination.
“So you know about the Library,” Collins said, and when I shook my head I thought he was going to punch a hole in the hotel’s stucco wall. “Okay,” he said, calming himself. “Tell me they at least told you he works for the UN.”
My nod provoked a happy sigh.
“Small favors, right? Well, remember what I said—Weaver’s dad used to work for the Russians. But then the old man moved to the UN, where he created this thing called the Library. His thinking, we gather, was that the intelligence agencies of the first world countries have a monopoly on what is known and not known in the world. And we work together—us and Israel and the UK, Russia and China, all of us together—to filter and alter intelligence to suit our own ends. So he put together his own outfit, the Library, and hid it deep inside the United Nations. Inside UNESCO.”
I tried to picture it but couldn’t. “The UN can barely fund its central air-conditioning, much less an intelligence agency.”
Collins shrugged. “That part’s a mystery. But however they did it, it functioned. And when the old man died back in oh-eight, his boy took it over. Been running it ever since. And from all accounts it worked well, completely under the radar, until it was blown back in October. Same time he disappeared.”
“Blown?”
“Wide open,” Collins said.
“Then why haven’t I heard about it?”
Collins wagged a dirty fingernail at me. “Not to the plebes, man. That’s seventh-floor knowledge. Don’t know who uncovered it first, but soon everyone knew—us, the Europeans, the Chinese … hell, even the Iranians got word of it. And do you know why it was blown?”
I didn’t.
“The Library stopped collecting intelligence; it started creating intelligence. It became an agency of active measures. Liquidating people. Remember Lou Braxton?”
I did. Braxton had been a Silicon Valley darling, founder of Where4, Nexus’s only serious competitor in the encrypted communications sector, until a couple of years ago when he died on a Beijing–San Francisco flight. “He died of cardiac arrest,” I said.
“With a full gram of sodium fluoroacetate in his system.” Off my ignorant look, he said, “Compound 1080—it’s used to kill pests. The company kept that quiet, but it didn’t help. A year later Where4 was bankrupt.”
“The Library murdered him? Why?”
Collins asked. “Who’s to say? They’re global. You hear of Joseph Keller?”
“He’s in the questions. Number eight—explain the circumstances of his death.”
Collins looked disappointed. “That’s all? Well, he was a British accountant. Worked for the Russians—MirGaz. We heard he had a side-gig laundering money for the Massive Brigade, so we put out a Red Notice on him. Then in October, when everything was blowing up, Paris cops found him buried in a park out in the burbs. The Library killing off its weak link. That’s the theory.”
“Jesus.”
“They’re even connected to piracy.”
Though I felt stupid saying it, I couldn’t help but blurt, “Piracy? That makes no sense.”
“Not to me either,” Collins said. “But all that? Someone was bound to notice. Us, the Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese. Everyone noticed. And everyone tried to take it down.”
“Did they succeed?”
“I suppose so—why else would the Library’s director be hiding out in this hellhole?”
“And the Massive Brigade?” I asked.
Collins opened his hands. “Weaver protected them in the past—that’s documented. Whatever you do, don’t underestimate him, okay? He’s hard as shit.”
There was no discernible change when I entered the slums of what Collins called a hellhole. The old Spanish architecture remained, and the dilapidated windows and shallow terraces and crumbling façades lining the narrow streets were just as they had been a few blocks back. But now there were more children running around columns and through alleys, slipping in and out of shadows, while others sat on steps and stared at me as I passed. It was unnerving, but when the fear crept up I thought of Haroun, who had for years traversed places far more ominous than this without anything more than a scratch. He hadn’t been killed by the greed of the world’s poor but by a blind religious fury that could have found him in Paris or London or New York.
I’ve always had a head for geography, and I reached the three-story walkup on Boulevard Al Hizam Al Kabir without a misstep. Like many other buildings I’d passed, it was dead looking, and I gazed up at the shuttered windows, thinking about the children around me, watching from a safe distance. I thought of Collins, watching from among them, and I thought of the uncomfortable gun in my waistband at the base of my back. And I thought that this truly was not part of my job description. I looked at data, and I interpreted it. I did not go searching for the data; that was what people like Collins were paid to do.
In the darkness I found a light switch on a timer, and in its bright glare the stairwell was surprisingly cool, dark, and clean. The banister shook when I touched it, so I left it alone as I ascended to the second floor. Off to the left a family was making noise, and a radio played a Haifa Wehbe hit. Weaver’s apartment—identified by a handwritten 4 on the door—was to my right, and when the timer ended darkness fell. I stood blind, listening to the high melody of Arabic pop but hearing nothing from behind number 4. Then I stepped forward and knocked three times.
Silence. I considered walking away. A man exiles himself in Western Sahara—that means he’s not interested in talking. And from what little I knew from the file, and from the mysterious nuggets Collins had given me, Milo Weaver wasn’t the kind of man who would talk if he wasn’t interested in talking.
But I stayed, if only because I didn’t want to return to those warm, dusty streets so quickly. I knocked again and said, “Hello?”
To my left, a door opened, spilling light into the stairwell, and a small girl peered out at me. The noise and aroma of a family meal wafted out with the Arabic dance music, then an indecipherable father’s shout; the child shut the door. Then number 4 opened quickly, accompanied by dim light, and a sunburned face peered out at me. A scatter of bristle, some of it gray, reached to his cheekbones, and there was gray around his ears. Big, bruised eyes. Looking nothing like his photos, yet exactly like his photos. Sandals, linen pants, a light-colored shirt he was still buttoning.
“Milo Weaver?” I said.
A pleasant enough smile crossed his face, and with a voice rough from disuse, he said, “Well, you certainly took your time.”