The shock took a while to fade. The idea that the Agency considered me expendable, yes, but more than that I couldn’t shake the image of Collins, tossed against that stone wall, the way his head had lost its form. His broken body stuck with me as we drove north, into the wide black desert that had been a home to my people, but to me looked like the antithesis of home, a terrain that left nowhere to hide. Just above our heads, the moon followed us.
I was cold, and I had to urinate, but Weaver explained over the wind that we didn’t have time to stop. We couldn’t know how close they were—all we knew for sure was that they were following.
“Who?” I demanded. “What the hell is a Tourist?”
Weaver wiped at his nose, then checked his fingers, presumably for blood, but it was too dark to be able to see anything. He moved to where I was being jostled against the back of the cab and leaned close so I could hear him above the engine. “In my day, years ago, Tourists served as the sharp end of American foreign policy. We were headquartered in Manhattan.”
“I never heard of them.”
“That was the idea. We had some notable failures, but more often than not we did all right. And we kept our secret until a decade ago, when the department was closed down.”
“Why?”
“Because it was wiped out. Dozens of Tourists killed by our rivals in China, all in the space of twenty-four hours.”
I rubbed my aching forehead and wondered if I was going to be sick. The noise and constant bumping through potholes, and now a story of mass murder by the Chinese. “You were one?” I asked.
“For a while. Then I moved into administration.”
“I see.”
“You don’t,” he said, “but you don’t have to.”
He was right. All I had to do was listen and remember, so that at some point in the future—a point that was growing increasingly distant—I could sit down with Paul and Sally and Mel and spill the entire story. It was their job to understand.
“Wait,” I said. “If it was closed down, who was shooting at us?”
“All I said was that it had been shut down, not what happened later.”
I looked out into the night, eyeing the moon. I could make out craters. This was not where I was supposed to be. “Why all this?” I asked him. “Why didn’t you just come to DC and tell your story? Dial a phone? Send a fucking email?”
He didn’t answer at first, and when I looked over I saw he was also staring at the moon. He said, “Everything would be intercepted. Any call. Any email. Letters.” He shook his head. “Me.”
“Then send someone else.”
He shook his head again. “I can’t put them at risk.”
“Of what?” I demanded. When he didn’t answer, I said, “Who cares if they intercept an email?”
“Because they can’t know what I know. And they can’t know who I’m telling it to.”
“Who are they?”
“We’ll get to that,” he said, and his answer angered me so much I couldn’t even speak.
At the Moroccan frontier, we blew through what seemed like a ghost village, a scattering of buildings and a single gas station; then we were back in the desert. Though it felt like forever, only an hour and a half passed before we were pulling into the coastal town of Tarfaya. I could make out wide, dusty streets and single-story buildings in the occasional streetlight. Faraway dogs barked. Though I’d never visited Tarfaya, I had an image of it from Haroun’s emails when he’d taken a day trip there. The cafés with their molded plastic chairs, the long, deep beach, and the rowboats tied up along a rocky port. And people: grizzled men chain-smoking over thimbles of coffee, robed women with piercing, beautiful eyes, and children smeared with the grit of childhood kicking soccer balls in the streets. Now the town was asleep and empty.
At the gate to the port, a policeman stopped us, and the woman behind the wheel had a short conversation with him that I couldn’t make out. Eventually the cop stepped around to smile at me and Weaver as he slipped some bills into his shirt pocket, then glanced at the empty space around us as if we weren’t there. He grinned like someone who’d been well paid for his blindness. He wandered away, and we began to move.
We finally climbed out along the water’s edge, where fishing boats bobbed in a cramped line along the port’s narrow peninsula. I looked in vain for a bathroom, then peered deep into the blackness of the Atlantic. I remembered what Haroun had called Tarfaya: The end of the world.
From one of the fishing boats came a man as white and out of place as Weaver, who nodded in my direction. “What about him?” he asked in what sounded like a German accent.
“He’s coming with us,” Weaver explained.
“Christ. Phones? Signals?”
“He’s clean.”
“I’ll find out.”
Weaver shook his head. “We don’t have time.”
The man, still angry, pointed at me. “This way.”
I looked at Weaver, who nodded, so I followed the man up the path to the piers. “I don’t have anything,” I said, trying to reassure him, but he didn’t answer. He just kept walking down the gangplank. Only the one boat was running, its engine grinding and gasping unconvincingly.
“In the water,” said the man.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
I knew what he wanted, and why, but I decided to stand my ground. “No.”
With disconcerting speed, the man grabbed my lapels and swung, using centrifugal force to propel me off the edge and into the cold water. It was deeper than I’d thought, and I was submerged completely. When I came up, chilled to the bone, the man was on his knees, peering down at me.
“Stay there a moment,” he said.
“Fuck you.”
He smiled, giving away the reason for his perpetual frown—his teeth were small, discolored nubs. He turned to look at the black woman running down the gangplank toward us. At that moment, I felt the warm release of my bladder emptying into the murky Atlantic, bringing on a mix of relief and shame.
“He’s clean now,” he called to the black woman, then turned back to offer me a hand. “Come on.”
I didn’t move, only treaded the dirty water. When the woman reached us, she said to him, “Griffon, you’re taking the truck to Ben Khlil.”
“No, Kanni, I am not.”
“You want them to be waiting for us?”
He withdrew his hand and stood up. “Fine. I’ll see you in Switzerland.”
As he skulked off she squatted and held out a hand to me. “He’s a dick,” she said as she caught my hand and tugged. “But he’s our dick.”