At 4:45 AM, after the first real night’s sleep since the Paris café attack, the hotel wake-up call pulled Maggie out of a near coma. It took her a moment to recall where she was—the Airport Hilton by Dulles International. She fumbled for the telephone by the bedside, answered it, thanked the automated service before she realized it was automated. Climbing out of bed she stumbled over to the bathroom where she made coffee. She needed to ping Kafka to keep the Dara ruse going, in the hopes that Abraqa was going to continue.
Maggie had prepared the skeletons of some basic texts the night before in a word file. Even though she’d been learning Arabic for over a year, working with a different alphabet, and writing from right to left didn’t come naturally. And the more she played Dara, the more she risked being caught out.
She powered up Dara’s phone and connected.
There was a text waiting:
KAFKA: are you there? I pray that you are recovering
She typed a response: critical care. so many drugs. but better, yes - slowly
Kafka answered almost immediately, giving her a jolt of both encouragement and apprehension.
KAFKA: alhamdulillah! Where are you?
Per the tracker app Kafka had buried on Dara’s phone, he should have been able to tell where she was, more or less. She had fudged the GPS coordinates to show she was at the American Hospital of Paris. Maybe he was testing her.
DARA: American Hospital
KAFKA: safe to call?
DARA: guard on door. nurses, doctors in and out. risky just to text. if i stop texting at any time you will know someone has come in.
KAFKA: must speak to you soon
That’s what she was afraid of. She’d have to put him off.
DARA: too soon. too risky. not well, plz be patient, habibi
KAFKA: can’t stay in paris much longer. have to get back
Her blood pressure ramped up. That very thought had been plaguing her.
DARA: but what about us?
KAFKA: when can we talk? so much to say
DARA: will try but not now - they have IV in me, not easy to move
KAFKA: must see you
DARA: you must promise not to come here. promise me that, habibi
There was a lengthy pause.
KAFKA: I promise. I will wait to hear your voice. The memory of it lingers.
And that was the problem. How to recreate Dara’s voice and continue this charade?
KAFKA: I want to finally see you in person. I think about that time on skype.
The Skype call wasn’t in Dara’s notes. But on her deathbed she said she had done one videoconference with Kafka.
DARA: I’ll try to call tomorrow. don’t leave. enta kol shay’a. You are my all.
Signing off, she powered down the phone.
How long could she string Kafka along? She had to keep him in Paris—until the op was formally reapproved. Until a plan had been put in place. Until she could return.
She hung up, took a shower, letting the hot jets push the shooting one more day into the past. Letting Dara’s dying face fade one more day back into her memory. Even so, she could hear the shots, see the bodies falling. How long would it take? Weeks? Months? She forced herself to focus on the task at hand—how to have a live conversation with Kafka and sound like Dara.
While she was getting dressed an idea came to her.
She pulled her laptop over onto the bed and did a Google search for the name: Elizabeth Stotz.
There she was on LinkedIn. Elizabeth Stotz was still at the DLI: Defense Language Institute in Monterey, where Maggie had taken Arabic.
She called Ed. He was staying in the same hotel. He answered the phone on the third ring, his voice thick with sleep.
“Please tell me this isn’t an emergency, Maggs.”
“Isn’t everything?”
“You talk to your old man?”
“He’s good with talking to Senator Brahms. I think we can extend Dara’s keep-alive at the American Hospital of Paris.”
“Slow down. Is Brahms a done deal?”
“It’s going to happen, Ed.” She hoped so, anyway. “In the meantime, I got Kafka breathing down my neck for a live phone call. Simple texts aren’t cutting it anymore.”
“Maggie, we need to get Abraqa officially reauthorized before we interact with a hot person.”
“We don’t have that luxury, Ed. Kafka’s going to skedaddle if I don’t whisper sweet nothings into his ear real time soon.”
She heard Ed light a cigarette, breathe in poison. Exhale. “Can you pull it off, Maggs?”
“I wish.”
“You were at DLI learning Arabic for how long? I should know. I had it approved. Unless you were off at the beach the whole time.”
“I don’t sound anything like Dara,” she said.
“You’re the techie. Use voice conversion.”
“It takes forever to reconstruct speech digitally with voice modulation and it’s not flexible enough. We need to be able to speak to him on the fly.”
“A man in the throes of desire is going to hear what he wants to hear, Maggs.”
True enough. Ed had spent the better part of two years being toyed with by an Irish girl who dumped him once he got her a US work permit using Agency contacts. The result was Ed smoking two packs a day and gaining thirty pounds.
“Here’s another wrinkle, Ed. My Arabic isn’t bad but it’s MSA—Modern Standard Arabic. Spoken Arabic is a whole different animal. Think BBC English versus Alabama good-old-boys. Kafka speaks Baghdadi—one of the four major dialects. I can fake the written, using Dara’s old texts as guides—but Kafka’ll spot me before I finish a sentence if I open my mouth.”
“Then we need to punt, Maggs,” Ed said. “Push back best you can. Make the bastard wait.”
“Kafka needs convincing now—before he runs. We need a stand-in who sounds like Dara on the phone—with me feeding her the lines.”
“Can you use Aunt Amina? She knows—knew—Dara.”
“Not a bad idea but Amina sounds nothing like Dara.” Maggie continued. “We need someone who sounds like Dara and speaks fluent Baghdadi Arabic. And has Agency clearance.”
Ed took a drag on his cigarette. “Does she have to do card tricks, too? Ride a unicycle?”
“When I took Arabic at DLI, we went out drinking with the instructors. One of them did impressions—Katherine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Rosie Perez—you name it, she nailed her. Had us in stitches. Her name is Elizabeth Stotz. She could do Dara in a heartbeat.”
“Stotz?” She heard Ed fumbling for a pen.
“I can’t very well call her two AM her time,” Maggie said. “But if you expedite it first thing in the morning, get the authorizations and clearances, I can get down to Monterey and hopefully see her tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I’m going to head out now and catch the first flight back to SF.”
She could almost hear what Ed was about to say: Here she was, going ahead without proper authorization. “I know what you’re thinking, Ed,” she said. “This isn’t the way we’re supposed to do it.”
“Walder is going to remind me of that when I meet him tomorrow before I head back myself.” She heard Ed suck on his cigarette. “Is this stunt going to work, Maggs?”
“It has before. And like you said yourself, Ed—desire is the hook. Kafka wants to believe.”