I did not get my Starbucks venti the next day, nor the day after that. Instead, after the police converged on the Congress Center and we were allowed to leave the hotel, Mel and Sally hustled me to a black SUV, and Samuel drove us all the way to Zürich, where a private plane was waiting. In the air there was little conversation. Mel and Sally conferred between themselves and talked on satellite phones, Sally eventually turning to me to say, “Did you hear the news?”
“No.”
“The government shutdown is over.”
That meant nothing to me.
When we landed, they brought me directly to Langley, where I was questioned periodically for hours in a cell located in a part of the building so deep in the basement that I hadn’t known it existed. How, they asked, did I know? How had I known what was going to happen? That I figured it out mere seconds before it occurred didn’t seem to faze them.
I’m an analyst, I told them. It’s what I do.
Only after two days of this did they finally call a taxi and send me home. Rashid was at school, and in answer to Laura’s anxious questions I took her hand and walked her into our bedroom. I sat her down, put my head in her lap, and wept.
When she asked about Haroun, I shook my wet face against her thigh and told her I’d been wrong. Haroun was not alive. He had died in 2009 in Mauritania. “I’m never leaving again,” I told her.
Though Sally and Mel never returned, Paul periodically took me from my desk to answer more questions from plain-faced white men. Their questions diverged into territory that was unfamiliar to me. For example, they wanted to know what Milo Weaver knew about Nexus’s relationship with CIA. I didn’t know. What I did know—and I repeated this—was that the murders at Davos had nothing to do with Milo Weaver or the Massive Brigade. Though they claimed to agree with me, in government press releases the administration blamed only the Brigade for the chaos. The witnesses, after all, unequivocally backed up that story. Switzerland promised greater security at next year’s Forum, and President Trump claimed that his administration had tightened the screws so much that the Brigade had had no choice but to head to Europe. “They’re weak on security over there. So weak. We’re so much stronger on security than the last administration.”
A week later, a Massive Brigade bomb erupted inside a suite in the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, the fire and smoke destroying half of the residential spaces. Luckily, no one was killed. The president had left just a few hours earlier for Bethesda, Maryland, for his annual physical examination.
Something they never asked me about, oddly, was Haroun. They never asked if he’d contacted me—perhaps they were monitoring me and knew he hadn’t—or what I knew about his life. So eventually I started to bring it up myself. “What happened to the Tourists? What happened to my brother?” They frowned and looked at their notes and told me that this was beyond the purview of their expertise. “And the Library?” I pressed, only to watch my interrogators feign ignorance.
One question they did answer was: “What happened to the snipers?” It had bothered me for a long time, the way the people in blue and red were able to take over the Congress Center’s roof without resistance. It was one of those small details that an analyst can’t let go. They told me that the snipers had been found after the event, drugged and tied up just inside the rooftop access door. Neither had been able to identify their attackers.
Eventually, over the space of weeks, I revealed almost everything to Laura but said nothing about Haroun. I didn’t have it in me to tell her what he’d become. She absorbed each fragment of the story like little blows to the body, then threw a series of smart, pointed questions back at me. Each, it seemed, required me to reveal more, and I eventually would have to stop her and say, “Later, okay? I can’t give it to you all at once.” After years of me telling her nothing, this arrangement was more than she could have hoped for.
By late February, she knew almost all of it. She understood why, that first day back, I furiously deleted Nexus from all our devices. And as she learned more, she began treating me differently. The mistakes that would once anger her, the ones I still committed, no longer evoked her wrath. She was patient, perhaps seeing me differently. Not as a better person, but as one, perhaps, who needed a little more guidance. And knowing that she understood me better, I made an effort to be more open, allowing her to help me along the way. I was often in awe of her wisdom.
“What matters,” she told me one night, “is that you know you’re doing right. As soon as you feel like what you’re doing—for the job, or in your personal life—is actually wrong, it’s time to leave.” A part of her was echoing her Communist father’s suspicion of my employer, but she wasn’t her father, just as I wasn’t mine. She said, “I’d rather struggle with the mortgage than have your spirit broken.”
And then, in late March, behind the headline news of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report implicating the president in ten instances of obstruction of justice, we learned that Sergei Stepanov, head of MirGaz, had been arrested in his Moscow apartment on charges of tax fraud. In April, the Berlin offices of Investition für Wirtschaft were raided as part of an extensive money laundering investigation, and Germany was demanding the extradition of Oliver Booth from the UK as part of it. London, reports suggested, was leaning toward handing him over, even as catastrophic Brexit negotiations were breaking down.
I had to look hard to find the news about Salid Logistics. The Oman conglomerate was being taken to court under antitrust laws. Economic analysts were surprised by the move but opined that the company would be broken up within the year. Tóuzī’s demise didn’t even make American papers. Two of its Shanghai managers were arrested, and within days the offices were simply shuttered.
Northwell’s woes took longer to surface. After the murder of its founder, a power struggle erupted. This was complicated by German regulators connecting the company to its IfW investigation. Cued by this, American regulators demanded Northwell’s account books and discovered a discrepancy between assets listed and assets owned, to the tune of half a billion dollars. Though government contracts remained in effect, all other Northwell operations were frozen until everything could be balanced. No one knew when that would be.
Nexus, on the other hand, blossomed. It continued to take over Facebook market share, so that by the summer analysts predicted half a trillion in revenue by the end of the third quarter. We, though, remained a Nexus-free household.
Yet with all this news coverage there was no mention of Milo Weaver, Alexandra Primakov, or the elusive Leticia Jones. Certainly there was nothing about the Library—had it really disbanded, as Milo claimed? After Davos, all the Red Notices against Weaver were revoked, though the Interpol database never mentioned why. I scanned reports coming to the Africa desk, searching for any sign of the librarians, or even the Tourists I still feared were out there in one guise or another. But there was nothing.