The Language of Secrets Page 27

  Chandni was a common Urdu nickname for girls. It meant “moonlight.”

  The calendar of Islam was based on the lunar calendar. The full moon, the half-moon, the crescent moon, the new moon.

  The beginning of the month of fasting depended on the sighting of the new moon, as did its end.

  The festival days of Eid-ul-Adha and Eid-ul-Fitr were predicated on the changeover of the lunar month.

  But Faiz had written of the moon as one of many poetic symbols, not as a cornerstone of his work.

  Not as the poet Nazik al-Malaika had—where the moon was Muhammad, the messenger who delivered the message of Islam.

  Why then? What had Mohsin wanted to tell him?

  “It’s all here.” Khattak looked at the folder that Coale aimed at him, without seeing it. He’d scarcely listened to Ciprian. Until he heard him mention Sehr Ghilzai.

  Coale gestured at Khattak’s name on the glass doors.

  “I told you it wouldn’t amount to anything, just as I told the commissioner and the superintendent that your unit was a mistake. It was like setting a fox to watch the henhouse.”

  Abruptly, Khattak understood what Coale was driving at. And why he had named Sehr.

  “Are you accusing me of wrongdoing? Of misusing my authority somehow? Or of being in collusion?”

  When Khattak didn’t take the folder, Coale dropped it on a nearby desk.

  It was Rachel’s desk, a fact that infuriated Khattak. Another emotion he couldn’t reveal. Not with so many eyes upon him, the audience to Coale’s spiteful sense of theater.

  “You were asked to keep our operation under wraps. To discuss it with no one, to give no one the slightest indication of it, least of all your sister.”

  “You’ve placed my sister in grave danger,” Khattak said evenly. “She’s still facing that danger, because of your lack of action. Even so, I haven’t contravened your request.”

  “Ashkouri was at your house, man! Do you expect me to believe that was a coincidence?”

  Khattak didn’t have time for this.

  “You’ve had my house, my sister, and from what I now understand from you, my cell phone under surveillance. If you have any evidence that it wasn’t a coincidence, I suggest that you produce it.”

  “Maybe I can’t prove that you warned Ashkouri off, Khattak. But do you know what I can prove? I can prove that you compromised my operation. That you went outside official channels. You met with Sehr Ghilzai, one of the prosecutors.”

  A sense of uneasiness surfaced in Khattak. Why had Sehr called him so many times? Why had she come to the hospital?

  “She’s a friend. She didn’t disclose anything she wasn’t authorized to disclose.”

  “Didn’t she?” Coale said with relish. “She told you about the gun.”

  “What gun? What are you talking about?”

  “The gun that killed Mohsin Dar. You see, we knew about the gun—we knew where it came from, we knew who had it. It seems that given your stay in hospital, you haven’t checked your voice mail.” He reached for Esa’s cell phone, keyed in the password, and hit the speakerphone.

  Sehr’s disembodied voice faltered into the silence. “I’ve been trying to reach you, Esa. I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s important. You asked if there was anything I knew that could help you with Mohsin’s murder. INSET should have told you about the gun. One of the members of Ashkouri’s cell brought it across the border. It was meant to be used at the training camp. As far as I know, the gun that was used to kill Mohsin Dar is still in his possession. It was the boy—his name is Dinaase Abdi.”

  Khattak stood without moving.

  Din Abdi was at the park.

  I freaking loved him, man. You killed him, I’m done.

  A charade? A masquerade for the benefit of those monitoring the Rose of Darkness website?

  Or the truth: Din smuggling the gun across the border, and handing it off to someone else—to Jamshed, or to Ashkouri himself.

  Coale silenced Khattak’s phone. His manner became no-nonsense.

  “So you see, we have you, Khattak. Your security clearance will be voided. Your partner will be disciplined for insubordination, unless you admit you sent her to Algonquin in direct contravention of my orders. And your friend the prosecutor will be suspended, pending an internal investigation.”

  “You hindered my investigation at every turn, Ciprian. I was asked to join this team, asked to handle Andy Dar—asked, in fact, to bring Mohsin Dar’s killer to justice.”

  “Not by me.”

  Coale appeared unsettled. He must have thought Khattak would blink and step back, unable to offer a defense to the accusations. The concrete evidence.

  “By the superintendent, then. Sehr was right. You should have told me about the gun. You’ve placed my partner and my sister in a life-threatening situation, and if anything happens to either of them, it’s not my career that will be on the line, it’s yours. If you intend to go live with your press conference before I can get them out of harm’s way, you’ll be hung out to dry.” Khattak gripped Coale’s shoulder. “Why haven’t you taken Ashkouri? What are you waiting for?”

  Coale shrugged off his grip.

  “Watch yourself, Khattak.” His hand strayed to his tie. His hard gaze moved around the room, assessing the reaction of his subordinates to Khattak’s assertion of authority. “I’ve a team in place. You’re panicking over nothing.”

  Khattak pressed a hand to his aching ribs. His voice was deathly quiet.

  “What are you waiting for, Ciprian?”

  He glanced around the room. A few of his former colleagues shook their heads, communicating something that Khattak should have known, if he hadn’t been misdirected.

  What wasn’t he seeing?

  Why was Ciprian focused on Khattak instead of on the final phase of his operation?

  Was it the final phase of the operation?

  He took his phone back from Coale, studied it. And then he realized the unpalatable truth.

  “You don’t have him.” He saw Laine look at him, widen her eyes, blink twice, nod. He tamped down all other emotions. “That’s why my house is under surveillance, why you wouldn’t let me pull Ruksh out. You can’t tie Ashkouri to any of this. You’ve been using Ruksh as bait.”

  He took the folder and tossed it at Coale’s feet.

  “Do what you want with this. Just give your team the order to extract.”

  He turned on his heel. Two members of the INSET team followed him to the door.

  “You won’t get there in time,” Coale called after him. But for the first time, there was a hint of doubt in his voice, a sense that he might have taken a step amiss.

  “You better pray that I do.”

  * * *

  He couldn’t afford his rage, couldn’t afford to broadcast it.

  Ciprian’s allegations were wildly misguided. He’d veered from accusing Khattak of collusion with the Nakba cell, to more general threats of corruption. He wanted Khattak to be guilty, to be inseparable from the members of the cell because of who he was.

  And that was an anomaly. For reasons particular to Ciprian Coale.

  Esa’s colleagues had seen through it because they trusted him. Just as he’d never had reason to doubt them. They’d worked with Esa for more than a decade, known that Coale’s agenda was personal. He had confidence in his friends, his colleagues, his city, and himself. If they could have told him about the gun, they would have. To do otherwise would have placed them in the same regrettable position that Sehr was now in.

  He’d do what he could to rescue Sehr when he’d cleared his head of the threat facing his sister. The voice mail implicated Sehr, clear as day. She would be reprimanded, suspended—he didn’t know what other repercussions she would face.

  He found himself wishing she’d been more circumspect, even as he didn’t regret the fact that she’d passed him vital information. Information Coale should have given him.

  Din Abdi had the gun
. But INSET hadn’t found the gun on-site.

  So where was it now?

  And who had used it to kill Mohsin Dar?

  27

  Late afternoon. The sun on the verge of setting. The roads empty, the highway streaked with traces of the earlier rainfall. And Gavin Chan wasn’t driving fast enough.

  “Hurry. Please,” Khattak said. “Rachel’s not answering her phone. Neither is my sister.”

  “The service in the park is spotty, at best.” Gavin Chan had worked with Khattak for five years at INSET, which was why he’d allowed him access to his cubicle. He’d spoken up for Khattak in each of the team meetings that had taken place without Khattak’s knowledge. He’d argued that the murder investigation would assist with INSET’s goal by bringing the tactical operation to a head much sooner. Coale had disregarded Chan, then sidelined him.

  That was why he was in the car with Khattak, driving north to Algonquin.

  And Khattak was grateful.

  “But we’ve traced her GPS transponder to an exact location?”

  “And sent it on to the tactical team.” Chan glanced over at Khattak. “They haven’t moved in yet.”

  Because Coale wouldn’t give the go-ahead. And Khattak couldn’t reach Martine Killiam.

  It seemed foolhardy beyond reckoning to hold a press conference in the midst of an ongoing operation, when there were so many things that could still go wrong.

  Fact. Paula Kyriakou and Grace Kaspernak had never been confirmed as members of Ashkouri’s cell.

  Fact. Neither had Rukshanda Khattak, sister of a veteran police officer.

  Fact. An undercover operative was also at risk, unarmed and without backup.

  Although Rachel had been ordered away from the park, she had acted exactly as Khattak would have in a situation that put civilians at risk.

  With great bravery, and the hope that luck would break her way.

  It was an act of desperation on INSET’s part to use the press conference as a means of flushing Ashkouri out. How could Ashkouri learn of the operation, when he was so far removed from things at the park? And if Ashkouri was able to communicate with the Nakba strike team, Khattak should have been able to reach Rachel.

  Ashkouri had known enough to leave town on the day of the takedown.

  It had to be coincidence.

  Unless …

  What did Mohsin’s final message mean?

  FAF.

  You love poetry, man. You’re old-school. It’s like you and Faiz share a language of secrets that shuts the rest of us out.

  Mohsin’s words. And he’d encouraged Khattak to spend his energy on better things—political commentary, polemical battles, human rights activism.

  But Faiz Ahmad Faiz could be polemical, his poetry an indictment of the political status quo. His most famous poem, “Darling, Don’t Ask Me for the Same Love Again,” spoke to a loss of innocence, of a man no longer able to turn away from the miseries of the world in the selfish pursuit of love.

  It wasn’t Faiz per se, Khattak realized. It was poetry, the language of secrets that Mohsin expected Khattak to decipher.

  He thought of the strange exchange between Ashkouri and Rachel—the nature of mud and crime, the Rose of Damascus, the equation of love and submission with death, and of Ashkouri’s periodic requests for the participation of others in his halaqas.

  Jamshed—a man old enough to recite venerable poets like Ghalib or Muhammad Iqbal from memory—had added nothing. Neither had Paula. Grace had offered lines of poetry in passing, but not as Hassan had requested. Instead, she’d made a point of noting the absence of female poets.

  It was Din who had complied with Hassan Ashkouri’s request, echoing back the themes of Hassan’s halaqa with the clumsy line of poetry that Ashkouri had approved.

  If you subtract the night from the day, the moon will blossom over the square.

  Khattak frowned. The moon was a signifier to Ashkouri. He had referred to it repeatedly, bringing it up in every conversation, in strange, befuddling contexts.

  The moon was the key to Ashkouri’s code.

  It was how he identified himself, in the grip of a staggering self-regard.

  In his mind’s eye, Khattak revisited a photograph from Rachel’s phone, a photograph she had taken while rummaging through the offices of Masjid un-Nur: a drawing in a sketchbook of a skating rink situated in front of two crescent moons that faced each other.

  He hadn’t taken note of it at the time. Why a skating rink under two moons in a sketchbook filled with rough drawings of various buildings in the downtown core?

  Unless … they weren’t crescent moons, as Rachel had supposed.

  There was a clangorous noise in his head, as realization struck.

  He thought of two buildings that were designed in the shape of a sliced banana, easily mistaken for a pair of crescents.

  The two buildings that made up Toronto City Hall.

  The skating rink was part of Nathan Phillips Square, the square that fronted City Hall.

  On New Year’s Eve, Nathan Phillips Square would be packed with sixty thousand revelers.

  Subtract the night from the day, the moon will blossom over the square.

  The Nakba plot had never been intended for an empty city on New Year’s Day.

  The strike was intended for New Year’s Eve.

  The code was in the poetry.

  How cleverly Ashkouri had misdirected the INSET team, his use of poetry a fog that had occluded his true intentions.

  And Mohsin Dar had pointed Khattak to the poetry by scribbling the initials of the poet, Faiz, into the tree, instead of using his last breath to identify his killer.

  Mohsin had found a way to communicate the true nature of Ashkouri’s plot, and if Khattak had been allowed to visit the scene, he would have made the connection much earlier.

  It was less than six hours to New Year’s Eve.

  He was struck by a pang of genuine fear.

  Did you get them all? Khattak had asked Coale.

  A few of them have gone to ground.

  Khattak turned in his seat.

  “Gavin, listen to me. You need to go back.”

  * * *

  “You forgot to return my keys.”

  Ruksh’s masquerade was falling apart. She was visibly nervous as she handed back the keys to Hassan Ashkouri’s car.

  They were gathered around the fire, three men, four women, on little stools that Ashkouri had brought with him.

  “New moon tonight,” he said.

  Rachel glanced at him sharply. He was relaxed, at his ease. He took out his phone and checked the time. Rachel longed to do the same, but Ashkouri had upped the ante. He’d sent Jamshed to call the women back before they could follow Grace to the creek.

  “The bonfire’s ready,” Jamshed had said. “What are you doing here?”

  Ruksh had answered with a slight stammer, “I wanted to p-pray for Mohsin.”

  He’d grunted. “Hassan wants you, it’s getting dark.”

  It was dark, the earlier light blotted out, the sun-swept robes of day gathered up. At the campsite, Ashkouri held out a little sack, and asked for everyone’s phones. One by one, he had taken the phones, and switched them off. Rachel slipped her phone into her boot, but not before Ashkouri had seen.

  He chided her gently.

  “I fear for a city that does not read.”

  “Depends on what you read,” Rachel said. “Some subjects are more worthwhile than others.”

  It was not as if Hassan had brought the book Fazail-e-Amaal to the campsite.

  Her phone vibrated in her hand. Two quick texts, both from Khattak.

  Din has the gun that was used to kill Mohsin.

  Hassan reached out his hand.

  “You see?” he said. “The outside world complicates things. It complicates your reality.”

  Her face ashen, the best Rachel could do was to turn off her phone herself, to prevent Ashkouri from accessing her logs.

  She was con
scious that she was also turning off the GPS tracker.

  Pray God Khattak knew where she was. She hadn’t had time to read his second text.

  “Come sit beside me, Ruksh,” Ashkouri said.

  Rachel found herself on the receiving end of an importunate glance. Ruksh took the stool beside Hassan, wincing as he slung his arm over her shoulders.

  Rachel tried to appear calm.

  Din had the gun. Had Din also killed Mohsin Dar?

  Rachel might not have a gun, but she had confiscated the ice screw from Grace, with the help of a made-up excuse. Her gloved hand was wrapped around it in her pocket.

  “It’s cold,” Rachel said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. I’d feel a lot better celebrating it in the city, like most years.”

  Jamshed dropped any pretence of politeness.

  “No one asked you to come.”

  “There’s no need to be rude, Jamshed. I’m sure Rachel has her reasons for being here. And perhaps a time of quiet reflection in the park instead of the company of a boisterous crowd will serve her better. Better than she knows.”

  Rachel braved Ashkouri’s glance.

  “Like I said, I came because I promised the kids I’d teach them how to skate.”

  “I’m not a kid,” Grace said, her voice sullen. “And anyway, Jamshed didn’t even let us get to our lesson.”

  “The memorial first, Grace.”

  Grace found a seat beside Din, linked her arm through his, and snuggled close. After a moment, Din patted her on the back.

  “New jacket?” he asked her.

  “She was freezing, Din. I gave it to her.”

  Rachel meant it as a caution to him—he needed to refocus on Grace, to think of Grace’s well-being as much as Grace thought of his. He looked away, ignoring Rachel.

  Jamshed didn’t sit. He took up a position leaning against one of the nearby trees, watching them all.

  Paula took the stool on Hassan’s other side, leaving Rachel the seat across from Hassan. When Ashkouri raised his head to take Rachel’s measure, she saw the deadness in his eyes, the luminous doom.

  “We came here because of Mohsin, our friend who died in this park.”

  The others held up their hands, palms up and close together. Hassan recited two prayers in Arabic, the first Sura Fatiha, the second the longer recitation of Sura Yasin.