The Mirage: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the university grounds. It was not a great evening—there were some unsavory characters there, I’m afraid—but your father impressed me. A good and decent man . . . We’re fortunate you follow in his footsteps.”
    Amal blushed.
    “Well,” said Abu Mustafa. “I will thank you once more for saving my son’s life and remind you that you are always welcome in my home, and then I will leave you to your official business.”
    “You’re going out?” Mustafa said, as Abu Mustafa stood up.
    “Just downstairs, to see your uncle Tamir. Don’t worry.”
    “I’m not worried,” Mustafa lied.
    With a smile and a nod to Amal, Abu Mustafa turned and left. After the apartment door clicked shut behind him, Mustafa sat quietly for a moment. Amal did too, thinking of her own father. Samir poured more tea.
    “All right,” Mustafa said. “Tell me where we’re at.”
    Amal went first. The search of James Travis’s hotel room, she said, had turned up nothing of interest, other than the tools he’d used to assemble the suicide vest. “The bomb-disposal guys say it was a decent job. He’d been well trained by somebody.”
    “So it definitely would have gone off?”
    “Oh yes.”
    “Do we have any idea what his target was?”
    “The Abu Nuwas Street Mall,” Samir said. “Travis had a tourist map of the waterfront. The mall complex was circled.”
    “And what’s Riyadh saying? Do they have any new intel for us? Preferably something more in line with reality?”
    “They’re ‘reevaluating their sources, in light of recent events,’ ” Amal said. “The good news is, we may have caught a break in Kufah . . .” For the past few weeks, Travis had rented a room at a guest workers’ hostel not far from the Kufah army base. “My old Bureau partner Rafi has been working down there on a different investigation, so I asked him to tag along when ABI swept the hostel yesterday. The room was clean—Travis threw out everything he didn’t take with him—and according to the manager, garbage pickup was yesterday morning. So at first it seemed like a dead end . . .”
    “What did they do, search the garbage dump?”
    “There was some discussion of doing that. But then Rafi got suspicious and made a phone call.”
    “Turns out the manager was lying,” Samir said. “Garbage pickup in that part of Kufah is actually on Mondays— if you’ve paid your garbage bill. But the manager discontinued the service over a year ago, without telling his boss. He was pocketing the money for himself and having whichever tenants were behind on their rent help him haul the trash to bins on other people’s property. So, long story short, ABI had the guy out dumpster-diving all night.”
    “They found Travis’s garbage around three o’clock this morning,” Amal said. “They’re still sifting it for clues, but one of the first things they found was a camera—”
    “A broken camera,” said Samir. “Smashed, like Travis took a hammer to it. Only he must have been asleep the day they taught destroying evidence in terror school, because he screwed up and left the memory card intact . . .”
    Amal switched on her cell phone. “Rafi emailed me the pictures. Take a look at this.”
    The scene was of four men seated at a long wooden table, indoors, in a close and poorly lit space. Travis, the picture-taker, was in the foreground, holding the camera at arm’s length, the flash highlighting the pinkness of his cheeks. He’d evidently consumed a large quantity of alcohol—Mustafa could make out the tops of several foam-flecked glasses on the table in front of him. Behind Travis, holding glasses of their own, were two blond men; their features were hard to discern on the small screen, but an enlargement might provide enough detail for computer identification. The fourth man, a surly red-haired fellow, had been caught in profile jabbing a finger at Travis, his mouth open to deliver a rebuke.
    “What do you think?” Amal