Chapter Ten · Adam's Robe Book 1

Beirut, Lebanon — Present Day

Katz had told her, on the flight in, that the single most dangerous thing about this trip was not going to be anyone hunting them specifically. It was going to be the ordinary, indiscriminate danger of a city that had spent the last several months absorbing strikes meant for someone else, and Leah had spent the descent into Beirut trying to decide whether that was meant to reassure her and failing to find a version of the sentence that did.

He traveled under a name that was not his and a passport that was not, strictly, anyone's, and he had made her memorize a cover story thin enough to survive a glance and not much more — visiting academics doing manuscript conservation work for a cultural heritage nonprofit, which had the considerable advantage, he'd told her, of being close enough to true that she wouldn't have to invent anything under pressure. Bourj Hammoud, when they reached it, did not look like a city absorbing a war so much as a city that had simply added the war to a very long list of things it had already learned to live inside of — narrow streets hung with electrical cable in nests thick enough to be their own weather system, Armenian signage over half the shopfronts, the specific density of a neighborhood built by people who had arrived with nothing and decided, collectively, over a century, that nothing was going to happen to them twice without a fight.

"Father Yousef has known me for thirty years," Katz said, as they climbed the narrow stairs to a church office that smelled of candle wax and old paper in a combination Leah found unexpectedly, disarmingly like her grandmother's house. "He doesn't know what I do for a living. He's never asked. That's not naivety — that's thirty years of a very deliberate choice on his part, and I'd ask you to respect it by not making him regret it."

Father Yousef turned out to be a small, precise man in his eighties with hands that shook faintly and a memory that, once they'd worked past forty minutes of tea and careful pleasantries, did not shake at all. He remembered a family — Assyrian, Church of the East by rite though they'd worshipped Armenian Apostolic for two generations by convenience and intermarriage, arrived from Tehran in the chaos of '79 with almost nothing and an old woman missing from among them nobody in the community had ever been told the full story of. The surname, when he gave it, made Katz go very still in the specific way Leah had learned meant he was containing something rather than not feeling it.

"Yonan," Father Yousef said. "The mother is gone now, God rest her — she outlived the daughter who came with her, which no parent should have to do. There's a grandson. Karam. He keeps to himself. Runs an import business out near the port, or did, before the port stopped being safe to run anything out of." He looked at Katz for a long moment, the look of a man deciding how much of thirty years of discretion he was prepared to spend in one afternoon. "You should know something else, Ronen, before you go looking for him. You are not the first person in the last month to come into this office asking about that family."

"Who else."

"A Pakistani gentleman. Very charming. Spoke three languages in the time it took him to drink one cup of coffee, and used all three, I think, mostly to see which one made me relax fastest." Father Yousef's mouth did something that was almost, despite himself, a smile. "He did not ask the way you're asking. You want to find them to help them, or you've at least convinced yourself of that, which for a man in your profession may be as close as it comes. He wanted to know whether anyone had found them first."

They found the man himself two streets from Karam Yonan's shuttered warehouse office, sitting at a café table with the specific unhurried posture of someone who had known, before they turned the corner, exactly which corner they were going to turn.

"Officer Katz." He didn't stand, but he did gesture, with real warmth, at the two empty chairs across from him, as though he'd reserved them. "And Dr. Sarkisian. I've read your dissertation, for what it's worth — the chapter on the Beirut fragment is better than your committee gave you credit for, though I suspect you already know that, and I suspect being told so by a stranger in a war zone isn't going to fix nine years of them not telling you."

"You have my dissertation."

"I have a great many things, Doctor. It's more or less the whole of my profession." He switched, mid-sentence, from English into unaccented Farsi, then, watching Katz's face for the reaction, back into English again, the particular showmanship of a man who wanted them to understand exactly how much of the board he could already see without needing to say so directly. "Tariq Bhatti. I work for a service you can probably guess at, in the interests of a country whose interests, at the present moment, are considerably more complicated than either of yours."

"You're ISI," Katz said. It wasn't a question, and Bhatti didn't treat it as one.

"I'm a great many acronyms depending on the room. Today, in this particular café, I'm simply a man who got here nine days before you did, and who has been trying, with limited success, to decide whether that head start is worth more to me shared or kept."

"And which is it."

"That," Bhatti said, with the specific pleasure of a man who genuinely enjoyed this part of his work more than almost any other, "depends entirely on what each of you is prepared to give me in exchange, and I haven't yet decided the price, because I haven't yet decided what I actually need from this war that I don't already have three other ways of getting. Which means, for today, I'm afraid you get nothing but my company and the honest admission that I know Karam Yonan's current address, and you don't."

Leah watched Katz do the calculation she'd already learned to recognize in him — the particular stillness of a man weighing whether patience or pressure would move faster, and choosing, as he almost always chose, patience.

"You could have avoided this conversation entirely," Katz said. "You chose the café closest to his warehouse and sat where you'd be seen. That's not a man protecting a head start. That's a man who wanted to be found."

Something in Bhatti's face shifted, fractionally, the first genuine reaction Leah had seen from him since they'd sat down — not caught out, exactly, but recalibrated, the look of a negotiator revising an opponent's competence upward mid-negotiation.

"You're better than the file on you suggested, Officer Katz." He signaled for the check with two fingers, unhurried, and stood, buttoning his jacket with the neat, unbothered precision of a man who had gotten exactly as much out of an encounter as he'd planned to. "Karam Yonan is not going anywhere today, and neither, I suspect, are either of you. Have dinner. Sleep. I'll find you again when I've decided what I want, and I promise you, when that day comes, you'll both wish quite badly that I'd decided sooner rather than later." He paused at the edge of the table, and looked, for just a moment, directly at Leah rather than at Katz. "For what it's worth, Doctor — the family you're looking for survived a great deal to still be sitting three streets from here. I'd be careful what you're willing to cost them, in service of finally being believed."

He left before either of them could answer, and Leah sat with the particular unease of a stranger having correctly identified, in under ten minutes, the exact shape of the thing she was most afraid of about herself.