Anonymous Sources (17 page)

This time someone answered right away.

“Mr. Malik? Good morning. Is everything all right?” It was a man. He sounded worried.

Lucien and I looked at each other. That name again.
Malik
. Who was Malik? And why did everyone who took calls from Nadeem Siddiqui expect to speak to him?

“Hello, Mr. Aziz,” Lucien said crisply. Well done, remembering the name we'd heard on the voice mail yesterday. “Just calling to check in.”

“Mr. Malik? Is that you?”

Mr. Aziz, whoever he was, must have caller ID. Either that, or else only one person ever used the number we'd just dialed. From the way he'd answered, Aziz was clearly expecting a specific caller.

Lucien raised his eyebrows at me questioningly, then pressed on. “This is Lucien Sly. I am an associate of his. He asked me to check on the status.”

Lucien was good. His wording was perfect.
The status
could refer to anything, after all. He was fishing.

But the voice on the other end sounded uncertain. “I don't know you. I deal with Mr. Malik.”

“Of course,” Lucien said soothingly. “But Mr. Malik is—is traveling right now, as I'm sure you know. That is why he gave me your name and number. And why he asked me to use this phone, his phone. So I could check the status.”

Aziz hesitated. Then he cleared his throat. “But the status is the same as when I last spoke to Mr. Malik. We shipped on the twenty-first.”

“Yes, yes, the twenty-first,” said Lucien, still winging it. “Do you have any update though on the arrival date?”

“I believe it's still due to arrive later today.”

“Splendid! Mr. Malik will be pleased. Yes. But he did also ask me to reconfirm the delivery address. Could you just read it back to me?”

“But it's the same address as I discussed with Mr. Malik,” protested Aziz. “He said he would be there to meet it.”

He would be there to meet it? I had no idea who this Mr. Malik was, or what shipment we were talking about, but it suddenly seemed urgent to find out where it was headed. I made frantic little hand gestures at Lucien. He batted me away.

“I'm well aware that you and Mr. Malik have discussed this,” he said sternly into the phone. “But you will appreciate the importance of confirming these details? It is in everyone's interest, certainly yours I would remind you, to ensure that everything goes smoothly. Now let's go over this again.”

When Aziz spoke again, he sounded rattled. He read Lucien a tracking number. And an address. An address in the United States. An address just outside Washington, DC.

I WENT FOR A LONG
run that morning, or a long run by my standards—the reverse of my Sunday loop, sprinting out across Parker's Piece and then several slow miles tracing the banks of the Cam.

I was trying to collect my thoughts. What did I actually know at this point? Often it helps if I try to write the news story in my head—figure out what my lede is, and what evidence and quotes I have to support it. Right now I had nothing remotely worthy of filing for the paper. My assignment was to investigate the death of Thomas Carlyle, and since last week I'd managed to accomplish very little on that front. I'd met his girlfriend. I'd seen where he lived. And I had learned that a man who had no reason to be in his room had possibly broken in and rifled through Thom's things, five days after he'd died.

But so what? That might have absolutely nothing to do with Thom's death. And it hardly made Siddiqui a murderer. Maybe Siddiqui really had left something in Thom's room. Maybe Petronella had been mistaken about the door's being locked. And maybe Siddiqui—a respectable Oxbridge lecturer, after all—had decided to take a spur-of-the-moment-vacation,
and that's why no one could track him down just now. Again, no crime there.

It did seem strange that he'd bumped into Petronella in Emmanuel College two days ago, when his landlady was under the impression that he'd left Cambridge. And I couldn't think of how this Malik character fit into the picture. Who was he? A friend of Siddiqui's? A workout buddy? Maybe an American, since he was having deliveries shipped to Washington.

Lots of things didn't make sense. But nothing seemed overtly illegal.

I sighed. Hyde was right. I didn't have anything, really. Only . . . how had he put it? A half-baked conspiracy about a Pakistani banana fiend.

    

    

E
lias was already up and on the treadmill when I called. Eleven in the morning my time, 6:00 a.m. for him in Washington.

Elias and I started at the
Chronicle
the same week. We were summer interns together, competing over stories like shark sightings on the Cape and the sinkhole that swallowed a professor's car in the MIT parking lot. A few times over that long, sticky summer we would buy cheap seats for Red Sox games and bike over to Fenway after work, to drink beer and eat hot dogs and complain about the metro editor. There was never anything remotely romantic about our friendship. That was why it worked, and why it has lasted. And why now, when I had no idea what to do
next, and Hyde was probably preparing to scalp me alive, I called Elias.

Around the same time I finally got promoted to cover the universities, he got the chance to fill in for a few months down in the Washington bureau, while the regular White House reporter, Nora Cooke, took maternity leave. He thrived. He filed stories nearly every day, often for the front page. He even managed to scoop the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
a couple of times. The news managers noticed. When Nora came back from leave in a huff two weeks early, to reassert her seniority, they kept finding excuses to keep Elias in Washington. He managed to secure a Pentagon hard pass and became a fixture at the Defense and State Department briefings. He somehow weaseled an interview with the head of the CIA, a man who rarely gave interviews. After a year, management bowed to the inevitable and named him national security correspondent. Elias says the secret is to get to the newsroom first and then work harder all day than anyone else. That, and always to have an important-sounding but vague series in the works, the better to dodge dull daily assignments.

“Hi, Ginger,” he panted now, picking up on the third ring.

“Good grief. Only you would already be in the gym. Or at least I hope that's why you're panting. How many miles?”

“Two to go. What's up?”

I smiled. Leave it to Elias to have already accomplished as much as I had today, when thanks to the time difference I had a five-hour head start on him.

“It's the Thom Carlyle story. I'm still in England.”

“I know. That didn't go down so well yesterday on the three p.m. call.”

The three p.m. call would be the daily conference call among editors planning the next day's front page. “It didn't? How do you know?”

“Because the Washington bureau got dragged into figuring out how to cover the funeral today when it turned out you weren't going to be there. I think they're going to leave it as a White House story.”

“A White House story? Why?”

“POTUS and FLOTUS are going, you know.” The president and the first lady. “Nora managed to get in the press pool on the plane up with him. So she'll write the story with a Boston dateline. The Silver Fox was ranting about it, but I guess there was only so much he could say, since he's the one who let you go to England in the first place.”

I nodded. “Hyde thinks I'm on a wild-goose chase over here.”

“Actually, I gather his language was somewhat more colorful than that.”

“Ouch. Did he say I should be chasing the goddamn bastard goose?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Forget it. But I do actually need your help.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“This wild-goose chase I'm on has to do with a guy named Nadeem Siddiqui. He was at a party Thom threw the night before he died. And then he may have broken into Thom's room last weekend. And now he's gone missing.”

“Gone missing how?”

“Well, I don't know if he's missing exactly, but he was supposed to have gone back to work in Pakistan and he hasn't. He's not replying to e-mail”—I'd finally gotten Syed Qureshi, the exchange coordinator, to give me the address—“and nobody seems to know where to find him.”

“Well, maybe he's on vacation.”

“Maybe. There's this other weird stuff, though, about a package that's getting delivered to the States. The point is, I really need to talk to him, and I'm wondering if there's a way to find out if he's left the UK. What's the Homeland Security–type agency for the UK, do you know? If we could find the right person, could they give us a steer, just as to when and where his passport last scanned?”

“I would say that's a
veeery
long shot. I have no idea where even to start calling in the UK. And there would be privacy issues involved.
They're not going to just check up on a private citizen and leak his travel plans to a reporter, Alex.”

I took a deep breath. “Well . . . okay, fine then. What about trying to track him down through his employer. He's a nuclear physicist. He works at someplace called . . . hang on . . .” I flipped through my notebook. “Here we go. Kohuto.”

“Kahuta? In Pakistan?”

“Yes. I think that's right.”

“That's the big nuclear facility. The headquarters.”

“I did say he was a nuclear physicist.”

“Right, but, I mean, it's famous, Alex. A. Q. Khan and all that.”

“Oh.”

“Only the biggest nuclear-proliferation scandal in history. How can you not have heard of it? Have you actually read my byline in the last several years?”

“Darling, you know I live for your byline,” I said sweetly. “So, do you have any sources there? Anyone who could help me track down our friend Nadeem Siddiqui?”

“Sources at Kahuta,” snorted Elias. “Obviously, sure. They're coming out of my ears. Those guys just won't stop hassling me. Jeez. Hang on.” Elias was huffing and puffing now. The treadmill machine let out a series of beeps as he slowed it down to a walk.

“Seriously, Alex, they don't exactly let you just fly to Pakistan, wander around the nuclear labs, and chitchat with folks. But let me think . . . . I tell you what. There's a guy here in Washington who used to be a military attaché to Pakistan. He works Pak nuke issues now for INR—the intel guys at the State Department. And then there's a very good source of mine out at Langley. Proliferation, Pakistan, some Iran stuff too, I think. He's pretty high up. I can run your guy's name past them, see if it raises any flags. But, Alex, these are good sources. I don't want to embarrass myself. Do you really need this?”

“I really need this.”

“Anything else I can use? To drag these conversations out to sixty seconds before they hang up on me?”

I told him the address where Nadeem had been renting, upstairs at Mrs. Forsyth's. “She says he's really into weight lifting. And what else . . . oh, he ordered bananas there. From Pakistan. Like, thousands of them.”

“Bananas, huh?” Elias burst out laughing. “Yeah, that'll get 'em talking. I've noticed that about spooks. Give them a Chiquita angle and they just can't stop blabbing.”

I glared at my phone. “If you're quite finished with the sarcasm, I'll let you go now.”

“Oh, man.” He was wheezing now, whether from laughter or the treadmill, I couldn't tell. “I needed that. I was just reading something interesting about bananas, actually. Can't think what it was. Or where.” He giggled again. “Probably some article my mom forwarded, telling me to eat more fruit. Anyway. I'll keep you posted on what I hear back. Talk soon, okay?”

“Okay. Bye, Shorty.”

“Bye, Ginger.”