Two red ties looked at each other as if this were a revelation they weren’t ready for or didn’t believe.

“But I help. I help you much.”

“Hey.” Ghazi hoped Kamal was awake.

“Yeah.”

“Your package didn’t arrive,” Ghazi said.

“It didn’t?” Kamal sounded sleepy.

“I swear, I didn’t receive it.”

“Nine forty-four, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Apartment two?”

“Two. I swear, I didn’t receive it.”

“Why didn’t it arrive?”

“How should I know? Do you have the receipt?”

“Receipt?”

“Call them, the number there,” Ghazi said.

“Hold on, I will look.”

“You cannot throw it away.”

“Fuck you. I thought it would get there, like the others. Why keep the receipt? Problems, every time, every day, problems. Nothing has materialized and—”

“Nothing came today?” Ghazi could not believe it. Kamal had been expecting a FedEx of stolen Belgian passports for a week.

“Nothing came today. Nothing. At twelve noon I opened it, and there was nothing. Hold on.”

Ghazi waited.

“I don’t have a number at all,” Kamal said. “The paper they gave, that paper, I threw it away.”

“Fuck.”

“Fuck you.”

“That paper is everything.”

“It will get to you.”

“Priority Mail?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure you sent it Priority Mail?”

“Of course! What did I tell you?”

“Dhakir told me it would arrive today.”

“He lied. It will get there tomorrow.”

They were a ring, a credit card ring. It was Ghazi’s idea to involve Rafik and then Kamal. Dhakir liked it. There was a waiter in a restaurant in Montreal, no one knew who he was, except someone who knew someone who knew Dhakir. These waiters, they had readers, little electronic boxes; they fit in pockets. A customer at a table gives a card. The waiter takes a leak, the little box reads the card. There were other waiters in Boston.

It was a deplorable situation.

Fake papers. Fake shipments. Everything Hank Bridges had accused Ghazi of doing, now Ghazi was doing it. He began by telling himself he was setting up Rafik and Kamal. That was three months ago.

Ghazi had no excuse.

Go to Boston, he told himself, turn in Rafik and Kamal, take your vengeance. Finish this.

So, with a pristine passport in the name of Manuel Marquez, Ghazi went back to Boston, not by bus but on American Airlines. He went home in too-small Gucci jeans and too-long cowboy boots. He had been led to believe his coat was cashmere. Whatever its makeup, it was black and warm and he felt, in his depressive state, almost good about it. He took a taxi to 6A Brooks and arrived around dinnertime. He still had a key. The lights were on, the shades down.

Chapter 25

25

So what do we have?” April Baron-Evans, FBI special-agent-in-charge of the Boston field office, was heading the meeting.