She had centered the camera on Qayoumi’s fatal knife wound. The tattoo was on the inside of his wrist. Three groups of letters, which I figured were three words. And below the words, a line with three dots above it. I turned the phone to see it better. Not that I could read the words anyway, but I wanted a closer look. The whole picture rotated in response, so that I was looking at an even worse angle. I said, “I hate these phones.”

“Can you read Arabic?”

“No. But I doubt that this is Arabic. The guy’s from Afghanistan. They speak Dari or Pashto or something, some kind of Persian-related language.”

“Pass it over, I’ll try to read it. They all use the same Arabic alphabet and there are commonalities.”

“They do? How do you know?"

“My parents are Egyptian.”

I looked at her in surprise. “And you read Arabic?”

“Of course.”

“Why didn’t you read it before?”

“Didn’t see it, or if I did, didn’t think it was important and the thing rotates whenever you try and read the words.”

I handed the phone back to her. “Try and read it now.”

Nazari multi-tasked. She manipulated the phone with a lot more precision than I had managed and drove at the same time. She figured the phone out. “It’s just Arabic, not Dari or Pashto. The words say, ‘Unity, Liberty, Socialism’.”

She handed the phone back.

I looked at the picture. It rotated back and the letters were vertical, not that I could read them anyway. “You sure it’s Arabic? It looks the same as Dari or Pashto to me.”

“One hundred percent. It’s Arabic. Every country has their own dialect, but there’s a standard written Arabic for religious texts and more formal stuff.”

“You don’t say.”

“Anyway, we’re here.” She was pulling into the old farmhouse estate.

She parked and got out. “I’m going to pack a bag, give me a couple of minutes.”

I stayed in the driveway, looking at the landscape. Down-river, the sun was still high. The trees and far-away hilltops blocked some of the light, making shadows on the water, which, seen from a distance looked like animal shapes.

The old farmhouse estate was on a gentle hill, sloping down toward the river. Across from her cottage was a neighboring property and I spotted a mound that looked a lot like the cavern entrance I’d seen in the forest outside the Vaugeois house. I walked over to it and looked in. Unlike the tunnel entrance at Brumaire, this one was well maintained. I walked through the stone archway into the cool dark tunnel. After twenty yards I came to a locked door. The air in the closed tunnel was already musky and humid. I heard Nazari’s voice from above, and turned around.