Now it was Nazari’s turn to listen in on a one-sided conversation. Blomstein hadn’t run the Afghan’s face, but he’d flipped through the photos that Nazari had taken on her phone. He’d taken one look at the tattoo photo and called me, except I hadn’t answered, until now.

Nazari was leaning against the wall and paying attention. I didn’t say much. Just a couple of grunts and appreciative noises. Blomstein was full of interesting information. He wasn’t reading from a computer or anything. He was improvising from memory, a smart guy.

He talked for quite a while. He told me all kinds of things. Some of which I already knew. Some of which I didn’t already know. When he was done I said, “Roger that.”

Blomstein said, “I’m going to run your pictures through the computer in four hours.”

“Appreciate it, Blomstein.”

Then I hung up and Nazari said, “So?”

“Hundred yard rule.”

We walked out of the building. Crossed the street and took a right towards the Lilles train station. There was a guy selling pressed sandwiches out of a van. We bought a couple of those and sat on a concrete cube in the middle of the square.

“It was my guy.”

“That was fast.”

“It’s not about the face. He didn’t run the face yet. It’s about the tattoo, it got his attention. Maybe we’ll get something on the face later.”

“So what about the tattoo?”

“Iraq. You ever heard of the Ba’ath party?”

“Is that a gentleman’s club?”

“It’s not how it sounds. It isn’t a spa thing, it’s a Middle Eastern politics thing. Ba’ath means something related to the Koran, but this isn’t a religious thing either. More like a military dictatorship thing. Ba’ath was a political party in Iraq that we put out of business when we went in there in 2003. The Ba’ath party were die-hard Saddam loyalists. They were his people.”

“Hold up, Iraq, not Afghanistan.”

“Correct. Baathists were the ruling party in Iraq. This has nothing to do with Afghanistan. Guess what the Iraqi Ba’ath party slogan was.”

“Unity, Liberty, Socialism.”

“Correct. Same as the tattoo.”

“So Qayoumi isn’t an Afghani asylum seeker, he’s Iraqi. And his name’s not Qayoumi. The asylum seeker papers are fake?”

“That’s what my guy is suggesting.”

“And he came to this conclusion based upon a three-word tattoo. What if Qayoumi was just a fan of the Ba’ath party?”