I took the phone from her and started tapping every icon that I could find. One by one. She got the Peugeot going. The streets and trees and houses rolled by. I clicked through her applications. Most of them asked me to sign back in, as if it wasn’t Nazari's phone anymore. I tapped my way patiently through three screens filled with icons. Then I tapped on the notes application icon. A box popped up on the screen asking me if I wanted to import notes from the SIM card. I clicked yes. A little wheel turned in the middle of the screen and then flipped to a list of notes with only one note in the list: ‘untitled’. I clicked it and it opened up with a little magnifying animation. As if a piece of notebook paper had grown out of the middle of the phone.

Nazari looked over and saw that there was something. “What is it?”

“Names, seven of them.”

“Latin alphabet?”

“Yeah.”

“Read them.”

I read her the list:

Layan Baqir

Yamina al-Zahawi

Safiya Raena Alshaibi

Nejla Ashkouri

Jamila Alasadi

Maryam Al-Ali

Khawlah al-Baghdadi

She was nodding as she drove. I asked, “Why are you nodding?”

“Those are female names. It’s all girls.”

Chapter Forty-Six

I looked at the top right of the phone screen. The time was 6:23 p.m.

I figured Blomstein had run the pictures by now. As if on cue the burner phone in my pocket made a little buzzy twitch.

I pulled it out and saw a message: 1/3 Your man is Iraqi ex-Ba’ath military intelligence: Abd al-Karim Qadduri. Not a person of interest at this time. Before I had time to consider that, the phone made another buzzy twitch, this time in my hand. A second message animated on to the screen, pushing the first down: 2/3 Search threw up a Bogie. Don’t know why, as Qadduri is not POI. Then, a third message dropped down with another buzz pushing the two previous messages to the bottom: 3/3 De Oppresso Liber. - B.

I looked down at the phone and quickly decoded the messages in my head. It confirmed that the dead Afghan wasn’t an Afghan, he was an Iraqi guy called Qadduri. And Qadduri wasn’t a person of interest, or POI. But doing the search had thrown up a warning message on the system. De Oppresso Liber is a Special Forces motto, something about liberating the oppressed, in Latin. Which meant good luck and goodbye.

Nazari was curious. I said, “It was my guy. We’ve got the dead man.” I read off the screen, “Abd al-Karim Qadduri. Ex-Ba’ath, Iraqi military intelligence.” She whistled. I said, “Not a person of interest at this time.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Qadduri is thought to have moved on from his past as a Ba’ath party guy.”