I had a phone in each hand. My left held the burner. In my right hand Nazari’s phone was heavier, and still had the SIM card we’d found on the dead guy, whose name was apparently Qadduri. “I’m calling the number.”

I tapped on the one and only contact registered on the SIM card. ‘Office’, the +964 Iraq number. The phone dialed it automatically. Nazari said, “Put it on speaker.” I handed her the phone and she tapped something. We heard dial tone. Then, the phone gurgled, as if it were being hooked into another network of phone lines. A new dial tone came on. The first one had been long tones, with silence in between. The new pattern was a series of short tones. Like dots on a page. Five dots and then a blank space, then the five dots again.

Then there was a click. A voice spoke in Arabic. I didn’t understand a word. The voice was calm and female. Without understanding anything that she said, I picked up qualities in her voice. Not old, not young. Experienced and fluent. Like a string instrument crafted by a master luthier, tuned and played by a veteran performer. There were miles of road behind that voice.

Nazari said, “That’s Iraq. It’s voicemail. Should I leave a message?”

I said, “Not you, me.”

She held the phone for me. I waited for the beeps.

“My name is Keeler. I’m calling from France about Abd al-Karim Qadduri. Call back on this number.”

Nazari hung up the phone and put it away. “Think they’ll call?”

“I don’t know, but I would, if I was worried about a friend or a colleague. I’d call.”

“So I should leave the SIM card in my phone?”

“Do you need your phone otherwise?”

“I don’t think so, not at the moment, no.”

I shrugged and leaned back in the seat. She drove. I closed my eyes and a familiar vertiginous feeling came over me, like I was in free-fall. Just air around me rushing by and time stood still, like I had plenty of time to think. No worries either, because I’d packed my own chute.

I thought about Blomstein’s texts, the second one. Search threw up a Bogie. Don’t know why, as Qadduri not POI.

Blomstein’s search had thrown a Bogie, slang for an alert. But a Bogie is an alert that gets automatically triggered when certain very specific search parameters are entered into the military intelligence query system. For example, if a person of interest were involved in a classified operation, a Bogie could be set that would trigger an alert if a search on that person was made.

But if Qadduri wasn’t a POI, why the alert?