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seemed confused, as if they had gotten lost on their way to a sledding hill or a skating rink.
    Mahmoud dropped his backpack onto the bed and sat down in the well-worn armchair by the window with the padded envelope in his hands. On one side his name was written with black marker in block letters.
    With trembling fingers he tore open the glued flap. He sat with the package open in his hands for a moment while watching a few snowflakes randomly swirl outside the window. He took a deep breath and poured out the contents.
    A clumsy cell phone, a charger, and a carefully folded piece of paper fell onto his lap. Mahmoud picked up the phone. It was a cheap Samsung. The kind of prepaid phone you buy for forty euros at a gas station. He put in the battery, which had been lying separately in the package, and pressed the power button. It turned on with a buzz. The contact list was empty. No messages.
    After taking another deep breath Mahmoud unfolded the piece of paper. Inside of it was another paper, which fluttered down and landed on the carpet. The paper Mahmoud held in his hands contained a short, typed message in Swedish:
    Mahmoud,
    I have information, and I don’t know what to do with it. I need your help. I think it might have something to do with what you’re researching. We need to meet after your meeting tomorrow. Keep your phone switched on between 13:00 and 13:30 tomorrow and be ready to move out. Otherwise keep it turned off and remove the battery. I will contact you.
    Determination, courage, and endurance.
    Mahmoud refolded the message and glanced at the phone. ‘Ready to move out.’ ‘Determination, courage, and endurance.’ Words from another time, what seemed like another life. Someone knew things about him that he himself had almost forgotten.
    Slowly, absentmindedly, he leaned forward and picked up the page that had fallen onto the floor. He unfolded it and instinctively shrank back from what he saw.
    It was a fuzzy, printed photograph. Grainy and pixilated. A digital image file printed out on a common, older printer. But the scene was all too clear.
    The photograph appeared to have been taken with a pocket camera or with a fairly good cell phone and took up nearly the entire A4-size page. A man was lying in the foreground, tied down on a stretcher with straps. The clothes he’d once worn were so tattered, they barely covered his body anymore. Through the rips, Mahmoud could see skin that looked soiled and raw. Down his arms, neck, and chest ran a trail of small, round burns. Cigarettes. Someone had burned him with cigarettes over and over again. But that was far from the worst.
    The worst thing was his eyes. It took Mahmoud a terrified second to realize that the man’s eye sockets looked empty because they were empty. He forced himself to hold the paper closer in order to see more clearly. The hollows of those eyes were dark abysses. Their edges were caked with coagulated blood and dirt. With queasiness, it dawned on Mahmoud that the eyes must have been torn or burned away from the man’s face. It was impossible to see if he was dead or alive.
    Mahmoud stared at the picture as if paralyzed until he couldn’t stand to look at it any longer, and he turned it over on his lap. It was a vision of hell. The clinical room in the merciless light of the camera flash. The stretcher with its straps. The blood.
    Mahmoud had seen his share of suffering, misery, imprisonment, and even torture. A total of three months in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past three years had exposed him to more misery than most. But this… This was worse than Abu Ghraib.
    ‘Oh my God,’ Mahmoud whispered to himself, even if his own God was much more complicated than the exclamation might suggest.

7
December 19, 2013
    Brussels, Belgium
    She smelled his cologne—rich with tobacco and vanilla, as sweet and dense as ambition—before she felt him gently grab her right elbow. The morning meeting she was on her way to, everything, fell away,