Collision(41)

I took a roundabout route to the hotel, thinking I could lose any tracker in the crowds and expanse of the massive square. I was wrong. At the hotel I was told by the fellow they called J—he has the bearing of a math teacher, if you ask me, and I am sure he is reading this—that four men shadowed me, following in a cascade so I would not notice, one moving ahead of me and then picking me up again, an invisible dance as I moved through the streets of Rome. J advised me of ways to circumvent such techniques; I will practice more in America, J tells me.

One must move without leaving a shadow, J says, and I quite like that phrase, that idea. Because the alternative is to be caught and to die.

J let me keep my Belgian passport with its French first name and Lebanese last name and provided me a rental car to drive to Paris. In Paris I flew to Miami. My seatmate was one of those tiresome boors who take a simple nod of hello as an invitation to interrogate you about every aspect of your life: where you went to school, where you live, what you do, what you like—and then must bury your every answer under his opinions. I am sure such people simply cannot abide the sound of silence or the shallowness of their own thoughts, but then I realized I need people like that—they give information. Information is power. This is my job now.

I was frightened for a moment that either this inquisitor was not an innocent nosy passenger, but rather either friend or enemy determined to catch me in a lie seven miles up, either to teach me a lesson or to unmask me. He told me that he sells enterprise software to large financial institutions and I decided he was telling the truth. I learned some important basics about banks and their operations; this might be useful to me one day, in selecting a target, in interpreting data.

At immigration they looked hard—without trying to seem so—at my Arabic face and they asked for my reasons to come to the United States. I explained I was here on business, as the sales representative of a start-up software company based in Brussels. J had given me brochures and I had memorized the product features. They asked their useless questions and I sailed through.

What would have happened, though, if I had been caught in a lie? Would I have been abandoned? I suppose I very well might have been; secret warriors can never be acknowledged. It would have been a harsh lesson.

From Miami, a seductive jewel of a city, I flew to New Orleans, a seductive ruin.

I expected that I would be followed at the airport—them trailing me to see if I had been trailed, to avoid a repeat of my Roman debacle, when I thought myself so clever. A necessary precaution. I spotted one man following me, but I am sure more lurked in my wake, and I’m not going to claim a victory I did not earn. Following J’s instructions, I took a cab first to the Audubon Zoo, trying to lose any shadows in the milling crowds, then I walked to Tulane, eyeing anyone who might be following, then took another cab to the Superdome. I walked through a hotel, checked into a room using my false name, but never set foot in it, walking through the back of the hotel, grabbing a final cab to a chain hotel in the suburb of Metairie.

New Orleans is a strange half city now. It reminds me of a once-treasured plaything abandoned by a child. Entire stretches of the city remain utterly devastated—here in a country that prides itself, incessantly, on its wealth, its ambition, and its (shall I be frank?) superiority. Yet here is this blister on America’s soul. The neighborhoods that have returned to a semblance of normalcy still give the sense of lives lived on an edge, of a hope tempered by the possibility that the city will never regain its former life.

I know how New Orleans feels. It is the way I feel.

And so, I arrived two months ago, and we started our work. Because it is a city where people are constantly coming and going, staying, leaving—no one will notice us here in the ruins.

I had no instructions at the final hotel. How was I to find my new colleagues? Adrift, I thought perhaps I would show initiative. I went for a walk, heading toward a local mall, and they grabbed me shortly after I arrived at the mall, escorting me into a dark Lincoln Navigator. I wasn’t afraid. We exchanged assigned code phrases, ones J gave me in Rome. They drove me to a large home outside the city proper—near a swath of a wealthy neighborhood ruined by floodwaters, close to Lake Pontchartrain—and to a large house, which had fresh paint, a new roof, a sense of restored solidity. The neighborhood remains mostly abandoned; those who can afford nice houses can afford to leave.

The leader here is Mr. Night. Is he reading my words? If you are, Mr. Night, you must admit, your name is the definition of pretentious. But it suits him: dark, unknowable, yet somehow comforting. If we listen to him, we’ll stay alive as we go to battle.