David Ellis - In the Company of Liars

She always loved the theater best.A Doll’s House, Ibsen’s play, was her favorite. She played the lead, Nora Helmer, the underappreciated mother, the wife to Torvald, in an amateur production one time. She remembers moving about the house in the final scene, when Nora left Torvald, left him devastated and confused, Nora finally empowered and taking control.

Plays are so hard, though, because so much of it is language. Dialogue can be so trying, so difficult to write exactly how people talk. But at least she knows the subjects well.

ALLISON: I don’t want Jessica to think I’m innocent.

MAT: Why not?

ALLISON: Because if she thinks I’m innocent, she’ll think that her testimony put me in jail. If she knows I’m guilty, it will be easier for her to accept.

(Mat seems uneasy with this. It is putting a lot on him, forcing him into a difficult conversation about their daughter.)

MAT(Sheepishly): What-what should I tell her? How could I possibly convince her that you’re guilty of murdering Sam?

ALLISON(pondering): Tell her that I buried the trophy at the base of a fence, near a yellow post, behind the Countryside Grocery Store on Apple and Riordan.

Allison reads it over and frowns. She hits the backspace button on the laptop and watches the cursor gobble up word after word, until this passage is wiped out.

“Needs more work, Ally,” she says to herself. She has time.

Peshawar was like another country. The terrain was not dissimilar but the people were. Other than the Afghan refugees, Ram had met very few people who were not natives in Baluchistan. Peshawar was different, a dusty town on the western border. Dozens of languages spoken on the street, different accents speaking each language. The contrasts were staggering. Exquisite Islamic architecture in one direction, an Afghani refugee camp teeming with women and children, sick and deprived, in the other. Men of all ages moved through the streets with assault rifles slung over their shoulders.

Father had said that he would sell carpets in Peshawar, that commerce was good there, better than in Quetta, and Ram knew that this was owing to the overflow of refugees and freedom fighters, and Americans and British there to help them fight the Soviets. Peshawar, near the Khyber Pass, was the principal gateway for themujahedininto Afghanistan, and this had made Peshawar an international city in the most notorious sense of that word.

They lived with Father’s cousin in a small house. Ram and his father shared a bedroom, slept nestled together every night. Father would always wait for Ram to fall asleep, caressing his hair, singing to him. They clung to each other, Ram believed, out of utter fear of losing the last remnant of their family.

But sometimes Father would leave the bed after he thought his son was asleep. Ram, as he was now called-he would never again be addressed as Zulfikar or Zulfi-would sometimes rise from the bed and listen in on conversations taking place between his father and the men who would come to visit.

They would talk about weapons. They would talk aboutjihad.

Ram saw changes. There had been enough upheaval already for him, the loss of his mother and sister, the move to a new village, but the single constant in his life, his father, began to change as well. There was something to the look in his eyes, something Ram had never seen previously-a sadness, an anger, a sense of purpose. And soon enough, in less than a year from the time they landed in Peshawar, they moved again, to their own home. Father was doing well in the carpet business, he told Ram; things were better financially than they had ever been before, and they would stay that way. Ram was glad, for his father more than himself. Ram just wanted what he had in Quetta. But there was no turning back, of course. So he did what his father told him to do, did not discuss politics and concentrated on schoolwork, which his mother would have wanted.

It was not until Ram was thirteen, after the Soviets had been repelled from Afghanistan, after the American CIA largely left Peshawar behind along with thousands of armed militants, after the United States reimposed economic and military sanctions on Pakistan for its development of nuclear technology, that Ram’s father finally told him.

Ram Haroon walks into the foyer of the Wickard Building on campus and removes his gloves and hat. Even the short trip from the dorms to this building, in this weather, requires full gear. He has spent the better part of two years in America’s Midwest, and still he remains shocked by the extremes in the climate.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees his contact, sitting in the lounge area in the open foyer, wearing headphones, face buried in a textbook. Haroon readjusts his backpack, and his contact, at the opposite end of the foyer, gets up and leaves through the south entrance of the building. Haroon makes his way into the lounge area and mills around a moment, as if to choose a seat in the rather populated site, then decides to take the seat where his contact was sitting only moments ago.

It is a chair in the corner of the lounge area, really two panels forming an L. Haroon takes off his coat and sits on it, then sets his backpack on the other chair and makes a point of sifting through its contents, while his other hand reaches under the cushion and quickly finds the note. He does not immediately read it, naturally. With one casual maneuver, he drops the note-a piece of stationery folded in half-into the pack.

Haroon kills twenty minutes until his class on socialism in the twentieth century is to begin. As he reads the textbook for the class, he reaches into his bag, removes the note, and drops it into the textbook.

Things are proceeding as planned. The testing is coming along very well. There is a high degree of confidence. Finalization should coincide with final exams.

As for her: Things are as good as could be expected. She is more concerned with protecting family than winning case. No indication whatsoever that she has any idea, regardless. This was probably all about nothing. But the doctor is insisting we keep watch, so we will.

The doctor.Ram Haroon smiles. His contact is keeping the reference vague, but Haroon knows. He can do his homework, too. Doctor Neil Lomas is his name, and he is good. Unsteady, but good. Nervous about nothing, but good. He can be as neurotic and dependent as he wants to be, as long as he delivers the formula.

But all in all, good news here. His contact has gone to great lengths to assure Haroon that things are proceeding appropriately. He expects to hear such things, of course; they want Haroon to feel safe and secure. They want this job to go through as much as Haroon’s people do. Yet Haroon realizes that his partners are sharing the risk, in their minds probably taking greater chances than he is. Haroon, after all, is doing this for a cause, something he is willing to place himself in harm’s way to achieve. His partners are Americans, doing this for money. A jail cell or notoriety would be far more horrifying to them than to Ram Haroon. So he must assume that these assurances are sincere, that his partners truly believe the coast to be clear. They will hope for the best, which is to say they will hope that Allison Pagone does not know what they fear she knows. They will hope for a trial that proceeds without incident, and then they can move forward with their plan. What they do not realize is that Haroon could never agree to let Allison Pagone live. If she were convicted, she could make a deal at any time, trade information for leniency or even clemency. The only way to guarantee Allison Pagone’s silence, he recognizes, is to silence her.