“You aren’t Abdul’s daughter,” he said.
“No,” said Danni. “Quite the other thing.”
She raised her gun.
Chapter 65
Cannes
Mattias and the others had arrived at the safe house sometime after five a.m. The rustic stone cottage sat high on a forested hillside ten kilometers above the town of Grasse. A man had been waiting in the drive. It was Sheikh Abdul from the mosque in Gothenburg. He had greeted them as if they were family, directing them to park the car inside a hay shed, before leading them inside and feeding them an early breakfast of warm milk, coffee, baguettes, and fruit.
After a fitful sleep, Mattias rose to meet the morning of his final day. As he stepped outside onto a gravel terrace, a warm drizzle falling, he smelled the fragrant air. It was the smell of lavender and saffron and thyme. Grasse was the world’s most important manufacturer of perfume, and most of the ingredients used were grown in the area. He looked to the south, to the body of water that began some twenty kilometers distant and stretched to the horizon. The Mediterranean lay calm and placid beneath a low, gray sky. His thoughts drifted to the water, to a sunny day five years ago.
Once the sea had tried to kill him…
TheMedusasailed from the port of Sirte on September the sixth. It was a blustery, blue sky day, strong offshore winds, whitecaps as far as the eye could see, the boat swaying at dock, making passage of the gangplank hazardous.
When Mattias had arrived at the dock, he believed that he had come to the wrong place. The boat he was to travel on—theMedusa—already appeared to be full. Every square inch of the deck was packed with men and women standing cheek by jowl. And yet, two hundred more waited to board. It made no difference. The handlers continued to hurry the passengers aboard, forcing them into a cavernous hold belowdecks. It was into this dark hell that Mattias descended for the three-day voyage.
He had barely set foot inside when the stench overcame him. Everywhere men and women were vomiting, already nauseated by the boat’s violent pitching and rolling. Though it was blustery on deck, no wind penetrated the fiberglass hull. The temperature inside was 90 degrees and rising. There was no water to drink other than the liter bottle he had brought with him. And no food, except for the packet of nuts and dates he had stuffed into his small travel bag. The single toilet was broken, overflowing with waste. Still more passengers came aboard.
Mattias, born Ibrahim Moussa, had arrived in Sirte a day earlier, after a month’s journey from the city of Nemharat in the Atlas Mountains, 1,200 miles to the south. He was twenty-one years old, a son of a sheepherder, tall and lean, hungry for life’s rewards but without the education, the barest minimum of wealth to be anything more than what his father had been, and his father’s father. Disease had ravaged the flock. Summers were hotter; winters colder. Two years before, he had traveled to Nemharat for work. At first, he’d found a job in a leather-tanning factory. The work was grueling, twelve hours a day, six days a week, a thirty-minute break for lunch, usually tea and bread, his monthly salary two hundred dollars, eight dollars a day. Of this, half he sent to his family. He lived in a boarding house. Men slept in six-hour shifts, then made way for the next, fifty in a room, one toilet, an outdoor shower that often did not work.
One day he was fired. No reason given. He remained in Nemharat for a year, doing odd jobs to survive. Selling tea on the street, digging graves, cleaning the abattoir. Even for these jobs, competition was fierce. He lived on a dollar a day, often going without food.
And then he met a man from his hometown who promised he knew a way to change his life for the better. He would send Mattias to Europe, where he could get a job that paid him enough to send two hundred dollars to his parents each month and still have more than enough to live in his own apartment, buy new clothes, eat three meals a day, and perhaps even go to a restaurant or see a movie. One did not have to be a citizen or have a passport. It sufficed to land on their shores.
Mattias would be an asylum seeker. On arrival, he would be placed in an immigration facility—this the man described like a fairy-tale castle: clean beds, hot showers, a cafeteria, even women—and after two weeks, he would be released and allowed to find a job or, as was often the case, given one if Mattias was intelligent enough. The man could see that he was. Mattias was tall and handsome. He had straight white teeth, and did he not speak English, at least a little? A fortune awaited. All he had to do was work up the courage to leave. With luck, there were a last few spots available on a fine vessel leaving in a month’s time.
But first, money.
It was not cheap to travel. The cost was three thousand dollars. Impossible, thought Mattias, his heart aching to miss such an opportunity. Three thousand dollars was a year’s wage, two years’ even. He could never come up with such a sum. The man from his village was undaunted. Surely Mattias’s family had saved. And if they had not, the man had another proposition. He would lend Mattias a portion of the cost. Mattias would pay him back after he found employment in Europe. If not, his father could help repay him. Did his father not own five hundred sheep?
There.
Soon after, the deal was agreed upon. One thousand dollars up front, paid in cash—the family’s entire savings, every last cent. The balance to be repaid over the next two years at a fair rate of interest, to be determined, naturally, by the prevailing market.
Taking in the chaotic scene around him, Mattias knew that the man had lied. What was he to do? There was no choice but to continue.
TheMedusafinally left the dock at two p.m. The first day passed in a haze of misery. With no room to lie down, he stood the entire time, hemmed in on every side. Mercifully, the sea calmed. The epidemic of seasickness abated. A boat passed their way, offering water and food, though at astronomical prices. The mood aboard the ship soared. In a day’s time, their feet would touch European soil.
Mattias was the first to notice the problem. It was late on the second day, nearing dusk. The sound of the ship’s engine had changed. Its steady rhythmic chug had slowed. More troubling, it had developed a persistent cough, like an old man suffering from tuberculosis. He sensed the decrease in the ship’s progress. The sound of the waves slapping the bow waned, the boat felt lower in the water.
He began to worry.
With difficulty, he made his way toward the stairwell, sliding and cajoling and worming his way closer and closer. His fingers could nearly touch the railing when suddenly the boat listed to one side. People toppled onto one another. A hue and cry came from topside. The acrid scent of smoke and fire stung his nose. Through the hatch, he saw a plume of smoke as black as night lifting into the air. Then, shooting up, tall, angry flames.
Panic.
Fear spread as if everyone was stung by the same hornet. In a rush to stand clear of the flames, the passengers above crowded to one side of the boat. Already unstable, the boat listed madly to port, her gunwales sinking below the surface, water pouring onto the decks and down the hatches, all kept open to allow precious air into the hold. The engine died altogether. The boat ceased moving. Unbalanced, making no forward progress, the boat became unseaworthy. In seconds, theMedusalay on her side, taking on water, the ocean pouring over the gangway, flooding belowdecks.
Mattias hauled himself topside, fell, was trampled, got to his feet, fell again, and was struck in the head by a loose piece of equipment—he never knew what. The boat was sinking. From the hold, screams. Then an explosion as seawater engulfed the overheated engine.
Mattias found himself in the water. Unlike nearly all the others, he could swim; in fact, he was a strong swimmer, having grown up in the mountains and spent summers fishing and swimming in their crystalline lakes. The top of a storage locker floated past. He took hold of it, kicking to distance himself from the vessel as it slid below the surface, only the captain’s bridge visible now. Then it, too, was gone.
Where was everyone? He had reckoned that at least four hundred persons had boarded theMedusa. Heads bobbed here and there. An arm reached for the sky, then went under. A few shouts for help, then no more.
Mattias spotted a small raft, hardly larger than a bathtub, a half-dozen men clinging to its sides. Other men held on to pieces of the boat that had broken off or floated away on their own. Fifty yards away, looking like a jaundiced iceberg, a large jagged slab of fiberglass rose out of the water.
