IT WAS A DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE SORT OF DAY. ON the sunny Dr. Jekyll side of the street, a prestigious national educational group had just decided I was the best professor in the entire United States. In the dark alley of Mr. Hyde, a sadistic serial killer wanted to destroy me, and probably my family, too, in the most painful way his twisted brain could devise. Like a Ping-Pong ball, I ricocheted back and forth, back and forth, from best to worst, from elation to despair. Finally, on the millionth bounce, I said, “Enough!” I desperately needed to reboot.
Suddenly, stunned, I remembered: Shafiq! 16–17! Were they indeed one and the same? Was it possible that, digitized within the phone clipped to my belt, was another nugget of information that could answer the question once and for all?
I opened the phone’s camera application and began scrolling through the images I had taken. There were more than a hundred of them—some crisp, some blurred, all maddeningly, illegibly tiny. I would die of eyestrain, I realized, before I made it halfway through the documents I had photographed.
Miranda picked up the intercom on the second beep. “Hey,” I said, not bothering with a greeting. “You’re pretty savvy with a cell phone, right?”
“Compared to the average twelve-year-old, I’m a dolt. Compared to you, I’m Stephen Hawking.”
“Then come be brilliant,” I said. “I took a bunch of pictures with my phone, but they’re tiny. Is there a way to see them on a computer screen, lots bigger?”
“There is,” she said, “but it would take a genius. I’ll be right there.”
MIRANDA LOADED THE PICTURES—ALL 127 OF them—onto her laptop, which she’d brought from the bone lab. “I’ve got Photoshop and iPhoto on this machine,” she said. “You’re probably still running Hieroglyph 1.0. Here, give me your phone.” She connected a short cable and pressed a few keys. As if by magic, photos began flashing across her laptop screen. “First thing, let’s get rid of the ones that aren’t in focus. That’ll cut out the number in half, at least.” She began scrolling through the photos at a blistering pace, hitting the delete key with a staccato speed that put me in mind of an old-time telegrapher.
“How do you even know the ones you’re deleting aren’t good?” I said. “They’re only on the screen for a nanosecond before you get rid of them.”
“Trust me, they’re bad,” she said. “If they look like a Weather Channel satellite photo, we’re not going to be able to read the words, no matter how long we stare at them. Here, I’ll show you.” She went into the trash file and pulled out one of the deleted pictures. Everything was a swirling blur.
“Looks like Hurricane Miranda,” I acknowledged grudgingly. “Okay, carry on. Sorry I doubted you.”
“Never do it again,” she said, quoting one of her favorite lines from The Princess Bride. Once she had separated the fuzzy chaff from the crisp wheat, she went back to the beginning, starting with the passport images. The first one showed the document’s two-page spread, but the next one was a close-up, zoomed in on the young man’s face. “Wow,” said Miranda. “Joanna really nailed it, didn’t she? I mean, the only thing she missed is that mole on his left cheek.” She shook her head. “Poor kid.”
Filling the screen, the image was more poignant than it had been as a thumbnail. The boy’s face was slender, his brown eyes large and frightened. Was he afraid of traveling to an unknown land, or afraid because he lived in a country ruled by military tyrants his parents despised? Or was he afraid—was it possible?—because he possessed, somehow, some uncanny, sixth-sense premonition about the terrible darkness that lay in wait for him in the not-too-distant future?
After the passport came contact information: the address of the apartment where he was living; the name and number of his landlord and roommates; the address and telephone number, back in Egypt, of his parents—before they were arrested, I assumed, not in the hellhole where they were probably now being beaten and “interrogated.”
Miranda had been overly generous when she estimated that half my images might be usable; as it turned out, only 31 of the original 127 had survived her merciless culling, and it was number 31 that made me jump to my feet. “Look,” I said, tapping the screen with one hand and grabbing Miranda’s arm with the other. “Look!”
“Oww,” she said. “Use your words, not your painful viselike grip. What?”
“Sorry. It’s a letter from a doctor. He says Shafiq needs a reduced course load because he’s been injured in a car accident.”
“So it does. ‘Orthopedic surgery on the right humerus and right femur.’ Golly.” Miranda read more, her tone becoming as excited as mine. “‘Bones repaired with plates and screws’—my God, it really is him!”
“It really is,” I echoed. “We’ll need to see if we can rustle up some x-rays or some DNA—maybe he left some personal effects at the apartment where he lived, like a hairbrush or a cap that would have some hair and follicles. But it’s him. It’s got to be him.”
“This is awesome,” said Miranda.
“It is,” I agreed. “Awful, too.”
“Awful, too,” she echoed.
CHAPTER 30