Faces Without Features

The lights reflected on the city's wet pavements looked to Yamen like distorted oil stains. His breath froze in his chest as he felt that sentence fall right behind his ear. "You forgot your bag... or did you forget me too?" It was not the words themselves that terrified him, but that astonishing match between the tone of the voice coming from behind him and the voice he had heard in the dark office minutes earlier.

Yamen turned slowly, his heart pounding violently against the walls of his chest. In front of him stood a man wearing a long dark coat. As usual, Yamen tried to scan the man's features in search of a distinguishing mark, but his mind betrayed him as always; he saw two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but they were scattered fragments that formed no "identity" in his memory. For him, the man's face was just another blank sheet in a lost book.

"Who are you?" Yamen's voice came out choked.

The stranger smiled, and his smile was visible through the movement of his jaw muscles rather than the shape of his lips. He held out the bag that Yamen had indeed left in the office, but the bag seemed heavier than he remembered. The stranger said in a friendly tone dripping with venom: "I am just a passerby who likes to look after other people's property... especially property that contains deadly engineering secrets."

At that moment, Yamen noticed the glint of a small metal blade protruding from between the fingers of the black leather glove the stranger was wearing. There was no commotion, no shouting, just a graceful movement calculated with surgical precision. Yamen realized that his death stood a single step away.

Instead of freezing, his architectural mind worked with astonishing speed. In a fraction of a second, he scanned his surroundings not as people, but as "voids" and "masses." He glimpsed a taxi approaching from a distance, the opening of a narrow alley to his right, and a leaning lamppost. And with an instinctive movement, he shoved the bag toward the stranger's chest with all his strength, which threw off his balance for a moment, and he set off running toward the narrow alley.

He was running not just to escape, but to flee that terrifying truth: that he was fleeing from someone he would never recognize if he met him in broad daylight five minutes later. The alley was dark, and the smell of dampness and garbage stung the nostrils. He heard footsteps behind him, a rapid and regular rhythm, "tap... tap... tap," a hard sole striking the asphalt. The stranger was not running wildly, but was pursuing him with the confidence of a hunter who knows his prey is trapped in a concrete box.

Yamen reached the end of the alley to find it blocked by an old brick wall. He turned in panic to find the shadow approaching. The alley's sole lamp suddenly went out, and pitch darkness prevailed. Yamen felt the movement of air, something piercing the stillness coming toward his throat. He ducked by survival instinct, to hear the sound of the blade as it embedded itself in the wood directly behind his head.

"You are good at escaping, Yamen, but you are not good at hiding the truth," the voice whispered in the darkness.

Before the stranger could deliver his second blow, a loud siren blared from the main street, followed by a rotating red and blue light reflected on the walls of the alley. It was a police patrol passing by chance. The stranger hesitated for a moment, then retreated into the darkness with the same terrifying calm with which he had appeared.

Yamen stumbled on his way out, and shouted at the top of his voice as he waved to the police car: "Help me! Someone is trying to kill me!"

An hour later, Yamen was sitting in the interrogation office, trembling as a coarse blanket was wrapped around his shoulders. The air in the station reeked of boiled coffee, old paper, and cigarettes. A man with a strong build and neatly trimmed gray hair, wearing an elegant civilian suit, entered the office. The man placed a file in front of him and sat down calmly.

"I am Brigadier General Hassan," he said in a deep and steady voice. "Tell me, Mr. Yamen, what exactly happened?"

Yamen began to recount the story stammeringly; the altered blueprints, "Symphony No. 0," the photograph he had found under his desk, and the man who had chased him. Hassan listened attentively, but his eyes betrayed a kind of professional skepticism.

"Very well, Mr. Yamen," Hassan said as he opened a small notebook. "Give me a precise description of this man. His height, the color of his eyes, his facial features... any distinguishing mark?"

A heavy silence prevailed in the room. Yamen rubbed his face with trembling hands. "I cannot."

Hassan furrowed his brows. "What do you mean you cannot? He stood in front of you, spoke to you, and tried to stab you in an alley lit by police lights!"

Yamen sighed deeply and felt the bitterness of failure. "I suffer from a rare medical condition called face blindness (Prosopagnosia). I see the features, sir, but I cannot put them together. To me, his face looked like yours, like the face of the soldier standing outside. I could not pick him out from among a thousand men if they stood before me now."

Brigadier General Hassan looked at him with a look that combined pity and doubt. "Are you asking me to chase a faceless ghost? Your claim that there has been tampering in the Burj al-Qimma project is very serious, and if you do not have a description of the assailant, then it seems as though you... let us say... are exaggerating due to work pressure before the opening."

"I am not exaggerating!" Yamen shouted as he rose from his place. "The tower will collapse! There is an equation in the vibration system that has been altered to destroy the building at a certain frequency!"

Hassan calmed him and gestured for him to sit. "We sent a team to the office, and they found no trace of a break-in, nor any files named Symphony No. 0. Your computer was completely empty of any modified blueprints. In fact, Mr. Yamen, your company reported that secret files disappeared from your office tonight, and they accuse you of taking them."

Yamen felt the ground shift beneath him. They had turned the tables on him in just a few hours. The person who had been pursuing him had not only wanted to kill him, but wanted to destroy his reputation and make him a scapegoat for the coming catastrophe.

"Sir, please... look for the smell of old leather and rain, look for the sound of footsteps as regular as a clock," Yamen said in despair.

Hassan smiled coldly and faintly. "This is not evidence I can present to the public prosecutor. Now, I will have to detain you until morning to verify some information, especially since we found something rather interesting in your car."

Hassan took out a transparent plastic bag, and inside it there was a small encrypted remote control, and beside it a folded paper in Yamen's handwriting that said: "The equation is complete. The fall begins from within."

Yamen was stunned. He had never seen this device before, and he had never written that sentence. He realized at that moment that the "featureless face" had completely tightened the siege around him. And while the soldier was leading him toward the detention room, Yamen glimpsed from the corner of his eye a man passing through the long corridor of the station. He was wearing a cleaner's uniform. He could not see his face, but he heard the "click" of his shoe sole on the tiles; it was the same rhythm, the same confident steps.

The man stopped for a moment, without turning around, and slowly raised his hand to adjust his collar, revealing a black leather glove covering a single hand.