On Edge

by Albert Ashforth

  “Why’s that?”

  “Oh, there’s something about you, a kind of restlessness, maybe, that makes you different. I hope you’ll be happy—”

  At that moment my phone began to vibrate. It was Stan, and he sounded excited. “You’re not gonna believe this, Alex. The body’s gone, disappeared.”

  “Nolda’s body?” When Stan grunted a yes, I said, “How the heck—”

  “Don’t ask me. There was some delay in the medical people coming over from Bagram. I guess that’s what it was. I’m not sure. That’s what we arranged. A doctor at the Bagram hospital was set to handle the autopsy.”

  “An autopsy would have been good. We could have figured out how long he was in the water. At least we’d get some idea.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s not the end of the world. I’m busy, but come around later. I’ll try to have the individuals in here who were supposed to be guarding the corpse. We can find out what happened.”

  After hanging up, I asked Wanda, “When did you see Nolda’s body? At about what time?”

  “I guess about 0730 hours. I rode over with Hammond. Why? You sound excited.”

  I told Wanda what Stan had just told me. I said, “Who was there in the morgue when you were there?”

  “There was a morgue attendant, and yes, one of our people, a sergeant. Why?”

  “We gave orders to a couple of MPs to guard the body. Evidently, they screwed up.”

  Wanda poked at the remains of her dessert. I took a long swallow of water. “The simplest kind of job, and they couldn’t handle it.” I may have groaned.

  “I’m glad I at least saw the individual who shot my husband. But why are you so upset?”

  Before I could answer, my telephone began vibrating. It was Stan again. Still mad, I answered with an angry “What now?”

  “I got hold of the MPs, 1500 hours. It’s one thing after another here.”

  “That was Stan again. He’s not happy.” But I had to wonder if he was really as unhappy as he sounded. I was the only one insisting on an autopsy.

  Wanda said, “You don’t seem happy either.”

  “I suppose I’m not.” I didn’t want to reveal the reason at that moment to Wanda, but Nolda’s body suddenly disappearing was one of those things that never should have happened. This figured to make it more difficult for me to prove that someone else, not Nolda, had killed Pete. I did my best to smile. “You’re right. What am I getting excited about?”

  “You’re also excited because Nolda’s body isn’t around. Same question: Is that a problem?”

  “It could be. His body appeared to have been in the water for a while.” I paused. “When was Pete shot? Eleven days ago, right?” When she nodded, I said, “If his body was in the water for longer than eleven days that would suggest he—”

  “Suggest what?”

  “Suggest he didn’t kill Pete. That someone else did.”

  Wanda frowned. “I see what you’re getting at, Alex. But if Nolda’s body isn’t available, we can’t be sure. What can we do?”

  “Maybe we’ll find it.” But I wasn’t too optimistic about that happening. It was probably back in the drink somewhere, this time with weights to hold it down.

  Wanda gazed downward, began toying with the stem of her glass. “Can we talk about other things?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything except the disappearance of Nolda’s body. It’s a difficult subject for me. I feel sick when I think about . . . that person.”

  I said, “You want to find Pete’s murderer, don’t you?”

  When she only nodded, I said, “I realize this is all very depressing, but it’s necessary. We have to talk about it. I have to ask you questions. There’s no way around it.”

  Wanda’s eyes flashed a grim smile, and she reached across the table and touched my hand. “Thank you, Alex.”

  “For what?”

  “For being so patient. I realize I have been letting things get to me.”

  A moment of silence followed. Finally, Wanda said, “Things were so different the last time we saw one another. My God! Was it really fifteen years ago?”

  “We were young then.”

  Wanda said, “I didn’t realize it, but we were, weren’t we? You know I was crazy about you back then.”

  “If you liked me so much, why didn’t you show it a little more?”

  “I did, but you weren’t picking up my signals.”

  “Too much interference?”

  “I guess. I admit some of it was provided by Pete, if not all of it.”

  I said, “You two really made a nice pair. Even I have to concede that.”

  “That’s nice, Alex. Nice that you should say that. Getting married to Pete there in the Fort Bragg chapel”—she touched a tissue to her eyes—“with my parents there, all the way in from Minnesota . . .” She sighed. “It was the happiest day of my life. I can’t tell you how much I miss him.”

  For the next couple of minutes, we did our best to stay away from any subject that might touch on Pete.

  I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. “You still have a nice smile, Wanda.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t smile much anymore.” She hesitated. “Not as much as I used to anyway.”

  The melancholy thought occurred to me that none of us do.

  “How is Kabul for shopping?”

  “Good for rugs and shawls. Do you like to haggle?”

  She laughed. “I love to haggle.”

  “Then you’ll like Chicken Street. I’ll drive you over.”

  When I caught the waiter’s attention, I made a scribbling motion with my hands, letting him know we wanted to pay. Later, as I drove back to Phoenix, I was surprised to see that it was already 1420 hours. Time had flown by.

  CHAPTER 8

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2013

  “AT EASE, SERGEANT. All right, start from the beginning.”

  From behind his cluttered steel desk Major Stanley Jones glared at Staff Sergeant Henry Olin, the MP we’d met at the Dawood Hospital morgue. I was seated on a straight-backed chair to Olin’s right, my legs crossed and a cardboard cup of java balanced precariously on my right knee.

  “We did just as we were told, sir. We waited around for someone to arrive to haul away the body. The place was a madhouse. People coming, people going. Nobody was speaking English.”

  “Wasn’t anybody there in charge?”

  “A guy in the corner behind the desk. He came in at six. He did a lot of talking. Then this Afghan guy came in, talked with the guy at the desk. He spoke English. Colonel Hansen came in and we showed her the body. After a while, the Afghan guy said I could take a break, have a smoke. I was anxious to get out of there for a while. I don’t like formaldehyde. The place really stank. Anyway, I went outside. When I came back, the body was gone and so was the guy.”

  “Which guy? The one who spoke English?” When Olin nodded, Jones said, “How long were you gone?”

  “About ten minutes.”

  I said, “No longer than ten minutes?”

  “Maybe a little longer. Fifteen maybe.”

  Stan glanced at me, shrugged.

  I said, “When you got back, Sergeant, did you see right away that the body was gone?”

  “No, sir, I saw it wasn’t where it was when I left. I thought maybe someone had moved it. I looked around for it, then I asked the guy at the desk, but he didn’t speak English. I checked out all the corpses. When I didn’t see it, I knew it had disappeared.”

  Stan nodded at Olin. “That’ll be all, Sergeant.” With Olin gone, Stan said sarcastically, “The place was drenched with formaldehyde.” He grimaced. “Anyway, that pretty much resolves the problem of Nolda being dead when Pete was killed.”

  “We should have given the job to a guy who likes formaldehyde.” I paused. “What I’m thinking, could it be someone wanted to get rid of the body?”

  “Why would anyone give a goddamn about Nolda’s body?” Stan shook his head. “I think you�
�re making too much out of that, Alex.”

  I said, “Let me think about it.” I didn’t want to say it again to Stan, but if the pathologist determined the body was already in the water on the day Pete was shot, Stan would have no choice but to drop the green-on-blue theory—and start searching elsewhere for Pete’s killer.

  “Doug Greer’s going to be here in fifteen, twenty minutes, Alex. Do you want to stay around?” When I said I would, Stan nodded, stood up, and crossed the room to his coffee machine.

  I said, “What does Greer do when he’s over here?”

  “From what I understand, he’s a real hands-on guy. People in D.C. like that. He even speaks a little Pashto. He determines how the infrastructure should be built up. Before the government spends money, he makes sure it’s going to the right places.”

  As Stan stood gazing out the small window through which we could see a circling helicopter, I thought I knew what he was thinking—that considering all the stress, headaches, and danger involved in the work, it was amazing that he and I were both still doing this stuff.

  “How long has it been, Alex? How long since you and I last worked together?”

  “Bosnia, I arrived in Tuzla just after 9/11.” Tuzla is a city in central Bosnia, the location of one of the agency’s smaller stations. It was my first stop in the Balkans, the place where I got my first briefings and some sense of what I’d be doing. One of the jobs turned out to be helping escort Slobodan Milosevic out of Belgrade and over to the Hague, where he would stand trial for genocide.

  “Right. And I’d been involved in Amber Star just around that time.” Handing me a cup, he said, “Before that, let’s see. A Christmas party in D.C.? In somebody’s apartment in Georgetown?”

  “Sounds right. You have a good memory.”

  After sitting back down, Stan said, “I’m starting to overdose on nostalgia. Not a good sign. I used to like this job. There was something new happening every day, but Afghanistan ain’t much fun, not anymore . . .”

  “Don’t let the green-on-blues get you down, Stan.”

  “It’s more than just that. It’s the whole situation. We’ll all be gone by the end of next year. I’m hoping this war hasn’t been in vain, that’s all.” Stan paused. “Tell me, Alex, what are your reasons for thinking that Nolda didn’t kill Pete?”

  “First off, I spoke with his company commander—”

  “Captain Bashiri.”

  “He didn’t seem to recall Nolda that well, and in a sense, that was a plus. Nolda had never caused problems, never done anything that would have made him stick in anybody’s memory. According to his records, the stuff Hammond showed me, he acquitted himself well in a couple of encounters with insurgent forces.”

  “I remember. For a while they were out in Herat.”

  “I have the idea that to commit a green-on-blue you have to be something of a fanatic. If Nolda had been a fanatic, his CO would have remembered him more clearly. If he’d been a Taliban sympathizer, he wouldn’t have fought against them. That would have been noticed.”

  “Go on.”

  “I also spoke with one of Nolda’s buddies, a guy from the same village.”

  “Nolda came from somewhere down in Helmand.”

  “It turned out to be a village where the Taliban wreaked a lot of havoc. Because of the stuff he saw when he was young, Nolda didn’t like the Taliban. His friend said he wasn’t the type to commit a green-on-blue.”

  “For my money, too circumstantial.”

  “His friend said he was a straight-ahead kind of guy.”

  “These people don’t know the meaning of straight-ahead.”

  “He also said he wasn’t the type to nurse hidden agendas. Also not the type to let people push him around.”

  “You’re the only one who sees things that way. Who made you an expert on how Afghans think?” Stan got up from his desk and stared out the window. “Maybe some warlord hired Nolda to kill Pete.”

  “Nolda’s not the guy he would have hired.”

  “You sound awfully sure of yourself.”

  “I’m wondering about his body disappearing. It disappeared because someone had a reason to get rid of it.” I checked my watch, got to my feet. “I have an appointment to talk with Hammond about the pictures.”

  “I know. He mentioned it. We got something in from the FBI yesterday. Personally, I don’t think it’s significant.” Stan paused. “You maybe will.”

  “What came in?”

  Stan nodded toward the door. With his phone to his ear, he said, “I’ll let Hammond show you. He’s good with the PowerPoint stuff.”

  Five minutes later, Stan, Hammond, and I were in a classroom-like room in a neighboring building. Standing next to a screen at the front and holding a remote, Hammond said, “What I’ve got are photos taken by the closed-circuit security cameras at the entrance to the Headquarters building. But you’re going to see there’s a bit of a problem, partly because of the low quality of the images. Some of the pictures aren’t bad. Like this one for instance.”

  On the screen in front of the room was a grainy picture of a guy with a mustache, wearing a uniform.

  I said, “Maybe I know him. It’s hard to tell.”

  “I know him,” Stan said.

  Hammond looked at Stan and nodded. “That’s one of the Askars at the Embassy. He was in Headquarters on the day Colonel Hansen was killed.”

  Stan shrugged. “One of the guards probably stole the good camera. He sold it and replaced it with a cheesy one. It’s happened before.” Hammond put up another picture, a grainy likeness of an Afghan soldier.

  I said, “Not clear. Not enough pixels.”

  “You’re right, Alex,” Hammond said. “They should be better quality. Good facial recognition requires at least sixty, seventy pixels. Most of these have from twelve to twenty.”

  As Hammond worked the computer, picture after picture appeared on the screen. The pictures varied in quality. “Unfortunately, there were quite a few like this.”

  Stan said, “The problem was, we could ID most of the people entering and leaving, but not all. We couldn’t say for sure whether Nolda had entered in the morning or whether he’d left at noon.”

  When I asked how many pictures there were, Stan responded, “Hundreds.”

  “Even with the camera problems and some people facing the wrong direction,” Hammond said, “we did fairly well. We ended up with eighteen photos of people we couldn’t ID. I figured maybe some were visitors. Even when the quality ain’t that good, it’s good enough. Look at this picture.”

  Hammond clicked the remote, and we got another picture, this one of an American soldier. “That’s someone else we know didn’t fire the shot. Facial recognition ID’d him. Here’s another. We ain’t sure who this is.”

  On the screen was a guy in an ANP uniform who had turned his head at the moment the picture was taken. “Could be the guy, we’re not sure. There were others like this one.”

  “That’s part of the problem,” Stan said. “We don’t have a picture of Nolda, not a clear one.”

  Hammond said, “We have like twenty pictures so grainy we’re not sure who the people are.”

  I said, “So we’re not sure he even came to work that day.” I recalled that there was no ID on Nolda’s body. Using his ID, someone could have signed in as him.

  “Right, as it now stands, we’re not sure. He could be any one of this bunch.” Hammond clicked on picture after picture, none of which was very clear. After a pause, he showed a few more. “We recognize all of these people. They worked in the building in different offices. All had alibis for the time Pete was shot. Almost all anyway.”

  “What do you mean almost all?”

  “I’ll show you.” Hammond put up a picture of an Afghan soldier. Although he was looking toward his right, it was a good enough three-quarter likeness to be able to recognize him. Hammond adjusted the lighting and the zoom.

  “Better,” I said.

  “Good, because t
his individual doesn’t work in the building.”

  “Why was he there then?” I asked. “Was he a visitor?”

  “We’re not sure,” Stan said.

  “But I can tell you who he is.” After a second, Hammond put up another picture on the screen. “When I sent it back to the States, the FBI ran it through their facial recognition database. Even though it wasn’t too clear, they got a hit right away.”

  When Hammond again punched the keyboard, another picture appeared. “This is what came up.” It was a shot of the same man, but this picture was an official photo. The name beneath the picture was Abdul Sakhi. His birthplace was given as Kunar Province. His birth date made him thirty-four years old.

  Stan said, “We received a communication telling us who he is. He’s one of our assets. The government has used him on three separate occasions.”

  “Black ops?”

  “What else?” Stan shrugged. “A couple of people know how to reach him. He gets paid, that’s the end of it. He’s reliable.”

  I said, “Nevertheless, we should talk with him.”

  Stan said, “We would if we could. He’s hard to locate.”

  I said, “First thing, we try to find someone in Headquarters who spoke with him.”

  “We already have,” Hammond said. “Colonel Campbell in Special Operations knows him and has had contact with him. But he didn’t speak with him the day Pete was killed.”

  As Hammond switched off the computer and turned on the lights, I stood up. “In other words, the investigation isn’t complete.” I could see Stan wasn’t at all happy when I said that.

  I didn’t say it, but I wasn’t happy either. The word to describe this investigation was “botched,” but I didn’t want to say it out loud.

  Back in the CID office, Stan checked his watch. “Doug should be here anytime. You’d never met Greer before this week, have you?”

  I shook my head. “The other day was the first time.”

  “I thought maybe you might have run into him the other times you’d been here. He’s back and forth between D.C. and Kabul on a regular basis. He’s been in Bagram the last couple of days, but he’s flying over here this afternoon. Pretty influential, from all reports.” When I interrupted to say I’d seen his name in the papers often enough, Stan nodded. “He’s definitely high profile.” Stan took a sip of coffee, gazed at me over the cup. “Being out here you kind of lose track of what’s going on back home. From what I hear he’s behind a lot of decisions. Right now, he’s responsible for figuring out what we should be doing with heavy equipment when the big drawdown begins.”