by Gary Haynes
Tom switched the TV off. “The hell did CNN get this before us?”
“The Pakistanis ain’t naive. They know the power of US public opinion.”
“I didn’t know that the police had seen known Leopards. The men I saw were all masked,” Tom said, walking over to the sofa.
“We got a copy of the report over an hour ago,” Crane said, a little sheepishly.
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“No point. Your mind was made up already. But now the world will believe they have those responsible.”
“You think?” Tom asked, resting his hands on the back of the sofa.
“What I think don’t matter diddly-squat as far as this is concerned. Perception, Tom.” Crane waved a finger at him. “It’s all about perception. And this little scene says the Leopards are guilty. The Iranians, too.”
“Which makes what we’ve agreed all the more important,” he said, straightening up.
“As I said, you’ve made up your mind already,” Crane replied, draining his Scotch. “Just get me another one of these before you leave, eh, Tom.” He held out his empty glass, as if Tom were a waiter.
“Don’t forget Houseman wants you to call him.”
“When I’ve finished my whisky.”
“It sounded important,” Tom said.
“No shit.”
30.
Tom was in the snug bedroom allocated to him by a non-CIA manager, who was responsible for mundane matters at the Ariana. It was a high-security building, but no one expected operatives or analysts to clean restrooms, and he was surprised by the number of diverse civilians who worked here.
He was stripped down to his boxer shorts, in need of a shower. He didn’t know how long it would be before he would get the chance again, and, as Crane had pointed out, he smelt like a rodent. He placed his small Buddha onto the nightstand and patted it. He would be on the move again in twenty minutes, going to what could be his death. He accepted it with a calmness that, paradoxically, worried him. He was not a risk taker; all of his training had been the opposite. A DS special agent on a protective detail was taught to eliminate risks. But he would not let the secretary go without doing what he could. Although he knew all too well that even if he successfully planted the bugs, there was no certainty that they would reveal anything useful, especially in the short timeframe.
There was a knock at the door. He slipped on a shirt and walked over to it. It was the CIA operations officer Crane had mentioned. She was a fellow Southerner with short blonde hair and a deep scar on her forehead. Her eyes were cerulean blue and as hypnotic as any he’d seen. After some brief small talk, she handed him a manila envelope containing car keys, a forged Pakistani passport and papers to enable him to cross the border, and the web address for the satellite imagery, which he hoped would result in a successful scan from the spy bug. She eased a canvas bag off her shoulder and gave it to him, too, saying it held a disposable cellphone, some clothes, a marked map, a Maglite and Pakistani rupees, together with the bugs. He noticed something about her. Something he couldn’t pin down. She seemed a little agitated; nervous, even. Crane had said she’d had a hard time here, so he decided not to dwell on it.
After she’d left, he walked across the azure tiles to the cubicle shower, feeling both lethargic and energized. He stepped in and put the showerhead directly above him, turning the dial to blue. He picked up a bar of soap and shivered as the cold water drenched him. He soaped his bruised body down. Placing the soap back into the cradle, he began to massage his aching muscles.
He’d weighed a little shy of thirteen stone for the last ten years, retaining the physique of a light-heavyweight boxer. He watched what he ate and ran most days. He’d trained in Muay Thai when he’d done a three-year stint at the US Embassy in Bangkok. He’d kept up the training, honing his techniques and working out with dumbbells or doing calisthenics when they weren’t to hand.
Bangkok had been his first long-term overseas posting. He’d been abroad on duty many times before, but he’d sampled as much of the culture as the average air steward did. It’d been a bar and a hotel room, then home. But after a week of late nights with a couple of other DS agents, he started to spend his days off exploring the city. The Buddhist temples were called wats, his cab driver said, and the best time to visit them was in the early morning when it was cooler and less busy. It was 13:02, sweltering and as packed as a subway at rush hour, the local workers being anxious to spend their lunchtimes offering the saffron-robed monks food parcels called tam boon. A way of attaining a better life the next time around, the cab driver had said with a sardonic grin as he’d driven Tom home.
The following day, the cab driver had arrived early and had taken Tom to the Grand Palace. Situated within the grounds, he explained, was the most important wat in Thailand: the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Wat Phra Kaew. The Buddha was carved from a single block of jade, and sat adorned in garments of shimmering gold, an elaborate headdress twice its own size atop its cherub-like face.
A woman came up beside Tom. She wore canvas sandals and a purple cheesecloth dress that reached down to about twelve centimetres above her ankles. She had long, curly grey-brown hair, with lengths of beads dangling among the wildness. She looked to be in her mid-fifties with light-blue eyes glinting like sunlight on a glacier.
They had spoken to one another for a minute or two only.
But on his second visit, she’d managed to convince him to light joss sticks in memory of his mother.
31.
The main A1 highway from Kabul passed through Jalalabad all the way to Torkham, the Af-Pak border town. Crane had told Tom not to stop, especially in Jalalabad, saying that the locals were as mad as hell. If the vehicle broke down, he should get a cab. There were more cabs in between Kabul and the border than there were wannabes in LA, he’d said. It would take about three and a half hours without a hitch, which would mean Tom would arrive in the early hours of the morning.
The vehicle Tom was driving was a rusted Ford pickup that’d been waiting for him in the Ariana parking lot, and which, he’d guessed, would tend not to arouse suspicion. But he quickly realized why the A1 was called one of the most dangerous stretches of road in the world, especially at night. The route snaked through mountain passes and was full of old ten-ton trucks that would give a traffic cop a heart attack, the car drivers risking their lives with a jaw-dropping regularity to overtake them. He’d had to drive off-road and await the passage of an Afghan military convey about midway between Kabul and the border. But at least the route lacked the numerous checkpoints manned by local police or security forces, whose presence clogged up the opposite side of the road.
At the border, the road was flanked by pedestrian walkways and metal fencing. Jagged rock faces towered above, rising to the foothills of the Khyber Pass. Torkham was a small town with dilapidated-looking hotels and poky, flat-roofed houses. He passed through without incident. But it was different for Afghans entering Pakistan. Those who didn’t have bribe money were openly beaten by the administration officials and members of the Khasadar Force, the local militia. He sat tight and watched as skinny men covered their heads and buckled under the vicious strikes from wooden batons and rifle butts.
Entering Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formally known as the North West Frontier Province, Tom felt equally vulnerable. It was a radical state, where even the liberally minded didn’t care much for foreigners, Americans in particular. Apart from the threat posed by the Pakistan Taliban, kidnapping was rife, the average official even more corrupt than their Mexican counterparts. The locals seemed to have a penchant for Kalashnikovs, which they carried slung over their shoulders like fashion accessories. Tom was glad he was wearing the clothes of a blue-collar Pakistani: sandals, a white collarless shirt and cotton pants, and had added his wallet, SIG and a suppressor to the contents of the bag that the CIA operative had handed him. His swarthy skin and dark hair were a plus, too, although the lack of streetlights meant the chances of getting hard
stares were limited in any event.
After leaving the border region, he kept on the N-5 National Highway, concentrating on driving on the left: a throwback to British rule. Along the roadside, people ate at dimly lit little stores. Roasted corn kernels wrapped in newspaper, green bananas and chicken wings. The road led all the way to Peshawar, the state capital, where he’d be picked up by one of Sandri Khan’s men and driven to Islamabad. He estimated that the thirty-five-mile journey would take less than an hour.
Apart from the traffic, the only other signs of life were a single-pump gas station and the four Pakistani police checkpoints he was stopped at. He knew that the average local felt about as safe around them as a Chihuahua in a basement full of pit bulls. But Crane had told him to put a couple of hundred Pakistani rupees – a little under two dollars – inside his passport to ensure he wasn’t held up. It had worked.
The land flattened out as he got closer to Peshawar, the fields filled with cash-crops: rice, sugarcane and tobacco. Stray buffalos and kids on mopeds still made driving hazardous, but as he saw the lights of the city, the mud-brick houses giving way to concrete blocks and pylons with sagging power lines, he started to adapt a little to the alien conditions. Crane had said that the streets of Peshawar were a dusty maze, and so he’d arranged for Tom to be picked up a mile from the outskirts, halfway down a private road flanked by broad-leafed shisham trees. The landowner would be paid to take care of the pickup, the man being an asset whom Crane had used often.
When he cut the lights, nothing stirred. Tom wound down the window. The night air was warm, the sky matte-black, the stars shining with the intensity of phosphorous bombs. He checked the map. It was roughly one hundred miles to Islamabad. He decided to get out, and walked over to some scrub. He squatted down beside it, put his bag by his feet and took out his suppressed SIG. Cocked and loaded, he placed it by his right foot. The main threat here was roaming bands of trigger-happy, anti-Leopard militia, paid to protect the city.
He saw the beams from a pair of full headlights approaching at speed, passing the remnants of a long-abandoned fort. The car stopped about seven metres from his vantage point, and the high beam was dipped. Tom reached into the bag and lifted out the Maglite. He signalled the three short, four long flashes that Crane had said to use, and waited for the four long, three short flashes from the headlights in return. Once registered, he bagged his SIG. Standing up, he walked out from the natural cover, and jogged towards a dark-green Mazda. As he got to it the front passenger door was opened and, bending down, he caught sight of his driver, a smiling middle-aged man with bad teeth and a lazy eye, who wore a ragged Shalwar Kameez and canvas flip-flops.
“Get in, please,” he said.
“Thank you,” Tom said, getting in beside him. He put the bag in the footwell and looked nervously about.
“My name is Jameel. We will be in Islamabad in less than two hours,” he said, putting the car into gear and driving off.
“Where are we meeting Mr Khan?”
“His house. You like music?”
“Sure,” Tom said, looking in vain for a seat belt.
“I always drive better to music. One day I will learn to drive properly and get a licence, and then I won’t need the music to calm my nerves,” he said as he turned on a cassette player and the sound of a Pakistani pop song belted out.
Despite Jameel’s disconcerting statement, they reached the western outskirts of Islamabad safely, and travelled through a slum settlement, the track barely wide enough for the Mazda to pass. As Jameel turned down the volume on the cassette recorder the car’s headlights picked up the acid-like eyes of wild dogs and the gappy smiles of barefoot street kids. The only other lights were the yellow glows coming from oil lamps in corrugated shacks. Jameel pointed out that the shacks masqueraded as all-night food stores or eateries, but were, in fact, brothels and drugs dens. Even inside the car, the stench was appalling, assaulting Tom’s nostrils, and he forced himself not to retch.
Leaving the slum, Jameel drove along a crater-ridden road before pulling into a back alley, which had a rivulet running down the side of it. As Tom saw the façades of a few three-storey tenements and derelict warehouses, Jameel stopped and cut the engine.
“Make sure you step over that,” he said, nodding towards the fetid flow. “Or your foot will be amputated.”
Tom wondered what manner of man this Sandri Khan would be.
32.
The rust-flecked metal front door led to a narrow stairway lit by an oil-filled hurricane lamp, hanging from a length of wire. The bare floorboards creaked, and plaster had flaked off the walls. At the top of the staircase, a potbellied man in an old undershirt sat on a wooden stool, an AK-47 resting on his knees. He was squinting at a newspaper but looked up as they ascended.
“He will frisk you,” Jameel said.
“No, he won’t,” Tom replied, jutting out his chin.
“Then turn around and go.”
As Tom reached the top of the stairs he held up his hands and the man did a thorough patting down. He snatched Tom’s bag from him and lifted out the SIG.
“He will give it back to you when you leave,” Jameel said.
Tom thought it useless to argue.
Jameel knocked twice on a first-floor door and, after a short pause, it was opened by a small man, about five-six, with a sinewy body and stubble. He wore a white robe that was stained and frayed at the bottom. His eyes were dull and flecked with red motes; his hair, bedraggled, hung to his shoulders.
“Come in. Mind the cats. They have free rein, but they will scratch and bite you if you approach them. They feel uneasy around strangers,” he said, grinning.
Tom saw that the room was as unkempt as the man Crane had called Sandri Khan, with piles of dirty laundry stacked high against damp-blackened walls. There was no furniture to speak of, save for a small sofa draped with a pale-red bed sheet, sprinkled with cat hairs. There were four cats. Their tails were almost furless, their bodies near-emaciated.
“They are my children. I am unable to have children, you see. And what woman would marry a man who could not give her children? So I live with my cats.”
“That’s a tough break,” Tom said.
“It is God’s will. I am a Christian,” Khan said.
Nodding, Tom thought that a little strange.
“You look surprised. We are the largest minority religion in Pakistan. There are almost three million of us, and yet we are persecuted lepers. Some tea, perhaps? I have no milk or sugar, but the tea is good.”
“No, thank you,” Tom said.
“Please sit.”
Tom risked attracting fleas and sat on the sofa, putting the bag down beside it. Khan filled a battered kettle from a tap that groaned and squeaked as a weak flow of water stuttered out. He put the kettle onto a single-ring gas burner before turning around and squatting on the floor.
“So you are an American. The problem with Americans is that you arm someone one day and fight them the next. Then you leave after you have wrecked the place.”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” Tom said.
“You armed Saddam against Iran, and then invaded Iraq. You pulled out of Iraq and the place descended into hell in a week. You armed the Afghans to fight the Russians and then invaded Afghanistan. Now you’ve left, the same will happen there, despite the politicians’ words. You don’t understand the region. Period, as you Americans say.”
“That’s a good speech. But I like to think we have a coherent strategy.”
“No offence. You have a coherent strategy in this part of God’s world like I have three balls.”
“I think maybe I have come to the wrong place,” Tom said, wondering if he should cut the meeting short and leave, although, in truth, he knew that would be self-defeating.
“No, no. Not at all. I am merely pointing out that you Americans have a habit of changing your minds. Think hard before you ask me to do something for you.”
“Did Crane ask you to say th
at?”
“I don’t know anyone called Crane,” Khan said, smoothing a cat as it passed by him.
“This is bullshit.”
Khan’s expression changed. “First you insult me by not accepting my hospitality. Then you insult me by questioning my discretion.”
“All right, I’m sorry.”
Khan nodded, his eyes narrowing. “Well?” he asked, raising his palms face up.
Tom looked at Jameel.
“Ask what you have to ask,” Khan said. “Jameel is my brother.”
“Okay. Do you know where Brigadier Hasni lives?”
“He is a ruthless killer and exploiter of men. What do you want with such a man?”
Tom blinked slowly, gathering his thoughts. He would need Khan. And if Crane trusted him, so should he. After all the dancing around, he figured his best option was to be honest. At least he might be taken seriously.
“His house. I’m looking for a soft spot,” he said. “I’d like to add a few bugs to his garden.”
Khan laughed, dismissively. The water from the kettle began to boil over, making a whistling noise through the old-fashioned spout cap, and Jameel began to laugh, too.
“Even the kettle thinks it is funny,” Jameel said.
“Make the tea, Jameel,” Khan said.
“The tea, of course, brother,” he said, appearing suitably rebuked.
Tom saw Khan looking at him. He’d seen that look before. It was the look of a man who could mix it with the best of them, despite his diminutive and shabby appearance to the contrary.
“Many men have tried and many men have failed. Hasni is well protected. His house is a fortress. A pretty fortress. But a fortress nonetheless. He sees assassins everywhere.”
“So you know where he lives?”
“I do,” Khan said, nodding. “I also know where the President of the United States lives. Would you try to find a way to bug his garden also?”
Jameel slurped from a dirty cup and smiled. “Would you?” he mimicked.