The engine roared to life, belching a cloud of black smoke that hung like a stain against the lemon sky and then dispersed slowly as a breeze unraveled it and the boat took off across the electric blue ocean, the roseate cliffs pressed against the horizon like cutouts, a spray of water raining onto Hook’s face and chest, but not enough to cool him.
Hook made this trip once a week to play chess with an American expatriate, Bob Carnahan, a retired dam builder from New York who lived with his wife on a narrow peninsula that was accessible only by long-tail.
The boat ride took fifteen minutes and the view was spectacular once the tawdry tourist town was lost to sight and even after six years Hook hadn’t tired of it, had never grown bored with the play of light on the water and the majesty of the rock towers, bearded with jungle vegetation, that rose from the ocean; always restored somehow by the sheer splendor of it all.
But today he was fatigued and his mouth tasted as if he’d been sucking on pennies.
He regretted coming, but he knew he would have been worse off at home neurotically surfing the Internet, his eyes caressing the bottle of Cutty.
The boat found the beach and Hook disembarked, wading out onto the sand that burned the soles of his bare feet, quickly stepping into his flops.
He trudged past rows of sundrunk bathers and entered the private gates of the Beach Club—a dozen large wooden houses built at the base of a cliff, thick foliage giving them privacy from the ocean front and one another.
Wealthy expatriates lived here, some of them renting the houses out when they went home to Chicago, or Rome or Paris or Copenhagen.
Hook made his way along a stone pathway and arrived at a two-story house with a well tended garden and a gurgling Buddha water feature trickling into a Koi pond.
Betty Carnahan sat in the shade in a bamboo recliner reading a book. She smiled when she saw him.
“Harry.”
“Betty.”
“How are you?”
“Good.”
Betty was maybe sixty, still beautiful. She’d spared herself from the harsh sunlight, and her skin was fine and just a little melba-colored and her salt and pepper hair wasn’t dyed, and her face had not been stretched and tweaked and Botoxed at one of the many clinics that offered these services dirt cheap in this part of heaven.
She flapped the book at him. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion.
“Ever read this, Harry?”
“No,” he said.
“It must be my fifth time. Do you think it’s a sin?”
“What?”
“Rereading a book so many times when there are so many new books out there?”
“I think that novelty is overrated, Betty. There’s a lot to be said for the familiar.”
“Spoken like a true fogey.”
“Yeah. Well.”
Bob Carnahan appeared from inside the house. He was a craggy guy with a shock of white hair and a bandito mustache, shirtless, still muscular, wearing Bermuda shorts. He handed Betty a drink and their hands touched and they smiled at one another with their eyes and Hook wondered about all the things he had missed in his life.
He followed Carnahan into the living room and the American poured him a Coke and prepared the chess board.
The room was beautiful, furnished in pale wooden furniture and prayer rugs and what Hook was certain was an original Rothko hung on one wall, amidst a constellation of framed family photographs.
Hook had lived like a nomad his whole life, had never owned a home, never in one place long enough to put down roots.
When his career had crashed and burned there was no thought of settling in the States. The U.S. was a foreign country to him now, way more foreign than the lands of brown and yellow people and musical languages and fragrant food where he had fought America’s wars—declared and undeclared—over the last thirty years.
Bob Carnahan called him over to the chess board. The big man lit a joint and took a hefty toke before holding it out to Hook, who, in his dry years, had still allowed himself a little weed, but he shook his head.
Carnahan was a good player and won most of their games, although Hook usually made him work hard for his victories. But today his mind wasn’t on the game.
As they played Carnahan said, “So, what about this plane crash?”
“Yeah. A mess.”
“Think it has anything to do with those Israeli kids on board?”
“No.”
Carnahan looked at him and his shrewd blue eyes narrowed. “You’ve heard something?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Aren’t you a guy who keeps his ear to the ground?”
“You know what they say about people with their ears to the ground?”
“Something about not seeing the stampede coming?”
“Yeah.”
They played on, but Hook was distracted, staring out the window at the cliffs, listening to the buzz of a fly.
He heard a clank as Carnahan tipped over his king, even though he was winning.
“Let’s quit this, Harry.”
“Sorry, Bob.”
“No problemo, man. You okay?”
“Sure. Just the heat.”
“Uh huh, it’s a bitch.” Carnahan squinted at him. “Want another Coke?”
“No. I think I’ll get moving.”
Carnahan stood, grinning his genial stoner grin. “Go Harry. Go get a massage. Have a swim. We’ll reconvene next week, okay?”
Hook was going to walk back to the beach but he found himself going toward the cliff, and out a gate on the west side, following a footpath that wound through a souk of low-rent resorts, cramped backpackers with overburdened septic tanks, massage parlors, bars and restaurants.
He emerged on the opposite side of the skinny peninsula from where he’d landed, in a swamp of mangrove-fringed tidal flats, and waded through black mud that sucked at his ankles like quicksand until he reached an empty long-tail that bumped in the low brown water and made a deal with the boatman to sail him southwest into the Andaman Sea, toward the sun that sagged like a blood orange, to where Kate Swift and her daughter were hiding.
THIRTY-FIVE
Nadja stood in the lobby of the clinic staring out at the glass doors at the long driveway flanked by rows of snow frosted oaks, her overnight bag on the floor beside her. She was still a little dislocated, her synapses still fogged by the industrial-strength sedatives that had been pumped into her.
It was a gloomy afternoon, the tops of the trees scraping a low gray sky.
At 4.00 PM a black Mercedes-Benz limousine from the late Sixties drifted up the driveway and stopped outside the lobby, the driver invisible behind the tinted windows.
The car was her husband’s conceit. Too small to drive it himself, he would sit beside her in the leather and walnut rear, smoking his foul cigarettes as they were chauffeured through the city, pleased with his beautiful European car and beautiful European wife.
Nadja lifted her bag and went out into the teeth of a wind that had her hunching like a crone as she darted for the car, her feet sinking into the snow. Fighting open the rear door she slid into an overheated interior as stifling as a drying room. There was no sign of Lucien.
The driver didn’t turn and all she could see of him was a pale neck rising from his shirt collar and thin dark hair plastered to his skull.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Morose.”
Without a word Morse clicked the car into gear and the Mercedes slid off down the driveway.
“Where is my husband?” she asked, leaning forward, catching a whiff of something antiseptic beneath his hair grease.
Morse’s dark eyes glanced at her in the rearview mirror before sliding back to the roadway, a pair of gates opening outward like unfurling wings.
“Mr. Benway sends his regrets that he couldn’t be here,” he said in that parched voice.
Knowing there would be no further conversation she sat back and watched his hands on the wheel. Broad, sallow hands, strands of
dark hair lying like quills on the white skin.
When Nadja found herself conjuring a series of brutal snapshots of those hands eviscerating Michael Emerson she looked out the window, watching as the countryside gave way to the crumbling outskirts of the city, a blur of industrial sites that grew like a fungus from the poisoned land.
THIRTY-SIX
“Now, Lucy, it pains me that we have to meet in this clandestine fuckin manner. I’d like to take you for a steak the size of a Doberman over at The Capital Grille and we could chow down and catch up but the climate, the fuckin climate, just will not permit that. Understand?”
“Understood, Congressman,” Benway said, seated primly beside the hulking black man in the rear of the Lincoln MKZ hybrid, protected by the tinted windows as they cruised Capitol Hill. “I’m just pleased that you can make some time for me.”
“Fuck, Lucy, don’t even think about it.”
It was always “Lucy” with Congressman Antoine Mosley. Always had been. Benway had learned over the years not to let it grate on his nerves.
In Benway’s experience black Republican politicians either adopted a super-slick persona, as smooth and purchase free as the carapace of a stealth fighter, or they went to the other extreme, amplified their down-hominess, their street cred.
Mosley was one of the latter and his recent appointment to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence had done little to mute his braggadocio or his ghetto bray—an affectation, Benway knew; the man had been reared in a middle-class Huxtable-esque household and had graduated summa cum laude and first in his class at Harvard Law School.
“Now, Lucy, I’ve always been of the opinion that you were treated like a shit.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I mean to say, we’re talking fuckin broken eggs and omelets here, right?”
“That would be one way of looking at it, Congressman.”
“And bet your ass that in Auntie Fazela’s Halaal Kitchen over in Whatthefuckstan nobody’s giving a good goddam about no broken eggs.”
“We do seem to be held to a higher standard, sir. One that hampers our capacity to do our jobs.”
“Too fuckin true.” The man shot his cuff and looked at a wristwatch the size of a fishpond.
Benway dipped his fingers into his pocket and emerged with a USB flash drive, which he held out to the congressman, who kept his hands in his lap and regarded it as if it were a piece of dung.
“The fuck’s that?”
“It’s a thumb drive, sir.”
“I fuckin know that, Lucy. Question is: what the fuck’s on it, man, that’s going to get this nigger’s black ass in a sling?”
Benway told him about the plane crash in Thailand and about Kate Swift’s finger.
Told him about the forensic report that he’d copied to the drive.
Still not taking the storage device, Mosley said, “This bitch, Swift, she caused you no end of grief, right?”
“She did, sir.”
“So it’s safe to say you got a dog in the fight?”
“I have an interest, it’s true.”
“Now, Lucy, you didn’t shin up a palm tree with a fuckin Gadfly surface-to-air missile and shoot that motherfuckin plane down, did you?”
“No, sir, sad to say, I did not.”
“Mnnn, mnnn. Okay then. Who did?”
“I don’t know that anybody did. The investigation is ongoing, I believe.”
“No Hamas towelheads taking pot shots at those Israeli kids?”
“Not that I know of but I’m no longer inside the circle of knowledge.”
“But our esteemed leader is choosing to say nothing about that traitorous bitch dyin in the crash?”
“Yes.”
“Must be a reason, Lucy. Has to be a fuckin reason.”
“I would agree with that, Congressman.”
“Bears scrutiny, that I will allow.”
“I’m pleased to hear you say that, sir.”
“Leave this with me Lucy. Leave this with me.”
Mosley palmed the thumb drive and the car cruised to a halt, ejecting Benway who stood for a few moments outside the Supreme Court Building before he hailed a cab.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Morse activated the remote on the keychain and the roller door of the townhouse’s garage rattled up like an anchor being raised. He drove the Mercedes into the garage that had been extended to accommodate the limousine’s length and brought it to a halt.
Nadja stood up out of the car, feeling the chill. Morse unlocked the door leading into the house and she walked through to the kitchen, setting her bag down on the counter.
Unbidden, Morse sat at the table and stared out at the gloom.
“You’re going to stay here?” she said.
“Those are my orders.”
“So I am your prisoner?”
“Mr. Benway has requested that you don’t leave the house until he returns.”
She went into her upstairs bedroom and stood for a few moments at the window, unsure of what to do. Desperate for some comfort she couldn’t name she searched for the secret phone Michael had bought for her.
Gone.
She opened the drawer of her vanity table, lifted out an antique music box and unfastened the lid, triggering the clockwork strains of “Clair de Lune”. She rifled through the jewelry inside, looking for the one gift that Michael had given her. A diamond pendant.
Gone, too.
Lucien was almost clairvoyant at times. It was what made him so good at his job.
Nadja sat and stared at her split reflection in the wing mirrors and was astonished to see tears flowing unchecked down her cheeks.
When last had she cried?
Was it when she was fourteen and her parents, prosperous bourgeoisie Muslims—a doctor and a lawyer—had been shot in front of her on a Sarajevo street? Or maybe it was after she’d fled, trying to get to relatives outside the city, and was captured and enslaved by the Serbian colonel?
In the face of the Serb’s attentions her tears had dried and evaporated along with her innocence.
But here they were, flowing into her mouth. Salty.
Nadja was overcome by apathy and lost what remained of the afternoon lying on the bed in her murky room in a litter of crumpled Kleenexes, staring at the TV, uncaring if she was watching genocide in Africa, obscenely peppy daytime television or jingoistic action movies.
She realized how far gone she was when she spent a dazed hour in the company of Kim Kardashian and her ottoman-sized hindquarters.
Whenever Nadja felt her mind bump up against the pain of Michael’s death—like a ship running aground in a deep fog—she would reach for a blister pack of tranquilizers and surrender herself to lassitude and inertia and wondered how long it would be before the pills no longer worked and she’d have to find a more permanent end to her suffering.
THIRTY-EIGHT
When something roused Kate from her sleep in her apartment in D.C., she thought at first it was Suzie, who had been restless and had needed many stories and lullabies before she’d finally closed her eyes and started snoring softly.
Kate listened but could hear no sound coming from Suzie’s room and then she realized that what she’d heard was an alert tone on the laptop that she’d left plugged in beside her bed.
Still bleary-eyed she reached for the computer and ran a finger over the touch pad to wake it and Kate saw that she had a notification: she’d been patched into a live video feed. She clicked on the link and her screen was filled with infrared images from a camera hovering above a clot of square mud houses.
It took her a second to understand that this was footage transmitted by a Predator drone and the mud houses were those of the tribes of South Waziristan.
Where Yusuf was.
She hit the speaker icon on her screen and unmuted it and heard the voices of the mission controller and the pilot.
“There’s a mosque. Do not engage the mosque. The rectangle is the mosque.”
“A group of men is oriented eastwards. You see them?”
“Affirmative.”
The crosshairs found the men, maybe eight of them, walking in the narrow street between the houses, the camera zooming in tight, the image sharp and, despite the solarization of the night vision, startlingly intimate. The group broke apart and she saw Yusuf, his walk unmistakable, that loose-limbed shamble, every gesture of his imprinted on her memory.
Fighting panic she reached for her Samsung, keying in the number of the satellite phone that he may or may not be carrying, aware that, because of image latency, what she was seeing had happened anywhere between two and five seconds ago. To overcome the great distance (and the earth’s curve), the images from the drone circling over Pakistan had to travel to a satellite that bounced them to the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany, from where they were sent via fiber optic cable across Western Europe, the Atlantic Ocean and the continental United States before they reached the pilot and the other watchers.
And her.
She heard the satellite phone ringing and after a few seconds she saw Yusuf reaching for his pocket.
The mission controller said, “Okay, you are clear to engage them.”
The camera zoomed in even tighter and Yusuf stepped away from the men, lifting something to his face. The phone?
“Yusuf,” she said. “Yusuf.”
Kate heard nothing and she knew that there was another latency, another delay, from the satellite phone.
Then she heard a crackle and Yusuf, standing still, said, “Yes?”
“Run!” she shouted, knowing that if he moved fast enough he’d keep ahead of them, that the latency could save his life, that they’d be shooting at where he had been. But he didn’t hear her.
The controller was yelling now. “Engage them. Light em all up. Come on, fire!”
Unleashing a Hellfire AGM-114 with 100 pounds of yield.
An explosion tore a white hole in the night.
Debris.
Dust.
And Yusuf, miraculously, ran from the fiery blast, stumbled, staggered, ran on.
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