The computer comes back to life.
And tells Kyle his card is denied and the system can’t issue a boarding pass. It instructs him to speak to a service representative.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
He hits the cancel button, swipes the card again, his foot keeping time with his anxiety.
Hum. Hum. Hum. Computer processes.
Waiting.
Same shit.
Still waiting.
Fucking frozen.
The computer refuses the card again. Instructs him to speak with a service representative.
He looks at the other machines; they’re all occupied, and the lines are starting to wind around the rope. He can’t get in another line; he’ll lose too much time. He needs to make his plane.
Fucking hell cocksucking shit.
He’s moved on to cluster cursing. Never an auspicious sign. He raises his hand to the side of the machine, ready to slap it. He tries to gain control of himself but loses it after one more quick glimpse at the blinking screen:
Card denied. Speak with a customer-service representative.
He doesn’t want to speak with a customer-service representative. He wants his goddamn fucking ticket. The one he paid for with Robinson’s fucking card.
That’s what he wants.
He broadsides the machine with his palm. Not once. Not twice. Three times. Hits it so hard that it’s shaking. Slapping the machine around like it’s a gangster’s moll momentarily pacifies his anger, but it also has an unforeseen side effect.
A uniformed security guard appears beside him and grimaces. “Problem, sir? Problem with machine?”
Kyle’s hand is still in the air and he’s contemplating a fourth slap. “Problem. No. No problem,” he says. Act like nothing’s wrong. Be Robinson. Smile in the face of adversity. But he can’t. His hand is visibly shaking.
“Hit machine,” the guard says. “Why you hitting machine?”
“Misunderstanding. Just a misunderstanding.”
“What? Why you hit machine? Can’t do. Can’t hit.”
“I was wrong. I’m going. I’m on my way out.”
“Why? Why you hit?”
“I’m just leaving…”
The guard stares past Kyle at the face of the kiosk. “No leave. You need to see customer service. That all. Very simple. No hit. Customer service.”
“No. Not necessary.”
“To hit. Yes. Customer service. Follow me.”
“No. Not necessary.”
“Customer service. I take you.”
“Oh, no, sir, I don’t want to trouble—”
“Not trouble. This way.”
“Sir…”
The guard gets on his walkie-talkie, speaks into the receiver in Khmer, then turns back to Kyle. “This way.” He beckons for Kyle to follow. “This way. With me.”
Kyle follows the guard’s instructions. Too late to run. No way he can leave now without causing a scene, no way he won’t be pursued, no way this won’t be on camera, and no way it won’t end up on the news once people figure out who he is.
No. No fucking way. He’s got to see a customer-service rep.
The guard leads Kyle to the service area while smiling and beckoning with his hand. “Very close,” he says.
Kyle trudges along, the unfamiliar sound of Robinson’s Ferragamos echoing. He curses the noise and the way the shoes strangle circulation. How the hell does Robinson walk around the third world in these? Kyle’s barely walked around the airport and already feels blisters blossoming.
The security guard plops Kyle down in a seat in front of a service rep, a Khmer girl blowing on a steaming cup of tea.
“Ticket trouble,” the guard says to the girl as he walks off, “man have ticket trouble.”
“I’m Mai. How may I help you?” she says to Kyle. She’s young, barely drinking age, wearing a simple black dress and thick-rimmed glasses.
“The kiosk won’t print my boarding pass,” Kyle says, and sits on his hands so she can’t see them shake.
“I’m sorry about that, sir.”
“Will this take long?”
“Not at all.”
“Good.”
“I’m just going to need to see your passport and e-ticket.”
Kyle dips into the jacket pocket, pulls out Robinson’s passport, puts it on top of the e-ticket, and turns them over to Mai.
“Oh…and your credit card too.”
“Fine,” Kyle says, and hands her Robinson’s black AmEx, then sits on his hands again.
Mai begins to type furiously. “Have you enjoyed your time in Phnom Penh?”
“Yes.”
“What was your favorite thing to do?”
Kyle sucks on his left cheek, thinking, Are we seriously going to do this shit, Mai? “I think…I wasn’t here very long. Just walked around the Central Market.”
“My mother sews. She has a stand at Central Market.”
Kyle tilts his head, trying to see what she’s typing. “Great. Good. Good for her.”
She opens up Robinson’s passport, flips through the pages, punches a few more keys. “You look younger.”
“What?”
“Than in this photo.”
“Oh,” Kyle says, shifting around on his hands. “I was tired when that was taken.”
Mai giggles, showing her rabbit teeth, her pink tongue.
“Everything okay?” Kyle asks.
She punches a few more keys, drinks some tea, flinches at how hot it still is, and says, “Hmph. I can’t…seem to override the system to print out your boarding pass.”
Kyle’s sweating like a man waiting for test results. Christ, he thinks, I’m a total bomb as Robinson.
Then Mai hands his passport back to him, leans over the desk, and says:
“You appear to be on a no-fly list, Mr. Robinson.”
Within twenty seconds of Mai’s verbal neutron bomb, three Asian men approach the desk dressed in corporate camouflage—sober suits and ties, the type of clothes designed and selected to be instantly forgotten.
One of them reveals himself to be the leader by removing his sunglasses and fixing his stare on Kyle. The other two look straight ahead, avoiding Kyle’s eyes, as if he’s committed a lurid crime.
“Mr. Robinson,” the leader says. “Security. We’re going to have to ask you to come with us. This is purely a formality.” He tilts his head a bit. “I’m certain you understand.”
“I want to be put on a plane immediately,” Kyle says. “I paid for my ticket. There is no reason for me to be on a no-fly list…”
“It’s not us, Mr. Robinson. It’s the computer.” He motions subtly for Kyle to rise. “We want this straightened out as much as you do. If you’ll just follow us.”
“If you’d please just follow us,” one of the other men says, still avoiding eye contact, echoing the leader.
“You’re harassing me,” Kyle continues. “I am an American citizen and I am being harassed—”
The leader interjects with a leer, “You would like us to call your embassy, then?”
Kyle’s trying to conquer his overwhelming fear with indignation. “You are harassing an American citizen.”
“We will happily call the embassy and they can come and—”
“I don’t want my embassy,” Kyle says, terrified they’re going to choose that option. “I want to get on a fucking plane,” he adds, his voice following a twelve-tone scale, starting low with general anxiety and ending in a soaring crescendo of panic.
“And you will, Mr. Robinson. Please follow us so we can straighten this out.” The leader gives another head tilt, more threatening this time. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“I don’t belong on a no-fly list.”
What would Robinson do? Well, apparently, he’s done lots and lots of nasty shit or Kyle wouldn’t be here.
Out of options, Kyle stands, defeated, and agrees to go with the three men.
The leader pulls a stray piece of lint off K
yle’s shoulder. “What a wonderful suit.” He flicks the piece of lint into Mai’s garbage can. “Follow me,” he says.
The leader and Kyle walk side by side out of the service area and into the airport proper. They pass a series of crowded boarding gates. Kyle looks at them longingly. All of these people on their way home to be greeted by loved ones the minute they pass through customs.
Kyle wishes he had told someone about this plan. But who? Neil’s his only friend and would have told Kyle he’d finally lost his mind.
No two ways about it. He’s stranded.
The leader leans into Kyle and whispers, “We appreciate you not making a scene. It would have been uncomfortable.”
Kyle sees fewer people, notices he’s being escorted to an increasingly remote section of the airport. “Where are we going?”
The leader doesn’t answer, just turns back and urges the two following behind to pick up the pace.
Why didn’t I run? he thinks. Why did I follow that guard to the counter?
The leader pushes open a service exit door and ushers Kyle through. The others follow. “Close that,” the leader snaps at his underlings.
The hallway’s empty except for a mop and a bucket filled with gray-green water. No windows, no air, no natural light; fluorescent lights flicker.
Kyle’s through playing along with this routine. “We near it yet? The security office?”
“Sure,” the leader says, smirking. “Right down this hall.”
Kyle knows this is bullshit; this whole situation is total bullshit. “Who are you guys? Seriously.” He feels the burn of the bleached floor in his nostrils. “Who are you? Tell me.”
What he wants to do is scream out that he’s not Robinson, that they’ve got the wrong guy. Problem is, he’s not much better off being Kyle West.
Maybe it’s best to just face the situation as Robinson.
Maybe somehow it’ll work out and he’ll get on the next plane.
Then it happens.
Bitter tang of chemical spray. Brutal. Sends Kyle’s gag reflex into overdrive. And that’s before it ends up in his eyes. He staggers, opens his mouth to scream, but the lingering chemical cloud is so strong, he chokes instead, a dry, hard hack.
A foot takes out Kyle’s legs, hurling him down. “Eat the floor. Eat the fucking floor.”
The foot stays put in the center of Kyle’s back while someone ties his hands together with cord and pulls it tight in one fluid motion.
“Keep your head down…keep it down.”
Kyle’s pulled to his feet. He can barely see through the tears. The chemical taste on his tongue is like ingested insect spray.
He sees someone wave around a Taser.
“Keep your fucking eyes in front of you.”
And then the hood goes over his head.
Claustrophobia kicks in. He can’t breathe. Starts to panic.
A quick kiss from the Taser current sets his spine straight.
“Move. Move.”
Someone steers Kyle by the waist and says:
“Nice to see you again, Robinson. Been too long.”
Then kicks him in the small of the back.
23.
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA
Tom Fowler’s bored as hell, so he’s doing dumbbell work. Lateral raises, concentration curls, triceps kickbacks. For someone in his sixties, he cuts an imposing figure. Doorway-size shoulders. Neck bulging like a frog stretching to catch a fly. The thick veins on his forearm fence a memento from Vietnam, a massive tattoo of a dragon, multicolored wings spread, clutching a submachine gun. Another reminder of the war dangles close to his throat, a necklace of Buddhist charms given to him by a monk he rescued in Cambodia.
Now the Agency’s sent him back here—the ashes of Southeast Asia.
His biceps starts to burn and he drops the weight on the office floor. He didn’t shower this morning, and his sweat’s mixed with the lavender of his girlfriend’s soap.
Women.
Fowler’s never forgotten what his first wife said as she slammed the bedroom door and never spoke to him again:
“When women are alone and bored, we play dress-up. We put on Mommy’s makeup and try on her clothes. When men are bored, they play dress-up too. Only when they do it, they put on uniforms, go to someone else’s country, and kill everyone.”
Her name was Victoria Rose. That was it. No fucking nicknames for her. No Vicki, or Vic, or Rosie. Don’t even think about it. Victoria Rose.
It’s 1975. Fowler’s just gotten back from Saigon. He’s anxious; he’s waiting for something. He meets Victoria Rose in a bar one night when he’s wearing his civilian uniform, Levi’s and a leather jacket, holstered gun close to his heart. At that moment, Fowler’s seriously considering bank robbery as his next career move. Something that lets him carry a gun. But Victoria Rose gives him an outlet.
She’s a peace activist, a graduate student in social work. But she fetishizes violence, specifically men of violence—men like Fowler. She likes to be close to it, to feel the weight of it lying on top of her. Like some of her hippie friends who called cops pigfuckers but secretly wanted that uniform, wanted to be on the other end of those handcuffs, the true unspoken Janus face of liberalism and power relations.
Because Fowler’s a rare breed.
Most men came back from Vietnam with PTSD if they were lucky, if they were real lucky. Most of Fowler’s buddies hit the booze, hit their wives, hit the heroin they had started fucking around with over there, or died horribly from cancer, courtesy of Agent Orange. But Fowler didn’t come back with PTSD, didn’t come back with the urge to drown all the memories in a sea of self-destruction.
Fowler wants another war. He gets Victoria Rose instead.
First day in Vietnam, September ’69, Fowler goes on a raid. There’s a firefight. He fends off the Communists and gets in a few close kills. Ted Shackley hears about the raid. And Shackley is the CIA in Laos; he pulls the strings. Locals call him the Blond Ghost.
And Shackley likes what Fowler did under enemy fire, under pressure, and recruits him into the Phoenix Project, a CIA-designed program of pacification that’s all about punching up big kill numbers to show the suits in Washington that we’re winning the war, that we’re rounding up any South Vietnamese harboring Communist or anti-Western sympathies. Working for Shackley is like working on a satanic factory line. He’s got to report quantifiable results back to the shareholders on the Hill.
And Fowler kills real good. He’s employee of the month every month for several years straight.
When the war ends, in ’75, Fowler goes home, and after settling down with Victoria Rose, he realizes he doesn’t like the idea of being out of uniform. So he takes Shackley’s advice and joins the Agency’s training program, where Fowler learns there are two types of CIA. There’s the intellectuals, the analysts, the guys who go to good climates under diplomatic cover and haunt embassy halls, blue bloods who pass notes to nuclear scientists at cocktail parties.
Then there’s guys like Fowler. Guys who get sent to denied territory to root out subversion. Guys who work off the books, fly below the congressional radar.
After he graduates from the program, Fowler gets his next war, gets his marching orders to Angola.
And Victoria Rose calls him a fucking fascist while he’s packing his bags to go.
But what she doesn’t get is this: It’s not that Fowler blindly follows orders. It’s not that he doesn’t question orders.
It’s that he likes the orders.
He does four years in Angola and enhances his reputation for being one of the Agency’s prime go-to guys for smash-and-grab ops. And just when he’s turning the tide in Africa, he gets a call to take a night flight to Afghanistan.
Fowler’s close to Bill Casey, Reagan’s controversial CIA head. Casey picks Fowler up personally in Angola, waits with him on a hot tarmac, and says:
“This isn’t ’Nam, Tommy. We’re doing this one right. We’re going over to win.”
&n
bsp; So Fowler’s in Afghanistan, but he gets kicked out. Everyone around Fowler wonders the same thing—and with good reason: How in the fuck do you get kicked out of Afghanistan, Tom? I mean, really.
Here’s how. He notices a certain disquieting trend in the makeup of his mujahideen. He notices that Egyptian intelligence is looking at the anti-Soviet jihad as the best news they’ve had in years. The bulk of Egyptian jihadists—the militant radicals who tried to whack Mubarak—are rotting in jail, and they’re pissed. Pissed right the fuck off. ’Cause they’re missing the big jihad, missing the chance to martyr themselves. Then the Egyptians get a bright idea: Let’s let them out. Fuck it. Let these lunatics go out and die. Let them be someone else’s problem.
Fowler’s fucking problem.
So a wave of militant Islamists, the real deal, the sons of Sayyid Qutb, arrive and start radicalizing Fowler’s troops. His freedom fighters weren’t exactly secularists before, but after the Egyptians arrive, the troops start praying five times a day and stop listening to Fowler because they’ve been told he’s an infidel.
So Fowler goes to the CIA director and gives him the frontline scoop: We’ve got to do something about these fucking Egyptians. I’m losing control of my troops. And Fowler’s told to let it go, that they’re all on the same side. And Fowler says, We’re all on the same side right now, but wait. The director doesn’t like Fowler’s tone. And Fowler doesn’t like this simple-minded anti-Communist who has never seen a day of frontline fire and doesn’t know shit about radical Islam. And, well, words are exchanged, there’s a hard shove against a filing cabinet, and Fowler’s given his walking papers.
But thank God things are really heating up in Nicaragua, because there’s no hard feelings, and Bill Casey puts Fowler on a plane that evening—to go train Contras.
And while Fowler’s camped out in Nicaragua with wife number two, the unthinkable happens: The Soviet Union implodes. (Another historical game changer the CIA never saw coming, just like the Berlin Wall and Pakistan going nuclear and, hell, let’s go there—9/11. Fowler always thought the Agency’s analysts were using a crystal ball covered in cobwebs.)
So the Cold War is over and Fowler gets called back home and that’s okay. He won’t miss Nicaragua, and wife number two elects to stay behind, and he’s okay with that too. Fowler doesn’t go native wherever he’s stationed. He knows the way the Agency works: the guy who’s your best friend today may be the guy you have to kill tomorrow. He keeps to himself, keeps his attachments loose.
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