But Fowler’s not someone who does well with peace.
When he gets back to DC, he’s beached behind a desk, and he panics. He’s been running hostile ops for almost twenty-five years and now he’s counting paper clips. Not a promising career trajectory. But thankfully—Fowler’s particular luck—the Balkans start acting like the Balkans again after a fifty-year nap. Clinton’s administration wants to help the Bosnian Muslims but doesn’t want to commit troops; Bill still has severe Somalia agita. And the Republicans aren’t big on humanitarian intervention yet. So Clinton turns to the Iranians and the Saudis to ship the guns and to guys like Fowler to show the Bosniaks how to use said weapons against the Serbs.
Plus the Agency needs boots on the ground, so they allow mosques throughout Europe and the Middle East to advertise this skirmish as “Afghanistan: The Sequel.” And this time, the Agency starts to notice strange things about the imported freedom fighters. They’re not only butchering Serbs—which no one minds, although the boiling-people-alive thing is a little much—but also starting to terrorize the moderate Muslim population, whom they consider just as bad as the Serbs for not following the “proper” path to Islam. And some of the CIA guys who knew Fowler in Afghanistan start coming up and saying: “Hey, Tommy, maybe you had a point back in ’85. Maybe a bunch of godless Communists or Serbian socialists is less scary than the alternative.”
No shit, Fowler thinks, but keeps his mouth shut. ’Cause Bosnia is the only war going right now, and he doesn’t want to get sent home.
In ’95, Milošević signs the Dayton Accord, and Fowler gets shipped back. He’s sweating bullets because he knows Clinton and Gore are cutting the CIA to ribbons and subjecting it to open-market principles. So when he gets called into DCI John Deutch’s office, he’s sure he’s getting handed a pink slip.
But he doesn’t. He gets promoted, put in charge of a new Agency program.
Extraordinary rendition.
After the attempt on Mubarak’s motorcade and the two bombings in Saudi Arabia targeting Americans, Clinton decided he needed to get serious about radical Islam. Because the 1993 World Trade Center bombing wasn’t a big enough tip-off? Fowler thinks as he listens to the DCI. But he keeps his mouth shut. Hardest lesson he’s had to learn, but he’s got it down pat.
“We need someone with your unique skill set for this,” Deutch says.
Unique skill set, Fowler thinks. Blow me. No problem, though, because Fowler’s back in business, sending eighty-something suspected jihadists to Egypt or Jordan for “questioning.” And then the trouble starts.
Fowler’s stationed in Milan—one of militant Islam’s main arteries—and the Agency tells him to rendition a radical cleric named Abu Aziz. When he and his team jack Aziz, it’s business as usual. The team waits for him to be out of public view, then a white van pulls up, someone shoots chemical spray in Aziz’s eyes, and he’s thrown into the back of the van. Hood and handcuffs follow. Then off to the airport, where Fowler’s crew and Aziz are packed on a plane to Egypt.
The usual stirrings occur back in Milan.
A witness comes forward to say Aziz was forced into the back of a white van. Aziz’s wife files a missing-person report, hires a lawyer and a private detective. In response, the Agency plants a trail suggesting Aziz might have taken a secret recruiting trip to Albania. It all dies down fast. Everything goes back to normal.
A year later, the Egyptians run out of reasons to hold on to Aziz. God knows they looked, but outside of being a loudmouth, he’s strictly jihad lite. And the first thing Aziz does with his newfound freedom is call his wife. And he’s got shit to say. He tells her the Americans kidnapped him and sent him to Egypt, where he was tortured nonstop for a year.
And here’s where it gets messy for Fowler.
The Italians had been watching Aziz for years, and part of their operation involved tapping his phone. So the Italians hear Aziz bitching to his wife about his rendition at the hands of the Americans, and they go fucking ballistic. How dare the Americans come in and snatch their suspect before their operation bears fruit? Of course, Fowler would have told the Italians, you don’t catch terrorists by waiting for them to do something.
The Italians take the Aziz tape to the state prosecutor, a man so fervent in his hatred of Bush and Iraq that he makes the Jacobins seem positively milquetoast about the Church and the monarchy. The prosecutor immediately opens up an investigation. And Fowler’s been sloppy. He let his people use personal cell phones and stay in hotels under their real names. So unraveling the case of Aziz and determining the chain of events that led him to a basement in Egypt with electrodes hooked up to his nuts is no sweat.
The prosecutor goes public with his case and with the suspects’ names, and he indicts them all for kidnapping, assault, and a whole smorgasbord of lesser charges. And the left-wing press on both continents is all over it, running exposés, signing book contracts. In fact, Kyle’s buddy Neil wrote a book called Torture Team, all about Fowler’s crew.
So in the middle of this shitstorm, the DCI travels to see Fowler in hiding.
“How the fuck did this happen, Tommy? How could you be so fucking sloppy?”
“I wasn’t.” Fowler’s wearing a suit to look nice for his boss, but he never wears suits, and his shirt collar is strangling him. “The Italians told us not to worry. That everyone was in on it. They were acting like it was the old Gladio days. I’m not that fucking lame. If they hadn’t said there was nothing to worry about, you think I would have taken such risks?”
“They want us to extradite you, want you to stand trial.”
“Fuck them. The prosecutor’s a Communist.”
“And we all agree, Tommy. No one’s gonna send you or any of your people back to Italy. This whole thing…pure politics.”
Fowler nods.
“And the way the press is talking about you,” the DCI says. “Treasonous.”
“They’re calling me a storm trooper. American Waffen-SS.”
“Treasonous.”
“Fuck them.”
“And, Tommy, you know no one is going to let anything happen to you. You’ve been a soldier for us for thirty years. We take care of our own.”
Now Fowler’s nervous. He knows what “take care of our own” usually means.
“You’re what now, Tommy, sixty-something?”
“Around that.”
“You can retire with the Cadillac plan.”
Fowler takes off his jacket, loosens his tie, rolls up his sleeves. “You want me to go out?”
“Not at all. But it’s like when a bar closes: you don’t have to stop drinking, but you can’t keep doing it here.”
“So where am I going?”
“Southeast Asia.”
And Fowler perks up; tons of radical Islam there. “Indonesia?”
The DCI laughs. “Right…Indonesia.” He laughs some more. “You get a respected cleric tortured for a year, and we’re gonna send you to the most populous Muslim country on earth.” He pulls a manila folder from his briefcase. “You’re going to Cambodia.” He stares at the tattoo on Fowler’s forearm. “Your first field of action, right?”
“One of them.”
“Two benefits, Tommy. One: It’s a nonextradition country, so it’ll shut the Italians up…”
“So I am a pariah to the administration.”
“Of course you are. Right now. But no one stays one forever. Plus the other benefit…”
Fowler taps his foot. “Malaria? Done that one.”
“The girl working under you is a right fucking tart.” The DCI tosses the folder to Fowler. “Rebecca Harris. Her cover is that she’s an ethnomusicologist. Know anything about Khmer music, Tommy?”
“It’s all sad.”
“Right, a lot of oral archives of atrocity.”
“Isn’t most music these days?”
The DCI laughs. “Rebecca was stationed in Ukraine. But she got too close to one of her agents and he burned her back. There were rumors of a rela
tionship of a…sexual nature. She can thank the Clinton administration she’s still got a job. We didn’t have enough women or fags for their taste, so now it’s impossible to fire either a woman or a fag.” The DCI motions toward the folder, and Fowler takes out Rebecca’s photo. “Nice, right?”
“Sure.”
DCI points to the picture. “Doesn’t do the tits justice.”
Fowler gives him a fake smile.
“See, you’re both exiles. Guy she bedded down with in Ukraine was a fifty-two-year-old professor—sorry, the guy she allegedly bedded down with.” He makes a face of disgust. “I have to remember my corrective training.” He recovers and smiles. “Maybe you two can be allegedly homesick together…”
Fowler bites his lower lip.
“They’ve already put your name on the door. It’ll be your first executive placement: You’re chief of station. And you ship out tomorrow morning.”
So Fowler gets to Cambodia and meets Rebecca Harris and takes her out for drinks and she’s giving Fowler the lay of the land when he bursts out with:
“I know this place.”
“Yeah, but a lot’s changed since you were here.”
He raises his drink to his lips. “They got a few high-rises…a few hotels…they threw some paint on a cemetery. The Vietnamese still run this place. Nothing’s gonna change until they don’t.”
“Still harboring some old prejudices.”
“It’s funny how your generation thinks facts that don’t fit into their view of the world are just old prejudices.”
“Right.”
“How’d you end up here, anyway?”
Rebecca smiles. “Like you don’t know.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“I was burned by my agent. Everyone thinks I let my guard down because we were having an affair.”
Fowler says this one slowly, because his chances of an office romance hinge on her answer. “They shouldn’t think that?”
“No. ’Cause I told them no. It’s just…neither agency, theirs or ours, can imagine a woman not being blown away by the chance to mercy-fuck a sad crony Communist teaching agriculture.”
“So you didn’t do it?”
“And he burned me because I wouldn’t.”
“Why didn’t you fight harder?”
“I did. They put me here. That was considered…generous.”
“Why didn’t you just quit? Fuck ’em.”
“Because I am a goddamned good agent, and wherever they put me, I’m going to try to do good.”
“You gonna ask how I ended up here?”
“Already know.”
“Right,” Fowler says. “Everyone knows. And?”
“What do I think?” Fowler nods, and she goes on. “I think what most people like me think: you’re a menace to civil liberties and our standing in the West.”
“Civil liberties don’t matter if you’re dead.”
“What if I’d rather be dead than live in that world?”
“You mean that?”
“I do.”
Fowler really likes this girl; shame his chances of a torrid affair seem null and void at this point. “So you think I’m shit?”
“Not at all. I think the policies you enforce are shit. I don’t know you from anything.”
“That’s fair.”
“Still like me?”
Fowler smiles. “Whaddya mean?”
“Come on, Fowler. You’re an Agency guy…you were hoping these drinks would just be the start of the evening. I have a reputation.”
Fowler sucks on his right cheek when he’s embarrassed. “Yeah. I like you.”
“Good. Then let’s get out of here.”
“Sorry?”
“I wasn’t interested in fucking the professor, Fowler.”
And Fowler’s not a kiss-and-tell guy, but the girl is worth getting burned for. They’re not exclusive, they both play around, but there’s real warmth between them—the first time Fowler’s ever felt that. She’s the smartest agent he’s ever worked with. She’s insinuated herself into the Khmer community in a way he can’t.
They see that tattoo on his forearm and they know he’s one of their ghosts come home.
24.
Rebecca bursts into Fowler’s office without knocking. “I got something,” she says, holding up a printout of an e-mail.
“No knock?”
“Please, Fowler.” She sits down in front of his desk. “When your door is closed, you’re doing one of two things. Lifting weights or sleeping.” She smiles, indulging him but never coddling.
Fowler sits behind his desk, lights a cigarette.
“I thought you stopped,” Rebecca says with a slight shake of her head.
“You can smoke in elevators and hospitals here. This is my last chance to smoke with total impunity. I mean…the kids here smoke.” And Fowler’s about to start in on how half the diseases and ailments in the first world are because of people’s luxury and boredom, as opposed to the actual epidemics in the third world, but he decides to keep quiet, because he can see Rebecca can’t wait to talk. “What have you got?”
“Strange things going down at the airport.”
“Usually are.”
“Even stranger today.”
“Locals’ turf,” he says. “We’re here by the good graces of people who don’t like us to stick our noses in over there.”
“Right, but it’s not sticking our noses in,” she says. “See…we have due cause. There was a guy on a no-fly list.”
Fowler perks up. “Say more.”
“And by order of Langley, we have to—”
“I know all that. Say more. No-fly guy…”
“Yeah. Name is Julian Robinson. He’d been grounded.”
“Know why?”
“Not yet.”
“Did we ground him?”
Rebecca shakes her head. “Not us. No. Not the Agency. Someone did, though.”
“Name like that. Julian Robinson. Two to one, it’s money laundering. He doesn’t pass my Muhammad test. Guys named Julian Robinson aren’t gonna show up with a bomb in their underwear or shoes. Get a guy named Julian, and he’s been laundering diverted UN money for a third-world despot.”
“You’re a caveman.”
“Start asking around back home. But it’s not strange yet. Just a no-fly guy.”
“’Cause you never let me finish anything. He’s gone.”
“Gone? Didn’t security detain him?”
“Robinson goes to speak to someone about his ticket. Customer-service rep. She tells him he’s no-flyed. Then three guys come and pick him up. Girl assumes they’re security, so she thinks nothing. Then a minute later, actual airport security shows up, responding to the initial alarm set off by the boarding-pass kiosk. And no one can find Robinson anywhere. He’s gone, and no one knows who these guys are who took him.”
That’s all Fowler needs to hear. He stands up, slides a blazer over his heavily worked-out shoulders. “First thing we need to figure out, did Robinson get carted away by friend or foe? ’Cause it obviously wasn’t airport personnel.”
“Right,” Rebecca says.
“I’ll call you from the airport.” Fowler looks for his car keys. “Start checking around, see what Robinson was grounded for in the first place.”
25.
Kyle wakes.
A series of hard slaps across the face, then a variation in tone, a few gentler ones, and then a final belt across the cheek.
Someone rips off the hood, and Kyle immediately wishes he had left it on.
His interrogator shakes out his hand; that last crack left him with some bodily feedback, a hand vibrating with violence.
The strobe lights are throbbing, suffocating. Kyle can’t find an image to hold on to. Everything blends into an amorphous pulse that churns his stomach.
He’s in a warehouse. That much he’s sure of.
In between the strobe flutters, he tries to make out his surroundings. The windows are b
lacked out, boarded shut. Rain damage has pulped the walls. Industrial ooze drips; smells like sulfur, moves like grape jelly. Exposed wires everywhere, coiled insect antennae.
“Robinson!” a voice shouts. Chinese, but not a heavy accent; the voice’s owner has spent years abroad. “Robinson, give me your eyes.” Fingers snap. It’s the guy from the airport, the leader of the crew that kidnapped him. “Give me your eyes right here.”
But Kyle can’t do that.
He feels like he’s just been born and is learning the world. His hands and feet are bound, and he’s seated on a metal chair that’s been bolted to the floor. The strobes’ rate picks up, an epileptic’s heartbeat. He cranes his neck, sees rats scamper across a bare mattress that’s a mass of electrical wires hooked up to an enormous battery. The apparatus hugs you close and gives you a charge.
Kyle sniffs the air. Scorched skin and fear-sweat.
Flicker. Flicker.
Kyle sees several belts and pairs of shoes by the mattress. People who came in and never came out. He can feel the pain haunting this place.
“Robinson…listen to me. Look at me.”
Kyle whispers, “I’m not Robinson. I’m not.”
“Who are you?”
“Kyle West.”
“That what you’re calling yourself now. ’Bout time. You always were too attached to being Robinson.”
A new voice. “Wasn’t healthy.”
“Why are you in Cambodia?”
A different voice. “Who is your target?”
Kyle can’t stop turning his head. “What? What?”
“Who is your target?”
“I don’t…”
“Why are you in Cambodia?”
“Who is your target?”
Kyle tries to answer but keeps stumbling, slurring out sentence slivers. “You’re the same guys from the airport…the guys who…I’m Kyle West.”
Another guy kneels down before Kyle. “Robinson.” His voice is different, still Chinese, but he sounds like a mellifluous date rapist with an Ivy League degree. “Sorry, I mean Kyle. Know what…I can’t get used to that one. You’re Robinson to me.”
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