“So you had a particular interest in it?”
“I imagined it could be a sensitive issue for the military. I wanted to be sure that if it progressed further, I’d know, so I could inform the right people. But no, it wasn’t of particular interest. As far as I know, there’s been nothing since then.”
A sensitive issue. And Wells thought of a question he should have asked before.
“Did you ever pass the intercept to military intel? Or tell them about it?”
“I don’t believe so, no.”
“Or the DEA?”
“You can imagine how many intercepts this station sees in a month, Mr. Wells. Not to mention HUMINT and surveillance reports. This was vague, didn’t touch on our ongoing operations. As far as I can recall no one even suggested to me that we make it an action item.”
After ninety minutes of this thrust-and-parry, Wells begged off. You need anything, you let me know, Arango said, as Wells left.
I’ll be sure to do that.
BACK IN HIS ROOM, Wells lay on his bed and tried to make sense of everything he’d learned. He hadn’t expected the officers here to treat him like a hero. But their unconcealed hostility surprised him. He wouldn’t want to be first through the door with only Lautner or Arango behind him. The conversation with Yergin perplexed him, too.
In truth, Wells much preferred having a trail to chase. Instead he was looking for an enemy who might not even exist. So he did what he had done before at these moments. He called Shafer.
From outside, on the Ariana’s helipad. On his own sat phone. He wondered whether he should have left the compound entirely. The sun had set and the floodlights outside the blast walls were up. Diesel smoke smudged the stars. Wells hadn’t liked Kabul a decade ago and he didn’t like it now. During the civil war, the city was overrun more times than anyone could count. By 1999, half its houses were rubble. Amputee children begged on every corner, surrounding any Westerner foolish enough to have stayed. In the mountains Wells saw flashes of a gentler—and certainly more beautiful—Afghanistan. Never here.
Now NATO and Western donors had rebuilt the city. But the new offices and houses looked cheap and tacky. Billions of dollars in reconstruction money had been siphoned to bank accounts in Dubai and Lebanon. Why bother to rebuild it properly? the Afghans seemed to be asking. When you leave, we’ll just have to destroy it again.
Only the mosques had survived. Wells wondered when the calls to prayer would sound. He wanted to get into a mosque and tip his head to the floor and see whether his faith could find him. Behind these blast walls he felt divorced from Islam. On the flight over, he’d looked forward to coming back to Afghanistan. Now he saw that he hadn’t returned, not really. The Ariana wasn’t the United States, but it wasn’t Afghanistan. It was purgatory.
He called Shafer. “Ellis.”
“John. How’s it feel to be home?”
“Kabul was never home.”
“I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
“They’ve all gone native, Ellis.” Wells explained what he’d found so far, finishing with the intercept. “It doesn’t add up. They said the right things about investigating it, but they didn’t, as far as I can tell.”
“You have it? Can you read it to me?”
Wells did. “There’s no unit name or number. No village or district. Not even a province. A hundred thousand suspects. How do we narrow that down?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you someone who does. Amadullah Thuwani.”
9
QUETTA, PAKISTAN
D
avid Miller was still alive.
Mere survival hardly qualified as an achievement for most people. But Miller was a heroin dealer and a sometime user, too. He was married to two women on two continents. He had been arrested in Chicago and Karachi, snitched for the DEA and the CIA. He had reason to be proud of his continued existence.
Now Miller was again putting his life on the line. He wished he had a choice in the matter. He was headed for a meeting with Amadullah Thuwani, the chief of a tribe of Pashtuns who lived on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. Miller knew Amadullah’s reputation for mindless viciousness. For a generation, the Thuwanis had fought—against the Soviet Union, other Afghans, and now the United States. During the 1990s, they’d locked prisoners in steel shipping containers without food or water, then let the containers cook in the desert. These days their main income came from drug trafficking.
Miller figured the Thuwanis didn’t like him much either. His dad was a Pakistani from Karachi, but his mom was African-American. He’d grown up in Chicago. Like all Pashtuns, the Thuwanis were obsessed with bloodlines. They viewed his lineage as impure. But they dealt with him, because he helped them move a lot of heroin.
Miller’s birth name was Daood Maktani. His dad, Omar, had always wanted him to think of himself as Pakistani. Every summer, Omar packed Daood off to Karachi to stay with his grandparents. The trips backfired. Daood liked the First World comforts of the United States, air-conditioning, televisions, his own bedroom. He got sick in Karachi, nasty intestinal bugs that glued him to the toilet. He couldn’t wait to leave. The longer he spent in Pakistan, the more he considered himself American. A few months after he turned eighteen, he changed his name to show the world how he felt. Daood Maktani became David Miller.
Miller’s preference for the United States extended to its police. In January 2002, DEA agents busted down the door of his apartment and found six ounces of heroin wrapped neatly on the kitchen table. Miller expected to go down hard. He didn’t. He turned out to be triply lucky. He was lucky that the feds and not the Chicago cops had arrested him. A six-ounce haul was a good day’s work as far as the locals were concerned. They would have gladly sent him downstate for ten years. The feds had bigger ideas. They wanted to bust kingpins who trafficked by the ton. They saw Miller as nothing more than a way to move up the supply chain.
He was lucky, too, that he’d been using at the time they busted him. He convinced the DEA he was a college kid who’d turned into a junkie and then a dealer to finance his habit. Please. In reality he’d gone to Harold Washington City College for a semester before he figured out he could make a lot more money dealing. And he was no junkie. He got high on the weekends, coke when he was out late, H to chill. Never more than a couple times a month. He’d seen what the stuff could do if it got away from you. But the feds, they believed their own frying-pan hype. They believed that casual users didn’t exist. When he said he wanted to come clean, they lapped up his story.
Most of all, he was lucky to be a Muslim arrested after September 11. A nonpracticing Muslim, that is. About two weeks after his arrest, after he made clear to the DEA that he would cooperate, a CIA officer showed up for his interviews. I’m not DEA, he said. Not FBI either. He introduced himself as Mr. Blue. He was white, late forties, with pale skin and freckles and thinning red hair.
Blue didn’t say where he worked, but Miller understood. He sensed that the man wanted him to know without saying so. Blue was smarter than the DEA guys. He didn’t fall for Miller nearly as hard as they did. Miller could tell Blue was looking him over, deciding whether he was a true believer. He wasn’t. Miller drugged and drank and ate pork fried rice every chance he got.
Maybe six weeks after Miller got busted, Blue came to see him alone. He took Miller to a wood-paneled conference room instead of the usual windowless interview cell. He unlocked his briefcase and pulled out a bottle and two glasses.
“Courvoisier,” Miller said. “Nice.”
“Didn’t want to insult you with anything cheap.” Blue poured two generous glasses, pushed one at Miller. “Drink up. No cameras in here.”
Miller glanced at the clock on the wall. Eleven-thirty. Blue followed his eyes. “You know what they say. It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
Miller picked up the glass, sloshed around the golden liquid inside. If this was a test, he was happy to pass. He took a long swallow. Blue followed.
&nb
sp; “Daood Maktani, you’re an infidel start to finish.”
“Am I under arrest for that, too?” The warmth of the cognac glowed inside Miller. He hadn’t had a drink since getting locked up. He’d missed the feeling. He finished the glass. Blue refilled it.
“Could you fake it?”
“It.”
“If I have to explain, I may have the wrong guy.”
Miller raised a hand in apology. “Those guys and I don’t exactly socialize, understand. I couldn’t even tell you where to look. You’d have to tell me.” But he was exaggerating a little bit. He knew the mosque behind the barbershop on South Marcy where the believers in his nabe hung out.
“But you’ve got the right pedigree. Spent summers over there growing up.”
“Mostly in the john,” Miller said before he could stop himself. The cognac had hit him hard. “The water over there, it’s nasty.”
“Focus, Daood—”
“My name’s David. And I’m telling you, you probably know more about Islam than me.”
“Best start reading up then. You speak Urdu and you’ve got a Paki passport, and if you grow yourself a beard I’ll bet they’ll be happy to have you in the local prayer group. You help me, I can help you. The place I work doesn’t give a rat’s ass how you pay your bills.”
“Help you how.”
“You want me to say it? Okay. I will.” The CIA officer took out a business card. It was blank. And light blue. He wrote a phone number and e-mail address on it and pushed it at Miller. “Find me some genuine jihadis, this is your get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“You can do that?”
“You know, they’re still finding bits of bodies at Ground Zero. At this moment, guys like me, we have the full faith and credit of the United States government on our side. Six ounces of heroin doesn’t mean jack.”
Miller raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
TWO MONTHS LATER, the prosecutors sealed the charges and cut Miller loose with probation. He kept up his side of the bargain. He became a regular at underground mosques in Chicago. He wormed his way into prayer groups that fed money to Islamic charities that recruited suicide bombers for the war in Iraq. Meantime he kept on trafficking. The jihadis never complained. Like the CIA, they didn’t care where he made his money.
Miller earned enough chits at the agency over the years to get sprung from two federal drug indictments. His biggest slip came when he tried to avoid paying a three-thousand-dollar bribe to a police colonel in Karachi. He was arrested and stuck for two weeks in a nasty jail there before he bought his freedom for three times the initial asking price.
He didn’t make the same mistake again. He had a nice run, making a couple hundred grand a year shipping heroin from Pakistan to Chicago, mostly inside brass lamps and other trinkets. To launder the profits, he bought low-end apartments in Dubai with the cash. Then he hired a local property management company, a legit business, to rent them to the laborers building skyscrapers in the desert. The management company forwarded the rent to Miller’s Citibank account. Simple as that, Miller had cash he could legally spend in the United States. He even paid American taxes on the income, like any honest citizen.
A decade after that conversation in the conference room, Miller had houses and wives in Chicago and Dubai. He looked a little like Mal-colm X, six feet tall and dark skinned. His clothes were simple and expensive and suited him. He could honestly say he appealed to women of all ages, creeds, and colors. Life was good.
Then the bill came due. In a way he didn’t expect. He was sipping a glass of Heineken Light in a business-class lounge at Terminal 1 at Heathrow when his phone rang.
A blocked number. Miller didn’t like blocked numbers. He sent it to voice mail. A minute later, the phone rang again. This time the caller ID came up as Daood Maktani, his own long-lost name. Miller decided he’d better answer.
“David Miller.”
“Daood.”
“This is David.”
“Same difference.”
“Who is this?”
“Your new best friend.” And the man explained why he’d called.
“Tell me something,” Miller said when he was finished. “This thing you want, is it official or unofficial?”
“Both. But don’t you worry about that.”
“I guess I shouldn’t ask your name either.”
“You can call me Stan. As in Afghani-stan.”
Clever, Miller thought. “It’s impossible. The Thuwanis will never trust you. You’ve hit them too many times.”
“Enemies today, friends tomorrow. Like me and you. Anyway, I’ll have you on my side, making the introductions.”
“I don’t know them. They’re on a different planet. A much heavier planet.”
“Same solar system. You can get people to vouch for you. And I hear that lately they’ve been looking for a new connection. Their buyers got stung.”
Miller had heard the same rumor. He didn’t bother to ask where the man had gotten that information. “It’s impossible.”
“No is not an option here, David. Over the years, you’ve made a whole lot of people guests of the government. Don’t you think they’d like to know who’s responsible for their change of address?”
Miller hung up. His phone rang again. He hesitated, then clicked on.
“Let me explain something to you, Daood. Something you need to understand. Are you listening?”
The man waited. Miller had never felt so powerless, not even in that windowless cell in Karachi. There he’d known that eventually they’d ask him for money and he’d pay and they’d let him out. But the man talking to him didn’t want money, and Miller had no idea how to manage him. “Yes. I’m listening,” he finally said.
“Good. So, please understand, nobody at my shop likes you. We’ve dealt with you for a long time because that’s what we do: we deal with guys like you.”
“And I’ve worked with you. I’ve helped you—”
“That’s true. You have. But you got paid in full every time. You figured you were being smart, making sure that you didn’t leave anything on the table. But the truth is that’s straight ghetto logic. Short-term thinking. Problem with playing that way is that at a moment like this, when you really need help, somebody who can help you with me, you don’t have anyone. You don’t have any favors in the bank. Not even a primary officer. Because nobody trusts you. It’s all transactional. You see?”
Miller kept his mouth shut, but he knew the guy was right.
“I’ll take that as a yes. So now, you go to anybody with this, ask about some guy named Stan and the favor he wants, nobody’s gonna care. Especially since you don’t even know my name. But I know yours. And when the word gets back to me, and I promise it will, I’ll jam you so hard you’ll wish you were back in that hole in Karachi. You don’t think I can find you? I’ll tell you where you are right now. You’re in Heathrow, waiting for a flight to O’Hare. Three-thirty p.m. You’re in seat two-A. Business class.”
Miller looked around the lounge, half expecting the man to wave to him.
“I upgraded.”
“Congratulations.”
Knowing when he was beaten was one reason Miller had survived. “I’ll try to do what you want.”
“You’ll do more than try. I’ll be in touch.” Click.
Miller couldn’t see a way out. Unless he just left everything behind, took his hundred grand in emergency cash and ditched everything, including his women. Bought a ticket to Lahore or some other Pakistani slumhole and melted away. Turned himself into Daood Maktani. He didn’t think this guy Stan would bother to chase him. He’d find some other pawn to do his work. The problem was that Miller would have to stay in Pakistan if he ran. He’d have to keep his head down, since even if the agency wasn’t actively after him, it would probably give his name to the Pakistani police. It wouldn’t even have to give a reason, just say he was an American citizen on a watch list. Miller would wind up in a crummy two-room apartment, wa
tching his money dwindle, cut off from everything and everyone.
No. He’d take his chances, play the game. He knew how to survive.
MILLER HAD NEVER VISITED Quetta before, but he knew the place from the moment he landed. Like Peshawar, three hundred miles northeast, Quetta was old, overgrown, dirty, and filled with secrets. The cities were twins, trading and commercial centers that sat on caravan routes between Russia, India, and Africa. Today, most goods traveled by jet or ship. But Quetta and Peshawar remained true to their history. In their bazaars and mosques and mansions, smugglers, jihadis, merchants, tribal chiefs, generals, diplomats, and spies drank tea together and practiced the art of lying for fun and profit. Truths might be told in Quetta, but never on purpose.
Arranging the meeting that Stan had requested took Miller a month, every favor he had in Pakistan, and eighteen thousand dollars in “friendship payments” spread among the lesser members of the Thuwani clan. But finally he was blindfolded and tossed into the back of a van and driven into the mountains outside Quetta. He didn’t know exactly where. Geography wasn’t his strong suit, even where he could see where he was going. He was dumped inside a concrete-walled compound where four guys with AKs watched him without much love.
Hours passed before Amadullah finally arrived. He was tall, with a thick black beard. He chewed the bright green tobacco that Pashtun men favored. Miller imagined that his teeth glowed green in the dark, like a monster in a sci-fi movie.
Amadullah didn’t bother with the usual Pashtun pleasantries, offers of tea or sweets. He extracted a wad of tobacco from a gold tin and pressed it into his mouth and said through fatted lips, “What is it you want?”
Miller was so tired of having to navigate Pashtunwali codes—the baffling and sometimes contradictory set of rules that governed life in the mountains—that he actually appreciated Amadullah’s lack of respect. Without further ado, he presented the offer. Which was met as he’d expected.
The Shadow Patrol Page 13