by Matthew Dunn
“What are you offering?”
“Something unique.”
“Then I’ll pass.” I sat in a chair opposite him. We were divided by an ornate Omani coffee table, on which sat a rare 1972 edition of Playboy magazine, his best-selling book about perpetual motion, a stuffed mongoose, and a dagger that I knew had once belonged to a disreputable Venetian prince. “Are you well?”
“Physically?”
I shook my head. “Mentally.”
“You’re prone to posing rhetorical questions?”
“I’m just breaking the ice.”
“By asking about my mental health? You should learn some manners.” The man, whose name was Zakaria, giggled like a successful prankster. “Why are you afraid?”
“I’m not.”
“You are, as evidenced by a fact. What is that fact?”
“I’m armed.”
“Correct. You bring a gun to my home; that’s further testament to your bad manners.”
We sat in silence for a while. I hated the quiet. Zakaria didn’t.
When I could no longer bear the feeling that Zakaria was mentally raping me, I said, “I need your help.”
Zakaria smiled wider. “Of course you do. But what do I get in return?”
I smiled back. “You get to keep living . . . here.”
Zakaria glanced at the dagger. “How long are you intending to stay in the United States?”
“Not long.”
Zakaria kept his eyes on the knife. Then he placed his manicured fingers together, dropped the smile, and locked his gaze on me. “Do you still fantasize about the erroneous possibility that your father might be alive, incarcerated in Evin Prison, a broken old man whose long hair and beard make him unrecognizable but one who’s not dead?”
I was motionless because I didn’t want to give the bastard the satisfaction of knowing that his question unsettled me. “He’s dead. An Iranian general killed him in his prison cell after he was captured and taken to Tehran.”
“My question doesn’t pertain to the issue of whether he’s alive or dead, but rather the fantasy.”
“I know, and I chose to ignore it.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a parasite.”
“Always trying to categorize me, Mr. Cochrane. That’s a flaw in you.”
“Actually, I do it for fun and to annoy you.”
“Rather crude objectives, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “I don’t care. Keeps me happy.” This was true. Baiting Zakaria was the only good thing about being in his presence. I repeated, “I need your help.”
“And if I don’t acquiesce, you’ll kill me?”
“Maybe, or perhaps I’ll tell the feds that the CIA is illegally harboring a very dangerous criminal.” I swept my arm across the room. “Let them take you away from all this luxury, and watch them put you in solitary confinement. For life.”
Zakaria laughed. “That would mean you’d have to step out of the shadows in order to testify against me. I can’t see you liking that one bit.”
I nodded. “Well, I guess that just leaves the option of killing you.”
The glisten in Zakaria’s eyes vanished, replaced by a darkness that made me wonder if I’d gone too far. To my relief he asked, “What help do you need?”
I leaned forward so that I was closer to the dagger if Zakaria attempted to grab it. “A young Indian man who calls himself Trapper wants me dead.” I gave him what little data I had. “I’m wondering if you might know him, or know of him?”
“I wish him good luck.” He tossed his head back and stared at the ceiling. “Appearance?”
“Slight, but wiry and strong.”
“What is your colleagues’ assessment of his intellect?”
“They thought he was clever.”
“Demeanor?”
“Brave.”
“And what is your assessment of your colleagues?”
“I think they’re dumb and cowardly.”
Zakaria drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Of course they are. And that means they’re not credible assessors of a man’s character. That said, perhaps by chance, or more likely because their stupid brains realized they’d been outmaneuvered, on this occasion they’re right.”
“I agree.”
“I’m glad you do.” Zakaria’s smile had returned. “Trapper’s an educated man, privileged, yet courageous and an independent thinker. What does that tell you?”
“He comes from a wealthy family, but I suspect he’s been alone for some time; had to make decisions on his own.”
“And therefore . . .”
“He no longer has a family.”
Zakaria bared his teeth. “Heartbreaking, isn’t it?”
“Not to you.”
“But it is to you, for obvious reasons.”
“Shut up and keep thinking and talking.”
“Tut tut, Mr. Cochrane. Do you always feel the need to expedite our conversations?”
“Yes. You’re mad, so I need to keep your mind on track.”
“Your track, not mine.” Zakaria lowered his head and looked at me. “Trapper is an unusual nom de plume, don’t you think?”
I agreed.
“What image does it conjure in your head?” Zakaria was looking at me with his professor look.
I indulged him by pretending to be his student. “Many. Mark Twain. Old America. Frontier land. Guys in bearskins trying to survive alongside meandering rivers. Nothing remotely South Asian.”
“And what can you extrapolate from that?”
“The code name’s been chosen with care. It’s specific to geographical location and me.”
“Indeed, it is.” Zakaria flicked a finger against the fangs of the dead mongoose. “I don’t know who he is.”
I made no effort to hide my disappointment.
Zakaria placed an electronic cigarette in his mouth. I was surprised, because he’d always been a devout smoker of Balkan tobacco. “You know what that means?” he said.
“It means he’s not who he says he is.”
“Probably, though new terrorists appear all the time. Even I can’t be expected to keep up with all their identities.”
“But you believe Trapper has the wrong profile to be a terrorist?”
“I wouldn’t be so bold as to make such an assumption. But I do think there’s more to this than meets the eye. Your eye.”
“And your eye?”
I knew Zakaria wasn’t going to answer me.
Instead, he checked his watch and said, “I’ve told you the truth that I don’t know who Trapper is. Do you feel that I’ve in any way been uncooperative on that point to the extent that I need to be incarcerated or murdered by the great Will Cochrane?”
“No. You’ve done what I’ve asked of you.”
“Good.” Zakaria stood. “I’m afraid our time’s up, because in one hour I need to be fifty miles away from here to have a rather forthright chat with a man who owes me money.”
I tried to object, but Zakaria raised his hand. “I hope I see you soon, perhaps under different circumstances. But for now, I’ll leave you with one observation.”
I was silent.
Zakaria’s grin was back on his face. “The fact that Trapper wants you dead isn’t your biggest problem. What should concern you the most is that he’s told your colleagues and you that he wants that outcome.”
Chapter 7
SAHIR WAS SITTING in his room, deep in thought. He needed to kill Will Cochrane. But he’d been told that it would be an exceptionally difficult task to capture him, let alone extinguish his life. And that meant he had to stack the odds in his favor by exploiting Cochrane’s only vulnerability: his unwavering need to protect the weak and innocent.
Sahir’s plan was simple and
brutal, and—given the fact that Cochrane had murdered his father—it was apt that his father had inadvertently supplied him with the inspiration for the plan.
As a child, Sahir had sat on his father’s knee and listened to his tales about their forefathers’ exploits in India and elsewhere. He’d learned about a captain who’d served in the ranks of Queen Victoria’s army and fought the Pashtun clans at the Khyber Pass, an architect who’d designed and built bridges over treacherous ravines in the mountainous north, a doctor who’d cycled the entire length of India to meet his future wife, and an owner of a tea plantation in Darjeeling who’d one day decided to diversify and cultivate opium.
The man who fascinated Sahir the most was his great-grandfather. Only one known photograph had ever been taken of him, and for the most part Sahir kept the photo on his person whenever he travelled. He pulled it out of his wallet and looked at the sepia image of a handsome yet roguish-looking man who was holding a rifle in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other, with a cigarette fixed in one corner of his smiling mouth and one foot planted on the head of a dead black leopard.
His name was Baber, but Sahir hadn’t thought of him by that name ever since his father had talked about him. “He was a shikari! The last of his kind; the best shot in India. And when he died, no man had equaled his bag of tigers.”
Shikari was another name for “hunter.”
Sahir loved one story about Shikari his father had told him. He could hear his father’s voice and words now.
“After World War I ended, he returned to his family home in Rajasthan, took off his Indian Army uniform, and told his village that his experiences on the Somme were nothing like hunting; he declared that any fool with a gun could have killed the poor souls who were sent over the top of the trenches into no-man’s-land.
“His wife, children, and the locals in his village were scared of Shikari because they thought they saw madness and vulnerability in his eyes. But they were also scared for another reason: a huge tiger had been spotted in the nearby outskirts of the jungle. Determined to allay their fears and to prove to them that he was the man they knew before the war, he put on some robust silks, fixed himself a flask of gin—for he was a prodigious drinker by then—paid a villager for her goat, and took the leashed animal to the jungle, where he tied the goat to a tree and clambered up its branches.
“He waited there for two days, his rifle in his hands, never moving from the branch. The tiger came on the third night, its nostrils flaring. Shikari had never seen one so big and knew it was powerful enough to leap up the tree and rip him apart. But it was fixated on the tethered goat, whose gullet had been slit so that the scent of blood would make the tiger insane with hunger.
“The tiger moved closer, ready to kill the goat.
“Shikari glanced at the stars, aimed his rifle, pulled back the trigger, and shot the beast in its paw.”
The child Sahir had interjected, “He missed?”
His father had shaken his head. “No. Just before the shot, Shikari had an epiphany that broke his heart. He realized the tiger was in no-man’s-land and that he was no better than one of the enemy German machine gunners at the Somme, waiting for him and his Indian and British comrades to draw closer so that they could be mowed down.
“After the tiger limped away and collapsed, Shikari returned to the village with tears in his eyes and alcohol coursing through his body.
“His family and the villagers kept their distance from him as he carried on drinking through the night. But his youngest son, your grandfather, was brave enough to knock on his door the next morning and tell him that a group of Quaker explorers were taking refreshments in the village and had heard he’d injured a tiger. They wanted to help the animal. The boy had expected Shikari to hurl drunken abuse at him, but instead he staggered to his feet and guided the Quakers to the spot where he’d last seen the injured animal. The tiger was still there, lying on its side, breathing fast. Using poles with nooses, they pinned the animal down, removed the bullet, cleaned the wound, and used needles to stitch it up.
“Keeping their guns trained on the tiger, they backed away and watched it limp into the jungle, never to be seen again. After the men returned to the village, the Quakers gave Shikari the leather pouch containing the needles they’d used to heal the tiger, and told him that they were to be his reminder that there was peace in the world.
“But Shikari knew he could never be at peace, because his life of hunting now seemed wholly wrong. So he gave the needles to his youngest son and went to bed, no longer a shikari, instead a confused and anguished shadow of his former self. That night, he died with the sound of German artillery fire raging in his ears.”
Sahir placed the photo back in his wallet and imagined the tethered goat. That’s what fascinated him the most about the story, because it seemed such an effective method to lure an alpha predator to its death.
And though Cochrane would want to rescue the tethered bait rather than kill it, the principle was the same. But he’d need something far better than a goat to distract Cochrane long enough to be able to creep up on him.
Chapter 8
WASHINGTON, D.C.’S ILLUMINATED night sky was sodden as I drove across a bridge that was taking me closer to the center of American politics and the city where Trapper believed I was hiding.
I was tired, and a large part of me felt that my trip to see Zakaria had been a wasted one because he couldn’t identify the man who wanted to kill me. But I was also puzzled by his last observation and kept trying to understand what it could mean. Zakaria never said anything for the sake of it; he’d seen something that I hadn’t, and that in equal measure annoyed and frustrated me as much as my car’s faulty seat-belt warning device, which had been pinging every second throughout my return journey.
I toyed with the idea of arriving unannounced at the safe house to tell Chrissie that my being away was fruitless and in any case I’d like to invite her out for a nightcap. But in doing that, I’d be telling her that I’d failed and had come back to her with my tail between my legs. I couldn’t bring myself to do that because I could imagine Chrissie smiling and saying something like, “So you’re like all the other Agency guys who talk a good game, trying to get me into bed, but can’t deliver the goods when it counts?”
Actually, I couldn’t imagine Chrissie saying anything like that, but I could imagine her thinking something similar, so I decided that tonight I wasn’t going to give her cause to believe I’m like some of the CIA guys she has to put up with. I wondered if Chrissie could be the one for me. She certainly made me feel good when I was in her presence. I momentarily fantasized about the two of us going on vacation together.
But I quickly put that fantasy and all other thoughts about Chrissie out of my head. Capturing or killing Trapper was all that mattered right now.
I drove through the city, windshield wipers on full, scrolling through radio stations until I settled on one playing modern jazz, but I quickly turned it off because the music sounded discordant and illogical alongside the infuriating and robotic ping ping of my seat-belt warning system. Plus, I had to stay focused on road signs, because I didn’t know my surroundings. Despite being a joint MI6-CIA officer for years, this U.S. trip was only the second time I’d been to D.C. Whenever I meet Patrick and his peers in Langley, they quickly put me on a plane to London because they think that if I stay in the States too long, I’ll cause them trouble. Given my current circumstances, it seems they are right.
I’d no particular destination in mind, though I had a loose idea to traverse the city until I found its northern outskirts and, hopefully, a motel where I could pay cash for a room, charge my cell phone, strip down and clean my handgun, and sleep. For now, I was an alien, drifting with buildings’ lights flickering over my face, free-falling with no idea where I’d land, a lonely predator searching for a secure place to rest. Solitary spies often feel th
is way. The more seasoned of us might have visited most of the world’s capital cities, but that doesn’t mean we are knowledgeable tourists; instead, more usually we are furtive travelers who migrate at night from one country’s Ritz Carlton to another’s Hilton and have no connection to our surroundings beyond the fact that they hold a man or woman with the potential to betray their country.
I felt that way in D.C.
It was just another dark city.
It was close to 11:00 p.m. when I found a motel with neon signs advertising its forty-dollar rooms and inability to accommodate teenagers or truckers. As I hauled my luggage out of the trunk, I thought that there must surely be less desirable people that the establishment would wish to deter. For example, fugitives, murderers, and me.
I looked around, rain dripping off my face, and wondered if this was the last place I would ever sleep.
Chapter 9
AT NOON THE following day, Sahir slung a black canvas bag over his shoulder and stepped out of his apartment.
There were three other apartments that could only be accessed from the narrow corridor outside Sahir’s apartment. As well as getting to know his immediate neighbor Isabella, Sahir had made it his business to ascertain the identities of his other neighbors. One of them was a construction worker who pulled twelve-hour day shifts and only came home to eat and sleep; the other was a sightseeing guide who spent every daylight hour walking tourists around D.C.
Sahir knew Isabella was in her apartment, because he could hear her singing along to pop music. As he knocked on her door, he wondered if she was stoned; he hoped so, because he wanted her to feel relaxed in his company. Not that he had any concerns about that, because Isabella struck him as the carefree, trusting type who saw the good in people rather than their flaws. Sahir liked that about her, and he was glad she was his closest neighbor.
“Who is it?” she called, probably panicking that the person at the door could be the landlord or a cop.
Sahir smiled. “It’s your neighbor. I’m bored and wondered if you could make me a cup of tea. I’ve run out of anything to drink.”