Reflexively, she touched her stomach. Had she felt him stir last night, as she had assured Dan Stein with a mother’s insistence, or had she merely felt the pulse of her deepest hopes? She truly did not know.
But it was time for her to sit again, the sole protection she could give her child. She walked slowly to the unlocked door and opened it.
Standing in the doorway, Carla felt herself start.
The antique rocking chair where she often sat, imagining that her child enjoyed this gentle motion, was occupied by a thin, dark-haired woman, who scrutinized Carla with probing brown eyes. Carla knew very well who she was – the reporter from the Enquirer who gnawed at Ben’s death like a vulture. Her proprietary air stoked Carla’s fury.
‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped.
‘Waiting for you,’ the reporter said with wilful calm. ‘Whether you like me or not, we really do need to talk.’
Carla fought for self-control. ‘If I’d known you were coming,’ she said coldly, ‘I would have invited you. But I didn’t, so you’re trespassing. Get out.’
The woman stared pointedly at Carla’s stomach. ‘You’re pregnant with Benjamin Blaine’s child. Now you can help me find out which Blaine killed him.’
For an instant, Carla was caught between anger and curiosity, the instinct that one of two men had murdered Ben, then lied about it. The report of the medical examiner’s inquest was still pending, but the testimony, at least what Carla knew of it, felt hauntingly incomplete. Then she focused on her first priority – the health of her baby, and therefore her own peace of mind. ‘When you find out,’ Carla retorted, ‘I assume you’ll tell the world. In the meanwhile, you’re not welcome here.’
Ferris ignored this. ‘I don’t know who pushed him,’ she continued with an assurance that made Carla squeamish. ‘But Adam Blaine knows. He broke into the courthouse, stole the investigative files, and choreographed a cover-up. I met with him twice, feeding him information about the case, before I knew what he was doing.’
Carla fought back her surprise. ‘Then you can prove all that without bothering me.’
‘I can’t. But you seem to have become strangely close to a very frightening man. Perhaps you know what I only suspect – that he’s a skilled practitioner of the darker arts. Lethal ones, in fact.’
The memory of Adam’s fleeting confession briefly silenced Carla. With considerable effort, she said, ‘You’re everything I despise about the media, wrapped up in a single person. If you’re not gone one minute from now, I’m calling the police. And if you ever break in here again, I’m getting a court order and suing you and the Enquirer. The dog vomit you collect doesn’t give you a licence to invade my home.’
‘However humble,’ the reporter replied in an insinuating tone. ‘A bit of a comedown from your rented McMansion in Bel Air. That should remind you how much you owe to a dead man who remembered you in his will. Unless, like his grasping and toxic family, you view his death as a convenience.’ Her voice sharpened. ‘Quite probably, Adam Blaine is an accessory to murder. Now, you’re in a position to learn things from him. I’ll give you time to decide whether your debt to Benjamin Blaine means less than your interest in his son’s attentions – whatever form they may have taken. If so, you’ll be his partner in the murder of your unborn child’s father.’
Suddenly pale, Carla opened the door wider, forcing herself to stare at this woman until, it seemed, she had willed Amanda Ferris from her chair.
Pausing in the doorway, the reporter gave Carla a last, long look. ‘My card is on your kitchen table. If you decide this wasn’t a mercy killing, call me.’
Carla turned away. When she heard the woman’s footsteps on the porch, she closed the door behind her. But the house no longer felt like a refuge.
For a moment, Carla stood there, shattered by all that had happened. When she sat at the kitchen table, she saw Ferris’s card atop a place mat. She wished that she could purge this place of her presence. But throwing away the reporter’s card felt like complicity in a crime she could not yet name.
Placing it in a desk drawer, Carla sat in the rocking chair vacated by her tormentor, hoping to soothe a child she might never meet in life.
TEN
Before the morning brightened, Adam and Steve Branch took off for the Pakistani border, leaving Rotner and Hamid behind.
The Mitsubishi was baulky starting. The problem was electrical, Branch concluded – that was why the dashboard lighting went in and out. Putting up the hood, he did a hasty fix on the wiring, his demeanour focused but untroubled. Adam was beginning to like the laconic Seal; Branch struck him as a highly skilled version of a certain American type, the man who could fix things and was undaunted by a challenge. There was comfort in this. For the next few hours their fates were intertwined.
Adam felt less certain about their vehicle. The electrical problems might recur, and the S.U.V. had a right-hand drive with a gear shift operated by the driver’s left hand, something neither man had experienced. Electing to find this amusing, Branch volunteered to drive. It became Adam’s job to keep watch to the front, back, and sides, ready to react at the first hint of trouble. Both men had A.K.-47s beneath their seats.
They passed through the outskirts of town, Adam noting the pedestrians or peddlers along the patchy dirt road, then a cluster of stooped labourers making bricks with mud, clay, and hay, laying them out to dry in the sun. Without turning, Adam said, ‘Wonder how many centuries they’ve been doing that.’
‘No way of telling,’ Branch responded. ‘But we could drive past here decades from now, and their grandkids will be doing the same damn thing. Here, a century lasts a thousand years.’
Adam nodded. ‘No joke. One guy I met in a remote village thought I was a Russian, even though they left here with their tails dragging twenty years ago. This place has a certain timeless indifference.’
They were in the countryside now. The dips and heights of the terrain became steeper, the rocks and potholes more punishing, sending jolts up Adam’s spine. They began fording shallow creek beds, the first few dry before they slowed to a crawl for another, this one swollen with water. Briefly, their tyres spun, spattering rivulets of muddy water on the front and side windows. Branch jerked the gear shift, rocking the S.U.V. back, then forward, straining for a purchase on the mud beneath. ‘Don’t like this for the wiring,’ he observed. ‘Getting wet won’t help a bit.’
Looking out the window, Adam hoped that the S.U.V. would not get stuck here in the open, leaving them exposed. The tyres kept grinding until, mercifully, the four-wheel-drive skidded forward on to dry land, a last stretch of rolling terrain before they hit the mountains. ‘Got a football team?’ Branch enquired.
‘College or pro?’
‘College, to start.’
‘Not much to say,’ Adam confessed wryly. ‘I went to Yale.’
Shifting gears, Branch shot him a look. ‘I can see the problem. What about pros?’
‘I used to follow the Patriots.’
‘I’m a Cowboys guy,’ Branch said with satisfaction. ‘“America’s team” – a stadium that looks like Disney World, and cheerleaders with perfect teeth and artificial boobs. Only one who’s had more plastic surgery is the owner. If that’s not All-American, I don’t know what is.’
‘Guess you’d have trouble with the Patriots, then. Their coach has the demeanour of a second-tier Kremlin bureaucrat. It doesn’t exactly warm the heart.’
Branch shrugged. ‘At least tell me you don’t watch soccer. Never got it – a bunch of guys in shorts running around in circles, most of them from shitbag countries that don’t like us. And now they’ve got actual teams all over our great land, like sleeper cells. I keep asking myself which of them are illegals. Makes me wonder what we’re fighting for, I can tell you that.’
The commentary, Adam realized, captured a surprising streak of irony, Branch riffing on his Alabama background. He was about to respond in kind when a goat cantered on to the road ahead of
them, followed by two more.
The seemingly prosaic sight made Adam instantly alert. A string of goats blocking the road could be happenstance, or the precursor to an ambush. Swiftly, he glanced around them. They were stuck – to the right was a four-foot wall fronting some mud houses; to the left, trees lined the bank of a deep creek bed. More goats filled the road.
Branch braked to a stop. ‘No choice,’ he said, and felt for the weapon beneath his car seat. ‘If there’s a stupider animal alive, I haven’t met it.’
Amidst the goats, a human being appeared from behind the wall – a boy in his early teens, Adam judged, prodding the recalcitrant beasts with a shepherd’s crook. He glanced at the S.U.V., then kept moving his charges along. As the last goat crossed the road, Adam felt himself relax a fraction, and then four other men appeared behind the herd.
They were of a different cast – bearded, hard-looking men who stopped in the road, openly staring at the Americans stalled five yards away. Adam felt Branch thinking along with him, trained to survive, knowing that at any moment they might have to kill these men. He could not tell whether the Afghanis had weapons concealed in baggy shirts. What was certain was that they had seen two men who, despite their dress and beards, were betrayed by Branch’s colouring as foreigners.
‘So?’ Branch enquired.
Adam thought quickly. ‘Let them go, or we’ll have to shoot the boy as well. Even if we did, we’d be leaving five corpses in an inhabited area. No point drawing that kind of attention before we’ve even started.’
The men kept staring at them, as though marking their faces. ‘If they call the wrong guy on their cell phone,’ Branch observed, ‘we’re fucked.’ But the fatalism in his voice conceded Adam’s point.
At last, the four men resumed following the young shepherd and his flock. In solemn imitation of an imperial despot, Branch intoned, ‘Let the boy live.’
He resumed driving as Adam glanced around them. One of the Afghans, turning, gave the S.U.V. a final look.
*
They drove another eight miles or so, at some unknown point crossing the Pakistani border, unmarked by wire or sensors or guards. A no-man’s-land – the province of warlords, jihadists, and Adam’s sometime business partner, Colonel Rehman, whose Afghan agent had set their operation in motion. A hall of mirrors, Adam amended.
‘That shepherd,’ Branch remarked after a long silence, ‘sort of reminded me of my oldest boy. Stringy like that, with the body of a pass catcher.’
This scrap of information made the Seal seem complex. ‘You have a family?’ Adam enquired.
‘I have kids – two boys and a pretty girl in the middle. Looks like her mom, who had the ingratitude to divorce me.’ Hitting the brakes, Branch slowed to navigate the steep, twisting road. ‘Called me uncommunicative, if you can imagine that.’
‘I can’t. Think of how close we are already.’
‘Soul mates. Guess it helps to have killing people in common.’ The humour bled from Branch’s voice. ‘You’re with your family, and you remind yourself they’re the reason we do stuff like this – that, and the thrill of it all. But they don’t really want to hear about it, and you don’t really want to tell them. So you just wall it off.’
The observation struck a chord from Adam’s sessions with Charlie Glazer. ‘What choice do we have?’
Branch glanced at him. ‘You married?’
‘Nope. I’ve been hoping to miss the first divorce.’
‘Got a girlfriend, at least?’
Involuntarily, Adam found himself distracted by an image of Carla – her face close to his, the electric jolt that came from the feel of her lips, the press of her body. ‘Not really. Just someone I’d like to see again.’
Only after he spoke the words did Adam appreciate their context. He looked around him, seeing nothing but the harsh, jagged terrain of the mountains that enveloped them as they climbed. His last phrase lingered there, unanswered.
At length they reached the snow-topped ridges that marked the beginning of their descent into the badlands. ‘Crappy place for an operating base,’ Branch observed, ‘but perfect for Al Qaeda. They could stash our P.O.W. anywhere.’
‘Guess that’s what the rush is about. Right now, we may actually know where he is. But once they move him, he’s a ghost again.’
They crept with agonizing slowness down a narrow twisting road, Branch braking constantly, glancing at the G.P.S. as Adam scanned the terrain – a sheer cliff hugging the driver’s side, a deep ravine on their left. Branch slowed the S.U.V. to a crawl; the drop was at least two football fields in length, and skidding would be fatal.
Suddenly, the motor died. The S.U.V. was still, a metal shell.
‘Fucking electricals,’ Branch said between gritted teeth. ‘Why now?’
Both men knew their roles. Grabbing his weapon as he jumped out of the driver’s side, Branch slung it over his shoulder and raised the hood. Adam closed the passenger door behind him and leaned against it two feet from the ravine, cradling his weapon as he looked to the front and back for any sign of trouble.
Peering beneath the hood, Branch began tinkering with the wires. ‘Like the goddam Gordian knot,’ he said. ‘No wonder Japan got so screwed up.’ Then his concentration became too intense for speech.
‘Hate to ask,’ he finally said. ‘But I need you to hold a wire.’
Reluctantly, Adam abandoned his surveillance. Taking a string of green wire from the Seal’s hand, he scanned the road behind them, his sight line partially blocked by the hood.
‘Getting there,’ Branch muttered, and then Adam detected a faint new sound. Like the buzzing of a swarm of bees, he thought, but could not yet pick up its direction.
‘Hear that?’
Branch glanced up, cocking his head. All at once there was a crack of glass breaking, the percussive sound of bullets striking metal like the banging of a ball-peen. From the road, Adam thought, and cried out, ‘Down!’
A hammer blow struck the centre of his back, a round pinging off his body armour. Adam jerked upright. A second bullet passed through his left shoulder with the force of a blow from a steel bat.
Blood spurted out as Adam dropped to the ground, stunned, instinctively using the truck as cover. Clamping his wound with his good hand, he peered out from behind the truck and saw two men on a motorcycle – a driver and a shooter. ‘Behind us!’ he shouted.
Kneeling, Branch began spraying bullets. The driver veered to evade fire, the shooter stymied from aiming. ‘Loading magazine,’ Branch spat.
Out of bullets, Adam knew. Pulling himself upright, he felt a searing pain course through his left arm, then saw the motorcycle steady itself, the shooter taking aim as they sped closer.
With one hand, Adam jerked his A.K.-47 and began firing at the driver, the percussive recoil jabbing his good shoulder. The motorcycle wobbled; in slow motion, the driver tipped to the side and toppled with his vehicle on to the hard dirt road. The haze of shock filled Adam’s eyes, white flashes obscuring his vision. As though he were watching from a distance, he saw the shooter rise to his knees and begin returning fire.
A round popped by Adam’s jaw. The shooter’s head snapped back, a gaping hole where one eye had been. As Adam slumped against the SUV, he saw Branch fire again, the shooter’s chest twitching as he fell backwards.
Adam dropped his rifle, right palm pressed against the hole in his shoulder. It pulsed with pain; blood seeped from between his fingers. Without glancing at him, Branch ran forward, firing at their prone attackers. Their bodies skittered with each bullet in an eerie death rattle. Only then did Branch turn to see Adam sliding down the side of the car, his white shirt soaked in carmine.
ELEVEN
Adam was bleeding profusely. Hurriedly, Branch grabbed a medical kit from beneath the rear seat and wrapped a compress around his shoulder. ‘You saved my ass,’ he told Adam. ‘I’m getting you out of here.’
Slumped by the S.U.V., Adam leaned his shoulder against a tyre to hel
p the compress stop the rush of blood. He could not argue. The mission was done; if the P.O.W. had ever been in the village, he would soon be gone. He felt the weight of their failure merge with shock and enervation. His wound was serious; unless he was tended to, the loss of blood and pressure would kill him. As to the men they had shot, he felt nothing except a vague relief that his training had not failed him.
Watching Branch throw the bodies and motorcycle into the ravine, he considered the logistics of their dilemma. ‘We can’t turn around here,’ he told Branch when the Seal had finished. ‘You drive forward until we find a place to turn. Then I’ll take over driving and you ride shotgun. Your aim will be better than mine.’
Branch glanced around them. ‘It’s a left-hand shift,’ he objected. ‘Your wound’s going to hurt like a son of a bitch.’
Adam’s shoulder felt as though it had been crushed by a sledgehammer. ‘It does now. I’ll go as far as I can.’
He stood, wrenching the passenger door open with his good arm. Branch gave the wiring a last tweak before getting behind the wheel. When he pushed the gas pedal, the S.U.V. started.
Branch expelled a breath. They inched forward for agonizing minutes, at last finding an indentation in the cliff side big enough for them to circle back toward Afghanistan. Both were silent, their failure confirmed, dangerous hours still ahead.
Branch stopped so they could trade seats, taking his A.K.-47. Throwing the car into drive, Adam felt a bolt of pain shoot from his shoulder to his fingertips.
‘What blew it?’ Branch wondered aloud.
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