The Prisoner's Wife

by Gerard Macdonald

  She said, “It’s okay, getting out. Really. I know how you feel. Stupid Cedric—we call him One Year Clean—”

  “Why’s that?”

  “New Year’s Day,” Anita said, “he relapses. Starts over. I hear that one more time, I swear, I’ll physically—you know.” She waited a moment, then said, “I’m glad you shared.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Must have been hard.”

  Shawn shrugged. “I guess, like lots of things. First time’s the worst.”

  Anita was standing close to him. He could smell her perfume. No alcohol tonight. Patchouli, at a guess. His first wife, Lala, wore patchouli. At times, at home, it was all she wore.

  “You were good,” Anita said. “You know what they say—that’s what helps. Speaking up.”

  He took her hands in his. “Works if you work it.”

  She said, “Can I buy you a coffee? Some place that’s not here?”

  Shawn thought it over. Considered the temptation. Knew how it would end.

  After a few moments, he said, “Rain check?”

  She nodded yes.

  He felt a need to apologize. “I live—it’s this, you know, village out on the hills—”

  “Felbourne.”

  So she’d checked his address.

  “—kind of a long drive back home. Cat to feed.”

  Eight bedrooms, all empty.

  “Shawn,” she said, “it’s all right. It’s okay. Another time.”

  Sober, single, sad, Shawn thought later, as he steered Martha’s little Merc down unlit country lanes toward an empty rectory in an English hamlet. That’s what he’d come to.

  There were times—and this was one—when he wondered if that was all he had left.

  3

  WEST SUSSEX, MIDDAY, 18 MAY 2004

  On a late spring afternoon in West Sussex, a chauffeur, a Scot whose graying sideburns matched his skin, slowed his master’s Lexus to avoid a flock of guinea fowl. Farther up the single lane of pitted blacktop he passed a sheepdog, three bantams, two cock pheasants bred to be shot, a skein of moorhen chicks, and islets of horse dung. He was not a man at ease with country roads.

  The chauffeur parked on a verge outside the churchyard of St. Perpetua, where Shawn’s wife and the village gamekeeper were recently buried.

  Across the lane was a long-windowed mansion, its facade thick with jasmine and rambling rose. A weathered sign on its northern wall read FELBOURNE OLD RECTORY.

  After exchanging words with the veiled woman in the car’s backseat, a Pakistani businessman named Ayub Abbasi stepped delicately into the lane. Though the thoroughfare was empty, Abbasi looked to his left and his right, then back at the graveyard.

  Middle-aged and plump, conscious of his appearance, he wore a dark Italian suit and Italian shoes, free of metalwork.

  Down the lane stood the gamekeeper’s daughter, watching. She whistled beneath her breath. Posh people.

  Carrying a crocodile-skin valise, Abbasi entered the garden of the rectory opposite. There he paused, checking his watch, a Patek Philippe. His father, the high court judge, had once told him Rolex was for gangsters.

  He inhaled a heavy scent that he recognized, with pleasure, as summer jasmine.

  Moments later, the chauffeur heard, close at hand, first one rifle shot, then a second. By the time he was out of the car, looking into the garden, his employer was nowhere to be seen.

  Within the grounds of the rectory, Ayub Abbasi pushed open a loosely hinged wooden door on which blue paint was peeling. He entered a walled garden and stood, his back to sun-warmed bricks, watching a tall American level a laser-sighted M-24 U.S. Army–issue sniper rifle. He aimed at a pear tree espaliered against the garden’s far wall. His first shot had atomized a wasp-bitten pear on the left side of the tree, above the level of the wall.

  Abbasi applauded discreetly. Though he himself carried no weapons, he appreciated expertise, in any field.

  “Mr. Maguire,” he said.

  Shawn emptied a round from the rifle’s chamber and came across the garden. He wondered, as he often did these days, if his visitor wore a wire.

  “Abbasi,” he said. “You found me.”

  Without speaking, Ayub Abbasi crossed the lawn to a slate-roofed summerhouse. He opened his valise and placed two bundles of hundred-dollar bills in the center of a cast-iron table, weighing them down with a chrome-plated garden trowel. “Down payment.”

  “For what, exactly?” Shawn asked.

  “Don’t spend it all in one place,” Abbasi said. “I heard that somewhere.”

  “I won’t be spending it anyplace, except the bank,” Shawn said. He raised a level hand. “Debts up to here.”

  Abbasi surveyed the estate. “An odd place for a man from Alabama. A rectory. Last time we met, you were out of D.C., were you not? Manhattan maybe. Nowhere like this.”

  Shawn glanced at the money on the table, estimating its amount. It should clear some of his overdraft. It was like that all through the marriage. Martha had money; Shawn had debts.

  He made a comprehensive gesture, taking in the rectory and its land. “Martha bought it. Came a time she wanted old England, not New England. A place in the country.” He pointed. “Her grandmother was born down that lane. So she said. Poacher’s kid.”

  Abbasi still considered the house. “Your wife lived here—she died here?” Shawn nodded. “I am sorry. You remember, I met her. Intriguing woman. Married to someone else at the time, was she not?”

  “We both were.”

  “She was buried in Boston?”

  Shawn pointed across the lane, beyond the Lexus, to the tree-shaded churchyard. “Martha’s there.”

  For a time Abbasi was silent. Then he asked, “If it is not an awkward question, did your wife understand the business you were in? If she knew, did she approve?”

  “Yes to the first,” Shawn said. “No to the second. She never came out with it, but she hated the work. Spying, interrogation, all that shit. Made me rethink some things.”

  “She knew about, what do they call it? Terminations?”

  “Not a place I want to go,” Shawn said. “Put it this way. I have regrets.”

  Looking across to the churchyard, Shawn recalled Martha’s energy. She was full of surprises. In Manhattan, he’d come home to find her ready to Rollerblade in the park or head for a gallery down among the meatpackers. She threw surprise parties for Shawn’s daughter, Juanita, until Juanita was reborn, in a Berkeley church, as a Taoist of the seventh life. Juanita visited with her father and his new wife. She apologized for evil thoughts she might have directed toward them; she said there were many. She promised she would never, in this incarnation, trouble them again.

  Martha had laughed and cried, driven her stepdaughter to Newark Airport, and kissed her good-bye. This was years back. Still hard for Shawn to believe that all Martha’s energy—her laughter and her tears—was buried there, in the shadowy churchyard of St. Perpetua.

  * * *

  Outside the gate, the mustachioed chauffeur had turned the Lexus around. He stood by the car, bending his head, speaking to the veiled woman within.

  “Your enemies, and your dead. Keep them close,” Abbasi said to Shawn. “I believe in that.” He stood by the slate-roofed summerhouse, scanning the walled garden. “So peaceful.” He considered his host. “Your face. You lost a fight?”

  “That was last week,” Shawn said. “Skinny drunk kid. Thought I could teach him a lesson. I was wrong.”

  Abbasi said, “We all get old. You attacked one of your colleagues, did you not?” Shawn nodded. “Suspended from active service, I hear. No longer an American spy.”

  “They call it extended leave. I behave, take anger management class, they let me back.”

  Abbasi covered his mouth, disguising what might have been amusement. “You think?” His attention elsewhere, he asked how Mr. Maguire spent his time.

  “You’ll laugh,” Shawn said. “It amuses people. What I ask myself these days—wh
at I try getting my head around—is, what the hell was I doing out there? Last twenty-some years.”

  “What you were doing as a spy?”

  Shawn nodded. “I mean, I know what I actually did, minute by minute, most days. Unless I was drunk. What I don’t know is why. Why they told me to do whatever I did. Why I did it.”

  “Protecting America from its enemies, were you not? So Mr. McCord would say.”

  “Yeah,” said Shawn, “right. It’s what I tell myself. It’s what I try believing.”

  He opened a bottle and poured two glasses of sparkling water. Abbasi, an observant Muslim, did not touch alcohol.

  “My turn for a question, Mr. Abbasi. You employ people. A lot of people. Import-export, it’s what I hear.”

  “In the past tense. I did employ. Like its owner, business is not what it was.”

  “I seem to remember offices, AfPak, Morocco, Kandahar, Miami. Am I right?”

  “Sadly, Afghanistan, no longer. Nor Florida. But still, we are in Islamabad. Tenuously, in Fes. Also Peshawar, on the AfPak border. As you call it.”

  “So why? Why would you need me?”

  “I have a problem,” Abbasi said, looking around him. “A problem with your people. CIA, Office of Special Plans, CIFA—one or all. I never know. A problem with my people, too. My Pakistani, would you say, compatriots?” He pointed to a table and chairs midway across the lawn. “Might we sit over there?”

  Shawn stood, moving out of the summerhouse. A cloud of white doves spread high through still air, planing and gliding in leaderless synchrony.

  “I don’t believe this. You’re worried about bugs? Here? An English village? Do you want to pat me down?”

  “If you would not mind. To be sure you do not wear a wire.” Ayub Abbasi ran his hands over Shawn’s body. “You are very fit.”

  “For your age,” Shawn said. “That’s usually how the sentence ends these days. I’m fifty-one. I lose fights.”

  “I know your age,” Abbasi said. “I read the file. You are fifty-three. You still attract women.”

  “That,” Shawn said, “I’m seriously trying to give up.” He unpacked a new box of shells.

  Abbasi eyed the rifle and the pear tree. “I know that you trained as a sniper. I had not realized you were such a shot.”

  Without looking down, Shawn reloaded the M-24. “I used to be good. Trying to get back there.”

  “For your own amusement? Or some other reason?” Abbasi seated himself at a wrought-iron table set on a mower-striped lawn. “You may know I also worked for your agency. Your former agency.”

  “CIA?”

  “Indeed. I was, as you say, on the payroll. Liaison between America and Pakistan.”

  “Not Pakistan as such,” Shawn said. “Liaison with Inter-Services Intelligence, is my guess. ISI was always the target. Always the problem.”

  “For our purposes,” Abbasi said, “and your purposes, ISI is Pakistan. You know, we all know, they are not just a spy service. Invisible Soldiers Incorporated, we call them. They take the dollars your Congress sends. They run my country, and much of Afghanistan, of course. Taliban is their creation. As is the drug trade.” Abbasi smoothed his lightly oiled hair. “Sadly, now, those invisible soldiers wish to kill me.”

  “What can I tell you?” Shawn said. “I’m not a bodyguard.” He glanced toward his sheep field. “These days, I’m a shepherd.”

  Abbasi made a dismissive gesture. “If I were hiring a bodyguard, I would not be here. You have heard of Nashida Noon?”

  Shawn searched his now-fallible memory.

  “I know the name. Prime minister of Pakistan, right?”

  “She was, three years ago. Next month, she will be again, if our president fails to rig the election. He has a problem, poor man. A dilemma. When she takes power, Nashida will dismiss the invisible soldiers. Dismantle ISI.”

  “She’ll try.”

  “She will try. If she succeeds, our president loses the people who keep him in power.”

  Shawn watched Martha’s Persian cat, Miss Mop, climb a tree, tailing a squirrel. “You’re telling me this because?”

  “Because I had some papers, some items—e-mails between ISI and your CIA—which would help Nashida do what she plans.” Abbasi looked around the deserted garden. “You have heard of Darius Osmani?”

  Losing its hold on a branch, the cat fell into long grass. Shawn stood, to see if it was hurt.

  “Quick change of subject there,” he said. “Osmani.” He thought for a moment. “Again, I know the name. I believe we had a file on him; not much in it. Memory’s not so good, these days. Would you like lunch?”

  Abbasi shook his head. “In five minutes, five or ten, I should leave. Osmani is, he claims, a research scientist. An archaeologist; a paleobotanist. Somehow, for some reason, he was among a group of Taliban fighters who overran the U.S. base outside Kandahar. These people also invaded my office. They took documents. None of them could read those papers.”

  “Except Osmani?”

  “Except Osmani. Iranian. Graduate of the grandes écoles. Now, I very much need to know what Osmani knows. I need those documents. They are my insurance against being tried in my country. Or yours.”

  Shawn spent a few moments thinking this through. Unhurt, the cat skittered crabwise across the lawn.

  “Mr. Abbasi, be serious. No one’s about to put you on trial. Not in America. Even in Gitmo. We still have court records. Documents, no documents, either way, you’d be an embarrassing guy if you started talking.”

  From the arm of Shawn’s chair hung a twist of paper on a string. On its hind legs, the cat reached up, paws batting the paper Shawn swung above it. Left, right, left, right came little cat blows. Back in his boxing days, Shawn would have given a lot to hit that fast.

  “Remember Noriega? Dictator of Panama? When I was young,” Abbasi said, “in those far-off days, I worked for Manuel. He was a son of a bitch but, as you people say, he was your son of a bitch. As we know, he, too, was on your payroll. George H. W. Bush, director of the CIA, put him there. The Agency knew Noriega was in the drug business, of course they knew—they protected the trade—but still, Manuel was useful. Arms go one way, drugs the other. So, as I say, all is okay. Until Congress outlaws the contras. Until George H. W. Bush becomes president. Until the canal must be returned to Panama. Suddenly, Noriega is no longer useful. What happens? America invades Panama. Thousands killed. Manuel is captured and tried. What comes out in court? Nothing. Do we hear of CIA drug-running? Not a word. CIA supporting Noriega? Paying Noriega? Of course not. Simply, he is a bad guy. Lock him up, throw away the key.”

  Shawn scooped up the little cat and cradled it on his lap. “He was a bad guy.”

  “Indeed he was. And President Bush, your forty-first president, the accomplice? The man who paid Manuel? Kept him in power?”

  On Shawn’s knee, the cat stretched upward, claws out, clutching at azure-winged dragonflies. “Okay,” he said. “Point taken. You don’t want to go to trial. Or jail. You want me to find this Osmani guy. You want your papers back. Why would you think I can do that?”

  “Because,” Abbasi said, “you have friends. In the world there are two databases containing a great deal of useful knowledge about these things. One belongs to Mossad, the other to your friends in American intelligence.”

  “Main Core?”

  “Indeed. Main Core. I have no contacts in Mossad. They would not help me if I had. However, I know you, and you know people—”

  “—who can access Main Core?” Shawn paused. “I do. One or two.”

  “Something else I know,” Abbasi said. “You need money. A lot of money.”

  “Last time I looked,” Shawn said, “it was illegal for U.S. agents to work for a foreign power. I take your cash, I’m out of intel for good.”

  Abbasi smiled. “Some would say you are already. There are many paths in life. Roads less traveled. Of course, there is also the question—do you have other ways of paying the rent?”
>
  Shawn shook his head. He glanced back at the bundles of bills in the summerhouse. “Serious money. How do you know I won’t take it and run?”

  “You have many faults,” Abbasi said. “I have never heard dishonesty was one of them.” He made a comprehensive gesture, taking in house and garden. “Also, as they say in movies, we know where you live.” His tone changed. “There is something else. When he was not riding shotgun with the Taliban, Osmani claims he was conducting an archaeological dig in Afghanistan. Excavating cellars in Ghorid ruins, somewhere on the Turquoise Mountain. Near Chist, I think. Now, whether he was doing that or not, he claims he found something of interest.”

  “Claims how?”

  “He called me from Paris. Before your colleagues picked him up. Some time ago.” From his diary Abbasi took a handwritten note. “Osmani wanted money for information. A great deal of money. There you have the phone number. The address, in the quatrième.” Abbasi paused. “I had a second call, from the same number. This time, it was his wife.”

  Shawn paid attention.

  “Is that surprising?” Abbasi asked, noting the reaction. “The man has a wife?”

  “It’s a lead,” Shawn said. “It’s interesting. So tell me. What’s Osmani claim he found? What does he believe you’ll pay for?”

  “A small nuclear device, a semiportable device, built under the direction of Dr. Qadir Khan. You do know of Dr. Khan?”

  Shawn said, “I worked on his proliferation file. He’s a problem for us.”

  “While for us, for Pakistan, a national hero.”

  “Well,” Shawn said, “you got my attention. If I do take your money, where do I start?”

  4

  WEST SUSSEX, 1:15 P.M., 18 MAY 2004

  In early-afternoon heat, an olive-skinned man stood sweating in an ancient English beech wood, overlooking the rectory of Felbourne village. He was dressed in what he hoped would pass for pheasant-shooting garb: green multipocketed Barbour jacket, tweed cap, trousers tucked into thick woolen socks, and soft-leather ankle boots. He carried a borrowed shotgun and, for quite other reasons, a nine-mil Beretta in a shoulder holster.