The Invisible (Ryan Kealey)

by Andrew Britton

  Kealey could remember the Spaniard’s precise words, but that wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t what Machado had said that was bothering him, but what he hadn’t said. He’d never offered an explanation for his unusual terms, and he hadn’t volunteered how he knew Mengal to begin with. Something was very wrong with the whole scenario. Kealey knew that now, and he was torn. Part of him was saying that he should do the right thing: that he should go to the restaurant, collect the key, collect the phone, and make the call to Owen. From there, they could begin running surveillance on Mengal’s known associates.

  At the same time, part of him was saying that Machado was not the kind of man to fuck around, that once he gave it, his word was good. Kealey couldn’t explain it, but somehow, he knew that if he did what was asked of him, Machado would hold up his end of the bargain. He felt sure that Machado could get them closer than surveillance could, and more importantly, it would happen much faster. As for the rest of it, Kealey agreed with Harper; once he found Benazir Mengal, he’d find Fitzgerald. The only question was what kind of shape he would find her in.

  The afternoon air outside the terminal was heavy and damp, the sky like a grayscale image: flat, somber, and absent of anything bright. Perfect weather for a funeral, Kealey thought. He turned right after leaving the building, then started to walk, weaving his way through the small crowd of travelers, Pétain by his side. They had walked half the length of the terminal, passing a number of taxi stands and bus shelters, before Kealey stopped in his tracks, looking around in confusion. Catching his expression, Pétain said, “What’s wrong?”

  He was still looking around. “I think we must have passed them.”

  “Passed what?”

  “The pay phones. We’re supposed to get a call from the man we’re going to meet.” Kealey checked his watch. “He should be calling right now.”

  “Harper told you that?”

  “Yes.” Pétain still thought that this lead had come through the Agency; she had no idea that her father had set it up, and Kealey wasn’t about to tell her the truth. He was about to say something else when he heard a phone ringing.

  “Over there,” Pétain said, pointing toward the building. A few pay phones were lined up against the exterior wall, partially hidden behind a cluster of abandoned luggage carts, all of which were dented and scarred from years of wear and tear. A pale, balding, grossly overweight man in blue Adidas warm-ups had one of the phones pressed to his ear, and he was staring at the phone that was ringing. Clearly, he was thinking about picking it up, but before he could, Kealey jogged over, snatched up the phone, and turned his back to the other man.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Kealey?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Kealey took note of the heavily accented voice and let his mind play over the possibilities. The accent didn’t mean much, at least not by itself. The Agency employed hundreds of foreign-born citizens, some of whom held high-ranking positions in the Operations Directorate. The man on the other end of the line might be an Agency operative, but somehow, Kealey doubted it. For one thing, if he was actively employed by the CIA, Harper would have brought him into the operation directly; there would have been no need for Machado’s secret offer of assistance.

  And there was something else to consider. Javier Machado had been retired for fifteen years—too long to still have reliable contacts in the Agency. Kealey was willing to bet that the man on the other end of the line was an agent, someone Machado had used to generate intelligence and recruit other agents when he had been posted to Islamabad. Machado had never said as much, but it was clear to Kealey that the older man had spent some time in Pakistan; otherwise, he wouldn’t have had the connection in the first place. Besides, Pétain had told him as much the day before. When he had asked her about the head scarf, she had revealed more than she’d probably planned, including the fact that her father had spent time in the Pakistani capital.

  “What about the daughter?” the man asked, as if reading Kealey’s mind. “Machado’s daughter. Is she with you?”

  Kealey looked at Pétain, who was staring at him expectantly, hands propped on her hips. “Yes.”

  “Good. Do you have money?”

  “Yes.” Kealey had stopped in the arrival hall at the airport to change a few hundred dollars into rupees. “Where am I going?”

  “Find a taxi and have the driver take you to the Queen’s Way Hotel. Don’t check in…Just walk south through the bazaar. When you reach the first road, take a left and head east. Eventually, you’ll pass a telephone exchange on your right, and then you’ll see a restaurant, the Bundu Khan. Go inside and ask for Nawaz, one of the servers. He will give you instructions from there.”

  Kealey resisted the urge to lose his temper, reminding himself that he’d be taking similar precautions if he were in the other man’s shoes. At the same time, the fixer had to know that time was an issue.

  “You understand that this is time sensitive, right? We don’t have all day to—”

  “I understand perfectly.” The voice was clipped, impatient. “If you want to get to Mengal quickly, you will do as I say. These precautions are for my benefit, not yours.”

  “Fine.” Kealey glanced up and saw that Pétain was fidgeting, clearly anxious to know what was going on. “We’re moving now.”

  The other man ended the call without a word. Kealey dropped the phone back onto the hook, grabbed Pétain’s elbow, and began guiding her toward the curb. There was a line of taxis, and the vehicles were facing the other direction; he’d forgotten that they drove on the left in Pakistan. There was a short line of people waiting at the taxi stand, but it looked like the queue was moving quickly; they wouldn’t have to wait more than a couple of minutes.

  There was no one around to overhear them, so as they walked toward the taxi stand, Kealey repeated what the fixer had said. When he was done, Pétain looked uncertain.

  “You said it was Harper who dug this guy up?” she asked.

  “No, I said his name came through the Agency. Harper didn’t have anything to do with it, other than passing the name on to us.”

  “But you don’t know his name,” Pétain said. Kealey looked at her, momentarily caught off guard. “Or if you do, it’s news to me. You haven’t mentioned it once.”

  “Didn’t I? His name is Khan,” Kealey said, saying the first name that popped into his head. Where the hell did I hear that? he wondered briefly. Then it came to him; A. Q. Khan was the renowned scientist and metallurgical engineer who had almost single-handedly turned Pakistan into a nuclear power back in 1976. Kealey remembered seeing the name in Newsweek. “We’re going to meet him now.”

  “Can we trust him?”

  Kealey debated the question, and when he looked at her, his smile was gone. “I don’t see that we have a choice.”

  CHAPTER 31

  PUNJAB PROVINCE, PAKISTAN

  The house that belonged to the first target sat on the other side of a large square in the small town of Sharakpur Sharif. The square was strewn with unsteady-looking wooden structures, all of which were loaded with racks of clothing, cell phones, televisions, head scarves, fruits and vegetables, and just about anything else a person might wish to purchase. A number of potential customers were browsing the stands, while a man with white eyebrows as thick as his beard swept the pavement with a whisk broom, oblivious to the people moving around him. Metal pylons erupted around a camera-shaped ad for Fuji Film, another for Kodak, and a cluster of fading eucalyptus trees. Fortunately, the open space was not crowded; from his seat near a small tea stand, the American had an acceptable view of the squat, whitewashed, two-story house that sat on the southeastern edge of the square.

  As he sat watching the house, the American took a sip from his bottle of water and checked his watch. He was not surprised to see he had been in place for just over thirty minutes. He had moved his position around the square four times over the past two hours. It felt like he had been sitting there much long
er than half an hour, and he knew how long he might still have to wait. Still, he was used to the long periods of inactivity that came with fieldwork, just as he was always prepared for the sudden burst of activity—as well as the danger—that might present itself at any moment. Such was the nature of his profession, and Lieutenant Colonel Paul Owen was a man well suited to his line of work.

  At the reasonably young age of forty-two, Owen had the gaunt face and tired eyes of a man years older, a man who might have recently undergone some tragic personal event, such as recurrent cancer or the loss of a child. In reality, these physical attributes were an indirect result of his chosen occupation. More specifically, they were brought on by the things he had seen in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sarajevo, where he had worked in conjunction with SFOR, the multinational peacekeeping force dispatched to Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-to-late nineties. During his twenty years of army service, Owen had been exposed to countless horrors, including rape, murder, and genocide, but he’d also had the privilege of commanding—in his opinion, at least—the finest soldiers in the world. It had been a difficult trade-off to make, but he had never regretted his choice of profession.

  That wasn’t to say he didn’t regret some of the associations he had forged in that time. For several years, Ryan Kealey had been one of the men under Owen’s command—first at Fort Carson, Colorado, where they both served with the 10th Special Forces Group—then at Fort Bragg, where they served with the 3rd SFG. At first, Owen had been impressed with Kealey’s ability to lead troops and make fast, effective tactical decisions, both in training and in combat. For this reason, he had pushed to put the young first lieutenant on the fast track for promotion, but before his efforts could yield results, Kealey had made the first of two grievous errors, effectively ending his own career before it could really get started.

  The first incident occurred in Sarajevo, during the last few months of the Bosnian War. In September of 1995, Kealey had been implicated in the murder of a Serbian warlord, a man by the name of Stojanovic, who had raped and killed a thirteen-year-old girl. The particulars of the case were not a factor. It didn’t matter that Stojanovic had gotten what he’d deserved, and it didn’t matter that the case against Kealey was circumstantial at best; it only mattered that the entire incident threatened to make an already volatile situation worse. Perhaps more importantly, if it had come to light, it would have reflected poorly on the U.S. Army and the troops it had committed to the NATO multinational force. As a result, Kealey was not subjected to a court-martial. Instead, he was eased out in the fall of 2001, but not before a disastrous operation in Syria that nearly cost him his life, not to mention the tattered remains of his career. Nevertheless, Kealey remained a highly trained operator, and it wasn’t long before he found a new home at the CIA, an agency he had already worked for on multiple occasions.

  Owen had also been recruited by the Agency for a few covert operations around the world, most notably in Somalia, where he had played a minor role in the Battle of Mogadishu and the events leading up to that disastrous conflict. Following Kealey’s dismissal from the army, they had operated together on several occasions: Kealey as an independent contractor of sorts, Owen as an active-duty officer on TDY (temporary duty) assignment to the Agency. The first two operations had come off without a hitch, but it was the third, a meeting with a former general of the Republican Guard in Iraq the previous year, that had decisively changed the Delta colonel’s opinion of his former subordinate, and not in a positive way.

  Owen had been watching the house for two hours, shifting position every twenty minutes or so. Three other operatives, Mark Walland included, were watching the house as well; Walland was on a mobile route throughout the square, while the other two were in static positions on the other side of the house. The building belonged to Tahira Bukhari, a twenty-four-year-old Pakistani who had just returned from the United States, where she’d been training at the University of Virginia’s School of Nursing. What had brought Bukhari to the forefront of the investigation was her father, an army officer who had served with Benazir Mengal for nearly fifteen years.

  In effect, Colonel Amir Fariq Bukhari had served as Mengal’s aide-de-camp for the duration of his career. During that time, he’d amassed nearly three hundred thousand dollars, which he’d left to his daughter prior to his death in 2005. The source of the money, which was presently sitting in Tahira Bukhari’s Citibank account, could not be traced, though the general assumption at Langley was that her father had come into the money through Mengal’s illicit activities, which included cross-border smuggling and illegal arms sales to Kashmiri militants. That kind of money could create a lasting loyalty, and if Bukhari knew where it had come from, it was reasoned, then she might be the person for Mengal to turn to. The only obstacle was her training; if Fitzgerald’s injuries were, in fact, life threatening, a licensed nurse would be able to do only so much. Nevertheless, the decision was made at Langley to add Bukhari to the list, which explained why Owen and the rest of the team were watching her house.

  Owen’s cell phone began ringing on the cast-iron table. He snatched it up, hit the TALK button, and lifted it to his ear. “What’s happening?”

  It was Walland. “She’s on the move. She just left the house and turned left. It looks like she’s going to stay on foot…. She’s heading north right now.”

  “Okay. Call Massi and Manik and let them know. We’re switching to alternate comms.”

  “Will do.”

  “Who’s driving?” Owen asked. The CIA station chief in Islamabad had already procured a car for them, an old Toyota four-door sedan, in addition to supplying the Motorola earpieces and lip mics they would use to communicate while on the move. He had also provided cell phones of the pay-and-go variety, which rendered them all but untraceable. He had supplied it all gladly and would have done more without being prompted by Langley. During their brief discussion the previous day, it had become clear to Owen that the station chief and Lee Patterson, the late ambassador to Pakistan, had been good friends.

  “Massi will wait by the car…We can call him up if she hails a taxi.”

  Owen nodded to himself; they were already fairly certain that Bukhari didn’t own a car, but they couldn’t afford to take the risk. Like in many Pakistani towns and cities, it was easier to get around in Sharakpur Sharif in taxis and rickshaws than in one’s own vehicle. Bukhari had left the house once before since they’d started the surveillance. She’d only walked down to the café for a pastry and a cup of coffee, but it was enough time to get a positive ID. Given the fact that they still had three other people to look at, they couldn’t afford to waste time following the wrong person, and they certainly couldn’t risk letting her slip through the coverage.

  Owen stood, nodded his thanks to the proprietor of the tea stand, and began making his way through the throngs of shoppers. He mulled things over as he walked, listening to the traffic coming over his earpiece. Personally, he didn’t think that Bukhari was involved. For one thing, her house was in a clamorous residential area, and Sharakpur Sharif was a fairly small town. A foreigner being brought in on a stretcher would definitely earn her some unwanted attention, so it seemed unlikely.

  At the same time, Owen wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. It was the reason he had lobbied so hard for this assignment, despite the fact that he had to work with Kealey. Unlike many of the other prominent figures in the U.S. government, Brynn Fitzgerald commanded his deep respect. In part, he thought, it was probably because she wasn’t really a politician. The vast majority of her years in government service had been spent behind the scenes, which was something that Owen could definitely relate to. At the same time, she had made an irrefutable difference. In short, she was one of the few people in Washington for whom Owen would gladly risk his life.

  The crowd ahead began to clear; the road was just beyond. There was a sputter of radio traffic, and Owen quickly adjusted his flesh-colored earpiece.

  “Owen, this is W
alland…What’s your twenty?”

  “Just coming into the main road from the east,” Owen murmured. It was one of the first things he had learned about communicating over a radio net; people had a tendency to talk too loud, which rendered the words inaudible on the other end. It was a common problem, especially in a firefight, when clear communication over the net could mean the difference between life and death. That didn’t mean that he was always disciplined when it came to radio procedure. U.S. Special Forces operators were a different breed. They operated outside the lines, and unlike the regular army, they tended to refer to each other by name, as opposed to rank. In an operational detachment, it wasn’t unusual for a staff sergeant to refer to a first sergeant by his first name, just as it wasn’t unusual for operators to leave out the unnecessary radio jargon, such as adding “over” at the end of every transmission. In a small, cohesive unit, all that did was slow things down.

  “She’s approaching from your right,” said Mark Walland, a former army ranger and a four-year veteran of the Special Activities Division, the paramilitary branch of the CIA. “You want to take point?”

  Walland was asking if Owen wanted to take a position forward of Bukhari. The trick to good surveillance was to form a sort of mobile, shifting perimeter around the target. Sometimes a specific operator might stay 20 to 30 feet ahead of the target; other times, he might drop back and take up the rear. One man stayed back with the car at all times, in case the target caught on or otherwise moved unexpectedly.

  “You right behind her, Walland?”

  “Ten meters back, same side of the street.”

  “What about you, Manik?”

  “I’m on the other side, moving parallel.” The speaker was Husain Manik, an eight-year veteran of the Operations Directorate. A native of the Maldive Islands, Manik had immigrated to the States at the age of twenty-four. He’d joined the Agency after earning his master’s in electrical engineering at MIT. Owen had yet to figure out why the man was stuck on surveillance, unless he spent most of that time developing new tools for the watchers. Perhaps he wanted to see what his tools were used for in the field, or perhaps he just fit the physical profile needed for this particular job. Either way, he seemed to know his business, and Owen was glad to have him along.