The Invisible (Ryan Kealey)

by Andrew Britton

  He gestured to a large gray box, which was positioned to Kealey’s left. Pétain looked over, then snapped back to Fahim and screamed, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this, you bastard? You’re supposed to be helping us!”

  The man didn’t react. Turning to Kealey, Pétain gripped his arm and whispered urgently, “We’ve got to run. He’s going to kill us both. You know we can’t—”

  “He’s not going to kill us,” Kealey said, his mind suddenly clearing. He felt intensely ashamed that he’d frozen, if only for a few seconds, but he couldn’t think about that now. In truth, he should never have let things get this far to begin with, but there would be plenty of time to focus on his numerous mistakes later if—and only if—they managed to survive the encounter. For now, he had to stay sharp and look for an opportunity. They might only get one, he knew, and he’d have to move fast to make the most of it. “He wouldn’t bother locking you up if he wanted us dead. Something else is happening here.”

  “What?” Pétain demanded. “What could possibly be happening? This wasn’t supposed to—”

  “Stop talking,” Fahim commanded, his voice carrying over the sound of the surging rain. “We don’t have a lot of time. Get over there and cuff her now.”

  Kealey hesitated, then grabbed Pétain’s arm and began pulling her toward the transformer, the cuffs in his left hand banging against his thigh with each step. She was struggling, but not too hard. Kealey couldn’t figure out why, at first, and then it hit him; she was too confused to put up a real fight. As they neared the transformer, though, she pulled away violently, obviously trying to catch him off guard.

  Kealey barely managed to keep his tenuous grasp around her wrist. Realizing she was about to break loose, he swung her hard against the metal access door. As she bounced off, her breath coming out in a rush, he caught her on the rebound. Slamming her back against the door, he pressed the outer part of his right forearm across her upper chest. Moving fast, he used his weight to pin her in place. She began to struggle violently, screaming for him to stop, but Kealey started to talk in fast, low tones, and she gradually stopped struggling. Then, panting for breath, she lifted her wild, questioning eyes to his.

  “You’ve got to stop,” Kealey said forcefully, once he was sure he had her attention. His face was just a few inches from hers. “I know you’re scared, but this isn’t helping. I can’t focus if you’re distracting me. Just try to stay calm, okay? I’m going to get us out of this.”

  She stayed silent for a few seconds, breathing hard. Then she looked away briefly. When her eyes came back to his, Kealey saw that she was calm, but only just, and she was clearly desperate for answers.

  “Ryan, what are you going to do?” she whispered urgently. “Why is this happening? I thought this guy was on our side. That’s what you told me…that he was here to help us.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m going to figure it out.” He removed his forearm from her chest and took a couple steps back. “Here, give me your hand.”

  She hesitated for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, she held up her left arm. Taking hold of her forearm, Kealey closed one of the cuffs around her wrist, then secured the other to the curved handle in the access door. As the second cuff ratcheted into place, Pétain closed her eyes and shook her head slightly, as if in denial of what was happening.

  Looking down at her, Kealey was tempted to offer some words of comfort. He wanted to tell her it was going to be okay, that he wouldn’t let anything happen to her, but they would have been empty promises, and he’d already made enough of those in his lifetime. Instead, he simply turned to face their supposed contact.

  It didn’t look as if Fahim had moved. He was still standing in the center of the gravel footpath, the long raincoat flapping around his legs. A satellite phone was now pressed to his left ear, but the gun was still in his right hand, aimed vaguely in Kealey’s direction.

  As he approached, Kealey heard a few snatches of conversation, but nothing that made sense to him. When he was about 7 feet away, the other man altered his aim, leveling the muzzle with Kealey’s chest. Kealey didn’t react visibly, but his muscles tightened, his breath coming faster, as he stared down the barrel of the semiautomatic. Fahim muttered a few more words, then lowered the receiver slightly, pressing it to his shoulder. Looking up, he said something that caught Kealey completely off guard.

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  For a few seconds, Kealey was left speechless, his mind racing to catch up with this strange development. “Who?” he finally asked, raising his voice to be heard. “Who the fuck are you talking to? Is that Mengal?”

  The other man didn’t reply. Instead, he simply tossed over the phone. Kealey managed to catch it, and once he verified that it was still on, he lifted it to his ear. “Who is this?” he demanded, shouting over the sound of the driving rain. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to listen,” Javier Machado said. His deep, cultured voice was as clear as a bell, despite the thousands of miles that separated them. “I want you to listen well, Kealey, because make no mistake, at least one life—and not necessarily yours—depends on what you do next.”

  CHAPTER 35

  NORTHERN PAKISTAN

  “You son of a bitch,” Kealey whispered. He was only dimly aware of his surroundings. Fahim was standing nearby, the gun leveled in his direction, and the rain was streaming down his face, but everything else had faded away. Just one thing was stuck in his mind, and that was that he had missed something big. He was frantically trying to figure it out, but nothing was coming to mind, and the anger was threatening to drown out his rational thoughts. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? I swear to God, I’m going to—”

  “I told you to listen,” Machado snapped over the line. “Where is Marissa? Can she hear you?”

  Kealey looked over, but he already knew the answer. Pétain was only about 20 feet away, huddled against the transformer to which she was handcuffed, but even at that short distance, the driving rain and the thunder pounding overhead were enough to obscure anything less than a shout. “No, she can’t hear us.”

  “Good.” Machado’s tone seemed to ease a little. “But we’re not going to take any chances. If you refer to me by name, you will not leave Pakistan alive. Is that understood?”

  “Yes,” Kealey hissed, unable to hide his anger.

  “Good,” Machado repeated. “Now, listen to me. Despite how this looks, I did not mislead you. Fahim, as you may have already guessed, was one of my Afghan agents when I was stationed in Pakistan. He was the first man I recruited in-country. He is very reliable, and he can lead you directly to Benazir Mengal. Everything I told you before was true.”

  “Then why all the bullshit? Why is your daughter handcuffed to—?”

  “¡Cállate!” Machado shouted. “I told you not to use my name!”

  Kealey hadn’t done so, not in so many words, but he understood what the Spaniard was driving at. “She can’t—”

  “Stop talking,” Machado said calmly. Kealey couldn’t help but lock on to the sudden shift in his tone. The man’s emotions were all over the place, but Kealey could detect an underlying, unmistakable tone of pure guilt. It was as if the Spaniard had done something wrong, something besides the obvious. Or was about to, Kealey thought.

  “I’m going to instruct Fahim to help you,” Machado was saying. “He is part of a larger network, a group he formed—with my help, of course—in 1988. At that time, they were primarily concerned with transporting funds and weapons to the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war. Now, they’re more concerned with…Well, let’s just call it private enterprise.”

  Kealey saw it immediately. “They’re smugglers.” Then he saw the other part. “And Mengal is their primary competition.”

  “Exactly,” Machado said. “So you see, it’s in his interest to help you. His men are watching Mengal right now, and he will take you to that location once you have carried out your end of th
e bargain.”

  “And what is my end of the bargain?”

  There was a quick intake of breath on the other end of the line, and then a long pause. Kealey sensed that the older man was steeling his resolve. When he finally spoke, his voice was laced with guilt and despair, but that did nothing to lessen the shock of the words.

  “I need you to shoot my daughter.”

  For a long moment, Kealey couldn’t reply. It was hard to believe he had heard correctly, because the words just didn’t make sense. On some level, he knew they combined to form a perfectly grammatical sentence, but the overall meaning, the very implication, was just too far-fetched to believe. Somehow, he had walked into something he didn’t fully understand.

  Finally, he managed to find his voice. “I don’t understand. You want me to…kill Marissa?”

  “No!” Machado blurted. With that single word, Kealey heard all the certainty, strength, and confidence drop out of his voice. He hurriedly regained control, but the younger man had caught the slip, and he was already thinking about how he could use it to his advantage. “God, no. I only need you to…”

  “To what?”

  “To injure her. To take her out of the field,” Machado said. There was a long pause. “Kealey, there is more to this than I can really—”

  “No,” Kealey said.

  There was an uncertain hesitation on the other end of the line. “What do you mean no? What are you talking about?”

  “I won’t do it. I won’t shoot her. You must be out of your fucking mind.”

  Kealey heard a long, weary sigh, and then Machado spoke in a voice devoid of emotion. “You don’t understand. I knew you wouldn’t understand, but it needs to be done. It’s the only way.”

  “The only way to what?” Kealey demanded, his frustration rising to match his anger and confusion. “Why are you asking me to do this?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Then explain it.”

  The pause lasted much longer this time, and when Machado finally spoke, Kealey was caught off guard, his attention divided between Fahim, the gun in his hand, and the blurred form of Marissa Pétain in the near distance. “You know about Caroline? Did Marissa tell you about her?”

  “Yes, she told me what happened.”

  “Then you know how she died. You know what the Colombians did to her.”

  “They tortured her,” Kealey said uneasily.

  “No,” Machado said. “You’re wrong.”

  “What?” Kealey was confused; he remembered every word of what Pétain had told him in Cartagena, and while she hadn’t delved into the details of her sister’s death, she had made the graphic nature of the incident reasonably clear. “I thought—”

  “You’re wrong,” Machado repeated quietly. “You see, it’s a matter of degree. They didn’t just torture her, Ryan. They started with her toes, so she wouldn’t try to run. Once they had them off, they began removing her fingers. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Do you understand the severity of what I’m saying? They took her apart piece by piece. That is not torture. That is something else entirely.”

  Machado stopped talking, and Kealey decided to venture a few words. “Look, I can understand how you—”

  “They gave her a mirror,” Machado continued. His voice was unnaturally calm and casual. “Did Marissa tell you that? They gave my firstborn child a mirror so she could see what they had done to her. Once they had taken her fingers, she obviously couldn’t hold it up for herself, so they did it for her. Very courteous people, the Colombians, and very thorough.” Machado let out a low, mirthless laugh. “You can say what you like about them, but they are devoted to their work, and they certainly like to be recognized for it.”

  And to that, Kealey had no response. Suddenly, it was clear to him just how far gone Javier Machado actually was. His daughter’s death—not to mention the nightmare he’d walked into when he’d opened his front door eight years earlier—had clearly pushed him over the edge, and there was no bringing him back. The only thing Kealey could do now was try to talk him out of the bizarre demand he had levied a few moments ago, but for that to happen, he had to know how Pétain figured into the story.

  When he asked the question, though, Machado merely offered a short, hollow laugh. It was a deeply unsettling sound, and Kealey had to pull the phone away from his ear just to get away from it. “You still don’t get it, do you, Kealey? Marissa joined the Agency because of Caroline. I’m sure she told you that.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Did she tell you that I did everything I could to stop her from joining? That I used every ounce of my influence to keep her away from Langley?”

  “No,” Kealey said. He remembered thinking the exact opposite, that Machado had used his pull to get her into the Agency. “She didn’t mention that.”

  “And why do you think she did that? Why do you think she ignored me when I pleaded with her to reconsider? Why do you think she ignored Élise when she begged her to stay in Spain?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because she wanted revenge. She wanted to find the people who killed Caroline, and she wanted them to suffer. And now she’s just a few months away from getting her wish.”

  Kealey went suddenly cold. “What are you talking about?”

  Machado laughed again, but it was a bitter, angry gesture. “Didn’t Harper tell you? Of course he didn’t…That isn’t his way. One hand never knows what the other is doing. That’s how it is at the Agency, though…I only wish I had known that sooner.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Two months ago, Marissa was selected to participate in an upcoming op in Colombia. And by ‘participate,’ I mean she is the op. Once she lands in Bogotá, she’s on her own. No control, at least not in-country, and no support from the embassy. Nothing but biweekly reports to Langley. The target is the NVC, otherwise known as the North Valley cartel.”

  “The same cartel that killed her sister,” Kealey murmured. He was speaking more to himself than anything else, but Machado had heard him over the line.

  “Exactly. The same people who butchered my Caroline. Marissa is going after the same bastards, but it’s not going to work, Kealey. She has minimal experience working under-cover and almost no experience working without a team. They’ll weed her out in no time, and when that happens…”

  Kealey let the silence linger as he thought it through. Perhaps Machado wasn’t as mentally unstable as he’d initially thought. But then again, what he was asking was just…

  As if sensing the younger man’s second thoughts, the Spaniard hurried to fill the dead air. “You know as well as I do that they’ll kill her. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried arguing with her, threatening her, and I’ve tried pulling some strings at the Agency to keep her away from this. Nothing has worked…Not even Élise can talk her out of it, and Harper seems intent on sending her. The Agency is desperate to get a foothold in Colombia. But if, for some reason, she wasn’t physically able to go into the field…”

  “Then Harper would have no choice but to scrap the op,” Kealey concluded. He didn’t know what to think about what he had just heard, but for the first time, he had a glimmer of understanding. He had to admit that in some ways, what Machado was proposing made perfect sense. At the same time, there was nothing rational or even sane about what the older man was asking him to do. “At the very least, he’d find someone else to send.”

  “Exactly,” Machado said. He sounded resigned and despondent, but also resolute. “This is the last thing I want, Kealey, believe me, but it’s for the best. She will still be able to stay at Langley. She has exceptional skills in other areas, and she’s a brilliant girl. Much too smart to be wasted on an operation like this. It is destined to fail…Believe me, I know. I spent some time in Medellín when I was with the DO. I know what it will take to infiltrate the cartels, and one person with limited experience is not the answer. If she goes, she’ll be dead inside a week. I guarantee it.
”

  Kealey looked over at Pétain, who was standing in front of the transformer, her left wrist cuffed to the access door. Her head scarf had come loose and was blowing across the gravel footpath. Her pale face was blurred by the rain, but he could tell that she was staring in his direction, waiting for some kind of sign. As he watched her, something clicked in his mind, and he made his decision.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” he said slowly, “and you’re probably right about what will happen if she goes, but you’re going to have to figure out another way to stop her. I’m not going to do it, Machado. If you have to call off our arrangement, then so be it, but I won’t do it. She deserves a chance to take those fuckers down, and I’m not going to take that away from her. I can’t take that away from her.”

  There was a long, tense pause, and then the Spaniard came back on, his voice tight and insistent. “Kealey, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. This isn’t a choice. You can’t decide one way or another. You’re going to do it, and that’s final.”

  “Hey,” Kealey snapped, his hand tightening around the phone. He had tried letting the man down easy; this was something else entirely. “Fuck you. I don’t have to do a fucking thing you tell me. Who the hell do you think you are? Now, listen—”

  “No, you listen. In case you’ve forgotten, I want to remind you of something. When you flew to Pakistan, you left someone behind.”

  Kealey closed his eyes and bit back his instinctive response. Suddenly, it was all clear, but he tried not to let his emotions cloud his judgment. There was no way that Machado would go that far…would he? “Naomi.”

  “That’s correct. I talked to your employer a few hours ago, and he’s brought me back into the fold, in a manner of speaking. He asked me to help get her out of the country. In other words, she’s with me for the foreseeable future.”

  “You wouldn’t hurt her,” Kealey said. He was fairly confident that he was right. He had misjudged the older man in Spain, but he didn’t think he’d gotten it that wrong. “You spent thirty years in the DO. She’s one of us, Machado. If you hurt her, you’ll be throwing away everything you ever did with the Agency, not to mention the fact that they’ll track you down in a heartbeat.”