“Good morning, Ms. Shaw,” she said.
The woman looked startled, then fixed her with a questioning gaze.
“How do you know my name?” she said. “Have we met before?”
“No,” said Anna. “I’m Sheetal Khanna. Colonel Afridi sent me to meet you.”
“Ah,” said Daphne with a relieved toss of her head. “It’s taken you a while.”
“I got here day before yesterday, but I didn’t want to come to your house. I’m sure it’s being watched.”
“Probably,” said Daphne. “They may have followed me here, as well.”
“Is there any place we can meet, discreetly?” Anna said.
“Where are you staying?” Daphne asked, leaning across to choose a loaf of bread from the shelf in front of her.
“At the college. I’m supposed to be doing research in the library.”
“I could meet you there,” said Daphne. “I have a guest membership at the library.”
“My carrel is in the basement, level C of the stacks.”
“I’ll be there in an hour,” said Daphne, pushing her cart past Anna with a nod of her head, as if they’d been discussing the comparative merits of whole-grain versus multigrain bread.
The supermarket was a thirty-minute walk from campus, and Anna had to drop her groceries back in her room. Taking the elevator down into the stacks, she switched on the lights. Nobody else was around. Very few students or faculty seemed to use the stacks. Waiting for Daphne to arrive, Anna picked up a sheaf of papers from one of the boxes, a set of photocopies of Sanskrit verses, on which Dennis Shelton had jotted notes in English. The original, from which the copy had been made, was an old edition, and she could see that the pages were coming apart at the binding. Shelton’s handwriting was neat and precise. He often crossed out a word and replaced it with another. His personal copy of Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit-English dictionary, with his notes in the margins, was also in the box. Anna remembered taking a class in Sanskrit once, as a girl, and thinking how pointless it was to try and pronounce words she would never use.
Just then, she heard the elevator door open. Daphne entered the stacks. Though she was in her early sixties, there was a youthfulness to her walk that suggested a woman half her age. Anna pulled up a second chair.
“Thank you,” Daphne said. “I’ve never been to this part of the library before.”
“I don’t think anybody comes down here,” said Anna. “They’re all doing research online instead.”
“It’s like catacombs,” said Daphne.
Anna laughed. “I have to apologize. I hope I didn’t startle you in the supermarket.”
“That’s all right,” said Daphne. “I’ve been startled several times this week. Where in India are you from?”
“Delhi.”
“Sheetal Khanna. That’s a Punjabi name,” said Daphne. “You don’t look Punjabi.”
Anna shrugged and smiled. “My mother’s Bengali.”
“I hope I can trust you,” Daphne continued. “Colonel Afridi assured me that he would do whatever he could to help.”
“What is the problem, exactly?” Anna asked.
“I’ve lived like a hostage in this town for fifteen years,” said Daphne, “and I hardly know a single person beyond saying hello in passing, not even my neighbors or my hairdresser.”
“I would have thought it was a friendlier place than that.”
“Maybe it is, but I’ve been forced to be discreet…. And because of my circumstances, I just haven’t made the effort. I don’t belong to any of the churches in town or the women’s clubs.”
“Do you work?” Anna asked.
Daphne shook her head. “For a while I had a job, the first two years I was here, but then I quit. Writing up purchase orders for the US military isn’t exactly the most stimulating form of employment, even if it’s in the national interest.”
“You worked for Peregrine?”
“Almost everybody in Eggleston does,” said Daphne. “They practically own this town.”
“What about the college?”
“Sure,” said Daphne. “The company has given almost $50 million to Bromfield, buildings, laboratories, scholarships, named chairs. Even this library is endowed by Peregrine. Roger Fleischmann was a student here, and he’s made it his mission to revive the town and support the college.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” said Anna.
“Maybe. But he controls both the board of trustees and the Eggleston town council. Nothing happens here without his blessing and his money,” said Daphne. “There’s a company airport and test facility just beyond the golf course. They send up UAVs all the time, supposedly for testing, but often I think they must be watching us, every move we make.”
“I saw one,” Anna said.
“On the surface, Eggleston looks like a picture-perfect Midwestern town—red barns and silos, cornfields, and kids bicycling down a sidewalk—but when you realize it’s all supported by an industry that builds weapons that destroy people’s lives in other parts of the world, things look different.” Daphne stopped herself with a flick of her wrist, as if erasing all she’d said. “Of course, I should be grateful. Even after I quit my job, they’ve kept me on the payroll thanks to some powerful connections.”
“It must get lonely,” Anna began, “being on your own …”
“No, no,” said Daphne. “I’m not complaining. And, please, don’t feel sorry for me. I like to be alone, most of the time.”
“But your son—”
“He’s been in a coma since 1998, at a critical care facility in a town nearby. I visit him two or three times a week, but he doesn’t know it. The doctors say he can’t see or hear or feel or think. He might as well be dead.”
“I’m sorry,” said Anna.
“His father came to see me eight days ago, on the sixth of April. He and I split up soon after our son was born, but when Naseem had his accident, he made arrangements to have him brought here to America and receive the best treatment in the world.” She paused and looked away. “Not that it does any good. But he takes care of me as well, I suppose.”
“Guldaar?”
Daphne laughed. “I’ve never called him that. It sounds too melodramatic. Guldaar Khan! Like something out of Kipling or the movies.”
“What do you call him?”
“A fucking bastard, most of the time,” said Daphne.
“Why did he come to see you? Colonel Afridi said it had to do with your son.”
Daphne looked away for a moment at the shadowy spines of books on the shelves. The surrounding darkness of the stacks was claustrophobic but also gave them a sense of security— that nobody was listening.
“Let me ask you first,” said Daphne. “What is Afridi like? I’ve only heard his voice on the phone. He sounds like an interesting man.”
“He is,” said Anna. “He’s a mountaineer, or used to be. When you meet him, you’ll find him gracious and old-fashioned, but he’s one of the smartest men I know. A true officer and a gentleman.”
“You sound as if you’re in love with him,” said Daphne.
Anna laughed. “No, he’s almost seventy. Older than my father.”
“That’s no reason not to fall in love,” said Daphne.
“He’s in a wheelchair,” said Anna. “His legs were paralyzed in a climbing accident forty years ago.”
“Ah,” said Daphne. “Why didn’t you tell me that first?”
“Because it’s not the first thing that comes to mind,” Anna said, feeling uncomfortable. “His disability doesn’t slow him down.”
“You’re very loyal to him, I can tell,” said Daphne, “but I’m still wondering if I can trust you. I have to be sure.”
“What would convince you?” Anna replied.
Daphne turned the ring on her finger around, so that Anna could see an emerald set in gold, almost as big as a sparrow’s egg.
“If you tell me your real name,” said Daphne. “It isn’t Sheetal, is i
t?”
Anna met her eyes with a deliberate stare.
“No,” she said. “Annapurna Tagore. Most people call me Anna.”
Daphne extended her hand to shake. “Thank you, Anna. Now we can start again. You asked me the name I use for my son’s father. It’s Jimmy, but I’m the only one who calls him that.”
Letting go of Anna’s hand, she laughed again, as if to reassure her.
“Why did he come to see you last week?” Anna asked. “Did it have something to do with Peregrine?”
“I don’t know, honestly. Jimmy hardly ever talks about that side of things, but I know, of course, he’s close to them…. Probably owns a stake in the company, too. That’s why they’ve supported me all these years.”
“What did you talk about?” Anna asked.
“He had a proposition,” said Daphne, her face now drained of humor and looking older. “He’s found a wife for our son.”
Anna looked at her, confused.
“Yes, it is absurd, isn’t it?” said Daphne. “He even brought a picture of the girl, a pretty young thing straight out of a village in the Mohmand Agency, blue eyes, pink cheeks.”
“But your son—”
“Common sense and logic have never been Jimmy’s strengths. Of course, women in that part of the world get married over the telephone all the time. They’re known as mobile brides. You can even perform a nikkah on Twitter, I’m told.”
Anna studied Daphne’s face in the half-light of the library bulbs. For the first time, she saw a trace of sadness in her eyes. Half her face was in shadow, and her profile was as perfect as in the publicity photos Afridi had shared with her, a look of tragic beauty.
“Jimmy wants a grandson,” said Daphne.
“He has no other children?”
“No,” said Daphne. “But it’s not for lack of trying. Even before Naseem’s accident, he wanted to father another child. For a while, Jimmy thought I might get pregnant again, but nothing came of it, and he moved on to other women. At first, I was hurt and jealous when he told me that he’d married some girl from Hyderabad. Then he divorced her and found another bride, and after a while I realized it was desperation on his part and denial. He hardly seemed to care about the women. All he wanted was to produce an heir, but it wasn’t happening. So now he’s come up with another plan, to take sperm from our son and have the bride artificially inseminated to carry on his name, his lineage.”
“Is that even possible?” Anna said.
“Jimmy seems to think so. Modern medicine performs all kinds of miracles these days. Some doctor in Chicago has assured him that it can be done, the same way they collect sperm from stud bulls—a rectal probe ejaculation.”
She said it softly but with suppressed anger in her voice. Anna could see that her hands were trembling.
“Of course, he needs my permission for the procedure,” Daphne continued. “And I’ll tell you, Anna, with God as my witness, I will not let Jimmy have his way with him.”
Twenty-Seven
The website www.martyrsofamudarya.com was crudely designed, with a stock image of pink roses growing out of twisted stems of barbed wire and Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim written in Arabic and English at the top. On the homepage were two links. The first led to a second page with photographs of martyrs, most of them young men from Afghanistan who had died fighting the Russians and Americans over the past twenty years. The images were disturbing in their stark simplicity, mostly black-and-white snapshots of men holding rifles and landmines, looking straight into the camera. None of the martyrs appeared to be more than thirty years old, and some were in their teens. Death gave them an ageless quality of eternal youth. Reading the names, Afridi felt dismay and anger, the senseless violence and enmity in a part of the world that had so little humanity to spare. The second link took him to a blog, with a Facebook account under the name of ShabeerAli91. The most recent picture posted was of an American journalist taken hostage somewhere near Chitral.
Afridi studied the photograph, comparing it in his mind to the images of martyrs. The American was slightly older, in his early thirties. He had a wound on his forehead, and his face was bearded. The message on the site suggested he was still alive. A splinter group of the Martyrs of Amu Darya, operating in Nuristan, along the border between Afghanistan and Chitral, claimed responsibility for the kidnapping. They demanded a ransom of two million dollars, along with the release of several of their fighters who had been taken prisoner by NATO forces. Afridi had been alerted to the post by one of his analysts, who was keeping an eye on the borderlands of Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan following the air crash near Siachen. Because of the recent earthquake, there had been a lot of activity by Pakistan Air Force helicopters, mostly relief work, but some of which strayed suspiciously close to the LOAC and seemed more opportunistic than humanitarian.
Afridi read through the hostage demands, which were written in Urdu on the website. It was clear that the Martyrs of Amu Darya were allied with Pakistani Taliban fighters. Though they did not disclose where the prisoner was being held, there was a reference to the earthquake and demands for increased medical supplies in the region.
“Excuse me, sir.”
Narender Rawat, one of HRI’s senior analysts, was standing at Afridi’s door.
“Yes, what is it?” Afridi replied, still distracted by the website.
“The flight from Kabul has landed, sir. You asked me to call you.”
“Yes, of course,” said Afridi.
He glanced at the photograph of the hostage one more time, the dazed blue eyes, dusty brown hair, and dark beard. His name, according to the website, was Luke McKenzie. Afridi moved his hand to the mouse attached to his laptop and closed the tab, revealing a clutter of icons on his desktop, as well as a photograph of a mountain at sunset, tinged a reddish hue.
Wheeling himself away from his desk, he passed through a set of automatic doors onto the verandah of the Himalayan Research Institute. It was just after dusk, and the snow peaks were faintly visible through a cross-hatching of deodar needles. The air was crisp, and the wisteria vines that trailed along the verandah roof were in full bloom, pendant purple blossoms emitting a faint perfume. Reluctantly, Afridi returned inside, passing through another set of automatic doors and entering a large room alive with an array of digital technology, more than a dozen screens relaying satellite images and live feeds from observation posts in every part of the Indian Himalayas. One of the larger screens displayed a Chinese airfield in the trans-Himalayan region, with fighter jets landing like flies.
Narender Rawat directed Afridi toward a monitor at the far side of the room, connected to a CCTV feed at Indira Gandhi International Airport Terminal 3. A single CISF constable was on duty at the gate, which opened off a jetway.
“When did the flight arrive?” Afridi asked.
“Ten minutes ago,” said Rawat. “They’ve just opened the doors.”
Seconds later, passengers began to stream out of the gate and pass down the hall toward Immigration and Baggage Claim. The quality of the image was remarkably clear. Unlike most CCTV feeds, the new cameras installed at the airport were high definition, with a facility to focus on specific objects and faces. Afridi recalled that when the Dutch surveillance company had demonstrated the cameras, they showed how you could read the visa number in a passport from fifty feet away. He watched in silence as Air India, Flt. 244 from Kabul disembarked. Most of the passengers appeared to be Afghans, though there were plenty of Indians among them, contract laborers and diplomatic personnel, Sikh traders with shops in Kabul. It was only a two-hour flight.
“There. That’s one of them.” Afridi pointed at the screen, as a man leaning on a cane with an exaggerated limp came through the gate. “Take a closer look.”
Rawat keyed in a command, and the camera closed in on the passenger as he made his way slowly down the hall. His left leg was stiff and dragging at the toe as he hobbled forward. When he reached an escalator, they could see him bracing himself an
d using both hands to climb onto the moving staircase. Rawat switched to another camera at Passport Control, where passengers had formed a queue.
They picked up the Afghan at Immigration. Afridi could see his face more clearly now, a man in his fifties with a graying beard and a karacul hat. He kept his balance as he waited in the line, though he favored his right leg.
“Show me the rest of the passengers,” Afridi demanded.
The camera pulled back, and they could see a line of immigration booths, with more people arriving from the flight and waiting their turn.
“Those two women at counter number six,” Afridi said.
Both of them had their heads covered, and their arms were hidden beneath long, loose sleeves. They approached an immigration officer together, and one of them handed him their passports and landing cards. Rawat zoomed in to take a look at the papers, but they were hidden from view as the officer checked the documents.
“Can you get a closer shot of her other hand?” Afridi said.
The camera panned to the right, where the woman’s arm hung by her side inside folds of layered clothing. Only the fingers were visible, emerging from the hem on her sleeve. As Rawat adjusted the magnification, they could see the forefinger and thumb. For a minute they watched to see if there was any movement, but the hand remained rigid. Eventually, when the woman lifted her arm and the cloth fell away below her wrist, the smooth plastic skin on the prosthesis was unmistakable.
Shifting the camera back and forth between the women and the man in the karakul hat, Afridi and Rawat watched them collect their bags and move separately toward the Green Channel at Customs. One of the officers, in a white uniform, stopped the two women and asked them to X-ray their bags. Afridi could see the man hesitating, then circling back toward the Duty Free shops, where he pretended to sort through his documents, marking time a short distance away. Eventually, the women were let through, and he quickly followed them out the door, having been waved past by the Customs officer.
“Sir, shouldn’t we have them detained?” Rawat asked, as the trio moved out into the reception area, where another camera picked them up.
The Dalliance of Leopards Page 14