by Dan Mayland
Maybe he could just bring whatever Mark wanted him to hold on to back with him to the States, Decker thought. Hell, that might even be the safest course of action. Get whatever it was out of the area of operations.
“John, you’ve got bigger things to worry about. Call your friend back.” She put a hand up to Decker’s cheek. “Tell him about your dad.”
“I can’t, Jess. You just have to trust me on this one. Listen, I gotta try reaching my brother in the States again.”
Decker flipped on the overhead light and started drifting to the side of the road as he searched for his phone in the compartment under the armrest between the driver and passenger seats. He’d tossed it in there amid the old soda cans and tins of chewing tobacco and random keys and wrappers from his favorite shawarma place in Bishkek.
“Really, honey, why don’t you let me drive?”
Decker found his phone. “I got it.” He pulled his Bluetooth earpiece out from under a wet napkin, stuck it in his ear, and dialed while keeping one eye on the road.
“What’s the latest?” he said, when his brother picked up.
“I don’t know, man. We haven’t gotten the test results back yet.”
“What tests?”
“They’re running this line or something from his arm to his heart.”
“Is he getting better?”
“He’s not getting worse. At least his heart is beating OK now.”
“Thank God.”
“There was something wrong with the rhythm before.”
Decker thought his brother sounded seriously stressed.
“Listen, tell Mom I might not be able to catch a flight till tomorrow morning. I’m working on it now, but things here are a bit of a cluster. I’m in the serious boonies, and even when I get out of here, it’ll be a day of travel. I’ll figure it out, but it might take a little longer than I’d hoped.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“OK, I’ll check in later. I gotta go now.”
He’d bought himself a little time, Decker thought, relieved to no end that his father wasn’t getting worse. He’d deal with Mark today. Come tomorrow, he’d have to make a decision, but there was no use worrying about that now. His only concern right now was what to do with Jessica.
He glanced at her as he tossed his phone back into the armrest compartment. The problem was, she’d moved out of the climber’s hostel a week before and had been crashing with him ever since. He’d feel like a jerk saying “see ya” and just dropping her off on the street. Besides, he liked having her around.
“So, Jess,” he said. “You remember I said I worked as, like, a high-paid security guard?”
“You’re a SEAL, honey. I know.”
“Was a SEAL. But it’s because I was a SEAL that I have the job that I have. Anyway, point being, I have special skills. It’s cool because I get to take off and climb with you and stuff, but sometimes, man, duty calls.”
“And you’re telling me this is one of those times.”
“Yeah, this is one of those times. That’s what the favor is about. It’s a job, but it’s a job for a friend. Kind of an emergency deal.”
“What about your dad?”
“I’ve got to pick up a package and guard it for a while. It shouldn’t be long, maybe just a few hours, maybe a little bit longer. After that, I’ll fly straight home. My brother’s there anyway. There’s nothing I’d really be able to do at home other than try to be nice to people, whereas here… Ah, shit, I don’t know…”
“What kind of package?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“I don’t know, but I figure there’s a reason they needed someone like me.”
“They don’t bring in the big guns for nothing, huh?” Jessica gave him a playful punch on his tree trunk of an arm.
Decker loved her Australian accent, and the way she said big guns. She was like a young Nicole Kidman.
“Anyway, if you want, if you’re worried, I can drop you off somewhere before I pick this thing up.”
“I’m not worried. I figure you can handle it.”
“All right. We’ll stick together then.”
“Done.”
“You’re a hell of a good sport, Jess.”
“Just let me know if I’m getting in the way of you being able to do your job. If I’m a burden, I’ll leave. Where is this package, anyway?”
Decker was about to answer when his phone rang. This time, it was Holtz.
“I’m hooking you up, buddy,” said Holtz. “Found you a spot on a C-17 that’s flying crap from Afghanistan back to Fort Bragg. Leaving tonight, twenty-two hundred hours. Refuel stop at Ramstein. Get your ass over to the air base by eight, have the gate crew give Colonel Greene a holler—I think you know him?”
“Yeah, he handled transport for the job we did for DoD this summer, but—”
“Good. Just check in with him and he’ll handle getting you where you need to be.”
“Only thing is, it turns out I can’t blow tonight. I have something I have to do. I completely blanked about it when I talked to you earlier.”
A long pause, then, “What do you suddenly have to do that’s more important than flying home to be with your dad?”
“Well, nothing that’s more important than that, I’m just talking about a brief delay. It has to do with Jessica.”
“Who’s Jessica?”
“The Australian girl. You met her last week.”
“You two still together? I thought she was just a—”
“Hey.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I promised her I’d drive her up to Almaty. I completely blanked.”
“Have her take the damn bus.”
“She’s not going to downtown Almaty. It’s one of the towns outside. She needs a ride for this wedding. I’ll catch a flight to the States from Almaty tomorrow morning.”
“You’re going to pay a couple extra grand just to drive a chick you hardly know to a wedding?”
“We actually know each other pretty well by now.” Decker gave Jessica a look and winked. “She’s a great gal.”
Holtz didn’t respond right away. When he did, he sounded suspicious. “Have you been talking to Sava?”
“Actually, no.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Deck.”
“I’m not bullshitting you.”
The line went silent. Finally, Holtz said, “All right. I’ll tell Colonel Greene you’re bailing.”
“I’m sorry to have put you out.”
“Yeah, whatever. Call me if Sava calls you.”
“Roger that.”
It took Decker an hour to get to Bishkek. After a ten-minute high-speed surveillance-detection run down half the side alleys in the city, he parked his Explorer a few blocks away from Mark and Daria’s condo.
“Wait here, OK?” he said to Jessica. “This shouldn’t take long.”
He popped open the back hatch of the Explorer, lifted up the mat covering the cargo area, and pulled out a metal box that had been fitted into a custom-made slot. Inside was a tactical chest rig, a Sig Sauer P226 9mm pistol, five spare twenty-round magazines for the Sig, an assortment of holsters, a set of compact night-vision goggles, a body armor vest with spare plates, a SOG SEAL Team knife, a Sig Sauer Mosquito pistol with a threaded barrel, a suppressor that could be screwed onto the barrel of the Mosquito, a short version of an M4 rifle, a box of ammo for the M4, three yards of detonation cord along with a few blasting caps, a thousand dollars in cash, a Leatherman tool, an LED headlamp, a compass, a tin of Skoal Straight dip, and a first aid kit.
Deck considered what to bring. He was just there to pick up a package; better to travel light, he thought.
He strapped on a shoulder holster, glanced around for cops—except for the M4, all the guns were unlicensed—slotted the Sig Sauer P226 into it, put on a nylon jacket that had been on the floor of the cargo area, zipped it up so that his gun was hidden, and slipped two spare, fu
lly loaded P226 magazines into each pocket of the jacket. Recalling that Mark and Daria’s condominium had appeared dark when he’d driven past it, he grabbed his night-vision goggles and slid them into an inside pocket.
After packing the rest of his gear back up, he climbed out of the car, walked down a few alleys, and then ducked in and out of the hospital on the opposite side of the street. Finally, when he’d convinced himself that no one was following him on foot, he walked across the street to Mark and Daria’s condo.
He let himself into the open stairwell, climbed one flight of steps, and knocked on a new metal door, expecting—with some trepidation—that Daria would answer.
Before Daria had quit the spy business, he’d worked with her on a job. A couple weeks into it, he’d taken her out to dinner. His advances, he recalled, had gone nowhere. They weren’t right for each other, he knew, but he still found her distractingly attractive.
Which, since she was with Mark, sometimes made him feel awkward around her.
He knocked again. No one answered, so he tried the door. It was locked. The light in the hallway was dim, but it was even darker along the crack between the door and the floor—which told him that the lights were off inside.
Well, damn, he thought. He knew Mark and Daria had a pretty sophisticated alarm system. Breaking down the door would set it off. If that was what it took, that was what it took, but Decker thought it couldn’t hurt to look for an open window. So he trudged back down to the street. That was when he noticed the loop of rope hanging off the balcony—and that the balcony door was cracked open an inch.
Bingo.
He waited a minute until the sidewalk was clear of pedestrians, and then ran at the exterior wall of Mark and Daria’s building. When he was close, he leaped several feet in the air, pushed up with his right foot when it hit the wall, and grabbed at the dangling rope with his left hand.
Two seconds later, he was standing silently on the balcony, his hand on the grip of his pistol, listening for sounds inside. All the lights still appeared to be off. He heard nothing, so after a minute, he slipped on his night-vision goggles, gently eased the balcony door open, and ducked inside, drawing his gun as he did so.
“Someone’s been having a party,” Decker said to himself.
The cushions had been removed from the living room sofa. Crumpled pieces of paper, a vase, and narde pieces were scattered all over the floor. A glass of milk and an open box of butter cookies sat on the kitchen table. Then Decker noticed a big box of what looked like diapers—he couldn’t read the Cyrillic letters, so he couldn’t be sure—on the coffee table in front of the couch.
Huh, he thought.
Gun still drawn, he started looking for a package. Mark had said he’d know it when he saw it. And to be gentle. Which had made no sense to Decker at the time and made no sense to him now.
He inspected the living room and kitchen, then ducked his head into Mark and Daria’s office. When he got to the bedroom, and saw that the sheets had been pulled from the bed onto what looked like the couch cushions, his confusion only mounted. He took a quick look under the bed.
Then Decker saw something move, something inside the pile of sheets next to the bed.
What the hell?
He caught a glimpse of what—with his night-vision goggles on—looked like fur. His first thought was that it was a rat, or a mouse. He swung his gun around and lifted the sheets up with his foot.
“Oh, no,” said Decker. “You have got to be kidding me.”
18
It was nearly nine p.m. by the time Daria and her two CIA minders reached Balykchy. The air had turned cold, hovering around the freezing point, and smelled of wood fires and marshland.
At a dirt alley that intersected the main road just past the town center, Daria said, “Turn here.”
They drove past a cluster of abandoned houses—crumbling, roofless structures with tree-sized weeds growing out of them. The decay stretched as far as the glare from the car’s headlights, and beyond. Dogs barked in the night.
“What the hell is this place?” asked the Asian CIA officer, who was driving. The pothole-riddled road was testing the suspension of the beat-up Russian Lada they were driving in. Daria assumed the car was supposed to help CIA officers fit in with the local population when on assignment. Or maybe the Agency had just been trying to save a few bucks.
“It’s just Balykchy,” Daria said, adding, “It’s not far now.”
After a half mile or so, a few inhabited houses appeared on the left.
“Stop here,” said Daria, when they’d reached the last house on the street. It was a one-story structure, made of dun-colored brick, and topped with a corrugated metal roof. In front of the house, waist-high grass grew around piles of rocks. Electric lights were visible through the single-pane windows. A fence made of scrap wood and barbed wire surrounded three sides of the house; on the right side stood a ten-foot-high concrete wall topped with concertina wire and defaced with graffiti extolling the virtues of a Bishkek-based rock band.
The wall, Daria knew, marked the boundary of an abandoned factory. A rusted metal door—what had once been a back exit from the factory—stood in the middle of the wall. Beyond the door, in the fields surrounding the abandoned factory, were vegetable gardens. Daria knew this because she’d been here before. The house belonged to a handyman who frequently helped at the orphanage; Daria had driven him home on several occasions.
The car stopped.
“I’ll have to go inside to get him,” said Daria.
“We’ll come with you,” said the redheaded CIA officer.
“It would be better if you didn’t. The people here, they’re not used to strangers. Especially not at this time of night.”
“We don’t have any choice in the matter. Nor do you.”
Daria shrugged. “All right, just be careful. And let me do the talking.”
All three of them climbed out of the car. It was a starless, moonless night. Daria could hear wind gusting through nearby trees.
She let herself through the makeshift front gate, which wasn’t locked. The two officers tried to follow closely behind her, but as soon as she was through the gate, she swung it backward as hard as she could, slamming it into the redhead’s knees. She sprinted toward the concrete wall that loomed up thirty feet away to her right.
Behind her, the officers yelled at her to stop. Dogs started barking inside the house.
When she reached the rusted door that led to the factory grounds, she pulled as hard as she could on a jury-rigged handle that had been affixed to the door, slipped through the opening, slammed the door shut behind her, swung a heavy latch into place, and began to run.
19
Jessica’s eyes widened in a cartoonish way when Decker opened the door to his Explorer, holding a child in his arms. The boy had a pacifier in his mouth, which he was sucking on hard as he whimpered.
All things considered, thought Decker, the kid was holding up pretty well.
He pulled his keys out of his pocket and tossed them to Jessica. “Here. You drive. I’ll sit in back with the kid.”
Jessica just stared at him as if he’d lost his mind.
Decker added, “He’s the package I needed to pick up.”
“He’s not a package. He’s a child.”
“Yeah, I figured that out.” Decker slipped into the back seat of the car, still holding Muhammad tight to his chest. “Drive! Please, Jessica. Just drive.”
“What’s the rush?”
“I don’t know. I got a feeling.”
“You’re weirding me out, John.”
“I’m just kind of babysitting, that’s all. No biggie.”
“Yes, this is a biggie!”
“Go!”
Jessica started the car and pulled out into traffic. “Babysitting for how long?”
“A few hours. Maybe a day.”
“Well, whose child is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t kn
ow.” Jessica sounded incredulous.
“I know this woman who runs an orphanage, OK? So I’m guessing the kid’s an orphan, but evidently there’s been some complications.”
“This woman who runs the orphanage—is she the friend that asked you to do this?”
“No. That’s this other guy. But I think he was asking for her. They’re like, almost married.”
Jessica gripped the steering wheel with both hands, staring with deer-in-the-headlights eyes out the front windshield. She shook her head a few times, as though having a conversation with herself.
Decker added, “The kid’s in some kind of danger, some people are after him, and I’ve been asked to protect him. That’s all I know and all I have to know. I’m gonna take him to my place, deal with things there. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”
Jessica took a full minute to answer. “I said I’d stay. We’ll take care of him together.”
20
Val Rosten, the deputy director of the CIA’s Near East Division, showed up at the US embassy in Bishkek just after nine.
Mark had met Rosten years before at Langley, when they’d both been station chiefs. Rosten had just given an intense, one-hour, head-spinning sixty-slide presentation on Jordanian economic policies. In the years since, Rosten had made short work of climbing over colleagues to get to his current position.
He took a seat across from Mark at the conference table in the room where Mark had been kept waiting. He was rail thin, short, and dressed in a navy-blue pinstriped suit with a yellow tie. His white shirt looked a little rumpled from travel and his mouth had taken the shape of something close to a smile.
“I’ll get right to it,” said Rosten.
“Please do.”
“The boy.”
Mark sat back in his chair and studied Rosten. He figured they were roughly the same age. “What of him?”
“I believe Ted Kaufman spoke to you about the necessity of releasing him to us. So we can place him under protection.”
Rosten spoke quickly, but he enunciated each word with studied precision. Mark had heard he’d been recruited from MIT, where he’d double majored in math and Middle Eastern studies.