Andrew Britton Bundle

by Andrew Britton

  “Pictures of your sister?” Kealey asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” Pétain sniffed. A few tears were working their way down her face, but she didn’t seem to notice. “And not just after, either. They took pictures the whole time they were torturing her. They made a video, too. They left that playing on the VCR. We could hear her screaming when my father opened the door…It was like she was right there, inside the house.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kealey said softly. It was most depraved thing he had ever heard, and it fit right in with what he knew about the Colombian cartels. At the same time, it answered all of his questions. Machado’s intense desire to shield his remaining daughter from harm made perfect sense now, as did Pétain’s lack of remorse for the death of Kamil Ghafour. After what she’d been forced to endure, the lives of men like Ghafour must have meant very little to her. Kealey couldn’t help but wonder how she’d made it through the Agency’s intensive screening process. Her background alone should have raised enough red flags to keep her out, though he reminded himself that her father could have pulled some very long strings on her behalf.

  “So now you know,” she said, pushing her glass away. She looked at him steadily, and Kealey saw that the tears had already dried on her cheeks. He supposed she’d had plenty of time to grieve over the past decade, and it didn’t take a genius to see that her grief had evolved into something far more dangerous. “Caroline’s death changed everything. My mother handled it as well as anyone could, but my father was devastated. He aged ten years the minute he walked into that house, and he’s never been the same.”

  “And what about you?” Kealey asked quietly. “How did you deal with it?”

  “Me?” She looked at him evenly, her body completely still. “I joined the Agency.”

  She stood and collected her empty glass. “I know what this was about, Ryan,” she said, catching him by surprise. He knew protesting would get him nowhere, so he simply sat back and waited. “This whole conversation. You came out here to learn something about me.”

  She paused for a moment, just watching him. “I can’t say I blame you…It’s important to know who you’re working with. But now that it’s all out in the open, I guess I should ask if you’ve changed your mind. So, do you still want my help?”

  He looked up and studied her face for a long moment. As far as he could tell, she was completely indifferent. He could answer either way, and she would accept it completely.

  “You’d better get some sleep,” he finally said. “We’ve got an early start in the morning.”

  She smiled and turned to go inside. She’d only taken a few steps when Kealey called out, and she turned to face him.

  “Marissa.” He hesitated, but he had to ask it. He had to know. “The people who killed your sister…”

  She shook her head, but she was still smiling, and there was a strange light in her dark brown eyes. “They never caught them, but I know who they are.” She seemed incredibly poised, once again in complete control. “The Agency, for all of its faults, does not abandon its own. The men who were responsible were lackeys at the time. Now they’re among the most powerful figures in the business, but that doesn’t mean a thing. Not in the long run.”

  “They can’t hide forever, is that it?”

  Kealey instantly regretted the words. They sounded patronizing, and that wasn’t like him at all. It didn’t seem to make a difference, though, as her smile didn’t falter.

  “That’s it exactly,” Pétain said. “And the end may be coming sooner than they think.”

  With that, she turned and melted into the darkness. Kealey watched her go, and for some reason, he believed her completely.

  CHAPTER 24

  SIALKOT • CARTAGENA

  The light was searing and shockingly bright, even through the opaque, fluttering shields of his eyelids. It burned into his brain, lighting the gray matter, illuminating every neuron, axon, and synapse between. The light joined the dull ache behind his right ear, the twin sources of pain coalescing, bundling right in the middle, preparing to radiate. The pain was intense, clouding out all thought. Dizzying, crushing, mobile waves of pain, and he hadn’t even opened his eyes yet…

  Randall Craig stirred, and his eyes snapped open. He pushed away the agonizing thump in his head, trying to think it through. An impossible task right from the outset…Christ, it hurt. He sat up, looked around, blinking away the confusion. The light wasn’t as bad now, and it was warmer than he’d thought at first. Not fluorescent light, so it wasn’t an office or warehouse. He was in a house, he realized, his impression confirmed by the comfortable surroundings. A scarred desk, built of sturdy oak and stacked with paper; a chair covered in cracked faux leather; small watercolors on two of the walls. A home office, maybe, but there was a bed. He was sitting on it now, a narrow bed with brass railings at the head and feet. Sitting up a little more, he swung his feet to the floor. The movement caused his head to thump savagely.

  “Motherfucker,” he groaned. He dropped his head forward, leaning over his knees, trying to stretch the pain at the back of his head. It was too centered; he needed to move it around a little. He clamped his eyes shut and reached back, gingerly feeling the lump. It was big, but his hand came away clean. He looked back at the pillow and didn’t see blood. He hadn’t been consciously afraid, but something came off his chest regardless: the absence of blood was vastly reassuring. “Motherfucker…”

  No blood, and his head was starting to clear. He tried to focus on those positive signs, wondering what they had hit him with. It was all coming back now; the little flashes of memory were starting to cooperate, the images lining up in the right way, forming a picture. He had been walking out to his car…He could remember the van, the frightened face of the young man. He could remember the pang of doubt, the little spark of uncertainty, but he’d stepped into it anyway, drawn in by the man’s tangible fear. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Twelve American tourists kidnapped in the north, the secretary of state ambushed in Rawalpindi, abducted in plain sight of dozens of witnesses…He should have had his guard up. Should have been thinking. He started to shake his head before realizing his mistake, the pain thumping back into place. It was okay if he didn’t move too much, but it was still there, like the worst part of a migraine. The part right before the peak and the slow ride down. He wanted to shake his head, the self-disgust like a living part of him. Should have been thinking…

  He had to think now; he knew that much. Okay. He stood up, fighting back the nausea, and checked his watch instinctively. It was gone. He frowned; that didn’t make sense right there. Why would they take his watch? It was a cheap, plastic piece of shit, worthless unless…

  Unless they wanted to isolate him, to bar him from the outside world. He nodded to himself, ignoring the pain this time. He was pleased with his realization. There were no windows in the room. He had no idea what time it was; it could have been day or night. If they were trying to cut him off, they had done a damn good job.

  He wondered how long he’d been out. What had they hit him with? Something hard, but the skin wasn’t broken, so what was it? He shook his head sharply, ignoring the pain once more, frustrated with his wavering train of thought. Why had they taken him? That was the important question. There had to be a reason, but he just couldn’t get to it. He was nobody special. He didn’t have any famous relatives, and he wasn’t connected to anyone with any real power. Basically, he was just another foreigner, and yet, he knew that the same could be said of the dozen tourists who’d gone missing over the past several months.

  This had to be somehow related. But they had disappeared far to the north, Craig reminded himself, and from what he had read, they had been taken in groups in isolated areas. If he had been kidnapped by the same organization, why would they change their mode of operation so drastically? There was also Fitzgerald, of course, but he had absolutely no connection to the secretary of state, so that didn’t make sense, either. What was it? What was the connection? He had to think�
�.

  He pushed it aside; there would be plenty of time for that later. First things first. He had to know where he was. There was only one door. He walked over, his legs shaky beneath him, and checked it. Locked. He was tempted to pound on it. He wanted to call for help but knew it wouldn’t get him anywhere. Instead, he turned and looked at the desk. There was a lot of paper. It was strewn about, obviously a work area. There had to be something there. A name, an address…something.

  He checked the drawers first. Two hardcover books: an ancient copy of the Koran and a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, both in English. Strange to find the Koran in English, he thought, but that was assuming he was still in Pakistan. There were a few other medical books, some written in English, others in Urdu. Otherwise, the drawers were empty. Frustrated, he sat down on the bed to think it through. He was still sitting there, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his head, when he heard a sound at the door. Startled, he stood up, unconsciously bracing himself as the key scraped in the lock, and the door swung in on its hinges….

  More than 4,000 miles to the west, Naomi Kharmai sat on the floor in the small bedroom on the second floor. The room was pitch-black, warm, and quiet. She sat in the corner on the far side of the bed, her back pressed into the spot where the walls formed a right angle, her arms wrapped round her knees. The house was completely still; no one had moved for more than an hour. She was looking down, her eyes not quite closed. She was staring into the black emptiness, immobile, unseeing.

  She had shed her tears, and though she had tried, she could not summon more. She was exhausted, but she could not sleep. The faces were too clear in her mind. Some were imprinted from the news coverage, the blurred, disbelieving features of the people out on the street. Their stunned eyes and gaping mouths. The others she had conjured herself, her guilty conscience summoning the faces of its own accord. Imagined faces, imagined lives, but as real in her mind as they would ever be. The happy face of a young woman, glowing with the thought of a child on the way, her first. The innocent face of a twelve-year-old boy, a child walking home after a football match. The wizened face of a widow in her sixties. All of them dead, stripped away before their time. Three others dead. Countless injured.

  She was responsible. Not responsible in some abstract manner of speaking, like the general who authorizes the bombing of a target in some distant country or the executioner who pushes the plunger in the death chamber, but actually, physically responsible. She had killed 6 people, and for what? She just didn’t know. She could never justify it, that much was certain. On the whole, the DCI was pleased; the Agency had been spared public humiliation, spared the need to explain the arrest of at least two operatives on foreign soil. Overall, the president was pleased; his administration had narrowly ducked an international incident, the kind that cropped up on a regular basis. The kind that would be forgiven in six months regardless.

  For this, she had taken innocent lives. For this, she had killed a pregnant woman and a twelve-year-old child.

  Naomi felt sick. Sick of her life and the things she had done. Sick of herself.

  She had waited as long as she could. Groping blindly for the jeans she’d been wearing earlier, she dug into the pockets, finding the plastic Baggie by feel. She pulled out three of the tiny white pills, hesitated, then swallowed them dry. Her third dose in as many hours, too much, even for her.

  She tipped her head back against the wall and waited for sleep or dawn, whichever came first.

  CHAPTER 25

  SIALKOT

  Craig followed the armed guard down the narrow, musty hall, the walls crowding in on either side. A second man followed a few steps to the rear. He was also armed, and Craig had seen the wary, alert look on his face when he first stepped out of the room. Clearly, they expected him to fight or run, which he found interesting in a detached sort of way. Back in high school, Craig had read about the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst, his chosen topic for a required book report. He knew about Stockholm syndrome and thought it was a bunch of bullshit—he just couldn’t imagine empathizing with someone who’d kidnapped him—but now, walking between his captors, he wondered about the percentages. He wondered how many people tried to fight.

  How many tried to escape.

  He had considered it briefly, the instant the door first swung open, but he changed his mind when he saw the gun. Craig had spent his youth in the wooded hills of Tennessee. The place was a haven for Heston’s acolytes, the kind of people who thought the NRA was a government agency. He had fired all kinds of weapons, dozens of handguns, shotguns, and rifles. He had never served in the military, and he’d never fired an automatic weapon, but he could recognize the simple lethality of the submachine gun the man cradled in front of his body, and he knew better than to make a rash, unplanned move.

  The gun made him wary, but it didn’t make him meek; he had expressed his anger with the stone-faced guard, who had simply repeated his first words: “Get up and follow me.” Craig had tried arguing, getting nowhere, until he realized that the guard’s English was probably limited to that one phrase. Finally, he decided to follow their instructions. Obviously, they had taken him for a reason; arguing wasn’t going to get him released, and it might just get him killed. Better to wait and see.

  They descended a staircase, their feet beating a soft rhythm on the threadbare runner, then turned into a second hall. They passed a living room off to the left. Craig glanced into the room, saw no one, and kept moving forward. The first guard tapped lightly on the door, received a response, and pushed it open. Looking at Craig, he tipped his head to the right, indicating that he should enter. Craig hesitated for a moment, then stepped forward, past the guard, and into the room. It was then that he got the shock of a lifetime, his eyes falling on the man seated at the kitchen table.

  “Said?” He heard the name come out of his mouth, knew it was right, but he still couldn’t believe it. Said Qureshi, here? It had been years since he’d seen the man. How the hell was he mixed up in all of this?

  The Pakistani doctor stood and greeted Craig with a slow, sad nod of his head. His mannerisms were polite but grim; clearly, he wanted to apologize for what had happened but was afraid to do so. “Randall.”

  Craig wasn’t sure what to ask first. He looked to the other person in the room, a squat, stocky man with a full head of wiry black hair. He was leaning against the oven, neat in a tailored dress shirt, dark slacks, and a pair of thick-soled boots. The boots looked vaguely military, like something that might belong to an old soldier. And that was what the man looked like, Craig realized. A soldier. But not just any soldier. His gaze was calm and commanding, and there was a considerable intelligence behind the dark brown eyes. A man with a good mind and a laborer’s build, Craig decided. As he looked on, the Pakistani pushed away from the oven with his hips, walked forward, and stopped. He did not offer a hand.

  “Randall Craig?”

  “Yes…?”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  Craig studied the older man for a half a minute, thinking back to newscasts and faces he’d seen on the street. Doctors he’d met at various clinics around the country. Members of the secretariat he’d met on a brief visit to Aiwan-e-Sadr, the presidential palace in Islamabad. Nothing was coming to mind. “No.”

  The older man stared at him for another few seconds, then nodded in satisfaction. “You’ve been brought here against your will,” he stated in cultured English. His voice was gravelly, rough, but somehow distinguished; he reminded Craig of a professor he’d once had at Vanderbilt, a brilliant man with a lifelong two-pack-a-day habit. Ironically, the year Craig had graduated from medical school, the professor had been on the short list of nominees for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. “For that, I apologize. Believe me, you would not be here if it wasn’t important.”

  Craig started to ask a question, glanced at Qureshi, and thought for a minute. “Who are you?” he finally asked, steering his words to the older man.

  “My name is not
important. Believe me, in the long run, it is better for you if you do not know.”

  Craig nodded, not buying a word of it. Believe me…He’d used that phrase twice in a row. Craig had lowered his defenses for a second on seeing Qureshi, but now they rolled back into place, like a steel shutter sliding down the front of a street-level store. “What the hell am I doing here?”

  “We need your help,” the older man said simply. “Said has agreed to perform an operation for us. He requires your assistance. We need you to help him—that part, I regret to say, is not an option—but once you are done, you will be released. You have my word on it.”

  Craig looked at Qureshi, watching for some sign. The man looked nervous but composed, as though he were biding his time. Good man, Craig thought. Wait for the right time. Wait for your chance.

  He knew the Pakistani doctor well. They had met during a weeklong seminar at the University of Chicago, and they had hit it off over a long weekend on the town. A year later, in 1995, they’d ended up working together at the University of Washington, Qureshi on the tail end of a yearlong visit. Qureshi, Craig had learned in one of Seattle’s most raucous bars, was quick to flaunt some of Islam’s more stringent rules, but he was a good man and an excellent doctor. They had made a strange pair, Craig knew, the Tennessee farm boy turned anesthesiologist and the small, mild-mannered Pakistani, but their friendship had flourished in the face of their colleagues’ skepticism, even if it had not survived Qureshi’s move back to London.

  Through the usual channels, Craig had heard of Qureshi’s minor disgrace at Guy’s Hospital. There had been rumors of drinking and medical malpractice, but Craig had never taken them seriously; anything could happen during a surgical procedure, and often did. There was a good chance that Qureshi was not even responsible for the incident that had killed his career and a young boy on the same table. In short, he knew Said Qureshi as well as he knew any man, and there was no way he could be mixed up in all of this. At least, not of his own volition.