The field office of OCHA, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan, sat on Circular Road between the Peshawar Business School and the American Club in the well-to-do area of University Town.
The building was set back from the road behind a garden and lawns. There were walls at each end of the street. The security hired by the UN, the American Club and several other NGOs on the same block was the bugbear of the local residents, all of whom were members of the Peshawari elite. First, no permit to block the road had ever been obtained. The concrete blocks initially set down had been incrementally replaced by ones that were larger and higher, and they now blocked not only movement but the view. Second, the men who staffed the barricades were considered undesirable. The residents worried about their presence in the neighbourhood, the intimacy with which they were able to observe them. There were rumours, in fact, of a criminal element, and some families had gone as far as to recruit their own security against the street guards.
But whatever their standing, the existence of the blockade did prevent strange cars from passing along the street. And it did save lives: because it could not be driven in, the bomb that subsequently went off in the OCHA did so in the mailroom, a room that had been installed at the far end of the furthest wing in case of just such an event. The girl ‘in the room with the explosion’ (the phrase used by the local police commander) was Ayesha Jinnah, a nineteen-year-old economics student at the nearby University of Peshawar. Jinnah was performing an internship with a UN program to empower women. While the local investigators presumed she had made the mistake of opening the package, in fact the detonation that blew out the windows, collapsed the ceiling and started a fire was timed. Knowledge of this particular aspect of Jinnah’s bad luck was confined to Creech Air Force Base: Raul visited the scene as soon as he arrived in Pakistan and concluded that the damage to the building was in exact proportion to that their own team had estimated was required to drop a light plane from the sky. The bomb was almost certainly the one they’d handed to Abu Ja’far.
For Gray and Wolfe, this was too much. Two bombings in as many days, the first killing a CIA officer and their friend, the second making use of explosives the agency had let wild. They put Abu Ja’far top twenty in the JPEL list, promoted Abu Yamin on the same, and alerted several friendly intelligence agencies (mentioning strictly nothing to the ISI).
When Raul rang to say he’d just seen John Wright check in at the Pearl, Wolfe winced and Gray said, ‘Fuck.’ Daniel didn’t ask but when he got home to the loft he performed an internet search. John Wright was a war correspondent, a journalist for The Guardian and a blogger for World Spectator. He was a cofounder of DemocratikV, a video site broadcasting the work of citizen journalists. He’d won a swag of awards; covered every European and Middle Eastern conflict in the last decade, as well as Sudan and East Timor. He wore sunglasses and was said to have a left-wing bias. American commentators had called him an anarchist. A committee had been founded with the aim of having him banned from Israel. In Baghdad, his driver had been kidnapped and was later found dead, with terrible burns on his torso, but he hadn’t given up Wright’s address. The Russians hated him. Citing visa violations, the Indonesians had deported him from Aceh after a short period in jail.
Daniel watched clips on DemocratikV: Wright interviewing Khalid Mishal from Hamas, the question of peace—was it wanted; Wright interviewing Donald Rumsfeld, the issue of torture and the crimes of semantics; Wright interviewed by someone else, discussing journalistic detachment and human response—the problem of standing by observing when maybe you should get involved. He was the author of three books, including a treatise on the psychology of killing. He’d been interviewed with Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk. He spoke matter-of-factly, his voice gravelly, and he had contacts all over the world.
What was he doing in Peshawar? Reporting on the car bombing probably, and now surely the OCHA explosion too. Daniel saw the danger for the CIA, the damage that would be done if the fact that the man behind the killings was formerly their agent became public. But it also occurred to him that if that happened, it would be the end of Abu Ja’far. Wouldn’t his men turn on him, a US mole? Wouldn’t they rip him limb from limb? And if not his Taliban friends then someone else in the region: al-Qaeda or a band or brethren of unaffiliated extremists, take your pick.
Really, if the CIA was of a mind to end this quickly, couldn’t they just publish the truth?
The stars were obscured by cloud and he was standing in the nowhere zone by the control stations, considering the idea of sleeping in one of the hot beds, when Ania called. She was leaving Binion’s in a hurry. She’d just witnessed her husband on the far side of the gambling floor.
‘Where are you?’ said Daniel. ‘Do you see him now?’
‘It was him, I guarantee it. It was a fair distance and he wasn’t facing me but why would you, following a woman around.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Downtown.’
‘I’ll come and get you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where are you?’ he repeated ‘Just now I am walking past the Glitter Gulch.’
‘Which way is that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Anywhere that is safe to stand.’
‘Stay on the phone.’
‘Yes.’
He ran for his car, got in and sped to the gate, waited for the attendant to raise the boom.
She kept him updated as he drove: ‘I am walking past the La Bayou.
‘I am across from Mermaid’s Casino.
‘I don’t see him. I am going past the Starbucks and it is closed.’
He had her on speaker, the phone resting on the passenger seat. He was five minutes along the I95 when she cut out. Calmly, he waited thirty seconds to see if she would ring back. His call then went to voicemail. He redialled five or six times but got the same.
He tried not to be too concerned. It would only be her battery, she was terrible at keeping it charged. She’d find another phone and call him, and by that time he’d almost be there.
But when he reached downtown, she still hadn’t called. He jogged up to Fremont having parked on 1st. The lights and screens of the Experience were off. The casinos were open and people were around but he felt a definite edge in the air, a wanting. It took no time for someone to approach him. ‘I’m not trying to walk up on you,’ said the man. Daniel started to walk away.
‘Hey, I said I’m not trying to walk up on you.’
‘It’s alright,’ Daniel said.
The guy didn’t bother to follow him.
He found the Mermaid then the Starbucks. Beyond them lay Fitzgeralds and the El Cortez. In the former was a small crowd. He paced around the slots then went upstairs to the tables. They were empty. The El Cortez was less populated but felt larger with its fewer machines. He performed a fast lap but she was nowhere to be seen.
‘A woman didn’t just come in?’
The guard was sitting by the door, wearing a blue polo shirt with a stitched-on badge. ‘I could ask you what she looks like,’ he said. ‘But no matter what, I’d tell you no.’
Past the El Cortez was the end of the flashing lights. He headed back towards Binion’s. Opposite, the Golden Nugget felt safe. He expected to see her sitting at the sports betting. He thought he might find her by the fish tank with the sharks. At the club upstairs they wanted ten dollars entry.
‘Did a woman just come in?’
‘Plenty.’
She wasn’t one of the five at the bar.
He went back downstairs, crossed the street. He wasn’t exactly worried—surely she was here somewhere. If her husband had caught up with her, was it so naive to think that someone would have helped her when she screamed?
She was not at Binion’s. She was not at the Plaza or the Fremont. At the Golden Gate there was an audience for the girls who danced behind the blackjack tables but Ania wasn�
��t there.
He stood out on the street and looked along it. There was a compact street sweeper. A woman called to him from the Glitter Gulch. He jogged a little way up 3rd Street then up 4th. He went to each of the casinos a second time.
Eventually he decided that she simply wasn’t anywhere downtown. Could she have been kidnapped? It wasn’t impossible but he didn’t feel it. Not knowing what else to do, he returned to his car and drove to the Nexus.
‘This kid, he is showing a pistol to a woman. What is that? It is fucking crazy!’
It turned out that Ania had got aboard the Deuce line. The bus had been pulling up as her phone expired and it seemed a good idea, if only to get out of there. Except, distracted by the need to watch for her pursuer, she’d sat down beside two young boys (she wanted to say ‘gangbangers’ though she wasn’t sure of the term), and she happened to look at them absentmindedly, and because looking is similar to calling someone’s mother a whore, they’d taken exception to this. The one of them did not drop his gaze for an entire stop while the other dipped his pants to show a gun he was carrying, Mexican style or whatever it’s called, and she had to stare straight ahead and worry that she might be shot, hoping despite all evidence that he is not so dumb he wouldn’t realise there are cameras on the bus and then not so unthinking as to realise his picture would be everywhere after the act, sending him to the electric chair. Which after she was done being afraid made her furious. First a husband following her to Vegas and now threats born of the place itself.
‘I mean this is stark raving. It is some kind of elemental psychosis. We must ask what kind of country is it in which this event takes place.’
‘I was worried about you.’
‘It’s a malfunction of what exactly? I don’t want to say empathy because it is something deeper than that.’
‘I didn’t think he’d gotten to you, but what if he had?’
They were standing in the kitchen that was lit by a cool morning light. ‘I am sorry to make you run around,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘I will stay on the Strip now. The big places where it’s safer.’
He didn’t realise what the night had taken out of him. He’d not been able to fall asleep for a long time and the few hours he did manage were interrupted. At Creech everything felt beyond him. He sat in the mess with a cup of coffee.
‘What’s up with you?’ said Peach.
Daniel looked at him.
‘I mean, you look vacant,’ said Peach. ‘Fucking white.’
‘Do I?’ Daniel paused. There was no way he was going to tell Peach about Ania. ‘Cards,’ he explained.
‘Cards?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I haven’t played in months. I like to think maybe I’ve quit it, but I know that’s not true. I’m on hiatus at best.’
‘That’s a good idea.’
‘You have to be right in the mind. If you’re not right, you’re going to lose. ’ ‘Yeah.’
‘Maybe you should take some time out too, if you’re pulling all-nighters. I mean, if you turn up here looking too much like a wreck it’s noticed.’
Daniel said nothing.
Peach said, ‘That’s about comradeship. That’s about we have to trust each other with our lives.’
Later, with the day’s flight airborne, Daniel went outside to take a break and Gray followed. He wanted to know how Daniel was, whether everything was alright.
‘You look distant,’ he said. ‘Today we walk past you and it’s hard to know whether or not you’re here.’
Daniel was surprised. He didn’t like the idea that he might be talked about like that, by the others, when he wasn’t there. ‘I’m fine,’ he explained. ‘A late night.’ He realised that Gray might take this to mean he’d been drinking. He added, ‘An argument with my girlfriend in Australia. We’ve broken up.’
Gray looked at him. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, I’d give you buck up and all of that. I’d also remind you that, like it or not, you happen to be at war.’
Daniel wasn’t sure what Gray meant. That he should watch himself more carefully? That he was letting the team down? They stood in the sunlight and Daniel decided that he didn’t care. If he’d been the topic of a discussion, he resented it. But if people were dying or endangering one another, it had stuff-all to do with him. Gray could shove it. If the alertness of your encryption operator was your primary concern, you needed your priorities set straight.
John Wright had discovered not only Dupont’s identity but also the fact that he was CIA. Raul was not pleased. The information had come from the local police who’d found it out God knew how, maybe from the ISI.
Raul tried to explain to the Peshawar police investigators that Dupont was a regular diplomat, exactly like himself, and told them not to talk to journalists—they will only write bad things about you and blasphemies concerning Pakistan.
For his part, John Wright was yet to ask for an interview with the US consulate. Raul considered this a bad sign: the kind of delay that occurs when you are putting together a case.
‘He won’t manage it,’ said Gray. ‘What else from the police?’
‘The name of our young martyr. Asif Marwat. Seventeen years of age.’
‘Have you checked in at his home?’
‘Better. His brother has given the police the address of a three-storeyed house he was visiting, mixing with a madrassa of radical types.’
They watched over it late that morning, a three-storeyed house on the edge of the old city, clearly more meeting place than private residence, men and boys busily coming and going, arriving in ones and twos, departing in waves. It was down a pot-holed road. A thin, walled area at the front. Large iron gates that were open.
Hours passed. They were waiting for what? Looking for what? Daniel began to feel this was stupid. He almost said so out loud. He thought about Ayesha Jinnah. The unfairness of her death grated.
It was just after 2 p.m. in theatre when it happened—the car, the maroon Toyota, suddenly on the move. Its GPS tracker showed that it was in the city’s south. Ellis made to plot a course but Gray quietly told him to wait. He was right too. They watched on the map as the Toyota snaked its way towards them and after fifteen minutes it was bumping slowly along the pot-holed road. When it stopped outside the house, Daniel looked at Gray for a sign of satisfaction at these dots connecting, but the only thing on the man’s face was dead concentration. Four men came out to the car; once they were inside, it drove off. The silence in the room seemed to become more pure, deeper, as they followed it. Peshawar petered out slowly, the city’s multitudes falling away until they saw just the car and the road. The route it took was slightly different to that it had taken before. It used back roads, dirt channels. It was a longer path but there was no doubting the destination, not from above, and once the GPS tracker’s range allowed it, Gray ordered them forward to the farmhouse, placing his finger on the map.
At the compound there seemed to be no one about, but figures were moving in the nearby fields. Daniel had no idea what these people might be doing. He watched them work while the others watched the walls and the barren yard. For a moment, he thought he saw one of them looking up. He checked their altitude on the console. Moore had them as high as possible, the operating ceiling.
When the car arrived, a lone man emerged from the house to open the gate. It drove into the yard and stopped. The people inside it did not get out.
Daniel looked at the firing controls. They were carrying a half complement: four hellfires and a pair of Paveway IIs.
So quiet in the station now they could hear themselves breathing. That and the equipment hum, the certain soundlessness of powered electronics.
Now the men got out. There was nobody they recognised. Ellis adjusted the primary camera, the forward sight. There was the compound and the yard; the green, faraway light and the workers in the fields.
The men had gathered at the back of the car. Now they opened the boot and peered in. The drone was too high and out of positi
on; it wasn’t possible to see inside. Eventually, they removed what looked like long gas cylinders, the type used for welding. These were carried to the corner of the yard and placed under a shelter. Everyone in the station was certain they were looking at missiles.
Then a boy came out of one of the buildings in the compound, a tiny, all-white figure, possibly the same boy who’d opened the gate the first time they’d come here. The men from the Toyota gathered around the boy and followed him inside, into the biggest of the structures.
The buildings reminded Daniel of Tarnak Farms and suddenly he found himself studying them for window gaps. He didn’t know why but he felt certain that Abu Yamin and Abu Ja’far were in that house.
Silence, but he expected the order to come. He didn’t dare, now, to look at Gray. Everyone was glued to the screens but it was as if the screens themselves did not exist.
Gray was on his feet. Daniel could hear the low creak of the floor as he shifted his weight. They watched. Nothing happened for an hour. It felt like an age. A few children arrived from the fields and went inside.
Finally, men came out of the building. A group of them went towards the car but one held back. It was Abu Yamin.
Nobody spoke. There was no need. The height was spot on. After this long hunt, the act of recognition was a physical, blood-felt response. This was the goal: a man on a landscape, a solitary figure and the long, open sky.
Now Daniel looked at Gray. The agent had crept forward; in his right hand was a phone, his thumb on the middle button.
Daniel had seen many hellfires used but he’d never seen a Paveway. He knew they appealed to the operators because of the way they flew: to correct their flight the missiles adjusted their fins fully—completely one way then completely the other—and the result was a tightening, edge-of-control sine wave of collapsing amplitude. It looked wholly insane but it hit every time.
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