“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 pitchblack, 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 pock
ets, 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.
Craig looked back at the older man, his skepticism obvious. “You’ll release me if I help you? Just like that?”
The man nodded solemnly, his thick, square hands clasped over his ample midsection. “You have my word,” he said again. Which didn’t mean shit to Randall Craig. If this man was behind the kidnappings in the north and the attack on Brynn Fitzgerald’s motorcade—and Craig was fully convinced that he was—then the man was a killer. There was no way he would release two people who’d seen his face.
Still, there was no point in resisting. Not yet, anyway. Better to let them see what they wanted to see, namely, complete and total submission. Craig let his shoulders drop a fraction of an inch in defeat, a resigned expression sliding over his face. He looked at Qureshi and thought he caught a glimpse of defiance in his old friend’s eyes. He didn’t have to ask why he was there. If Qureshi was going to undertake a serious procedure—and it had to be serious to go to this amount of trouble—he would need someone to put his patient under.
“What’s the situation?” asked Craig.
Qureshi let out a shaky sigh and looked away. Finally, he looked back, his composure restored. “It’s better if I show you.”
He stood and turned to a
second door leading out of the kitchen. He opened it, stepped out. Craig looked at the older man, who nodded and indicated for him to follow. Craig crossed the tile, his apprehension growing; something about Qureshi’s last expression was sticking with him. He felt a little shaky himself as he followed the small Pakistani through the living room. They skirted a dusty grand piano and entered another hall. Craig had not seen the outside of the house, but he could tell it was large, judging by the sheer number of rooms they had passed through. It also had a vaguely British feel to it, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Turning right now, passing a dark room the size of a coat closet, Craig glanced to the right and saw the outline of a ceramic sink and a tray full of instruments. His stomach tightened inexplicably. He had seen far worse than a tray full of sterilized instruments in his thirtyeight years, but something about the way it was sitting there in the dark made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. It was like an omen of some kind, a sign of bad things to come.
There were two guards outside the door, both standing ramrod straight, both holding stubby black submachine guns. Qureshi eased between them and opened the door, then stepped into the room. Craig followed, sensing the stocky Pakistani was a few steps to his rear. He stopped just inside the threshold, more out of surprise than anything else.
The room was large and square. Unlike the rest of the house, which was warmly lit, the surgical suite was thrown into stark relief by harsh fluorescent lights that ran the length and width of the plaster ceiling. The floor was a light blue tile with cement-based grout, easy to clean and maintain. The instruments common to all surgical theaters were clearly visible: a portable Medtronic defibrillator; an aging Hewlett-Packard EKG, the monitor sitting nearby; a transport ventilator with a cracked plastic shell. There was also an array of tools that anyone on the street could identify: an IV pole with 2-inch swivel casters, blood pressure cuffs, a box of surgical gloves. There was a scrub sink directly opposite the door and, to the left, a piece of machinery that Craig recognized immediately. He guessed that it had been purchased specifically for this procedure; if Qureshi had frequent need of an anesthesiologist, he would also have access to one, and he wouldn’t have needed Craig.
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