In the world of Chemical Claude, power comes in many forms but the most obvious one to Yoder is the little black notebook Claude carries with him everywhere he goes and never lets anyone see. Rumor has it Claude sleeps with the book in one hand and an Uzi pistol in the other. When Yoder finally works up the nerve to ask Chemical Claude what’s in the little black notebook, he’s met with reproach.
“When it’s time,” Claude says cryptically, “the whole world will know.” And there Yoder was, hoping for a little more detail.
At this point, the USAWMD report indicates a conflict between sources. One source swears Yoder stole the notebook and hid it at an undisclosed location; another one swears that, although he tried, he never got his hands on it. And yet a third claims that during the wedding of Chemical Claude’s dead wife’s niece, while guarding the bathroom door to insure his boss could take a poop in relative safety, Yoder found himself holding Chemical Claude’s dinner jacket, the black book winking at him from the breast pocket. Stepping back so as to be out of view of Chemical Claude while he sat on the toilet, Yoder had a full four minutes with the notebook before the sound of flushing startled him back to reality and he quickly returned the book to its place in the jacket pocket.
But no one knows what actually occurred as no source was willing to back down. Sources can be cranky that way.
What happens next is the result of poor planning or sheer idiocy, depending on how you choose to look at it. Yoder manages to recruit a few of Claude’s underlings to go along with his coup attempt by promising them riches beyond their wildest dreams. He knows he’ll never be able to deliver on his promises, but he’s sure all this will be in his rearview mirror by the time anyone realizes they’ve been had.
But it’s important to remember that Chemical Claude did not climb to the top of the bad guy heap by having a weak spot. Upon discovering Yoder’s betrayal, Chemical Claude flies into a fury the likes of which people have never witnessed before. His rage is boundless. Before Yoder’s sad little crew of coconspirators can even launch their attack, they’re all dead and Yoder himself is running for his life. It doesn’t take long for Yoder to realize he has two choices, both highly unattractive.
But the man is the definition of desperate. He calls Simon Still.
“You’re going to want to take this one, sir,” says the agent on duty as Yoder is patched through to Simon’s Washington home, where he is happily drinking Scotch and smoking illegal Cuban cigars.
“Got in a little over your head, did you?” Simon asks without preamble. “He’ll hunt you until you’re dead, you understand. There are no second chances with your mentor.”
Whether Yoder has been running or is just having an anxiety attack, it takes him a minute to catch his breath and answer.
“How did you know?” he asks.
“I know many things,” Simon says, gnawing on the cigar.
“I don’t want to die,” Yoder says.
“Well, no one wants to die,” Simon says. He pauses to take a sip of Scotch, savoring the smoky flavor as it rolls back on his tongue. “Give me something. Out of goodwill. Show me you care.”
“There’s a bomb being transported as we speak,” Yoder says without hesitation. “It’s en route from Kazakhstan to Afghanistan.”
“How?”
“Fake Army transport. The papers are flawless.” Yoder sounds almost proud. He was, after all, in charge of the forgery. Simon doesn’t appreciate his tone, so he brings him down a notch.
“I wouldn’t say ‘flawless,’” he says. “‘Flawless’ would mean your bomb was delivered safely to its buyers. Which it wasn’t.”
On the other end of the phone, Yoder is speechless. He begins to think making this call was a very bad idea.
For his part, Simon has always believed Source Number One to be right about Yoder and the notebook. This is mostly because Source Number One keeps Simon in those good Cuban cigars but of course no one would ever admit to such a bias. But there’s a reason Yoder ended up talking to Simon and that’s because Simon set it up to happen in just that way. Since escaping all those years ago (no, I never caught him), Chemical Claude has been running around causing chaos without a hall pass and, with Yoder in hand, Simon finally sees a way to take down Claude. And to make it hurt.
To do this properly, Simon needs to know what’s in the little black book. His need borders on the irrational but that’s not unusual. Agents go overboard in the pursuit of critical intelligence all the time. It’s expected.
“Stay where you are,” Simon tells Yoder. “If you’re still alive in thirty minutes, we’ll pick you up.”
As Simon hangs up the phone, he thinks he hears Yoder crying.
It turns out Yoder has a lot more to cry about after spending a year at a black site prison in the Czech Republic, compliments of the United States of America. A layer of thin green moss covers the thick cement walls of his cell. The whole place smells of feet.
Down in its murky depths, Simon and Yoder spend many months talking about the little black book, after which time Yoder is more a wisp of smoke than a human being. A year of black site hospitality can do that to you.
But at the end of the year, Simon is forced to admit he might have been wrong about Yoder because no one could stand up to these enhanced interrogation methods and not confess. Often, people confessed to things they didn’t actually do just to make it stop. But Yoder takes it all silently, continuing to claim he knows nothing of the little black book. His uselessness infuriates Simon. He hates wasting time.
Yoder ends up in the hands of HIDE, the USAWMD’s version of witness protection. When he steps out of the prison and sees the sun again, he weeps.
Several weeks later, Richard Yoder is reborn as Ronald Smith. Ronald Smith cleans office buildings at night and is never late for work. He doesn’t have close friends. Those with whom he shares the occasional sandwich would describe him as a quiet, nervous young man who generally keeps to himself. A woman he takes on a single date to the movies calls him haunted, old beyond his years.
Ronald Smith is a diligent worker for a kid barely out of his teens, seemingly content to push the floor-waxing machine up and down the hallways. He drives a used Chevy Malibu and lives in a slightly run-down house of his own with a green garage door. At night, the shadows from the streetlights make him nervous. The house sits on the corner of Judah and Twenty-eighth Avenue in the fine city of San Francisco, which means that for the last twelve months, Richard Yoder has been living not five miles from my front door.
14
I lean back in Will’s desk chair as far as I can go without tipping over. I glance at the time. Soon, my illegal access to the USAWMD database will expire. But the knowledge I’ve gained comes at a price and the one I have to pay is going back in my memory, once again, to Nepal.
By the time our ragtag crew of three reached Namche Bazaar, a tiny town tucked into the Himalayan mountainside at 11,000 feet, I was the respiratory equivalent of an asthmatic off her meds.
“Meager air,” Min commented, although he seemed impervious to it. “Not much oxygen.” I had yet to actually hire Min in any formal way but he didn’t seem overly concerned by the detail. After saving my ass at the hotel, he acted as though he was responsible for my overall well-being as long as I was in Nepal. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake him.
The intelligence report, handed to me as I set off on this mission and probably not worth a single rupee, listed a number of behaviors that were meant to give me insight into Chemical Claude’s psyche. The first was that Chemical Claude paid the Sherpas to bring as many empty water bottles and oxygen canisters as they could manage down from Everest. The second was that he would then make art, little plastic animals and replicas of the mountain herself, out of the discarded bottles and canisters. Trekkers, attracted to lightweight and unusual souvenirs, would buy his mini sculptures from a little stand on the main drag of town. If you were to rank the bizarre hobbies of America’s most wanted, this one would certain
ly be up there.
“The element of surprise, Sally,” Simon Still told me before I left. “He’ll never expect us to come at him in Nepal.”
“If he’s actually there,” I said.
“Don’t be cynical.”
I was to uncover what I could about his operations without detection. No one believed he was really crazy enough to simply be hanging out in the mud, making plastic origami. No. He had to be up to something and we wanted to know what.
After being forced to jump out of my hotel window, it was pretty clear my mission was compromised. I should have called it a day and gone home but if I had to choose between Chemical Claude shooting me in the head or Simon Still accusing me of acting like a sissy, I thought I might pick the bullet. I was in it to the end, whatever that turned out to be.
Min settled us into a guesthouse that smelled of yak dung and unwashed armpits. The stink from the indoor latrine wafted along on the faint breeze. I pulled a scarf around my face, covering my nose and mouth, which worked well to filter the air and also hid my features. Ayushi didn’t seem to mind the smell.
“You get used to it after a while,” she said. “That’s what we used to tell the Western visitors at the hotel.”
“Is Kirin really your father?” I asked.
We sat together in a small room on the ground floor of the guesthouse. Below our feet were wide, unstable planks upon which sat a small stove. The guesthouse owner was methodically feeding hardened patties of yak dung into the fire, where they crackled and hissed. The smoke vented right into the room, filling the space between us. Around the fire were wooden benches made from plywood that no one had bothered to sand. It was important not to move too quickly lest you end up with an ass full of splinters.
“No,” Ayushi said, playing with the tattered end of a prayer flag. “He found me in town. His wife wanted a child so he took me. But then she died.”
Took her? “Did you have parents of your own?”
She shrugged matter-of-factly. “I don’t remember.”
“What am I going to do with you?” I asked. I didn’t really intend the question for the girl but more for myself. Bringing Ayushi here was not only against protocol but it was completely at odds with plain old common sense. Any other agent would have dumped her on the street in Kathmandu and, not giving it a second thought, raced off to get the bad guy. But not me. No. I was just naïve enough to think my force of will could protect her. This was going to end badly for both of us.
“I will go along with you until you are done,” she said with a finality that left little room for debate.
“I have things here I’m supposed to be doing,” I said, coughing on the smoke, my eyes watering.
Ayushi smiled as if she knew much more about the world than was appropriate for someone her age.
“I stay with you,” she said again firmly. I wondered if I could somehow transfer this problem to Min, make him take her back down to the mountain and deposit her with his wife’s cousin’s sister as we should have done in the first place. But when I looked around, Min was gone.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, leaving Ayushi in the smoke. “Don’t go anywhere.”
Outside, I looked up and down the street for my guide, determined to get Ayushi headed back down the mountain as soon as possible. Trekkers crowded the narrow muddy strip between buildings. Stalls were set up every couple of feet, with vendors hawking an assortment of junk, brightly colored polyester Chinese blankets, handmade wool hats with pom-poms and long tassels meant to be tied under the chin, strings of Tibetan prayer flags and jewelry bearing all sorts of incomprehensible religious symbols. There was knock-off technical gear like North Face down jackets with the labels sewed on upside down and hiking boots guaranteed to fall apart at the first sight of snow. There were blurry photocopied maps and bootleg copies of recent best sellers in German and English and French.
I took a step out into the sea of people drifting by and made my way toward the end of the line of stalls looking for Min, sure that sending him back down to Kathmandu with Ayushi was the proper thing to do. I didn’t need a guide anyway; all you had to do was follow the yak poop and eventually you’d get where you needed to go.
Inside another guesthouse, through a door partly off its hinges, I caught a glimpse of Min. He was on a satellite phone, gesticulating wildly. His face was red and he seemed frantic, angry. As he slammed the phone down, he turned toward the open door and our eyes met. I immediately looked away, pulling my scarf tighter around my face and pushing back into the crowd.
A minute later, Min grabbed me from behind and swung me around toward him. His voice was calm and serene, belying the fire in his eyes.
“Allison. Sorry,” he said. “I was talking to my family. Some trouble with my brother.”
“Sure,” I answered. “I hope everything is okay.”
“It will all be fine,” he said, sounding grim. I had only a second to decide which team Min was playing for. Was he in with the men who wanted to kill me in Kathmandu? Or was he coming at this from a different angle altogether? Because if he was on the phone talking to his family back home, then I was destined for the cover of the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. And that just didn’t seem likely.
“Let’s go and get your camera,” he said, linking his arm through mine. “We can stroll among the vendors and get some of the shots you wanted.”
“I have my camera,” I said, pulling it from inside my heavy coat.
“Great news,” Min said with forced enthusiasm. “Let’s get to work. Tomorrow we go back down to Kathmandu and we send you home, okay?”
Why the rush?, I wanted to ask but Min didn’t look like a man who was going to answer such a question.
Forgetting all about Ayushi, we slogged along in the mud, not having to work too hard to blend in with the other gritty trekkers. In his mug shot, Chemical Claude had a face that looked average at first but upon closer inspection was off in a number of ways. His eyes were too close together and his broad forehead appeared to go on for miles. He tried to hide its expanse with shaggy bangs that went out of fashion with the Monkees. His deep, saggy cheeks could have stored a winter’s supply of nuts without much effort. The result made for an unattractive man but not one so horrifying as to make small children run away at the mere sight of him.
I snapped picture after picture of the vendors, hoping that Chemical Claude still resembled his mug shot and hadn’t grown a long beard, dyed his hair, or gotten plastic surgery after escaping from prison. At one stall, a long cotton scarf, indigo and pale green, caught my eye. I thought it would look nice on Ayushi.
“How much is that?” I asked in Nepali, pointing to the scarf. A similar scarf flecked with orange obscured most of the vendor’s face and he wore sunglasses to cover his eyes. But even so it was obvious he wasn’t Nepali or Tibetan. He was not a large man but sturdy, his feet planted as if he were anticipating an attack. He paused for a moment at the sound of my voice before handing me the scarf.
“It’s a bargain,” he said. His Nepali sounded strange, tainted by an odd, flat accent. I ran my hands over the scarf. It was dirty and torn on one end. Fingering the frayed edge, my body started to tingle. It was either the acute onset of altitude sickness or something was wrong here.
“You hesitate,” the man said. “One should never hesitate when one knows what one truly wants.”
He leaned close to me. “Welcome to Namche Bazaar, Sally Sin. They told me you’d walk right in like John Wayne, like you owned the place, dragging innocent children behind you no less. So American. You people can’t bear to be alone.”
Time did that strange thing it does when you have but a split second to decide what you’re going to do and yet the choice could use so much more consideration. My entire focus turned to Ayushi, whom I had left stupidly unattended in the smoke.
I dropped the scarf, turned, and ran back through the market toward the lodge where I had left her earlier. Behind me I could hear the man laughing. It
was a high-pitched sound that bounced off the surrounding mountains and ricocheted around the valley with wild abandon.
I crashed through the flimsy front door of the guesthouse. Min was at my heels, trying desperately to figure out what was going on.
“Where is she?” I shouted at the owner’s wife.
“Those men said you sent them to get her and meet you. She went with them.”
I grabbed Min by the shoulders and shook him as if he were a rag doll. “Where would they take her?”
“Who?” Min stammered.
“Claude Chevalier. Chemical Claude. Notorious bad guy who likes to make origami.” I didn’t expect my explanation to mean anything to him but, without pause, he answered.
“Back down,” he said. “To the river. The bridge. They have done it before.”
“Before? What are you talking about? Oh, forget it. Move!”
I shoved him out of the way and took off at a run down the very trail we had toiled to scale that morning. Behind me, I could hear Min shouting for me to stop, but all I could see was Ayushi’s face. The terrain was rocky and damp and my boots skidded around as if the whole trail were coated in ice. My ankles repeatedly gave way, bending at unnatural angles, but I kept running, not willing to slow down even a bit.
As I rounded a corner, I heard the pop of a gun. Instinctively, I dove to the side of the trail and lay flat in the yak shit and mud, completely still. A moment later, Min came barreling down the trail, a Glock 19 gripped tightly in one hand. Briefly, I registered that a Glock 19 would cost more than what the average Nepali trekking guide made in a year. And it’s not like you could just drop by the local hunting and fishing superstore and pick one up at your leisure.
“Nice gun,” I said from my position on the ground, “but why the hell are you shooting at me?”
Min tucked the Glock into the pocket of his puffy down jacket. “I asked you several times to stop but you did not seem to hear me.”
Spy Mom Page 38