The First Order

by Jeff Abbott

  Judge had little interest in theater; he would rather read a play than sit in a darkened room with strangers. Crowds made him nervous when he didn’t need them for cover. And people mentioning, even for a moment, a play in which a leader is murdered in the simplest of manners when Judge was puzzling out an impossible assassination—it struck him as a troubling omen. He left a handsome tip for Bertrand and headed out into the evening. Life roared all around him, and he was pondering death. Three minutes later, as he was walking through Bryant Park, the idle conversation of the theatergoers shook a thought loose in his head.

  He saw, with the sudden certainty of the songwriter who hears in her head the first strains of a beautiful new melody, the beginnings of how it could be done.

  2

  Islamabad, Pakistan

  WHERE WAS HE held captive? Answer me!” Sam Capra gripped the man’s neck and held the combat knife to the man’s throat.

  The answer was a gasp. “The village doesn’t even have a name anymore.”

  “Then the GPS coordinates. I want an exact location.”

  The man tried to jerk away from Sam’s knife, reaching toward his own gun on the table. Sam lowered the knife—a 5⅞-inch Böker Applegate-Fairbairn, double-edged—to the man’s groin and he froze.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Sam said, “but I will. I have very little to lose right now. You tell me the coordinates for this village.”

  The man whispered the coordinates.

  “Thank you,” Sam said. He heard a noise, feet outside the door. One was not often alone in the katchi abadis—the slums of Islamabad where thousands were crammed and piled atop one another in dried-mud-and-stone hovels and makeshift shacks, criminals and refugees and outcasts packed together unwillingly. This was the Afghan Basti, a shantytown of thousands of escaped Afghans and poor Pakistanis. “The Brothers of the Mountain. Are they still using the village?”

  “It’s…it’s a place to sleep, only, on a smuggling route. No one lives there. It’s cursed.”

  “Why did you talk about the Brothers of the Mountain on your phone?”

  “How did you know…?”

  “The American NSA has very big ears.”

  The man blinked as if he didn’t understand. “The Brothers… They’re not extremists. They’re businessmen. Heroin.”

  Sam steadied the knife. The room was cramped, just a table and a chair and a small filthy stove. Two cots in the other room, buckets to carry water, and to Sam’s surprise, a modest amount of heroin stored in the next building. These guys didn’t live here; this was a working space to move cash and drugs. But there were lots of people nearby, and if the man yelled for help…Sam would have a very hard time getting out of the katchi abadis if this man’s friends came to his aid. Most of the people in the Afghan Basti were honest laborers just trying to survive and avoid deportation to Afghanistan. But many criminals, and worse, hid among them. A few weeks ago a Pakistani narcotics agent had been captured while undercover here, and tortured for days, left headless at the gates of the fences the government was building to keep the katchi abadis isolated from the rest of the city.

  “Six years ago, were you there? The Brothers of the Mountain took two Americans. They killed them…”

  Then a second man came through the doorway, his gun raised. Sam moved more quickly than the second man, who was pivoting, trying to get a bead on Sam in the dim candlelight. Sam whirled, the first man now his shield, the combat dagger back at the throat.

  “Shoot him, Adnan,” the first man urged. “Shoot him dead.”

  “Cooperate,” Sam said, “and you both live. Don’t, and you die. This is a simple choice.”

  “Let’s all stay calm,” Adnan said, teeth gritted. He kept trying to lock his aim on Sam’s head, but Sam kept the first man positioned so he wasn’t willing to take the chance. “Let him go.”

  Then Sam noticed the hat the man was wearing. It was a beret, with the blue Islamabad Territory Police badge stitched at the front—but riddled with bullet holes, ragged, and stained. An obscene and brutal fashion statement. I killed a policeman, it said.

  “I will cut his throat,” Sam said. “Put down your gun, raise your hands. I’ll let you both live if you cooperate.”

  “Put down the knife,” Adnan said. “Or I’ll blow your brains out.”

  Sam let the blade bite into the man’s throat, just enough to draw blood. “Put the gun down. I got what I came for, and now I’ll go.”

  “You will die here,” Adnan said. “It’s just choosing how you die. Slow or fast.”

  “He’ll die fast,” Sam said. “Put down the gun.”

  Sam could see the decision play across Adnan’s face: the certainty that even if he put the gun down, there was no way for Sam to get out of the Afghan Basti without being caught by Adnan’s friends. So Adnan nodded, very slightly, toward the hostage and set the gun down on the table next to the doorway.

  “Raise your hands, away from the gun,” Sam ordered.

  Adnan hesitated but finally did, his right hand against the wooden support frame that climbed to the ceiling, his left up in the air.

  “He asked about two Americans, six years ago, in the Hindu Kush. Aid workers,” the man Sam held said. “He wants to go to the dead village.”

  “The aid workers,” Adnan said. “The two men. Yes.”

  Sam froze.

  Adnan decided to press, to unnerve. “Ah. I wasn’t there. Sorry. I only heard the stories. About how they cried, wept, begged for their lives…I don’t think you’ll easily make it there. I think you better let him go; otherwise, you will die. You have nowhere to go, much less that place.” He tapped at the police beret, as if it evoked a memory.

  Sam yanked the man off balance and threw the combat knife, straight like a spear, none of that showy spinning. It thunked hard into the wall, piercing Adnan’s right hand to the wood, and he screamed. Sam set his feet, wrenched the man backward, and broke his neck. The man dropped soundlessly, eyes open and staring. Adnan kept screaming in agony and shock and didn’t have the presence of mind to pull the knife out of his hand. Sam picked up Adnan’s gun off the table and shot Adnan through the head.

  It was over in ten seconds.

  Voices raised in the neighboring shacks, men yelling. Sam slipped through the window. The skyline of the Afghan Basti was a jumble: stone huts of varying size, roofs mostly of dried straw, some of tin, haphazard wires strung along improvised, jigsaw streets. The air reeked of waste and garbage. Sam ran, jumping from roof to roof, aiming for the broad wooden planks that held the straw in place. If he missed…The night was falling, lights coming on in the more fortunate shacks.

  A bullet zipped close to his ear.

  He jumped, landing on a straw roof that parted under his weight. He fell onto a stone floor, an old man in the corner hollering in rapid Pashto. Sam scrambled out the door, desperate to get back onto the roofline and away from the crowds. In the street, people lined up with buckets at a single water faucet, some staring at him, others yelling and pointing, calling to his pursuers.

  He ran through the street, past vendors, past old women, and vaulted up back onto the roof. The edge of the slum lay close, and he could see the cleared land where the authorities were laying out the frame of a massive fence, a wall to keep the poor refugees and the criminal and extremist elements away from the cleanly planned city of Islamabad. As if you could seal away darkness and despair as a cure.

  On the roofline, on the higher, taller shacks ahead of him, lights gleamed as the sun faded below the horizon. Behind him, men roving on the rooftops, hunting him.

  And he was silhouetted against the glow.

  They opened fire, careless of the danger to others, intent on the kill. Bullets parted the air around his head. One light shattered just ahead of him. Sam hunkered low and ran, seeing a mass of cables ahead. They were tied to cars parked in a flat lot to his left. Much of the electricity here was run off automotive batteries. He grabbed the cables, yanking hard; a flas
h sparked, and the lights illuminating him went dark. He heard angry calls. He swung down the bunched cables, using them as a rope, stepped onto the roof of an idling car, and jumped to the ground.

  An angry man tried to grab him, yelling in furious Pashto. Sam punched him hard and bolted for the open area where the fence was being slowly erected.

  A soldier stopped him. Sam slipped him a paper with the stamp of the Pakistani interior secretary. The soldier let him pass, and Sam ran into the night.

  A kilometer away on the road, a Mercedes pulled up to him and he got in.

  “They’re sending the police into the Afghan Basti,” August Holdwine told him. “Well done, you.”

  “Don’t,” Sam said.

  “Please tell me you got what you needed.”

  “I did. Thank you.”

  “Did you kill anybody?”

  “Only the people who tried to kill me.” Sam leaned back. His normally dirty-blond hair was dyed black, and he wore contacts to turn his eyes the rich dark hazel seen in many Afghan faces. “No one will know I was there.”

  “We don’t need an incident. I called in every favor for you on this. Getting the NSA trace on the Brothers of the Mountain chatter, getting you that pass, letting you stay at a safe house…”

  “These men knew where my brother was held. And…killed.” He hadn’t told August his suspicions that his brother was still alive. “It’s in the Hindu Kush. So I need to get to Kabul. I assume the CIA would be willing to investigate a lead on two missing Americans.”

  August, Sam’s oldest friend from his former days in the CIA, said nothing for a minute. “I could call Bob Seaforth, but I heard he’s leaving the CIA soon. He’s in Kabul.”

  “Thank you.” Sam stared out at the night as they drove through the carefully laid out streets of Islamabad, back toward a safe house in a wealthier district. “I think I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

  “I don’t think you were at all welcome in the katchi abadis,” August said.

  Danny, Sam thought. I’m going to find you. Dead or alive. For six years he’d thought his brother dead, until he’d found a burned file in an abandoned secret prison, and his brother’s picture, time-stamped well after his supposed murder. He had told none of this to August, just that he had a lead on the group that had kidnapped and executed his brother.

  It was only an hour-and-fifteen-minute flight from Islamabad to Kabul, but he knew that direct flights ran only five times a week, usually on Thursday and Sunday, and cancellations happened as a matter of course. After six years, he was so close, and any delay seemed agonizing, but he’d have to calm himself, spend the night here, and figure out his next move.

  “You haven’t mentioned your son,” August said.

  “Oh. Daniel’s fine.” Sam’s voice was distant.

  August glanced at him in the rearview mirror but said nothing.

  At the safe house, Sam washed the black dye out of his hair, removed the dark contact lenses, restoring his eyes to their normal green color, and put the clothes he’d worn in a burn bag to be destroyed, so there would be no trace of the killer who came into the Afghan Basti. He thought about the two men he’d killed, that if they’d just not fought him he would have tied them up and let them go. About why people chose to die, why people chose to live. His brother was a man the world thought dead and yet…there was a chance.

  August came to the door as he was getting dressed. “Seaforth said come to Kabul and you two can talk. Frankly, I’m surprised.”

  “I’m still a pariah to a lot of the agency,” Sam said. Being accused of treason, and your wife actually committing it, were bad for the career. His name being cleared had not changed his refusal to rejoin the agency’s Special Projects team, a secret group focused on fighting overseas organized crime where it threatened national security.

  “If he wants to help me, he must have his own reasons.” Sam expected the CIA to take his information, push him aside, and handle it themselves. But the fact he had once been wrongly accused of treason and forced out of the agency gave him a certain traction in his dealings with them. They owed him. But that, he knew, would not last forever, and their help depended on the capriciousness of the person he approached. Bob Seaforth was a good man, but he was not someone Sam considered a friend eager to do him favors. “But if he doesn’t help me, I’ll go into the mountains alone.”

  “What about your son, Sam?”

  “I told you. Daniel’s fine.”

  “He won’t be if you end up dead in a Pakistani slum or a Taliban village,” August said. “Daniel already lost his mom. I know you want to find your brother, but he’s likely dead and if he isn’t… Well, he doesn’t need you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You have a wonderful kid at home who needs his father.” There was a steel in August’s tone that Sam had never heard. “A kid who’s been through so much… He can’t lose you.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “This is not healthy.”

  Sam turned and stared at him. “If it was your brother, you’d have to look for him.”

  “If it was my brother, I’d tell the CIA what I knew and let them find him.”

  Sam finished dressing. “I have my reasons.”

  “You need to worry about being a father more than a brother,” August said.

  “Look, I appreciate your help…”

  “And this is the cost of it. You, listening to me. Have you told your parents or Leonie that you’re looking for Danny?”

  “I can’t. Not until I know.”

  “Where do they think you are, Sam?”

  “I told them I was checking on my bars in Europe.” Sam’s voice went flat.

  “So you’re lying to your parents, to the woman who takes care of your child. What do you think your parents would say about you being over here where they already lost him?”

  “I…I have to do this. I have to find Danny.”

  “Why? If he’s dead you can’t bring him back. And if he’s alive all these years, why hasn’t he contacted you?” August let the awful question hang in the air, unanswered. “Maybe you can’t bring him back either way.”

  Sam didn’t look at August. He just stared at the floor. Finally he said, “I know what I’m doing. The sooner I find him, the sooner I’m home with Daniel.”

  “Grab your bag,” August said. “I’ll drive you to the airport now.”

  3

  Afghanistan

  THE MI-8T HELICOPTER rose into the bright blue sky from Bagram Air Force Base and roared east. Its tail markings indicated it belonged to a humanitarian relief agency based in Morocco, which it did not. Inside the security team of ten soldiers watched their young passenger, sitting in the back of the chopper, staring at his phone. His face was gaunt, as though whatever played on the screen was a private nightmare.

  He was a mystery.

  Sergeant Will Allen, the squad leader, watched the young passenger out of the corner of his eye. He guessed the passenger was in his midtwenties. They’d been roused to take on this unexpected escort duty on a day they thought they’d have off to watch movies or read books or exercise. Instead they would now have tomorrow off, and spend today flying Seaforth, a senior intelligence guy, and this young passenger out to a “Sleepy Hollow”—an abandoned village in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. It should be a “milk run,” an easy, no-stress operation, but Allen knew that milk runs could turn deadly. You had to expect the unexpected.

  This passenger was the unexpected.

  Allen played a game in his head, and he thought the rest of the squad did the same: trying to figure out who the young passenger was and if today’s trip was another example of “combat tourism,” where they escorted a dignitary to a safe, insulated spot far from danger where he inspected the locale while wrapped in a bubble of protection, had his picture taken, and then went home to tell his audience that he understood the situation in Afghanistan, having been “on the ground.” Such VIPs were usual
ly older. And this guy wasn’t a famous actor or musician here to entertain the troops. He seemed too young to be in Congress. Maybe an aide to someone important? Allen decided he wasn’t a media guy because they—newspaper reporters, photographers, TV hosts—always mentioned who they worked for, and often wore a bulletproof vest with PRESS on it. So maybe an administration appointee, Allen thought, from a think tank or a university, some desk-bound geek who had read books and blogs on terrorism or the Islamic world or Afghanistan’s endless misery but never risked the reality. Those guys were nicknamed “Fobbits” because they never left the Forward Operating Base, lest their safety or opinions be challenged by reality.

  After the passenger’s initial firm handshake and hello to each squad member, thanking each of them for his help today, he hadn’t tried to make small talk or buddy up to the soldiers like a guy who had never known a moment’s danger sometimes tried to do. The passenger carried a reinforced Pelican backpack, the kind with metal plating to make it crushproof and waterproof. Maybe a photographer? He wore a dark-navy baseball cap with no insignia. Lean, with darkish-blond hair, a boyish face, but a gaze that seemed older than his years. As they had departed Bagram he sat silently, staring ahead, not even making small talk with Seaforth. After a few minutes he took out his phone and seemed to be studying something on the screen, his mouth a tight line of anger.

  Allen was impressed with how clean and nice the MI-8T was on the inside. The CIA guys always did it right. He asked Seaforth, “Where are we headed, sir?” as the intel chief came back from conferring with the pilots.

  Bob Seaforth was fiftyish, thick hair graying, with the stern face of a demanding schoolmaster. He had been at Bagram several times before, although Allen was unsure of his exact title or area of responsibility. Did he work for the CIA, or one of the many other intel agencies? He kept those details close. Seaforth surveyed the squad. Allen saw the young passenger put away his phone, and he gave Allen, after a moment, a polite nod.