Wells stepped toward the fire stairs at the end of the hallway, then realized the kidnappers probably had a car waiting there. Even if they’d come through the main entrance on the way in, why risk it on the way out? A guess, but logical. He grabbed the second Talib’s Makarov and bolted down the hall, yelling, “Fire!” in Pashto. Warning the other guests increased his chances of being caught, but the hotel had no sprinklers. Wells couldn’t let civilians burn in their beds.
As Wells sprinted down the hotel’s front steps, the clerk appeared. He saw Wells, turned to run. Wells leapt down, grabbed the man’s scrawny arm, twisted until his shoulder began to pop from its socket. In Pashtun: “Those men, which way were they going to take me?”
“Sir, please—”
Wells put the Makarov to the clerk’s temple. “Which way?”
The clerk pointed at the front door.
“If you’re lying, I kill you.”
“I promise on my father.”
Now Wells had to bring the guy with him. If the clerk was lying and the other Talibs were waiting outside the fire door, Wells could use him as a hostage. If he was telling the truth, the Talibs were outside the front entrance, a few yards away, and the clerk would surely run to them and tell them where Wells had gone.
Wells frog-marched him down the hall toward the fire exit. The man squirmed but didn’t fight. Footsteps thumped overhead, and the smell of smoke was thickening by the second.
Wells kicked open the unmarked fire door at the end of the hall, pushed the clerk out—
And stepped into a trash-covered alley that ran along the side of the hotel. It was empty.
“See?” The guy seemed to want a medal for telling the truth with a pistol to his head. Wells lifted the Makarov, whipped it down on the guy’s skull. The dull thud of Bakelite on bone echoed up the alley. The clerk crumpled.
Wells ran for the back of the hotel, barely squeezing through the rough brick walls that formed the alley. He popped onto an unlit street. He had no idea of the neighborhood’s geography or its streets, so he took the simplest possible zigzag, left, right, left, right.
Wells was prepared to make a stand in these empty streets. He would die before he let the Talibs grab him. But he didn’t see or hear anyone. The kidnappers in front were probably still trying to figure out what had happened.
Trash piled up and the streets grew shabbier until he came to a ridge that fell away into a muddy slum. He was alone. No Kabulite with a choice ventured out at this hour. He checked to be sure the Makarov had a round chambered and its safety off, walked down the hill.
The smell of waste was nose-wrinkling here, the houses crumbling mud walls topped with miserable quilts of tin and plastic. Aside from the dim orange glow of fires and the faint starlight that seeped through the smoke, the hillside was dark. The slum was a city within a city, the families inside clustered against the night. Wells wasn’t worried about anyone calling the Taliban on him here. No one here supported the group. Or opposed it. For people this poor, survival was the only politics.
On the left he saw a hut that didn’t have the usual blue tarp covering its entrance hole. Even the poorest families insisted on that much privacy for their women. Whoever had lived here was gone. Wells stepped inside, found himself in a void. Someone moved against the back wall. “My friend,” Wells murmured in Pashto. Afghanistan had a major heroin problem. This hut could easily be the last stop on the junkie downbound.
In response, he heard only paws scrabbling, the whimper of a dog that wanted no trouble. Wells rested against the mud wall beside the entrance. He left the pistol in his lap but clicked on the safety. He closed his eyes, expecting the cold would keep him awake. It reached into his bones as the adrenaline from the fight faded. If fight was the right word.
But he must have drifted, for around him dozens of flowers bloomed at once, roses, waving in a summer breeze, an easy vision—
He leaned close to smell their scent, watched as the roses turned, bone-white stems and blood-tipped petals, each one a man Wells had killed, spindly, nerveless, and growing without end—
The dog barked once, a sudden alarm—
Wells came to his feet, the Makarov in his hand. But he knew even as he lifted the pistol that he had nowhere to aim. This poor mutt feared him, no one else. A colossal weariness overcame him. He squatted and ran his hand across the hut’s dirt floor, feeling its grit. More men dead, and he hadn’t even been picked up for rendition. Maybe he should simply have flown into Bagram and disappeared from there. Maybe he should have avoided Afghanistan entirely, gone straight to Bulgaria with the right papers.
But he’d chosen this route precisely for its difficulty. What Wells knew better than anyone was that Samir Khalili would feel an unspoken relief at his capture, relief at escaping the mountains at last, relief that a drone strike hadn’t punched his one-way ticket to Paradise. If he airmailed himself to Sofia, he had no hope of capturing that feeling, or of being a plausible Samir.
Again he leaned against the wall. After a while, the dog came across the hut to him, one slow step at a time, waiting for a kick to send him away. Wells didn’t move. Finally, the beast stretched out and lay beside him with a faint sigh that might have been satisfaction.
Together, they waited for the dawn.
—
WHEN IT CAME, Wells powered his phone, called the cabbie. “I need a ride.”
“From the Winter Inn.”
“No.”
“No?” Surprise in the driver’s voice.
“Let’s say I had an early checkout.” Wells explained the path he’d taken, how he’d wound up in the slum.
“I think I know where you are. Be at the top, where you came in, in an hour.”
“Faster is better.” Morning would reveal the blood that spattered Wells’s dark blue sweatshirt and jeans. He could take off the sweatshirt, but with only a T-shirt underneath he’d stand out even more. Plus he’d have no place to hide the Makarov.
“Half an hour, I’ll try.”
The dog watched this conversation with concern. Wells figured human voices rarely meant good news for him. He was a hundred different breeds, in better shape than Wells had feared, skinny but not emaciated. He had calm brown eyes and a stump for a tail. Twenty minutes later, when Wells stood and stepped out, the dog tilted his head and rose to follow. Wells shook his head, and the animal whimpered and sat, resigned to his fate.
Wells reached the slum’s entrance just as the Toyota rolled up.
“What happened, my friend?”
“Drive.”
They drove slowly along the narrow road along the slum’s eastern edge.
“What’s your name?” Wells said.
“Dilshod.”
“I need to be at the TV Hill road at nine a.m., Dilshod.”
Dilshod reached across the seat, ran a thick finger down the biggest bloodstain on Wells’s sweatshirt, an oddly intimate gesture.
“Looks like the Empire State Building, I know.”
“I drove by the hotel on my way here.”
“Not sure where you’re going with this.”
Dilshod put the taxi in neutral and they rolled to a stop. “You have money?”
“I have money.”
“Two thousand dollars, I take you to TV Hill.”
“TV Hill, then you drive me to Jalalabad, one thousand total.” Jalalabad was a hundred miles east of Kabul, the last big Afghan town before the Pakistan border. The Taliban controlled the mountains around it. But the highway from Kabul was relatively safe. At least during the day. At least for vehicles that weren’t obviously American military or Afghan National Army. “I need two more shalwar kameez, too. I lost mine.”
Dilshod tapped the photos of his children taped to the dashboard like they could help him decide. “One thousand now. Right now. I take you to TV Hill, then I decide J
alalabad.”
Wells gave him ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. Dilshod lifted his tunic and stuck the money in his waistband like the world’s hairiest stripper.
—
ON THE WAY to TV Hill, Dilshod stopped at a tailor’s shop, emerging after a few minutes with two shalwar kameez, identical and ugly, light brown tunics and dark brown vests. “Only ones big enough.” He turned in to an alley, and Wells pulled off his sweatshirt and wriggled into the tunic and the vest and pants. He left his old clothes in a pile. No need to burn them. The Afghan police had a better chance of finding a UFO than connecting the blood on that sweatshirt to the fire at the hotel.
They reached the turnoff to TV Hill ten minutes early. Afghan kids were already lined up at a water station near the road. The mountain slums had no water system, so every gallon had to be carried in. The lucky kids led donkeys. The rest carried plastic jugs they would hump up themselves. In other countries, they would have been described as school-age, but here school wasn’t even a fantasy.
Dilshod pulled over. “Keep driving,” Wells said. He didn’t feel like sitting still. When they returned a few minutes later, a beaten-up Toyota 4Runner sat near the turnoff. So now Wells knew what 4R meant.
Wells’s phone buzzed. Taxi?
Y.
Follow.
The 4Runner pulled out in front of the taxi.
“After him.”
Dilshod seemed about to object, then didn’t. The Toyota headed for the highway that ran toward central Kabul. Wells sincerely hoped the British weren’t planning to make the handover at their embassy. Nope. They passed the downtown exits and the big blue dome of Pul-e Khishti without slowing.
“Your friend, he wants to go to Peshawar, too,” Dilshod said.
After another few minutes, the neighborhoods around the highway thinned out. The 4Runner pulled off beside an industrial park and parked behind a waiting minivan. Wells’s phone buzzed: Park in front. Engine off.
“Here. And turn off the engine.”
“Your friends don’t trust you much.”
No one trusts me much. A tall man stepped out of the 4Runner and ambled up to Wells’s window, holding a short blue duffel bag weighted by the AK inside.
“Lot of trouble to drop off a bag.”
“You have a certain reputation.” The Brit had a ski-jump nose and thick dirty-blond hair that justified the label Byronic. “Also, we thought you might be upset about Hong Kong.”
“Not a bit.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed you’re the forgiving sort. Anyway, this is yours.” He handed the bag forward.
Wells peeked inside: a short-stock AK and two loaded magazines; a worn Canadian passport that had supposedly expired in 2009; a well-thumbed Quran and a book of the Prophet’s sayings; a yellowed picture of an Arab woman; a fake Pakistani identity card featuring Samir Khalili’s photo; two expired credit cards; a bundled stack of dollars, afghanis, and Pakistani rupees; and the pièce de résistance, a genuine post–September 11 photo of Osama bin Laden. It had never been seen publicly. SEAL Team 6 had found it during the raid on the house in Abbottabad. On the back, the words safe passage were written in spindly Arabic handwriting that matched samples of bin Laden’s that the SEALs had also recovered.
“Thank you.”
“Our pleasure. You don’t want your own people to know about this? I can’t say I understand the play, but I’m sure it has a logic all its own.”
Wells could listen to this guy talk all day. “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”
“In that case, I’d prefer you didn’t.” The Brit leaned in, dropped his voice to a whisper. “Speaking of killing, we’re hearing rumors that someone took care of two Talibs at a guesthouse this morning.”
“News to me.”
“The Talibs are supposedly very angry. They’ve vowed to find the man. Good luck to him if they do. All the SEALs in the world won’t get him back.” Byron handed back the keys, opened the door. “Be careful out there. You never know who to trust.” His eyes shifted to the cabbie.
“Whom.” Wells had never been happier to correct another man’s grammar.
“Whom?”
“Whom to trust.”
10
LANGLEY
FOR WEEKS, Shafer had burned his eyes and brain reading every file that Reg Pushkin, Vernon Green, and Walter Crompond had generated during their agency careers. Every annual evaluation. After-action statement. Background check. Expense report. Email and text.
None of the three had Facebook pages, of course. But their wives and parents did. Shafer checked them all, not just the public posts but the private ones. The National Security Agency had those saved for posterity.
He drove past their houses and kids’ schools. He pored over bank statements and tax returns, court filings and speeding tickets. Health insurance claims, too. He had, for now, stopped at getting the details of medical records.
So far, he’d come to one main conclusion, one that only made his job harder.
All three were good officers. Excellent, even.
The relentless pressure of the war on terror meant the agency couldn’t afford paper pushers on the seventh floor. And Duto was a keen judge of talent—as his relationship with Wells proved. Pushkin, Green, and Crompond were driven, smart, and brave. All had served with distinction in Iraq.
Pushkin had risen fastest. He’d taken over Moscow after only two years on the insistence of the outgoing chief. I have never seen a harder-working, more forward-looking officer, she wrote. It is my strong recommendation that he become the next COS. Even more impressive, Pushkin had convinced the deputy he’d jumped to stay and work for him.
Green had run Nigeria, working hundred-hour weeks to support that country’s fight against Boko Haram, its own radical Muslim insurgency. A superior chief who has gained the respect of local intelligence officers with his personal bravery, the chief of the West African desk wrote in a letter of commendation. In other words, Green had gone into the forests and chased Boko’s guerrillas himself.
Meanwhile, Crompond had taken over the drone desk at Langley, making endless close calls. Twice he had refused to okay an attack despite pressure from more senior officers. Both times the agency’s final analysis showed he was correct. Has uncanny judgment and a keen moral sense, his boss wrote.
—
BUT all three men had red flags.
Pushkin and his wife had government salaries and champagne taste: two kids in private school, his and her BMWs, and almost no savings. Their financial records showed that her parents had sent her four checks in the last two years, forty-eight thousand dollars in all. Without the money, they would have fallen behind on their mortgage. Two other times, they had made ninety-five-hundred-dollar cash deposits, just under the limit that triggered banks to report deposits to the Internal Revenue Service. Shafer assumed that money came from her parents, too, but unless he asked, he couldn’t be sure.
Shafer didn’t like German iron. One of his many not entirely random prejudices. He was old enough, and Jewish enough, to remember that the Bayerische Motoren Werke had used slave labor to make jet engines for the Luftwaffe. But even in his most cynical moments, he couldn’t imagine anyone would betray the United States to the Islamic State for a 528i. Especially since the nineteen thousand dollars in cash he’d found so far would barely cover the down payment.
Still, needing constant help from the in-laws couldn’t feel very good. Maybe the pressure had gotten to Pushkin. He also traveled the most of the three. As deputy director, he left the United States regularly to talk with his counterparts. Paris, Berlin, and Cairo, three cities notable for their Islamic State cells, were his most frequent destinations.
Even more surprising was the fact that despite their money problems, he and his wife had taken trips to France in each of the last two years. If Pushkin was passin
g information to Daesh, the vacations were great cover. As the deputy director, Pushkin had full-time bodyguards. Freeing himself from them in northern Virginia wouldn’t be easy. But I’m going to Paris with my wife and we want the week to ourselves was a solid excuse.
Or maybe the Pushkins just liked the Mona Lisa.
—
MEANWHILE, Green had divorced three years before. His wife wound up with their kids. He hadn’t contested the ruling. The split looked relatively friendly to Shafer, at least from the court filings. Yet only Green knew how it felt to him. His bank account showed a half-dozen three-hundred-dollar checks to one Ben Appelbaum, a psychiatrist near Baltimore. But going to a shrink didn’t make you a traitor. Neither did trying to keep the agency from knowing about it by picking a guy an hour away.
Green’s emails and texts revealed that in the wake of the divorce, he had what might politely be called an active social life. Shafer could hardly fault him for taking advantage of the perks of being a single, handsome, successful African-American man in Washington. However, the sheer volume of his conquests bespoke a certain lax attitude toward risk.
Green also had a potential connection to the Islamic State. He was Christian, but he had a cousin in Baltimore, Ali Shabazz, who was a Black Muslim. Shabazz was highly devout, according to a brief file that the agency’s counterintelligence desk had compiled. He served as an imam at a storefront mosque in West Baltimore. He’d even made the hajj, the ritual trip to Mecca that all Muslims were supposed to take at least once.
Green had never hidden his connection with Shabazz, though he claimed he saw his cousin only a couple of times a year. Nor could Shafer find any evidence that Shabazz had an actual, as opposed to potential, relationship with Islamist terror groups. But, like Pushkin’s trips, Green’s cousin might be a backdoor route to funnel information to the Islamic State, which actively recruited Black Muslims.
The Prisoner Page 17
