by Matthew Dunn
Chrissie had been making an effort to distract me. Patrick had told her about Trapper and what he’d said in Afghanistan, and I’d told her about yesterday’s call from Trapper because she deserved to know she was cohabiting with a man who was being hunted. For a few hours, Chrissie had done a good job, but after I’d taken myself to bed, thoughts had raced through my mind throughout the night. The most dominant of them all was that I hated being taunted by a killer while I was in hiding. But it seemed that Patrick had bigger plans for me, so I was temporarily on the shelf with my hands tied behind my back.
But at least there was comfort that Chrissie was here.
I wasn’t concerned about her being near me, because CIA safe houses are given that name for a reason. They’re anonymous, secret, and sold every six months so that new houses can be purchased. No one outside of Langley knows their locations, and even within the Agency, that knowledge is limited to a handful of people. But I was concerned that the more time I spent with Chrissie, the greater the likelihood that I would make a pass at her and she would rebut me.
At one point during my restless night, I’d attempted to think about other things by recalling my evening with Chrissie in Vietnam and how we’d amicably bickered yesterday evening about whether our Szechuan chicken dish should contain one or two fresh chilies. At approximately 2:00 a.m., while fruitlessly trying to sleep, I’d decided I’d like to marry Chrissie.
Now, in the cold light of day, it seemed the silly thought of an inactive man prone to boredom.
No, I thought as I showered and dressed, this was not one of my capricious moments. It felt more real. Impetuous and gushing, yes. But real.
I walked out of the room, heard sizzling noises, and smelled bacon and sausages. Chrissie was in the kitchen, wearing a sharp suit, nudging food in a frying pan. It seemed she was cooking for the both of us. I was surprised, because I had her down as a wheatgrass-smoothie-on-the-go-breakfast girl. Many things about Chrissie were surprising me. It all made me wonder if I should buy her a diamond ring today.
I needed a coffee and probably a slap in the face to snap out of it.
Instead those imperatives were curtailed by a call to my secret phone.
Trapper said, “I think you’re in Washington, D.C.,” and hung up.
I rang the number back but knew he wouldn’t answer because it was a landline, almost certainly a public pay phone. I muttered, “Shit,” and saw that Chrissie was looking at me.
“Him?”
I nodded. “Him.”
She flipped bacon. “How’s he got your number?”
“No idea.”
“You going to tell Patrick?”
“That would be the sensible course of action.”
“And yet, why’s Trapper taunting you?”
“Precisely.”
She tossed me her spatula, winked, and said, “Your turn to play housewife.”
I complied, placed Chrissie’s food on a plate, and ensured my bacon was singed to the point of being black, because I like meat but not if it resembles meat—the result, I guess, of seeing the remains of human flesh too many times. “You know what I’m thinking?”
Chrissie leaned against a bench, her arms folded. I thought she might be checking me out, but I wasn’t sure. “Yes.”
“And you’re going to tell me I’m an idiot?”
“I should.”
“But you’re not going to?”
Chrissie stood next to me, looked in the pan, and said, “You’re burning your bacon.” She placed her hand on mine; it was the nicest thing that had happened to me in a long time. “If you tell Patrick that Trapper’s in the States and is in contact with you, he’ll task an Agency team to go after Trapper. Trapper will go to ground, and he’ll keep doing so until he gets you on your own.”
Chrissie was right, which was why I knew I’d no choice but to leave the safe house and go after Trapper. “You’ll cover for me?”
Chrissie nodded. “If Patrick calls, I’ll tell him you’re a pain in the ass to be around, but otherwise you’re doing as you’re told—watching TV, reading books, doing nothing remotely interesting.”
After breakfast, I packed my bag and called a cab. When it arrived, I was standing in the hallway, ready to go. Chrissie was with me, silent. I breathed in deeply, summoned up every ounce of courage I had, and asked, “When I’m finished, can I take you out to dinner somewhere nice?”
I fully expected her to say no.
Instead, she approached me, brushed a finger against my face, briefly kissed me on my cheek, looked at me in a way that was undeniably meaningful, and whispered, “Yes.”
I was in heaven.
Two minutes and thirty-nine seconds later, as my cab pulled away from the safe house, that feeling vanished, because Trapper called again and said, “We must meet tomorrow. Alone. I will call tomorrow at ten p.m. with precise instructions. If you bring anyone with you, I will kill them just before I kill you.”
Chapter 5
THE REAL NAME of the Indian man who called himself Trapper was Sahir.
It means “magician.”
Sahir had often wondered how his parents could have known that their newborn son would develop into someone who would excel in trickery. Perhaps they hadn’t known and it was mere luck that his name had matched his subsequent hobby, or maybe he’d unwittingly developed his talents to give meaning to his identity. He’d never asked his parents for their opinion on this, and now he’d never know, because his father had been shot in the head, and his grief-stricken mother had thrown herself off a sheer face of the Guru Shikhar mountain.
That had happened one year ago, and it had left Sahir alone in the world. He had no siblings, and his extended family had turned their backs on him in disgust after his parents had decided that their wealth should be inherited by their only son. But being alone had never bothered Sahir because he liked being the gray man; the person who could move unnoticed amid throngs of people and do things that they would least expect.
Now was going to be one of those times, for the benefit of his amusement and the nearby homeless amputee war veteran who was lying on a sidewalk, fruitlessly begging for a few dollars.
Sahir was sitting at a table in an alfresco D.C. café, wearing a silk shirt, expensive slacks, and shoes, sipping black tea, and enjoying the early morning sunshine wash over his smooth skin. He fit in here because every table around him was occupied by other rich people who looked good on the outside, though they didn’t appear to share Sahir’s inner sense of calm. To him, they seemed brash, angry with life, and they spoke only in negatives. As a child, Sahir had heard about the American Dream and had marveled at the notion that an entire nation could have a collective notion of happiness. It had made him envious and confused, because in India there are so many different visions of success. But now that he was in the States, he decided that if the American Dream was true, the people around him hadn’t experienced it yet.
One tall and well-groomed man, three tables away from Sahir, seemed particularly affronted with life. He was talking loudly to four friends, all of whom—like him—were wearing thousand-dollar suits and watches that would have cost ten times that much. He was using racist language to declare that D.C. was going to shit because liberal jerks on Capitol Hill wanted all American cities to turn into faggoty, tree-hugging social experiments.
Sahir decided that the man was a pernicious idiot savant, because he was clearly gifted at garnering wealth but had a mental blind spot when it came to the joy that can be derived from being compassionate. That meant Sahir had to punish him.
Sahir finished his tea, left a tip on the table for the waiter, and moved to the angry man, who was now jabbing his finger on the table in time with each embittered word he spoke.
“Sir, I would like to perform a trick and was wondering if you’d participate?”
The man looked flummoxed. “A trick?” He glanced at his friends before returning his gaze to the Indian. “You’re joking me, right?”
Sahir smiled in a confident yet respectful way. “I am an amateur magician.” He waved his hand in a flourish. “I need a participant and an audience to practice my craft.”
One of the man’s female friends giggled and said, “Go on, Carl. Sounds fun.”
No doubt Carl didn’t agree. “You live here?”
“No, sir. I’m visiting your country, and when I’ve finished doing so, I will return to my country and will never bother you again.”
The woman was now laughing and said, “Come on, Carl, he’s obviously not one of them guys you’re talking about. Give it a go.”
Carl looked cornered. “What do I have to do?”
Sahir smiled wider. “Simply stand in front of me and extend your hand.”
“Err, okay.” Carl did as Sahir requested.
Sahir withdrew a dime, placed it in the palm of his hand, and showed it to Carl’s friends. “Please don’t take your eyes off the coin.” Sahir moved his hand slowly, keeping it flat so that the coin was visible right up until the moment he embraced Carl’s hand. He asked Carl, “Can you feel the dime?”
Carl nodded. “Yeah, of course.”
“Excellent. I’d like us to shake hands and then, after the count of three, quickly turn our hands flat so that your friends can see our palms.”
It happened exactly as Sahir had requested, and Carl’s friends gasped when they saw the coin had vanished.
Carl rubbed his head, dumbfounded. “Well, I’ll be damned. That’s some trick.”
Sahir bowed and said, “My sincere gratitude.” He walked to the homeless man, who was forty yards away and out of sight of Carl and his friends, and dropped Carl’s Rolex watch and wallet in the man’s lap.
Sixty minutes later, he entered a tiny rental apartment in D.C.’s Upper Northwest. The place was clean and pleasant, but also cheap, nondescript, and one of many in the block. Unlike Sahir, who’d chosen the accommodation because it was discreet, occupants of the other apartments had a tight budget in common, but otherwise they were a diverse bunch of tourists, summer students, and employees on temporary assignment to the capital. Most of them took no notice of each other, and the only person Sahir had spoken to was his neighbor—a young and pretty Argentinian woman called Isabella, whose parents had paid for her to come to the States to improve her perfectly adequate English, when in fact she seemed to spend most of the day in her apartment smoking weed. Isabella thought Sahir was a PhD student from the Bengal Engineering and Science University who was participating in a Georgetown University summer semester. She had no inkling that her neighbor might be a man capable of murder.
He entered the kitchen and opened a bag of masala peanuts while listening to Mr. Conrad and The Excellos sing “I’m Dissatisfied” on a CD he’d earlier purchased from the blues section of a record store because he wanted to understand how it was possible for American musicians to be unhappy in the land of hope and glory.
Six spiced peanuts, juggled high into the air before landing in quick succession in his mouth, abated all feelings of hunger, and he moved to the living room, opened a trunk containing chains, ropes, saws, shackles, and a razor wire whose sole purpose was to garrote a man, and withdrew a leather pouch containing sterilized needles of varying widths. He pulled out one that had been used by early-twentieth-century Quaker explorers to insert stitches into the paw of an injured tiger, and thrust the needle through the same palm that had earlier held the dime. Avoiding bones and veins was key, and as Sahir saw its tip emerge through the top of his hand, he imagined an audience who would be disgusted yet fascinated by what he’d done but wouldn’t see the real reason behind the grotesque act, which was to increase his pulse rate to that of a frightened animal, sweat, and appear to everyone that he was a victim of his own machismo when in truth he was calculating facts about his emotionally vulnerable audience so that he could use their secrets against them.
Just like he’d done when he’d been a captive in the U.S. base in Afghanistan.
He closed the trunk and smoothed his hand over its surface. The sturdy piece had been handcrafted by him, and he was pleased with the result, because he was sure that there was no other trunk like it in the world. The box was large enough to contain a big man, and Sahir had designed it so that even he would be unable to escape the container if he was locked inside it.
Will Cochrane would slowly die in the coffin, chains wrapped around him, the garrote slicing his neck if he moved his head. It would be an agonizing death but one that was justified, because Cochrane had murdered his father.
Chapter 6
ON MY FIRST day of special forces airborne training in the Groupement des Commando Parachutistes, a jump instructor told me that my existing Foreign Legion qualification as a static line jumper meant shit compared to what he was going to teach me.
In his Gauloises-gravelly voice, he said, “Caporal Cochrane: The only way you can die during a static line jump is if you’re shot while descending. Free-fall jumps are different because you have a one-in-thousand chance of your chutes not opening.” He winked at me when he added, “I’ve got seven hundred and forty-one jumps under my belt, and so far my chutes have opened every time. But I’m getting closer to jump one thousand, and that means each free fall is taking me closer to death.”
As I drove my newly acquired rental car west, away from D.C., I pondered the instructor’s observation and decided that it had parallels to my existence, because statistically, one day I would fail. It had to happen—confronting a person who’s smarter and more proficient than me, making a wrong decision, hitting a stroke of bad luck, or simply giving up the will to keep fighting. Of course, I’d no crystal ball or sixth sense to predict when that day would be. But I knew with certainty that I wouldn’t die of old age, and that every day I went to work brought me closer to that one thousandth jump.
Maybe that day would be tomorrow, sometime after Trapper called me at 10:00 p.m. Or perhaps it would be today, because the man I was driving to see was a bloodthirsty lunatic who was a ten out of ten on my scale of nasty people I’ve had the displeasure to know. But I had to meet with him because he was a former Pakistani intelligence officer who had a brain the size of a small planet and the memory of an elephant, and knew pretty much all there was to know about terrorists in Afghanistan. And that meant he might know something that would help me nail the identity of Trapper.
Aside from his psychopathic tendencies, two things were against my winning over his cooperation: the first was that I’d outwitted him by setting him up to look like a CIA spy, forcing him to flee from Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency for fear of being executed; the second, that shortly after his arrival in the States I’d had to plunge a knife into his arm to stop him from strangling me.
I hadn’t seen him for five months and eighteen days, and I’d cherished our time apart. But all good things come to an end, I thought as I stopped my vehicle at a remote farm in Jefferson National Forest. This was his home, chosen for him with care by the CIA because the Agency didn’t want him to cohabit too close to other citizens and stupidly hoped the stunning location might placate his egregious desires. I knew it would have the opposite effects. Isolating him gave him space to breathe and kill—since he arrived here, West Virginia had suffered eleven unexplained murders—and seclusion would enhance his warped but clear thinking in the same way that humbler men gain greater understanding of the world by becoming monks and retreating to monasteries. But Langley thought it knew best, and I was ignored by the bureaucrats who made these decisions and had never been up close and personal to thoroughbred evil.
Part of me wanted to put the car in reverse and get the hell away from here, but there was no point. Our meeting was by prior arrangement, he knew I was here
, and I would have been dead by now if he wanted me to be.
I got out of the car and walked over the yard toward a huge clapboard farmhouse that was encircled by outbuildings and dense woods. I wanted the man I was meeting not to be an operative who’d once stood in an interrogation cell in Islamabad, recited W. B. Yeats’s “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead,” and slashed a naked Islamist terrorist’s stomach. But he was that person, as well as a craftsman of beguiling wooden toys, a student who’d taught himself the Choctaw Native American language in four weeks, an academic who’d deciphered the book of Revelation, a proficient anesthetist, and a man who could easily bench-press a three-hundred-pound frozen human torso.
As I knocked on the door, I told myself that I was nothing like him, even though I suspected that we’d killed nearly the same number of people, had identical intellects and espionage talents, and were only differentiated by purpose and sanity.
He called out from somewhere in the house. “Come in, Mr. Cochrane. My door is always open to you.”
Instinctively my hand moved to my concealed sidearm, just to check it was still where it should be and to give me slight reassurance that I might walk out of this place in one piece. As I moved through the property, I noticed the interior had changed since I was last here. Back then, the home had been undergoing reconstruction and decoration; now it looked like the interior of a sheik’s palace.
I had no idea where he was, but I soon found out. As I entered a large living room, I saw him sitting in the center of an expensive Oriental couch that was big enough to seat eight adults. He was barefooted, his legs in the lotus position, and he was wearing black trousers and a collarless white shirt and was grinning with ivory-white teeth. I guessed most women would find him sexy in a back-in-the-day-Omar-Sharif kind of way.
“Mr. Cochrane,” he said in an accent that suggested he might have served as an officer in Her Majesty’s Colonial Service, “are you hungry?”
