The Invisible (Ryan Kealey)

by Andrew Britton

  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 thirty-eight 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.

  His appraising eye took note of the quality—judging by the array of medical supply stickers that lined the base, it was a refurbished model—but he had used the Drager before, and as long as it worked, it would get the job done. The Drager Narkomed 4 had been one of the better anesthesia machines available when it first hit the market back in the late nineties. Now it was considered hopelessly outdated, at least in the States. In Pakistan, it still represented the best of modern medicine.

  Craig could have dealt with far worse. Over the past ten months, he had learned how to make do with substandard equipment, and the Drager was anything but. The surgical table was off to the right, a simple, stainless-steel contraption with a circular base and hydraulic hand cranks. Twin Burton lamps were mounted over the table, a total of eight bulbs lighting the patient below.

  The patient…

  Qureshi was standing at the head of the table, partially blocking Craig’s view. He walked forward, took a single step to the left, and looked down. He saw the woman’s face and experienced that brief moment of recognition. Then came the split second of complete inaction before his instincts took over. He took a fast step back, his hands coming up to ward off the sight.

  “Oh, fuck,” Craig heard himself say. His eyes went wide, and he took another quick step back, his right arm pointing accusingly at the table, as if he were the first to figure it out. “Jesus Christ, do you know who that is?” A stupid question, he realized a split second later, but he continued, anyway. “That’s the fuckin’…”

  Qureshi was pulling him off to the side, pushing him into a chair. It was a considerable effort, given his small frame. The older Pakistani was standing next to the door, subtly blocking the only exit. Craig heard himself protesting, swearing, but he couldn’t seem to stop. His mind was moving in a million directions at once, and part of him was saying, You knew what you’d find when you walked in. He ignored that part, reminding himself that he couldn’t have known….

  “That’s Fitzgerald,” he blurted out. He was still pointing the accusing finger. “That’s the goddamn secretary of state. The whole world is out looking for her, Said, right now, as we speak. What the hell have you done?” He whirled on Qureshi, shaking his head, his whole body trembling. “What the hell have you done? I can’t….”

  “You will,” someone said. The hard voice came from the door. Craig looked over, eyes wild. Qureshi said nothing, just looked at the floor. “You can and you will,” Mengal reminded them. “She is your patient. You are both responsible, and you will fix what is wrong with her.”

  “No way,” Craig mumbled. “No fucking way. I’m not going to—”

  Mengal was already crossing the floor, coming up from the rear. His left hand moved in a blur, snatching the hair at the base of Craig’s neck. His right hand came up, and he shoved the muzzle of a snub-nosed .38 into the right side of the doctor’s temple. Craig froze at the touch of the gun, his mind sharpening, narrowing with the nearness of death.

  “You listen to me,” Mengal hissed, his words cutting the cool, quiet air in the suite. Qureshi froze along with Craig; on the table, Brynn Fitzgerald remained motionless. She had barely stirred in thirty hours. “You will do what you were brought here to do. You will save this woman’s life. If you don’t, I promise you now, you will share the grave you dig for her.”
>
  He shoved Craig’s head forward, releasing his grip at the same time. The pain was intense, so close to his earlier injury, but Craig was oblivious. He was too stunned to even react. The woman’s face was stuck in his mind, pale, calm, so unnaturally still…He just sat there, trying to see a way out of it.

  The footsteps were fading behind him. He heard voices, a harsh, rapid exchange of Urdu. For the moment, he and Qureshi were alone in the room. Qureshi crouched before him, so their eyes were level. His expression was one of limitless sorrow.

  “You gave them my name,” Craig said in a monotone. It was hard to know how he meant it. “You told them where to find me.”

  Qureshi shook his head, but it wasn’t quite a denial.

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Mengal,” the Pakistani murmured. “Benazir Mengal. He was a general in the Pakistani Army. He’s killed many people, and he’s behind everything that’s been in the news. The disappearance of those climbers on the Karakoram, the ambush of Fitzgerald’s vehicle…everything.”

  “What about me, Said? Why am I here?”

  Another hesitation. “You have to understand,” Qureshi began weakly, “I wasn’t given a choice. They were going to—”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Craig cut in. His face was red, his tone suddenly harsh. He was embarrassed, Qureshi realized, ashamed that he’d allowed Mengal to get on top of him. Ashamed that he’d been bullied into submission.

  “Blunt force trauma sustained in the attack on her car. She had a partial pneumothorax of the left lung, but I’ve already put in a chest tube. That was the lesser injury.”

  “So…?”

  “So she needs a pericardial window,” Qureshi said quietly, “and she needs it soon. Preferably within the hour.”

  Craig had only briefly surveyed the equipment in the room, but he didn’t have to look to know that Qureshi didn’t have access to a digital EMI. “You don’t have a—”

  Qureshi waved it away, slightly annoyed. “It’s a physiologic diagnosis…I don’t need a CT scan to see the obvious.” He quickly went over his earlier observations: the abnormal blood pressure reading, the J-waves on the EKG, the specific complaints Fitzgerald had made when she was still lucid. “She’s sedated at the moment, but I need you to put her under all the way. I have everything you need. We can start as soon as you’re ready.”

  “How do you—”

  “I wrote the list out myself, and Mengal sent his people to pick up the items. It’s all here, ready and waiting. I’ve checked everything personally.”

  Craig nodded slowly. He could see that Qureshi had sold him out, had provided them with his name, but he couldn’t summon the anger he should have felt. They would have put pressure on him, and while he wasn’t a coward, Qureshi wasn’t the kind of man to fight back. At least, not unless he was facing imminent death. Craig couldn’t blame him for what he’d done.

  Craig looked up, directly into the other man’s deceptively placid eyes. “They want her for propaganda value, Said. In the end, they’ll probably kill her. And if they’re willing to kill her, we don’t stand a chance. You must know that.”

  “Yes, I do.” Qureshi seemed to hesitate. “But I can help her, and for that reason alone, I have to do as they ask. I can’t walk away from that responsibility.”

  Craig didn’t alter his steady gaze, just gave a short, understanding nod. “So you’re going to operate. Then what?”

  Qureshi smiled in a resigned kind of way, but he never broke eye contact. “I’m not a fighter, but I won’t make it easy. I don’t want to die, but they are all over the house, the grounds, and one of them…”

  “Yeah?” Craig was intrigued; Qureshi had gone away for a few seconds there, an expression of pure, unadulterated fear crossing his dark face. “One of them what?”

  Qureshi shuddered and said, “One of them is the devil himself.”

  CHAPTER 26

  CARTAGENA

  Dawn was slipping steadily over the landscape, ocher-colored light pouring into the room on the second floor of the house. Lying on his back in bed, still fully dressed, Kealey stared out the window, his view limited to the tops of the dark firs that shielded the house from the road. He had been awake for most of the night, unable to sleep. His mind was too occupied with all that had happened. His disconcerting conversation with Javier Machado was weighing heavily on him, as were Marissa Pétain’s startling revelations regarding the death of her older sister. There was a lot of history there, much of it wrapped up in the Agency, and while Kealey had heard the facts, he was worried about each person’s underlying motivations. For Pétain, it seemed pretty straightforward. She wanted revenge for what had happened to her sister in Colombia. Machado’s goals were not nearly as clear, which troubled him deeply.

  Marissa Pétain’s desire for revenge was something that Kealey could understand. He’d heard it said that revenge didn’t accomplish anything, that in the end, it only made the pain more acute. He didn’t believe that. Revenge was not a pure motivation, but when applied to a specific task or goal, it could provide one with the strength and clarity of mind needed to accomplish almost anything. Kealey knew this was true because he had gone through it himself, and in Pétain, he saw that same kind of focused intensity. She wanted the Colombians, but to get a crack at them, she would have to prove herself. That was what she was doing now, Kealey suspected: carving a niche for herself in the DO, waiting for the right time and the seniority she would need to initiate another move against the North Valley cartel. Kealey didn’t think she’d have to wait long. Diego Sanchez-Montoya, one of the principal leaders of the NVC, had been a mainstay on the FBI’s most wanted list for years. The Agency would get a lot of mileage out of a successful undercover operation in Colombia, especially if it managed to bring Sanchez-Montoya down.

  Javier Machado, on the other hand, was completely unreadable. Why was he so intent on keeping his daughter with Kealey? They had never met before, so why the strange degree of trust? And how did he know about Benazir Mengal? The answer to the third question seemed obvious: Pétain had brought her father into the loop the previous day, while Kealey was sleeping. But how did Machado know Mengal? And who was this man in Lahore? Kealey just couldn’t be sure. As troubling as the whole situation was, though, and as much as it deserved his attention, he couldn’t focus on it. He was far more concerned by what had happened in Madrid. More specifically, he was worried about what Naomi had done, as well as the effect it was clearly having on her.

  He had wanted to speak to her the night before, after Pétain had gone to bed, but he just couldn’t bring himself to knock on her door. He’d told himself that it was too late, that their conversation would likely dissolve into an argument, which would wake everyone up, but that wasn’t the truth. The truth was that he didn’t know what to say to her. Before he’d been drawn into the Agency by Jonathan Harper, Kealey had served in the army for eight years. In all that time, he had never killed a noncombatant. He knew that might not be strictly true. He’d fought in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Gulf, and some of those battles had taken place in heavily populated urban areas. It was possible that one of his rounds might have gone astray, but he didn’t know of a specific incident, and he felt reasonably sure that the rounds he’d fired had hit their intended targets and nothing else.

  Naomi, on the other hand, knew exactly what she had done; there was just no escaping it. She had killed 6 innocent people in one fell swoop. Not intentionally, of course—in fact, her actions had been purely selfless—but Kealey knew that didn’t make a difference. At least, it wouldn’t make a difference to her. It didn’t help matters that she had killed another innocent person ten months earlier. Kealey didn’t have to remember how hard that had been for her, because he could see it every time he looked at her. She was still trying to come to terms with what she had done, and that had been one person….

  And now this.

  He rolled off the bed, got to his feet, and padded into the adjoining bathroo
m. He turned on the shower and climbed in without waiting for the water to heat up. Three minutes later he was out and reaching for a towel. He wiped some steam from the mirror and looked at his face, wondering about the beard. He’d been growing it out for months now. It wasn’t exceptionally long, falling a few inches beneath his chin, but it served to conceal his age and the shape of his face. He thought about keeping it, knowing it would help him to blend in when he and Pétain landed in Pakistan.

  But he wouldn’t be able to pass as a native, anyway, and they still had to get out of Spain. The beard, he realized, would be remembered by witnesses in Madrid, noted on the incident report, and included in the sketches the CNP would have undoubtedly drawn up and distributed to the airports. Better to take it off.

  Once he’d shaved and rinsed off his face, he went back to the bedroom and dressed, pulling on a pair of dark jeans and a charcoal T-shirt. Stepping into the hall, he paused for a moment, gauging the sounds of the house. It was early yet—just after eight—but he could hear clanking dishes coming from the bottom of the stairs, as well as the sound of running water. Walking down the hall, he paused outside Naomi’s door. That was where the sound was coming from, he decided; she must be in the shower.

  He hesitated, thinking about it. Then he tried the handle. The door was locked, but it was a simple lock; he could pick it in twenty seconds. If he wanted to.

  Did he want to? He thought back to the look she’d given him at the hotel in Madrid. Back to what he had seen in her eyes. She had been so distracted, but it was more than the post-traumatic stress he knew she was dealing with. The PTSD wasn’t a secret; he’d known about that for a long time, and so had the psychiatrists at Langley. It wasn’t the kind of thing she could hide. What he had seen at the hotel was something else entirely, and he had to know where it was coming from, even though he’d decided to leave her behind.