Yes, Hasad was at the root of his troubles. As soon as General Jari and his buddy Shaiq had turned to Hasad for help, he had handed them off onto Rashid, putting him into the middle of this mess.
But why did he listen to Hasad? Why did he accept the op? Even as Hasad was explaining it to him, Rashid knew he was fucked. Still, he had never known how to say no to Hasad. Not simply because he feared the violence of Hasad’s vindictiveness—though that was always a factor when anyone worked for him—this time he felt he owed the man. The year before he’d accepted another mission from Jari—one that Hasad had warned him off of. Still, Rashid had desperately needed the money, and Hasad had nothing for him at the time.
Rashid was to rescue an American embassy worker imprisoned in a Taliban camp in a desert pit-cage. Nine feet deep and four feet across with a steel grid for a trapdoor, it was the most barbaric prison cell Rashid had ever seen—so barbaric its previous resident had not survived his stay. In fact, the man’s rat-gnawed corpse was still in the pit with the American.
Even worse, when he and his team reached the camp, Rashid learned they’d been informed on. His men were killed on the spot, and he was thrown in the hole with the cadaver, the barely breathing American, and the ravenous rat pack. The Taliban was now seeking to ransom him as well, naively believing that someone might care whether Rashid lived or died. The hard truth was that no one did.
Except—to Rashid’s eternal surprise—Hasad.
Just as Rashid had given himself up for dead and was about to succumb from the interminable beatings, dysentery, inanition, and dehydration, Hasad and his extraction team stormed the camp, killed the tribesmen guarding him, and dragged him and the American out of the pit-cage.
So he owed Hasad his life. Even before Hasad’s men could take the American to Maroof International Hospital in Islamabad, Hasad was personally checking Rashid into its ER, holding his hand the entire time.
He paid for everything.
Rashid was grateful but puzzled. This wasn’t the Hasad he’d known for the last decade, the man who didn’t do favors and who viewed employees as utterly disposable—replaceable as used tissues.
Even more bizarre was that Rashid had felt indebted to him—a feeling he’d never felt for anyone.
Not friends, not family.
So when Hasad had ordered him to arrange for the meeting between Jari, the TTP, and Pakistan’s ISIS contingent, Rashid accepted—even though it violated every survival instinct vibrating in his brain and body. Still, he’d met with the participants on and off for three months and, per Hasad’s instructions, brokered their accord.
Rashid had helped finalize a plan to detonate three terrorist nukes on U.S. soil.
It had to be the lowest point in Rashid’s already abysmally low career.
He had now officially become a nuclear terrorist.
At which point General Jari accused him of betraying them all to the outside world.
Jari’s charge was not completely unfounded—if one considered Hasad part of the outside world. In accordance with Hasad’s orders, Rashid had sent him nightly reports on the negotiations. Why, Rashid did not know. He’d only asked Hasad one time why he wanted those reports. Hasad had answered, “Who says I want them? Who says they’re for me?”
Then that last night, the chickens came home to roost. After the terrorists’ last meeting, Jari’s men broke into Rashid’s room, seized Rashid’s computer, and methodically tracked down those nightly reports in his server’s trash bin. So while Rashid’s transmissions were scrambled and encrypted end-to-end, then sat-bounced all over hell’s creation—until God Himself could not have determined the final recipient of the e-mails—the ISI, nonetheless, had found his e-mails and had him cold.
Rashid knew better than to give up Hasad. He would do things to him that would make the ISI’s pain-racked ministrations look like a mosque prayer vigil.
Which was why Pakistani intelligence had sent for “the Cleric”—the most feared interrogator in all of South Asia and the Mideast.
Locked, bound up, and gagged in his stinking, coal-black cell, Rashid could only imagine what lay in store for him the next day.
He shuddered at the thought.
To even contemplate it was to peer into the darkest pit of hell.
3
“What goes around, comes around.”
—Elena Moreno
Hasad sat in a jump seat in the forward section of an ancient, reconditioned C-130 cargo plane, which the Pakistan Air Force had purchased from the U.S. in the ’60s. Its four Allison T56-A-15 turboprops produced a nonstop rumbling roar. It shook, bounced, and chugged badly, and while Hasad was not normally a nervous flier, this rickety relic was getting to him.
Surrounded by wooden crates and steel shipping containers filled with various kinds of ordnance—semiautomatic pistols, machine guns and ammunition—he was the only passenger in the hold. Jammed tightly in the compartment between the closely packed crates and containers, he was becoming uncomfortably claustrophobic.
But he was alone with his thoughts, and for that he was grateful. He had a lot on his mind, and he appreciated the solitude. For the first time in a long time, he was unsure of what to do. Pakistan’s ISI was flying him to Dubai, where he would catch a berth on a container ship, transporting his men and their supplies to Baltimore Harbor in Maryland. From there, he would take them to a safe house in Virginia.
The mission angered him, and he was especially furious with Shaiq and the general. They had played him false, holding out on his final payment and issuing threats. He would see to it that they came to grief with him over that.
Still, he had a nagging sense that he could turn this whole thing to his advantage. For some time, he’d wanted to see Elena again.
He’d spotted her by accident two years earlier. He was having a cup of coffee at a café in Islamabad, and she was seated at a table with a Pakistani deputy foreign minister, presumably discussing business. Instead of the traditional burqa or chador, she was dressed in a long tan skirt, a beige blouse, and a headscarf, but her face was clearly visible. He’d have recognized her anywhere. Hasad, on the other hand, wore a long, white Arab robe with a keffiyeh, a thick dark beard, a ponytail, and sunglasses. He could have been anybody.
When he first glimpsed her, he could not believe the wave of feeling that swept over him. It took every ounce of self-control not to stare gape-jawed at her. He hadn’t felt like that since he’d left her twenty years ago. He knew then and there in that café that he had to have her back—no matter what it took. That she ran the CIA’s Pakistan desk was of no consequence. He had to have her back even if he was flogged, castrated, dismembered, and beheaded for it. For reasons he honestly did not understand, getting her back was suddenly the most important thing in the world. In a life of incessant savagery, mayhem, and fear, she had been his only positive constant—the only thing of any value, the only person he’d ever felt truly close to. He did not want to spend the rest of his life alone. He wanted her at his side. It was as if he was her and she was him, as if they were the same person. In his entire wretched life, she was the only person he’d ever loved.
And if that wasn’t enough, he was sick to death of the profession of arms—this life of bloodshed, violence, and slaughter. Didn’t he deserve some peace?
Probably not—not after the things he’d done and seen.
So he’d initially thought to buy his way back into her affections. He’d dragged Rashid into his new assignment—brokering a deal between the TTP and ISIS—and had forced him to e-mail his reports on the deliberations. He’d then forwarded them to Elena, allegedly from Rashid’s server. She was a CIA agent, and if giving her priceless intel about an alliance between the two most dangerous terrorist groups on earth didn’t get her attention and affection, nothing would.
Furthermore, he had no use for Pakistani intelligence, the TTP, ISIS, or the murderous cretins he worked for. Nor did he hate Americans. He despised many of their country’s polici
es and politicians, but he genuinely liked the Americans he’d known individually. Deep down inside, he wanted Jari and Shaiq’s plans to fail.
Yes, he could turn this mission to his advantage.
Whatever happened, this would be his last op. Why not play it out, see where it led? Maybe it would somehow help him win back Elena. He’d also be giving America’s leaders exactly what they were begging for. After seven decades of selling the most destructive nuclear arms technology imaginable to the world’s most unstable nations, their political elite needed to get a taste of what they were so recklessly purveying.
Elena used to tell him, “You choose your dues. What you put out, you get back. What goes around, comes around. ‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap.’” Well, the bloody nuclear instructions, which America had so assiduously taught the earth’s worst despots and fanatics, would now “return to plague the inventor.” Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare had imparted that brutal truth to audiences in Elizabethan England, and if they could benefit from his hard-won wisdom, the U.S. could, too.
And along the way, he planned to educate Shaiq and Jari on the real meaning of revenge. Why not? What had any of them ever done right in their sordid lives anyway, himself included? Nothing. Why bother to do the right thing now?
And anyway this could be fun.
For the first time in a long time, Hasad smiled.
4
“He’s all the worst passages in the Koran rolled up into one.”
—Adara Nasira
Another bucket of camel piss hit Rashid in the face, and he came to. He was sorry he had. He was back in the torture chamber. Still strung up by the wrists to the overhead beam, his shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints throbbed unbearably. The big gorilla they called Ali was yelling at him, but all he could hear was a dull, gale-force roar, blowing between his ears.
Ali got close to him and shouted in his face: “Can you hear me?”
Actually, Rashid did hear his screams now, so he nodded weakly.
“Then listen to this.” He hit him in the stomach with a hard looping right.
Rashid gasped, rasped, and again passed out.
Another bucket of camel urine, and again Rashid came to. Ali grabbed him by the hair, lifting his head up.
“I don’t see how you can stand to touch him,” the woman said, her face wrinkled in disgust. She was seated in the corner, smoking, her face grimacing from the room’s stink. Otherwise, all Rashid saw of her was a red blur, his eyes bloodshot from the incessant blows.
“I don’t either,” a new man added as he entered their small one-room building and closed the door. He was dressed in white clerical robes, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and sported curly white hair and beard. He carried a large black doctor’s bag.
“I think the stink’s harder on you and me than it is on Ali,” the woman said to him. “Camel piss doesn’t really bother him.”
“He is part camel,” the cleric said.
“More,” the woman said.
The cleric dumped his bag on the wall table. “What is the prisoner’s name?” he asked Ali.
“Asshole,” Ali said.
“A good Islamic name.” The cleric walked up to Rashid and smiled.
“Do you know who our new friend is?” the woman asked Rashid. When Rashid failed to respond, she said: “He is a doctor.”
“I could use a doctor.” Rashid groaned, his voice thick with pain.
“Me, in particular,” the cleric said. “I’m both a medical doctor and a doctor of divinity. You know in my postgraduate work I specialized in pain therapy? Well, not so much the therapy part—more the application of it. When someone informed Pakistani intelligence—its dreaded ISI—of my exceptional talent, they quickly recruited me.”
“Which just proves what I’ve always believed,” the woman said. “Great torturers are born, not made.”
“It was ever thus,” the doctor said.
“He has a God-given gift for death as well,” the woman told Rashid.
The cleric nodded his agreement. “I like to think of myself as ‘Death’s Second Self.’”
“But in the service of Allah,” the woman said.
“His left hand, so to speak,” the doctor said.
“Unfortunately, our friend, Rashid, is not devout,” the woman said.
“But you are of the true faith, no?” the doctor asked. “You do pray to the one and only God, Allah, eight times a day?”
“More,” the hanging man whispered.
“And what do you pray for?” the cleric asked.
“That you’ll shut the fuck up.”
An old-fashioned aluminum coffee pot on the stove began to percolate. The cleric poured himself a mugful and put it to his lips.
“This stuff’s good, strong but boiling hot,” the cleric said, wincing from the heat.
He emptied his mug onto Rashid’s exposed genitals.
His screams shook the room, reverberated into the relativities of time, then rang, roared, and chimed through the echo chambers of hell.
“I’m sick to death of his endless whining and sniveling,” the woman said. Walking up to Rashid, she grabbed his chin and shook it. “Can’t you be a little more stoic about all this? Stiff upper lip and all that?”
“You are so right!” the cleric shouted. “Stoicism is exactly what he needs. The great philosopher, Epictetus, would have much to teach him.”
“Enlighten him,” the woman said.
“Epictetus understood only that the ignorant seek the outside world for benefit,” the cleric explained, “while the wise simply let events happen.”
“Rightly so,” the woman said.
“We are all characters in a play the One True God has written,” the cleric said, “and we must act our parts.”
The hanging man stared at the woman, incredulous. “Who’d you say this guy was?” He nodded toward the doctor.
“Oh, he’s all the worst passages in the Koran,” the woman said, “rolled up into one.”
“But the question,” the doctor said, “is who are you? What do you want?”
“You’re kidding,” Rashid whispered weakly.
“Seriously,” the woman said. “We want to know.”
“Money?” Rashid asked, somehow managing a shrug.
“Excellent answer,” the woman said.
“Anything else?” the doctor asked.
“Sex?”
“So you wish great wealth and beautiful women?” the doctor said.
“I’m not quite ready to die,” Rashid said.
“Ah, but if you ask me, the fear of death is at the root of all your troubles—that and your dread of the unknown. You must accept the path of stoic resignation. You must see death as your wisest advisor, and welcome her as a trusted friend. One day, you will leave this world, and when you do, it must be with thanksgiving in your heart and joy in your soul. Allah lent you your life, and it’s His to reclaim whenever He wishes. So let Him have that which He will take back anyway. We must all make room for others, not crowd the house of the world. To be truly free, one must embrace death, take it as a lover.”
“Where’d you find him?” Rashid asked the woman, nodding toward the doctor. “Idiots ’R’ Us?”
“Ah,” the doctor said, “you joke. I like that. But I know you. I see into your soul.”
“And I’m sure you’re the better for it,” Rashid said, groaning.
“Perhaps,” the cleric said. “But I fear the next few hours will not go well for you.”
“You mean I’m not going to enjoy our little slumber party?”
“He means you’re not going to survive it,” the woman said.
“You are about to soar on the wings of the night,” the cleric said.
“A thousand times in a thousand different ways,” the woman said.
Rashid’s vision was starting to sharpen, and he could see the woman more clearly now. She was at the far end of the room, laughing, putting on red lipstick, of all things. She had changed her cloth
es and was now undoing the top two buttons on her black silk blouse, taking off her baseball cap, and letting her hair down.
“Damn, it’s hot,” she said.
She began walking toward him. Her thick, waist-length mane of raven hair was cascading over her shoulders and down her back, her hips swinging arrogantly, like a runway model’s. Her wide generous lips were now scintillatingly scarlet, her concupiscent décolletage startlingly sensuous. Stopping a dozen feet from him, she did a quick flirtatious pirouette—apparently so he could see her black jeans stretched tight across her impudently elevated derriere and observe the pruriently pointed, six-inch heels of her thigh-high jet-black boots. Pausing to look over her shoulder at him, she gave him the most malevolent smile he’d ever seen.
Walking up to him, she cupped his face in her hands. “Doctor, you asked before whether our friend was religious, whether he believed in anything? I’ve read his file. He believes he has to screw anything that’s female and breathing, anything with a pulse.” She was now nose-to-nose with him, her eyes fixed on his. Her hand began caressing the inside of his thighs.
“You’d give anything to have a woman again,” she said, “wouldn’t you?”
She kissed him, kissed him again, long, deep, luxurious kisses, her left hand across the back of his head, pulling his mouth brutally against her own, her tongue probing and teasing his, rimming his teeth and lips, then plunging deeper and deeper, in and out, in and out—a sensuous simulacrum of strenuous intercourse. Suddenly her right hand reached down low again and grabbed him with all her might, iron tight, tighter than tight, harder and harder, till he couldn’t breathe.
A crashing tsunamic of ecstasy hit him like an express train, crushed him like a power-vise, smashed him like a collapsing bridge. She was no longer a woman but a force of nature—a level-50 earthquake, an asteroid strike, a supernova blasting its blazing core into the infinite void.
And Into the Fire Page 9
