“I had a very strange adventure,” he said. “I was kidnapped.”
“You were damned lucky,” she said after hearing the story. “Usually they kill the people even after the ransom is paid. Where are you now?”
“At the American embassy, in the infirmary.”
“I hope you remember that you owe me a dinner,” she said teasingly.
Malko suddenly perked up. “Want to come share mine this evening? They aren’t discharging me anytime soon.”
“They’ll never let me in.”
“I’ll arrange it,” he promised. “Come whenever you like. They bring me dinner around eight o’clock.”
Down in an NDS basement, Mossein Ravash regretted renting out his well. For hours, he had been beaten with fists and metal bars. Then they stretched him out on a bloodstained wooden table, tied his arms and legs down, and pounded his belly and groin.
Yet he had already told them everything he knew, which wasn’t very much. He’d only been providing a service. His Pashtun interrogator now picked up a knife, came over, and breathed stale onions in his face.
“Brother,” he said sarcastically, “if you don’t tell us everything you know, I’m going to slit you from here”—he put his finger on Ravash’s navel—“all the way down. And believe me, it’s going to hurt.”
From the man’s expression, Ravash knew this was no idle threat. He desperately racked his brains for something to tell him. The police had already identified all the culprits, so there wasn’t much left.
Suddenly he recalled a conversation he had overheard between two of the kidnappers.
It might just save his life.
As he repeated the conversation between the two thugs, he knew he’d caught his interrogator’s attention. The Pashtun flashed an evil smile and went upstairs to report.
Maureen showed up five minutes after Malko’s dinner arrived: spare ribs and broccoli and a bottle of California wine.
Shrugging off an enormous down coat that made her look like a blimp, the young woman stood revealed in all her glory. She was wearing a tight black sweater whose buttons down the front looked ready to pop off, and tailored black leather pants stuffed into fur boots.
She came over to Malko and pressed cold lips to his.
“You’ll have to forgive me for not wearing stockings!” she said. “Winter isn’t quite over yet, and it’s cold in the evenings. When you come to the house, it’ll be different.”
“I’m too weak to do anything,” Malko assured her. “I just wanted to see you.”
“Me too,” she said. “I was really worried, you know. In Kabul, when people don’t pick up the phone, it usually means they’re dead.”
They arranged the dinner plates in front of them, and Maureen opened the wine.
“To us!” she said.
The California wine was fine. They were both hungry and ate quickly. Then Maureen sat on the edge of the bed and ran a hand gently over Malko’s cheek.
“You look nice with a beard.”
“I feel scruffy,” he protested. “As soon as I get out of here I’m going to make myself look human again.”
Maureen leaned closer and brushed her lips against his. She prolonged the kiss, finally darting a tongue into his mouth that tasted of California wine. Malko felt something like a shock of static electricity. The young woman’s breasts were pressed against the sheets. He first stroked around them through the cashmere sweater. When he brushed a nipple, it immediately hardened under his fingers.
She started. “Cold weather makes me very sensitive,” she murmured.
Malko was already undoing the tiny buttons, and the sweater parted to reveal a generously filled black bra.
They had stopped talking. He conscientiously encircled her beautiful breasts, gradually shifting the bra aside.
Though seemingly content, the young woman suddenly jumped up. “Wait!” she said.
Her breasts swinging, she marched over to the door to lock it but unexpectedly bumped into a fat black nurse who had come to retrieve the dinner cart. At the sight of the bosom yearning to breathe free, the nurse rolled her eyes.
Maureen didn’t turn a hair.
“I was about to call you,” she said smoothly. “We’re finished.”
Taken aback, the nurse grabbed the cart and fled from the room as if she had Beelzebub nipping at her heels.
Maureen calmly locked the door, came back to the bed, and leaned over Malko.
“Are you feeling any better now?”
She finished unbuttoning the sweater and offered her breasts to Malko, who playfully squeezed them and brushed their nipples. Smiling, Maureen slipped her hand under the sheet and touched his chest.
“You lost some weight,” she said.
Her hand wandered over Malko’s body. But when it reached his belly, he flinched.
“I’m still sore all over,” he explained. “I was lying huddled up twenty-four hours a day.”
She gently began to massage him with a circular movement. Very gradually, her hand drifted lower. When the tips of her fingers reached Malko’s groin, she asked, “Do you still hurt there?”
He was starting to get an erection. The young woman’s fingers now wrapped around the base of his cock and moved up the shaft a little.
Maureen gently pushed the sheet aside and let out a little cry. “It’s true, you’re really skinny!”
Her mouth moved down to Malko’s left nipple. When she teased it with her tongue, he again felt that little electric shock.
By now, she had taken his prick in her hand and was gently stroking it.
“I’d say you’re on the road to recovery,” she said. “You seem even stiffer than before.”
With Maureen gripping its base, Malko’s prick was now standing at rigid attention.
“You’ll have to be satisfied with my mouth tonight,” she said. “I don’t have the energy to get undressed.”
Malko didn’t speak.
Maureen bent her head and very gently took his cock in her mouth. He lay back with his eyes closed, savoring every second of delicate pleasure. While he played with her breasts, Maureen sucked him in her special way. Each time he twisted her nipples, her tongue got more active, until the moment she finished him off. As if he were being drained by a succubus, he grunted briefly and exploded in her mouth.
Feeling exhausted and happy, he took Maureen’s hand and squeezed it.
“You could make a dead man come!” he said.
“Don’t say things like that!” she exclaimed, making a funny face. “Talk about death, and you’ll make it happen.”
She’d gotten up and was putting on her bra. She calmly buttoned her sweater and leaned close to Malko.
“Next time we’ll go to the Boccaccio, and I’ll hose you down afterward.”
Still strapped to the wooden table, Mossein Ravash was shivering with cold, unable to sleep. But he was feeling pleased with himself at having stopped the interrogation. Afghan cops were quick to use torture, but when the “customer” talked, he usually pulled through.
He heard footsteps and turned his head to see his interrogator, who had left nearly two hours earlier. The Pashtun was carrying a kind of black bag and approached Ravash from behind. Standing above him, he unfolded the thing he was holding: a hood with a drawstring. He quickly slipped it over the prisoner’s head and tightened the drawstring around his neck.
Jerking against his restraints, Ravash shouted, “What are you doing, brother?”
The Pashtun didn’t answer. He took a cord with a slipknot from his pocket and wrapped it around the prisoner’s neck. Then, using all his strength, he strangled him.
Ravash didn’t even have time to be afraid. He tried to tense his muscles, but the cord dug into his flesh, crushing his larynx and carotid artery. With his lungs starved of air and his brain of blood, he struggled for a few moments more, then gave a final shudder and went limp.
The interrogator waited a while longer to be sure Ravash had stopped breathin
g, then untied the cord and removed the hood. The strangulation marks were barely visible.
Leaving the way he’d come, he went up to his office to draft his final report. It stated that the prisoner had suffered a heart attack during enhanced interrogation. It happened all the time.
A half hour earlier, the interrogator’s supervisor had listened to his account of the confession and consulted his own superiors, then decided that Mossein Ravash had to die. His secret was too explosive for him to be allowed to live.
“You look in great shape, Malko! No one would ever guess you just spent four days down a well!”
Malko smiled at the station chief’s somewhat forced cheer. Fresh from his rest at the embassy, his first visit had been to Michaelis.
“Did they find the money?” he asked.
The station chief shook his head. “Not a cent. And we’ll never know if it was taken by the kidnappers or by the Afghan police.”
“Then you’ll have to bring me another five hundred thousand dollars from Dubai.”
“I’ll take the necessary steps,” said Michaelis with ill grace. “You still need it, right?”
“My mission hasn’t changed,” said Malko. “As you know, I was kidnapped while bringing the money to its intended recipient.”
“Nelson Berry?”
Malko met Michaelis’s eye. “What makes you say that?”
“I found his number in your cell phone. Which poses a small problem. We stopped dealing with Berry some time ago, on orders from Langley. He’s one of a number of people we no longer hire because of his dubious activities. He’s occasionally been known to protect poppy shipments.”
“That needn’t concern you,” said Malko. “I’ve been in contact with Berry, and at Langley’s request. And I’ll remind you that my activities in Kabul have nothing to do with your station. So you don’t need to worry about fallout from them.”
Michaelis flushed slightly, opened his mouth, then closed it again. He’d been put in his place, well aware that he couldn’t oppose a decision by Clayton Luger.
In no mood to prolong the meeting, Malko stood up. “I’m counting on you to have the money brought to me at the Serena. If you have any questions, you can ask Langley for a new authorization.”
Even after his rest in the infirmary, Malko still felt pretty shaky. He was eating normally again, but his bones didn’t seem to have completely thawed.
Time to get this assignment back on track, he thought. He would start by contacting Mullah Kotak. But first he had to thank Nelson Berry. Without him, he might still be at the bottom of the well.
The South African had told Michaelis how he’d gotten involved in the kidnapping, when the Pashtuns found his number in Malko’s phone and called him, and what he’d done next.
“You saved my life, Nelson!” said Malko warmly, when he came on the line.
The South African took this with his usual aplomb. “If I hadn’t found you, the station would have taken charge.”
Malko had just hung up when Michaelis called.
“We have some news from the NDS,” he said. “The owner of the farmhouse wasn’t able to tell them anything more. They roughed him up a little too much, and he died of a heart attack during the interrogation.”
That was a sad funeral oration, but for Malko, the incident was already ancient history. This was Kabul. The city wasn’t really dangerous, but sometimes it had bad surprises in store.
When Malko entered Musa Kotak’s quarters at the mosque, the fat cleric struggled to his feet and hurried over to him.
“My dear friend!” he exclaimed, taking Malko’s hand in both of his. Kotak’s somewhat protruding eyes seemed to radiate kindness. He led Malko to the back of the room and sat him on some cushions, next to a tea tray.
“I prayed to Allah a great deal for you,” said Kotak, as he and his belly settled themselves on the cushions. “When I heard you hadn’t returned to the Serena, I got very worried.”
“How did you know about that?”
“I have friends everywhere,” said the mullah with a beatific smile. “I first did some checking on my side, but I didn’t get anywhere. Now I understand things better.”
“They were just crooks,” said Malko reassuringly. “Thugs who wanted to make some money. I was locked up with a young Afghan banker, and they shot him when his family couldn’t pay.”
Kotak’s chubby face looked grave.
“I think there is more to this than money,” he said mysteriously.
“What do you mean?”
The cleric took a sip of tea before answering.
“After you were rescued, I continued looking into this business. Did you know that the NDS interrogated the owner of the farmhouse where you were held?”
“Yes, I was told that he died while being questioned,” said Malko. “Heart attack, apparently. But I don’t see that he would have anything to tell them.”
“That’s not quite correct,” said Kotak. “It’s true that he died in NDS custody, but not of a heart attack. He was strangled, on orders from above.”
“Strangled!” exclaimed Malko. “Why?”
“Because without realizing it, he told them something very important.”
“About me? I never even saw him!”
“That’s true. But what he told the NDS agents was critical. Apparently the kidnappers discussed you in front of him, and they revealed that the kidnapping was done to order. They’d been told to kidnap you and, once they got the ransom, to kill you. A murder disguised as a botched kidnapping. It wouldn’t have attracted any attention, because it happens often enough.”
“But they really did want the ransom,” Malko insisted. “They even tried to get it from the CIA.”
“Of course! The ransom was their premium for the operation—which wound up costing the people who ordered it nothing.”
“How can you be so sure of all this?” asked Malko skeptically.
“We have informers in the NDS. One of them read the report written by the interrogator. It says that the farm owner talked and was then executed. This report went directly to the head of the NDS. To his deputy, that is, since we managed to put Asadullah Khalid out of action.”
“Who ordered those men to kill me?” asked Malko. “They didn’t know me.”
“We did some investigating and found that this gang often works for a certain Babrak Parwan. He’s a big drug trafficker who has a fancy poppy palace here in Kabul. When they’re not kidnapping people, the gang handles his drug shipments. They do whatever he tells them to.”
“Even assuming that’s true,” said Malko, “what does this drug trafficker have against me?”
“I’ll let you guess. Parwan is a member of the Popolzai tribe, and a distant cousin of President Hamid Karzai.”
Kotak fell silent to give his dramatic revelation time to sink in. Malko was shaken. Not for a moment had he considered that there might be a connection between the kidnapping and his mission in Kabul. What Kotak had just told him opened some very dark new vistas.
“In other words, you think President Karzai gave the order to eliminate me? But why?”
Looking like a cat playing with a mouse, the cleric smiled again. “I can only think of one reason,” he said. “He heard about your intentions. Since he can’t oppose the Americans openly, he used the gang, Afghan-style.”
“This is very serious!” said Malko.
The mullah nodded his round head. “True enough, but there’s worse. It means that someone has learned your plans. And if we don’t discover who that is, we are heading for disaster.”
Malko was speechless. This was an absolute catastrophe. It was so easy to get rid of somebody in a city like Kabul—especially if that somebody didn’t know where the attack was coming from.
“Are you positive about what you’re telling me?”
Kotak nodded sadly. “I’m afraid so. It’s a miracle that the farm owner revealed what he did. Otherwise, I would have been as much in the dark as you, and the ne
xt attack might have been worse. Now we have to figure who the ‘mole’ is.”
“It won’t be the CIA,” said Malko. “They don’t operate that way.”
“Also, they don’t have the local connections,” added Kotak.
“It isn’t the people I met with in Washington, either. And the NDS agents who searched my room at the Serena wouldn’t have found anything compromising.”
“I doubt that an official agency is involved,” said the mullah. “I can only think of one group: the people in my circle who oppose this plan.”
“You mean within the Taliban shura?”
“That’s right. There are a number of factions in Quetta. Some feel that we should deal with Karzai and persuade him to step down. I think they are wrong, because it’s not just Karzai. His entire clique will fight to stay in power.”
“Are you suggesting that someone in Quetta warned Karzai about my plan?”
“It’s not impossible,” admitted the mullah. “He has his contacts among us. Everybody plays his own game.”
“In that case, I’m in very serious danger.”
The mullah gave a short, bitter laugh.
“Yes, but it’s nothing personal! Karzai doesn’t even know you; he just wants to hang on to power. Besides, you work with the CIA, so you are officially untouchable. But you still must be extremely careful.”
“Could that drug trafficker you mentioned be acting on his own?”
“No, he would never attack a foreigner, especially not one close to the CIA. But here’s another possibility. Maybe Karzai’s CIA friend Mark Spider heard about the project and warned him. Let me think about this. When I know something, I’ll text you.”
The dining room in the Jardin de Taimani was full. The recently opened French restaurant attracted many expats and few Afghans.
Maureen Kieffer was practically dressed for summer, with a long gypsy skirt and a yellow sweater so tight that it precisely outlined her nipples. She was watching Malko eat, almost tenderly.
“You really are doing a lot better!” she said. “I put a bottle of champagne on ice for us.”
Chaos in Kabul Page 10
