Town crossed the road to a liquor store and went inside and found some water in the refrigerator and, on impulse, helped himself to a half pint of Early Times. He wasn’t much of a fan of Kentucky whiskey, but he bought it anyway.
An old Korean woman standing behind a counter lined with candy jars and plastered with beer ads and family snapshots took his cash and bagged the water and the liquor. On the way out of the store Town spotted a coin-operated pay phone by the door and surrendered to another impulse, digging in his pocket for change and holding the bag in the crook of his arm as he dialed home.
It would be after ten in New York and Ann would be reading or working in her darkroom. She still developed and printed her own photographs, even in this digital age. The sulfuric smell of the chemicals following her out of the laundry room that she’d converted to this purpose, with its arcane paraphernalia and red light, to where she’d find him in the kitchen and sit and drink wine and talk.
The phone rang for a long time and he was about to hook it back in its cradle when his wife said, “Yes?”
“It’s me,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How are you?”
He heard her breath and then she said, “I’ve been watching TV.”
“Okay.”
“So that’s your little mission?” When he didn’t reply she said, “I think it’s repugnant.”
“It’s for the greater good,” he said, with just enough irony.
Ann had the grace to laugh. “And the end will neatly and happily justify the means?”
He was thinking of a reply when she said “Goodnight” and he was listening to dead air.
ELEVEN
Hunt Gidley watched the scrawny brown man in the cheap blue suit dip a sugar cube into his cup of Turkish coffee to soften it, and then raise the cube to his mouth and fit it in the gap left by a missing incisor. He then proceeded to slurp the coffee through the cube, the noise of his drinking loud enough to reach Gidley’s ears over the Arab pop music that blared from a speaker above his head and the car and motorcycle traffic that swarmed around the sidewalk café in Istanbul’s touristy Laleli district, an area where a big frenk like Gidley was not out of place on this bright morning.
Omar Hassan finished drinking, swallowed the sugar, and smiled his gap-toothed smile.
“I thought you were dead, my friend,” he said.
Gidley, no friend of his, had to quell the urge to slap the man from his seat, and merely shrugged his coat-hangar shoulders and said, “As you see.”
“Yes, I see. I see. What do you Americans say? Large as life and twice as ugly?” The man laughed and Gidley calmed himself by taking a little trip down memory lane, conjuring images of when, as a contractor in Iraq, he had tortured Hassan with a zeal bordering on the sexual. Had burned his body with the so-called “American tasting” Pleasure cigarettes that Gidley’d only ever seen in Baghdad, removed most of his finger and toe nails with pliers, sliced off the tops of his ears with a razor blade (the Iraqi wore his curly black hair long enough to cover this disfigurement) and applied electricity to his penis and testicles.
The missing tooth had not been his handiwork.
That had come when Hassan had been held in Camp Bucca, a “theater internment facility” in the parlance of the military, near the Kuwaiti border. The camp, a major detention center for Saddam’s soldiers, had been something of a high school for terrorists—most of the present-day leaders of Islamic State did time in Camp Bucca.
The conditions were bad and there were outbreaks of violence directed at the American jailers. The inmates were given a ration of powdered chai tea and they’d mix it with water and sand, rolling the paste into apricot-sized balls. They’d hide the balls in the sun, on roofs, behind walls, to dry hard as stone and when they rioted against their captors the sky would turn black with the little projectiles. Omar Hassan, always in the thick of a fight, had taken some friendly chai fire and lost his tooth.
After he’d been kicked loose from the camp he’d joined the Sons of Iraq, a Sunni militia down in the Anbar Province who’d organized themselves into an ad hoc army, funded by the U.S. military.
Gidley had spent time with them, and helped hone them into an efficient death squad. There were things the U.S. military couldn’t be seen to be doing, so they’d outsourced the dirty work to the Sons, who’d raped, pillaged and murdered with a fearsome gusto.
While Gidley had been working with the Sons, he’d suspected that Hassan was feeding information to one of the many splinter groups who were still fighting the Americans, hence the days of Pleasure cigarettes and razor blades. It had turned out the little man was innocent—of that, at least—but in some weird Stockholm-syndrome transference he had come to admire and respect Gidley.
When the Americans pulled out in 2011 the Sunni Sons were on the wrong side of the new Shi’a regime and most signed on to what became Islamic State.
Gidley had lost touch with Hassan, but word had reached him over the years that the Iraqi had risen to prominence in ISIS, and Gidley had jumpstarted the remnants of his old network and had tracked down his erstwhile victim, who, with the lure of Kip Littlefield’s dollars dangling before him, had agreed to meet Gidley in the Turkish port city. Gidley was in no hurry to visit Syria, the decapitation capital of the world.
So here they sat, drinking coffee in bustling Istanbul.
“What do you do, exactly, these days?” Gidley asked.
Hassan made a sweeping gesture with his arm and the frayed cuff of his suit jacket rode up and Gidley was gratified to see the scars of a trio of cigarette burns on the underside of his wrist.
“I am Amn al-Kharji. Islamic State foreign intelligence. I spend my time behind enemy lines.” He winked. “Very good job. Syria is a shit hole.” He waved again, taking in the stores selling women’s fashions and cell phones and electronic gear. “Much nicer to be here. Or Paris. Or Brussels.” He winked again and laughed and showed that missing tooth.
Gidley sucked his own teeth and nodded. It explained why the man was clean shaven and wore Western clothes. People who did what he did didn’t get far if they dressed jihadist-style.
Gidley picked up a bag from the floor beside him and slung it across the table. Hassan knew enough to do nothing but stare at it.
“Open it.” Gidley said. “Take a gander.”
The Iraqi looked at him for a moment then he placed on finger on the bag as if feeling for a pulse and then quickly opened the zipper just enough to see the forest of dollar bills crammed inside.
A suck of breath and he muttered something in Baghdadi Arabic.
“You walk away from here with that bag if you tell me what I need to know,” Gidley said. “If you can’t give me the information I need you don’t manufacture some dumb lie, you just level with me and maybe we do business again sometime down the road. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“You’re based in Raqa?”
“Yes. But as I said, I spend much of my time outside of Syria.”
“But you have just come from there?”
“Yes.”
“If you’re intelligence you don’t have dealings with the hostages, do you?”
“Not directly, no. That is the business of Amn al-Dawla. State security.”
“But you have connections with state security?” Gidley saw the man dart a hungry glance at the bag. “The truth, mind.”
“I do, yes. Operatives at a certain level of seniority from all the branches meet to discuss strategy. There are many overlaps.”
Gidley looked at him. “I think you can guess what I want to know.”
The Iraqi smiled and inclined his head. “About Catherine Finch?”
“Yes.”
“Whether she was, in fact, killed in that drone attack?”
“Yes.”
Another lingering look at the bag, before the Iraqi shrugged and said, “I spoke yesterday with men from Amn al-Dawla. Nobody survived that attack. Nobody.”
“
You’re sure?”
“My friend, I tell you what I was told. Catherine Finch, Ahmed Assir, his bodyguards, a driver and a cameraman were evaporated. That is the word that was used.”
“Why then hasn’t Islamic State refuted this claim? That she survived?”
Another shrug. “I can only guess.”
“Guess then.”
“Recently there was talk of her being released. For a big sum of money.”
“Paid by who?”
Hassan raised his hands. “People who saw value in her release.”
“Go on.”
“ISIS needs money, always. Alive Catherine Finch has value. Dead...” He shook his head. “So I think the leadership waits to see if there is something, later, that will be to their advantage.”
Gidley stared at him until a bead of sweat broke from the man’s hairline and traced a path down his furrowed brow.
“Take the bag,” Gidley said.
As the Iraqi reached out Gidley said, “Wait,” and the man’s hand froze, hovering. “Won’t you be suspected? Coming here?”
Hassan, hand still poised above the bag like a snake charmer’s over a basket, said, “No. I am here on legitimate business.”
“You are?”
“Yes, I’m babysitting a martyr.”
“A bomber?”
“Yes.”
“Here in Istanbul?”
“Here. Yes.”
“When?”
“Today.”
“Where?”
The man shook his head. “I want to take your dollars, my friend, but of this I cannot speak. All I can say is that it would be better for you to stay in your hotel room this afternoon.”
Gidley nodded and gestured toward the bag. Hassan grabbed it and rose all in one motion and plunged into the traffic like a weasel into wiregrass.
Gidley sat for a minute until the music drove him from his seat and he walked a few blocks through the old city to the Grand Laleli hotel.
He found the business center and sat at one of the aging desktops, accessed an anonymous Hotmail account, and composed a message.
Dear Mother
Just to let you know that Dot has definitely departed. Will keep you posted.
Love
John.
Gidley hit send, logged out and went up to his room.
- - -
A half hour later, balls powdered and ribs strapped, wearing only a pair of boxers, he lay on the bed and thought about his next move.
He decided that it was time to go and have a talk to Richard Finch in Los Angeles.
Gidley felt tired and had just closed his eyes when he heard a low whump, and the glass in the window shook and a couple of lira coins and the black steel Breitling Chronomat he’d bought in duty-free rattled on the table beside the bed.
Then the almost preternatural stillness that comes after a calamity was broken by sirens and Gidley let their wails lull him into a deep, dreamless sleep.
TWELVE
On his way home from Washington’s Dulles International, sitting high and mighty at the helm of his paramilitary black Lincoln Navigator, Kip Littlefield stopped in at the Tenley-Friendship Neighborhood Library, a little haven of lemony light and warmth on this cold, snowy night.
He reversed the brawny SUV into a spot on Wisconsin Avenue directly outside the library and, his blood still thin from his sojourn in warmer climes, dashed into the building.
He liked the library. Liked its sleek, modern lines. Liked the smell of the books in its serried shelves. Liked its orange plastic chairs and white tables. He found an unoccupied internet-enabled computer with a wafer-thin monitor and a gleaming keyboard, drew up a snazzy little Danish modern chair that molded itself to his back and, piloting the freshly sanitized mouse, called up one of his many accounts and found the email from Hunt Gidley.
He read it twice before clearing the browser history, exited Chrome and sat with his fingers steepled beneath his button nose and stared at the monitor.
So, he was right. There had been deception.
And Kip Littlefield understood deception at a granular level.
His name, like so much of his life, was a fabrication.
At the age of ten months, just old enough to take his first, tentative steps, he’d been dumped on the highway divider of Pittsburgh’s Beaver Valley Expressway during evening rush hour in the manner of an unwanted puppy. Before he could toddle into the traffic he’d been rescued by a highway patrolman and so had begun sixteen dismal years of institutional drudgery and sporadic foster care. He’d been subjected to the whims of adult strangers who were interested in him either for the state grants they received, or in ways that were unwholesome and, frequently, unsanitary.
Somehow the name John Johnson had attached itself to him, a name that he’d come to find hilarious for its lack of imagination: a perfect barometer of the world’s low regard for the foundling boy.
At sixteen he’d escaped from the system and, when he’d surfaced in Manhattan, renamed himself Kipling Littlefield, a name that to his teenage imagination had smacked of prep schools and Upper East Side privilege, of cotillions and debutante balls and girls from Smith and Bryn Mawr.
And he had held his nose and plunged into a stream as toxic as the Love Canal, a stream that led him through a year of street hustling, petty crime and drug dealing. And then—by one of life’s caprices—washed him into the dominion of a man of vast venality, a man whose enthusiasm had initially been sexual (for, at seventeen, Littlefield had looked no older than twelve but was artful in things way beyond his years), before he had come to regard the boy as a protégé and had given him an entree into a world of which he had only dreamed.
From Bradshaw “Bing” Bingham (a scion of one of those dynasties in whose dung Littlefield had planted his faux family roots) he had learned how to speak and dress and what to eat and which item of cutlery to use. And when to say “fuck it” and spread your elbows and eat with your hands at some $10,000-per-plate black tie shindig, your tablemates obliged to jettison their silverware and ape you, because, goddamn it, you were who you were.
Bingham had introduced to him to his business associates, the men who were more important than potentates and presidents, whose corporations were more powerful than nation-states: the arms manufacturers.
“You're face to face with the men who buy and sell the world, baby,” Bing, paraphrasing David Bowie, had drawled at a clambake of arms dealers in Gstaad. “Forget about politicians, they’re small fry. Why be a king when you can be a kingmaker?”
He took Kip on a whirlwind tour of some of the world’s trouble spots and as they stood on Kabul’s TV Hill, a peak south of the city pincushioned with broadcast antennas, watching as American and British jets rained bombs upon the sprawl below, Bing, sipping champagne from a cooler box in the back of a Range Rover, had said, “It’s profitable, baby, to let the world go to hell.”
Bradshaw Bingham’s taste for excess had led to his end. His organs of elimination exhausted, machines taking over the business of processing his waste as he lay dying, shrunken and yellow as a Gila Monster, in the suite at Mount Sinai’s Eleven West Pavilion where Littlefield had said his farewells.
Bing had left Littlefield some money and an extensive address book which the eager disciple had parlayed into his own empire.
Littlefield had apprenticed himself to the kingmakers, and slowly built up his own power base, until he too had been able to buy and sell governors and congressmen and senators. He’d come within a whisker—such had been the volume of dark money he’d raised and pumped into a candidate’s super PAC—to owning a president, his man being narrowly edged out by the inferior specimen who now sat in the Oval Office, stitching together this peace initiative.
Littlefield knew that orchestrating the death of Catherine Finch had made good business sense, but it had also brought him pleasure. He’d despised the woman with her self-righteous YouTube videos, and this ploy to keep her alive had gotten his dander up, as Bi
ng would have said.
He left the library and turned his SUV toward Spring Valley, to the Littlefield family seat.
The notion of family was close to his heart.
When he’d gained sufficient money and influence he’d tried to find his birth parents. Not for some tearful and snotty reunion, but to take his revenge on the people who had left him to die on that highway. But the trail had run cold and he’d lost his lust for retribution and had, instead, committed his energies to building a family of his own.
He cruised through the cottony snow and turned into Indian Avenue, a road that wound past high walls and carriage lamps, the pitched roofs and chimney pots of grand houses peeping above the ancient oaks.
He loved this drive and it never failed to fill him with pleasure, as did the knowledge that he, at the age of thirty-eight (although he looked a decade younger) had come to afford a home in this leafy harbor of exclusivity, where Nixon, Johnson and George H. W. Bush had lived, where ambassadors had their residences.
He turned into a driveway that meandered awhile through what appeared to be parkland before his house hove into view. A mansion, really, built in the late thirties. Two stories. Eight bedrooms and five bathrooms. A dining room. A drawing room. A landscaped garden.
And a wife and toddler daughter asleep inside.
Before driving into the garage Littlefield stopped the Lincoln outside the baronial entranceway and sat in the idling car looking at the warm, gleaming light cut into diamonds by the lead paned windows. He drummed his gloved fingers on the steering wheel, then he sighed and turned the car and headed back toward the city where he kept an apartment.
He didn’t have the stomach for home and hearth.
Not tonight.
THIRTEEN
Ann Town watched her husband’s face appear through the developer solution, that moment of alchemy of which she never tired. Working by the glow of a red bulb she used tongs to lift the print from the chemical bath and submerge it in fixer. Once it was fixed she turned on the light and washed the print under a faucet.
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