“And now?”
“I’m retired.”
“But you’re here?”
“It’s in the nature of a favor,” Town said.
She ran a hand through her bobbed hair. “What about this? Mary Beth’s got the locks.”
Town passed her a bag. Another gift from Golding.
She opened it and lifted out a long blondish wig. “Seriously?”
“Sorry.”
“No, I totally get it.”
She held the wig in her lap, stroking the hair like it was the coat of a Pekinese, and then regarded Town. “So there’s going to be this rescue mission and then I’m going to do Catherine Finch for the media?”
“It’ll be at a distance. You’ll be seen carried from a troop transport and put on a helicopter to take you to a plane heading for a U.S. military hospital in Germany. There’ll be no interviews.”
“But I won’t get to Germany?”
“No, the helicopter is going to be shot down.” He shrugged. “It’ll be convincing. There’ll be wreckage found in a remote area. It’ll have been shot down by a missile fired by any one of the mélange of sects, tribes and terror groups that run wild in those parts.”
“Are people going to believe that?”
“My associates seem to think so.”
“I guess people believe what they’re told?”
“Sadly, that’s true a great deal of the time, “Town said. “If they’re told persuasively and insistently enough.”
Kirby eyed him for a long while. A surprisingly direct gaze for her. “Anything you’re not telling me?”
Town was sure that it was all over his face, the lie. The lies. But he looked her in the eye and said, “No. That’s it.”
She bounced the wig. “Okay.”
“You can say no,” he said, knowing the consequences of this.
She shook her head. “No. I’ll do it. It seems, well, fitting. Kind of.”
Kirby had laughed, and he’d wanted to stand up and grab the wig and the passport and tell her to take a Greyhound to Scottsdale and find a life for herself.
But he hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t.
“Hi,” she said from across the aisle of the Gulfstream.
“Hi.”
“We’re close, aren’t we?”
“Under an hour.”
She stood and stretched and disappeared into the lavatory and when she returned she was wearing the blonde wig.
“Does it look okay?”
“It looks fine.”
She gestured to the seat beside him. “May I?”
“Sure,” he said and she sat.
Kirby glanced at him before her eyes shifted to the sky that was changing from black to violet. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes,” he said, trying to stay cool, relaxed.
“What happened to your leg?”
He was startled and peered at her, her features just visible in the dim light.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just being nosy.”
“No. No, it’s okay.”
Town looked away, watching the first rays of the sun hit the wing, flaring like flame.
He was ready to tell her some lie about a car wreck when he surprised himself by saying, “It happened in Afghanistan a while back. There was a source within Al-Qaida, highly placed, a Pakistani who was working as a double agent. He traveled across the border to be debriefed. I was part of the contingent that was to meet with him at a military base. He stepped out of the vehicle and as we approached him he detonated a suicide vest and killed seven Americans, a Jordanian and an Afghan. A number of others were injured. I was one of them. The ball bearings that were packed into the vest passed beneath a truck and struck me in the lower leg. I was lucky.”
“Lucky?” she said.
“Yes. I lived and my leg was saved. Others were left way worse off than me.”
“I’m not sure I’d call that lucky,” she said as she stood and returned to her seat and gazed out at the sunrise.
After a few minutes he saw that her eyes were closed and she was asleep or pretending to be.
His account of the mess in Afghanistan had been spare. Lacking in nuance. Most that was significant shaved from it. Like how he, who had once been destined for great things, had fallen from favor—his views too liberal, perhaps, and he’d spoken too openly about how the CIA had falsified information to support the thesis of weapons of mass destruction.
Town had ended up on numerous shit lists, not the least the Agency director’s. He’d hit an invisible ceiling and his career had stalled, and his once indispensible counsel was no longer needed. He was exiled from Langley and given a series of hardship posts (Kinshasa, Benghazi, Beirut) before ending up in Afghanistan. Sitting in Kabul, smoking too many cigarettes and fighting ennui instead the enemy du jour.
He’d made no mention to Kirby Chance of how he had warned against meeting with the double agent, warned that he wasn’t to be trusted. The station chief, twenty-five years Town’s junior, had shouted him down. He was old. He was a relic. He valued the instinctual above the empirical.
When he said he would travel with them to meet the agent, the station chief refused. But Town persuaded her in the belief that, somehow, he may be able to change the ordained order of things.
He had not.
Lying on the ground, barely conscious, he saw her torn body, saw her blood soaking into the yellow sand, and recalled that she had young children back in Virginia.
After he’d recovered and returned home from Germany he was given a medal but was considered something of an albatross, as if his warnings had somehow turned things bad. Never underestimate the superstition of operatives living in a world of suspicion, paranoia, betrayal and dumb luck.
Town’s career was over and he was left with an inexpressible sense of loss. A sense of a life not fully lived.
Which had brought him here, to this plane, with this woman young enough to be his daughter.
The Gulfstream banked and Town heard a double chime and he clicked his seatbelt closed and stared out the window as the plane swooped down toward another desert land.
TEN
When Faisal “Freddy” al-Dahabi stepped up into the SUV outside Le Meridian Hotel on Queen Nour Street in Amman Kip Littlefield knew that the Catherine Finch offer was the fruit of Operation Timber Sycamore. The CIA, Saudi Arabian and Jordanian ménage à trois that provided lethal assistance to Syrian rebels bent on deposing Bashar al-Assad.
A colonel in the Mukhabarat, the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate, Dahabi was tall, handsome, urbane, an Oxford polo blue who had once played for his country. He wore a Savile Row suit way above his pay grade, had his hair cut in Paris and exuded an exclusive fragrance, something citrus with just a tinge of spice.
“Freddy, why didn’t you tell me it was you?” Littlefield said as the SUV took off, the two close protection operatives up-front scanning the road for threats. “Why all the cloak and dagger? Digital disappearing ink and all that?”
The colonel laughed. “Well, this isn’t a shipment of AKs and a couple of RPGs, now is it, Kip?”
“No. No it’s not.”
Dahabi ran a lucrative underground business stealing and trading weapons purchased by the CIA and the Saudis (frequently from Kip and his associates) when they were brought to Jordan, ostensibly destined for the Syrian rebels. Kip had partnered him on a few deals, buying back weapons for a fraction of the price and selling them on again.
Money, as Freddy al-Dahabi would say, for bloody jam.
And if those stolen weapons sometimes landed in the hot little hands of Islamic State Littlefield relished the irony and pocketed the money and lost no sleep.
“So, Catherine Finch is alive?” Littlefield said.
“Yes. As you saw.”
“How? How the heck did she take a Hellfire down her throat and live?”
Dahabi shrugged. “Just bloody lucky, I suppose. I don’t have all the details. My contacts aren’t exactly loquaciou
s.”
“Who are they?”
The Jordanian flicked a hand as if he were swatting a fly. “A rogue faction within Islamic State. Opportunists after a little personal enrichment. My sense is that they’re foreigners, Chechens or some other Northeast Caucasians most likely, who have grown disenchanted with the caliphate.”
“Do you know where they have her?” Littlefield said.
“No. They have not furnished GPS coordinates.”
“Why you?”
“Because they understand that I enjoy the confidence of men like yourself,” Dahabi said.
“Do you have exclusivity?”
“I’d love to say yes, but who knows with these buggers? My sense is there are a few bidders.”
“Have you approached anybody else?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me, Freddy.”
“Cross my heart, Kip, you’re my one and only. I know your pockets are deep. Why go elsewhere?”
“How much do they want?”
“They haven’t revealed an opening bid as yet,” the colonel said.
“Tell them I’ll better anything they’re offered.”
“No ceiling?”
“No ceiling.”
As they drew abreast of the Amman Citadel Littlefield signaled the driver to stop and Dahabi cracked his door, allowing in the tinderbox heat.
“I want her, Freddy,” Littlefield said.
The Jordanian stepped down into the scorching brightness, framed for a moment by the ruined pillars of the Temple of Hercules.
“Of course you do, Kip,” Dahabi said. “And have her you shall.”
ELEVEN
A blank mud wall of a house rising from the desert dust. Brown on brown. Wind whipping the frayed strips of yellow plastic on the roof with a sound like frantic bird wings. A running shadow falling on the wall, black as paint: a helmeted figure, rifle extended.
Boots on gravel. Rapid breath. Another gunman running, weapon ready. A corner turned. A door, wooden, ill-made, startlingly blue against the brown and beside it one small window.
A rifle muzzle javelining forward and smashing the window and raking the interior with fire. A whip pan to the door and a shout—American—“Ready?” and a man raising a boot and kicking the door off its hinges and rushing in, yelling, “Down! Down!”
Six men crowding into the cramped, dusty space. The glimpse of a ceiling, corrugated sheet metal and cardboard and the remains of a meal trampled on a beaten-earth floor.
Flat slaps of gunshots.
Rushing along a short corridor into another room. Sparks. Muzzle flashes. Bursts of gunfire. Ejected rounds flying from automatic weapons.
Shouting. Firing. A bearded man dead on the floor. A second man, cradling an AK47—dead.
Another door kicked down and a dark room pierced by the narrow beam of a weapon-mounted tactical light. The beam sweeping and finding the blonde woman, bound, blinking, huddled in the corner.
Pete Town, sitting in the passenger seat of a Toyota Land Cruiser parked a little way from the house, a portable video monitor in his lap, watched the live feed from the helmet camera.
He turned to the big, bearded American who leaned into the open door of the vehicle, dressed like the others in jeans and boots.
“We need to go again,” Town said.
The big man shouted, “Okay, reset!”
The six gunmen with long hair, beards and sunglasses, their weapons held with journeyman casualness, emerged from the house.
The man with the camera mounted on his helmet walked over, weapons rattling, blinking away dust, and said to Town, “You got notes?”
The big guy snorted and Town, too, despite the circumstances, couldn’t but find this funny.
He swallowed his laugh and said, “You’ve got to hang back maybe half a second. When you went into the first room I saw that the point man was firing into a corpse.”
“Okay,” the man in the helmet said, “got it.”
Town climbed down from the vehicle, wincing as his bad leg ached.
“Give me a moment to talk to the woman,” he said.
He limped across to the front door, passing the men who stood in a huddle, two of them smoking, the others reloading their weapons and looking out at the nothing that was north eastern Syria.
Town entered the hovel and scuffed through the meal—a mush of chickpeas and pita bread. The handiwork of the Syrian gofer, a pimply youth in a Jay-Z T-shirt and sweats, thin as a kebab skewer, who crouched in the shade of an outside wall, watching expressionlessly.
Town stepped over the first dead man, his body torn by assault rifle fire, and passed the second man who had taken rounds to the head. These men (who they were and where they had come from he did not know) had been brought in on the back of the Land Cruiser an hour ago.
“Pre-killed,” the big man had said laconically when he’d dropped the tailgate to reveal the corpses.
Town entered the last room and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Kirby Chance was in the corner, head bandaged, hunched against the wall.
“You okay?” he said.
“Yes.”
“We need to do it one more time. A technical thing, not you. You were great. You looked terrified.”
“I am terrified,” she said.
“It’s almost over,” Town said and walked out again into the wind and the glare and he crossed to the big man and nodded and said, “When you’re ready.”
The gunmen regrouped and then took the house again.
Town sat with the monitor in his lap and watched and this time it was perfect.
“Got it,” he told the big man. “I just need them to carry her out and then we’re done.”
He watched as the man with the helmet cam trailed two others who carried Kirby Chance from the house, silhouetted against the searing light, her bare feet scuffing the dirt, her head hanging.
When Town said he was satisfied Kirby stood and the men retreated from her and went and huddled together, turning their backs on Town, as if distancing themselves from something shameful.
Town walked over to Kirby and gave her a bottle of water. He gestured to where the Syrian kid was crouched and said, “Go sit over there out of the wind. We’re done.”
“Now we go back to Turkey?” she asked.
He looked at her and hated himself as he said, “Yes, now we go back to Turkey.”
Town returned to the Land Cruiser and sat up front with the big man. The two of them used the iPad to select the clips that told the story of the storming of the house and the removal of the injured woman.
The big man attached the clips to an email and Town himself hit send, dispatching the footage to Paul Golding who waited in a little fortress in southern Turkey, surrounded by media, ready to toss the video of the rescue of Catherine Finch into the insatiable maw of the twenty-four-hour news cycle.
TWELVE
“Ma’am?”
Ann Town opened her eyes and saw the lean man, Jim, standing in the doorway, backlit by a shaft of morning sunlight.
“Yes?”
“Just checking that you’re okay.”
“I’m okay.”
He nodded. “There’s some soup down in the kitchen.”
“Thanks, but no,” she said.
“Okay.” He turned and went away.
Sitting up, getting the blood flowing into her limbs, Ann realized she was starving.
Walking down the stairs, avoiding the broken banister, she found Jim sitting alone at the kitchen table. A scene of warrior domesticity. A submachine gun lying on the table beside a plate of sliced bread. He was eating soup from a bowl. It smelled like Campbell’s tomato, something she hadn’t eaten since she was a child.
He stood.
“Please,” she said, waving a hand, and he sat. “That soup still on offer?”
“Sure, ma’am,” he said and pushed a pot and a bowl across to her.
She helped herself. “You don’t need to call me ma
’am.”
“Ah, but I do.”
“Nobody’s going to fire you if you call me Ann.”
“It’s not that.”
Ann looked at him as she took a mouthful of the soup that tasted better than anything she’d eaten in a very long time and said, “What is it then?” He shrugged and she said, “Okay, I think I get it. It’s to keep a distance, an emotional remove, right? In case the shit hits the fan?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
“I understand. I don’t want to compare what I do to what you do, but I was embedding myself a long time before the word was coined. With soldiers. With refugees. With comedians. And I had to make sure I got close enough to get good pictures but not so close that I’d lose my edge, get sloppy. Get sentimental.”
He nodded again as he ate. “You know, I had one of your photographs stuck up on my bedroom wall when I was a kid.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, that ballerina with the bleeding feet.” She gaped at him and he laughed. “You were expecting me to say maybe one of your pics of Marines or even John Belushi getting wasted?”
“Yes. Yes, I was. I’m sorry if that’s profiling you.”
“Hey, it’s cool.”
She thought of the photograph, taken just before the Soviet Union had disintegrated, Arkady pulling strings to get her special access at the Bolshoi. She’d found the dancer, little more than a child, sitting in her leotard and tights in an empty rehearsal room, slippers off, feet with their hammertoes, black nails and purple flesh bleeding onto the wooden floor. As Ann had taken the picture she’d known that it would be one of her best. Newsweek had bought it and it had won her a slew of awards.
“A boy with that photograph? Weren’t you teased?” she asked Jim.
“Oh, hell, you’ll never know.” He laughed. “But I’ve always been able to look after myself. Always punched above my weight. And the picture of that little girl, I dunno, it just kinda spoke to me. About real toughness.”
“She was tough okay.”
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know.”
He nodded and they sat awhile, just the clinking of their spoons against the china breaking the silence.
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