Eden in Winter (15 page)

The Pakistani studied Adam further, his eyes glinting with resentment and a certain sour humour. At length, he said, ‘I will give this new partnership a try. I only hope that, whoever you are, your skill matches your nerve.’

With this, Adam acquired another agent, at considerable risk to himself. Now, driving with Hamid to meet the colonel, Adam reflected that, on Martha’s Vineyard, he had effectively run his father as his agent, jeopardizing Jack and putting himself at risk to protect his brother, Teddy. He still did not know whether George Hanley or Amanda Ferris might unravel his machinations. In which case, his own country would be no sanctuary from danger.

Dismissing the thought, Adam returned to the dangers of the present. ‘See anything?’ he asked Hamid. The translator merely shrugged. Anyone they might spot was likely harmless; their enemies were skilled at staying invisible.

At the bottom of a hill, they drove through a wadi and back up a slope toward a walled compound, the would-be clinic. In due time, a doctor would be located, supplies brought in, and word put out that the Americans offered medical assistance to Afghans. Until then, the colonel had suggested that this was a good place to meet – easy to secure, with a commanding view of the area and the road traversing it. On this basis, at least, Adam could not fault his reasoning.

Hamid drove them through the narrow gate of the compound and spun the Jeep around, parking it just to the right of the gate. Then they began scouring the rooms inside to ensure no one was there. Opening each door, Adam felt the tension in his shoulders.

No enemies awaited them. Meeting Adam back in the courtyard, Hamid raised his eyebrows and shrugged. They walked to the entryway, and saw a group of shepherds moving their flock in the distance. Otherwise, the harsh terrain showed nothing.

Edgy, the two men watched and waited, chatting absently about Hamid’s family. After a time, they saw an S.U.V. kicking up dust in the wadi. Silent, Adam watched it close the distance to the compound.

Abruptly, the S.U.V. stopped by a mud hut near the road. When the driver got out, Adam recognized one of his agents. As planned, two men unknown to the driver emerged from the hut and got into the S.U.V. – the Pakistani colonel and, apparently, the Afghan he had insisted on bringing. Adam had proposed this tradecraft to prevent the Pakistani’s vehicle from being associated with the clinic. He could only wonder if the Afghan’s information – if real – would justify the risk.

At last, the S.U.V. dropped its passengers inside the compound, and left. Then Hamid closed the heavy door and the four men were alone.

Adam greeted Colonel Rehman with elaborate warmth, then faced the Afghan – Mahmud Hakeem, or so the colonel said. He was a man in his mid-forties, Adam judged, with liquid brown eyes and a seamed walnut face, more wary than friendly: the face of a survivor in a hard place.

Often with such men, Adam spoke in English, using Hamid as a translator to conceal his language skills. But pretence was useless here – the colonel knew better. In Pashto, Adam said, ‘It is an honour that you have travelled this far to meet with us. We appreciate your willingness to help.’

Hakeem simply nodded – whatever life he had led seemed to have cured him of the need for persiflage. Accepting this invitation to directness, Adam said, ‘We need some information from you.’

Phlegmatically, Hakeem responded to Adam’s questions – where he was born; where he lived; how old he was; what he had done in the years before. His answer to the last pricked Adam’s nerve ends: as a young man, Hakeem had worked for the Afghan army intelligence, which meant that he had reported to the Russians. This made him no friend to Americans or, contradictorily, to many Afghan leaders of the Taliban, who had worked with the C.I.A. to drive the Russians from their country. Adam’s one certainty was that he was not meeting with an innocent. But then he already knew that – the man was keeping company with Colonel Rehman.

As the dialogue continued, the Pakistani watched Adam keenly. Since the Russians left, Hakeem told him, he had settled down with a family of five boys and two girls, all of whom lived with him across the border with Pakistan. He owned a large truck; his business was delivering food and supplies throughout the border areas. But, with so many mouths to feed, he could always use extra money. Adam surmised that he was already smuggling weapons for the colonel.

At the end of Hakeem’s account, Adam nodded politely, arranging his features in an expression of doubt. ‘How would
you feel about working with America after working with the Russians?’

Hakeem shrugged. ‘The past is the past.’

‘Your home village,’ Adam said abruptly, ‘is in an area known to harbour Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Have you seen them there?’

The Afghan seemed to measure his words. ‘Al Qaeda, yes – Arabs from outside Pakistan and Afghanistan. But they don’t stay in the village.’

‘Where do they sleep at night?’

Again, the Afghan weighed his answer. ‘I only know the general area.’

‘Are there Taliban in that area?’

Hakeem hesitated. ‘Yes.’

Adam went to his Jeep, taking out a notepad and pen. ‘Draw me a map of your town, and the area where Al Qaeda and the Taliban hide.’

Hakeem took the pad and pen and, frowning, began to draw. As he did, Adam felt the colonel watching him, no doubt confirmed in his suspicion that Adam was hunting the Taliban for the C.I.A. For his part, Adam felt sure that Hakeem was the Pakistani’s cut-out: the colonel meant to use him as a go-between – limiting his contacts with Adam and therefore his own risk – while taking more money from the Americans. It was Adam’s job to manipulate them both, ever alert to the chance that he was being manipulated.

‘Who is helping Al Qaeda in your village?’ Adam asked.

The Afghan did not look up. ‘A man named Salim.’

Adam took the proffered map, primitive but clear enough. ‘Can you write out directions to where Al Qaeda and the Taliban are?’

Hakeem smiled faintly. ‘With all your satellites and electronics, can’t you do this already? Why rely on my humble drawings?’

Adam’s own smile did not reach his eyes. ‘I appreciate humour. But we are very serious about this.’

At once the man’s expression changed. ‘And I am serious about making money. For that, I will help you find the men you seek to kill. But the rewards must equal the risk.’

Curtly, Adam nodded. ‘If your information is good, they will.’

In a crabbed hand, the man wrote out directions, describing the terrain between his village and the place where, in his telling, Al Qaeda and the Taliban had taken refuge. Handing back the notepad, the Afghan glanced at Colonel Rehman.

‘There is something else,’ the colonel told Adam tersely.

Silent, Adam turned back to the Afghan. In a softer tone, Hakeem enquired, ‘Is there an American soldier missing?’

Adam felt himself tense. Two years before, an American private, Bowe Bergdahl, had become the only American P.O.W. of the Afghan war. To impress on Adam the importance of finding this single American soldier, his case officer had shown him the videos provided by the Taliban. In the first, Bergdahl looked young and frightened; the later videos traced his emotional deterioration. When the Taliban had demanded one million dollars and the release of Taliban prisoners in exchange for Bergdahl’s life, the Pentagon had determined to free him by other means. Now the P.O.W.’s fate might be in Adam’s hands – unless, of course, this was an elaborate ploy.

‘We have a soldier missing,’ Adam replied evenly. ‘You know that. What else do you know?’

Again, the Afghan glanced at Colonel Rehman. ‘I was bringing supplies to a village in Pakistan near the border, closer to where I believe Al Qaeda and the Taliban have taken refuge. While I was there, I overheard two men guarding a building, one asking the other if they were moving the American. From how they acted, the man they spoke of was inside. That’s all I know.’

‘When was this?’

‘Perhaps a week ago.’

Adam handed back the pad and pen. ‘As best you can, draw a map of the village, showing the building where the guards were.’

With a pained expression, the man did so. Studying the drawing, Adam was careful to reveal nothing.

‘We will be in touch with you,’ he told Hakeem, ‘through the colonel. If this information bears fruit, you will certainly be rewarded. But we may need more from you.’

The meeting was over. Facing the Pakistani, Adam said simply, ‘Thank you, Ayub.’

The Pakistani gave him a faint, sardonic smile. ‘What else would I do? We are friends, are we not?’

With this, the two men got in Adam’s Jeep, lying on the floor so that they could not be spotted. Under cover of darkness, Adam and Hamid left the compound and dropped them behind a massive boulder where another car would meet them.

Leaving, Adam asked Hamid, ‘What do you think?’

The translator shrugged his heavy shoulders, gripping the wheel as he looked for rocks captured in their headlights. ‘No point in guessing. You’ll have to test him, and even then you can’t be sure.’

Adam felt an apprehension he could not name. ‘Agreed. But certainty may not matter here. Not this time.’

When they reached the compound, Adam went to his room and called his case officer in Kabul.

‘Tell me about
your
childhood,’ Adam had asked her in an email. ‘I know too much about mine, but nothing about yours.’

Sitting with her laptop as early sunlight brightened her windows, Carla wondered how to answer this, even as she pondered the weight and meaning of her sometimes-painful memories. At length, she resolved simply to begin.

‘My father was Italian – obviously – a policeman in San Francisco. Mom was Irish, and worked as a secretary for the parish. Neither was terribly well educated; both were conservative Catholics, especially my mother, for whom the rituals of the Church were sacred. We lived in the Sunset District, a last stronghold of the city’s middle class, among people whose stucco houses, and beliefs, were much like ours. So it was a given that I, the only child they were able to have, would go to parochial school from beginning to end, before living, they assumed, a life much like theirs.’

Fingers resting on the keyboard, Carla wondered if this seemed too condescending – patronizing her parents from the lofty perch of her precious self-awareness, having failed so completely to manage her own life. There was something arrested in hanging on to the wounds of childhood; after all, her parents had once been children too, scarred by their own parents’ flaws and weaknesses. But Adam had asked, and so, after typing in this qualifier, she continued with her narrative.

‘My father was abusive – physically and verbally. When he drank too much, which was often, he hit my mother for no reason. It was as if Irish whiskey had flipped a switch in his brain that made him erupt in violence. Sometimes he hit me.’ Involuntarily, Carla paused, and realized that she had closed her eyes. ‘I knew that other girls saw their fathers as a source of comfort and security. But early on I felt like Mom and I were living with an enemy who could turn on us at any moment. We were only safe when he was gone. I learned to dread the turning of the doorknob when he came home, never knowing what might follow. I started pulling the covers over my head, as though he might not be able to find me.’

Another memory struck Carla – the night that her father, whiskey on his breath, had gently kissed her forehead. In the wave of gratitude that followed, she had begun to fall asleep, then heard her mother crying out in pain. Now turning to the window, she reminded herself that she was thirty-three years old, pregnant with her own child, gazing out at a green meadow on a bright and peaceful Vineyard morning. ‘Night after night,’ she continued typing, ‘I saw the stoicism with which she accepted this as her fate. And so, like my mother, I learned to keep my father’s secret.’

She had also learned, Carla now understood, to block out the most searing pictures. But nothing could erase the damage to her own self-image. ‘As children will,’ she told Adam, ‘I wondered if this was my punishment for being a bad person – as though God knew that I fantasized that another bad person, some criminal, would shoot my father dead in the streets. But every night he kept coming through our door.

‘The night I begged him not to hit my mother, he whipped my bare legs with a belt. She stood between us, begging him to stop. Instead of staying with her, like a coward I ran to my room, crying from pain and fear. Then my mother came to me, one eye swollen from the beating she’d taken for me, and put ointment on my legs. “It’s the drink,” she whispered. “Tomorrow he’ll feel sorry.”

‘Falling asleep, I tried to forget the despair I heard in her voice. But the next day, I put on my school uniform, and realized that the other girls could see my bruises. And I was afraid they’d know what happened in our home at night.’

Carla was not ready to explain to him how these hardships had bonded her to Benjamin Blaine, whose own abusive father had scarred and shaped him. Instead she wrote, ‘This email is beginning to sound like a Dickens novel, only way more self-pitying. So instead of all this bathos, I’ll try to explain how this seven-year-old girl came to look at the world.’

Even so, Carla reflected, why should Adam care about the hurt of a lonely child? But he had asked and, despite his self-possession, Adam struck her as a deeply wounded man. Though it made her wary, she cared for him, and she had valued his honesty on the night of the hurricane, a brief window into all he kept locked inside him. The only way to reach him was to be honest in return.

‘To my childish mind,’ she continued, ‘the way Mom and I covered up for my father merged with our religious faith. In my imaginings, “God the Father” was a stern and bearded patriarch whose rules we could never question, enforced by our Father in Rome through the presence of our parish priest. Though Father Riley seemed benign enough, all this male authority was a one-way street. My mother never once imagined confiding in him about the darker secrets of our home.’

Sitting back, Carla touched the swelling of her belly, resolving yet again that her own child would come before any man. Then she felt her thoughts drift to an ironic memory. ‘My first confession was telling,’ she typed as its images fell into place. ‘It was the day before my First Communion, and confession was an absolute prerequisite. I left my mother and walked into the confessional – this hushed, sepia place – filled with dread at my own void, desperately scouring my imagination for some sin to confess, one worthy of this moment. If only I could have seen into my future, I’d have tied up Father Riley for quite some time. But my mind was so blank that I felt myself trembling.