Midnight Empire (15 page)

‘The missiles.'

‘The missiles are going east, not west. They're not meant for seven forty-sevens but for us. The war.'

‘Abu Ja'far.'

‘Having worked the situation to his best advantage, he is turning his gun our way.'

Wolfe said, ‘I think this is something we should be discussing with Raul.'

‘I think it's something Raul should have been discussing with us.'

‘How embarrassing is this?'

‘Funding a Taliban spy.'

‘I'd call it an error of judgement.'

‘The enemy of my enemy.'

‘What about Abu Yamin?'

‘I'll look it up,' Gray said, ‘but you know what I'm going to find.'

‘“Came to al-Qaeda through the Taliban,”' Wolfe said.

‘That or he's a more recent convert.'

‘Do you think he knows about it, Abu Ja'far's connection to us?'

Gray thought about this. ‘In that part of the world, I don't think I'd tell anyone, would you?'

Cold air ripped through the car on the highway yet Daniel kept the windows down, felt numb. The roads all the way to the Strip were deserted. He hardly noticed. Thinking about Dupont and the explosion and what Gray had just said, he forgot to watch for pursuing cars.

When he stopped at the intersection of Spring Mountain Road and the Boulevard, a mob of tourists crossed in front. They were drunk and rollicking. He paid little attention until something banged across his windshield. He startled and the group jeered. A beer bottle?

The traffic signals changed and he threw the car angrily into the turn, inches from where they stood on the kerb. His wheels squealed and he heard the gang shout. There was another violent thud, something bouncing off his chassis, and this time he saw what they were throwing—plastic bottles full of water. The night had been hot, and the street vendors always did a good trade.

At the Nexus, Ania was home. She had bought pizza and an Australian shiraz she'd found in a liquor store up on Fremont Street, home of the first casinos and many vanished places, the Horseshoe, the Frontier Club, the Apache Hotel; there were only dead games there on Fremont, at Binion's and the Golden Nugget.

She told Daniel she was now convinced that her husband was in Vegas. From a payphone, she'd called his cell phone and he'd answered. She'd then called the house on Fletcher Street and no one was home.

They sat on the sofa and looked at the city's sea of lights. Ania asked him what was wrong.

He looked at her. ‘Someone died today,' he said.

‘Oh,' she said. ‘Where?'

‘Not here. Over there.'

‘But you knew him?'

‘Of course I did.'

Ania said nothing. He realised he'd snapped at her. She looked away. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘It's just nobody saw it coming.'

‘Alright,' she said, reaching for the wine. ‘But you must have expected something like this. Isn't it part of the game we have chosen to play?'

‘We?'

‘We,' she said, ‘royally meaning
you
.' She filled her glass.

‘Though I suppose now I am a player also, hiding out here as I am.'

A suburban street in North Vegas, rocky mountains in the distance. Peach's home was small and cream-coloured. A satellite dish sat on the roof.

Peach had seen Daniel's car and was waiting on the doorstep. They went inside to the kitchen. Peach began to make coffee.

‘So after I've been asking for more than a year, my ex-wife finally wants to send my boy over to visit me,' said Peach. ‘Know why? Because she wants to take a week's vacation to some place she won't say.'

‘Oh.'

‘But can I have Jared visit now?'

‘No, you can't.'

‘Fuck right I can't. Can't bring a kid into the zone. So instead I say that I'll visit them. I'll get four days' leave, just give me time to go to war with unit command. But guess again, jerk, she's had my restraining order extended. This is a bitch that does not miss.'

One of the neighbours had a radio on, not quite tuned, static rising through the sound. Peach waved a packet of sugar. Daniel shook his head.

‘So, you want this gun?'

There was a moment of silence. Daniel said, ‘Is . . . is that alright?'

Peach slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You're a soldier, aren't you?'

‘I'll get a permit.'

‘They won't give you one.' Peach smiled. ‘Just don't carry on base. Don't take it anywhere dumb.'

They went out to Peach's garage. It was full of clutter: paint tins, plywood, a surfboard. His truck was in the centre, a power drill on its roof. Peach stopped to point out something on the dash. ‘Cameras,' he said. ‘Two forward, two back. I'm putting a laptop in. Contractor I know works in plate recognition, police software. We're working it to watch for repeat numbers. People following. Anyone who stops to observe.'

Daniel looked inside. Peach wasn't joking. He'd cut the glove box away and screwed a tray in place, wires running to cameras on the dash.

‘I'm going to park this in my street,' Peach said. ‘Start cataloguing plates to build up some data for counter-surveillance.'

Daniel nodded. If the kill squad was real, this was a good idea.

‘Know how to shoot?'

‘Only rifles. A shotgun.'

Peach opened a plastic box and took out a small silver revolver. He opened the cylinder, explained that it was five shot, closed the cylinder and demonstrated the tucked thumb grip.

‘Don't have your finger inside the guard unless you're going to fire,' he said. ‘Use two hands. Feet together, knees bent, head up high. This is a .38 airweight. It's snappy and difficult to aim so lean into the gun to bring it to target. That's hand to the gun, gun in front, sight to the target, one, two, three. Shoot for the centre mass. You'll miss so don't stop shooting until the body is on the ground.' He paused. ‘If you want to, this is a gun that you can pocket holster. The shrouded hammer stops it catching in your clothes. Remember, five shots, and at the end of the fifth shot, run.'

Daniel felt the balance of the weapon in hand. It wasn't cold or heavy. If it didn't look so real it would have felt like a toy.

Peach gave him a small cardboard box with ammunition. ‘A thirty-eight has the stopping power of a lover's whisper but these help—hollow points. You have five. The rest are target rounds from Walmart. My advice is drive up into the hills behind Indian Springs to practise some. You want to draw easy. The biggest danger carrying one of these is managing to shoot yourself.'

The field office of OCHA, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan, sat on Circular Road between the Peshawar Business School and the American Club in the well-to-do area of University Town.

The building was set back from the road behind a garden and lawns. There were walls at each end of the street. The security hired by the UN, the American Club and several other NGOs on the same block was the bugbear of the local residents, all of whom were members of the Peshawari elite. First, no permit to block the road had ever been obtained. The concrete blocks initially set down had been incrementally replaced by ones that were larger and higher, and they now blocked not only movement but the view. Second, the men who staffed the barricades were considered undesirable. The residents worried about their presence in the neighbourhood, the intimacy with which they were able to observe them. There were rumours, in fact, of a criminal element, and some families had gone as far as to recruit their own security against the street guards.

But whatever their standing, the existence of the blockade did prevent strange cars from passing along the street. And it did save lives: because it could not be driven in, the bomb that subsequently went off in the OCHA did so in the mailroom, a room that had been installed at the far end of the furthest wing in case of just such an event. The girl ‘in the room with the explosion' (the phrase used by the local police commander) was Ayesha Jinnah, a nineteen-year-old economics student at the nearby University of Peshawar. Jinnah was performing an internship with a UN program to empower women. While the local investigators presumed she had made the mistake of opening the package, in fact the detonation that blew out the windows, collapsed the ceiling and started a fire was timed. Knowledge of this particular aspect of Jinnah's bad luck was confined to Creech Air Force Base: Raul visited the scene as soon as he arrived in Pakistan and concluded that the damage to the building was in exact proportion to that their own team had estimated was required to drop a light plane from the sky. The bomb was almost certainly the one they'd handed to Abu Ja'far.

For Gray and Wolfe, this was too much. Two bombings in as many days, the first killing a CIA officer and their friend, the second making use of explosives the agency had let wild. They put Abu Ja'far top twenty in the JPEL list, promoted Abu Yamin on the same, and alerted several friendly intelligence agencies (mentioning strictly nothing to the ISI).

When Raul rang to say he'd just seen John Wright check in at the Pearl, Wolfe winced and Gray said, ‘Fuck.' Daniel didn't ask but when he got home to the loft he performed an internet search. John Wright was a war correspondent, a journalist for
The Guardian
and a blogger for
World Spectator
. He was a cofounder of DemocratikV, a video site broadcasting the work of citizen journalists. He'd won a swag of awards; covered every European and Middle Eastern conflict in the last decade, as well as Sudan and East Timor. He wore sunglasses and was said to have a left-wing bias. American commentators had called him an anarchist. A committee had been founded with the aim of having him banned from Israel. In Baghdad, his driver had been kidnapped and was later found dead, with terrible burns on his torso, but he hadn't given up Wright's address. The Russians hated him. Citing visa violations, the Indonesians had deported him from Aceh after a short period in jail.

Daniel watched clips on DemocratikV: Wright interviewing Khalid Mishal from Hamas, the question of peace—was it wanted; Wright interviewing Donald Rumsfeld, the issue of torture and the crimes of semantics; Wright interviewed by someone else, discussing journalistic detachment and human response—the problem of standing by observing when maybe you should get involved. He was the author of three books, including a treatise on the psychology of killing. He'd been interviewed with Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk. He spoke matter-of-factly, his voice gravelly, and he had contacts all over the world.

What was he doing in Peshawar? Reporting on the car bombing probably, and now surely the OCHA explosion too. Daniel saw the danger for the CIA, the damage that would be done if the fact that the man behind the killings was formerly their agent became public. But it also occurred to him that if that happened, it would be the end of Abu Ja'far. Wouldn't his men turn on him, a US mole? Wouldn't they rip him limb from limb? And if not his Taliban friends then someone else in the region: al-Qaeda or a band or brethren of unaffiliated extremists, take your pick.

Really, if the CIA was of a mind to end this quickly, couldn't they just publish the truth?

The stars were obscured by cloud and he was standing in the nowhere zone by the control stations, considering the idea of sleeping in one of the hot beds, when Ania called. She was leaving Binion's in a hurry. She'd just witnessed her husband on the far side of the gambling floor.

‘Where are you?' said Daniel. ‘Do you see him now?'

‘It was him, I guarantee it. It was a fair distance and he wasn't facing me but why would you, following a woman around.'

‘Where are you?'

‘Downtown.'

‘I'll come and get you.'

‘Yes.'

‘Where are you?' he repeated ‘Just now I am walking past the Glitter Gulch.'

‘Which way is that?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘Anywhere that is safe to stand.'

‘Stay on the phone.'

‘Yes.'

He ran for his car, got in and sped to the gate, waited for the attendant to raise the boom.

She kept him updated as he drove: ‘I am walking past the La Bayou.

‘I am across from Mermaid's Casino.

‘I don't see him. I am going past the Starbucks and it is closed.'

He had her on speaker, the phone resting on the passenger seat. He was five minutes along the I95 when she cut out. Calmly, he waited thirty seconds to see if she would ring back. His call then went to voicemail. He redialled five or six times but got the same.

He tried not to be too concerned. It would only be her battery, she was terrible at keeping it charged. She'd find another phone and call him, and by that time he'd almost be there.

But when he reached downtown, she still hadn't called. He jogged up to Fremont having parked on 1st. The lights and screens of the Experience were off. The casinos were open and people were around but he felt a definite edge in the air, a wanting. It took no time for someone to approach him. ‘I'm not trying to walk up on you,' said the man. Daniel started to walk away.

‘Hey, I said I'm not trying to walk up on you.'

‘It's alright,' Daniel said.

The guy didn't bother to follow him.

He found the Mermaid then the Starbucks. Beyond them lay Fitzgeralds and the El Cortez. In the former was a small crowd. He paced around the slots then went upstairs to the tables. They were empty. The El Cortez was less populated but felt larger with its fewer machines. He performed a fast lap but she was nowhere to be seen.

‘A woman didn't just come in?'

The guard was sitting by the door, wearing a blue polo shirt with a stitched-on badge. ‘I could ask you what she looks like,' he said. ‘But no matter what, I'd tell you no.'

Past the El Cortez was the end of the flashing lights. He headed back towards Binion's. Opposite, the Golden Nugget felt safe. He expected to see her sitting at the sports betting. He thought he might find her by the fish tank with the sharks. At the club upstairs they wanted ten dollars entry.