Midnight Empire (16 page)

‘Did a woman just come in?'

‘Plenty.'

She wasn't one of the five at the bar.

He went back downstairs, crossed the street. He wasn't exactly worried—surely she was here somewhere. If her husband had caught up with her, was it so naive to think that someone would have helped her when she screamed?

She was not at Binion's. She was not at the Plaza or the Fremont. At the Golden Gate there was an audience for the girls who danced behind the blackjack tables but Ania wasn't there.

He stood out on the street and looked along it. There was a compact street sweeper. A woman called to him from the Glitter Gulch. He jogged a little way up 3rd Street then up 4th. He went to each of the casinos a second time.

Eventually he decided that she simply wasn't anywhere downtown. Could she have been kidnapped? It wasn't impossible but he didn't feel it. Not knowing what else to do, he returned to his car and drove to the Nexus.

‘This kid, he is showing a pistol to a woman. What is that? It is fucking crazy!'

It turned out that Ania had got aboard the Deuce line. The bus had been pulling up as her phone expired and it seemed a good idea, if only to get out of there. Except, distracted by the need to watch for her pursuer, she'd sat down beside two young boys (she wanted to say ‘gangbangers' though she wasn't sure of the term), and she happened to look at them absentmindedly, and because
looking
is similar to calling someone's mother a whore, they'd taken exception to this. The one of them did not drop his gaze for an entire stop while the other dipped his pants to show a gun he was carrying, Mexican style or whatever it's called, and she had to stare straight ahead and worry that she might be shot, hoping despite all evidence that he is not so dumb he wouldn't realise there are cameras on the bus and then not so unthinking as to realise his picture would be everywhere after the act, sending him to the electric chair. Which after she was done being afraid made her furious. First a husband following her to Vegas and now threats born of the place itself.

‘I mean this is stark raving. It is some kind of elemental psychosis. We must ask what kind of country is it in which this event takes place.'

‘I was worried about you.'

‘It's a malfunction of what exactly? I don't want to say empathy because it is something deeper than that.'

‘I didn't think he'd gotten to you, but what if he had?'

They were standing in the kitchen that was lit by a cool morning light. ‘I am sorry to make you run around,' she said, taking his hand. ‘I will stay on the Strip now. The big places where it's safer.'

He didn't realise what the night had taken out of him. He'd not been able to fall asleep for a long time and the few hours he did manage were interrupted. At Creech everything felt beyond him. He sat in the mess with a cup of coffee.

‘What's up with you?' said Peach.

Daniel looked at him.

‘I mean, you look vacant,' said Peach. ‘Fucking white.'

‘Do I?' Daniel paused. There was no way he was going to tell Peach about Ania. ‘Cards,' he explained.

‘Cards?'

‘Yeah.'

‘I haven't played in months. I like to think maybe I've quit it, but I know that's not true. I'm on hiatus at best.'

‘That's a good idea.'

‘You have to be right in the mind. If you're not right, you're going to lose. ' ‘Yeah.'

‘Maybe you should take some time out too, if you're pulling all-nighters. I mean, if you turn up here looking too much like a wreck it's noticed.'

Daniel said nothing.

Peach said, ‘That's about comradeship. That's about we have to trust each other with our lives.'

Later, with the day's flight airborne, Daniel went outside to take a break and Gray followed. He wanted to know how Daniel was, whether everything was alright.

‘You look distant,' he said. ‘Today we walk past you and it's hard to know whether or not you're here.'

Daniel was surprised. He didn't like the idea that he might be talked about like that, by the others, when he wasn't there. ‘I'm fine,' he explained. ‘A late night.' He realised that Gray might take this to mean he'd been drinking. He added, ‘An argument with my girlfriend in Australia. We've broken up.'

Gray looked at him. ‘Okay,' he said. ‘Well, I'd give you buck up and all of that. I'd also remind you that, like it or not, you happen to be at war.'

Daniel wasn't sure what Gray meant. That he should watch himself more carefully? That he was letting the team down? They stood in the sunlight and Daniel decided that he didn't care. If he'd been the topic of a discussion, he resented it. But if people were dying or endangering one another, it had stuff-all to do with him. Gray could shove it. If the alertness of your encryption operator was your primary concern, you needed your priorities set straight.

John Wright had discovered not only Dupont's identity but also the fact that he was CIA. Raul was not pleased. The information had come from the local police who'd found it out God knew how, maybe from the ISI.

Raul tried to explain to the Peshawar police investigators that Dupont was a regular diplomat, exactly like himself, and told them not to talk to journalists—they will only write bad things about you and blasphemies concerning Pakistan.

For his part, John Wright was yet to ask for an interview with the US consulate. Raul considered this a bad sign: the kind of delay that occurs when you are putting together a case.

‘He won't manage it,' said Gray. ‘What else from the police?'

‘The name of our young martyr. Asif Marwat. Seventeen years of age.'

‘Have you checked in at his home?'

‘Better. His brother has given the police the address of a three-storeyed house he was visiting, mixing with a madrassa of radical types.'

They watched over it late that morning, a three-storeyed house on the edge of the old city, clearly more meeting place than private residence, men and boys busily coming and going, arriving in ones and twos, departing in waves. It was down a pot-holed road. A thin, walled area at the front. Large iron gates that were open.

Hours passed. They were waiting for what? Looking for what? Daniel began to feel this was stupid. He almost said so out loud. He thought about Ayesha Jinnah. The unfairness of her death grated.

It was just after 2 p.m. in theatre when it happened—the car, the maroon Toyota, suddenly on the move. Its GPS tracker showed that it was in the city's south. Ellis made to plot a course but Gray quietly told him to wait. He was right too. They watched on the map as the Toyota snaked its way towards them and after fifteen minutes it was bumping slowly along the pot-holed road. When it stopped outside the house, Daniel looked at Gray for a sign of satisfaction at these dots connecting, but the only thing on the man's face was dead concentration. Four men came out to the car; once they were inside, it drove off. The silence in the room seemed to become more pure, deeper, as they followed it. Peshawar petered out slowly, the city's multitudes falling away until they saw just the car and the road. The route it took was slightly different to that it had taken before. It used back roads, dirt channels. It was a longer path but there was no doubting the destination, not from above, and once the GPS tracker's range allowed it, Gray ordered them forward to the farmhouse, placing his finger on the map.

At the compound there seemed to be no one about, but figures were moving in the nearby fields. Daniel had no idea what these people might be doing. He watched them work while the others watched the walls and the barren yard. For a moment, he thought he saw one of them looking up. He checked their altitude on the console. Moore had them as high as possible, the operating ceiling.

When the car arrived, a lone man emerged from the house to open the gate. It drove into the yard and stopped. The people inside it did not get out.

Daniel looked at the firing controls. They were carrying a half complement: four hellfires and a pair of Paveway IIs.

So quiet in the station now they could hear themselves breathing. That and the equipment hum, the certain soundlessness of powered electronics.

Now the men got out. There was nobody they recognised. Ellis adjusted the primary camera, the forward sight. There was the compound and the yard; the green, faraway light and the workers in the fields.

The men had gathered at the back of the car. Now they opened the boot and peered in. The drone was too high and out of position; it wasn't possible to see inside. Eventually, they removed what looked like long gas cylinders, the type used for welding. These were carried to the corner of the yard and placed under a shelter. Everyone in the station was certain they were looking at missiles.

Then a boy came out of one of the buildings in the compound, a tiny, all-white figure, possibly the same boy who'd opened the gate the first time they'd come here. The men from the Toyota gathered around the boy and followed him inside, into the biggest of the structures.

The buildings reminded Daniel of Tarnak Farms and suddenly he found himself studying them for window gaps. He didn't know why but he felt certain that Abu Yamin and Abu Ja'far were in that house.

Silence, but he expected the order to come. He didn't dare, now, to look at Gray. Everyone was glued to the screens but it was as if the screens themselves did not exist.

Gray was on his feet. Daniel could hear the low creak of the floor as he shifted his weight. They watched. Nothing happened for an hour. It felt like an age. A few children arrived from the fields and went inside.

Finally, men came out of the building. A group of them went towards the car but one held back. It was Abu Yamin.

Nobody spoke. There was no need. The height was spot on. After this long hunt, the act of recognition was a physical, blood-felt response. This was the goal: a man on a landscape, a solitary figure and the long, open sky.

Now Daniel looked at Gray. The agent had crept forward; in his right hand was a phone, his thumb on the middle button.

Daniel had seen many hellfires used but he'd never seen a Paveway. He knew they appealed to the operators because of the way they flew: to correct their flight the missiles adjusted their fins fully—completely one way then completely the other—and the result was a tightening, edge-of-control sine wave of collapsing amplitude. It looked wholly insane but it hit every time.

Abu Yamin still standing. Shadows dropping from the compound's walls. The others moving for the car. Gray at Daniel's shoulder, first sending then receiving a message on his phone.

For a long minute it seemed they would do it. Daniel's neck felt clammy and on Ellis's brow was a film of sweat.

No one said anything.

The Toyota was leaving. Daniel looked at Gray, wondering what they would do about the car, whether they would let it go. Abu Yamin had not moved. Daniel thought of the hundreds of hours of flight, the thousand hours of effort that had conjured this moment. In one way, it was an incredible, near-to-impossible feat. In another, it had not been difficult at all.

‘Arm,' said Gray.

Abu Yamin was moving now, going inside the largest of the buildings, adobe walls, two window gaps that Daniel could see. From outside the control station came a rumbling and fade, the staging noise of a jet fighter over the desert, headed for Nellis.

The car had driven off.

‘Near gap,' said Gray.

It felt a long while before he fired. During that time, nobody left the house nor entered it. Daniel wanted to ask: ‘Did anyone see those kids come out?'

The Paveway flew low, adjusted high, went low again then seemed to be travelling flat when it entered the window; you almost expected it to go straight through and out the other side.

The explosion began with a white flash. Black clouds that appeared in an instant, billowing outwards, a great wind and dust in all directions, sparks everywhere, the whole compound engulfed; it took an age for the dust to clear enough to see the thing blown apart. The building they'd hit was gone. Elsewhere, walls had collapsed along with the roofs above them. It was all debris and raw earth and flames. The figures in the fields came running, stopped, stood, rushed forward, stopped, threw their hands up, stood, looked everywhere and to the skies. Smoke floated across the road, across other fields, through the irrigation channels between crops. The infra-red camera showed pure white. Daniel wanted to see the children, where were they? The people in the fields came no closer. The biggest fire was in the corner of the yard, walls aflame, presumably the missiles. Daniel wanted to hear it, the noise of it, the screams. A black bird crossed their vision, a crow. He looked on. The people in the fields looked on. He kept hoping to see them, the children. Where were they?

10

F
inally, it rained. Thick pellets that carried the sound of stones. The sky a cathedral of mist and dark cloud. The smell of moisture stronger than Daniel had ever smelled.

Men came out to the apron to stand in the rain. Some whooped and others roared. An operator ran the length of the near runway, sprinting in his boots with his arms for wings. People clapped. There was a collective sense of the need for redemption, for natural event. The landscape was left mottled and the dust splashed.

It was twenty-four hours after the strike and there was a feeling of the sky around them conquered and endless. They breathed the far air and felt a sense of purpose. They'd reached over the horizon and they'd got Abu Yamin and the feeling was ancient and fulfilling.

They wondered, of course, what the strike meant for Abu Ja'far. They might have waited longer at the farm to find out whether he too was there, but after their experience in Ma'rib's mountains, the possibility of tunnels or another of the myriad arts of escape, there could be no playing percentages. How would they come to know whether the strike had killed him? If it hadn't what would he do now?