C
HAPTER
6
O
ne of the insurgents raised his Kalashnikov into the air and fired. The villagers recoiled in fear.
“We are fighters for God, and we demand hospitality in your fine village,” he said. “We will need beds and food for all my men.”
Zalmay tried to remain calm. He had nothing incriminating on him, and the memory card was safely tucked away back in the truck. He had a well-rehearsed story about why he was on the road, and he did not look like a Tajik farmer, whom the Taliban, who were almost exclusively of the rival Pashtun ethnicity, would undoubtedly target first. As long as he stayed quiet, he told himself, he would live through this.
“You will stop your sinful music now, and the women will cover up appropriately,” said the leader.
Malang, looking positively triumphant, came forward to greet the man.
“Welcome,
talib
,” he said. The word was the proper singular of Taliban, and meant
student.
Malang continued, “We honor your presence in our simple village.”
Everyone else was too terrified to move, but a few were suppressing looks of indignation. Zalmay looked at Faqeer, who was standing across the square and whose fury was barely checked. He was fuming, and his eyes were wide with mad hatred.
“We claim all the vehicles in this village, along with anything else that might aid us in our fight against the invader.”
Don’t do anything stupid
, Zalmay urged Faqeer in his mind.
Please
. The leader, who had been ambling as he spoke, now stood in front of Faqeer and apparently saw the expression on his face.
“Do you have something to say?” the
talib
demanded.
Faqeer did not answer but managed to restrain his emotion; his face became blank and accepting. The
talib
seemed satisfied that he had cowed Faqeer into submission, and he turned away. But it was a mistake: as soon as his back was turned, Faqeer pulled out a short revolver and shot the man twice in the torso.
Everyone watched in complete silence as the dead man fell to the ground. Faqeer panted, with wide-open, crazy eyes. And then, almost immediately, there was a burst from the AK-47 of a nearby insurgent. Faqeer crumpled to the ground, his final expression of wild anger frozen on his face. One of the villagers, a wizened old woman who had been in the line of fire, fell down as well. She began to wail pitifully. All the villagers and their guests gasped and recoiled, except for Gorbat, who ran to succor her. The assailants raised their weapons to make very clear what would happen if anyone decided to pull a similar stunt.
“Throw him into the fire,” said one of the Taliban with practiced authority, pointing at Faqeer’s body.
Zalmay was shocked. Cremating a body was forbidden, a grievous sin. His heart burned with rage against these thugs. He knew that this was equally intolerable to the villagers—even more so, since their honor would compel them to protect their guests. But they did not move; instead, he saw, their heads hung in shame. Zalmay remembered the bullet holes on the sides of the houses. This village had seen their share of misfortune, and war, apparently, had broken their will.
As his underlings moved to carry out the order, this new leader pulled Malang aside and conferred with him. Malang spoke and then pointed directly at Zalmay.
So much for not attracting too much attention to myself,
he thought
.
The man walked toward him, and Zalmay spoke a quick prayer under his breath.
The man stood in front of him, commanding, “On your knees!”
Zalmay complied, trying to hold steady while clinging to whatever desperate hope he could find.
“You were with the pig that shot our brother?”
Zalmay tried to speak but was frozen, the barrel of the man’s Kalashnikov inches from his face.
“Speak!”
Zalmay couldn’t. Another man said, “Shoot him!”
The man raised his rifle and prepared to fire. Zalmay shut his eyes and braced for the bullet, the end of everything. But it never came. Instead, Zalmay heard shouting.
He opened his eyes and saw that Mirzal had stepped forward defiantly, preventing anyone from moving Faqeer’s body. Despite his shortness, Mirzal’s silhouette against the bonfire seemed tall and proud. One of the thugs yelled for him to step back, but that just prompted Gorbat to step up to stand beside him.
Emboldened, the villagers came forward to stand with them, one by one. The insurgents shouted, “Back! Back!” But the villagers moved forward instead, edging the armed men back toward their trucks.
The man who had his rifle on Zalmay turned to deal with this new situation. The armed men were shouting and motioning for the villagers to step back, but they would not. They continued to advance.
Zalmay realized that all the thugs were distracted. If he took off at a sprint, he could probably make it far enough into the darkness to get away from the armed men and then run back to the highway. All he had to do was dash out of there.
Instead, he stood up and walked to stand by his hosts, facing the men with guns. Zalmay saw that most of the men seemed uncomfortable, unwilling to actually open fire. All but the man who had almost killed him, the one who seemed to be in charge. His cruel face seemed murderous in the flickering firelight.
“Swine!” he said. “Step back, or you die!”
Zalmay knew this was not an empty threat, and so did everyone else. But nobody faltered, nobody stopped. Whatever they were grasping on to, whether it was their honor and hospitality or just being tired of the thuggery of the Taliban, the people of this village were willing to die that night. And Zalmay was prepared to die with them.
At least he would die on his feet. He braced himself, ready for it this time. The cruel man raised his rifle, and the others followed suit. All he had to do was give the order, and then—
There was a
pop!
of a gun from the darkness beyond, and the insurgent’s head erupted, splattering red onto Zalmay’s face. The man fell to the dust. Almost immediately, there were three more reports, and three more Taliban collapsed. The rest, realizing what was happening, turned around and started shooting wildly into the darkness. The villagers dropped to the ground to avoid incoming gunfire. The thugs, shooting ineffectually into the darkness, continued to drop. They tried to run, but bullets caught up to every one; soon, they all had dropped like flies.
That’s when Zalmay noticed that the square was surrounded by men in desert camouflage, wielding M-16s and shouting at everyone in broken Pashto,
“Stay down! Stay down!”
Americans
.
They had been saved by the Americans.
C
HAPTER
7
L
ess than three hours after they left the Morgan home, Plante was ushering Dan Morgan into the CIA’s New Headquarters Building. Called the George Bush Center for Intelligence, it had been added to the original building in the nineties. It was a complex of steel and glass that always made Morgan think of a shopping mall, with its flower gardens, arched entrance, and blue glass. It brought to mind the last time he had seen Plante, when he had come down to tender his resignation as an operative (even if, officially, of course, he had never worked for the CIA).
Plante had been Morgan’s handler and usually his only contact in the CIA, summoning him whenever he was needed. Plante had accepted his resignation without much protest. He gave Morgan no grief, other than reminding him that the confidentiality agreements he had signed at the beginning of his service still held. Then Plante wished him well in his new life, and that was, Morgan thought, the end of it.
But then, in the coming weeks, Morgan began to notice things. Things like an unfamiliar car parked near his house. Or odd phone calls in the middle of the night, when there was nothing but a ominous silence on the other end. Or, even, strangers in public places who bumped into him deliberately and whispered menacingly, “We’re watching you.”
Morgan tried to call Plante, to get them to stop, but all he got was the bureaucratic runaround. His calls were never transferred to Plante, and he was reduced to yelling at powerless underlings. The harassment eventually stopped, but it had left a lot of bad blood between himself and the Agency. Since then, he had all but completely cut ties with Plante and everyone else in the CIA’s hierarchy.
There was one exception to that silence. Morgan had left certain items in a personal locker at headquarters during his days as a wet contractor in Black Ops, items he wanted to get back. He didn’t return for them right after his resignation, partly out of pride but mostly out of fear of calling attention to the locker’s contents: incriminating records and documents that he should have destroyed long ago, and some that never should have existed at all. Among them was a diary of everything he had ever done in the service of the CIA, with dates and detailed accounts of his every Black Ops mission: a little black book filled with the Agency’s dirty little secrets. He had thought of it as his insurance policy, in case things ever got really bad. The situation soured before he could collect them, and so there they had remained.
Years had passed by the time he decided to retrieve the stash in his locker. He had called the National Clandestine Service—formerly known as the Directorate of Operations—to find that Plante was still there. He scheduled an appointment, but they never met. When he arrived, Morgan had been told that Plante was in a meeting. He was left waiting until some desk flunky told him there was no record of any Code Name Cobra ever working at the CIA. He had lost his temper, made a scene, and burned his bridges with the Agency. As far as he was concerned, at the time, he was done, for good.
And yet here he was again, being escorted through security by Plante himself. He first walked through a bulky metal arch much thicker than any metal detector. He hadn’t been asked to remove anything from his pockets. They then took digital prints of all his fingers, a head shot, and scanned his retinas.
“What, you’re not going to ask me to take off my clothes?” he said sarcastically.
“No need,” said Plante, pointing at the scanner he had just passed. “That machine has already revealed everything and more. If you were trying to sneak in here with a bomb up your ass, we’d know. Hell, if you were trying to sneak in here with a straight pin up there, we’d know.”
Morgan signed a pile of nondisclosure agreements and was issued a visitor ID and admitted into the building. Plante escorted him down a long, sparse, antiseptic hallway, where he passed busy, professional-looking people who had that familiar intensity of CIA employees. Plante stopped in front of a door and swiped his employee ID through the key-card reader. The door unlocked with a buzz and a click, and Plante led him into a small conference room.
“I’m going to have to leave you here for a few minutes, Cobra. I’ll trust you to behave.” Plante walked out, and the door clicked shut behind him. Morgan figured he might as well sit down. He took the chair opposite the door and looked around the room. At the far end was a chalkboard-size computer screen. The table was sleek and functional, the chairs comfortable enough. Behind him, the metallic-blue windows offered a view of the woods that separated the Agency headquarters from the Potomac.
It was an unremarkable room, especially after he’d seen what they had deeper in this building. Behind layers and layers of security, people rushed past one another in hallways abuzz with activity, briefing rooms that had the latest technology, bunkers and safe rooms that could hide the entire staff in case of emergency, a thousand operations going on at any given moment. And then there was the Ops Center, the nerve center of the whole facility, with more monitors than NASA’s Mission Control, with live feeds from every surveillance satellite available. There was far more here than met the eye, beyond this sleepy office environment.
Morgan had been in the room for a few minutes when the door clicked and swung open again. But instead of Plante, the person who came in was a stocky, baby-faced, freckled man with light red hair who didn’t look a day over eighteen, even though Morgan knew he must be at least thirty by now. His name was Grant Lowry, a computer prodigy who worked as an analyst for the Clandestine Service.
“Hiya, Cobra.”
As a rule, CIA employees kept to themselves. Apart from getting a beer now and then with members of their work group, they did not fraternize, and the Agency liked it that way. There was nothing like a company holiday party to leak sensitive information. As a Black Operative, Morgan had even less contact with the people who worked at headquarters. In fact, Plante was practically the only one with whom he’d ever had any sustained contact. People who do what he did don’t exactly like to advertise their identities to anyone, even within the Agency. But Lowry had consistently run support and intel for Morgan on missions. The two men had formed an unlikely bond, and Morgan was pleased to see his grinning mug again.
He exchanged a warm handshake with Lowry and then sat across from him at the table. “Hi, Grant. I didn’t know you were working on this op.”
“Hey, Cobra, you know that kind of talk is off-limits. But I’m not here on official business. I heard you were in the building, and I thought I’d drop in and say hello.”
“I thought the CIA was good at keeping secrets,” Morgan said with a smirk. He sat back in his chair, resting his arms on the table.
“Nothing’s a secret if it’s on a computer,” said Lowry, with a devilish look on his face. “You just have to know how to ask.”
“I swear, people put far too much trust in machines.”
“Machines just do what you tell them, Cobra. It’s people you have to watch out for.” Grant gave a light-hearted chuckle. “So how’ve you been, old man?”
“Old man? I’m three years older than you.” Morgan looked at him with mock anger.
“And retired,” said Lowry.
“I
was
enjoying my ‘retirement.’ You?”
“Ah, you know, same old,” said Lowry, half reclining in his chair. “Thinking of leaving the life behind me—maybe start my own consulting agency.”
“No shit?”
“It’s what all the cool kids are doing. Plus, it’s hardly any fun anymore. This whole gig has been a little too stressful since 9/11.” He sighed. “It was always difficult to tell friends from enemies, but lately, things have been ridiculous. And then there’s this McKay character.”
“The senator? I thought her whole business was corporate regulation.”
“Oh, she’s a busy little bee. She’s heading up the Senate Committee on Intelligence.” Lowry looked around, leaned forward, and lowered his voice, as if he was worried people might be listening. In this place, he was probably right. “She’s taking a real hands-on approach, and apparently she’s taken a special interest in the CIA. She’s been around to tour the facilities a few times. Seems like she’s planning a major review of operations—some transparency and accountability business. Gonna rattle some cages and all-around raise hell around here, from what I heard.”
Morgan raised an eyebrow. “Can she do that?”
“If she gathers enough support. Not,” he said, lowering his voice again, “that I’m exactly happy with the management here. Or, should I say, the micromanagement.”
Morgan could sympathize. Nobody really got promoted in the CIA because they were competent, at least not those above a certain rank. The higher-ups, the career bureaucrats, were there because they were masters at the game of politics. That, or because someone even higher up the ladder had decided they could be controlled. That made the bosses almost invariably grade-A assholes, even though, by all accounts, the current head of the NCS, Jeffrey Boyle, was an exception. Morgan had worked with him in the field in the old days, and fieldwork formed a bond of trust that wasn’t easily broken.
“So what about Kline getting to be number two at the NCS?” Morgan asked, grimacing.
“Oh, plenty of us called foul, but Boyle swears by him. If you ask me, Kline plays the game well and knows how to keep the bigwigs happy. He’s even got a lot of us underlings legitimately on his side.”
“Yeah. From what I understand, Plante is one of them.”
“Hey, who knows? Maybe the guy has qualities that the rest of us are missing. At least I can vouch that he’s not a total incompetent.” Morgan looked at him doubtfully, and Grant shrugged. “So what exactly is it that brought you here?”
“Cougar,” he said simply.
“Ah, so you heard. My condolences, Cobra. He was one of the best.” Lowry smiled wanly, looking down. “You know, maybe you should’ve stuck around. We could use more men like you around here. Don’t you ever miss it?”
Morgan grinned. “Do you even have to ask? Of course I miss it. I loved it. And it
mattered
, too, Grant. There’s not much I can do now that’s as important as what I did here. And all I can think of ever since I heard about Cougar is that, if I had been around, he might not be dead now.”
“Or you might be dead, yourself.”
Morgan looked at him ruefully.
“Well, why not come back?” Lowry said, changing the subject.
“Because it wouldn’t be long until I remembered what made me leave in the first place. And in any case, I made a commitment to my family, and I intend to keep it.”
Someone outside swiped an ID card and opened the door. Harold Kline walked in, wearing a stiff black suit. He was a slight man with a thin hooked nose and thin lips that hid tiny sharp teeth. In tow was Plante, carrying a slim folder marked CLASSIFIED.
“Lowry,” said Kline, curtly.
“Just leaving, boss,” he said, getting up and slipping past the two men and out the door.
“Code Name Cobra,” Kline said perfunctorily, with affected formality. “I hope you had a pleasant flight down.” He held out his hand, but Morgan just glowered at him. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s get right to it, shall we?” He sat down opposite Morgan, and Plante took the adjacent chair. “Let him have it, Eric, would you?”
Plante took a single sheet of paper from the folder and handed it to Morgan. “This is a copy of the last communication we received from Cougar. The original is still in Afghanistan. We had experts on the ground analyze the paper, and there was no secret message on the paper itself, apart from what’s plainly written. Can you make any sense of it?”
Morgan took the sheet and looked at it. It read:
For Cobra’s eyes only.
A fruit vendor in Kabul once said to me, “Afghanistan is always the same; it is only the invaders who change.” “Well, you know what they say,” I replied, “variety is the spice of life.”I am pleased to report blue skies over Kandahar and hope that things are the same stateside. It reminds me of the days I would tear down the highway in that GTO to make it in time for the daily ritual—remember, in Stoney? The.re is no such happiness to be f.ound here. Still, people persist. Let it never be said that the Afghans are not a resilient people.
Yours truly,
Cougar
It had obviously been hastily written, with no pretension of having a surface meaning. Conley must have been pressed for time.
“Well?” asked Kline impatiently.
“Looks to me like he’s having fun at summer camp.”
“Very funny,” said Kline dryly. “I think that’s very funny. Don’t you, Plante? Listen, Cobra, did you come down here to waste our time?”
“No, you brought me here to waste mine,” said Morgan, with a touch of anger, sitting up in his chair. “You can’t give me this without any context and expect me to tell you what it means.”
“So you’re telling me what?” said Kline.
“I need to know the facts on the ground,” said Morgan. “If you keep me in the dark, you can’t expect me to be able to read, can you?”
“So you want to hear sensitive details about a classified operation because you need
context
?” said Kline.