“So there are no true believers at ISI?”
“Did I say that? You’re not listening. Sure there are. And sometimes one of them asks me to believe along with him, so I kneel at his side and pretend for a while. But the true believers don’t last. Eventually some new creed comes along and they fall out of fashion, which leaves only the purists like me. Which is why I’m interested only in the product, the information. And that’s why I’m interested in you, because you can help me get it. Which reminds me. One other favor, if you don’t mind.”
As if he could actually say no.
“Keep an eye on Bashir. Let me know what he’s up to.”
“He’s leading the rear guard. That’s what he’s up to.”
“Of course he is. How else do you think we knew you’d be leaving in a few hours?”
“Bashir works for you, too?”
Tariq shrugged.
“For us and for others. Which is why we want to keep an eye on him.”
Najeeb remembered the calling cards, the ones Skelly had been so excited about, thinking that they gave the man credibility. He’d forgotten the names but knew that one worked for a pipeline company and the other for the U.S. State Department. He’d seen the same two logos on cards presented to his father, at times, back in the days when promises and dollars were easy commodities. Doubtless they were back in fashion.
“So who am I really supposed to watch, then? Bashir or Razaq?”
“Both. And anyone else who seems interesting. Including your client.”
“You sound like you don’t have a clue what’s going to happen.”
Tariq’s smile had a malicious twinkle.
“Just about any outcome suits our purposes, as long as I’m kept informed. But one thing about Bashir you should keep in mind, as long as you’re still working for Mr. Stanford J. Kelly. Bashir hates Americans. Always has. He even killed a few once. Although that was years ago.”
“Then why would he agree to take an American with him?”
“Very good question. Let me know as soon as you have the answer.”
“And when I’m done? What happens to those knives in Usman’s briefcase? And to the police? Last time you talked about a visa. It won’t do me much good if I’m in jail.”
“Do a good job and you won’t have to worry about anything.” He checked his watch again. “But what you need now is sleep.”
As if I’d even get a wink, Najeeb thought. Tariq cleared his throat, which brought Usman back out of the kitchen.
“Good luck,” Tariq said. “And stay in touch.”
The two men left, footsteps echoing down the stairwell. They hadn’t bothered to close the door, and Najeeb wondered if it was even worth the effort. Anyone who wanted to seemed able to get in.
Besides, in three more hours he’d be leaving for Afghanistan.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE MORE SKELLY THOUGHT about Najeeb’s sudden desertion, the angrier he got. Personal problems or not, no previous fixer had ever similarly abandoned him, and certainly never at such a crucial moment.
He cursed and fumed in the back of the taxi, loud enough for the driver to keep glancing back, as if fearful that this madman would tear apart the upholstery—or worse, stiff him on the fare. The worry beads clicked against his rearview mirror with fresh urgency at every bump and curve.
But Skelly paid without complaint, not even arguing when the driver announced a final price five thousand rupees above what they’d agreed to. “Too much waiting at the camp,” the driver explained nervously, raising his hands as if helpless in the matter. Skelly tossed the bills onto his lap, wanting only to rid himself of this entire exasperating day.
He stood curbside a few yards beyond the steps of the Hotel Grand. While the Pearl Continental was buffered from the highway by a broad expanse of clipped grass and palm trees, with a guardhouse to fend off the unworthy, the Grand sat cheek by jowl with the busy highway in the heart of Little Kabul. Even at this hour there was still plenty of noise and bustle, and the smoke of wood fires was as thick as fog. The Grand’s rooms, at least, faced away from the maelstrom, stacked in a rectangle six stories high surrounding a gloomy inner courtyard. Someone had dug a huge pit in the courtyard, at least ten feet deep, making the whole place smell of damp earth. Perhaps they were building a pool, or maybe there was a problem with the plumbing. Skelly didn’t relish spending the next three hours there, and he lingered by the curb.
When he finally turned, he saw a man climbing into a truck by the hotel’s plate-glass doorway, perhaps fifteen yards away. A face appeared at the side window, then quickly turned away, but Skelly could have sworn it was Sam Hartley. Any familiar face at this hour was encouraging, so he waved, calling Hartley’s name. But the man didn’t look back—was Hartley avoiding him or had he imagined it?—and the truck swerved sharply across the grit. Skelly got a fleeting glimpse of the driver as the truck passed through the glare of the street lamp, and for a moment he was sure it was Arlen Pierce. Impossible. He must have been thinking of the man because of Bashir’s business cards. But the truck, he saw now, wasn’t of any make or model you ever saw around here. It was a black Chevy Suburban, the sort of big American vehicle you found in embassy motor pools, and it was headed away from Peshawar, in the direction Skelly had just come from. His imagination jumped in five directions at once. Best to have a beer and a shower and try to calm down. Although here there was no beer, of course. Only bottled water or juice. Or Coke, which would only keep him awake.
He climbed the stairs to the third floor, too impatient for the Grand’s clanking elevator, the size of a closet and the sort with a door you had to pull open. Strolling the railed walkway to his room, he gazed into the muddy darkness of the hole in the courtyard, which seemed to exhale dankness and decay. Maybe they were digging up the sewerage. Wonderful. But he couldn’t shake the image of Hartley and Pierce, if that was indeed who he’d seen, and as soon as he entered his room he picked up the phone, pressed the buttons, and heard the clicks of a rotary dialing signal. Two rings, then an answer.
“Pearl Continental.”
“Room 311, please.” That was Hartley’s. Might as well set his mind at ease, even if it meant waking the man up. Seven rings later the call jumped back to the switchboard.
“I’d like to leave a message for Mr. Hartley in 311.”
“One moment, sir. I’ll connect you to the front desk.”
The desk clerk asked for patience, and Skelly heard papers being shuffled, people talking.
“I am sorry, sir. Mr. Hartley has checked out.”
“When?”
Another pause, more shuffling.
“This morning, sir.”
“Shit.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. Thank you—wait! Is there a Mr. Pierce registered?”
“Peace, sir?”
“Pee-erce. P-I-E-R-C-E. First name Arlen.”
More shuffling of papers.
“No, sir. No Mr. Peace.”
“Pierce. Whatever.”
“Yes, sir.”
He hung up, then tried Hartley’s cell number, getting only a recording, which meant the receiver was either beyond range or turned off. He couldn’t help but remember the way the signal on his own phone had died just a few miles west of here.
So had he really seen them? And if so, were they a team? Bashir seemed to think so. But for what purpose? It crossed his mind that he might see them later at the rendezvous point with Bashir. Where else would a pair like that be headed at midnight? Or maybe Hartley had merely driven back to Islamabad, or was flying down to Quetta. Wasn’t there a landing strip nearby? Or maybe all Skelly had seen was a pair of foreign hacks. But in a Chevy? Problematic, unless some place around here rented or sold them.
Then he had another idea. He fumbled in his satchel for a typewritten list, looking up the number of the American embassy in Islamabad. All but a few diplomatic personnel had been sent away weeks ago, along with their families, but there would still be a duty officer, even at this hour. He dialed the number.
“United States Embassy.” Midwestern accent, flat and noncommittal.
“Duty officer, please.”
“Speaking.”
“Yes, I’m trying to locate Arlen Pierce. Do you have his cell number?”
“Who’s speaking, sir?” Wary now. Alert.
Skelly hurriedly mumbled his name and newspaper, hoping to avoid the usual runaround reserved for the press.
“Say that again?”
“Stan Kelly. He knows me.”
“With?”
“The
Ledger.
Look, we’re old friends.”
“You’re a reporter?”
“Yes.”
“Just a second.”
Damn it.
A pause, the receiver thumping on a desktop, then some consultation in the background. Why would there be more than one person of any authority on duty at this hour? Had a bombing occurred, or some other crisis he hadn’t heard about? The BBC at eleven had carried only more of the same—stalemated battlefronts and further claims and counterclaims on civilian losses. But whoever answered the phone hadn’t rejected the name Arlen Pierce out of hand, and Skelly supposed that was something. They were back on the line now.
“Try this number. Country code 1, area code 202 . . .” Washington, in other words. Then a number that began with 647.
“That’s the State Department.” It was the old runaround.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, what are you saying, then?”
“I’m saying you can’t reach Mr. Pierce at this number.”
“Are you saying he’s not in-country?”
“Please try the number I gave you, sir.”
“But . . .”
Click.
Well, now. Whenever they said nothing, it meant anything but. You’d have thought by now that they’d have learned a smoother way to lie. A bored “Mr. Pierce? Who’s he?” would have thrown him off the scent. But in Skelly’s experience the State Department’s most skilled dissemblers stayed close to home, or maybe it was just that in Washington they never got out of practice.
It almost certainly meant Pierce was in the country, in his world of back channels and unofficial contacts—although it didn’t prove he had been the man in the Chevy.
He phoned downstairs to the Grand’s front desk, but there was no record of any Pierce or Hartley having checked in or out. If the two men had arranged a meeting they wanted to keep secret, though, it certainly would have made sense to do it here instead of at the Pearl, where half the world’s media was gathered. The only hacks staying at the Grand besides him, Skelly had discovered, were a Dutchman, a Belgian and a couple of Japanese, from publications he’d never heard of. And he could see why. The walls of his narrow room were drab and smudged. Every lightbulb was a dim forty watts. The TV was ancient, the bed a mere three feet wide, and the dirty carpet was currently host to a caravan of ants, winding their way to a sprinkling of crumbs lying next to a crumpled chip bag in the corner.
Skelly set the alarm on his watch for just before 3 a.m., then phoned the desk again for a backup wake-up call, only to learn that no one would be on duty at that hour. He wondered if he would even be able to call for a taxi then—Christ, everything was falling apart—so he spent the next fifteen minutes getting the deskman to arrange for a car to be out front at 2:50. No, better make it 2:40. Less than three hours from now. He should sleep, he supposed, as if such a thing was possible. Hardly even worth getting undressed.
That thought summoned a fresh burst of anger at Najeeb. What if no replacement showed up? Should he even go? Would any of Bashir’s men speak English? For that matter, how would he even know he was meeting up with the right group? He might rendezvous by mistake with a gang of smugglers, or a band of religious fanatics heading into town to bomb the embassy.
But at least Razaq spoke the language. Skelly might have to stake everything on meeting up with him at some point, on hoping that the so-called rear guard would eventually join the main body. Then he recalled Bashir’s tantalizing allusion to the expedition’s supposed true quarry, the world’s most wanted man.
If anyone would be able to deliver on something like that, he supposed, it would likely be some fringe player such as Bashir, hidden in a refugee camp yet seemingly well connected. Maybe the man was even a CIA plant. Wheels within wheels, indeed. Skelly momentarily felt the excitement of being near the beating heart of something faceless and powerful, the dread animal crawling at the core of every major event, yet rarely showing its face. Might Skelly get a glance? Could be. Then the moment passed, and he again felt lost, uncertain.
Because there was another possibility, too, equally plausible. Bashir might be a fraud, a con artist, a brigand. He might have saved the calling cards from some earlier chance encounter. Or worse, he’d stolen them from some journalist. But if that was true, why hadn’t he already robbed Skelly? Perhaps he was waiting for Skelly to be fully packed for travel, when he’d be loaded with expensive equipment and all of his cash.
Enough of such worries. Maybe a new fixer would actually appear. For now he supposed he had better check in with the foreign desk.
He got the connection on the fifth try. The foreign editor was out for coffee, so he talked to the assistant, who was thrilled to hear of Skelly’s plans, or at least he was until he heard Skelly didn’t have a sat phone.
“Don’t worry. Razaq has one,” Skelly said, letting them assume that he would be traveling near the great man himself. He decided not to mention the possibility of bumping into the leadership of al-Qaeda— partly because he wasn’t sure he believed it himself, but partly also because the editor seemed pleased enough as it was. No sense raising their expectations unreasonably when Skelly was already rising on the charts, a star reborn. And for a heady moment he recalled what it had once felt like to have people waiting eagerly for his dispatches, confident that he would deliver the goods. Maybe this time he’d give them the biggest story of all.
“Have you called your wife, by the way? She was checking on you this morning, making sure you were okay.”
“Thanks. I’ll do that.”
He truly was overdue, he supposed, so after hanging up he dialed Janine, this time making it through easily. Fuzz and static, then a few clicks. It was midafternoon where she was, so she was probably picking up in the kitchen.
“Hello?”
“Hi, sweetie.”
“Stan?”
“Well, who else?”
“My God, how are you? I’ve been wondering if you even made it. Then I saw your byline yesterday. Sounded pretty hairy.”
“What? Oh, the demo. Just a few hotheads really.” And nothing compared to what I’m about to get into, he thought.
“So what’s it like over there?”
“The usual chaos and starvation. Anger and shouting. ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ and that sort of thing. You know the drill.”
And she did, having been posted to four different locations around Asia by the Australian economic mission before she’d met up with Skelly in Jakarta. She knew all about the volatile mix of demos and hotheads and starvation.
“Spoke to your editor this morning. He said your stomach was a problem.”
“Nothing serious. Just a runny egg.”
“You took your Cipro, I hope.”
“Popped a couple the other day. Seems okay now.”
“They say yogurt’s a help.”
“They say, but they don’t have to eat it. How’s Brian?”
“Ear infection, so he’s drugged and down for the count. Was up half the night crying, but he’s okay now.”
“It’s what, a little after three?”
“Yes. But you’re up late. Been writing?”
“Came up empty today. Wasted trip to the border. Going back again in a few hours. With any luck this time we’ll get across.”
“Into Afghanistan?”
“Yes.”
“Good Lord. With who?”
“Some warlord’s rear guard. Well behind any possible action.”
“Let’s hope so. Did you hear about the Frenchman, the scribbler from
Le Monde
?”
“No.” Skelly wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“Got caught sneaking across in a burqa. Posing as a woman.” Janine laughed.
“What did they do with him?”
“Locked him up overnight, then kicked him out. He was six foot five.”
Skelly joined in the laughter. This was Janine at her best, talking the lingo of the field. As a foreign service worker she’d traveled in the same circles as Skelly, swapping the same quirky stories. She knew the survival tricks as well as he did. But after several years of being marooned in the Midwest she had, alas, adapted just as gamely to its vagaries as those of Bangkok or Hong Kong, and she was now an inveterate mall shopper and carpooler, signing Brian up for everything from infant swimming lessons to day school, three years ahead of schedule. This, too, was a demonstration of her flexibility, he supposed, but it somehow lost its appeal when occurring on such familiar ground. Their conversation tonight at least took them back to the subjects they preferred, or that he preferred anyway.
“Oh, I saw the Stephensons the other day at the supermarket. She wished you luck.” A pause. “Are you sure about this Afghanistan trip? Sounds chancy. What other hacks are going?”