State of Honour (15 page)

Linda had put on the burqa, as she’d been ordered to do. There was no need for a niqab, her face being covered almost completely by the garment’s lace net. But at least the man hadn’t trampled on her dignity by staying in the cell as she’d changed. She remembered that the men had left the room at the makeshift operation theatre where her tracking device had been removed from her arm. Another confirmation that they were Muslims. Something that she’d decided to take advantage of.

Propped up against the stone wall, she clasped her hands. She’d accepted there’d been a chance, albeit a remote chance, that she could be injured or assassinated while performing her public duties. But now the worst had happened, and if her plan didn’t work she’d likely die here. She guessed that being executed in a burqa would be a political statement for the Leopards. But then she remembered that the wearing of the burqa was very rare in Shia countries. Most women opted for and were permitted to wear only the hijab, a simple headscarf. The realization puzzled here. If she was in Pakistan, maybe the Leopards, being Shias, were intent on blaming it on the Sunnis. But what about the words on the tape recorder? Besides, although the generals had passed a law that all women wear the hijab, Pakistani women only wore the burqa in the Tribal Areas and Balochistan. She wondered if she would be taken to one of those regions. Her thoughts made her head ache, that and the dehydration she was suffering from.

She pictured John and her girls. John hadn’t said anything expressly, but she knew he had been unhappy about her visit. It was a dangerous place with no respect for Western women, after all. And she recalled an unfamiliar sense of foreboding as soon as she had arrived in Pakistan. Something that had prompted her to ring home far more than usual.

In her temporary office in Islamabad two hours before she’d been kidnapped, she’d decided to wake John and the girls. After the girls stopped yawning, she told them she loved and missed them, that she would be back on Tuesday and that they would all watch a movie together. She asked them to look after their father and to remember that he was a dear man. The girls had just grumbled at being woken up and had gone back to bed.

John had been confined to a wheelchair two years ago, his spine shattered in a hit and run while out for an early morning jog. He’d done his best to cope with the physical and mental trauma of his disability, but she knew he was struggling. When he’d asked her if she was all right, she’d brushed it off, saying that it was the jet lag and heat getting to her.

She got up and paced about now, finding the garment both restrictive and degrading. For those who chose to wear it, good luck to them, she thought. But she felt genuine sympathy for the millions of women who were forced to live in them daily before being effectively locked away at night behind closed doors. She smiled, despite everything. The burqa would play a part in helping her break free from the men who guarded her.

She said a prayer for her family and then one for herself, as she did every morning and evening, although she had no idea of the time. She’d asked God to give her the strength to carry out what she’d set her mind to.

The person Crane had arranged to meet Tom just before the Af-Pak border drove a faded blue saloon. She was a striking-looking woman, who said she was an American, the daughter of first-generation Pakistani immigrants. She was a little under six feet in flats, her shoulder-length hair dragged back from her flawless skin by a jet-black hijab. She was heavy-boned but lean, her eyes the colour of red cedar wood. Confident.

When he asked her name, she just smiled before pouring him a coffee from a Thermos, sweetened with sugar to the point that it resembled liquidized molasses. Then she patched up his neck with Vaseline and a bandage, and gave him some painkillers from the glovebox. It eased the throbbing sensation a little and he thanked her.

Despite her calm demeanour, the incident with the ISI and his face on the cells had still left him feeling shaken. That and what Crane had said when he’d rung him a few miles from Torkham, as he’d asked him to.

“How did they get a photo of my face?” Tom had asked. “It was only a few hours since I was in Islamabad.”

“There were only two men who could’ve taken your photo—that’s what you’re thinking right now, ain’t it?” Crane said.

“Yeah. Khan or the cab driver. But the cab driver was random, so it had to be Khan.”

“The eyes play tricks, especially in stressful situations. You got one of the cells on you?”

Tom dropped the disposable cell onto the front passenger seat and pulled over onto a stony verge. A little way beyond, the edge of the verge fell away a hundred metres or more to the base of a red-earth ravine. He jerked out one of the cells he’d put in the bag. He thumbed the image open.

“Shit!” he said, smacking his forehead.

He was wearing a white shirt in Islamabad, and had been given a similar one by the cab driver’s cousin. But the white shirt he had on in the photograph had a different collar. He picked up the disposable.

“What is it?” Crane asked.

“It’s a different shirt.”

“Think. When were you wearing it?”

“I … When we came back from Kurram, at the Ariana. With you, Crane,” he said, knowing there were scores of people at the former hotel who could’ve taken his photograph.

“What did Khan tell you?”

Tom was a little taken aback by Crane’s abrupt change of subject. “Only where Hasni lived,” he said, lying, still conscious that Crane could spoil matters for him.

“You sure?”

Wait, Tom thought. Crane might have set the whole thing up. After he’d been insistent about going over the border, he figured Crane might have seen an opportunity and ordered Khan to tell him about Mahmood. By why all the subterfuge? Maybe Crane was covering his tracks if things went to rat shit. Is he using me? Tom thought.

Then he decided that he was starting to think like Crane, and did his best to zone out the internal dialogue. It would simply confuse him.

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Are you done this time?” Crane asked.

“I’m done.”

“Looks like you got Khan killed, too,” Crane said, disconnecting.

Tom thought that that was a vicious jibe, given the secretary’s sentence. But he guessed that Crane had a right to be angry. Still, if Crane hadn’t engineered the whole thing, the only person who knew what he planned to do in Boston was Khan, he thought. Unless he’d crumbled under torture, if in fact he hadn’t made it out. The realization that Hasni’s men could be waiting for him stateside as he went after his son, Mahmood, didn’t exactly fill him with confidence. But he’d told himself to shape up. He might be getting somewhere.

As the saloon got close to the border a stream of trucks packed with food and white goods from the port of Karachi were waiting to enter Afghanistan. The woman pulled over and told Tom to hide in the trunk, covering his body with a stack of Pakistani silks wrapped in clear polythene. His leather holdall was in there, too. He figured that Crane was serious about wanting him to quit. As he curled up into a ball, just as the dome light was fading, he inhaled a couple of gasps of fresh air.

After crawling along towards the border-crossing proper, the car slowed to a halt. He heard the door open and the voices of the Pakistani border guards and the woman, but they were faint. He sensed that his whole body was covered in a sheen of sweat. The trunk was flipped and he tensed, refusing even to breathe. He felt something prodding him that he took for a baton. The silks were pulled off. Tom turned around and stared at the dark faces of two border guards, standing motionless outside the car. The woman said nothing but offered them a brown-paper package.

The guards looked at one another.

“A million rupees,” she said in Pashto. “And we leave now.”

Tom’s face was frozen in an open-mouthed stare. He could go for his SIG, but what was the point? he thought. If he wounded or killed them, the cop’s words in Islamabad would come true:
You will never get out of Pakistan
.

The younger of the two raised his long baton, and Tom flinched involuntarily. But the older one, his yellowing eyes fixed on Tom, motioned with his hand for him to lower it. The younger one hesitated before complying. The older one nodded to the woman and snatched the package from her hand, closing the trunk slowly afterwards. Tom breathed out audibly and brought his hand down over his face, furrowing the skin.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

Crane had told him that the average Pakistani wage was PKR 250,000 per annum, about $2,500. His freedom had just been bought for ten thousand dollars. But before the car pulled away, he heard two muted cracks, as if they’d whacked the car’s hood with their batons, although it’d sounded as if something had smashed. He wondered if the windshield had been hit.

Fifteen minutes later, the woman stopped opposite a clump of sprawling banyan trees. The trunk was opened and Tom felt the dry air swamp him. He clambered out and got back into the front passenger seat, realizing the windshield was still intact. They travelled in silence, the woman manoeuvring past the various hazards with apparent ease. They weren’t held up at the dozen or so Afghan police and security services’ checkpoints, either, due in no small part to the plastic wallet which she handed over.

But by the time they reached the steep summit of Kabul gorge, the wind was gale force and a dust cloud hit them. The cloud was so dense that the woman slowed down to a near stop. Lightning struck nearby and thunder boomed. Tom noticed that she was gripping the leather steering wheel tightly. The voltage from the storm clouds was almost palpable.

“Maybe we should stop for a while. Till it clears,” he said.

“He said no stopping.”

“You known him long?”

She just stared ahead, not even a flicker or a twitch in response. But then she pressed a switch underneath the dash and began to drive with confidence again, despite Tom realizing that the headlights had been knocked out. After he asked if she’d been a cat in a past life, she explained that she’d activated the night-vision section of the windshield, together with an infrared camera sited in the plastic casing of the rear-view mirror. The IR scanned the road ahead, projecting any life forms onto a small video screen beneath her side of the dash. The faded bodywork made the saloon look like a wreck, but it was carrying close to $250,000 worth of equipment.

The disposable cellphone rang. Tom took it out of his pocket.

“You safe?” Crane asked.

“Yeah. We’re just coming into Kabul,” Tom said, thinking Crane’s mood changed quicker than a crack addict’s.

“There was a bug in my room, hidden in a clock radio. The room is swept once a week. The last time was three days ago.”

Tom didn’t doubt that that was possible.

“And, Tom. Dump the cellphone the female operative gave you at the Ariana. Do it now.”

Crane didn’t have to say why. Tom knew that was how the men at the roadblock had known he’d be arriving there, despite their incompetence once he had. And if they knew that, they’d know where Khan lived. He just had to hope that Crane would be able to get a message to him before he returned there, if he’d gotten out. Then he realized that whoever had been tracking the cell would know he’d been to Hasni’s home, too. It was all bad. But he had a gut feeling that things would only get worse.

By 14:02, Tom was inside Kabul International Airport. He’d cleaned up in a restroom, changed into jeans, a khaki shirt and sneakers, and had dumped the SIG a mile away after wiping it down. He got a cup of coffee from a fast-food restaurant in the departure lounge and eased himself into a low-slung plastic seat. He looked around, feeling eyes on him. A different form of paranoia now, one that he didn’t care for at all; one that was playing with his mind and making him feel jittery.

He took out his smartphone from his holdall and emailed Lester, the friend he’d told Crane he was seeing in Boston, but not why. He hoped he’d pick up the message quickly on his cell. The man’s full name was Lester Wilson. He owned a private security business. When Tom had asked him how he’d swung that, Lester had told him that this was America, and even a man who’d gotten thrown out of the Marines could prosper. Lester had been a US Marine for eleven years, three of which he’d spent in military custody for various offences, the most serious of which was punching an officer. An act that had also led to his dishonourable discharge. But Tom and Lester had become friends.

He asked Lester to meet him at Boston Logan airport in 5.5 hours, if he could, stating that he was on a scheduled flight from Kabul. The email also stated that he needed a Taser, plasticuffs, steel bracelets, duct tape, an MP4 player and a remote lock-up near Harvard. A rental car, too. He requested that Lester emailed back either way, pointing out that it was real important.

Allowing for boarding and the thirteen-hour flight, it would be 20:00 local time when he reached stateside, Kabul being eight and a half hours ahead of Boston time. And when he did, he would have just over forty-one hours to find her. Less than two days.

Sipping the bland coffee, he felt that he was missing something. Something that had happened on the morning the secretary had been taken. He started to piece the events together, his mind focusing on the man who’d fired the Stinger. He picked up his smartphone again and went online, scanning web pages on Islamic customs.

He was interrupted twenty minutes later by the flashing inbox indicator. He checked his email. It was Lester.

I’m in New York
.
Sure I will man
.

Tom grinned. He was one person he could rely on. Besides, Lester owed him. He’d dragged his battered body from a heap of rubble after the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, had been bombed in 1998. Lester had been a young jarhead, Tom a rookie agent. Afterward, he’d said that Tom’s constant encouragement had given him hope as he’d lain in the darkness. And that that was a gift.

Hope.

With his head resting against the back of the cabin seat en route to Boston, Tom wondered what kind of hope the secretary had right now. She was a remarkable woman, he thought. By his reckoning, she deserved to be the first woman president. A good, family woman, too. A devoted mother.

Maybe it was the tiredness or the after-effects of the adrenalin dumps, but his thoughts kept wandering. He saw his own mother in his mind’s eye, a woman who had been beautiful but for whom a life of stress and poverty had taken its toll. By the time he was sixteen, she looked old, her teeth nicotine stained, her eyes heavy with bags. Her once thick, lustrous hair was dull and ridden with split-ends. What little money she had from working the reception at a local machine shop went on heating and food.

The last time he’d seen her, he’d convinced her to go to the grocery store to buy eggs and bacon, because they had nothing in the fridge or cupboards for lunch, save tins of weak soup, which, for a hungry teenager, hadn’t been exactly appetizing. Tom’s granddaddy had taught him to drive the previous summer, and had spent the equivalent of three months’ pension on a twelve-year-old Buick, which the old man had made roadworthy over a period of six weeks. Tom promised his mother he’d pick her up in it after he’d changed the oil. But when he’d finished, a high school buddy had come by, and he’d gone fishing with him instead.

Forcing himself back to the present, he asked the flight attendant for an English copy of the Qur’an and, after it was handed to him, he began checking the references he had seen online.

Two hours later, the Holy Book fell from his hands as he drifted into a deep sleep. But he’d found what he’d wanted.