Black Skies (7 page)

The floor of the garage was tiled black and white, the walls bearing white cracking paint. Harun got out of the car and both of them made their way around to the back.

Harun popped the trunk, and the man swung out his good arm with something that flashed in the dim light. Conley felt a sharp pain in his left forearm. He instinctively slapped the weapon out of the man’s hand and then backhanded him across the face. He looked down and saw that it was a screwdriver that had been stored somewhere in the trunk.

“Bad move, buddy,” said Conley. He and Harun took him out of the trunk. He was struggling, but with a broken arm and a leg, there was little he could do to get free. They took him, limping, through a dusty, unfurnished parlor and into a room that had been chillingly repurposed for what might euphemistically be called interrogation: The floor was all linoleum, with a large drain right in the middle, and a steel chair with straps for hands and legs. There were hooks on the ceiling and walls. It was a room made for brutal acts. Conley would not hesitate to use violence in self-defense or to neutralize a target, if the mission called for it. He was no pacifist. But this level of cold and calculated cruelty rattled him.

They sat the man down on the chair and strapped him in, dripping with sweat that mingled with the dried blood on his shirt. “Please,” he was moaning in Urdu, but Conley and Harun made no acknowledgment of him. He cried out as they secured his injured arm and leg. Once he was tightly bound, Conley and Harun left the room, turning off the light and closing the door behind them. The man shouted as they walked out, but once the door was closed, all sounds from within were wholly muffled.

They sat down on wooden chairs, the only furniture in the kitchen dimly lit by the rising sun. “So,” Harun said first, “what is the strategy?”

“Let him sweat for half an hour or so,” said Conley. “Leave him in the dark and let his imagination go wild.”

“We don’t have time!” cried Harun. “We are racing the clock! If the Secretary dies, our countries could go to war!”

“Rushing the interrogation won’t help anything,” said Conley. “If we start pulling out fingernails, he’s just going to tell us whatever he can to make us stop. He might tell us the truth, but we’ll have no way of knowing that.”

“We need to be aggressive, Cougar.”

“We will,” he said. “Leave it to me. I have a plan.”

“This better be good,” said Harun, taking off his bloody shirt to put on a spare button-down he’d brought from the car. “If we are not interrogating him right now, I’m going to get us something to eat. Can you handle him on your own?”

“Yeah,” said Conley. “I’m going to make some phone calls while you’re out.”

Conley dialed his satellite phone as Harun pulled out of the garage in his Daihatsu. He checked in with a few of his intelligence contacts, who had nothing new to report. Next he dialed Diana Bloch.

“Give me some good news,” she said. “Did your hunch pan out?”

“With a vengeance,” he said. He filled her in on what was happening.

“This looks promising,” she said. “Don’t screw it up. And for Christ’s sake, keep the body count down.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he said, and hung up.

Conley then scanned the day’s headlines on his tablet computer. The media circus continued, but there was nothing notable. Washington was controlling the messaging well, doling out enough information to keep the hounds hungry and coming back for more.

He read the news for a few minutes until he heard Harun’s car pulling into the garage. The Pakistani walked in with a plastic bag with three paper packages in it.

“Bun kebabs,” he said, laying them on the dusty kitchen counter. “I brought one for our guest, in case he’s feeling helpful now. Did he give you any trouble while I was out?”

“None at all,” said Conley, unwrapping one of the sandwiches. He bit into it. Spicy savory lamb in a fried bun and the kick of raw onions. He was hungrier than he’d thought. The two men devoured their meal in silence.

“So, are we ready to do what we’re here to do?” asked Harun, still chewing the last morsel of his sandwich. “Just take my lead,” said Conley, wiping his hands on the flimsy paper napkins Harun had brought in the bag.

They walked together to the door of the holding cell. Conley slammed the door open and they stepped in. The man raised his head with a start.

“Morning, sunshine!” said Conley loudly in English. “Time to wake up!” He took the man’s head in his hands and shook it. “You’re going to tell us who your boss is.” Harun leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette.

“Go to hell, American,” the captive spat, looking up at Conley. “I’m not telling you shit.”

“I know,” said Conley. “You’re afraid of the people you work for. Every two-bit flunky is. You all know you’re expendable, that your employer will get rid of your ass like a tick on a fingernail if they think you ratted them out. But the person you ought to be afraid of right now, buddy, is
me.
”

The man laughed, but Conley could tell it was false. He was trying to put up a brave front. “Afraid of you? No chance.” He was forcing a grin that was just a little too wide and stiff. Here was a man who was scared.
Good,
thought Conley. It was something he could work with.

“You’re not convincing anyone, buddy.”

“The people I work for are powerful,” he said. “They will kill you both, and I will spit on your bodies before they are buried in an unmarked grave.”

Conley chuckled—and his was actually relaxed, with that nonchalant menacing quality of someone who has absolutely all the power. “Here’s the score. Nobody—and I mean
nobody
—knows you’re here except me and my friend over there. We found you by a fluke. Total accident. No one even knew we were there. So you see, no one will know to look for you here. You’re on your own, my friend. It’s just you—and
us.
”

“Bullshit,” he said. “The other one—him—he is Pakistani. Someone will know. Someone will find out.”

“No, but you are getting closer to what I need to know,” said Conley. “So your boss has ties in Pakistani intelligence?”

He just looked at Conley with seething anger. “You killed Rashid,” he said.

“Rashid? Is that your friend, that we took out back there?” asked Conley. “Actually, it was my buddy who killed him. But I’d have done it myself in a heartbeat.”

“Bastard!”

“I don’t think you’re half as choked up about that poor EMT the two of you murdered back there.”

Conley held the man’s gaze. He had wide eyes and flared nostrils, sweat dripping off the tip of his nose.

“Look, you have two options here. You can talk, and take your chances out there with the people you work for. Or you can keep your mouth shut, and die for sure.”

“You are lying,” he said. “Americans never let anyone go. You will send me to some hellhole until the day I die—”

“I’m not the CIA,” said Conley. “I don’t give a crap if cheap muscle is running around Islamabad.
I don’t care about you.
Talk, and I won’t only let you go, I’ll pay for your cab fare to anywhere in the greater Islamabad area. But you only get to go if you tell me everything.”

“You will have to kill me,” he said, all bluster.

“See,” said Conley, with a tight smile on his lips, “we won’t kill you exactly. We’ll just—leave. No one ever comes in this house. And the walls? They’re soundproof like you wouldn’t believe. You can scream your guts out and it won’t do a bit of good. No neighbors are going to come snooping around.”

The man tried to put up a front of pure anger, but fear was showing in his eyes.

“Look, man, you’re not a true believer. I can see that. You’re here because they’re going to toss a few bucks your way, which you can blow on hookers and a tricked-out car. You don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself, so don’t start with this loyalty crap now, all right?”

Conley studied the man’s face. He had on a mask of arrogance, his chin up, lips in a light pout.

“Do you know what it’s like to die of dehydration?” asked Conley. “That means dying of thirst, in case they didn’t teach that at goon school. So, do you? It’s not pretty. You’re going to get hot, because you can’t sweat. How hot do you think this room is going to get if we shut you up in it for a couple of days, do you think? You’ll get delirious, too. See things that aren’t there. That, and the constant nausea, and dry heaving because you’ve got nothing left to vomit. You’re going to be consumed by your desire for water. You’ll gnaw on your tongue just to feel the moisture of your own blood in your mouth. Your skin will look like that of an old man. You’ll be praying for death, but it won’t come quickly enough. It never does when you really want it.”

The man looked down. He was sweating profusely, and his brow was furrowed in a look of abject terror.

“Now, is this really what you want your next week to look like?”

He swallowed hard, and broke down. “What do you want to know?”

I
t was past midnight when Buck Chapman signed in through security at the Pentagon. Despite the late hour, a steady trickle of people went in and out, each with the same glum, tired expression that Chapman knew so well. There was no quitting time in a crisis.

He walked down a long corridor under grating fluorescent lights that, in his exhaustion, seemed to be pulsing. Time hardly seemed to pass at all, and the hall had a hypnotic sameness to it, so much so that he almost missed his turn. When he arrived outside William Schroeder’s office, he could remember nothing about the way over. There was no one to admit him, so he knocked on the door.

“It’s open.”

He let himself in. Schroeder was sitting behind his desk. His office, to which Chapman had been a great many times, was as cluttered as ever with a smorgasbord of fishing trophies, gun paraphernalia, and pictures of his family, not only of his wife and three kids but old pictures going back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

“Close the door, Buck,” he said. “Take a seat.”

“So,” said Chapman. “You rang?”

“Things are mayhem here,” he said. “The State Department’s a mess. We’re struggling just to get our bearings.”

“Things aren’t much better at the Agency,” said Chapman.

“Cigar?” Schroeder held out a Cuban to him. Chapman declined by holding up his hand. Schroeder snipped off the tip with a guillotine and lit it, puffing without relish. “I’m not supposed to be smoking in here, but screw it.” He took a puff and let the smoke billow out of his mouth. “The President personally went to talk to Wolfe’s family. Wife, two college-aged girls.” He puffed on his cigar again. “Did you know him?”

“Can’t say that I did,” said Chapman. “I don’t think I’ve ever even been in the same room as him.”

“He was one of the good ones,” said Schroeder. “He got sidelined for the presidency, you know? Some party bullshit. It could have been him in that Oval Office. He’d have been good. He’d have been a hell of a commander in chief. A real man in the White House.” His maroon leather chair creaked as he leaned back. “It’s been a hell of a day.”

“That it has,” said Chapman. “I’d kill to be able to spend a few hours in my bed.”

“Let’s get to business then,” said Schroeder. “The sooner we’re done with this, the sooner I can spend some quality time with a bottle of single malt and Frank Sinatra records.” He punctuated the thought with a series of shallow puffs to his cigar. “I need to know how close we are, Buck. Are we going to get him back?”

“It’s been a day, Bill.”

“Which means they’ve had the goddamn Secretary of State for a whole twenty-four goddamn hours!” he said. “That’s twenty-four too many and you know it.”

“We’re chasing every lead. We’ve got three SEAL teams ready to drop in anywhere within two hundred miles of Islamabad in less than two hours. As soon as we get a location, it won’t be long.”

“
If
you get a location,” said Schroeder, tapping his cigar on an ash tray. The acrid smoke was permeating the room and making Chapman’s eyes water.

“We’ve got people on the ground, and information’s trickling in. I know it’s not much right now—”

“Goddamn it, Buck, we can’t afford this kind of black eye. We can’t lose to the terrorists. Haider Raza can’t beat us like this
again.
”

“We’re doing everything we can.”

“We’re not,” said Schroeder. “Not everything.”

Chapman stiffened in his chair. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying there are more drastic avenues that we, the government of the United States, can pursue.”

Chapman leaned forward in disbelief. “You can’t mean—”

“The possibility of military operations has been kicking around in the upper echelons,” said Schroeder.

“Look, the captors haven’t come forward. We haven’t received any demands yet! Christ, Bill, it’s only been a day. Can we give it a little longer before we go into worst-case scenarios?”

“This is a worst-case scenario already,” said Schroeder. “We’ve got a member of the Cabinet of the President in the hands of the enemy. We won’t negotiate, because we don’t negotiate with goddamn terrorists. Any minute now, they could leak a video of his beheading on the Internet. A good man dead, and the terrorists coming out on top, showing that we’re weak and emboldening a new generation to come out and blow themselves up for Allah. So tell me, do you still think ground troops are a goddamn overreaction?”

Chapman’s mouth was left slightly agape. “You’ve got a delicate situation. Invasion is taking a mallet to it. There’s no way the Secretary lives if Raza sees the US Army coming for him.”

“It would show that we’re not cowed by these bastards,” he said. Then, in a measured tone, he asked, “How do you think the Pakistani government would take it?”

“I think the words ‘international incident’ would be a bit of an understatement,” said Chapman. “I think the term you’re looking for here is ‘disaster.’ ”

“Drastic circumstances call for drastic measures,” said Schroeder. “It might be the lesser of two evils.”

“They’re a nuclear power, Bill. Are we really going to kick that hornet’s nest?”

“Ultimately, it’s not my call,” he said. “I just wanted your honest opinion.”

“Well, you’ve got it,” said Chapman, standing up. “It’s goddamn suicide. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to do everything I can to get us to step away from the ledge.”