The Prince of Bagram Prison (9 page)

Someone jostled Kat from behind and she felt herself being swept forward, down the aisle, out through the narrow abattoir of the ramp, and into the terminal.

Pleasure,
she reminded herself, sliding her passport from her purse, repeating her lines in her head one last time.
A Spanish vacation. Tapas and dancing. The obligatory afternoon at the Prado.

Nothing to worry about.
But, as she handed her passport to the young man at immigration, she had to fight to keep her hands from shaking.

“W
ELCOME TO PARADISE
,” Kurtz's roommate, a fellow Agency recruit whose real name was Jonathon Pope, but who went by the unfortunate nickname of Digger, had remarked on their first night at Monterey.

Kurtz had heard plenty of stories about the Defense Language Institute, about the after-class beach parties and the women, but he hadn't really believed any of them. With the exception of a handful of older students, State Department civilians like Kurtz and Pope, most of whom were actually destined for intelligence careers of one form or another, the majority of the students appeared to have come straight from boot camp. It was an odd mix, the military's brightest, kids who hadn't necessarily shown promise in the civilian world but who had been handpicked from the sea of recruits. They were all young and tan, their bodies military lean.

“You gotta feel sorry for those assholes in Spanish,” Kurtz observed, taking a swig of his beer. Spanish was one of the shortest courses at the institute, while Arabic, to which both Kurtz and Pope had been assigned, was notoriously long. From where Kurtz stood, a year's stint at the institute didn't look so bad.

“You think if we screw up badly enough they'll make us repeat the course?” Pope asked hopefully.

“I have a feeling these girls are just a bit out of our league,” Kurtz said, realizing too late that Pope was the kind of man who undoubtedly had never felt such a thing in his life. “Agewise, I mean.”

Pope shook his head and squinted, showing his Kennedyesque wrinkles—a sign, in his world, not of age but of luxury: summers on the water and winters at Stowe or Chamonix. The well-earned ravages of a perpetual tan.

Kurtz let his eyes drift with Pope's toward the far end of the beach, where a group of female students were playing volleyball.

“That one, for instance,” Pope announced, pointing to a brunette in an orange bikini who had just stepped up to the service line.

She couldn't have been more than eighteen, Kurtz thought, tall and lanky, with the lingering awkwardness of a teenager, her hair pulled back into a long dark braid. When she tossed the ball into the air and jumped to meet it, her body arced perfectly, legs and chest and arm in one fluid and graceful motion of power.

It was Kurtz's first glimpse of Kat, and he would never forget it. He had an undeniable urge to possess her, as if by doing so he could claim a portion of her self-assurance.

“I'll bet she likes older men,” Pope mused.

Kurtz was suddenly defensive. “Don't be an asshole,” he snapped.

“Y
OUR KEY
,
SIR
,” the front-desk clerk said, patronizing Kurtz one final time with her impeccable English before sliding his key card across the narrow counter. She was attractive in a decidedly Iberian way, with a long neck and a slim nose, dark eyes set beneath carefully arched brows.

Kurtz turned gratefully from her gaze and made his way across the glass-and-steel lobby, toward the hallway that the woman had indicated led to his room. Spare and soulless, the hotel Janson had chosen was an homage to European modernity, part of a movement of designer bullying that Kurtz found especially unfortunate.

It was a style not unlike the architecture of the Gulf States, though there, against the sparse backdrop of sea and sand, such masculine simplicity, perfectly and richly executed, made a kind of sense, while here on the Continent it seemed merely gratuitous. A reaction, Kurtz thought, to centuries of culture.

Kurtz found his door off the first-floor hallway and let himself inside, surveying the space as he turned the lock behind him. There was a shabbiness to the room that sheer force of size had camouflaged in the hotel's common areas. The white walls were scuffed, the cheap veneer on the bed and dresser curling away at the edges. Time, Kurtz thought, had already been unkind to the establishment.

Setting his sample case on the bed, Kurtz opened the leather flap and emptied the contents. Tiny bottles of orifice guard. Miniature sample urns and autopsy gloves. A stack of prayer cards addressing the various gods. Deterrent for even the most ambitious customs officer.

Any reason this is going to be a problem?
he could hear Jan-son say as he lifted the false bottom from the case. And for the briefest of moments, looking down at the Beretta nestled there, he wasn't sure.

Almost as if to reassure himself, he picked up the gun and set it against his palm, slipped the spare clip into the stock.

Mother and child, Harry Comfort thought as he settled into his deck chair and scanned the horizon, contemplating the unobscured terror of the universe. The moon was not yet up, the sky as clear as Harry had seen it for some time. In the distance, Mauna Kea's humped back rose from the dark plain of ranch land. Above her, Cetus the whale slipped westward through the krill swirl of stars like a calf surfacing for air.

Harry took a sip of his vodka, then balanced the tumbler on his stomach and scanned the sky, letting his eyes come to rest on the green planet cradled just below Aquarius. Harry had been tracking Uranus for several weeks now, sketching the planet's slow progress with the diligence of a schoolboy, using his old Leica binoculars while he waited for his Celestron to arrive.

It wasn't glamorous work, but it was the kind of repetitive task Harry needed. His first months on the island, the night sky had been so overwhelming to him that he'd been unable to look at it for more than a few moments at a time, and Uranus had given him something to which he could tether his mind. He'd always had a soft spot for the crater-pocked planet, the sort of sentimental attachment one might feel for an old boxer who had once been great but had hung on too long and taken one too many beatings at the end.

Down in the pasture that abutted the Tamarack Pines, one of the steers lowed a mournful protest and the rest of the herd shifted gracelessly in reply, their hooves scuffling the soft earth.

Hawaii, is it?
Heinz, the new European DO had remarked as they'd cleared up the last of Harry's paperwork.
Lots of retired Agency men there. I'll have Karen get you a list
.
Can't hurt to have some contacts. Show you around the island, treat you to a game of golf.

Harry had agreed, smiling his usual accommodating smile. But in truth he hadn't been able to imagine anything worse. For a moment he'd even thought about changing his plans. But then he'd realized just what such a step would mean, how much he'd sacrificed for them already, and how he wouldn't be able to forgive himself if he gave them the rest of his life as well.

Harry finished his drink and set the empty glass on the lanai, then reached for his sketchbook and flashlight. How slow it all seemed from here, the progress of the planet across millions of miles of space nearly imperceptible. A few lines on paper, the relation of a handful of dim points of light. And yet this was the only way the mind could even begin to make sense of it all.

From somewhere inside the apartment came the muted sound of the phone ringing, but Harry didn't move to answer it. Char was the only person whose calls he cared to take, and she was asleep inside. It was too late for solicitors, which left only the possibility of a wrong number, or worse, one of those long, vacant calls filled with satellite chatter which Harry knew were not wrong numbers at all but vulgar reminders of everything he could not leave behind.

The kitchen light switched on, obliterating the sky, and Harry saw Char's shadow skate across the lanai. He had told her several times not to bother with the phone, but she was the kind of person for whom such a concept was entirely impossible to grasp. In Char's world, Harry was learning, a ringing phone was meant to be answered, even at one o'clock in the morning. Especially at one in the morning, for the likelihood of disaster was so much greater then, the prospect that the caller might need help.

It was this same impulse that had drawn Char to him, her innate desire to be of use in some way, to fix things that were broken—something, Harry couldn't help observing, that she appeared to be unable to accomplish in her own life. One day she was cleaning his house and the next she was in bed with him, as if his need for intimacy were as easily fulfilled as his desire for a clean bathroom.

In their interactions with each other Harry and Char observed the unwritten etiquette of exiles, which meant asking as few questions as possible about the past, but Harry had managed to glean the basics of what Char had left behind on the mainland. At least one ex-husband and two kids. A house and a car. A job that, most likely, had not required cleaning other people's toilets.

Harry turned in his chair and craned his neck, watching her through the patio doors. She had thrown on one of his shirts, but it was unbuttoned, and Harry could see her body and all its failings in the glare of the overhead lights. Her thighs were heavy and thick, her pubic hair a dark and unruly triangle, her stomach sagging, silvered with stretch marks. Two kids, Harry thought, possibly three.

Char picked up the phone and cradled it against her shoulder, then looked quizzically out at Harry.

“Hello?” he heard her say through the door.

Harry shook his head vigorously, trying to signal his desire not to be interrupted, but it was no use.

“Yes,” she told the caller, motioning to the phone, as if Harry simply hadn't understood that it was for him. “He's right here. May I ask who's calling?”

A title searcher, Harry thought, watching this odd bit of professionalism revealed. Or an insurance adjuster, one of those necessary jobs that seem, to outsiders at least, completely unnecessary. That's what Char would have done. For a moment he could see her in a cheap suit and sensible pumps, eating a fast-food lunch in the front seat of her car.

“Hang on,” she said into the phone, then she put her hand over the receiver and slid the patio door open.

Harry reached desperately for his drink and tilted the last of the dregs from the glass. Not a soul out there, he thought, whom he'd rather talk to sober.

Char leaned out toward him, her breasts slouching forward as she did, the nipples big and dark against Harry's shirt. “It's Dick Morrow,” she whispered, shrugging slightly, as if even she was dubious of what the name meant. Then she thrust the phone into his hand.

Harry put the phone to his ear and waved her away. Not back to bed, for he knew better than to expect privacy, but his dignity required at least the illusion of it. He waited for her to move inside, then reached over and pulled the lanai door closed.

“Harry?” Dick Morrow's voice came through on the line. “Harry, it's Dick.”

Six thousand miles between them and still the words were like a hammer in Harry's gut. “Yes?” he said quietly.

Morrow cleared his throat as Harry had heard him do so many times before. “Hawaii, is it?” he said, his tone carefully offhand. “Got your stargazing after all. I remember how beautiful it can be out—”

But Harry didn't let him finish. “What do you want?” he asked.

Another throat-clearing and then a moment of dramatic silence. “It's about Madrid, Harry.”

He was supposed to ask now, but didn't, refused to be Morrow's accomplice. Instead, he watched Char pad across the kitchen and take her stash box, an old Lion Coffee can, from the cabinet above the sink.

“It's the boy,” Morrow told him at last. “He's disappeared.”

“I'd think that would be an Agency problem,” Harry said, knowing full well the reach of Morrow's hand since his “retirement” to the Pentagon. “Aren't you supposed to be playing golf somewhere? I've heard Florida's great for that.”

Morrow ignored the remark. “Any idea where he might have gone?”

“None whatsoever,” Harry replied. This, at least, was the truth.

“He's in real trouble, Harry. I shouldn't have to tell you that. It's a matter now of who finds him first.”

Yes, Harry thought, and God help him if it's you. “Maybe you should ask my replacement,” he told Morrow. “He struck me as a real go-getter. Flynn, I think his name is.”

Morrow cleared his throat yet again, and decades of practice and intuition told Harry that Justin Flynn was no longer available for questioning.

“I don't know anything. Surely they told you that. It's why they pulled me out in the end.”

“They told me you had weekly meetings with the boy. You must have talked about something.”

Not even an attempt to deny that he'd been poking around, Harry thought. And why should there be? They both knew each other's secrets.

“We played cards,” Harry said, watching Char light a joint and take a long, satisfied drag.