“Yes, General. He wanted to make a gift. Of course he did. I told him our proverb. Sta da khaira may tobah da, kho das pie de rana kurray ka. ”
“And what does that mean? I am a Kashmir-born man, and I do not speak your Pashto language.”
“Sir, the words of the proverb say, ‘Don’t give me your alms, just save me from your dogs.’ I was trying to tell him that I could not help him with his enemies. But he wanted to give me the money anyway. It was a very large amount.”
“And what did you decide, Azim Khan, when you had thought about it?”
“Well, sir, I thought, if these foolish Americans want to give money to an old man with a white beard, why not? So my nephew told him that. Yes, I would meet him again and accept his gift. And he was coming to see me, this man, on the night he was taken.”
“How much money was he sending you, brother? No harm will come to you if you tell me the truth.”
“Well, General, I am embarrassed. But I will tell you. He was sending me two million dollars. It was wired to my account, from a secret fund. And he promised more money, much more, in the future if we worked together. He said it would be ten million dollars, maybe more. He would put it in an account, where I could go visit all this money. And there would be more money for other Pashtun people. I think they wanted to buy peace, sir.”
General Malik laughed. He did not mean to, but he could not help himself. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, as if he were brushing something unpleasant away.
“ Dudh vich mingyan, ” he said, a Punjabi expression that means, literally, “rat turds in the milk.” “These Americans are the clowns of the world, are they not, my brother? They drop their bombs from the sky, and then when we get angry, they think of friendship. They think they can make war, and then charm us with money. Really, they bring mirth on a summer day.”
“Yes, General. We smile, but we have a saying for this, too, sir. ‘A stone will not become soft, nor an enemy a friend.’ These Americans think they can change all things with money, even the hardness of the stone. But they cannot.”
“So here is my question, Azim Khan, the thing that still puzzles me. How did they know to come to you, an elder of the Darwesh Khel? Are they this clever, that they understand our tribes and clans? Or has some Pakistani person told them on what doors they should knock? I think it must be the second answer, don’t you?”
“I am sure I do not know, sir. These Americans have advisers for everything, and perhaps for this, too.”
“Now I must ask you another question. It has been troubling me ever since the day this American man disappeared. We know who took him. They are the miscreants, the takfiris who hide in these mountains beyond, who think they are God’s assassins.”
The old man nodded sadly.
“But what I do not know is how these miscreants learned that the American agent was coming. And I am wondering, Azim Khan, I will not play the rabbit with you, I am wondering if it was you who told these miscreants about your meeting. Or your nephew, perhaps it was him.”
“No, sir. We did not say a word. Why would we do that? I am not a greedy man. But now my two million dollars has gone. I do not have it. You can turn over every stone from here to Bannu, but you will not find it because I never got it. And the ten million more that they promised, surely that is gone, too. How will I get that now, General? I cannot.”
General Malik had taken his chin in his hand, which was something that he did when he was pondering a question and did not have the answer.
“So how did the miscreants know of the meeting, Azim Khan, if you did not tell them?”
“Sir, there are secrets and there are mysteries, and this is a mystery. It is a problem for the Americans. They are leaving footprints that cannot be seen. But someone is tracking them, just the same.”
General Malik said his goodbyes. He left presents, as well, gifts that he had brought that, although they were not two million dollars, still brought a deferential nod from the clan leader, and rented his loyalty for a season.
The general got back in his two-seat Mashaq trainer and flew back toward Peshawar through the late afternoon. The summer clouds were forming to the east, hot and sticky, and the plane was buffeted like a shuttlecock, so that the pilot felt that he must apologize to his distinguished guest for the turbulence. But the general barely noticed the rough ride, for he was lost in his puzzle book.
Where did the information come from that drove the American operations? That was what the general wondered, and it had bothered him more each year since September 11, as the Americans squeezed for more from Pakistan. He knew they had their agents, of course they did. The ISI tracked them, and usually it found them out. But this was something more delicate and evanescent. It was as if the Americans had found a window on the culture itself, so that they thought not just about this secret or that, but about the social glue that held the place together.
Who could tell them such things, that was what troubled the general. Who would be smart and subtle enough to see the patterns and describe them to the Amriki? If General Malik encountered a person with such a subtle mind, he would want to hire him for the ISI-unless he was a traitor, in which case he would kill him.
General Malik had searched for such an agent, most diligently. He had conducted surveillance, made arrests, interrogated people in the most unpleasant ways, looking for the one who might be opening to American eyes the family secrets of Pakistan.
The general had conducted what the services in the West described as “mole hunts.” But he did not like the word “mole.” It made these people sound cute and furry. He preferred to call them by the local slang, gungrat, which means “dung beetle.” For that was what they were, burrowing into the shit of the motherland and then scurrying away to the West. But if there was such a dung beetle, the general had never been able to find him.
He was too smart, this one, too mindful of the ways of intelligence services, and the general had concluded that he must be a man who knew enough to erase his tracks even as he made them. He was out there, for a certainty, and as the little plane bumped over the last ridge of mountains and began its descent toward Peshawar, General Malik made a promise to himself that he would find this man someday, and punish him.
10
The sun was just coming up over Hyde Park when Thomas Perkins got off the phone with “Mr. Jones.” The first rays were white gold. From the top-floor study of Perkins’s house in Ennismore Gardens, he could look across the rooftops to the rust-red bricks of Harrods on Brompton Road, and east across the park to the hotel towers that marked the boundary of Mayfair. The city was changing shifts-some boozy stragglers wandering in from Clubland, a ruddy crew of workingmen mounting the scaffolding that wrapped a building nearby-all bathed in the early summer light.
It was the sort of June morning that had made London irresistible to Perkins ever since he’d set up shop there in the late 1990s. What he had discovered was that this was the best place in the world to be rich. But even that pleasure had its limits.
Perkins told the housekeeper he was going out, and that if a visitor arrived, he should wait in the parlor for his return. He knotted a cashmere scarf around his neck against the morning chill and trundled down the back stairs of his townhouse, slipping out through his garage door onto a mews. He followed this passageway until he emerged at Rutland Gate, where he crossed into Hyde Park.
Perkins was preoccupied. He hadn’t liked talking to this fictitious “Jones,” the government official who so ostentatiously wouldn’t say who he really was. The arm’s-length treatment made him feel tawdry, like someone who had gotten caught doing something wrong. That wasn’t the way it had started. The “recruiter,” for that’s what he had been, had spoken of patriotism. September 11 was still a burning memory, and Perkins had wanted to help, like everyone else. And then it had gotten more complicated.