The young man shook his head.
“That is a lie, Nikka. You do not fight the Americans. You are their friend.”
The general ignored the taunt. He let the silence build again, and spoke after another minute had passed.
“I feel sorry for you, brother. You are a foolish young man. Those who know do not speak. Ask your superiors in the Tawhid. They will tell you. I think I am finished with you. You have not earned my respect.”
The courier studied the general. This was not what he had anticipated. Every fighter expects to be beaten if he is captured, and he tries to prepare for torture. To be treated as a dangerous man is a mark of honor. But the fighter’s dignity had been challenged by the general’s scorn. He puffed his chest and thrust his chin up like a fighting cock.
“We know their secrets,” the courier repeated. “We will take them down, just as we did their agents in Karachi and Moscow. We see everyone and everything.”
“So that was your operation, then, in Moscow?” asked the general, inclining his head forward in a bow of respect.
“Of course, and there will be more to come, thanks God. Wait and you will see. It is not a lie. We know everything.”
General Malik sat back. He studied the prisoner and then shook his head.
“No, I do not believe it. If you were as important as you say, you would be carrying documents across the frontier. But we have looked at that little thing, that little chicken prick that you were carrying in your pocket. We have studied it, brother, and we know that it is just a few numbers and banks. If that is your big secret, then you are kutti da putr, as we say in the Punjab, the son of a dog.”
Now the courier was truly upset. He had been insulted, and he reacted in the way the general knew he would.
“You are wrong, Nikka. The proof of my words will come soon when more American agents are dead. Why do you think I was carrying the computer stick? Because I am taking the knowledge that it contains to my brothers in Afghanistan, and they will take it north, to Dushanbe. If I am caught, what of it? There are others on the road, and not just to Kabul. They travel to Cairo and even London and Paris. Soon the whole earth will be aflame and the American spies will not be able to walk upon it, anywhere.”
“The document has the names of banks in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Are the banks part of your plan for vengeance?”
“Ah, sir, that I do not know. I am a fighter, not a clerk. I do not study this computer stick, so I do not know what is on it. You are unlucky, sir. You have captured me for nothing.”
The general fell silent again, and not just for effect. He was thinking carefully about what the courier had said and trying to fit it with other things that he knew. After another long minute, during which the young man became restless again, the general posed a new question.
“Tell me about the man you call the professor. Do you know him?”
“No, Nikka, I do not know this man.”
“But you have heard of him. Do not lie, because I will find out and it will be worse for you later.”
The young man shrugged. “Of course I have heard his name. He is our sword, the professor. He is the one who knows. But I have never met him. Nobody meets him. He is the ghost. And now I am happy that you are asking, because it means you do not know who he is.”
“Do you think your computer stick comes from him?”
“Perhaps. Why not? I do not know. But it has the secrets, so maybe it comes from the professor. But I will never know. Nor will you, old general.”
“Are you lying to me, Haj Ali?”
“I am a fighter. I am Badal. I am taking vengeance for the death of my brother and my uncle and restoring the honor of my family. Why would I lie? You can beat me for a week and a month and a year, but you will learn nothing more than what I have told you.”
They did try to beat it out of him, of course. But, true to his word, he did not give up any more of the secret. General Malik observed the first interrogation session, back in Aabpara where they brought the prisoner, hooded for questioning. The general did not watch after that. He didn’t like torture, but more than that, he knew that in this case it would do no good. The man was just a courier. He didn’t understand the secrets of the letters and numbers himself. He only knew that they were deadly to the United States. They couldn’t let the courier go, after all that had happened. He died on his way to a prison in Lahore.
General Malik wondered whether he should share with the Americans what he had learned. He decided against it. It was not his job to protect intelligence agents of the United States, especially ones who were acting illegally inside his country. A simpler man would have set the Tawhid loose so they could bloody a few more faranghi spies, and gone off to the mosque to say his prayers. But General Malik was cursed with a Western trait: He brooded about his mistakes; he felt guilty about what he had left undone.
What did he really know? He had a four-item spreadsheet of numbers and letters. He would ask his analysts to explore what this intelligence meant, and then he would consider what to do with it. But it was not his problem. He would say to the Americans, much as they had said to him, lund te char. Hop on my dick.
25
Everyone loved Meredith Rockwell. She was Istanbul’s answer to the Junior League. She was a pretty girl, with flowing blond hair, so flamboyant and social that nobody wondered when she went jetting off to Dubai or Casablanca for the weekend. She had quickly become a fixture in the American community in Istanbul, organizing lunches and dinners, seances with local artists and boat trips up the Bosporus. She was a widow, she told everyone, children going to boarding schools back home; a big trust fund from her late husband to help her travel and entertain. Colorful stories about her had spread in the year she had taken residence in her fancy apartment in Besiktas. She was having an affair with a French count; no, it was a Saudi prince, or, in a third version, a Russian oligarch. All the while, she kept partying with her friends and traveling to exotic places, coyly refusing to explain where and why.
She was found dead on a street in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, where she had gone for one of her famous trips. She had taken a suite at the new Dushanbe Hyatt Regency, the fanciest hotel in Central Asia. The staff recognized her; she had been there before. Her luggage was still in the room, two Louis Vuitton bags, one of them still unpacked. The local authorities let the embassy tidy things up.
The police report said she had gone to find a bank on Rudaki Avenue and then taken a walk in the city park near the hotel. She had met a man there; she seemed to know him, witnesses said. She brought him back to the hotel and up to her room, and then he left. The hotel staff members were not scandalized. They expected that sort of behavior from Western women. The man was Tajik, witnesses said, or perhaps Uzbek or Pakistani. Nobody got a very good description. The doormen and porters looked away politely when the couple arrived.
Next she had taken a taxi, north along the Varzob River and then right on Somoni Avenue. She got out near the presidential palace but walked the other way, away from the crowded boulevards and the traffic and down a quiet street. It was a Russified neighborhood, still bearing the remnants of Soviet days: wood frame buildings painted salmon pink; signage of twinkling lights that formed Cyrillic script; high-cheeked Tajiks strolling in their summer T-shirts and jeans. Through this cityscape passed the American woman. She seemed to be going somewhere, from her deliberate pace, but there was no evidence that she had planned a meeting.
The assassination was a professional job. A car with darkened windows pulled alongside Rockwell as she was making her way down a lane a half mile from the city center. The assassin opened the door and fired two shots with a silencer. People didn’t realize they were gunshots at first; nobody would have paid attention at all, if she hadn’t screamed so loudly in English as she fell. The police tried to talk to her in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, but she wouldn’t answer their questions. They thought she was in shock. She died in the emergency room as a Tajik doctor tried to stop the bleeding.