A courier appeared at the glass door, punched in the cipher code, and entered. Without a word he laid a stack of four brown, red-striped folders and an accordion folder before Margolin and then departed. Margolin passed out the folders, and for the next fifteen minutes the group read in silence.
Finally Mary Pat said, “A sand table? I’ll be damned.”
“Woulda been nice if they’d brought it back whole,” Turnbull said.
“Look at the dimensions,” Cummings said. “No way to get it outta there on foot. Not without compromising the team. Right call, I think.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” the Acre Station chief mumbled, unconvinced. Turnbull was under incredible pressure. While the official line was that the Emir wasn’t at the top of the United States’ Most Wanted List, he indeed was. However unlikely his capture was to turn the tide in the war on terrorism, having him on the loose out there was at best embarrassing. At worst, dangerous. John Turnbull had been hunting the Emir since 2003, first as Acre Station’s deputy, then as its head.
As good as Turnbull was at his job, like many current career CIA officers, he suffered from what Mary Pat and Ed called “operational disconnect.” He simply had no idea what an op looked like or felt like, in person, on the ground, and that disconnect led to a plethora of problems, which generally fell into one category: unrealistic expectations. In planning an op, you expect too much, either from the people working it or from the scope of the mission. Most ops aren’t home runs; they are base hits that slowly and steadily put points on the board that eventually add up to a big win. As Ed’s literary agent once told him, “It takes ten years to become an overnight success.” The same was generally true with covert ops. Sometimes intelligence, preparation, and good luck come together in the right way at the right time, but most times they’re out of sync just enough to keep that long ball from sailing over the left-field fence. And sometimes, she reminded herself as she continued scanning the report, you don’t know you’ve got a home run until well after the fact.
“You see this business about the Koran they found?” Cummings asked the group. “No way that belonged to anybody in that cave.”
No one responded; there was no need. She was right, of course, but barring an inscription and a “return to” address on the front cover, an antique Koran wasn’t going to do them much good.
“They got plenty of pictures, I see,” Mary Pat said. The Rangers had meticulously photographed all the URC faces in the cave. If any of them had been nabbed or tagged in the past, the computer would spit out the details. “And samples of the table. Smart guy, this Driscoll. Where are the samples, Ben?”
“Somehow they missed the helo out of Centcom Kabul. They’ll be here in the morning.”
Mary Pat wondered what, if anything, the samples would tell them. Langley’s Science and Tech wizards were miracle workers, as were the FBI labs at Quantico, but there was no telling how long that thing had been in the cave, nor was there any guarantee the mock-up would hold any peculiar traits. Crapshoot.
“Pictures we got now,” Margolin said.
He picked up a remote control from the table and pointed it at the forty-two-inch flat screen on the wall. A moment later an 8×10 grid of thumbnail images appeared on the monitor. Each was annotated by a date and a time stamp. Margolin clicked the remote and enlarged the first photo, which showed the sand table in situ from a distance of about four feet.
Whoever had actually taken the shots had done a thorough job, Mary Pat saw, photographing the sand table from the macro to the micro, using a miniature measuring tape for scale in each shot. Despite it being a cave, they’d taken care with the lighting, too, which made a big difference. Of the 215 shots Driscoll and his team had taken, 190 were variations on a theme-same view but close up or at a different angle-and Mary Pat wondered if there was enough for Langley to create a 3-D rendering of the thing. Something to pursue. Whether animating the damn thing would make any difference she had no idea, but better to try it and fail than later regret not trying. Somebody in the URC had gone to a lot of trouble to make this thing, and it’d be nice to know why. You don’t make a goddamned sand table on a whim.
According to the report, the remaining twenty-five pictures were repeats of three separate spots on the sand table, two on the front and one on the back, all displaying some kind of marking. Mary Pat asked Margolin to call these up on the monitor, which he did, setting it for slideshow. When it was done, Mary Pat said, “The two on the front look like manufacturer’s marks. Driscoll said the base was heavy-duty plywood. Might be able to use the marks to track something down. The other mark, on the back… Tell me if I’m wrong, but that looks handwritten.”
“Agreed,” Margolin said. “We’ll turn the translators loose.”
“And what about the million-dollar question?” Cummings said. “Why make the sand table, and where’s it supposed to represent?”
“The Emir’s vacation spot, I hope,” Turnbull said.
They all laughed.
“If wishes were horses…” Margolin mused. “Mary Pat, I can see the gears cranking in your head. Got an idea?”
“Maybe; lemme get back to you.”
“How about the documents in the ammo box?” Turnbull asked.
“Translators estimate tomorrow afternoon,” Margolin said. He opened the accordion file, withdrew the map from the cave, and unfolded it on the table. Everyone stood up and leaned over it.
Cummings read the legend: “Defense Mapping Agency… 1982?”
“Left behind by the CIA advisers,” Mary Pat said. “They wanted the mujahideen to have maps, just not the best maps.”
Margolin turned the map over, displaying the Baedeker’s Peshawar side.
“Got some markings here,” Mary Pat said, tapping the paper and leaning closer. “Dots. Ballpoint pen.” They scoured the map and in short order found nine marks, each a cluster of either three or four dots.
“Who’s got a knife?” Mary Pat asked. Turnbull handed her a pocketknife, and she slit the masking tape along all four edges, then turned the Baedeker’s over. “There you are…” she murmured.
Inscribed in the upper-right-hand corner, no larger than a quarter-inch, was an upward-pointing arrow followed by three dots, and a downward-pointing arrow followed by four dots.
“Legend,” Margolin whispered.
23
IT STARTED in the Department of Justice. Forwarded by the Pentagon, it was First Sergeant Driscoll’s written report of his takedown in the Hindu Kush cave. The report-only three pages long, and simply written-detailed what Driscoll and his men had done. What flagged it for the attorney who reviewed the report was the body count. Driscoll reported having killed nine or so Afghan fighters, four of them with a silenced pistol at zero range. Direct shots to the head, the attorney saw, which made his blood run a little cold. It was the nearest thing he’d ever read to a confession of cold-blooded murder. He’d read his share of such confessions but never written so directly. This Driscoll fellow had violated some rules or laws or something, the attorney thought. It wasn’t a battlefield action, not even a sniper’s account of killing people at a hundred yards or so as they stuck their heads up like ducks at a shooting gallery. He’d taken care of the “bad guys” (so he called them) while they slept. Slept. Totally harmless, the lawyer thought, and he’d killed them without as much as a thought and reported it straightforwardly, like an account of cutting the grass in his front yard.