“Great.”
“But it is bad form to begin selling the parlor furniture while grandfather is still upstairs on his deathbed. Would you agree?”
Alden said nothing for a moment. “So … I am not here to discuss my options for next January?”
Laska shrugged. His cashmere sweater barely moved as his narrow shoulders went up and down inside it. “You will be taken care of in a post-Kealty America. Do not fear. But no, that is not why you are here.”
Alden was at once both excited and confused. “Well, then. Why have you asked me here?”
Laska grabbed a leather-bound folder resting on the end table next to the sofa. He pulled out a sheaf of papers and placed them in his lap. “Judy Cochrane has been meeting with the Emir.”
Alden’s crossed legs uncrossed quickly, and he sat up straight. “Oh, okay. I need to be careful about that matter, as I am certain you understand. I can’t give you any information regarding—”
“I am not asking you anything,” Laska said, then smiled thinly. “Yet. Just listen.”
Alden nodded stiffly.
“Mr. Yasin has agreed to allow the PCI to handle his representation in the Western District of Virginia for the Charlottesville attack three years ago.”
Alden said nothing.
“As part of our agreement with the Department of Justice, Judy and her team are not allowed to detail the capture of the Emir nor his imprisonment until the day he was delivered by the FBI to the Bureau of Prisons.”
“I’m sorry, Paul, but you are already treading in waters that are too deep for me.”
Laska kept talking as if Alden had not protested. “But the story he tells is quite incredible.”
Alden indulged the old man, who, quite possibly, held the key to Alden’s future. He explained, “The attorney general questioned me at length about any CIA involvement in the Emir’s case. We had no participation whatsoever, and I communicated that to him. That is already more than I should say to someone without the proper clearance.”
Laska shook his head, talked over the last part of Charles Alden’s words. “He says he was attacked on the street in Riyadh by five men, shot when he resisted, then kidnapped, brought to a location in the United States, and tortured for a number of days, before being handed over to the FBI.”
“Paul, I don’t want to hear—”
“And then the FBI shipped him off to some other location for several months, a so-called black-site prison, before delivering him to Florence, Colorado.”
Alden raised his eyebrows. “Frankly, Paul, this is starting to sound like a bad movie. Pure fantasy.”
But Laska relayed the Emir’s claims as fact. “He got a great look at four of the men who kidnapped and tortured him. And although the Emir is, if you believe the allegations against him, a terrorist, he is also quite an artist.” Laska took four pages from the file in his lap and offered them to Alden.
The deputy director of the CIA did not reach out and take them.
“I’m sorry” was all he could say.
“You said they were not CIA. So you will not know these men. What is the harm?”
“Frankly, I am very disappointed that your true motivation for having me over this evening was nothing more than—”
“If you don’t know them, Charles, just hand the pages back to me, and you will not spend the next several years testifying as the former head of Clandestine Services of the Central Intelligence Agency. The man at the helm when an illegal rendition was performed in an allied nation against the direct orders of the President of the United States.”
Alden emitted a long sigh. In truth, he didn’t know what many of the CIA’s foot soldiers looked like, as he rarely left the seventh floor at Langley. Did Laska think the Agency’s paramilitary men just hung out at a water cooler on the top floor, covered in grease paint and battle gear, waiting for their next mission? Certainly, Alden told himself, he would not be able to recognize a drawing of any field man in the Special Activities Division, the CIA’s paramilitary arm and the operators who would have had the training to make this happen. After talking to AG Brannigan about the Emir’s capture a year earlier he’d gotten the impression DOJ thought the Emir had been picked up by some Middle Eastern intelligence agency for some personal beef and then snuck into the United States and dumped at the FBI’s door in order to curry favor at some later date. It was a mystery, yes, but it wasn’t anything Alden had to worry about.
He decided he’d take a look at the drawings, shake his head, and hand them back. If that was all it took to secure a position in a Laska foundation after his time in CIA ended, then so be it.
He shrugged. “I’ll indulge you and look at the pictures. But I won’t discuss this matter with you any further.”
Laska smiled. His square face widened. “It’s a deal.”
Alden took the pages, crossed his legs, and looked up at Laska. The CIA political appointee retained a slightly annoyed appearance while doing this.
Laska said, “What you have there are photocopies of tracings Judy made of the Emir’s original drawings. The quality is not perfect, but I think they get the point across as to what the men look like.”
This first picture, just as he expected, was a detailed but not particularly lifelike sketch of a man’s face, a face Charles Alden did not recognize. The man was young, white, and his hair was shaded in with a pencil, presumably to indicate that it was black or dark brown. He wore some sort of bandage on his chin. Below the picture were some handwritten notes. “Kidnapper 1. American, 25 to 30 years old. 183cm. This man shot me on the street. He was wounded slightly on the face, hence the bandage.”
It was a decent drawing of a good-looking guy in his twenties, but otherwise Alden did not find the photo remarkable.
Charles shook his head no for Laska’s benefit and moved on.
Drawing number two was of another young man. He wore his hair shorter than the first man, and it was dark. He was nondescript in every other way. The text under the drawing said: “Kidnapper 2. 28 to 35 years old. Shorter than #1.”
Still, Alden didn’t know the man.
Another shake of the head, and on to the next drawing.
Alden’s eyes widened, and then narrowed, and he immediately worried that his host might have seen the change in his expression. This drawing was of an older man, much older than the others. Quickly he scanned down to the notes Saif Yasin had written about Kidnapper 3: “Maybe sixty years old. Healthy. Thin. Very strong and angry. Cold eyes. Speaks fair Gulf Arabic.”
Oh my God, Alden thought to himself, but he was careful to betray no more emotion to Paul Laska. His eyes flicked back up to the picture. Short hair lightly shaded as if to indicate that it was gray. Deep-chiseled features. Years etched into his skin. A square jaw.
Could it be? A sixty-year-old who was still out on the sharp edge? There were a few, but it certainly narrowed it down. One man did stand out, however, and he bore a more than passing resemblance to the drawing.
Alden thought he recognized this man, but he was not certain.
Until he turned to the next page.
A rendering of a Hispanic male, mid-forties, with short hair. The caption below his name said he was “Kidnapper 4: short but very powerful.”
God fucking damn it! Alden screamed it internally. John Clark and his partner. The Mexican guy from Rainbow? What was his name? Carlos Dominguez? No … that’s not it.
Alden did not try to hide his amazement now. He let the other pages fall to the floor of the library, and he held each photocopy in a hand. Clark in the left, the Hispanic fellow in the right.
These two men had sat in Alden’s office a year earlier. He’d sent them packing, cashiered them from the Central Intelligence Agency.