“I’m so sorry I look like this, but I had to get away. He was in the bedroom. I couldn’t get to my clothes.”
“Smart move,” Iggy said. “He would’ve popped you.”
Jackie’s bloodshot eyes grew wide. “You know Brian, don’t you?”
“Brian and I go way back.” Iggy nodded. “He can be quite a charmer when he wants to, but you don’t fuck with him. He’s a mean son of a bitch.”
“His name isn’t Brian, is it?” Tears ran down her face. Jackie looked up and took a deep breath. “This is going to sound crazy and I know I already look crazy, but I’m pretty sure Brian’s a spy.”
“We both know him as Joe Chronister,” Camille said. “He’s been a CIA case officer since Vietnam.”
“I knew it. It was all a lie,” Jackie said over and over, crying as she rocked herself. “I married some fake person.” She cried harder.
Camille and Iggy volleyed glances. Iggy shrugged his shoulders and Camille rolled her eyes at him as she got up to retrieve a box of tissues. She handed it to Jackie and put her hand on her shoulder while they waited for her to calm down. As far as Camille was concerned, emotions were obstacles to be controlled and defeated, not something to be processed. Her own feelings made her uncomfortable and other people’s were worse. She poured a glass of water, then handed it to Jackie, then she sat down on the couch beside Iggy.
The tears seemed to slow and Jackie grew quiet except for snorting sounds. She wiped her cheeks and nose with a tissue. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t bother you, but I know he was going to do it. Ray couldn’t save me, he said. No one could.”
“Who’s Ray?” Iggy said.
“Ray-that’s what he called himself. I don’t know his real name. You were looking for him when you dropped by the apartment. Ray rescued me.”
“His real name is Hunter Stone. Why did your husband say Hunter couldn’t save you?”
“He told me Ray, uh, Hunter wasn’t coming back.” Jackie’s voice cracked. She started to cry again.
“Everything’s going to be okay. You don’t need to cry. You’re safe here and we’re going to save Hunter. I promise,” Camille said, keeping her words slow and steady as if she were trying to talk a jumper off a window ledge.
Jackie bowed her head, wiped away tears, then blew her nose. “Sorry.”
“We need to know everything he said about Hunter. Everything, even if it doesn’t seem very important to you.”
Jackie nodded. “Brian, uh, Joe said he was taking Ray to his favorite place tomorrow. He said something about taking the gloves off for a man-to-man talk.”
“Where the hell is that?” Iggy said.
“He’s been working on some big project for the last couple of years. I know that’s what he meant.” She blew her nose into an already soaked tissue. “He wouldn’t tell me a thing. He disappears for days, sometimes weeks at a time. That’s how I knew he wasn’t really an oil exec. He kept going to the same place, but there’s no oil there.”
Iggy held up his prosthetic hand. “Hold on a minute. I thought you said he wouldn’t tell you where he was going.”
“He wouldn’t. I figured it out from the dirt on his shoes when he got home. I’m a forensic soil scientist.” She sniffed loudly, sucking the phlegm back into her sinuses. It grossed Camille out even more than the constant nose blowing. “I don’t know what his project is about, but whatever it is, I have absolutely no doubt it’s somewhere near Zarafshan, Uzbekistan.”
“You can be that specific?” Camille said.
“Only because I analyzed a zillion samples from the Muruntau gold deposits there for a summer job when I was in grad school. I was bored out of my mind and I used to study the micro flora. I discovered a new member of the Terfeziaceae family-a desert truffle-on the roots of a…You don’t want to hear all of this, do you?”
“I’ve heard enough to believe you know what you’re talking about,” Camille said, smiling to reassure her. “Did your husband ever mention SHANGRI-LA or BALI HAI?”
Jackie knit her eyebrows and stared into the room for a few moments. “You know, he did. One time when he came back from Uzbekistan and I asked him where he had been, he said he’d been to SHANGRI-LA. I thought he was just being his usual asshole self.”
Camille and Iggy finished the interview and Camille gave Jackie a towel and some fresh clothes. She showed her into the trailer’s bathroom so she could freshen up.
Iggy looked at Camille and sighed. “You were great with her. But please don’t make me ever go through another interrogation like that again. I’d rather take a cattle prod to some guy’s cajones. I don’t know how therapists can stand it. Hell, a full day of that touchy-feely stuff and I’d fry my own nuts.”
Camille laughed. “Use my computer and get some overheads of Zarafshan. There’s an old KGB prison in the mountains north of there, near all the gold mines. You won’t be able to see the prison-it’s constructed inside an abandoned mineshaft.” Camille walked to the sink and filled a coffee carafe with water, then poured it into her Braun coffeemaker. She wasn’t about to go to Central Asia undercaffeinated.
“How the hell do you know all of that?”
“I was there on one of my first jobs with my dad-old Soviet days. The name was gora-something. You’ll have to check with the spooks. I totally forgot about it. It was an Agency contract to take out one of their own before the KGB softened him up to much.” Camille shoveled coffee into the filter, spilling some on the stainless-steel counter.
“You don’t have to make it strong just for me.”
“You can water it down.” She wiped up the grinds. “The KGB prison was built inside a mountain in an old gold mine that dated back to tsarist days before they started open pit mines in the region. It was an impossible job to get to anyone in there.”
“Right. Your father didn’t know the word impossible. How’d Charlie pull it off?”
“It wasn’t his usual surgical work. We used the air vents. There was no other way. He felt horrible about it. I was thirteen, a kid on my first real mission behind the Iron Curtain. I just thought it was cool.”
“You probably put a lot of poor bastards out of their misery.” Iggy turned the computer on. “So the Agency’s running an old KGB prison in Uzbekistan-one more hellhole under new management. I bet the Rubicon tie-in is that they’ve used those guys instead of Halliburton to renovate it for them. You know I don’t have any qualms about doing whatever we have to do to keep our country safe, but why the hell do we have to use the same goddamn facilities the KGB did their dirty work in? I fought those monsters for years. We were the good guys, taking down the Evil Empire. It gets to me to know our guys are using the same electrodes, the same tubs…”
“You don’t think we need to do it?” Camille turned on the coffeemaker, then retrieved cream from the fridge.
“I’m not saying that at all. The tangos aren’t playing by any rules. You have to get rough with them if you want to find out anything.”
“Seems to me like most of what you get that way is junk. The poor bastards say anything to make it stop.”
“You know, Camille, interrogation is an art. The real masters can extract pure information. The problem is anybody can torture someone. Not everyone who can cut open a head is a brain surgeon. You get the jerk-offs who get off on it and the idiots who’ll keep going cause they don’t know how to evaluate the detainee’s potential. Sometimes the torturers themselves make up shit. But then there are real masters. They’re the ones who know when to quit.”
“Not to change the subject, but I don’t want to think any more than I have to about what they’re doing to Hunter.” Camille leaned against the counter while she waited on the coffeemaker. “GENGHIS and I need to get moving as soon as we nail down a plan. I’d like to bring in some serious hardware and some top operators from our Afghan shop.”