Emma said, “Of course,” and asked the guide to give them a moment. Grudgingly, the guide moved a few steps away. The pilot glanced at the sky, taking in the thin cumulus clouds that raked it. “There’s a front moving in. If you think it’s windy here, wait until we get up high. The gusts will be blowing at gale force. It might be better to postpone the expedition.”
A front meant snow. This late in the year, a significant snowfall would keep the missile buried until the spring thaw next May or June. Emma couldn’t allow that to happen. “We’ll manage,” she said. “Let’s finish fueling and get moving.”
“So we go?” asked the guide, who’d overheard every word. The trip meant payment, and in his case an early retirement.
“We go,” said Emma.
The guide smiled broadly and began barking orders at the porters and engineers to get to the chopper. Emma did not smile, though she had equally compelling reasons to get up the mountain. Her future survival would depend on it. She phoned Balfour and informed him that they were completing fueling and would be taking off again in minutes. All further communication would be conducted via radio.
Emma climbed into the copilot’s seat and pulled the door closed. The helicopter lifted into the air, buffeted by the gusting wind. The town of Chitral passed below, a maze of mud walls and battered buildings laced with thousands of colorful prayer flags. The pilot pushed the stick to the left and the aircraft banked hard, leaving behind the high plateau and advancing into the towering, shark-toothed mountains.
Behind her, the guide and the engineers sat bunched together, looking miserable. The porters were crammed along with the equipment into the aft cargo bay. Emma shifted in the seat and stared out of the Perspex canopy. An infinite landscape of peaks and valleys beckoned. The wind calmed, and she felt as if she were floating into the jaws of a great white beast. The altimeter read four thousand meters, but already the mountains soared high above them. The broad, snowy faces threatened to graze the helicopter’s skids, passing so close that she was certain she could reach out and scrape her palms against the exposed rock.
Emma roused herself from her daydream, reminding herself of the importance of the mission. It was a rare rebuke. Normally her single-minded focus was her strongest suit. And so she readily admitted to having been drifting for a while now. Days, if not weeks. Her destination never varied: it was the past that drew her. And now, looking at the mountains, feeling as if she were being swallowed whole by them, she heard its siren song more strongly than ever.
She knew only one person who loved the mountains more than she did.
“His name is Ransom. He’s a surgeon. We think he’s exactly the ticket to provide you the cover you require.”
The photograph showed a tall, lanky man in jeans and a parka carrying a rucksack. Dark hair with a hint of gray, strong nose, sturdy lips, and black eyes that made her look twice.
“Rather on the intense side, isn’t he?” said Emma as she slid the picture across the table. “He looks more like a student than a surgeon.”
“He’s finishing up a fellowship at Oxford in plastic surgery. Apparently he’s the real deal. Has offers from hospitals all over England and the States.”
“Is he one of us?”
“Good Lord, no,” said General John Austen, the air force two-star who had stood up Division several years before. “And we don’t want him to be. He just turned in his application to work for Doctors Without Borders.”
Emma took back the picture. “A do-gooder?” she said, not entirely trusting.
“Aren’t we all?” Austen opened a file on his desk. “We want you in Nigeria. The deputy minister isn’t playing ball. He’s making noise about terminating some contracts with our friends in Houston. Thinks his country is more than capable of drilling their own oil and seeing it to market.”
“And I’m going to convince him otherwise?”
“Either that or kill him,” said Austen.
“Come now, General, you don’t mean that.” It was the other man in the room who spoke. The fat one who insisted on wearing short-sleeved shirts and was constantly perspiring. Emma remembered his name: Frank Connor. “The deputy minister has been dipping his finger in the till for quite some time now. We’d like you to collect evidence of his greed and remind him where his true interests lie.”
“Or else I’ll provide the information to the prime minister,” said Emma, “who’ll string him up with piano wire and cut off his balls with a rusty knife.”
Connor frowned. “Accurate and persuasive.”
“I still say we kill him,” said John Austen. “But I will defer to Frank, seeing as how this is his operation.”
Connor went on: “We’re putting you into Doctors Without Borders a month ahead of Ransom. We’ve wrangled you a job as a mission administrator. Basically, you’ll run the whole show. Don’t worry, we’ve got a few weeks to bring you up to speed. Get close to Ransom and we’ll fix a transfer for him to Lagos. The Lagos mission is staffed by locals, so it’s imperative that Ransom request that you accompany him. No one’s going to be looking at a doctor and his trusted colleague.”
Emma didn’t like Africa. It was too hot, too humid, and had far too many creepy-crawlies. “How long?”
“Start to finish? Two months in Liberia. It’s up to you to see how quickly you can get the job done in Nigeria. Best case, six months.”
“And after?”
“The usual. You break it off with the doc. We pull you out. Take sixty days and go lie on a beach somewhere.”
Emma looked at the photograph again, and she felt a current pass through her. Ransom was handsome, to be sure. But there was something about him that disturbed her. It was his eyes. Like her, he was a believer. And so he was dangerous. At once she warned herself to be wary of him. Six months was a long time. “Where did you find him?”
Austen took back the picture and slid it into his file. “None of your business.”
The helicopter landed on a rock-strewn plateau at 4,500 meters. Emma shouldered open the door and jumped to the ground. The cold hit her like a hammer. To the east, a track of cumulus clouds streamed past the summit of Tirich Mir. During the hour’s flight, the sky had turned a curdled gray. Heavy weather was approaching.
Emma dug the Magellan GPS out of her pack. The device put the distance to the bomb at twenty-two kilometers. But that did not take into consideration the 1,500-meter gain in elevation, the lack of a well-marked trail, or, most trying of all, the thin air. Alone, she might cover that stretch in six hours. She looked over her shoulder at the porters unloading the equipment. Each would carry a load weighing forty kilos. They would be fine. Near them stood the two engineers, batting their arms for warmth. One took a few steps, then bent double and put his hands on his knees. They would not be fine.
Emma walked to the guide. “Get those men some oxygen,” she said. “And tell the porters to hurry. We move out in twenty minutes.”
She watched the guide run off, then turned her attention back to the darkening sky.
Trouble.
24
“You have thirty seconds to walk into a room and commit everything you notice to memory,” said Danni.
“Like what? The color of the curtains? Kind of bedspread? I don’t get it.”
“Both of those. But also the location and type of desk. Do the drawers have locks? What’s on the counters? How do the windows open? Is there an alarm system? Anything that your instincts tell you is important.”
Jonathan stood next to Danni on the front steps of a run-down villa in the hills above Herzliya. It was past two in the afternoon. The morning’s robin’s-egg blue sky had given way to sodden gray clouds. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, and raindrops had begun pelting his cheek. Mentally he prepared himself for the task at hand. Closing his eyes, he willed his mind to become a blank slate able to capture everything it saw. He drew a breath and ordered himself to be calm. But all the while a voice shouted in his head: “You have to do better!”