“Then why does your brother have two of his hoods watching you?”
Balfour followed Lara’s eyes to the two men. “Them?” he chuckled, his humor firmly back in place. “They’re not His Highness’s men. They’re ISI. Pakistani intelligence. I consider them my backup protection.”
“Really?”
“They see to it that the boys from Indian intelligence don’t get their hands on me. Delhi is convinced that I had a hand in the Mumbai attacks. They say I armed the bad guys. They’re out for blood.”
Hence the Uzis. “Did you?” she asked.
“Of course,” said Balfour. “But that’s beside the point. I was just the broker. I sold them their toys. They could’ve bought them from anyone. In point of fact, the weapons were yours.”
“Mine? I didn’t even know you then.”
“I mean Russian. The lot. AKs, grenades, fuses, even the phones. It was a Russian package from stem to stern.”
Lara looked at her watch. They had been standing together conspicuously on the slope for ten minutes, which was nine minutes too long. As a contact, Balfour was a nightmare. Somewhere along the line, he had gotten it into his head that he was not a criminal wanted by the law enforcement agencies of a dozen Western nations but a legitimate businessman. In Germany or Britain, his brand of flagrant behavior would have gotten him either killed or jailed for life. In Pakistan, where he made his home, it made him a king.
“And so?” she said. “Midnight. At your hangar at Sharjah Free Trade Zone.”
“I’ll have one of my aircraft ready to transship the merchandise.”
“Where’s it going?”
“Tsk, tsk,” said Balfour. “That’s the prince’s business.”
“We like to know where our weapons end up.”
“There’s only one war going on in the region that I know of at the moment. Use your imagination.”
Business concluded, Lara waited as Balfour and his men skied to the bottom of the hill. On cue, the pair of Pakistani intelligence officers followed them down the slope.
She spent another hour at Les Grandes Alpes, taking the chairlift to the top of the hill several more times and skiing down. Certain she wasn’t being trailed, she made a final descent, took off her skis, and returned them at the rental desk, along with her boots and poles. Leaving the rental desk, she proceeded into a changing room, where she removed her ski attire and packed it neatly in a shoulder bag.
She emerged five minutes later, wearing denim shorts, a tight black tank, and low heels. She’d exchanged her oversized Uvex goggles for Ray-Ban aviators and freed her hair from the ponytail, letting it take its usual ungoverned course, falling around her face and shoulders.
Walking past the base of the ski slope, she glanced up to the sky, where giant snow machines hidden in the rafters continued to shower perfectly formed snowflakes onto the mountain. Not bad, she thought to herself, for a desert kingdom thousands of miles from Europe. What did the Quran say? If Muhammad won’t go to the mountain, bring the mountain to Muhammad.
A moment later she pushed through a pair of tall double doors and stepped into the harsh sunlight and ninety-degree temperature of a late fall day in the sprawling metropolis of Dubai City, on the shores of the Persian Gulf.
As soon as she reached her car, she placed a call. Not to Moscow, but to Washington, D.C.
“It’s Emma,” she said. “It’s a go. Midnight at the duty-free zone in Sharjah. The prince himself is coming.”
4
Her name was Amina. She was a nine-year-old wisp of a girl with fine black hair and doe eyes that bore a hole into Jonathan’s conscience the first time he saw her. He knew nothing more about her, whether she was in school or knew how to read, if she enjoyed embroidering or was a tomboy who played soccer. Amina couldn’t talk, and Afghan parents didn’t discuss their children with strangers. None of this mattered. As a surgeon, all Jonathan needed to know was evident the first time he examined her. He’d taken one look at her wounds and sworn that he would help her.
Amina lay sedated on the operating table. There was no respirator to ensure a steady flow of oxygen, no blood gas machine to monitor the anesthesia in her system, and no readily available blood should she hemorrhage. He didn’t even have scrubs or surgical masks. He had only his skill, generic pharmaceuticals, and what the Afghans called “God’s will.”
“Where do we start?” asked Hamid.
“With the face. It’s the most difficult and will take the most time. We do it while we’re fresh.” The temperature inside the clinic hovered at a damp fifty degrees. Jonathan massaged his fingers in an attempt to rub away the chill. “Okay, then, it’s eight-fifteen by my watch. Let’s do it. Scalpel.”
He rolled the instrument between his thumb and forefinger, examining the child’s features, plotting his steps. There was a hole the circumference of his pinkie beneath her jaw, where the bullet had entered, and a much larger wound where the bullet had exited, destroying most of the girl’s upper palate and nose. Amina was not a victim of war, at least not in the usual sense. She was a victim of carelessness, and a culture where automatic weapons were as common in homes as brushes and brooms.
A month earlier, while playing with her older brother, she had picked up her father’s AK-47 and used it as a crutch or support, placing both hands over the barrel and resting her chin on her hands. No one knew what happened next, whether her brother pushed her or inadvertently kicked the rifle. All that mattered was that there was a bullet in the chamber, the safety had become dislodged, and somehow the trigger had been pulled, firing a 7.62 mm copper-jacketed bullet through Amina’s hands, through the soft flesh beneath her jaw, and into her mouth, where it passed through the palate and into her sinus cavity, striking bone (thus saving her life) and altering its trajectory ninety degrees, after which it left her skull, tearing away most of her nasal cartilage and flesh.
The tragedy didn’t end there.
Still traveling at near its initial velocity, the bullet continued on its new azimuth and struck Amina’s brother in the temple, entering his brain and killing him instantly.
The procedure would represent a test of Jonathan’s skills. He had no illusions about the result. He could never restore Amina’s beauty. The best he could hope for was a face that would not provoke gasps and might one day help her find a husband.
An hour passed. Outside, the sounds of battle rose and fell, long periods of silence interrupted by staccato bursts of machine-gun fire and the thud of mortars and grenades. Each progressive clash brought the fighting closer.
“Clean up some of that blood,” said Jonathan.
Hamid dabbed the wound with gauze, looking up from the girl every few seconds to gaze out the window. “Haq’s reached the village.”
“If he comes, he comes. There’s nothing we can do about it. I need you here. Not just your hands but your mind.”
Jonathan concentrated on cutting cartilage from Amina’s ear and using his scalpel to pare it into a slim strip that would define her nose.
A shell landed one hundred meters away. The building rocked, loosing a veil of dust. Amina’s father clasped his arms to his chest but said nothing. Jonathan leaned closer to the girl, driving the noise and distraction from his consciousness. Somewhere beyond his world, a woman wailed, but he did not hear her. All that mattered was this little girl.
A bullet tore through the wall, spraying dust and wood splinters.
“Shit,” muttered Hamid, ducking.
Jonathan stepped back from the table. Despite the cold, he was sweating and his shirt clung to his back. “What do you think?”
Hamid stared down at the girl. “You’re a magician.”
“Hardly, but it just might do.” Jonathan pulled back skin and straightened the cartilage. “I don’t know if it’s an Afghan nose, but in Beverly Hills it might be the next rage.”
Just then a volley of automatic-weapons fire rang out close by. It was loud enough to make Jonathan wince and Hamid cry out. Amina’s father held his daughter’s limp hand, eyes to the ground, saying nothing.