Chapter 2
It was the most god-awful frightening place she had ever been. Some parts of Jakarta came close. Jakarta with its garish slums, oppressive pollution, and packs of teenage muggers giggling with hostile intent. Macao had a few dark corners where you didn’t dare venture. And everyone knew about Rio, the gorgeous bad boys on motorbikes, streaking past with their razors at the ready. But here-the unremitting heat, the hostile stares, and worst of all, the burqa draped over her head and shoulders, baking her like a Christmas goose-this topped it all.
Her name was Sarah Churchill, operational designation: “Emerald,” and through her black gauze veil, she watched the target advance across the intersection. She could see that he was in distress, trying not to limp, compensating by standing too straight and puffing out his chest. Two days she’d been tracking him, up and down the mountain passes, a distance of sixty miles. She was hurting, too, but she’d be damned if she’d show it. Her feet were raw and blistered in their leather sandals; her legs fatigued beyond measure. A little while ago, her lower lip had cracked and she could feel a trickle of blood, salty and strangely reassuring, on her tongue.
A trio of Indian women clad in red and orange saris scurried across her path, and she mimicked their gait. The “second-class shuffle,” she called it-head bent, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed to the ground like a dog that’s been beaten too much.
Drawing in her shoulders, Sarah made herself shrink beneath the full-length garment. Her horizons seemed to dwindle before her and she bridled at her training. Blend in with your environment: the first rule of tradecraft taught at Fort Monckton, where all good little English boys and girls go to learn to be spies. Ever the prize pupil, she kept her back hunched and continued to hug the inside of the street.
She was too tall. That was the problem. You didn’t see many Pakistani women who stood five feet nine inches in bare-stockinged feet. Her height came from her father, a six-foot-four-inch Welshman. Her hair, a raven’s black and cut to her shoulders, was her mother’s gift, as were her sierra brown eyes. Her attitude, though, was all her own, and not subject to amendment or revision. She was determined, outspoken, and possessed a dangerous temper she could not quite control. Five years ago at IONEC, the Intelligence Officer’s New Entrant’s Course, she’d set the women’s mark for the fifty-mile hike, but when at her graduation ceremony her instructors called her their toughest recruit, she’d broken down and cried like a baby.
Her earpiece crackled with static. “Primary still visual?”
“He’s gone into the store,” she whispered. “Bhatia’s Gold and Precious Jewelry.” She spelled the name slowly, enunciating each letter just as the matron had taught her at Roedean. “It’s the bloody hawala, all right. Time to call in the reinforcements.”
“Give us a GPS read.”
“Coming up.” She found the global positioning device on her belt and hit the locate/transmit button. Within a second, the stationary satellites that comprised the Central Intelligence Agency’s proprietary GPS had established her exact latitude and longitude to within six inches of where she actually stood, and her altitude above sea level to within four. She’d been transmitting her location every hundred meters since she’d entered the bazaar. Taken together, the coordinates constituted a route marker for the cavalry, or in more dire circumstances, a path to get her the hell out of Dodge.
“Emerald, you are mapped. An A-team is moving in to clean up. ETA is twelve minutes.”
“Twelve minutes? He could be out the back and halfway back to Pesh by then. Damn it, tell them to hurry.”
The Smugglers’ Bazaar encompassed an area as big as the City of London, with half again as many alleys, roads, and lanes. Few of the roads were marked, if they even possessed a name. There were certainly no addresses. It had sprung up as an informal “gray market” trading in goods stolen across the Afghani border. Carts had given way to shacks, and now most of the stores were housed in sturdy concrete bungalows. A patchwork of dubious signs advertised the wares. Marks and Spencer. Maytag. Pringle of Scotland. Sony. And her absolute favorite: Sacks Fifth Avenue. Though wholly within Pakistan’s borders, the bazaar was treated as its own autonomous region. Crime was rampant. Thieves, pickpockets, and worse roamed freely, practicing their trade on the weak and unsuspecting. It was up to the victim to catch the criminal. Once he did, the punishment was up to him, too. If there was any rule at all, it was the harsh custom of the Pathan tribesmen who made it their home.
“Maintain visual,” snapped the voice.
“How’s the picture?” she asked. “Getting what you need?”
“Reception’s a little fuzzy. Keep still for a second. I need to reset the color balance.”
Sarah held still, staring out at the bustling street. Seven thousand miles away a technician was deciding whether the picture was too red or too green. The Sony microdigital camera embedded in her sunglasses was a gift from the boys in Langley. She liked to think of it as a “welcome to our side of the pond” present given upon her secondment from MI6. The Yanks always had the neater toys. The camera’s images ran to a transmitter in her belt that relayed both audio and visual signals to a spot station nearby. The spot station, in turn, sent the signals on to Langley. The boys at Langley had also given her a machine pistol, three spare clips of ammo, and a tab of cyanide tucked inside a neat little compartment where her wisdom tooth used to be.
“Give us a slow scan left to right.”
Sarah turned her head as directed, the camera capturing the same exotic imagery as her eyes: the mosque and its beautifully carved doors, the merchant stringing fresh offal in his front window, the gunsmith tooling a rifle barrel on the sidewalk, and finally, Bhatia’s Gold and Precious Jewelry, where she could make out a tall, lean figure standing at the far counter. Abu Mohammed Sayeed. “Omar,” for operational purposes.
But they couldn’t get the smell. The acrid whiff of long-tended fires; the spiced scent of lamb on a spit; the eye-watering odor of men who toiled and sweated in the one-hundred-degree heat and had not bathed in weeks.
“Close enough?” she asked. “Or would you gents like me to stick my head inside the store and say hello?”
“Negative. Just give us a walk-by. Nice and brisk. We can slow down the pictures on this side.”
Sarah crossed the street, dodging a howling Vespa, doing her best to keep to a walk. She was sure that somewhere in the Koran there was a hadith banning “righteous women” from running, just as the holy lessons banned them from everything else, except catering to the whims and desires of “righteous man folk.”
Stepping onto the raised walkway, she continued past the jewelry store, letting her gaze fall on the array of gold chains in the window. The doorway gaped beside her. Two guards with AK’s stood at attention inside. Surveillance cameras stared down from the corners. A portly Indian was talking to Sayeed. There were no other customers.
“Confirmed. Omar on premises,” came the voice in her earpiece. “Looks like he’s got some muscle in there. Keep it moving.”
For a quarter second longer she watched, then continued her promenade. At that very moment, however, there was a flurry of movement inside the store, and she stopped. It was a clumsy, jerky halt, a dead giveaway. And there she stood for one second… two-a perfect silhouette frozen in the doorway.
“He’s going in the back,” Sarah whispered. “I mean, the two are going together. So is one of the guards. Where are the bully boys?” she asked, desperation crowding inside her.
“ETA nine minutes. Do not jeopardize your cover. Proceed to the Tikram Mosque and continue surveillance from there.”