A team of hotel security waited. Quietly, they guided Gomez, Santini, and Keck to the service elevator. Babtiste followed, swinging the stainless steel case loaded with eighty pounds of A/V gear as if it were a lunch box. Leclerc took the stairs with Chapel. Entering the opulent suite, he shot the American a challenging glance. “You look nervous,” he said.
“I am,” Chapel answered.
Six months, Sarah had been chasing the shadow. Six months shuttling between Kabul, Kandahar, and the Khyber Pass, chasing down leads like an errant fielder. One week she was a UNICEF relief worker, the next, a clinician from Médecins Sans Frontières, and the next, an administrator for the World Bank. She spent as much time building her legends as she did working her sources.
The first whispers had reached her at her desk in London, though by wildly different routes. A field officer had buried a mention in his report of some rumors he’d picked up at a party at the Indian consul’s in Kabul, the kind of boozy affair frequented by aid workers, diplomats, and the local gentry, in this case a few of the tamer regional warlords. Then there were the firsthand snippets delivered over a tepid lunch at Fortnum’s by a wallah from agriculture just back from a tour of the area: something vague about a new poppy farmer in the southeast taking control of the large fields near Jalalabad. With the Taliban gone, the Afghanis were hell-bent on reclaiming their place as the world’s largest suppliers of raw opium. Word was, however, that the seller wasn’t a local, but an Arab-Afghan like bin Laden, a devout Muslim from the Gulf who had fought as a Mujahadeen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There were rumors of an important sale. Several tons of product coming to market.
Both times the word “Hijira” came up.
“Hijira,” as in the journey from Mecca to Medinah undertaken by the Prophet Muhammad in the year A.D. 622 to escape persecution. Or more important, “Hijira,” as in the date from which the new Muslim calendar began.
To Sarah’s seasoned ears, it could not be a coincidence.
Marshaling her evidence, she’d marched downstairs to Peter Callan’s office and demanded an immediate posting in country. When he demurred, she blew her stack. Wasn’t CT what it was all about these days? Counterterrorism. Intelligence’s desperately needed raison d’être borne on silver wings in what everybody had to agree was the barest nick of time. When he hesitated still, she built his argument for him. Arabic speakers were in demand. Those who spoke Pashtun were particularly prized. Sarah, who’d taken a first in Oriental languages at Cambridge, trumped them all, with Urdu, French, and German under her belt as well. The question wasn’t why she should go to Afghanistan. It was why she wasn’t already there! Callan had grunted something about a budget and called Langley.
Four days later, she was packed aboard a commercial flight to Dulles for a one month’s crash course in the culture of the American intelligence community. From there, it was on to Karachi, and by overland route to Kabul.
Her brief was simple: Keep an ear to the ground for the bad guys. “Players,” the Yanks called them. She was to cultivate sources, debrief agents in place, and establish her own network.
“Follow the money” was her maxim, and it led to the gold souks of Gilgit, the vaults of the Afghani central bank, and Kabul’s bustling black market for medical supplies.
While she never found the Arab-Afghan, she did run across one Abu Mohammed Sayeed, wanted by nearly every Western intelligence agency for barbarous acts too numerous to mention, as he scurried to and fro across her radar arranging to sell his mother lode of opium.
Follow the money, she repeated silently, staring at the gold chain in her hand. She had, and the money had led her here, to Faisan Bhatia’s jewelry store in the heart of the Smugglers’ Bazaar.
“No, no,” she remonstrated the clerk. “The quality of the links is terrible. Look: this is not solid gold. It is electroplated.”
“Yes. Twenty microns.”
“Ten at most,” she countered. “I can scratch it off with my fingernail.”
She’d been in the store for twenty minutes, and her every sensor was telling her to get the hell out. One of the surveillance cameras was pointed directly at her, and she could imagine Sayeed in the back room, glancing up at the monitor and asking, “Is she still there? That’s a bit long, isn’t it?”
She dropped the chain on the counter and pretended to spot a bracelet that captured her fancy.
“There’s been a delay,” said a voice in her ear. “A traffic jam.” It was Ranger and he no longer sounded so calm and authoritative. “The A-team will be there in five minutes. If Omar comes out, you need to stop him. Once he’s in the bazaar, he’s got the advantage. We need him penned in.”
Stop him? The reply choked deep in her throat. Damn it! She knew they wouldn’t make it in time.
“Are you with me?” asked Ranger. “Just nod.”
So, it had come to this, thought Sarah. With all their satellites and uplinks and GPS, it had come back to the same old thing. Put your body in front of the bullet.
She would do it. She never considered saying no. Not with a daddy who’d gone ashore with 2 Para at Goose Green in the Falklands and a brother who’d done thirty missions over Baghdad. The Churchills were bred to fight. And they had the coat of arms and the professional soldier’s proud penury to prove it.
She just hadn’t thought it would be hers to do alone.
Swallowing, she found her throat dry as a chalkboard. It was the heat, she told herself.
She nodded.
“I’d like to see the red one.” To her surprise, Sarah realized that she was asking the salesman a second time to see the bracelet and that he wasn’t responding. She heard a rustle behind her, the creak of a door opening, hushed voices. The salesman’s eyes were pinned to the men emerging from the back room. Against her every instinct, she turned so that Langley could see what she was seeing, so that they would know that their vaunted A-team, their bare-chested macho superstars, were too late, and that Omar was going to get away unless she tackled him right then and there.
Sayeed was talking on a cell phone, his words rushed, urgent. She caught a string of numbers, a pause, saw his mouth widen to utter an arrogant laugh. As he slid past her, she caught his ripe scent.
Stop him, Glendenning had said.
Sarah took a step back. The collision was stilted and orchestrated. Sayeed grunted and spun, immediately on the defensive. And even as she turned to apologize, and the futility of her cause overcame her, she knew that, at least for a moment, she’d accomplished what she’d been told, and that her father, the general himself, would be proud.
Abu Sayeed lifted his arm to brush away the woman, his eyes drawn into a distasteful grimace. Until she had backed into him like a clumsy ox, he thought he’d been wrong to suspect her. Her burqa was immaculate. Her posture at once respectful, yet with the right amount of pride. She revealed no part of herself. She was a righteous woman, not a street whore eager to prey on a man with a little money in his pocket.
Abu Sayeed believed in the law of Hijaab, or “concealment.” He believed that women had no place in public. They belonged at home, caring for children, tending to their household. Only in this way could their dignity be upheld, their purity protected. Should they have to venture out, they must cover their figure in deference to the Prophet. The smallest piece of exposed flesh was as provocative as a woman’s pudenda.
Now he knew it was a sham. Her adherence to Hijaab, a lie; a ploy to rid an unsuspecting male of a few dollars. It was common enough practice. You could barely pass a diamond merchant without spotting the women waiting outside like jackals. After all, if a man had a few hundred dollars to spend on a precious stone, he might be willing to part with a good deal less to sate his baser desires. He’d been mistaken. The cloudy reception on Bhatia’s TV was from her pager, no doubt. They all carried them, anxious to meet their customers’ beck and call. Carrion birds, they were. Vultures. And laden with as many diseases.