The Year of the Locust, page 8
“Okay—so they lie,” she said, taking a breath. “Go on.”
“The man will be sympathetic but his job is to make sure you accept their version of events. Ask if your partner was on CIA business and he’ll say ‘Yes, absolutely.’ Want to know what sort of business? He’ll tell you he was in Germany meeting with our intelligence partners or something just as bland. No matter what else you ask, he won’t expand on it.”
“So, that’s the end of it?” she said. “If he has nothing more to say, no explanation to give—what, he leaves?”
“There’ll be more conversation and he won’t rush, but yeah—pretty much,” I replied. “He will give you a number to call if you need anything. He’ll also tell you he’ll be in touch if more details come to hand, not that he thinks they will—it was just a terrible accident.”
“Will he call?” she asked.
“He’ll have to,” I said. “There’ll be funeral arrangements. During that conversation, he’ll say as a result of the burns sustained in the accident, it has to be a closed-casket service.”
She looked at me askance: it was a strange thing for me to even mention. “Why would he say that? Burns? Why is it important?”
“Because…” I said. “Listen—don’t argue, you won’t get them to change their mind.”
“About opening the casket?” she demanded.
“Yes. More than likely, the coffin will be empty or it will have somebody else’s body in it.”
She stared at me. It wasn’t something she had anticipated and it rocked her. Until then, despite the grim subject matter, she had been dealing with it: the tears had retreated and the deep lines of anxiety across her forehead were less pronounced. Being able to cope with death was the doctor in her, but now the reality of my work came storming back.
“It’s just a sham, isn’t it—the whole funeral?” she said quietly. “Why?”
“It’s not a sham. In most cases in my section—and I can’t tell you any more than this—it’s far too dangerous to try to recover a body. That’s the nature of the work.”
“Oh God,” she said, hanging her head, her hand kneading her face. “You were right when you said ‘lost’—if you die, you’ll be totally lost,” she whispered.
I reached out, put my arms around her, and held her.
“The casket is closed,” she said. “Then they just fold the flag and give it to me to keep?”
“Yes,” I replied, her head leaning hard against my shoulder.
“And I’m left to put my life back together the best I can? There’s nothing more?”
“No,” I said quietly. “Nothing more.” It wasn’t exactly the truth—there was one more thing but I couldn’t see any point in telling her.
Ten or twenty years later, when the mission I had been involved in no longer had any intelligence value, Rebecca would get a letter from the person who was then occupying the corner office, inviting her to attend a small and highly classified ceremony in the foyer of the Original Headquarters Building.
It is an impressive space. On one wall—etched into the stone—is a quote from the Gospel of St. John, the CIA’s unofficial motto: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Facing it, on the opposite wall, are rows of small stars and—on a stand below them—a book with the names of dozens of intelligence agents written in it. Rebecca would be invited to witness my name being entered and the unveiling of my star. Each name and star recorded a man or woman who had died on duty; it was the CIA’s wall of honor.
The letter from the director would ask Rebecca if, after all these years, she wished to attend the ceremony. I had no doubt she would be married by then and have kids—she had always wanted children and it turned out to be a source of ongoing and serious trouble between us, even though we both agreed that my work didn’t exactly lend itself to a stable family life.
Sitting in the plane, the engines screeching now, the illuminated runway seeming to stretch to eternity, I hoped she would find the time and the interest to go to the ceremony. More than anything, I hoped she would remember me with affection.
I looked out the window as we became airborne and saw spectacular thunderheads rolling out of the east and heading straight toward us. Riders on the storm, I thought—that’s all we are and can ever hope to be. Riders on the storm.
CHAPTER 25
Through shimmering waves of heat, the oasis stood among a sea of dunes, its date palms blowing in the hot wind and a broad expanse of green water glinting in the noonday sun.
Like human rights reforms, like a new economy for a new age—like so much of life in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—the oasis was a mirage. It trembled and twisted on the far edge of Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport, a collection of five terminals that rose out of what could best be described as a moonscape.
The GreenEnergy Gulfstream landed on the north runway just after noon, turned briefly toward the fantasy oasis, and then taxied to a highly secure section of the complex. I looked out the window and saw a dozen passenger jets with the simple words “Saudi Arabian” on their fuselage, identifying them as part of the king’s personal fleet. Closest to us was a new Boeing 737 and I wondered if it was the aircraft that had been specially outfitted to accommodate a hundred of his prized hunting falcons.
Looming behind it was an Airbus A380, still the largest passenger plane ever built, its steps replaced by a gilded escalator. It also featured, according to reports, a fountain in its entrance foyer and solid gold fittings in every bathroom. As Dorothy Parker once said, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people He gave it to.”
We turned and parked close to the royal terminal, not because I was an honored guest but because it was the most discreet part of the airport. Those arrangements had been made by Falcon, who, without revealing any details of my mission, had called the head of GID, the Saudi intelligence agency, and asked him to organize for an off-the-books CIA jet to land and to then provide transport for its only passenger. There was no need for further discussion—both men knew that the radar tracking files would be deleted and the control-tower logs would make no reference to the Gulfstream. It was a ghost flight by a ghost plane: just one more mirage in a country full of them.
As the engines powered down I stared out the window. Royalty or not, it was a forlorn place; there was nobody, just the desert wind battering the huge hangars and the heat rising off a thousand acres of blisteringly hot asphalt. The pilot stepped out of the cockpit and shook his head. “According to the gauge up front, it’s a hundred twenty-four degrees on the blacktop.”
“But is it a dry heat?” I asked.
He laughed as I grabbed my bags and he opened the door to deploy the stairs. We both squinted out into the glare, struggling to see somebody—anybody—there to greet us. “They’re buying time to run their cameras,” I said. “Then they’ll use facial recognition to try to find a match.” I stepped back into the interior. “No point in making it easy for them.”
The pilot smiled and pointed to one of the hangars: a midsized gray Mercedes emerged from its shadow, drove slowly across the apron, and stopped at the steps.
Head lowered, I went down to the car—exactly the type of vehicle used by the good hotels in Riyadh to ferry their clients back and forth to the airport. The driver, coming to take my carry-ons, was dressed just like one of their chauffeurs, too—except he wasn’t. He was Saudi intelligence: aged in his thirties with thin lips, a stone-cold face, and dead eyes, he was typical of his kind.
Wordlessly, he waited for me to get into the back of the vehicle, slipped into the driver’s seat, and headed across the asphalt until we left the airport’s royal precinct and hit the twelve-lane highway that circled the airport. He gunned it for a dozen miles, negotiated a cloverleaf, and stopped at the terminal that handled Saudia airlines international flights. The subterfuge was now complete: to anyone watching, I was a guest from an upmarket hotel being dropped off by one of their drivers to catch a flight. In my case it was to Karachi, the financial capital of Pakistan.
One of the axioms of the secret world is that you never leave a footprint in the sand.
CHAPTER 26
Karachi. What can I say? Cleanliness probably isn’t the city’s strong suit. One of the most polluted metropolises in the world, it is also afflicted by severe flooding. Storms sweep in, rainwater mixes with an overwhelmed sewage system, and diseased water surges down the city’s avenues and alleyways. Year after year the rains come and nothing changes—the outbreaks of disease escalate, the population grows larger, and different terrorist groups continue to launch attacks, especially against Westerners.
Fifteen miles from the chaos of the city, on the road to Hyderabad and past a huge Pakistan Air Force base, Jinnah International Airport rises out of a flat and featureless landscape. On the day I flew in, the arrivals procedure seemed as overwhelmed as the sewage system, and two hours after landing I finally stepped up to an immigration desk.
The man behind it—fifties, immaculate in his gray and black uniform, a sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve—compared me to the picture in the passport and slid it into a data reader.
I was traveling on a Saudi book, provided by the GID, and I waited in silence while the software checked my details. I would have had nothing to worry about if the CIA had contacted the Inter-Services Intelligence group, the Pakistan intelligence agency, and told them that I was entering the country. We didn’t do it because the Pakistanis—nominally an ally of ours—would have then asked for what purpose, and no matter what story we spun them, they would have followed me and tried to discover the real aim of my mission.
The truth was, nobody in US intelligence trusted the Pakistanis; not only had they been caught harboring Osama bin Laden but that deceit only added to years of evidence that they were always walking both sides of the street. Langley was convinced that when it came to betrayal, the Pakistanis were in a league of their own. Nobody on the seventh floor believed that if their intelligence discovered my real objective they wouldn’t tell the Army of the Pure about my impending arrival in order to gain some leverage with yet another terrorist group.
In Pakistan’s profit-and-loss account, an agreement by the Army not to attack targets within the country would have been more than worth the death of one American spy.
The seconds dragged by; I tried not to show any anxiety, glancing at the data reader occasionally like any normal visitor, and I started to think about the worst: if either the passport or myself was flagged as suspect, I would be arrested immediately and interrogated under what are known in the intelligence world as “extreme protocols.” People who had experienced them reported that a freezing concrete cell and a length of lead-weighted rubber hose were the Pakistanis’ preferred methods.
At last the data reader started to flash. The officer scanned the screen, removed the book from the reader, and looked at me with concern. He spoke in Gulf Arabic. “I am going to have to ask you some questions,” he said.
His accent and grammar weren’t perfect and I figured he was using the language to find out if I really was a Saudi. “Sure,” I replied. Thankfully, my Arabic was good enough to convince anyone that I was a native speaker. “How can I help?”
“The law requires you to be completely honest,” he said, indicating a sign that explained in various languages the draconian punishments for giving false information.
“Of course,” I said, as if lying was the furthest thing from my mind.
He asked me the usual questions—place of birth, purpose of my visit, how long I was staying—until, apparently satisfied by my answers and my command of the language, he found an empty page in my passport, stamped it several times, and handed it back. “Enjoy your stay in Pakistan.”
I nodded and picked up my carry-ons. I had no other luggage so I walked through customs, past uniformed officers chatting among themselves, and approached the doors that opened into the arrivals hall.
They slid open, and surrounded by waves of discordant music, dozens of different dialects, and the exotic aroma of spiced tea, I squeezed through a milling crowd, turned left, and headed down the cavernous hall. I had never been in the airport before but thanks to the hours I had spent memorizing its layout, I knew exactly where I was going.
I passed a group of men dressed in the traditional shalwar kameez—loose-fitting trousers topped by a knee-length shirt—about to enter the prayer room and then, fifty yards farther, I saw a sign with a graphic identifying the bathrooms. It was what I was looking for: next to it would be a large area full of rows of luggage lockers that were available to rent.
As I had been briefed at Langley, locker seventeen was in a corner at the back, a location that had been chosen because it was the most secluded. I checked the room was empty, entered a code I had brought with me into the combination lock, and opened the steel door. Inside was an envelope that had been left the day before by the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. It contained a map of the north parking lot, the number of a bay, the ticket to insert in the pay machine, and a set of car keys.
And that was how, on a Tuesday afternoon in July, a Denied Access Area spy, formerly a junior officer on a US Navy submarine, a man who had washed out of the silent service in strange circumstances and thanks to his language skills was hired by the CIA, an American citizen born in Loxahatchee, Florida, but traveling on a Saudi book, had arrived—unheralded and unobserved—at a locker in Pakistan’s largest airport and was about to brave Karachi’s toxic air and get in a beaten-up car he had never seen before.
The border with Iran lay five hundred miles to the west, and in another ten minutes he would drive sensibly to avoid attracting attention, the road beneath him mostly flat and straight, burning like a skillet in the midsummer sun, to keep a rendezvous with a man whose name he didn’t know, in a place he had only seen on maps, where the slightest mistake would kill them both.
Welcome to the rodeo, I thought as I unlocked the vehicle.
CHAPTER 27
Sticking to the speed limit, I drove along the lonely Makran Coastal Highway, the fastest route toward the border with Iran, boiling in the summer heat, with an old song by AC/DC playing on a loop in my head: the highway to hell, indeed.
I was at the wheel of a battered white Toyota pickup, probably the most common—and, therefore, the hardest to track—vehicle in the Arab world, used by upstanding citizens, dope couriers, government contractors, terrorists, and everyone in between.
On my left was the Arabian Sea and on my right was Hingol National Park, one of the most remarkable landscapes in the world: rock formations as dramatic as anything in Monument Valley rose out of the desert, strange mud volcanoes bubbled on an arid plain, and untouched canyon floors were green with tropical ferns.
With waves of heat shimmering all around me, Hingol’s lost world faded and I skirted a remote port called Gwadar. Barely seeing another vehicle, getting closer to the Iranian border, I stopped a few miles short of it on a ridge, looked for a long time at one of the most dangerous countries in the world for someone like me, then made a hard right and bumped down a ruin of a road. At its end was a barely known town called Mand, a collection of silent earthen-colored houses, high walls, and meandering dirt roads.
On its outskirts was a clay-brick warehouse with half its roof missing and dozens of wrecked four-wheel drives sitting among the weeds. This was Mand’s auto-repair shop, and the rusting vehicles were its inventory of spares. My story—if anyone should have asked—was that I was in Gwadar when the front suspension of the Toyota failed and I needed a replacement. My jarred back was a testament to the reality of the problem and there were plenty of times on the trip when I had cursed Langley’s attention to detail.
The suspension was the fiction; the reality was that inside a small shed used to store barrels of recovered engine oil, half-hidden at the back of the building, a man was waiting for me. A Pakistani in his forties—a trusted operative of our station chief in Islamabad—he had arrived the day before, driving a covered truck with three ponies hidden in the back along with the rest of the equipment I needed.
Parking at the far corner of the property, he had approached the owner and the only other person there—the man’s son—and, after the obligatory cup of tea, offered the two men half a million rupees each if they found an urgent need to go to Karachi and pick up some spare parts. He suggested that such a mission would have to take at least two days. Over the years the owner had seen it all: drug smugglers, terrorists, grifters, Pakistani security forces, and—like the man sipping tea in front of him—a fair share of people he guessed were intelligence agents. He was a practical man, uncomplicated by ideology, and had dealt with them all: his only criterion was whether the money was good enough.
“Three thousand each,” he said in Urdu.
The agent shrugged. “Sure, I offer five hundred thousand and you only want three…?”
The men laughed—they all knew the owner was talking about US dollars and three thousand was a large premium over what he had been offered. The CIA operative had no information about the mission he had to help organize but he knew nothing could be allowed to jeopardize it. He haggled for appearance’s sake and then raised his hands in surrender.
The owner and his son grinned, and flush with cash and driving the most serviceable of their rolling wrecks, they set off on their unexpected journey, planning to take the opportunity to attend prayers at the white marble Masjid e Tooba in Karachi, one of the most stunning mosques in the world.
When I arrived, I parked out of sight, made my way through the workshop, and stepped into the junk-strewn rear yard. Lit only by starlight, I was almost invisible, but the night was deathly quiet and the agent must have heard the Toyota approaching. I didn’t realize it, but he wasn’t waiting—as planned—in the shed at all; he was in the deep shadows cast by the warehouse wall, a Ruger SR40 handgun pointed at me, a weapon powerful enough to rip a crater the size of a baseball mitt in my chest. To be honest, I would have been disappointed if he hadn’t been positioned and ready to shoot. It is another one of the tenets of the intelligence world: only the paranoid survive.
