The Kill List (8 page)

The Tracker ordered the Rangers to stay with the machine. With just Capt. Hawkins beside him as introducer and translator, he walked down the street, nodding from side to side and uttering the traditional
“Salaam”
greeting. A few grudging
Salaam
s came back. The Australian knew where Mahmud Gul lived. The veteran was sitting outside. Several children scattered in alarm. Just one, a three-year-old girl, more curious than afraid, clung to her grandfather’s cloak and stared up with huge saucer eyes. The two white men sat cross-legged in front of the veteran warrior and offered greetings. They were returned.

The Afghan glanced up and down the street. The soldiers were out of sight.

“You are not afraid?” asked Mahmud Gul.

“I believe I have come to visit a man of peace,” said the Tracker. Hawkins translated into Pashto. The older man nodded and called something up the street.

“He is telling the village there is no danger,” whispered Hawkins.

With pauses only for translation, the Tracker reminded Mahmud Gul of the session with the Reintegration team after Friday prayers the previous week. The Afghan’s dark brown eyes remained unblinking on his face. At last he nodded.

“Many years ago, but it was the same voice.”

“But on the television he was speaking in English. You do not understand English. How could you know?”

Mahmud Gul shrugged.

“It was the way he spoke,” he said, as if no other consideration need apply. With Mozart, they called it perfect pitch—the ability to record and recall sounds exactly as they were. Mahmud Gul might be an illiterate peasant, but if his conviction turned out to be right, he also had that kind of ear.

“Please tell me how it came about.”

The old man paused, and his gaze fell to the bundled package the American had carried down the street.

“It is time for gifts,” whispered the Australian.

“Forgive me,” said the Tracker, jerking loose the binding. He spread out what he had brought. Two buffalo robes, from a Native American memorabilia store, backed with warm fleece.

“Long ago the people of my country used to hunt the buffalo for his meat and his fur. This is the warmest hide known to man. In the winter, wrap one round you. Sleep with one beneath you and one above. You will never be cold again.”

Mahmud Gul’s walnut face slowly cracked into a smile, the first Capt. Hawkins had ever seen on him. There were only four teeth left, but they did their best to create a broad grin. He ran his fingers through the thick pelt. The jewel box of the Queen of Sheba could not have brought him more pleasure. So he told his story.

“It was in the fight against the Americans just after the invasion against the government of Mullah Omar. There were Tajiks and Uzbeks pouring out of their enclave in the northeast. We could have coped with them, but they had Americans with them, and the
farangi
were directing the airplanes that came from the sky with bombs and rockets. The American soldiers could speak to the airplanes and tell them where we were, so the bombs seldom missed. It was very bad.

“North of Bagram, retreating down the Salang Valley, I was caught in the open. An American warplane fired at me many times. I hid behind rocks, but when he had gone, I saw I had taken a bullet in the hip. My men carried me to Kabul. There I was put in a truck and taken farther south.

“We passed through Kandahar and crossed the border at Spin Boldak into Pakistan. They were our friends and gave us shelter. We came to Quetta. That was the first time a doctor saw me and I had attention to the hip.

“In the spring I had started to walk again. I was young and strong in those days, and the broken bones healed well. But there was much pain, and I had a stick under my armpit. In the spring I was invited to join the Quetta Shura and sit in the council with the mullah.

“In the spring also a delegation came from Islamabad to Quetta to confer with Mullah Omar. There were two generals, but they spoke no Pashto, only Urdu. But one of the officers had brought his son, just a boy of nineteen. He spoke fluent Pashto, with the accent of the high Siachen area. He translated for the Punjabi generals. They told us that they would have to pretend to work with the Americans, but that they would never abandon us and let our Talib movement be destroyed. And so it has been.

“And I talked with the boy from Islamabad. The one who spoke on the white screen. Behind the mask. That was him. By the way, he had amber eyes.”

The Tracker thanked him and left. He walked back down the street to the threshing floor. The men stood or sat in silence and stared. The women peered through the cracks in the shutters. The children hid behind their fathers and uncles. But no one molested him.

The Rangers were in an outward-facing circle. They ushered both officers into the Black Hawk and clambered aboard. The chopper lifted off, sending dust and chaff in all directions, and they flew back to Bagram. There are reasonably comfortable officers’ quarters there, with good chow but no alcohol. The Tracker had need of only one thing—ten hours’ sleep. While he slept, his message went through to the CIA station in the Kabul embassy.

• • •

B
efore leaving the States, the Tracker had been advised that the CIA, despite any interdepartmental rivalry, was onside to give him the fullest cooperation. He needed this for two reasons.

One was that the Agency had huge establishments in Kabul and Islamabad, a capital where any visiting American was likely to be under the closest secret police surveillance. The other was that back at Langley the Agency had a superb facility for the creation of false documents for use abroad.

When he woke, the deputy head of station had flown up from Kabul to confer, as requested. The Tracker had a list of requirements, of which the intelligence officer took careful note. Details would be encrypted and sent to Langley that day, he was assured. When the papers requested were available, a courier would bring them personally from the U.S.

When the CIA man had returned to Kabul, flying by helicopter from the U.S. compound at Bagram to the grounds of the embassy, the Tracker took his waiting J-SOC executive jet and flew to the large American base at Qatar on the Persian Gulf. As far as official records would show, no one called Carson had even been in the country.

The same applied in Qatar. He could while away the three days it would cost to prepare the new papers he needed inside the perimeter of an American base. On landing at the base outside Doha, he dismissed the Grumman to return to the States. From inside the base he ordered the purchase of two air tickets.

One was on a cheap local airline for the short hop down the coast to Dubai and was in the name of Mr. Christopher Carson. The other, from a different travel agency based in a five-star hotel, was for a business-class ticket from Dubai to Washington via London on British Airways. It was in the name of the fictional John Smith. When he received the message he was waiting for, he flew to Dubai International.

On landing, he made his way straight to the transit hall, where the truly vast duty-free shopping mall was thronged with thousands of passengers enjoying the biggest airline hub in the Middle East. Without needing to disturb the transit desk, he walked into the club-class lounge.

The courier from Langley was waiting at the agreed-upon entrance to the men’s room and the murmured recognition signals were exchanged. Very old-fashioned, a hundred-year-old procedure, but it still works. They found a quiet corner and two secluded armchairs.

Both men had carry-on baggage only. They were not identical, but that did not matter. The courier had arrived bearing a genuine U.S. passport in the name of John Smith to match the America-bound ticket. He would obtain a boarding pass from the BA desk on the floor below. John Smith, having arrived by Emirates, would depart for home after a remarkably short stopover, but by a different airline and no one the wiser.

They also swapped bags. What the Tracker gave the courier was irrelevant. What he received was a wheelie, containing shirts, suits, toiletries, shoes and any short-stay-traveler’s paraphernalia. Scattered among the clothing and airport-purchased thriller novels were various bills, receipts and letters, confirming the owner was Mr. Daniel Priest.

He handed over to the courier every scrap of paperwork he had in the name of Carson. That would also return unseen to the States. What he got in return was a wallet of documents the Agency had spent three days preparing.

There was a passport in the name of Mr. Daniel Priest, a senior staffer with the
Washington Post
. It bore a valid visa from the Pakistani consulate in Washington, securing Mr. Priest entry into Pakistan. The securing of this visa would mean that the Pakistani police were aware of his coming and would be waiting. Journalists are of extreme interest to sensitive regimes.

There was a letter from the publisher of the
Post
, confirming that Mr. Priest was preparing a major series of articles on “Islamabad—the making of a successful modern city.” And there was a return ticket via London.

There were credit cards, a driver’s license, the usual paperwork and plastic cards to be found in the wallet of a law-abiding American citizen and senior executive, plus a confirmation that a room awaited him at the Serena Hotel, Islamabad, and that the hotel car would be waiting for him.

The Tracker knew better than to emerge from the customs hall at Islamabad International into the seething, surging chaos outside and then allow himself to be hustled into any old taxi.

The courier also handed over the stub of his boarding pass from Washington to Dubai and the unused onward ticket from Dubai to “Slammy,” as Islamabad is known in the Special Forces fraternity.

A thorough search of his room, virtually a certainty, would reveal only that Mr. Dan Priest was a legitimate foreign correspondent from Washington with a valid visa and a logical reason for being in Pakistan; further, that he intended to stay a few days and then fly home.

With the exchange of identities and “legends” completed, both men descended separately to different airline desks below to secure boarding passes for their onward flights.

It was nearly midnight, but the Tracker’s EK612 flight took off at three twenty-five a.m. He killed the time back in the lounge but was still at the departure gate with an hour to spare, then held back to size up his fellow passengers. He knew that if there were a breeze, he should stay upwind of most of them.

As he suspected, the economy-class passengers were overwhelmingly Pakistani laborers, returning after their statutory two years’ virtual forced labor on building sites. It is customary for the construction-trade gang masters to confiscate the laborer’s passport on arrival and return it only after the two-year contract is done.

During that time, the laborers live in sub-basic hovels with minimal facilities, working hard in fearsome heat for minuscule wages, some of which they try to send back home. As they crowded to the door for boarding, he caught the first whiff of stale sweat flavored with a diet of constant curry. Mercifully, the economy class and business class were soon separated, and he relaxed into upholstered comfort up front with a complement of Gulf Arab and Pakistani businessmen.

The flight was just over three hours, and the Emirates Boeing 777-300 touched down on time at 0730 local. He watched from the porthole of the taxiing airliner the military C-130 Hercules and the presidential Boeing 737 drift past.

In the passport hall he was separated from the jostling throng of Pakistanis when he joined the queue for foreigners’ passports. The new document in the name of Daniel Priest, adorned only by a few European entry and exit stamps and the Pakistani visa, was meticulously examined page by page. The questions were perfunctory and polite, easily answered. He produced proof of his reservation at the Serena. The plainclothesmen stood well back and stared.

He took his wheelie and struggled through the clamoring, pushing, shoving mass of humanity in baggage claim, aware that this was of a Teutonic order compared to the chaos outside. Pakistan does not queue.

Outside the building, the sun was shining. Thousands seemed to have come, bringing entire families, to greet the returnees from the Gulf. Tracker scanned the crowd until he spotted the name Priest on a board held by a young man in the uniform of the Serena. He made contact and was escorted to the limousine, parked in the small VIP parking lot to the right of the terminal.

Since the airport sits within the sprawl of old Rawalpindi, the road, once clear of the airport hub, turns down the Islamabad Highway and into the capital. As the Serena, the only earthquake-proof hotel in Slammy, is on the outskirts of town, the Tracker was taken by surprise as the car swerved into a short dogleg; right, left, past a barrier that would be down for visitor cars but up for the hotel’s own limousine, up a short but steep ramp and to the main entrance.

At the reception desk, he was made welcome by name and escorted to his room. There was a letter waiting for him. It bore the U.S. embassy logo. He beamed and tipped the bellhop, pretending to be unaware the counterintelligence police had bugged the room and opened the letter. It was from the press attaché at the embassy, welcoming him to Pakistan and inviting him to dinner that evening at the attaché’s home. It was signed Gerry Byrne.

He asked the hotel switchboard operator to put him through to the embassy, asked for and was patched through to Gerry Byrne and exchanged the usual pleasantries. Yes, the flight had been fine, the hotel was fine, the room was fine, and he would be delighted to come for dinner.

Gerry Byrne was also delighted. He lived in town, in zone F-7, Street 43. It was complex, so he would send a car. It would be delightful. Just a small group of friends, some American, some Pakistani.

Both men knew that there was another party to the conversation who was probably more bored than delighted. He would be seated at a console in the basement of a cluster of adobe buildings set among lawns and fountains, looking more like a university or a general hospital than the headquarters of a secret police. But that is what the complex on Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy Street looks like—the home of the ISI.