ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN
She moved with the crowd, hiding in plain view, flowing with the natural rhythm of the streets that were her home. But it was her eyes, as dark as her hair beneath her light green burka, that separated her from bustling vendors and haggling customers. They constantly checked for motion that broke the natural rhythm of the marketplace.
Goats, ducks, chickens, figs, bread, and milk, along with assortments of silks, cashmeres, and leathers, dominated the negotiations. She kept her pace steady, in control, even though she felt like running, her emotions boiling when Gorman didn’t return her text on his secure line.
Where the hell is he?
She pressed her lips together, loathing the need to signal for a meeting this way.
But there was no other choice. The short paragraph she had read completely by accident on her father’s computer during a short visit for tea an hour ago forced her to violate protocol, even at the risk of—
Maryam Gadai spotted the tail across the street: the wrong shift of a head at the wrong time, just as a vendor held up two slaughtered ducks, presenting them to his suddenly uninterested patron.
It had been subtle, a glance to check her position.
But it had been enough.
Cutting right into the nearest alley, she raced through a store and swapped burkas, dropping her old headdress and cash in the hands of the surprised owner. She was back out in twenty seconds, cloaked in lavender, swiftly moving down the alley and turning left into another teeming street, then right into a loud food court.
Her mind still in shock at her father’s top-secret plan, Maryam zigzagged past crowded tables, slicing through the stifling smell of curry, baked bread, and body odor. She exited at the other end and made three more turns before leaving the market.
Crossing an adjacent park, she vanished in a narrow patch of forest before risking a backward glance. Two men stepped onto the street, one holding a radio to his lips while gazing in every wrong direction.
Amateurs.
Maryam dropped her thick brows at them, feeling the cold steel of her Heckler & Koch USP .45 ACP pistol pressed against the small of her back. She was glad she didn’t need to use the semiautomatic this afternoon. At least not when her father continued to fill the ranks of his internal police with operatives who couldn’t cut it in the field.
Maryam left them behind and continued down Isfahani Road, going over the bridge crossing the Jinnah Stream, and turning south on Zhou Enlai Avenue, her eyes always checking her surroundings. Off to her far left stood the Preparatory School of Islamabad for girls, the place she had spent her teenage years before being shipped to England.
Maryam sighed. Her deepest secret—besides how hard she had fallen for Bill Gorman—was her love for the West and the creature comforts it offered, many of them in conflict with her Islamic upbringing. Before leaving that girl’s boarding school to spend eight years at Oxford to become a physician, Atiq would punish her for listening to rock music or watching “violent” American TV programs. But Maryam wanted Pakistan to be more like England, the country that opened her eyes, where she became a woman, tolerant to every race and religion. And this secret of secrets, which she kept locked so tightly for fear of being labeled an infidel, made her wonder if the West could help Pakistan achieve that—a thought that had steered her many years ago in the direction of Bill Gorman.
She stared at the boarding school before her eyes followed the Jinnah Stream south to the complex of buildings that made up the Shifa College of Medicine adjacent to the Shifa International Hospital. She had returned here almost fifteen years ago a freshly minted physician from Oxford specializing in emergency medicine. It was there that Maryam practiced her trade for a few years before slowly being lured into the intelligence world by her father. It had happened rather organically, as she used her position at Shifa, combined with her bedside manners and her looks, to gather intelligence for her dad on the wide range of patients that flowed through the hospital.
Sickness and disease are the great equalizers, my dear Maryam.
And her father had been right, of course. Men and women from all walks of life filled the beds of the hospital, becoming targets of opportunity for those in the hunt for human intelligence. Maryam’s ability to approach them, gain their trust, and turn them into ISI assets led her to a formal induction into the intelligence network. Her father’s connections and her education allowed her to skip the required step for most female ISI operatives to “cut their teeth” in honey-trapping assignments in India before moving up the ranks.
Maryam continued down Zhou Enlai, until reaching a spot precisely across the Jinnah Stream from the American Embassy while producing an inch-long piece of white chalk.
The unimaginable had happened. She needed to tell Gorman what she knew so that he and the rest of the world could better prepare for what was sure to come next.