The person Crane had arranged to meet Tom just before the Af-Pak border drove a faded blue saloon. She was a striking-looking woman, who said she was an American, the daughter of first-generation Pakistani immigrants. She was a little under six feet in flats, her shoulder-length hair dragged back from her flawless skin by a jet-black hijab. She was heavy-boned but lean, her eyes the colour of red cedar wood. Confident.
When he asked her name, she just smiled before pouring him a coffee from a Thermos, sweetened with sugar to the point that it resembled liquidized molasses. Then she patched up his neck with Vaseline and a bandage, and gave him some painkillers from the glovebox. It eased the throbbing sensation a little and he thanked her.
Despite her calm demeanour, the incident with the ISI and his face on the cells had still left him feeling shaken. That and what Crane had said when he’d rung him a few miles from Torkham, as he’d asked him to.
“How did they get a photo of my face?” Tom had asked. “It was only a few hours since I was in Islamabad.”
“There were only two men who could’ve taken your photo—that’s what you’re thinking right now, ain’t it?” Crane said.
“Yeah. Khan or the cab driver. But the cab driver was random, so it had to be Khan.”
“The eyes play tricks, especially in stressful situations. You got one of the cells on you?”
Tom dropped the disposable cell onto the front passenger seat and pulled over onto a stony verge. A little way beyond, the edge of the verge fell away a hundred metres or more to the base of a red-earth ravine. He jerked out one of the cells he’d put in the bag. He thumbed the image open.
“Shit!” he said, smacking his forehead.
He was wearing a white shirt in Islamabad, and had been given a similar one by the cab driver’s cousin. But the white shirt he had on in the photograph had a different collar. He picked up the disposable.
“What is it?” Crane asked.
“It’s a different shirt.”
“Think. When were you wearing it?”
“I … When we came back from Kurram, at the Ariana. With you, Crane,” he said, knowing there were scores of people at the former hotel who could’ve taken his photograph.
“What did Khan tell you?”
Tom was a little taken aback by Crane’s abrupt change of subject. “Only where Hasni lived,” he said, lying, still conscious that Crane could spoil matters for him.
“You sure?”
Wait, Tom thought. Crane might have set the whole thing up. After he’d been insistent about going over the border, he figured Crane might have seen an opportunity and ordered Khan to tell him about Mahmood. By why all the subterfuge? Maybe Crane was covering his tracks if things went to rat shit. Is he using me? Tom thought.
Then he decided that he was starting to think like Crane, and did his best to zone out the internal dialogue. It would simply confuse him.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Are you done this time?” Crane asked.
“I’m done.”
“Looks like you got Khan killed, too,” Crane said, disconnecting.
Tom thought that that was a vicious jibe, given the secretary’s sentence. But he guessed that Crane had a right to be angry. Still, if Crane hadn’t engineered the whole thing, the only person who knew what he planned to do in Boston was Khan, he thought. Unless he’d crumbled under torture, if in fact he hadn’t made it out. The realization that Hasni’s men could be waiting for him stateside as he went after his son, Mahmood, didn’t exactly fill him with confidence. But he’d told himself to shape up. He might be getting somewhere.
As the saloon got close to the border a stream of trucks packed with food and white goods from the port of Karachi were waiting to enter Afghanistan. The woman pulled over and told Tom to hide in the trunk, covering his body with a stack of Pakistani silks wrapped in clear polythene. His leather holdall was in there, too. He figured that Crane was serious about wanting him to quit. As he curled up into a ball, just as the dome light was fading, he inhaled a couple of gasps of fresh air.
After crawling along towards the border-crossing proper, the car slowed to a halt. He heard the door open and the voices of the Pakistani border guards and the woman, but they were faint. He sensed that his whole body was covered in a sheen of sweat. The trunk was flipped and he tensed, refusing even to breathe. He felt something prodding him that he took for a baton. The silks were pulled off. Tom turned around and stared at the dark faces of two border guards, standing motionless outside the car. The woman said nothing but offered them a brown-paper package.
The guards looked at one another.
“A million rupees,” she said in Pashto. “And we leave now.”
Tom’s face was frozen in an open-mouthed stare. He could go for his SIG, but what was the point? he thought. If he wounded or killed them, the cop’s words in Islamabad would come true: You will never get out of Pakistan.
The younger of the two raised his long baton, and Tom flinched involuntarily. But the older one, his yellowing eyes fixed on Tom, motioned with his hand for him to lower it. The younger one hesitated before complying. The older one nodded to the woman and snatched the package from her hand, closing the trunk slowly afterwards. Tom breathed out audibly and brought his hand down over his face, furrowing the skin.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.
Crane had told him that the average Pakistani wage was PKR 250,000 per annum, about $2,500. His freedom had just been bought for ten thousand dollars. But before the car pulled away, he heard two muted cracks, as if they’d whacked the car’s hood with their batons, although it’d sounded as if something had smashed. He wondered if the windshield had been hit.
Fifteen minutes later, the woman stopped opposite a clump of sprawling banyan trees. The trunk was opened and Tom felt the dry air swamp him. He clambered out and got back into the front passenger seat, realizing the windshield was still intact. They travelled in silence, the woman manoeuvring past the various hazards with apparent ease. They weren’t held up at the dozen or so Afghan police and security services’ checkpoints, either, due in no small part to the plastic wallet which she handed over.
But by the time they reached the steep summit of Kabul gorge, the wind was gale force and a dust cloud hit them. The cloud was so dense that the woman slowed down to a near stop. Lightning struck nearby and thunder boomed. Tom noticed that she was gripping the leather steering wheel tightly. The voltage from the storm clouds was almost palpable.
“Maybe we should stop for a while. Till it clears,” he said.
“He said no stopping.”
“You known him long?”
She just stared ahead, not even a flicker or a twitch in response. But then she pressed a switch underneath the dash and began to drive with confidence again, despite Tom realizing that the headlights had been knocked out. After he asked if she’d been a cat in a past life, she explained that she’d activated the night-vision section of the windshield, together with an infrared camera sited in the plastic casing of the rear-view mirror. The IR scanned the road ahead, projecting any life forms onto a small video screen beneath her side of the dash. The faded bodywork made the saloon look like a wreck, but it was carrying close to $250,000 worth of equipment.
The disposable cellphone rang. Tom took it out of his pocket.
“You safe?” Crane asked.
“Yeah. We’re just coming into Kabul,” Tom said, thinking Crane’s mood changed quicker than a crack addict’s.
“There was a bug in my room, hidden in a clock radio. The room is swept once a week. The last time was three days ago.”
Tom didn’t doubt that that was possible.
“And, Tom. Dump the cellphone the female operative gave you at the Ariana. Do it now.”
Crane didn’t have to say why. Tom knew that was how the men at the roadblock had known he’d be arriving there, despite their incompetence once he had. And if they knew that, they’d know where Khan lived. He just had to hope that Crane would be able to get a message to him before he returned there, if he’d gotten out. Then he realized that whoever had been tracking the cell would know he’d been to Hasni’s home, too. It was all bad. But he had a gut feeling that things would only get worse.