By 14:02, Tom was inside Kabul International Airport. He’d cleaned up in a restroom, changed into jeans, a khaki shirt and sneakers, and had dumped the SIG a mile away after wiping it down. He got a cup of coffee from a fast-food restaurant in the departure lounge and eased himself into a low-slung plastic seat. He looked around, feeling eyes on him. A different form of paranoia now, one that he didn’t care for at all; one that was playing with his mind and making him feel jittery.
He took out his smartphone from his holdall and emailed Lester, the friend he’d told Crane he was seeing in Boston, but not why. He hoped he’d pick up the message quickly on his cell. The man’s full name was Lester Wilson. He owned a private security business. When Tom had asked him how he’d swung that, Lester had told him that this was America, and even a man who’d gotten thrown out of the Marines could prosper. Lester had been a US Marine for eleven years, three of which he’d spent in military custody for various offences, the most serious of which was punching an officer. An act that had also led to his dishonourable discharge. But Tom and Lester had become friends.
He asked Lester to meet him at Boston Logan airport in 5.5 hours, if he could, stating that he was on a scheduled flight from Kabul. The email also stated that he needed a Taser, plasticuffs, steel bracelets, duct tape, an MP4 player and a remote lock-up near Harvard. A rental car, too. He requested that Lester emailed back either way, pointing out that it was real important.
Allowing for boarding and the thirteen-hour flight, it would be 20:00 local time when he reached stateside, Kabul being eight and a half hours ahead of Boston time. And when he did, he would have just over forty-one hours to find her. Less than two days.
Sipping the bland coffee, he felt that he was missing something. Something that had happened on the morning the secretary had been taken. He started to piece the events together, his mind focusing on the man who’d fired the Stinger. He picked up his smartphone again and went online, scanning web pages on Islamic customs.
He was interrupted twenty minutes later by the flashing inbox indicator. He checked his email. It was Lester.
I’m in New York. Sure I will man.
Tom grinned. He was one person he could rely on. Besides, Lester owed him. He’d dragged his battered body from a heap of rubble after the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, had been bombed in 1998. Lester had been a young jarhead, Tom a rookie agent. Afterward, he’d said that Tom’s constant encouragement had given him hope as he’d lain in the darkness. And that that was a gift.
Hope.
With his head resting against the back of the cabin seat en route to Boston, Tom wondered what kind of hope the secretary had right now. She was a remarkable woman, he thought. By his reckoning, she deserved to be the first woman president. A good, family woman, too. A devoted mother.
Maybe it was the tiredness or the after-effects of the adrenalin dumps, but his thoughts kept wandering. He saw his own mother in his mind’s eye, a woman who had been beautiful but for whom a life of stress and poverty had taken its toll. By the time he was sixteen, she looked old, her teeth nicotine stained, her eyes heavy with bags. Her once thick, lustrous hair was dull and ridden with split-ends. What little money she had from working the reception at a local machine shop went on heating and food.
The last time he’d seen her, he’d convinced her to go to the grocery store to buy eggs and bacon, because they had nothing in the fridge or cupboards for lunch, save tins of weak soup, which, for a hungry teenager, hadn’t been exactly appetizing. Tom’s granddaddy had taught him to drive the previous summer, and had spent the equivalent of three months’ pension on a twelve-year-old Buick, which the old man had made roadworthy over a period of six weeks. Tom promised his mother he’d pick her up in it after he’d changed the oil. But when he’d finished, a high school buddy had come by, and he’d gone fishing with him instead.
Forcing himself back to the present, he asked the flight attendant for an English copy of the Qur’an and, after it was handed to him, he began checking the references he had seen online.
Two hours later, the Holy Book fell from his hands as he drifted into a deep sleep. But he’d found what he’d wanted.