JOE AND YELENA RODE back to the hotel in the motor-cart, lounging on the wadded fabric that had once been the roof, watching the night sky flow over them like a river of stars between the buildings.
“Sorry, Joe. All I did tonight was get you in trouble.”
“And get me back out,” he told her. “Anyway, I think I learned something important.”
“Watch out for booby-traps.”
“That there was something there worth booby-trapping. And sending a small army of mercenaries with a chopper to protect. I think you were right all along. Zahir is just a front. And now we know it’s a front for a US corporation. Wildwater.”
“So what will you do?”
“Catch a plane. Why chase the shadow around here? Especially now that they’re onto us. Let’s go back home. Start looking at Wildwater and see what we find.”
She turned to face him. “You say we and let’s. But New York is not my home.”
“And Kandahar is? If you want to retire, fine. Go to Tulum or someplace. If you want to get into trouble and help earn this half million, come back with me.”
She smiled. “Trouble and money are always tempting. But don’t forget, I already made some money today. Not half of a half million, but enough for a nice slow trip around the world.”
The cart came to a stop by the hotel. “Sorry. Mote’as-sefam.” Joe told the driver again as they climbed down. The driver shrugged. A hundred US dollars for a short ride more than covered some repairs. For him at least, it had been a good night. The small hotel was silent and dark. Joe used the key he’d been given, and they went quietly upstairs to where Joe and Hamid had adjoining rooms. A light shone from under Hamid’s door.
“I will think about it tonight,” Yelena whispered. “Meanwhile, we should take turns on watch until we leave for the airport. Tell Hamid to rest first.” She squeezed his hand in the dark. “And we will try not to wake him up.”
Smiling, Joe found the right key and was already saying, “Hamid, you missed a real party,” when he swung the door open and found him, sprawled across the bed, dead eyes staring up at them, blood from his slit throat staining the white sheets red.
Joe and Yelena moved immediately and in silence, automatic responses taking over, drawing their weapons and checking the other room and the bathrooms, which were all empty. There was, sadly, no reason to check Hamid; even a glance at his body, marked with slashes and burns, twisted with breaks and bruises, revealed that he’d been tortured before he was killed. The rooms had been ransacked, but all that was missing seemed to be Hamid’s phone and laptop, as well as the satchel containing Yelena’s money from the earlier exchange. They packed fast, pausing only for a moment over Hamid.
“I can’t just leave him,” Joe said. “I’m the one who brought him here. I owe his family more than that.”
“You know you can’t bring him,” Yelena said. “The people here are very religious. They will know what to do. They’ll treat him properly, and say the prayers.”
Joe nodded. “That’s more than I can do.” He reached out and closed his eyes. Then they shut off the light and left.
Powell felt like he was in hell. He felt damned. He’d met the devil and he, or in this case, she had just sucked out his soul. And the devil’s name, which we know is Legion, was, surprisingly, Vicky. He didn’t know her last name and didn’t want to. He already knew too much, more than he could ever forget.
After the others rushed out to investigate the break-in and explosion at the local Wildwater office, the only person remaining in the private lounge besides himself was the striking but feral young woman in the torn black jeans and black leather jacket. Powell’s intention had been to say goodnight and retreat to his hotel room, but she had other plans. She stood, set down her hookah, and grabbed her small leather backpack.
“Come along, company man,” she said in a posh British accent, as she led the way out. “I’ve another errand to run for the boys. You can observe and advise me.”
At first, Powell was frankly excited. The revelation of the Zahir group’s true makeup and purpose had troubled him, but he was prepared to accept a certain amount of troubling; he was, after all, in the CIA. They had a long history of making murky alliances with sordid parties in the hope of achieving sometimes dubious goals, always, of course with the country’s best interests in mind. That same history begged the question of how well this strategy usually turned out—in Cambodia for instance, or Iran or Cuba—but that, to Powell, was academic. Doing nothing while the world rushed into chaos and horror wasn’t an option. And maintaining some sort of James Bond–like, or even better, Superman-esque moral purity and detachment was, literally, a fairy tale. The only thing to do was play the dirty game as best as you could, and the very fact that they’d sent him here demonstrated that he, and they, had some of his superiors’ tacit approval. The CIA had been mixed up in the heroin trade at least since Vietnam. They’d armed and funded warlords and opium traders in these very same valleys back when the Soviets were their common enemy. If intervening in the dope trade now saved some American lives later, so be it. It was all part of the usual game.
But this woman was not usual. Powell followed her downstairs to where a young, dark-skinned man, fine-featured and exquisitely muscled, in jeans and a white T-shirt, was standing beside a black Range Rover. He jumped to open the rear door, shut it after them, and drove.
“I’m Mike Powell, by the way,” Powell said, as they moved through the evening traffic, extending a semi-ironic hand. “I wonder if you’d like to tell me where we’re going?”
“Victoria,” she’d said, her eyes facing out the window, his hand ignored. “Though I prefer Vick or Vicky. We are en route to ask someone a question or two.”
Powell smiled to himself. Here he was, riding in an expensive car through an exotic city, accompanying a strange woman to a mysterious rendezvous. This really was like a scene from a movie and he had to admit, to himself if never to anyone else, he was delighted. For the first time in a long time, he was excited to be a spy.
They pulled up in front of a small, nondescript hotel, with a tiny, threadbare foyer rather than a proper lobby. The driver approached the old man behind the counter, speaking rapidly and drawing a wallet from his pocket. He waved some sort of credential, and then, after the cringing old man handed over a key, began to count out money, while Vicky, without further ado, took the key and proceeded quickly upstairs. Powell followed, starting to have more questions, but before he could formulate them, she stopped in front of a door, turned to him with a finger over her lips for silence, and handed him the key. Then she drew her gun.
Powell had no gun. And this wasn’t the sort of meeting he’d been expecting. But there was no way to call a time-out now, so he carefully slid the key into the simple lock set in the doorknob, turned it, and stepped aside as he pushed it open. Victoria went in first.
There was only one man in the room. A dark-skinned kid in western clothes, a hoodie, jeans, and sneakers, with closely buzzed hair and a neat goatee. Powell realized he’d been in the photos Toomey had shown him. Now he was wearing headphones and staring so intently into a laptop that he only noticed them when it was too late, eyes going wide in terror, and hands rising, as Victoria put her gun in his face.
Powell had seen people tortured before. He’d even participated in beatings or waterboardings. He’d put people in hoods where they couldn’t see or hear, or kept them awake with blinding light or noise. He’d worked with creepy CIA interrogators and ruthless Mossad experts. He’d even seen plain old cops smack suspects around. But he’d never seen anything like Vicky, he’d never seen a true sadist go to work on a victim and take the kind of pleasure in pain that he saw that night. By the time she was done, the poor kid was praying for death, and when—after extracting all the information she could about his mission in Afghanistan, about Joe Brody and the Russian woman he knew only as Yelena and the bounty that New York gangsters had offered for the head of Zahir—she finally took his life, she did it with an expression he could only describe as joyful, smiling, eyes aglitter, as she brushed his head soothingly with one hand, telling him he was a good boy, and then releasing him from his broken body and from a world of pain by expertly slicing open his throat.
Then she turned to Powell, as thrilled as if she’d just been on a funhouse ride: her pupils were dilated, her breathing rapid. Her fair skin was flushed and the pulse beat in her own throat. She ran her tongue over her parted lips. She was, he realized, aroused, sexually, and to his horror, he realized, so was he. He was also disgusted.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he said. “He would have talked. He’s just a kid. You didn’t have to kill him.”
She smiled. “Don’t worry. One more dead boy doesn’t add up to much in Afghanistan. There’s a war going on, remember?”
“But he’s not Afghani, is he?” Powell argued. “He’s American. He’s from Brooklyn, for God’s sake.”
“Well then,” Vicky said with a shrug, “he should have stayed home, shouldn’t he, where it’s safe? Now then . . .” She casually reached between his legs, feeling where, without his own consent or control, he responded to her touch. “Are you going to continue to bore me? Because if so, you can find a cab, and I’ll ask my handsome driver to escort me safely home.”
That was when Powell understood that, like some character in an old folktale, he had met the devil and without even knowing it, had traded away his soul.
Joe and Yelena were on the highway. When they came down from the hotel, they’d found their driver still out front, taking a smoke break after bundling up the torn fabric from his truck’s awning. “Kabul?” Joe asked him, gesturing to Yelena and himself. He pulled out another hundred. “The airport in Kabul? Beh fooroodgah?”
The driver hesitated. It was more than four hundred fifty kilometers; it would take all night. And he already knew these foreigners were armed and in some kind of trouble. Then again, trouble was not unusual in Kandahar, nor were armed foreigners, and this one was holding out another hundred-dollar bill. He added yet another, two hundreds, making three for the night. The driver shrugged and pocketed them, then got his engine going while his passengers settled in the back, using the fabric to improvise cushions.
And so, Joe and Yelena got to take in the view after all, riding through the desert at night, watching the ancient landscape pass, the moon rise and fall, staring up from their makeshift bed at the infinite stars, which had outshone all the names they’d been given and the countless prayers they’d heard, until, alive for one more day, both finally drifted into sleep, holding each other under the silence of heaven.