CLARK TOOK IT AS a sign of his advancing age that he’d grown increasingly intolerant of air travel. The cramped seats, the bad food, the noise… The only thing that made it remotely tolerable were the Bose noisecanceling headphones and a horseshoe neck pillow he’d gotten for Christmas, and a few tablets of Ativan Sandy had given him for the trip. For his part, Chavez sat in the window seat, eyes closed as he listened to his iPod Nano. At least the seat between them was empty, which gave each of them a little more elbow room.
After his discussion with Hendley and Granger, he’d found Ding, brought him up to speed, then called Mary Pat’s cell and arranged to meet her at home later in the afternoon. At her urging, he arrived early and shot the breeze with Ed for an hour before she arrived. While Ed started dinner, Clark and Mary Pat retreated to the back deck with a pair of beers.
Ignoring Hendley’s “tread carefully” warning, Clark laid his cards on the table. They’d known each other too long for anything less. Mary Pat didn’t bat an eye. “So Jack did it, huh? Always wondered if he’d gone through with it. Good for him. Well, they didn’t waste much time snatching you two up, did they? Who tapped you?”
“Jimmy Hardesty, about ten minutes after Alden canned us. The thing is, Mary Pat, I think we’re working on the same puzzle. If you’re not okay with cross-decking whatever intel we dig up…”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“For starters, we’ll be breaking at least three federal laws. And be risking the wrath of the Aldens at Langley.”
“If we can get this asshole-or even get a little closer to getting him-I’ll be fine with that.” Mary Pat took a sip of her beer, then glanced sideways at Clark. “Does this mean Hendley’s footing the bill?”
Clark chuckled. “Call it a gesture of goodwill. So what’s it going to be? A onetime deal, or the beginning of a wonderful friendship?”
“Share and share alike,” Mary Pat replied. “Bureaucracy be damned. If we have to put our heads together to get our man, so be it. Of course,” she added with a smile, “we’ll have to take credit, seeing as how you guys don’t exist and all.”
Half a tablet of Ativan and a beer helped Clark pass the last five hours of the flight in a deep, untroubled sleep. As the plane’s wheels bumped and squelched on the Peshawar airport’s tarmac, he opened his eyes and looked around. Beside him, Chavez was stuffing his iPod and paperback into his carry-on.
“Time to work, boss.”
“Yep.”
Surprising neither of them, their passage through the airport’s customs and immigration line went slowly but without incident. An hour after entering the terminal, they were outside at the ground transportation curb. As Clark raised his hand for a cab, an accented voice behind them said, “I would advise against that, gentlemen.”
Clark and Chavez turned to see a lanky white-haired man in a powder-blue summer suit and a white plantation hat standing behind them. “The cabs are death traps here.”
“You would be Mr. Embling,” Clark said.
“Indeed.”
Clark introduced himself and Chavez, using first names only. “How did you-”
“A friend e-mailed me your flight information. After that, it was simply a matter of looking for two chaps with the appropriate air about them. Nothing obvious, mind you, but I’ve developed something of a… radar, I suppose you would call it. Shall we?”
Embling led them to a green Range Rover with tinted windows parked beside the curb. Clark got in the front passenger seat, Chavez in the back. Soon they were pulling out into traffic.
Clark said, “Forgive me, but your accent-”
“Dutch. A throwback to my service days. There’s a significant Muslim population in Holland, you see, and they’re fairly well treated. Much easier to make friends-and stay alive-as a Dutchman. A matter of self-preservation, you see. And your covers?”
“Canadian freelance writer and photographer. Spec piece for National Geographic.”
“That’ll do in the short term, I suppose. The trick to blending is to look as though you’ve been here awhile.”
“And how do you do that?” This from Chavez.
“Look scared and disheartened, my boy. As of late, it’s the Pakistan national pastime.”
Care for a quick tour of the hot spots?” Embling asked a few minutes later. They were driving west on Jamrud Fort Road, moving toward the heart of the city. “A little who’s who of Peshawar?”
“Sure,” Clark replied.
Ten minutes later they pulled off Jamrud and headed south on Bacha Khan. “This is the Hayatabad, Peshawar’s version of your South Central Los Angeles. Densely populated, impoverished, very little police presence, drugs, street crime…”
“And not much in the way of traffic laws,” Chavez said, nodding through the windshield at the zigzagging stream of cars, trucks, man-hauled carts, and mopeds. Horns honked in a nearly continuous symphony.
“No laws at all, I’m afraid. Hit-and-runs are almost a sport here. In years past, the city’s made some effort to lift the neighborhood, mind you, but they never seem to get any traction.”
“Bad sign when the police stop showing up,” Clark observed.
“Oh, they show up. Two or three cars pass through twice a day, but unless they see a murder in progress, they rarely stop. Just last week they lost one of their cars and two officers. And when I say ‘lost,’ I mean they vanished.”
“God almighty,” Chavez said.
“Not around here,” Embling muttered.
For the next twenty minutes they drove ever deeper into the Hayatabad. The streets grew narrower and the homes more ramshackle until they were passing huts of corrugated tin and tarred-over cardboard. Vacant eyes watched Embling’s Range Rover from darkened doorways. On every corner, men stood clustered, smoking what Clark assumed wasn’t tobacco. Garbage lined the sidewalks and blew down the streets, pushed along by dust devils.
“I’d be a whole lot more comfortable armed,” Chavez murmured.
“No worries, my boy. As luck would have it, the Army’s Special Service Group is fond of Range Rovers with tinted windows. In fact, if you look behind us right now, you’ll see a man running across the street.”
Chavez turned around. “I see him.”
“By the time we reach the next street, doors will be slamming.”
John Clark smiled. “Mr. Embling, I can see we’ve come to the right person.”
“Kind of you. It’s Nigel, by the way.”
They turned yet again and found themselves on a street lined with a mixture of cinder-block stores and multistoried homes of unbaked brick and wood, many of whose façades were either fire-blackened or pockmarked with bullet holes, or both.
“Welcome to extremist heaven,” Embling announced. He pointed at buildings as they drove past, reciting as they went the names of terrorist groups-Lashkar-e-Omar, Tehreek-e-Jafaria Pakistan, Sipah-e-Muhammad Pakistan, Nadeem Commando, Popular Front for Armed Resistance, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen Alami-until he turned yet again, where the list continued. “None of these are official headquarters, of course,” he said, “but rather something akin to clubs, or fraternities. Occasionally the police or the Army will come in and conduct a raid. Sometimes the targeted group goes away altogether. Sometimes they’re back here the next day.”
“How many in all?” Clark asked.
“Officially… almost forty and counting. The problem is, the ISI is doing the counting,” he replied, referring to the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s version of the CIA. “Military intelligence to some extent as well. It’s the proverbial fox-guarding-the-henhouse scenario. Most of these groups either receive funding, or resources, or intelligence from the ISI. It’s become so convoluted that I doubt the ISI is counting wickets anymore.”
“That damage back there,” Chavez said. “From police raids?”
“No, no. That’s the work of the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. They are without a doubt the biggest dog on the block. Any time one of these guppies swims in the wrong pond, the URC comes in and swallows them up, and unlike with the local authorities, when that happens, the group stays gone.”
“That’s telling,” Clark replied.
“Indeed.”
Through the windshield, a few miles away, they could see a plume of smoke gushing into the sky. They felt the crump of the explosion in their bellies a few moments later. “Car bomb,” Embling said lightly. “Average three a day here, plus a couple mortar attacks for good measure. Nightfall is when things get truly interesting. I trust you can sleep through gunfire, yes?”
“We’ve been known to,” Clark replied. “I have to tell you, Mr. Embling, you paint a bleak picture of Peshawar.”
“Then I’ve given you an accurate portrayal. I’ve been here on and off for nearly four decades, and in my estimation Pakistan is at a tipping point. Another year or so should tell the tale, but the country’s about as close to being a failed state as it’s been in twenty years.”
“A failed state with nuclear weapons,” Clark added.
“Right.”
“Why do you stay?” Chavez asked.
“It’s my home.”
A few minutes later Chavez said, “Back to the Hayatabad… What I’m wondering is who doesn’t live there?”
“And a good question it is,” Embling said. “Though it’s a subjective measure the three big players here-the URC, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Sipah-e-Sahaba, formerly Anjuman-are generally clustered around the Peshawar cantonment-the Old City-and the Saddar area. The closer to the cantonment they are, the more dominant they are. The URC currently holds that title.”
“As luck would have it, we’re primarily interested in those areas,” Clark said.
“Imagine that.” A smile from Embling. “My house is just outside the cantonment, near Balahisar Fort. We’ll have a spot of lunch and talk shop.”
Embling’s houseboy-a term Clark had trouble wrapping his head around, despite knowing it was common here-Mahmood served them a lunch of raita, a yogurt and vegetable salad; lentil stew; and kheer, a rice pudding, to which Chavez took a ravenous liking.
“What’s the boy’s story?” Clark asked.
“His family was killed during that bad business following the Bhutto assassination. He’ll be going to Harrow in Middlesex next year.”
“That’s a good thing you’re doing, Nigel,” Chavez said. “You don’t have any-”
“No.” Curt.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to stick my nose in your business.”
“No apology necessary. I lost my wife in ’79, when the Soviets invaded. Wrong place, wrong time. Who’s for tea?” Once he’d poured everyone a cup, he said, “What’s it going to be, gentlemen? Person, place, or thing? What you’re after, I mean.”
“For starters, a place. Places, plural, actually,” Clark replied. From his briefcase he pulled out a digitally enhanced copy of the Baedeker’s map, then pushed aside the cups and saucers and unfolded it on the table. “If you look close-”
“Dead letter drops,” Embling interrupted. He saw Clark’s and Chavez’s astonished expressions and smiled. “In the ancient days of espionage, gentlemen, dead drops were our bread and butter. Three-dot cluster for drop-off; four for pickup?”
“Reverse that.”
“How recent is this map?”
“No idea.”
“So we have no way of knowing whether the drops are still active. Where did you-”
“In the mountains,” Chavez replied.
“A dark and dank place, I’m guessing. The previous owners-were they present?”
Clark nodded. “And did their damnedest to destroy it.”
“That’s a point in our favor. Unless I’m off the mark, the three-dot clusters aren’t intended so much as a pickup location as they are a pickup signal.”
“Our thought as well,” Clark replied.
“Is your interest in what’s being dropped off and picked up, or who’s doing either or both?”
“The who.”
“And do you know the signal?”
“No.”
“Well, in all probability, that’s the least of our worries.”
Chavez asked, “How so?”
“We’re not so much interested in the signal’s correctness as we are in identifying who takes an interest in it. In that case, we’ll have to chose our location carefully.” Embling went silent, clicking his tongue and staring at the map. “Here’s my suggestion: We take the afternoon on doing a little recce-”
“Come again?” This from Chavez.
“Reconnaissance.”
“Must have missed that over there.”
“We spent a little time at Hereford,” Clark explained to Embling.
“There’s a grim-faced bunch,” Embling replied. “Nice to see you haven’t lost your smiles. Okay, then, we’ll get you gentlemen comfortable with the territory, then start laying bait tomorrow. Otherwise, I fear we’ll run out of daylight today.”
While the majority of the drops were well outside the cantonment, they decided to concentrate on the four within the Old City, first driving around its perimeter, roughly following the wall that enclosed the cantonment until the mid-’50s. “Used to be sixteen gates here along the wall, complete with turrets and ramparts for archers,” Embling said, pointing out the passenger window. “In fact, in Persian, Peshawar means ‘The High Fort.’”
Clark liked Embling, partially because during his Rainbow tour he’d come to understand the British mind-set a little better, and partially because he was a genuine character-emphasis on the former. Given the way Embling waxed on about Peshawar, Clark half wondered if the man had been born a hundred years too late. Nigel Embling would have been right at home during Britain’s rule of the area.
Embling found a parking space near Lady Reading Hospital, and they got out and walked west into the Old City. The streets of the cantonment buzzed with activity: bodies, moving elbow to elbow, darted in and out of alleys and beneath canvas awnings; on overhanging balconies, children peeked curiously through wrought-iron bars. The scent of roasted meat and strong tobacco filled the air, along with an overlapping babble of voices speaking in Urdu, Punjabi, and Pashto.
After a few minutes walking, they entered a large square. “Chowk Yadgaar,” Embling announced. “All the drop-offs are within a half-mile of the square.”
“Probably chose it for the crowds,” Chavez said. “Hard to be seen, easy to get lost.”
“Another astute observation, young Domingo,” Embling said.
“I have my days.”
Clark said, “Let’s split up and check ’em out. Meet back here in an hour.” They decided who would take which, then parted company.
They regrouped and compared notes. Two of the spots-one in a small courtyard between the jeweler’s bazaar and the Mahabbat Khan mosque, and one in an alley near the site of the Kohati Gate-showed the faintest traces of a single chalk mark, the gold standard for dead-drop pickup signals since the Cold War. Chalk weathered well and was easily dismissed as a child’s doodling. Clark got out his map, and Embling checked the two locations. “Kohati Gate,” he said. “Easiest to surveil, and closest exit out of the cantonment.”
“Done,” Clark said.
“It’s early yet,” Embling said. “How do you chaps feel about cricket?”