QUEBEC, CANADA PRESENT DAY
The silver-white Gulfstream IV charter jet was idling outside its hangar at Jean Lesage International Airport. It was nearly 11:00 a.m., and the sounds of commercial jetliners coming and going rumbled toward the cavernous building every two minutes or so.
Reed Bishop took comfort in the sound. Being in a strange airport was like going to church or McDonald’s in a foreign land: you always knew just what you were going to find. For an FBI agent, predictability of any kind was a godsend. Sights, ambient sounds, traffic patterns, personal habits. It was all part of the baseline. It helped you realize when something was off, either because it stood out or it caused a ripple effect.
So far, everything was normal. But then, there were a lot of moving parts in this operation. There was still enough time for something to go wrong.
Bishop spotted the black Mercedes as it pulled around a slow-moving catering truck and sped along the service road. He squinted his forty-three-year-old eyes to check the tag irregularity that he’d been told about before he took off. The macron, the accent over the E, ran the entire length of the letter, instead of partway. That meant the car was bona fide Canadian Security Intelligence Service. If there’d been a hijack, a substitution along the way, there was a sure way to tell. It was one less thing to worry about. The car flashed its brights. That was the second way to tell. A hijacker wouldn’t have known to do that.
The sun was hidden behind thickening gray clouds, making the sedan’s dark windows seem even more opaque, more forbidding. A chill crept along Bishop’s arms. The FBI agent spit his chewing gum to the tarmac and reached into his Windbreaker for his cigarettes, feeling a pinch of guilt. He’d promised his ten-year-old daughter he would quit by her eleventh birthday. That left him two weeks to make good on his pledge. But he’d barely managed to cut down from his usual two packs a day, and the nicotine gum only made him want it more. He’d have to SARR the habit-follow the Self-Administered Recovery Regimen, as they called outpatient work in Allison Dearborn’s deprogramming division.
He remembered when they called it “cold turkey.” It was difficult then, and it would be just as difficult however it was dressed.
Cold turkey or aversion training or hypnotherapy or whatever the hell, he would deal with it after this business was done, he promised himself. When the prisoner was airborne, he could relax a little. It had been two weeks since her capture. He’d practically lived in his small office on Pennsylvania Avenue since then. There had been arrangements to make; egos to deal with; rules to bend, rewrite, or ignore. And he still had his regular work to do, tracking the internal flow of information on top secret operations and counterespionage activities so that none of the intel went from the inside out.
He lit up, aware of others on the tarmac looking at him. Smokers had become like FBI agents, acutely aware of their surroundings and who was glaring at them. He ignored them. The SOBs were breathing jet fumes, for God’s sake. And they were Pakistani. Surely they were around smokers enough to not give a damn.
Bishop did not know the three men standing beside the jet, nor had he seen the faces hidden by their balaclavas. The Pakistanis had worn the masks since he arrived at the airfield an hour ago. Dressed in black suits, like corporate ninjas, they had gathered silently outside the hangar to await their prisoner’s arrival. Bishop was here as a representative of FBI internal affairs. He was present in case human rights watchdogs heard about what was going on. He was supposed to give the transfer a veneer of international legality.
It was all a public show, of course. He was partnered with Jessica Muloni of the CIA’s Rendition Group One-“the waterboarding people,” as they laughingly called themselves. She wasn’t here to make sure the prisoner’s rights were protected. And he wasn’t here to make sure she was held accountable. Though he was technically in charge of this operation-another of Homeland Security’s increasingly less uncommon joint, cross-jurisdictional operations-professionally and ethically he felt their captive deserved whatever Muloni and the Pakistanis had planned.
He took a deep pull of smoke, held it in his lungs for a glorious moment, then let it swirl from his nose into the morning breeze. He should have worn his leather flight jacket. It was chilly even for Canada, the sky low and overcast. The damp gusts carried the smell of pines and imminent rain from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
They could have told me the weather before I left, he thought. He and Muloni had left Washington on a 7:00 a.m. flight. Before he headed to Dulles, the Canadians had given him details about the Mercedes, photos of the agents, satellite images of the terminal. Everything but the goddamn weather report.
Maybe it was a sign from God. The weather was ugly to suit the job he and Muloni had arrived to manage.
He drew hard on the cigarette as he watched the progress of the charcoal Mercedes. He was glad, at least, that the CSIS was the one who had made the nab. So far, the Canadians were proving more cooperative than some of Washington’s other “allies,” who insisted on follow-through and quid pro quo and complicated every mission threefold. It was tough to be clandestine when you had a half dozen agents trying to be inconspicuous, instead of one who actually was.
A woman came up behind him.
“How’s the room?” he asked without turning.
“Fine. Clean.” There was something in the clipped tone of her voice he didn’t like. Perhaps he’d thanked God too soon. “What’s wrong, Agent Muloni?”
“Your question.”
“You lost me.”
“The question should be, ‘What’s right?’ The answer-nothing. I just got word that our plans have been modified.”
Bishop slowly turned to face the African American woman, saw the cell phone in her hand. “Got word from whom?”
“Someone we can’t just ignore, like we’d usually do,” she said. She wobbled the phone. “Our consul general here called me directly. Seems that two high-level CSIS officials paid him a visit in the middle of the night.”
“Official, or did they creep through a window?”
“All on the up-and-up,” she said. “They insisted that the Mounties accompany Veil to her destination.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am so serious.”
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the CSIS were one unit until 1984. Since then, there had been very few jurisdictional battles because the responsibilities were clearly defined: the CSIS collected intelligence, while the RCMP acted on it. This job was what Bishop’s people called a fence straddler.
Bishop snapped his cigarette butt to the ground. Why give up smoking at all? He’d only have to start again when crap like this came down the chute. “He told them it would compromise security, having extra targets?”
“Yes,” the woman replied. “He said that the Canadians were intransigent. They told him that if we wanted their prisoner, we’d have to trust their guys.”
“It’s not about trust, for Christ’s sake. It’s about numbers.”
“Don’t tell me,” she said.
Bishop shook his head. “Not a good precedent.”
“I’m not happy, and word is the prime minister isn’t thrilled, either,” she said. “If something goes wrong, he doesn’t want to catch any blowback.”
“But the Mounties want to share the glory if everything goes right-”
“When,” she said firmly.
It took a moment for him to understand. “ When everything goes right,” he corrected himself.
Jessica Muloni smiled. He regarded the woman’s big brown eyes. There was nothing about them to suggest that her calm had been ruffled by the unexpected turn of events. She did not in any way fit the stereotypical mold of a cold CIA field operative. She was warm and easygoing. There was something about her that made you trust her, not just personally but professionally, a combination of her relaxed confidence and poise. Plain, thin, her natural brown hair cut functionally short, she wore almost no makeup and shapeless clothes, giving her a subdued, relaxed appearance. In her case, looks were somewhat deceptive, however. According to her file, she was easygoing until someone displayed the kind of dangerous incompetence that frontline personnel could not afford. Whether Jessica’s takedown was a physical assault, a psychological strike, or any combination thereof, witnesses reported it was a frightening thing to behold.
“Listen,” she said. “Let’s give them some leeway here. The CSIS found her, the Mounties snatched her from the school, and the Canadians are letting us circumvent their deportation laws without squawking.”
“Without squawking too much,” Bishop corrected her.
“Fine,” she agreed. “Look, there are legitimate concerns, and the brain trust here feels they need to have hands-on, so it’s not technically a turnover. Seems they read File four-oh-four-one-one in the ASD.”
The ASD-the Archive Sharing Database-employed by the FBI, the CSIS, Britain’s MI5, Interpol, and twenty-four other agencies, had a different name in Washington: Ass So Demolished, from the number of times the United States got screwed in that exchange program. Not that he didn’t see the Canadians’ point. Bishop had been part of that operation in 2001, at Bromma Airport in Stockholm, when Egyptian asylum seekers Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery were turned back by Sweden at the request of the FBI, which had Middle Eastern resources to protect. The file contained a detailed explanation of the diplomatic maneuvering that took place to make it seem like a Swedish decision in response to concerns voiced by Cairo, and not a decision cooked up in Washington. Even so, Sweden took a lot of heat for having failed to let the United Nations Human Rights Council study the case before taking unilateral action. It wasn’t just Swedish neutrality that took a hit, but the country’s reputation for independent action. Canadian authorities would accept the first, not the second.
“Are we expected to fly all three to Pakistan?” Bishop asked.
“No. Just two of them,” she said.
“Well, there’s a blessing,” Bishop said cynically. Two sets of regionally trained eyes on the worldly Pakistani operatives, a gaggle of suspicious Pakistani eyes on the territorial Canadians, fewer eyes on the package. “You cleared them?”
She wriggled the phone again. “They’re clean. Uninspiring but stainless.”
He produced a weary, resigned sigh and shifted his attention back to the vehicle. There was no point arguing over the stipulation if the diplomats had consented to it. No point, and no time. It was times like this that made him want to become a green badger-the nickname for former Bureau personnel who joined private industry to handle security in global hot spots. The stress was high, but the bureaucracies were thinner and the pay was better. And frankly, it was easier to protect a region or a city or just a business with international outlets, instead of the whole damn world.
Bishop watched as the Mercedes eased to a halt and the stocky driver exited. A moment later a second man in civilian clothes slid from the backseat, followed by a blond woman in a leather jacket and jeans who emerged from the opposite side and then turned to lean back in, reaching to unclip the prisoner’s seat belt.
Muloni took pictures of each individual with her cell phone. She tapped a six-digit code on the keypad. Facial recognition software from the Company’s sophisticated XApps database compared the images with the JPEGs she’d been sent. The password she’d used was phone specific; without it, the app would not function.
She showed the results to Bishop. The images all matched. They had no reason to prevent the Canadians from sticking around.
Bishop and Muloni had already been ID’d at the outside gate. Still, he thought, the first Mountie to emerge from the car should have done a backup check. All it would have taken for ringers to get through and cut them down was one bribed guard.
Bishop’s eyes narrowed as a fourth party, the notorious killer Veil, emerged from the vehicle. She had been named in at least a dozen attacks, from pinpoint assassinations to RPG attacks. Her hands were cuffed behind her back; her ankles shackled; the second plainclothesman helped to steady her on her feet. She wore a short black skirt over a wine-colored blouse that drew Bishop’s attention to her figure for longer than he hoped anyone had noticed. Her beige slip-on sneakers didn’t match the rest of her clothes: the Mounties had removed whatever shoes or boots she was wearing when she was bagged to make it easier for her to walk in restraints.
“Dressed to kill,” Muloni remarked.
“Cute.”
“No, really,” the woman replied. “You wouldn’t have been watching her hands, would you?”
“Damn it.” She was right. And he was busted.
“My great-grandmother was a painter in Uganda,” the woman said. “Made her own pigments, stretched animal skins for canvas. She painted village life. There were a lot of bare-chested women, and do you know why?”
“It was a hundred and ten in the shade?”
“That, plus it inured men to the sight of barely clad women so they wouldn’t be distracted in tribal wars or in trading,” she told him.
“I wonder what those women thought when they encountered European women,” Bishop said.
“The Zulus thought they were comical,” Muloni told him. “Not the kind of high ground the British missionaries wanted.”
Bishop didn’t want to tell her that overexposure wouldn’t have worked with most of the men he knew. Then again, some of them-like himself-might actually have been studying the woman’s face instead. Veil’s expression was nondescript. No anger, no frustration, no fear. Just neutral. It wasn’t even a kind of practiced blankness that made you think something might be working inside her skull, like a plan of escape. She was simply a woman who was going along with whatever came from moment to moment. Undistracted, if an opportunity presented itself, she’d be ready. That was how assassins worked. But all that aside, there was something riveting about a woman who seemed to have no opinion in her expression.
Bishop reached for a cigarette, thought of his promise, then let it go. He chewed his cheek and watched as the woman shuffled ahead amid her captors, her shoulders squared, her head high and defiant.
The woman the Bureau had code-named Veil-she called herself Yasmin Rassin, though that was believed to be an alias-was responsible for the deaths of at least fourteen individuals around the world. She was wanted in the United States for trying to kill the deputy director of the CIA, Jon Harper, outside his home in Washington, a hit paid for by Tehran, according to a mole in the Majles-e Khobregan, Iran’s ruling council of clerics. The trail that led to her capture had been long and convoluted. Photographed by a street-corner security camera, she had vanished for almost a year after the attempted hit. Eight months ago, a pair of MI5 antiterror agents on another assignment had made a chance ID at Heathrow and taken her into custody. On the way to Thames House in London, their car disappeared. It was later found burning in a field northwest of the city. A month later, the body of one of the agents was recovered from the water under the Westminster Bridge. His throat had been cut with a razor. Pink cotton fibers found in the wound suggested the razor had been tucked into the sweater she was wearing, probably the sleeve. Though her hands had been zip-tied behind her, shavings suggested that the restraints had been slashed, apparently by another razor blade. Rassin had undoubtedly made a lengthwise slit in the back of her leather belt and tucked the razor inside so its edge was even with the top of the belt.
The other driver remained missing.
Despite a hunt involving the cooperation of multiple international security and intelligence groups, Rassin had again gone to ground until last May, when the CSIS got a tip about an Egyptian boy who kept to himself at school, never took gym class due to vague religious restrictions, and-what had surprised fellow students-remembered his locker combination the very first day. Simultaneously, the Mounties turned up an inconsistency in his passport that had been recorded at customs and eventually passed along: the customs agent had clandestinely noted the young man’s travel history-routine with young men coming from the Middle East-but there was no record of his having gone to the places stamped on the document. The Mounties tracked Rassin’s movements, compared photographs of the “boy” with the computer-enhanced security camera image of her, and finally made the arrest.
According to Bishop’s hurried briefing, Rassin did not resist the takedown. With the headmaster of the school present to lend an air of invisibility to the arrest-he was always talking with education officials-Rassin was taken away at gunpoint, outside, during lunch. And that was that.
Bishop watched as she was brought toward him. She certainly looked different from the security camera image he’d seen. She no longer had wavy raven-black hair tumbling to her shoulders. She was a redhead, her hair clipped short, boyish. Her features were more strongly defined, probably the result of Botox and malar or submalar implants. The eyes were slightly more rounded at the corners, and she was no longer wearing blue contacts. Her eyes were dark and piercing. Finally, Bishop noticed that while her skin was still olive smooth, her Mediterranean complexion was lighter, possibly due to topical melanin inhibitors, like hydroquinone or glucocorticoids.
She was slight, no more than a few inches over five feet, and with the proper clothes, he saw how she could pass as a teenage boy. The CSIS had subsequently learned from school officials that her “widower father” was an oil company geologist who was always up north, looking for untapped deposits. Presumably, visitors to her rented home, like her handler, would have come at night, wearing “dad” clothes and carrying luggage. E-mail would be checked only on school computers, which, as a rule, were off provincial law-enforcement radar absent specific tips about violence-which were virtually nonexistent in Canada. With hacking codes provided by her allies, she could even track CIA or FBI pursuers.
It was a brilliant disguise, one she’d maintained for seven months. Unfortunately for Veil, the RCMP was off her radar. It was like the traffic stops that turned into big drug busts: the law usually came at you by accident, from a blind spot.
Leading her across the tarmac, one of the Mounties stopped in front of Bishop and inclined his head formally. “Good morning. I am Inspector Javert.”
Bishop grinned. “Really?”
“Indeed.”
Bishop nodded toward the driver. “Valjean?”
“Yes,” the inspector replied humorlessly, then indicated to the female plainclothes officer. “This is Cosette. She and I will be traveling with the prisoner to her end point.”
Bishop had expected the Canadians to use aliases around their prisoner. It gave them added deniability and would protect their families from retribution if she ever passed them on to her associates. Still, he was used to traditional military-style assignations with Greek letters attached, like Tango-Alpha or Foxtrot-Beta. The Les Miserables references gave this a kind of amateur, community theater feel.
Javert looked at the men in black on the runway. “You are ready for us to bring the detainee aboard?”
“Not quite, Inspector. We have to make some preparations before takeoff.”
“Of what sort?”
“They won’t take long,” Bishop insisted. “In the meantime, you can wait comfortably aboard the-”
“Please answer my question,” Javert said, his face tightening. “What type of preparations?”
Bishop hesitated. There were no written-in-stone guidelines for what he was compelled to share with local authorities. Still, he preferred not to lie to them. That could lead to mistrust at best, complications at worst. Cooperation did not, however, mean he was inclined to share everything.
Bishop let the pause stretch out, still weighing how much to reveal. Muloni spared him the decision.
“We’re going to conduct a body-cavity search on the prisoner,” she said. “We also have different clothes for her. There’s a room in the terminal where she can change.”
The inspector studied her flatly. “We searched her last night and found nothing,” he said. “She has been under constant observation since then. You needn’t be concerned.”
“I’m not,” she replied. “We have our own protocols and ways of doing things. This is going to happen.”
“They’ll be with us,” Bishop said quickly, pointing toward the masked Pakistanis.
Javert’s eyes remained on Muloni. “Is that supposed to put my mind at ease?”
“Not my problem,” Muloni replied.
Alone time with the prisoner was vitally important, but the reasons were secret. Mulling how to break the impasse, Bishop let his gaze drift toward Veil. He discovered she was staring back at him, her gaze hot and penetrating. He made himself wait an uncomfortable moment to see if she looked away-she didn’t-before turning to Javert.
“Inspector, no one disputes that it’s your prisoner being transferred to the custody of Pakistan,” Bishop said. “We have simply come to assist-”
“As needed,” Javert pointed out. “That was the agreement.”
“It was,” Bishop agreed. “But the rules of extradition in Canada are largely uncharted legal and political territory, while we have a great deal of precedent. To deviate from standard procedure without authorization… Well, it would take hours to contact the proper parties on both sides. Ten minutes,” he said. “That’s all we need.”
The Canadian scowled with a mixture of reluctance and skepticism. But they both knew he would have to relent. He had carried out a kidnapping sanctioned by his country’s top intelligence dog. The more talk that went back and forth, the more phone logs there were, the longer Veil remained on the ground in Quebec, the more someone might start to take a closer look at how all of this had been accomplished.
“Very well,” Javert said. “We will escort the prisoner to the terminal and stay as observers until you are finished.”
“Shouldn’t you be checking the aircraft?” Muloni asked.
“Why? It got here, didn’t it? The Pakistanis have been watching it, haven’t they? What exactly would we be looking for? ”
There was no arguing with his logic, however naive it was, and Bishop couldn’t fault him for insisting on that condition-it might have been partly about alpha-dogging the operation, but it was more likely the inspector wanted to see that nothing too extreme happened on Canadian soil.
Muloni’s eyes remained on Javert for several seconds. Then she glanced at Bishop, gave him a disengaged little shrug. Javert seemed to have become his problem exclusively.
“Observe all you want, Inspector,” Bishop said at length. “The only thing I ask, respectfully, is that your people don’t get in our way.”
“Why would we?” he asked. “It’s just a search.”
“Right,” Bishop agreed. “But as with the airplane, we tend to check in places and with ways that might not be part of your tool kit.”
The inspector eyed him suspiciously, then looked back at his Mounties and waved them forward. They all fell in more closely around the shackled Veil, the two men flanking her, the blond woman a step or two behind. Bishop and Muloni watched the service road and the tarmac, respectively, in case anyone made a rescue attempt. But there were no sounds of car engines, nothing to break the reassuring monotony of the roaring turbines.
When they reached the jet, Bishop noticed Veil’s eyes shoot toward the masked men. It was the first time she was in a position to see them. The woman moved ahead without halting as they followed her into the charter terminal.
Bishop felt a chill. In his nineteen years with the Bureau, the former field operative had learned to respect his intuition almost to the point of obsession.
She knows who they are, who they were, he thought. She would not want to go back to Baghdad with them. Any prisoner would rather die. It was a dangerous game they were playing now, but if it worked, the payoff would be considerable.
The terminal was a barracks-style concrete structure with a small functional waiting area and a corridor running back along one side of the unattended reception desk. On her arrival at the terminal that morning, Muloni had picked a small boxy storage area at the end of the corridor for the holding room. She directed the others toward it. Javert entered the corridor first, followed by the other Mounties and Veil. The black-clad men from the Gulfstream came next, with Bishop and Muloni in the rear. She shut the door behind her and locked it.
“He’s not going to like this,” she warned as they lagged well behind.
“I know. But what’s he going to do about it? Quote regulations at us? We’ll be done before he can even start to explain this to his commander.”
“Our boy here can still shut down the tower,” Muloni said. “Veil’s got to be airborne before it hits the fan.”
“She will be,” Bishop promised. “Remember what Harper’s buddy Ryan Kealey did to that United Nations security guard in oh-seven?”
She grinned. “It’s legend among those who knew what went down. Said he mistook a walkie-talkie for a gun. Threw the guard across the room. And he wasn’t even the target-it was the diplomat who was crossing behind him. The guard got credit for the takedown.”
“Classic,” Bishop said. “I’ll make sure only Javert comes in, and make it seem like it was his idea.”
Muloni was still smiling. “Perfect. My move, if it comes to that.”
Bishop nodded as the group clustered tightly around the door.
“You can stand by in the corridor,” Bishop said, reaching for a doorknob. “We’ll let you know when we’re set to roll.”
“No,” the inspector said. “We will observe all of it.”
“All right,” Bishop said. He pretended to consider his options. “But just you. Nobody else. And no talking. Take it or leave it.”
Javert’s jaw muscles were working. He nodded once, sharply.
“Who has the key to the prisoner’s restraints?” Bishop asked.
Cosette came from behind Veil and flicked her right hand up from her side. The key hung from a steel-plated bracelet locked around her wrist.
Bishop extended his hand, but Javert inserted himself between them.
“I’ll take it,” the inspector said.
The woman unclasped the bracelet and gave it to Javert. Bishop nodded to Muloni. She entered the office first. Javert grabbed the prisoner’s handcuffs and, walking behind Veil, guided her in. The Pakistanis went next, followed by Bishop. The American shut and locked the door behind him. It was a solid oak door with a shoulder-high dead bolt. While Javert watched Muloni, Bishop slid the bolt into place.
The room was empty except for a small card table against one white cinder-block wall. On the table were a folded tracksuit, a digital camera, and a scalpel. Surrounded by her captors, Veil took notice of the surgical implement for scarcely an instant before letting her eyes move on to study the rest of the room. Bishop felt an uncharacteristic edginess as her roving attention fell on him again. Muloni had examined the room personally, so he was confident no one had hidden a weapon where Veil could grab it. Perhaps it was because this was the first time a woman had been rendered with his direct involvement. If anything definable was bothering him, he supposed that explained it.
Bishop watched as one of the men in black coveralls took the scalpel from the tabletop. He was tall and square-shouldered, only his eyes visible through the balaclava that concealed his features. Bishop was assured that he had been cleared by voice recognition, as had all the others. The FBI phones had an XApp for that as well. The Pakistani looked at Bishop.
“Let’s get it done,” the American said.
The hooded man crossed the room to the prisoner with two large strides, raising the scalpel and then sweeping it down the front of her skirt. The skirt came apart with a whispery shredding of fabric and dropped over her ankles, revealing her bare thighs underneath as he brought the blade up again to slit open her blouse. For a moment she stood, shackled, in her bra, panties, and the plain low sneakers. Another swipe of the blade sliced the bra in half, leaving her nude from the waist up, the limp remnants of her blouse hanging from her arms and wrists above the cuffs.
Bishop wasn’t sure who was more surprised by the act, the prisoner or a visibly horrified Javert.
The photos came next, a second man in black rapidly snapping pictures of the woman with the digital camera. Bishop caught himself looking at her tanned, nude flesh and guiltily lifted his gaze. When he did, she was staring back at him, her dark, bright eyes steady, burning into his own as they had on the tarmac. There was no trace of embarrassment or submission in her expression, nothing to indicate she was at all intimidated. Just her seething anger and steadfast eyes.
Bishop could tell she was thinking. Hard.
“What’s the need for this?” Javert asked, frowning unhappily.
Bishop was glad for the distraction. “Remember our agreement, Inspector? No talking.”
“Yes, but you go too far,” Javert replied.
“You think so?” Muloni cut in. “How would you ID her if you found her dismembered body in a Pakistani street?”
Javert’s mouth snapped shut, audibly.
“Okay, Inspector,” Muloni went on. “We’ll need her out of those arm and leg cuffs.”
Javert stepped forward. The man with the scalpel backed off to make room for him. The inspector bent and opened the ankle restraints, then straightened, slipped the key into the handcuff lock, and gave it a three-quarter turn. The manacles clicked open and came loose in his hands. He took two steps back, holding them with both hands.
The man with the scalpel nodded to his teammates. “Check her. Everywhere inside,” he said in Arabic.
Bishop recognized the words. He’d heard them in more rooms like this than he could remember. They were not really instructions, since his companions knew the drill. They were meant for Veil, designed to cut away her dignity the way the surgeon’s blade had slashed away her clothes. This repatriation unit of the Pakistani Quel Affada intelligence division had been active for twenty-four months, its members handpicked from Saddam Hussein’s disbanded Mukhabarat. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations insisted the infamous secret police were the wrong people to rehabilitate criminal Pakistanis operating abroad, but the FBI had gone ahead with the plan. Part of the QA charter was to prevent Baghdad from exporting terrorists and criminals. The threat of being turned over to a unit comprised of professional torturers was credited with helping to discourage black market operators and the export of terrorists.
For the masked men, the routine was familiar. For Bishop and Muloni, it was necessary. For Javert, it was a new experience, and as two of the masked men closed on her, he let his eyes drop.
That was when Veil struck. Her left hand shot out in a palm-heel strike. It connected with Javert’s chin, causing his teeth to clap shut on his tongue. Blood oozed from the sides of his mouth as he stumbled back, dropping the shackles. Veil remained in motion. As the nearest of the Pakistanis moved forward, she sidestepped him and made for the man with the scalpel. Her right hand formed a tiger claw and raked laterally across his eyes. He screamed, temporarily blinded. As Muloni stepped toward her, Veil was already pivoting and struck her in the gut with a perfectly executed backward kick. She reached for the blade in the blinded man’s hand.
Fists pounded on the door.
“Inspector? Is everything all right?”
Cosette’s cry went unanswered as Bishop and the other masked men rushed to form a tight circle around the prisoner. She ignored them, fighting with the Pakistani for the scalpel. Veil grabbed his wrist in an effort to twist it from his hand. Before she could successfully apply the wrenching kote gaeshi maneuver, Bishop grabbed her from behind, pulled her back, twisted, and threw himself atop her body, both of them facedown. He easily outweighed the killer, but she hadn’t relented and was thrashing wildly on the floor, arms and legs flailing, her gums peeled from her teeth, trying to turn and bite the hands pressing down on her shoulders.
“Somebody get the goddamn chains!” Bishop yelled.
Recovering from her blow, Muloni spotted the shackles on the floor. She grabbed the hand restraints. The key was still in the lock as she wrestled one of Veil’s wrists into the iron band and snapped it shut. Bishop moved slightly so Muloni could get to her other arm. After some fierce wrestling, the woman’s arms were once more immobilized. Breathing heavily, Bishop sat up, still on her back. Meanwhile, one of the Pakistanis had found the ankle restraints and was working to clamp them on while Muloni held down her legs.
Five of us, Bishop thought. Five of us to bring her under control.
Cosette was still pounding on the door. Muloni opened it, disdainfully pushed the bloodied Javert out, then closed and locked it behind him. He had wanted to see the examination, and he had. What he had missed, because he wasn’t looking for it, was the start of the breaking of a high-value prisoner, one who had killed energy officials and politicians the world over but would soon be asked to kill Iranian politicians and the sons of oil sheikhs. The struggle proved that the FBI was right about her: she’d be a hell of an asset. Soon she’d be conveyed into a purgatory inhabited by other malign ghosts like herself. Confined, interrogated, if she refused to work for the good guys instead of the Iranians and oil sheikhs who had trained and paid her, she’d be eliminated.
But Bishop didn’t think that would happen. No human being who operated solely as a mercenary would endure what lay in store when the option was simply to shift their loyalties. And they still had one more card to play.
Bishop was still kneeling over Veil when Muloni crouched beside them. The agent leaned close to the Pakistani woman.
“I have some information for you,” she said, snarling.
Veil tried to spit, and Muloni punched her in the nose. There was a loud, ugly crack.
“You’ll want to listen,” Muloni said.
“ Dozakh, ” she cried.
“ Jannat! ” Muloni hissed back with a wicked smile.
Addressing her in Urdu got Veil’s attention. Bishop could see the assassin’s shoulders relax slightly.
“You will want to hear the reason we brought you in here,” Muloni continued in English. “It involves your daughter, Kamilah.”
Veil’s eyes instantly lost their fire. It was the first time Bishop had seen anything get to her.
“What about her?” the assassin demanded in thinly accented English. “What have you done?”
“What have you done, ma’am? ” Muloni corrected her.
Veil stared at her. She didn’t spit. She didn’t struggle. She was already starting to understand. The American would tell her nothing and would hit her again, and again, until she did what she was told.
“What have you done, ma’am?” Veil asked.
“Nothing, yet,” Muloni said. “But we know where she is. We’re watching her.”
“No one knew,” Veil muttered.
“Akila did,” Muloni said.
The name drained the color from Veil’s face.
“If you want to keep her safe, you’ll do everything you’re told, starting now,” Muloni said. “You’re going back to Pakistan, where you’ll tell these boys everything you know. Names, contacts, safe houses, everything. The interview will be taped, a copy given to us. If we like what we hear, Kamilah will be fine.”
Veil did not move. Jessica Muloni rose slowly. She swiped a hand across the orange suit folded on the table. The outfit landed on the floor next to Veil.
“Help her up,” she told the Pakistanis.
They did. She stood unsteadily, blood flowing from her nose.
“Forget the cavity search,” Muloni said. “Help her get dressed ASAP.”
The group leader, the one who had been holding the scalpel, translated for the others. Bishop rose, and they got to work. Muloni was obviously on the clock now, trying to get the jet off the ground before Cosette or Valjean got in the way.
“You got anything to add?” Muloni asked Bishop.
“I’m good,” he said.
There was no point telling her that this was a shitty business. They knew it, the Pakistanis knew it, and now a small group of Mounties knew it.
The team escorted the prisoner back down the corridor. Javert, Cosette, and the Mercedes were gone by the time they reached the tarmac. Valjean looked shaken. He told Bishop they went to the hospital. There was a bloody handkerchief on the tarmac beside him.
“These individuals are free to depart without the RCMP contingent,” the Mountie said of the Pakistanis and their prisoner.
“Understood,” Bishop said. His voice was matter-of-fact, as though it had been a tactical decision and not the result of the team leader nearly biting off his tongue.
“I’m to remain with you until you leave,” Valjean added.
“Of course,” Bishop replied. He looked at his watch. “Our flight home’s not for another ninety minutes. Can we buy you coffee?”
“If we can find an open bar, I’d prefer a scotch,” he answered.
“Sounds good,” Bishop replied.
Within five minutes, Bishop was driving the three of them to the terminal building. The Gulfstream IV, with Veil and the Pakistanis on it, was just one more rolling boom in the succession of jets leaving the runway. Bishop relaxed a little. Muloni was calm.
“I didn’t realize you knew Urdu,” Bishop said.
“Women who work for the Company need an edge,” Muloni told him. “Farsi and Urdu were mine.”
“Impressive. What did you say to her?”
“She started to swear at me. She only got as far as ‘hell.’ Probably going to tell me to go there. I said, ‘Heaven.’ The inflection suggested that was the only place I’d be going-unlike her.”
“Crap. You did all that with inflection?”
“That’s a lot of what language is,” she replied. “Language was my major. In the Semitic world especially, you find so much of language is just taunt and counter-taunt, with the ante constantly being upped. ‘Your father picks lemons.’ ‘Your mother sucks lemons.’ ‘Your sister is a lemon.’ That sort of thing.”
“Only a little rougher, I’m guessing,” Bishop said.
“Yes.” She smiled. “My father’s family had a Moroccan strain. They were Muslim traders. Very vocal.”
“You get that in my Irish and Italian heritage, as well,” Bishop told her.
“We’re all more alike than we care to admit,” Muloni said. “That’s the damned thing about us killing each other.”
Bishop shook his head. “That’s what happens when you run out of insults, I guess.”
“Screw you,” she said with a little wink.
She was right. Inflection was everything.
The man removed his black mask several minutes after the Gulfstream had taken off. He swept a gloved hand through his damp blond hair. He was Caucasian, with the hulking build of an American football player.
He was clearly not Pakistani.
“Close one,” he said, blinking sweat from his pale blue eyes. “I thought we were going to have to waste them.”
The man sitting across the narrow aisle yanked off his own balaclava. He was an African American male in his thirties. He pulled off his gloves and tossed them, and the mask, on the table in front of him. This man was not Pakistani, either.
“I wouldn’t’ve lost any sleep over it,” he said. “Javert. Valjean. What are they? Freakin’ librarians?”
There was general laughter among the men. Across the table were two other deep luxury seats. The third man sat in the one by the aisle. Their prisoner sat by the window, her olive complexion ruddy in the sunset, her eyes narrow as she watched the last man unmask himself. He had Asiatic features, possibly Hawaiian.
“All that matters is it worked out,” the first man said. The blue eyes settled on Yasmin. “You don’t look surprised, little lady.”
Yasmin didn’t bother explaining. She didn’t want to provide information that might help these men or their handlers in the future. Their affected accents had been good, but she had doubted from the first that any of them were Pakistanis. Neither they nor the aircraft cabin smelled of cigarettes. She had never met a Pakistani agent who did not smoke. She had also noted the bulge of wallets in their pants. Pakistanis typically carried folded currency. They were not big on credit cards. These were mercenaries. Working for the highest bidder.
“She’s got a good poker face, I’ll give her that,” the African American said.
“But a looker,” said another.
“Yeah, well, that’s all you’re gonna do,” the African American said.
“I know. I’m just saying.”
Yasmin was instantly tired of their locker-room banter. She had heard it in the barracks as a young girl; a world and a decade away, there was nothing different in their looks and remarks. It was pathetic.
“What is going on?” she asked. She did not expect them to tell her much. But any information was more than she had now.
“It’s a classic good news, bad news situation,” the man beside her said. “Do you understand that expression?”
She nodded.
“The good news, as you’ve probably figured out, is that we’re not taking you to Islamabad.”
“Where, then?”
“That’s a secret, I’m afraid. But that’s also good news. You won’t be cooped up here for the better part of a day. We’ll have wheels down in-”
“Two hours or less,” she said. “In New York, I think.”
The men fell silent. The Asiatic man confirmed her guess with his look of open admiration.
“What makes you say that?” he asked.
“That’s a secret, I’m afraid,” she replied.
A jet such as this one had a ceiling of 13,000 meters. They were leveling off at around 2,000 meters. That suggested a very short flight. There would be nothing in a Canadian city that Quebec would not provide, so she guessed they were headed to America. Only New York made sense within a two-hour radius.
“Who are you people?” she asked.
“Sorry. That, too, is need to know only,” the Asiatic man said.
“Do you, in fact, have my daughter?”
“We do,” the Asiatic man went on. “We needed a way to get your attention.”
“For what?”
“That’s the bad news,” he said, but he did not elaborate.
She wanted to ask about Kamilah, how she was, when she might see her or even talk to her, but she doubted they would tell her anything. Information was power, and their body language told her that her little display had set them on guard. That was exactly what she wanted. A man on defense was easier to provoke.
Yasmin regarded the African American. “What is your code name?” she asked.
He just smirked.
“Dr. Fed? FBI-Zee?”
The man’s expression soured, and he moved forward suddenly, as though he intended to strike her. The Asiatic man held up a hand, palm out. The other man hesitated, then settled back into his seat.
The leader turned to her. “Don’t talk.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I’ll have them cut off your daughter’s finger and show it to you on a live feed,” he said and held up a phone.
It was a Tac-Sat Elite. She was right. He was FBI.
“Let me talk to her,” she said, pressing-not because she expected him to oblige, but because he would feel in control again if she asked.
“Maybe… when you show us you can behave,” he said as he slipped the phone back inside his jacket.
Feigning obedience, the woman sat back. Her hands were still cuffed behind her, and she had to roll toward the window, keeping them as far to the right as she could, in order to sit comfortably. Even that was painful, however; they had not treated her gently back at the terminal, especially the two agents who had been unmasked. She had pulled every muscle in her back and shoulders trying to escape.
Yasmin contemplated what might lie in store. It was unlikely they wanted her to go back to Pakistan, blend in, and start killing radical elements. All that would have taken was the right price and the release of her daughter. That would hardly be “bad news” to a mercenary.
No. The scenario suggested a suicide mission, though even there she saw problems. Why go through the trouble of hijacking a skilled assassin, then waste her on a mission that anyone with a family could be forced to execute? Because she was a woman? That made no sense. Any whore could be paid to get close to someone in power. Any whore with a child could be coerced into killing him.
And what of the other two Americans at the airport? Yasmin didn’t think they knew the identities of these three men. They had behaved as though the three were Pakistani security. The African American was right: the Canadians weren’t sophisticated enough to have made that level of deception necessary. Her abduction was a covert operation within the FBI that the other agents had not known about.
All she knew for certain was that, before too much longer, she would have answers. And given that they still held her daughter, she probably wouldn’t like them.