“What do you hear about ransom negotiations? I mean for Craig.”
“I hear five crore-dollars, not rupees-is the asking price.”
“That’s a lot of money,” I said. “It’ll be hard to move fifty million dollars in Pakistan.”
“Yes. I have interests in the largest bank in Pakistan, and now I am hearing discreet inquiries from people connected to ISI: how can they conceal an influx, an unusual influx, source unspecified? This country! Do you know, Theo, that my bribery bill is an insanely large percentage of my payroll? How can one run a nation this way? Look, I am not pure like my father. I do business, and to do business in Pakistan one must play along, but I am also my father’s son and I say there is a limit. There is still decency.”
He went on about the agony of Pakistan for a while before I brought him back to my immediate problem. “Can you get me in to see Seyd?”
“Not a good idea, Theo; he is a peculiar fellow, my dear brother. He is very proud and quite incompetent, which is a dangerous combination. He might even have you arrested or expelled. He owes me a great deal, but he would die before acknowledging how much of my influence has gone into supporting his position in the military. As for him knowing anything that could help you-well, let us just say that Seyd is not privy to the inner secrets of his organization.”
“Yes, there are people like that in every army.”
“And ours has more than most. Half our national budget goes to arms, and I ask you, have we ever won a war? The country is tearing itself apart, and these imbeciles spend and spend on nuclear weapons. Do you know the nuclear establishment employs over twenty thousand people?”
“Including Jafar. He seems to have done well out of it anyway.”
“Yes, of course, but we have brownouts in Lahore every day. How can you run businesses this way, I ask you? And these nuclear bombs, what use are they? To frighten India? Don’t make me laugh! Meanwhile, this war in the north-it could be the end of Pakistan, you know? And no one knows what the hell to do about it.”
I couldn’t help him there.
Then he asked, “Suppose you find out this location. What will you do? Because if you are thinking that the Pakistani authorities will help, I cannot encourage you. And this plan of yours-I can’t say I have much confidence in it.”
“I don’t either, but it was all we could think of. As you say, we can’t expect much help from the authorities here.”
“Yes, but I wish you had come up with something that did not involve yet another violation of our sovereignty. Poor Pakistan: caught between monsters, and yet we persist in twisting all their tails.”
He reached into a jacket pocket, removed a business card case, and wrote on the back of one of the cards with a gold ballpoint. Handing it to me he said, “This is a cell-phone number reserved for the family. If you need my help, do call, any hour. I have a very wide reach throughout Pakistan, and most problems can be solved with a proper infusion of money. It is, unfortunately, a national trait.” He laughed and patted my shoulder. “Or fortunately, I should say, in the present case.”
And then we drifted back over to the other group and the rest of the evening was devoted to talk about sports and stuff, and Nisar said he could offer me a car and a driver, if I wanted to travel north-it was safer, after all-which I gratefully declined. After a while the ladies came out and we chatted amiably under the stars. It was nice enough but it was not like an evening at Laghari Sahib’s.
The next morning I woke up early, the sky still bright pink, with little flags of the palest blue attached. I’d had a dream that the family party I’d just been at was my regular life, that the bomb had not gone off, that Laghari Sahib was still there at the head of the table and that I’d been raised and educated in Pakistan, and never been a mujahid or an American soldier, and that I was telling everyone at the table a dream I’d had, a nightmare, which was my real life and everyone thought it was awful, and for a few seconds when I woke up I didn’t know which life was real.
I dressed in my American traveling clothes and went downstairs. I found Hassan and Iqbal having tea and parathas for breakfast, and I joined them. There’s something intimate about breakfast; more than the other meals it reminds you of home and how your mother used to make your eggs and toast just right-if you had that kind of mother, which I didn’t. These parathas and this tea tasted exactly like what I used to eat every morning when I was a kid in my grandfather’s house, and waves of aching memory overcame me and I fell back into my dream a little until I realized that Iqbal was talking to me. Did I still follow cricket in the U.S.? So I snapped out of it and we talked about cricket and baseball, differences, similarities, and so on, a nice easy conversation. I said I needed a vehicle and Hassan asked if I could ride a motorcycle and I said I could, and just like that he handed me the keys to his and said I could use it as long as I wanted.
Iqbal said he had to go check his e-mail, to eye-rolling and jibes from his brother, and when he came back he had a piece of paper in his hand and a troubled expression on his face.
He handed me the paper and said, “It’s from your father. It was encrypted so I decrypted it and printed it out for you. I hope you don’t mind.”
I read the note. Hassan asked, “Bad news?”
“Sort of. My father says someone in NSA seems to have almost sniffed out what we’re doing. A woman, apparently, a translator named Cynthia Lam.”
“How did she find out?” asked Iqbal.
“He doesn’t say.”
“And how did he find out she suspects us?” asked Hassan. “I thought NSA was the topmost of top secrets.”
“It is,” I said. “But everything has leaks. My dad says he got the tip from a man named Afridi, and Afridi got it from sources he won’t reveal, as my father says discreetly. Afridi was some kind of CIA asset in the Russian jihad, and apparently he still has contacts with the spooks. But all that doesn’t matter. The question is, what do we do about it?”
Iqbal was looking at the paper over my shoulder. “I noticed he has obtained her home e-mail and IP address. And her taxpayer ID number and bank information.”
“Yeah, I’d sort of like to know where that came from. But obviously someone in Washington is supplying this information about her in the hopes that we’ll figure out some way to distract her or discredit her long enough to pull this thing off. I’m open to suggestions, gentlemen. This is definitely not my department.”
They had a number of suggestions, and I left the doing of them in their capable, devious hands. They seemed to regard it as some kind of game, which I guess it was for them, and I got myself together to do my part. It would not be nearly as gamelike.
I went out to the garage and found Hassan’s bike, a six-year-old Ducati ST in decent shape, and rode it back into the old city and the Urdu Bazaar in Anarkali. Lahore traffic was as I recalled it, maybe a little worse-more motorcycles, bigger trucks-but the same sense of riding in a circus parade operated by crazy people. Again I had the sense of dipping into an alternate existence, and also the feeling that I was comfortable in a way I was never comfortable when driving my rental through the streets of Washington-and even more at ease when I bought a Chinese fatigue jacket, a couple of shalwar kameez outfits, bull-hide sandals, and a scarf and kufi hat at a shop and changed my clothes in the back of it, wrapping my head with the scarf Pashtun style, my hands moving without thought.
Out on the street again, I swaggered around like a hill man in the big city and bought a couple of prepaid cell phones, a carton of Marlboros, and a tin hand mirror, so I could admire my beauty or kohl my eyes, and also a nylon duffel bag to put all that and my other clothes in. That done, I wandered through the bazaar and had tea and Afghan bread in a stall that Gul Muhammed used to like. The man there looked me over and addressed me in Pashto, we had the usual polite conversation, and once again memories rolled over me like heavy surf and I had to struggle not to drown in them.