Then I excused myself and said I had to go fetch my aunt and would probably be back quite late. Abdur wished me a safe journey and said his wife and daughters would be happy to receive the begum at any hour. I went out into the street. Perfectly black, overcast, a narrow alley like a mine shaft. I squatted down and screwed the silencer into my Stechkin and switched it to single shot. Then I strolled off to the wife’s cousin’s house. Paidara was shut down for the night, no one around, no sounds but the occasional dog barking and the purr of a generator. It had been a piece of good luck to meet Abdur, but anyone in the village could’ve given me information almost as good. Everyone knew everyone’s business in a village like this, and it would never occur to any of them that an American soldier could pass as one of the tribe. I had a pretty good map of the village in my head from studying the satellite shots and I didn’t have much trouble finding the house, a short street away from the inn.
It was a two-story building of the usual adobe brick and crumbling plaster, with an outside stairway up to the top floor and a high wall around it topped with a few strands of barbed wire. The gateway was closed with a wooden gate capped with spikes and faced with sheet-metal panels, and the windows were closed with louvered shutters. Bars of light strayed from the louvers in one of the upstairs windows, and I could see a ruddier flickering light coming from behind the closed gate. I stayed in the shadows across the little street and listened for a while. Men were talking in Arabic, softly: at least two, not more than four. I waited. They teach us to wait in my part of the army, and it’s one of the hard things; you have to stop thinking you’re in a movie, where action follows action.
Someone raised his voice, and there came an answering voice from the roof of the house. There was a man up there; I could just make out his silhouette. So figure three guys standing around a fire barrel in front and one up on the roof. He had to go first.
I walked through the darkness to the back of the house. Very good. A shedlike extension behind it with a tin chimney and a sloping tiled roof that connected with the rear wall of the house. It was not hard to get up on the tiles, and then it was a climb of maybe fifteen feet up the wall. Brick houses in this part of the world are not hard to scale; the brickwork is rough and often crumbling and the people are poor and slow to make repairs. I’d been climbing up walls like this since I could walk. I scrambled up and over the low parapet and crouched there in its shadow.
I heard steps. The roof guard had finished his conversation and was making his rounds, or maybe he was just moving because of the chill. He walked right by me and I stood up behind him and silently shot him through the head and grabbed his AK before it could hit the ground.
I slung the rifle over my shoulder and went down the outside stairway from the roof to the second floor. The door was unlocked and I entered the house. I was in a hallway with four doors. The only light came from under the door at the end of the hall; someone had a lamp going in there. It was enough light to see where they were keeping the hostages. It’s hard to turn a private house into a jail. The interior doors of a house don’t ordinarily lock from the outside, but the Arabs had attached two simple barrel bolts to each door, top and bottom. I chose one of the doors, pulled the bolts, and went in.
Two charpoys, each with a sleeping form under blankets. I bent my face closer to one sleeping head and sniffed. Unwashed woman. I took a lock of the invisible hair between my fingers. It was fine and when I walked my fingers down the strand I found that it was longer than my mother’s hair. I went to the other sleeper and sniffed again and closed a deep unconscious switch, an animal relic. I knew my mother’s smell. Gently, I touched her face. Her eyes popped open and her mouth opened to say something but I placed my hand over it.
“Quiet,” I whispered. “It’s me, Theo.”
“Theo,” she said and stared at me. She looked like she thought she was dreaming. “How did you get here?”
“Parachute.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“It’s a long story, Mother, and we haven’t got time. We have to get out of here.”
“Get out… you mean all the hostages?”
“No, just you. I came for you.”
“Theo, I can’t, I can’t just leave all these people.”
“You won’t have to. There’s a rescue operation on the way, but I want you where I can keep an eye on you. Put your shoes on.”
The other woman stirred in her sleep and made a sound. After a moment’s hesitation I heard my mother feeling around for her footwear and she stood up and I led her out of the room, bolting the door behind me.
Then someone shouted from outside. And again, more urgently. The men in front must have missed hearing from the guard on the roof. Footsteps and shouts on the outside stairway. I switched my machine pistol to full automatic.
A door opened. The hallway flooded with light. The black shape of a man in the doorway at the end of the hall. Everything was moving in slomo now as it does in a firefight. I had to take out the man in the doorway and then I’d go to the head of the stairs and shoot the guys coming up. I raised my Stechkin. I put the sight on the silhouette and squeezed the trigger, and as I did so, my mother struck my elbow an upward blow and the burst slammed into the ceiling.
“Theo!” she yelled. “Don’t shoot him. It’s Wazir!”
20
T hey took Cynthia to the basement of the main NSA building, OPS-2A, where the police force that monitors Crypto City has its headquarters. She was placed in the canonical windowless room with a table and two chairs, all bolted to the floor. There was no sound from outside, the only noise the whir from the overhead vent. At one corner of the ceiling hung a small closed-circuit TV camera.
She sat and avoided looking at the camera. The Dutch courage from the martinis was rapidly fading, and this vexed the martinis, so that they no longer wanted to dwell in this unprofitable belly. Along with her spicy lunch they were sending urgent messages that they wished to leave, perhaps to decorate the sterile top of that table, or the floor.
Cynthia took deep breaths; she attempted calming thoughts. A fine cool sweat bloomed on her forehead. The door to the room opened and the two security men who had lifted her walked in. One was a mild-looking Latino; the other was a taller man with a flat ugly face and small, deep-set, piggy blue eyes. The tall one, the obvious bad cop, walked around the table and stood just out of her peripheral vision, leaning against the wall. The Latino sat down on the chair opposite her. He extended his hand and she took it, aware of how clammy her own was.
“Gene Arbenz,” he said. “That’s Bill Cavanagh over there. We’re here to explain your situation as it now stands.”
“Can I make a phone call?”
“Not at this time, Cynthia.”
“Well, when can I make one?”
“I don’t have any information on that,” said Arbenz.
“Then why don’t you find someone who has that information?”
She felt the wind of movement behind her and Cavanagh leaped forward and slammed his hand down on the table with a shocking noise that made her bladder give way for a second, dampening her underwear.
His mouth was inches from her ear; she could smell his aftershave as he said, “Why don’t you fucking shut up and listen!”
Arbenz cast an admonitory look at his colleague. “Bill? Let me handle this, okay?”
Cavanagh grunted and went back to the wall.
Arbenz smiled and said, “Look, Cynthia, in a little while this is going to be out of our hands. You know what we usually do in security; we put up posters and check bags, and we run like a small-town police force for the facilities here at Meade. We’re not set up to, like, interrogate terrorists.”