He heard the door open. A man with massive hands sat in the chair opposite him, struggled to get comfortable in the confined space.
“They build this place for midgets?” he said.
Tom looked up. It was Dan Crane, a near-legendary CIA operative. Crane smiled, the skin on his wide face crinkling around his robin’s-egg-blue eyes.
“You look like shit,” he said.
“You don’t want to know what I feel like.”
“I can guess.”
Tom had come across Crane when he had spent two years in New Delhi, protecting the US embassy eight years ago. He’d seen him a couple of times since; once in DC and another at Langley when he’d been guarding the secretary. Crane had a reputation for sardonic humour of the un-PC variety, but he knew the Middle East and South Asia better than anyone else in the agency. He spoke five languages and had an encyclopaedic mind. He’d been held hostage by Hezbollah for three months back in the late eighties. He still had the remnants of scars on his neck and hands, off-white blemishes that looked like skin grafts. Tom didn’t want to think about where else he might have scars. His fame had been assured after he’d overseen the analysts who’d pinpointed bin Laden in Abbottabad. That also meant that he could get away with a lot of things that for others would’ve led to a reprimand, or worse. Crane was an offbeat kind of guy to say the least.
“So they all got away. Even the sonofabitch you say you shot on the roof and the one who fired the Stinger,” Crane said, waving his hand through the air.
“Wait, the man on the roof was incapable of walking. How the hell did he disappear?” Tom asked, straightening up.
Crane held up his hands. “You tell me?”
“You don’t believe me?” Tom wondered if Crane had been sent to do what the kid hadn’t had the experience or guile to accomplish: make him say something to incriminate himself.
“I didn’t say that. I just said he wasn’t there when the command centre asked the police to pick him up.”
“What about the man and the woman in the official line-up? They were all supposed to be vetted.”
“They were,” Crane said. “The Pakistani police raided their houses. Guess what? They weren’t there. Now, let’s go through it again.”
Jesus Christ, Tom thought. Back to square one.
Tom was questioned for a further fifteen minutes. Crane nodded his approval for most of the time, and never once lost his temper or even appeared irritated. When he finished, he looked genuinely sympathetic.
“That’s it. Same as I told the kid,” Tom said.
“Don’t beat yourself up too bad. The guys on the Kennedy detail let it affect their whole lives, even though everyone knows they did all they could. Now it’s home for you. There’s a flight taking the Under-Secretary of Defense and some brass back at fifteen hundred. You’ll be on it.”
“I wanna stay. Help out.”
Crane sighed. “It’s outta the DS’s hands. POTUS’s orders,” he said, using the acronym for the president. “It’s down to the spooks now.”
“She’s still my responsibility. I got a week left as head of the detail. A guy like you can understand that.”
“It’s not up to me. Besides, you’re probably still in shock. And don’t assume you know what makes me tick. You don’t,” Crane said, pushing the chair back against the wall, attempting to ride it.
“Whatever. But I’m not leaving.”
“You disobeying a direct order from POTUS?”
“He’s at the top of the food chain. He don’t concern himself with cleaner fish.”
Crane raised his thick eyebrows. “Wow, you got some self-esteem issues there, Tom. You gonna sprout gills?”
Tom smiled, weakly.
“Seriously, you’ll get through this. You’re a nice guy, Tom. Go home.”
They batted the issue around for a further five minutes. Finally, Crane agreed to pass it by Deputy Director Houseman, who was staying behind to coordinate matters on the ground.
“Appreciate it,” Tom said.
Crane struggled to get his bulk out of the chair. “Interview rooms for midgets. Jesus. They’ll be ordering us to carry stepladders next so they can climb up and feel less intimated.”
“Technically they’re called dwarves. Back home they like to be called little people. And they are the same as you and me,” Tom said.
“I’m joking with ya. You know that, right?”
“Sure I do,” Tom said.
“I know they’re the same. They just come up to your goddamned waist.”
Tom rubbed his temple and sighed. Crane was smart, but he was a jerk, too. He glanced up. “So come on. How do you figure that guy on the roof disappeared?”
Crane was looking serious, his eyes narrowing. “He was evidence. I guess the Leopards had some plainclothes guys on the ground, who cleaned up before the Pakistani cops got there.”
“Yeah. Sure they did.”
“A conspiracy theorist, huh. Well, it won’t come as any surprise to you when I say that if the deputy director lets you stay, don’t trust anybody. You hear me, Tom?”
Tom thought for a moment. “That include you?”
An hour later, Crane told Tom that he’d swung it, and that the old man had asked him to join them for an initial in thirty minutes’ time.
The secure conference room was thirty metres square, the massive windows obscured by gleaming Venetian blinds. Tom sat at a large pine table on one of the matching rattan-wicker chairs, his brown loafers resting on coral-blue tiles. Crane said that it had been swept for bugs ten minutes before. Behind the locked door, two Marines ensured that they wouldn’t be disturbed.
“The ISI are playing hard ball,” Houseman said, cradling a fist. “But we have no jurisdiction here. They won’t allow the FBI to investigate. Anyone else in the US intelligence community, either.”
“They’re in a difficult position,” Crane said. “If they’re seen to be too pro-West, they’ll play into the hands of the Pakistan Taliban. And they got enough on their plate with the Shia Leopards just now. On the other hand, if they alienate us, they won’t get what they want.” He pinched an ear lobe, looking a little smug.
“Which is exactly?” Tom asked.
“About ten US divisions heading into Tehran,” Houseman said.
“We should leave them to fight their own battles. The Pakistanis double-crossed us,” Crane said, his tone surly. “Goddamned lying sons of bitches who caused the deaths of thousands of US and coalition forces.”
Tom knew Crane was referring to bin Laden. If it weren’t for the Pakistanis, he would’ve been captured in Tora Bora back in 2001. A bunch of al-Qaeda and Taliban lieutenants, too. After that, the ISI babysat thousands of insurgents in the Pakistan Tribal Areas. Then they just picked up where they’d left off. When bin Laden’s six-year holiday in Abbottabad was factored in, Tom was inclined to agree with Crane.
“That maybe, but I want to know what we’re going to do to find Lyric?”