“The ISI had to be involved,” Tom said. “The assault couldn’t have happened if they’d done what they said they would. The helicopter didn’t arrive on time. The snipers just disappeared. And it was too well organized.”
Houseman cleared his throat. “Listen, son. The Leopards have ex-military in their ranks. They were capable of it. The Iranians equip them with top weaponry. We ain’t dealing with farmers with AK-47s here. The building was razed to the ground by thermobaric charges.” He snatched up a bottle of water, took a frustrated pull.
Tom saw Crane staring at him.
“When a country is going down the tubes, people start to do all sorts of weird things. It could be as simple as rogue elements,” Crane said. “Or just plain corrupt ones. God knows it’s a national disease. Besides, the ISI are saying it was Shia traitors in their ranks. Shia cops, too. You remember when Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, got assassinated?”
Tom nodded.
“Then you’ll recall it was two of her own bodyguards. Peppered her with thirty rounds. Sikhs, who did it for revenge after the army stormed their temple and killed hundreds. Religion in these parts overrides any other affiliation.”
Tom studied Crane’s face. He guessed he’d been a handsome man once. But now his features looked tired, his eyes hooded, his mouth drooping at the sides.
Houseman banged the bottle on the table, as if he wanted Tom to stop staring. Clenching his jaw muscles, the old man said, “Up until the generals took over here, the Pakistanis were talking about declaring war on us if we attacked the Iranians. That gives you a hint at how complicated this area of the world is. They were buddies; now the Pakistanis regard Iran as an existential threat.”
“I don’t get it,” Tom said.
“You obviously ain’t heard of the Iran-Pak gas pipeline,” Crane said. “The Pakistanis have an ongoing energy crisis. They figured sidling up to the Iranians would go a long way to fixing that. The thing is now, the new Sunni regime here wouldn’t let an Iranian pipeline cross their land if their lives depended on it.”
“I thought the Iranians wanted to invade Balochistan to get their hands on natural gas,” Tom said.
“You’re right. They’ve got the resources to find and extract it. The Pakistanis don’t. All their efforts are focused on national security.”
“And so what now?” Tom asked, pursing his lips, feeling a little out of his depth.
“There are no contingency plans for such a kidnapping,” Crane said. “Not on foreign soil that ain’t fully cooperative. That’s the risk, and Lyric knew it.” He sat back in his chair, began riding it, as appeared to be his habit.
Tom bristled. “What are you saying?”
Crane ignored him. “The flight to Kabul leaves in twenty minutes. Get what you need.”
“Wait a second. Lyric is very likely to be right here in Islamabad. And we’re leaving?”
“POTUS has ordered the closure of the embassy in forty-eight hours,” Houseman said. “You come to Kabul with us or you go home.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Tom said. “But why Kabul?”
“The flight time is thirty-five minutes,” Houseman said. “We still got a fully operational set-up there. Otherwise we’d be flying back to the States and doing this from a computer screen at Langley. Now get outta here before I change my mind.”
Reluctantly, Tom stood up and strode over to the door. They hadn’t said anything explicitly, but he guessed the real meeting would begin as soon as he reached the corridor outside.
“You okay?” Houseman said to Crane after Tom had left.
“I guess.”
“Anyone knows what she’s going through, it’s you, Dan.”
“Yeah,” Crane said, his mind going back.
He was walking down a narrow street in Beirut, Lebanon, the air thick with the smell of Arabic coffee and grilled chicken. It was midday, and he was sweating badly beneath his flannel shirt. The so-called South Lebanon conflict, the Israeli occupation, which had begun in 1982 and would last until 2000, was in its fifth year.
The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home.
He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street.
They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then.
The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips.
Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites.
The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra.
“Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?”
He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him.
By the time they freed him, he was a different man.
The Ariana Hotel was in the Diplomatic Quarter, Kabul, near the US Embassy and the Presidential Palace. But it hadn’t been open to the public for well over a decade. The former hotel still housed the headquarters of the CIA in Afghanistan. The compound and the roads around it were some of the most heavily protected in the capital,