He could see the dim outlines of tricycles and hobby horses strewn about the floor, and the shape of a giant sliding board in the back. The newly painted walls bore pictures that were barely visible in the darkness.
Richard crouched low and ducked into a room thirty yards ahead, knowing that the trail of blood from his wound would lead them to him. But he wanted them to find him now. He wanted it to be over.
The doorknob twisted and three men moved in, spreading out to either side of the room.
“We’re here!” said the leader. “Are you?”
Richard recognized the voice now. It was Joe Miller, the same man who’d led the CIA team in the mountains of Tora Bora. Miller was the kind of man others followed. It wasn’t because he was especially intelligent or threatening. Nor was it the fact that he’d been a Special Forces major prior to joining the agency. There was just a force about him-a feeling. He had only to speak in that world-weary, cynical growl, and it was enough to make lesser men submit.
Richard was not a lesser man, and he had no intention of submitting. “You know I’m here, Miller,” he said as he slid along the wall, his legs even weaker than his voice. “And you know all of us won’t be walking out.”
Miller used hand signals to point to the area where Richard’s voice had come from and his men moved in that direction. “It’s hard to know anything when it comes to you, Richard. We thought we knew where you were in the mountains, and we were wrong, weren’t we?”
Richard moved toward an opening in the wall that led to another room. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said as his pursuers moved closer.
“I’m talking about Afghanistan, Richard. I’m talking about the reasons you kept going back.”
“I wanted to fight,” Richard said, sliding down the wall and easing the gun around the corner.
“That’s what we all thought at first,” the squad leader said as he got down in a prone position and turned on his weapon’s laser scope. “And with all the intelligence we gathered and got to you guys in Delta Force, we figured the fight would be easy.”
“It should’ve been,” Richard said. “But it’s hard to fight a war with the CIA in the way.”
“It’s even harder when one of your best soldiers is a traitor,” he said in an effort to hold Richard’s attention. “I have to admit, it took us awhile to figure out how you did it. The simplicity of it was pure genius.”
Suddenly, one of the men flew around the wall. Even with his bleeding leg and dimmed senses, Richard was too fast to be caught off guard. He turned and fired one shot from the silenced gun, hitting the agent in the temple. The man was dead before he stopped moving.
Another flew around the wall and was upon Richard, who grabbed his arm and twisted it until it broke. There was a scream and a muffled gunshot, and the agent’s last breath came out along with the contents of his bowels.
Richard pushed the body away with a grunt, and when he did so, Miller was standing over him with his gun pointed at Richard’s head. His face was just as Richard remembered it-red and pockmarked with a bulbous nose and a mouth that was fixed in a scowl.
“Drop the gun,” Miller said, his tone low and angry.
Richard did as he was told. With the blood he’d lost since being shot in his leg, and the energy he’d expended fighting them off, he was too tired and weak to do otherwise.
“I should kill you right now,” Miller said.
“Yeah you should. So why don’t you?”
“Because I need to hear, from your own mouth, why you helped the enemy in Tora Bora.”
Richard was parched. He was finding it difficult to breathe, let alone talk. The house seemed to be getting colder. Still, he wanted to tell him why, because in a perverse way, Richard needed to hear it from his own mouth too.
Richard ripped open his T-shirt, revealing the ugly scar on his chest. “I did it because of this,” he said.
Miller looked at him curiously.
“Fighting the battle at Tora Bora was like getting this scar all over again,” Richard said wistfully. “It was like reliving ethnic cleansing.”
Miller furrowed his brow. He was clearly confused.
“I’m Bosnian. I grew up in a mountain village where you could look out and see minarets from four-hundred- year-old mosques poking through the clouds. It was beautiful. It was peaceful. It was home. Then the war started.
“I was eleven years old when the Serbs came to our village. They stripped the men and paraded them in front of their wives before executing them. Then they raped the women. I was lucky, I guess. They just sliced my chest with a machete and left me to die.”
Richard looked up at Miller, who’d been struck dumb by the story. “I saw my mother and sister violated. I saw my father humiliated. I saw all of them murdered. And the only thing I had to remember them by was this scar. Even after I got adopted by a nice American diplomat and his wife, even after they changed my name from Mujo to Richard, even after I learned to love this country, I never forgot what happened to my people. I couldn’t, because I had this scar to remind me.
“I never thought when they trained me for Special Forces and put me in Delta Force that I’d end up fighting Muslims in those mountains in Tora Bora. But when I did, something snapped, and it was like I was that frightened, angry little boy back in Bosnia.”
“So you sent a radio transmission to make them think you’d been cut off from your unit,” Miller said matter- of-factly. “Then you went over a mountain pass and killed enough Afghan militia to let the mujahideen escape.”
The house was silent except for the sound of Richard’s increasingly labored breathing.
“Did you realize who you were helping?” Miller asked.
“I realized I was helping Muslims who had the ability to fight back. That was more than my family ever had.”
“But you knew that the man commanding those Muslim fighters in Tora Bora was Osama bin Laden. Didn’t you?”
Richard closed his eyes and smiled. It was a joyless gesture-one fraught with all the contradictions that had plagued him all his life. “Of course I knew. That’s why I kept going back to Afghanistan. I wanted to make up for it by doing my duty for America. But when I couldn’t atone for my sins, I wanted to forget I’d ever committed them. That roadside bomb that hit my Humvee was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to come home and forget Afghanistan. It allowed me to come here and marry Corrine. At least for a little while, I had something beautiful again. But you and your men took that away too.”
“Actually, they didn’t.”
Richard’s eyes snapped open at the sound of that voice. It was velvety, feminine, and familiar. It was Corrine. As she walked into the room, Richard tried to make his mouth form the question, but it wouldn’t.
Perhaps he’d been struck dumb by the blood loss and the resultant dementia. Or maybe he was already dead, and Corrine was meeting him in paradise.
“You did a good job, Agent Miller,” she said to the squad leader who’d captured Richard. “We lost five men, but at least we got our subject, and we got him alive.”
“
“The same thing you were talking about a few minutes ago,” Corrine said as she wiped the fake blood from her chest. “Doing my duty for my country.”
“But you can’t be real,” Richard said, laboring to breathe as he began to hyperventilate. “You can’t be one of them. You died back at the house. They killed you.”
“Funny what a little red paint and a lot of imagination can do, isn’t it?” Corrine replied with a wicked grin.
“But you said you loved me,” Richard said as his facial expression went from hurt to sadness to outright devastation. “You
“And you married me too, even though you knew the CIA could come after you one day for what you did. You valued your happiness more than you valued my safety, and you never trusted me enough to tell me what happened in Tora Bora, no matter how many times I asked you.”
“I kept that from you to protect you,” he said as a tear rolled down his cheek. “I kept it from you because I loved you. Not that it matters. This was all just another operation for you. The marriage, the house- everything.”
