Wells didn’t argue, just slapped the duct tape back on Ridge’s mouth. Though maybe the guy had a point. In his years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Wells had seen a dozen men executed for dealing or using drugs. Mostly heroin, occasionally hashish. The youngest was a boy, no more than fourteen, only the slightest peach fuzz on his chin. He’d been caught smoking heroin by the Talib religious police. His family lacked the money to buy his freedom or his life.
The incident had happened a decade ago, but it was etched into Wells’s mind as deeply as the first man he’d killed. The central square in Ghazni, a town southwest of Kabul. The boy’s father waited silently as the Talibs tied the boy to a wooden stake, pulling his arms tight to his body. Hundreds of men waited in a loose cluster. Wells stood on the fringes. The binding seemed to last hours, though it couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes. The kid didn’t say a word. Maybe he was still high. Wells hoped so.
He wanted to step in, raise a hand to stop the slaughter. The penalty might be legal under
The Talibs finished their binding. The leader of the religious police, a fat man with a beard that jutted off his chin, spoke to the boy too quietly for Wells to hear. A pickup truck drove up. The fat Talib opened the liftgate and stood aside as dozens of stones, baseballsized and larger, rolled out.
The crowd moved forward, men pushing at one another, reaching down to grab the rocks. Wells had a vision of the last time he’d been bowling, in Missoula with friends on his sixteenth birthday, picking up a ball and squaring to toss it.
Finally the boy seemed to understand what was happening. He pulled at the stake, but it held him fast. “Father, please,” he said. “Please, father. I won’t do it again. I promise—”
The big Talib raised his arm and fired a long, flat stone at the boy, catching him in the side of the head. The boy screamed, and suddenly it seemed as if the air was full of rocks. The screaming grew louder, and then ended as a softball-sized stone smashed open the boy’s skull. His face went slack, and he collapsed against the stake.
That was the Taliban policy on drugs. Zero tolerance. Yet heroin and hashish were everywhere. Men staggered glassy-eyed through Kabul, their mouths open, smiling to themselves even on the coldest days of winter. Once, in a hailstorm on the Shamali plain, north of Kabul, Wells had stepped inside an abandoned hut for shelter and found a half-dozen men huddled in a semicircle around a low flame, cooking a fat ball of opium. They turned and growled at him like hyenas at a kill. He raised his hands and backed away. Even at the time he’d thought,
NOW HE LOOKED DOWN to Ridge, who was pale, eyes closed, an unhealthy shine on his cheeks. “Ridge.”
“What now?”
“You want out, I’ll get you home. Get-out-of-jail-free card. No DEA or anything.”
“You can do that?”
Wells nodded.
“Man,” Ridge said for the second time. “Who
“I have friends.”
“The original original gangster.”
“You want it or not?”
“Maybe.” He looked Wells over. “What, I’m supposed to say thanks? After you kidnapped me, bashed my head in? You’re a real humanitarian.” Ridge closed his eyes. Wells decided to do the same.
“JOHN,” GAFFAN SAID. “READY?”
Wells scrambled up beside Gaffan. “Where are we?”
“About three minutes from Unity Hall. So how do I play this?”
“Show them your ID and tell them as little as possible. Tell them to call the embassy if you have to, the JCF”—Jamaica Constabulary Force. “They won’t want to.”
“If they ask where we’re going?”
“Tell them you can’t say.”
At the gatehouse, the guard was a small dark-skinned man who wore a blue shirt with a seven-pointed star. “Yes?”
Gaffan flashed his badge.
“Let me see that,” the guard said. Gaffan handed his badge and ID over. Wells followed.
“This is Jamaica. Not America.”
“The man we want, he’s a U.S. citizen.”
“What’s his name?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“No name, no pass.”
“Call our embassy.”
“Tell me his name or I call the constables myself—”
Wells leaned across the seat. “His name’s Mark Edward. Drives a Toyota with a big spoiler on the back. Celica.”
The guard nodded. “That one a cheap bastard. Gwaan, then. You know where to find him?”
“End of the second row on the left.”
“Exactly wrong. Right and then left. House one-forty-three.”
The barrier rose, and they rolled ahead. “His son’s first name and his middle name,” Gaffan said. “Nice guess.”
“Looks like he should have tipped the guards better at Christmas.”
THE HOUSES AT UNITY Hall were a mix of brick mansions on narrow lots and semi-attached town houses. Robinson’s was one of the latter. His Celica sat in the driveway in front, black, a spoiler jutting off the back deck. A pink flamingo and three dwarfs in Rasta hats graced the concrete front landing. Gaffan drove past, dropped Wells in front of the house. He walked ahead and rang the doorbell. A chime inside boomed.
“Who is it?”
Wells rang again, heard a man stepping slowly down the stairs in the front hall. He unholstered his pistol, held it low by his side.
“Yes? Who’s there?” The voice was raspy and low. He’d heard it a few days before, on the phone in Janice’s house in Vienna. But not in person. Until now, Wells and Keith Robinson had never met.
“Keith.”
“You have the wrong address.”
“Keith. It’s John Wells. It’s over.”
CHAPTER 4
THE AMERICAN EMBASSY COMPOUND IN SAUDI ARABIA WAS A FOR tress within a fortress, the most heavily guarded building in Riyadh’s high-walled Diplomatic Quarter. The Saudi government had built the zone in the 1980s, on a low mesa on the western edge of Riyadh. Unsmiling Saudi soldiers in armored personnel carriers guarded its gates, subjecting vehicles to inspection by explosives-sniffing dogs. Trucks and SUVs faced undercarriage examinations with long-handled mirrors, the bomb-squad version of the reflectors that dentists used to see inside their patients’ mouths. Drivers who grumbled about the searches found themselves forced to turn off their engines — and their air-conditioning. With summer afternoons in Riyadh topping one hundred twenty degrees, complaints were rare.
