But buying heroin by the kilo was a different game. Fowler couldn’t figure what Rodriguez was doing with the stuff. He wasn’t selling it on base, that was for sure. And where did he get the money for it? Fowler didn’t know what a kilo of heroin cost, but even here at the source it had to be a couple thousand bucks.
Next question: Did everybody know what was going on? Was Fowler the only sucker in the squad? Young hadn’t seemed surprised. Although Young always acted so cool. No, if everybody knew, Rodriguez wouldn’t have bothered to hide the deal. So Fowler had a choice: keep his mouth shut, ride out the last couple months. Or go to the CID — the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division — which had offices at the big base at Kandahar. But if the CID officers came poking around, Rodriguez would probably guess that Fowler had snitched.
Maybe Young would have the answer. Fowler was almost embarrassed to be leaning so hard on Young, who was barely two years older than him. But Young got along with everybody. He had that black-guy way of being cool without working at it.
The squad was stretched out, moving slowly, half-assed. Fowler slowed down to let them catch up. Rodriguez was directly behind him, Roman on the other side of the canal. Fowler was glad that Young was watching.
When they got about three hundred meters outside Hamza Ali, Fowler saw clumps of men and boys walking toward him. The show at the school must have ended. Fowler had forgotten all about the Stupid Afghan Tricks. The kids made a game of jumping across the canal, their gowns ballooning around their legs. A boy kicked one of the soccer balls that the platoon had handed out, his steps as precise as Fowler’s mom dicing an onion, back home in the kitchen. Fowler wished he could be there now.
The boy popped the ball into the air and headed it to himself. Kids were kids everywhere. Fowler smiled. “Hey,” he yelled. Fowler pointed at himself. “Kick it here. Me.” The kid hesitated and then kicked a perfect curling strike that soared out of the canal toward him—
AND EXPLODED.
Fowler heard the shots
Fowler jumped into the canal for cover and spun to find the shooter. To his right, the rest of the squad followed. They were stretched in a line, rifles at the ready. The fields in front of them looked empty. Then Fowler saw the shooter. It was the Afghan with the scar, the one who’d sold the drugs to Rodriguez. He was a long way off, at least four hundred meters, and sneaking along a low wall perpendicular to the canal. He was doubled over like he had a bad case of the runs.
For once, Fowler wasn’t afraid. His training took over. He grabbed the rough stone at the edge of the canal and pulled himself up to get a clean shot. He didn’t squeeze too tight and he led the target. He thought he had the guy.
But he missed. The dude was just too far off and too low and too many walls were in the way. Fowler aimed again, tightened his finger on the trigger—
He never heard the shot that cut his spinal cord in half. Didn’t feel it either. The pain faded as quickly as it bloomed. The earth rushed up to him and caught his chin. He didn’t understand what had happened to him, couldn’t frame this new place he’d gone. This lost country.
Pure confusion. He stood up, but he didn’t. His legs didn’t work, or his arms. The dark trickled into his eyes and his brain got thirsty and he needed air. So he took a breath but nothing happened. He had to breathe. Breathing was easy. Everyone could breathe. But not Fowler. Then the fear, panic, a pure white panic that flared against the black, but the black came on, stronger and stronger, and the white shrank to a pinprick and then nothing at all and—
He died.
YOUNG WAS CLOSEST to Fowler and the first to realize what had happened, that he’d been shot from behind, from somewhere in the fields between the canal and Hamza Ali. Young ran to Fowler. The others followed. They pulled his body into the canal and set up a perimeter and screamed at the villagers to get back, back, back.
Rodriguez got on his radio, called Weston. The rest of the platoon arrived minutes later. But the shooter was gone by the time they reached the huts behind the canal that were the most likely firing point. None of the villagers had anything to say. No one had seen anything. And so the Lost Boys of Bravo Company could do nothing but carry Fowler’s corpse back to their $2 million Strykers.
The guys didn’t talk much on the ride back to FOB Jackson. When they did, they cursed Hamza Ali and the Taliban, and Fowler, too, for his bad luck. Everybody figured he’d died in a freak ambush. He was the kind of guy who worried so much that he attracted his own trouble. Bad karma. Coleman Young didn’t say a word. But as he sat on the bench next to the empty space where Fowler should have been, he wondered who had killed Fowler. Rodriguez and Roman couldn’t have. The shot had come from behind the squad. Which meant someone else in the platoon was involved.
Young went through the likely suspects in his mind. One name stood out. He wondered what he should do. If anything. Three months left on this tour. Coleman Young closed his eyes and thought of home.
4
The floors at CIA headquarters were not created equal.
Take the third floor of the New Headquarters Building, home to the unit once called the Directorate of Administration and now known as the Directorate of Support. On its public Web site, which existed mainly as a recruiting tool, the CIA did its best to make the DS sound exciting: “Our job is to ensure that all our mission elements have everything they need for success… while the support we provide may be invisible — the results certainly are not!”
Invisible indeed. The agency’s more glamorous divisions hardly noticed the DS’s existence. But the directorate’s employees soldiered on, administering health plans, making sure the agency wasn’t overcharged for printer paper, and approving the world’s strangest expense reports:
Which made it the perfect place for a sterile room.
BC1-3-114 had once been a supply closet. The evacuation plans that the DS so meticulously maintained still identified it as one. The only clue to its new use came from the keypad and thumb reader that opened its magnetic door lock. Inside, it held a steel desk, two battered chairs, a phone — and a computer that with the right passwords could access any agency database. Even ones that were supposed to be available only on much more important floors.
SHAFER HAD JUST EXPLAINED the setup to Wells, who was back at Langley for the first time in almost a year. He’d come directly from Montana, not even stopping in New Hampshire for a change of clothes.
“Doesn’t a room like this violate every rule of computer security ever created?”
“
“Seriously, Ellis?”
“Seriously. First, you need passwords. Both on this end and for the database you’re accessing. Second, the mirroring software works only in this room. Third, and most important, nobody knows it’s here.”
“Who exactly is nobody?”
“Me, Vinny, a couple others. We installed it last year, and it’s been used only twice, in situations like this, when we want to get somebody up to speed quietly. This way, you can read every file from Kabul station and nobody will know.”
“I
