“The opposite. Julianna told me the guys on the second floor were interested.”
“Did she say who, specifically?”
“No.”
“Back to the call. Can you check the database, see how many times that Paki cell was used in the year leading up to it?”
After three quick clicks, she had the answer. “Five,” she said. “But never to that Afghan number. A couple of times to other Thuwanis, and I’m not sure about the rest.”
“And afterward it was never used again.”
“Correct.”
“One last thing. Can you print me a copy of the transcript?”
“That’s a real no-no.” But she clicked the screen, printed him a copy. It was barely a page long.
“Thanks.”
“Do me a favor. Burn it before you leave.”
“Will do.”
“And one day when we’re both back home, you can come over and teach me how to use that SIG.” She winked.
Wells edged out the door. “Your first impression is deceptive.”
“So they say.”
WELLS TUCKED THE TRANSCRIPT AWAY, went back to the second floor. He spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Arango, the chief of station, and Julianna Craig.
Craig confirmed Frey’s story about the wiretap. Lautner and Yergin had encouraged her to have Frey pursue it, she said. Arango was a Marylander from the Eastern Shore, polite, distant, and soft-spoken. He deflected Wells’s questions, swallowed them up in inspirational cliches that offered no hint of what he was thinking.
“So Gordie King left the station a shambles?”
“I wouldn’t say shambles. But we had to put up our sleeves and get to work and that’s what we did.”
“It must be difficult for Pete Lautner to work here after what happened.”
“I wasn’t here for Marburg, although of course I know what happened. Pete came highly recommended. He’s done fine work. I don’t think it’s my place to ask him how he feels about his family. We all have different ways of coping with grief.”
“Do you think Duto made a mistake sending me here?”
“I’d never second-guess the director. Of course I’ve instructed everyone to answer whatever questions you might have….”
And, finally: “Do you remember a wiretap that indicated U.S. military forces might be purchasing large amounts of heroin from the Taliban?”
Arango didn’t hesitate. As if he’d expected the question. Wells wondered whether Frey or Craig had tipped him. “Yes. Lautner mentioned it. This was a couple months ago. I asked him if the intercept had any actionable details. He said no. I told him to keep me informed.”
“So you had a particular interest in it?”
“I imagined it could be a sensitive issue for the military. I wanted to be sure that if it progressed further, I’d know, so I could inform the right people. But no, it wasn’t of particular interest. As far as I know, there’s been nothing since then.”
A sensitive issue. And Wells thought of a question he should have asked before.
“Did you ever pass the intercept to military intel? Or tell them about it?”
“I don’t believe so, no.”
“Or the DEA?”
“You can imagine how many intercepts this station sees in a month, Mr. Wells. Not to mention HUMINT and surveillance reports. This was vague, didn’t touch on our ongoing operations. As far as I can recall no one even suggested to me that we make it an action item.”
After ninety minutes of this thrust-and-parry, Wells begged off.
BACK IN HIS ROOM, Wells lay on his bed and tried to make sense of everything he’d learned. He hadn’t expected the officers here to treat him like a hero. But their unconcealed hostility surprised him. He wouldn’t want to be first through the door with only Lautner or Arango behind him. The conversation with Yergin perplexed him, too.
In truth, Wells much preferred having a trail to chase. Instead he was looking for an enemy who might not even exist. So he did what he had done before at these moments. He called Shafer.
From outside, on the Ariana’s helipad. On his own sat phone. He wondered whether he should have left the compound entirely. The sun had set and the floodlights outside the blast walls were up. Diesel smoke smudged the stars. Wells hadn’t liked Kabul a decade ago and he didn’t like it now. During the civil war, the city was overrun more times than anyone could count. By 1999, half its houses were rubble. Amputee children begged on every corner, surrounding any Westerner foolish enough to have stayed. In the mountains Wells saw flashes of a gentler — and certainly more beautiful — Afghanistan. Never here.
Now NATO and Western donors had rebuilt the city. But the new offices and houses looked cheap and tacky. Billions of dollars in reconstruction money had been siphoned to bank accounts in Dubai and Lebanon.
Only the mosques had survived. Wells wondered when the calls to prayer would sound. He wanted to get into a mosque and tip his head to the floor and see whether his faith could find him. Behind these blast walls he felt divorced from Islam. On the flight over, he’d looked forward to coming back to Afghanistan. Now he saw that he hadn’t returned, not really. The Ariana wasn’t the United States, but it wasn’t Afghanistan. It was purgatory.
He called Shafer. “Ellis.”
“John. How’s it feel to be home?”
“Kabul was never home.”
“I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
“They’ve all gone native, Ellis.” Wells explained what he’d found so far, finishing with the intercept. “It doesn’t add up. They said the right things about investigating it, but they didn’t, as far as I can tell.”
“You have it? Can you read it to me?”
Wells did. “There’s no unit name or number. No village or district. Not even a province. A hundred thousand suspects. How do we narrow that down?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you someone who does. Amadullah Thuwani.”
9
David Miller was still alive.
Mere survival hardly qualified as an achievement for most people. But Miller was a heroin dealer and a sometime user, too. He was married to two women on two continents. He had been arrested in Chicago and Karachi, snitched for the DEA and the CIA. He had reason to be proud of his continued existence.
Now Miller was again putting his life on the line. He wished he had a choice in the matter. He was headed for a meeting with Amadullah Thuwani, the chief of a tribe of Pashtuns who lived on both sides of the Afghan- Pakistan border. Miller knew Amadullah’s reputation for mindless viciousness. For a generation, the Thuwanis had fought — against the Soviet Union, other Afghans, and now the United States. During the 1990s, they’d locked prisoners in steel shipping containers without food or water, then let the containers cook in the desert. These days their main income came from drug trafficking.
