Miller figured the Thuwanis didn’t like him much either. His dad was a Pakistani from Karachi, but his mom was African-American. He’d grown up in Chicago. Like all Pashtuns, the Thuwanis were obsessed with bloodlines. They viewed his lineage as impure. But they dealt with him, because he helped them move a lot of heroin.
Miller’s birth name was Daood Maktani. His dad, Omar, had always wanted him to think of himself as Pakistani. Every summer, Omar packed Daood off to Karachi to stay with his grandparents. The trips backfired. Daood liked the First World comforts of the United States, air-conditioning, televisions, his own bedroom. He got sick in Karachi, nasty intestinal bugs that glued him to the toilet. He couldn’t wait to leave. The longer he spent in Pakistan, the more he considered himself American. A few months after he turned eighteen, he changed his name to show the world how he felt. Daood Maktani became David Miller.
Miller’s preference for the United States extended to its police. In January 2002, DEA agents busted down the door of his apartment and found six ounces of heroin wrapped neatly on the kitchen table. Miller expected to go down hard. He didn’t. He turned out to be triply lucky. He was lucky that the feds and not the Chicago cops had arrested him. A six-ounce haul was a good day’s work as far as the locals were concerned. They would have gladly sent him downstate for ten years. The feds had bigger ideas. They wanted to bust kingpins who trafficked by the ton. They saw Miller as nothing more than a way to move up the supply chain.
He was lucky, too, that he’d been using at the time they busted him. He convinced the DEA he was a college kid who’d turned into a junkie and then a dealer to finance his habit. Please. In reality he’d gone to Harold Washington City College for a semester before he figured out he could make a lot more money dealing. And he was no junkie. He got high on the weekends, coke when he was out late, H to chill. Never more than a couple times a month. He’d seen what the stuff could do if it got away from you. But the feds, they believed their own frying-pan hype. They believed that casual users didn’t exist. When he said he wanted to come clean, they lapped up his story.
Most of all, he was lucky to be a Muslim arrested after September 11. A nonpracticing Muslim, that is. About two weeks after his arrest, after he made clear to the DEA that he would cooperate, a CIA officer showed up for his interviews.
Blue didn’t say where he worked, but Miller understood. He sensed that the man wanted him to know without saying so. Blue was smarter than the DEA guys. He didn’t fall for Miller nearly as hard as they did. Miller could tell Blue was looking him over, deciding whether he was a true believer. He wasn’t. Miller drugged and drank and ate pork fried rice every chance he got.
Maybe six weeks after Miller got busted, Blue came to see him alone. He took Miller to a wood-paneled conference room instead of the usual windowless interview cell. He unlocked his briefcase and pulled out a bottle and two glasses.
“Courvoisier,” Miller said. “Nice.”
“Didn’t want to insult you with anything cheap.” Blue poured two generous glasses, pushed one at Miller. “Drink up. No cameras in here.”
Miller glanced at the clock on the wall. Eleven-thirty. Blue followed his eyes. “You know what they say. It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
Miller picked up the glass, sloshed around the golden liquid inside. If this was a test, he was happy to pass. He took a long swallow. Blue followed.
“Daood Maktani, you’re an infidel start to finish.”
“Am I under arrest for that, too?” The warmth of the cognac glowed inside Miller. He hadn’t had a drink since getting locked up. He’d missed the feeling. He finished the glass. Blue refilled it.
“Could you fake it?”
“It.”
“If I have to explain, I may have the wrong guy.”
Miller raised a hand in apology. “Those guys and I don’t exactly socialize, understand. I couldn’t even tell you where to look. You’d have to tell me.” But he was exaggerating a little bit. He knew the mosque behind the barbershop on South Marcy where the believers in his nabe hung out.
“But you’ve got the right pedigree. Spent summers over there growing up.”
“Mostly in the john,” Miller said before he could stop himself. The cognac had hit him hard. “The water over there, it’s nasty.”
“Focus, Daood—”
“My name’s David. And I’m telling you, you probably know more about Islam than me.”
“Best start reading up then. You speak Urdu and you’ve got a Paki passport, and if you grow yourself a beard I’ll bet they’ll be happy to have you in the local prayer group. You help me, I can help you. The place I work doesn’t give a rat’s ass how you pay your bills.”
“Help you how.”
“You want me to say it? Okay. I will.” The CIA officer took out a business card. It was blank. And light blue. He wrote a phone number and e-mail address on it and pushed it at Miller. “Find me some genuine jihadis, this is your get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“You can do that?”
“You know, they’re still finding bits of bodies at Ground Zero. At this moment, guys like me, we have the full faith and credit of the United States government on our side. Six ounces of heroin doesn’t mean jack.”
Miller raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
TWO MONTHS LATER, the prosecutors sealed the charges and cut Miller loose with probation. He kept up his side of the bargain. He became a regular at underground mosques in Chicago. He wormed his way into prayer groups that fed money to Islamic charities that recruited suicide bombers for the war in Iraq. Meantime he kept on trafficking. The jihadis never complained. Like the CIA, they didn’t care where he made his money.
Miller earned enough chits at the agency over the years to get sprung from two federal drug indictments. His biggest slip came when he tried to avoid paying a three-thousand-dollar bribe to a police colonel in Karachi. He was arrested and stuck for two weeks in a nasty jail there before he bought his freedom for three times the initial asking price.
He didn’t make the same mistake again. He had a nice run, making a couple hundred grand a year shipping heroin from Pakistan to Chicago, mostly inside brass lamps and other trinkets. To launder the profits, he bought low-end apartments in Dubai with the cash. Then he hired a local property management company, a legit business, to rent them to the laborers building skyscrapers in the desert. The management company forwarded the rent to Miller’s Citibank account. Simple as that, Miller had cash he could legally spend in the United States. He even paid American taxes on the income, like any honest citizen.
A decade after that conversation in the conference room, Miller had houses and wives in Chicago and Dubai. He looked a little like Mal-colm X, six feet tall and dark skinned. His clothes were simple and expensive and suited him. He could honestly say he appealed to women of all ages, creeds, and colors. Life was good.
Then the bill came due. In a way he didn’t expect. He was sipping a glass of Heineken Light in a business- class lounge at Terminal 1 at Heathrow when his phone rang.
A blocked number. Miller didn’t like blocked numbers. He sent it to voice mail. A minute later, the phone rang again. This time the caller ID came up as
“David Miller.”
“Daood.”
“This is David.”
“Same difference.”
“Who is this?”
“Your new best friend.” And the man explained why he’d called.
“Tell me something,” Miller said when he was finished. “This thing you want, is it official or unofficial?”
“Both. But don’t you worry about that.”
“I guess I shouldn’t ask your name either.”
“You can call me Stan. As in Afghani-stan.”
Clever, Miller thought. “It’s impossible. The Thuwanis will never trust you. You’ve hit them too many
