The Invisible

CHAPTER 25

SIALKOT

Craig followed the armed guard down the narrow, musty hall, the walls crowding in on either side. A second man followed a few steps to the rear. He was also armed, and Craig had seen the wary, alert look on his face when he first stepped out of the room. Clearly, they expected him to fight or run, which he found interesting in a detached sort of way. Back in high school, Craig had read about the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst, his chosen topic for a required book report. He knew about Stockholm syndrome and thought it was a bunch of bullshit—he just couldn’t imagine empathizing with someone who’d kidnapped him—but now, walking between his captors, he wondered about the percentages. He wondered how many people tried to fight.

How many tried to escape.

He had considered it briefly, the instant the door first swung open, but he changed his mind when he saw the gun. Craig had spent his youth in the wooded hills of Tennessee. The place was a haven for Heston’s acolytes, the kind of people who thought the NRA was a government agency. He had fired all kinds of weapons, dozens of handguns, shotguns, and rifles. He had never served in the military, and he’d never fired an automatic weapon, but he could recognize the simple lethality of the submachine gun the man cradled in front of his body, and he knew better than to make a rash, unplanned move.

The gun made him wary, but it didn’t make him meek; he had expressed his anger with the stone-faced guard, who had simply repeated his first words: “Get up and follow me.” Craig had tried arguing, getting nowhere, until he realized that the guard’s English was probably limited to that one phrase. Finally, he decided to follow their instructions. Obviously, they had taken him for a reason; arguing wasn’t going to get him released, and it might just get him killed. Better to wait and see.

They descended a staircase, their feet beating a soft rhythm on the threadbare runner, then turned into a second hall. They passed a living room off to the left. Craig glanced into the room, saw no one, and kept moving forward. The first guard tapped lightly on the door, received a response, and pushed it open. Looking at Craig, he tipped his head to the right, indicating that he should enter. Craig hesitated for a moment, then stepped forward, past the guard, and into the room. It was then that he got the shock of a lifetime, his eyes falling on the man seated at the kitchen table.

“Said?” He heard the name come out of his mouth, knew it was right, but he still couldn’t believe it. Said Qureshi, here? It had been years since he’d seen the man. How the hell was he mixed up in all of this?

The Pakistani doctor stood and greeted Craig with a slow, sad nod of his head. His mannerisms were polite but grim; clearly, he wanted to apologize for what had happened but was afraid to do so.

“Randall.”

Craig wasn’t sure what to ask first. He looked to the other person in the room, a squat, stocky man with a full head of wiry black hair. He was leaning against the oven, neat in a tailored dress shirt, dark slacks, and a pair of thick-soled boots. The boots looked vaguely military, like something that might belong to an old soldier. And that was what the man looked like, Craig realized. A soldier. But not just any soldier. His gaze was calm and commanding, and there was a considerable intelligence behind the dark brown eyes.A man with a good mind and a laborer’s build, Craig decided. As he looked on, the Pakistani pushed away from the oven with his hips, walked forward, and stopped. He did not offer a hand.

“Randall Craig?”

“Yes . . . ?”

“Do you know who I am?”

Craig studied the older man for a half a minute, thinking back to newscasts and faces he’d seen on the street. Doctors he’d met at various clinics around the country. Members of the secretariat he’d met on a brief visit to Aiwan-e-Sadr, the presidential palace in Islamabad. Nothing was coming to mind. “No.”

The older man stared at him for another few seconds, then nodded in satisfaction. “You’ve been brought here against your will,” he stated in cultured English. His voice was gravelly, rough, but somehow distinguished; he reminded Craig of a professor he’d once had at Vanderbilt, a brilliant man with a lifelong two-pack-a-day habit. Ironically, the year Craig had graduated from medical school, the professor had been on the short list of nominees for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. “For that, I apologize. Believe me, you would not be here if it wasn’t important.”

Craig started to ask a question, glanced at Qureshi, and thought for a minute. “Who are you?” he finally asked, steering his words to the older man.

“My name is not important. Believe me, in the long run, it is better for you if you do not know.”

Craig nodded, not buying a word of it. Believe me . . . He’d used that phrase twice in a row. Craig had lowered his defenses for a second on seeing Qureshi, but now they rolled back into place, like a steel shutter sliding down the front of a street-level store. “What the hell am I doing here?”

“We need your help,” the older man said simply. “Said has agreed to perform an operation for us. He requires your assistance. We need you to help him—that part, I regret to say, is not an option—but once you are done, you will be released. You have my word on it.”

Craig looked at Qureshi, watching for some sign. The man looked nervous but composed, as though he were biding his time.Good man, Craig thought. Wait for the right time. Wait for your chance. He knew the Pakistani doctor well. They had met during a weeklong seminar at the University of Chicago, and they had hit it off over a long weekend on the town. A year later, in 1995, they’d ended up working together at the University of Washington, Qureshi on the tail end of a yearlong visit. Qureshi, Craig had learned in one of Seattle’s most raucous bars, was quick to flaunt some of Islam’s more stringent rules, but he was a good man and an excellent doctor. They had made a strange pair, Craig knew, the Tennessee farm boy turned anesthesiologist and the small, mild-mannered Pakistani, but their friendship had flourished in the face of their colleagues’ skepticism, even if it had not survived Qureshi’s move back to London. Through the usual channels, Craig had heard of Qureshi’s minor disgrace at Guy’s Hospital. There had been rumors of drinking and medical malpractice, but Craig had never taken them seriously; anything could happen during a surgical procedure, and often did. There was a good chance that Qureshi was not even responsible for the incident that had killed his career and a young boy on the same table. In short, he knew Said Qureshi as well as he knew any man, and there was no way he could be mixed up in all of this. At least, not of his own volition.

Craig looked back at the older man, his skepticism obvious. “You’ll release me if I help you? Just like that?”

The man nodded solemnly, his thick, square hands clasped over his ample midsection. “You have my word,” he said again. Which didn’t mean shit to Randall Craig. If this man was behind the kidnappings in the north and the attack on Brynn Fitzgerald’s motorcade—and Craig was fully convinced that he was—then the man was a killer. There was no way he would release two people who’d seen his face.

Still, there was no point in resisting. Not yet, anyway. Better to let them see what they wanted to see, namely, complete and total submission. Craig let his shoulders drop a fraction of an inch in defeat, a resigned expression sliding over his face. He looked at Qureshi and thought he caught a glimpse of defiance in his old friend’s eyes. He didn’t have to ask why he was there. If Qureshi was going to undertake a serious procedure—and it had to be serious to go to this amount of trouble—he would need someone to put his patient under.

“What’s the situation?” asked Craig.

Qureshi let out a shaky sigh and looked away. Finally, he looked back, his composure restored. “It’s better if I show you.”

He stood and turned to a second door leading out of the kitchen. He opened it, stepped out. Craig looked at the older man, who nodded and indicated for him to follow. Craig crossed the tile, his apprehension growing; something about Qureshi’s last expression was sticking with him. He felt a little shaky himself as he followed the small Pakistani through the living room. They skirted a dusty grand piano and entered another hall. Craig had not seen the outside of the house, but he could tell it was large, judging by the sheer number of rooms they had passed through. It also had a vaguely British feel to it, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Turning right now, passing a dark room the size of a coat closet, Craig glanced to the right and saw the outline of a ceramic sink and a