The Invisible

they prescribed?”

She nodded slowly without looking at him, but it wasn’t a yes; she was simply considering the question. Wondering if she should lie, maybe. “Why does that matter?”

“It matters, Naomi. If you—”

“No,” she said, her voice barely audible. “They weren’t prescribed. I got them from a friend in Washington. She’s a physician.”

“Some friend.” The anger was still there, but he was trying to think past it, trying to weigh the implications. “Does Harper know?”

She looked up reluctantly, meeting his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“He knows.” Kealey felt his hands curling into fists, the muscles tightening in his arms. It was a completely involuntary reaction; he just couldn’t control the anger rising inside of him. “He fucking knew the whole time, and he sent you, anyway. Tell me I’m wrong.”

She shook her head, but he was right, and they both knew it.

“How bad is it?” He held up the tablet. “How many of these a day?”

“I don’t know. Between ten and fifteen. Sometimes I don’t . . .”

He waited, but she wasn’t going to finish. “What’s the dosage?”

“Twenty milligrams each.”

“So . . . what? Two hundred milligrams a day? Two hundred twentyfive?”

“Yeah, I guess.” She was leaning against the door frame, her railthin arms still crossed over her chest. She was mumbling her responses at the floor. Kealey didn’t know if she was ashamed, embarrassed, or just sorry that she’d been caught. It was probably a combination of all three.

“Naomi . . .” He waited for her to lift her head, but the silence seemed to stretch on forever. “You can’t keep this up.”

She finally looked up, and he saw that the combative attitude was gone. Tears were streaming down her face, running over the pale, jagged scar on her right cheek. She lifted a hand to touch it, then subtly shifted her body to the right, turning the scar away from him. She’d been doing this since the day she was first released from the Agency’s private facility in Loudoun County, Virginia, and it stung him deeply every time. He didn’t think she knew she was doing it, which only made it harder to watch.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” And he really didn’t. He knew how important the Agency was to her, but he couldn’t let her continue in this state. He was tempted to throw the question back at her—What would you do in my shoes, Naomi? —but that would have been too easy. He had been trained to set aside his feelings in order to make hard, fast decisions, and in this case, the decision was already made. What had just transpired only served to reinforce it.

“I’m not going to say anything,” he said quietly, “but you’ve got to fix this. I know you want to work, but if you keep going the way you’re going, it’s going to end badly. You’re going to get yourself or somebody else killed, and if that—”

He didn’t catch his mistake until the words were out of his mouth, but he caught every part of what happened next. Her face crumpled, and her shoulders seemed to jerk forward slightly, as though she’d been punched in the stomach.

“Oh, Christ.” He was instantly contrite. “Naomi, I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t talking about what happened in Madrid. You couldn’t have known it would turn out the way it—”

He was wasting his breath; she had already turned in retreat. The bathroom door closed behind her, with a solid thump, and he heard the lock snap into place. He couldn’t get to her now; she was lost in her own little world, and Kealey knew that he wasn’t welcome. He looked at the pill in his hand, his mind a complete blank. A thought came: he should crush it, destroy it, remove the temptation. Instead, he tossed it onto the bedspread, turned, and left the room.

CHAPTER 27

SIALKOT

Randall Craig stood in the harshly lit surgical suite. The room was almost completely silent, but he was aware of Said Qureshi’s tense, economical movements over by the scrub sink. He was also aware of the unnaturally still form of Benazir Mengal, who was leaning against the counter a few feet away. As Craig stared down at one of the most recognizable faces in the world, he was reminded of a patient he had once worked on, a minor celebrity and self-proclaimed socialite. To his knowledge, it was the only time he had treated a person of public interest, but that was different. This was different. Brynn Fitzgerald was much more than a glossy teen with a cult following and too much of her parents’ money; simply put, she was one of the most important people in the U.S. government. In the hundreds of procedures he’d attended, he had been able to maintain the necessary air of cool, calm detachment. Complete professionalism. He had always been proud of this fact, but not overtly proud; it was simply part of his job. Now he felt his composure deserting him. He was sweating beneath the scrubs that Qureshi had provided him with, and his hands felt hot and damp beneath a tight layer of latex; the surgical gloves felt like oven mitts, alien to his hands. He was consumed by the possibility of failure. Looking down at her, he didn’t see another patient; he saw the woman whose face had graced the covers of Newsweek, Time, and Harper’s, all inside a three-month period. He saw a regular fixture on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. He saw the most powerful woman in the United States, and he was terrified by what he might do to her. All it would take was one mistake, one little slip, one minor allergy they didn’t know about, and she would be gone forever, killed at the hands of a Tennessee farm boy. . . .

“Randall?” Craig’s head shot up, and he turned to face Said Qureshi. The Pakistani doctor was looking at him with an expression of uncertainty. “Are you all right?”

Craig tried to shake it off, feeling Mengal’s intense, suspicious stare. “I’m fine.”

Qureshi walked over with a tray full of sterilized instruments. Setting it down, he reached up and adjusted the arm on one of the Burton Genie lamps, positioning the four bulbs directly over Fitzgerald’s upper abdomen. Snapping his mask into place, he looked up and met Craig’s eyes. “Are you ready?”

Craig nodded slowly. He and Qureshi had not had the chance to decide exactly what they were going to do when the operation was over. He suspected that the Pakistani would fight for his life, as he’d indicated earlier, but no matter how Craig looked at it, he just couldn’t ignore the overwhelming odds they were facing. There were at least 8 armed men on the property, according to Qureshi, and more stationed at the end of the drive. He suspected—and Craig believed he was right—that there were more armed guards positioned at either end of the main road, which was located 150 meters south of the house. If Mengal’s background was any indication, Qureshi had said, the men who worked for him were ex-soldiers, probably drawn from the ranks of the SSG, the Special Services Group. The SSG was Pakistan’s answer to the Green Berets, and while trained to a lesser standard, they were still extremely proficient, particularly on their own ground.

Craig knew that fighting them would only get him killed, but he wasn’t going to lie down, either. It just wasn’t his way, and besides, he felt he owed something to Brynn Fitzgerald and the people who’d been kidnapped on the KKH. A few of them were fellow Americans, after all, and his national identity was something that Craig held very close to his heart. If he could stand up for them, he would. But first, he had a job to do.

“I’m ready,” he said, his voice firm. He glanced at the bank of monitors. The blood pressure cuff was already on Fitzgerald’s right arm. The catheter was in place in her left arm, and on her left forefinger, a portable pulse oximeter was clipped into place. This was used to monitor the amount of oxygen in her blood; if it dropped below 95 percent during the procedure, they’d have to increase the flow.

Qureshi had explained what he’d been doing prior to Craig’s arrival. He’d been administering 5 milligrams of Midazolam every thirty to forty minutes to keep Fitzgerald calm and compliant, and so far, it seemed to be working. The cardiac monitoring they were using only allowed for six tracings—not as good as the twelve tracings a better EKG would have provided, but it would have to suffice. Otherwise, everything looked good. Craig had everything he needed: the anesthesia machine itself; an endotracheal tube, 20 millimeters in length, already smeared with Xylocaine jelly to ease insertion into the trachea; a laryngoscope with a No. 3 blade, which would be used to check