Kealey stopped in his tracks, looking around in confusion. Catching his expression, Petain said, “What’s wrong?”
He was still looking around. “I think we must have passed them.”
“Passed what?”
“The pay phones. We’re supposed to get a call from the man we’re going to meet.” Kealey checked his watch. “He should be calling right now.”
“Harper told you that?”
“Yes.” Petain still thought that this lead had come through the Agency; she had no idea that her father had set it up, and Kealey wasn’t about to tell her the truth. He was about to say something else when he heard a phone ringing.
“Over there,” Petain said, pointing toward the building. A few pay phones were lined up against the exterior wall, partially hidden behind a cluster of abandoned luggage carts, all of which were dented and scarred from years of wear and tear. A pale, balding, grossly overweight man in blue Adidas warm-ups had one of the phones pressed to his ear, and he was staring at the phone that was ringing. Clearly, he was thinking about picking it up, but before he could, Kealey jogged over, snatched up the phone, and turned his back to the other man.
“Hello?”
“Is this Kealey?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Kealey took note of the heavily accented voice and let his mind play over the possibilities. The accent didn’t mean much, at least not by itself. The Agency employed hundreds of foreign-born citizens, some of whom held high-ranking positions in the Operations Directorate. The man on the other end of the line might be an Agency operative, but somehow, Kealey doubted it. For one thing, if he
And there was something else to consider. Javier Machado had been retired for fifteen years—too long to still have reliable contacts in the Agency. Kealey was willing to bet that the man on the other end of the line was an agent, someone Machado had used to generate intelligence and recruit other agents when he had been posted to Islamabad. Machado had never said as much, but it was clear to Kealey that the older man had spent some time in Pakistan; otherwise, he wouldn’t have had the connection in the first place. Besides, Petain had told him as much the day before. When he had asked her about the head scarf, she had revealed more than she’d probably planned, including the fact that her father had spent time in the Pakistani capital.
“What about the daughter?” the man asked, as if reading Kealey’s mind. “Machado’s daughter. Is she with you?”
Kealey looked at Petain, who was staring at him expectantly, hands propped on her hips. “Yes.”
“Good. Do you have money?”
“Yes.” Kealey had stopped in the arrival hall at the airport to change a few hundred dollars into rupees. “Where am I going?”
“Find a taxi and have the driver take you to the Queen’s Way Hotel. Don’t check in . . . Just walk south through the bazaar. When you reach the first road, take a left and head east. Eventually, you’ll pass a telephone exchange on your right, and then you’ll see a restaurant, the Bundu Khan. Go inside and ask for Nawaz, one of the servers. He will give you instructions from there.”
Kealey resisted the urge to lose his temper, reminding himself that he’d be taking similar precautions if he were in the other man’s shoes. At the same time, the fixer had to know that time was an issue.
“You understand that this is time sensitive, right? We don’t have all day to—”
“I understand perfectly.” The voice was clipped, impatient. “If you want to get to Mengal quickly, you will do as I say. These precautions are for my benefit, not yours.”
“Fine.” Kealey glanced up and saw that Petain was fidgeting, clearly anxious to know what was going on. “We’re moving now.”
The other man ended the call without a word. Kealey dropped the phone back onto the hook, grabbed Petain’s elbow, and began guiding her toward the curb. There was a line of taxis, and the vehicles were facing the other direction; he’d forgotten that they drove on the left in Pakistan. There was a short line of people waiting at the taxi stand, but it looked like the queue was moving quickly; they wouldn’t have to wait more than a couple of minutes. There was no one around to overhear them, so as they walked toward the taxi stand, Kealey repeated what the fixer had said. When he was done, Petain looked uncertain.
“You said it was Harper who dug this guy up?” she asked.
“No, I said his name came through the Agency. Harper didn’t have anything to do with it, other than passing the name on to us.”
“But you don’t
“Didn’t I? His name is Khan,” Kealey said, saying the first name that popped into his head.
“Can we trust him?”
Kealey debated the question, and when he looked at her, his smile was gone. “I don’t see that we have a choice.”
CHAPTER 31
PUNJAB PROVINCE, PAKISTAN
The house that belonged to the first target sat on the other side of a large square in the small town of Sharakpur Sharif. The square was strewn with unsteady-looking wooden structures, all of which were loaded with racks of clothing, cell phones, televisions, head scarves, fruits and vegetables, and just about anything else a person might wish to purchase. A number of potential customers were browsing the stands, while a man with white eyebrows as thick as his beard swept the pavement with a whisk broom, oblivious to the people moving around him. Metal pylons erupted around a camerashaped ad for Fuji Film, another for Kodak, and a cluster of fading eucalyptus trees. Fortunately, the open space was not crowded; from his seat near a small tea stand, the American had an acceptable view of the squat, whitewashed, two-story house that sat on the southeastern edge of the square. As he sat watching the house, the American took a sip from his bottle of water and checked his watch. He was not surprised to see he had been in place for just over thirty minutes. He had moved his position around the square four times over the past two hours. It felt like he had been sitting there much longer than half an hour, and he knew how long he might still have to wait. Still, he was used to the long periods of inactivity that came with fieldwork, just as he was always prepared for the sudden burst of activity—as well as the danger—that might present itself at any moment. Such was the nature of his profession, and Lieutenant Colonel Paul Owen was a man well suited to his line of work.
At the reasonably young age of forty-two, Owen had the gaunt face and tired eyes of a man years older, a man who might have recently undergone some tragic personal event, such as recurrent cancer or the loss of a child. In reality, these physical attributes were an indirect result of his chosen occupation. More specifically, they were brought on by the things he had seen in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sarajevo, where he had worked in conjunction with SFOR, the multinational peacekeeping force dispatched to Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-to-late nineties. During his twenty years of army service, Owen had been exposed to countless horrors, including rape, murder, and genocide, but he’d also had the privilege of commanding—
in his opinion, at least—the finest soldiers in the world. It had been a difficult trade-off to make, but he had never regretted his choice of profession.
That wasn’t to say he didn’t regret some of the associations he had forged in that time. For several years, Ryan Kealey had been one of the men under Owen’s command—first at Fort Carson, Colorado, where they both
