a-half-year-old. Chace had looked for, but hadn’t seen, Zahidov in the shot. “I’m wondering if she knew they’d be photographed.”
“It looks unstaged,” Crocker said.
“So maybe the Ambassador didn’t know the camera would be there. But maybe she did.”
“You think she’s parading the boy? Why?”
“I don’t know.” Chace put out her cigarette. “But you read my after-action, you know what I was asked during the torture. If Zahidov was trying to play psychological games along with the physical ones, that’s one thing. But if Ruslan actually escaped, that’s something else. Sevara brings his son out for a photo op, that’s a warning to him. ‘Hey, look—hostage.’?”
Crocker scowled, tilting forward in his chair. “You could just be paranoid.”
“There’s that, too.” She smiled thinly, to show that she didn’t think she was. “But no one ever confirmed Ruslan’s death, boss. I didn’t get a good look at him, and no one from our team ever saw the body.”
“There were two state funerals held in Uzbekistan the week after you got home. One for President Malikov, one for his son.”
“Closed casket,” Chace pointed out.
“For Ruslan, yes. And if he died the way you thought he died, that would make sense, because he would have caught a faceful of shrapnel.”
“You don’t think he’s alive?”
Crocker exhaled smoke. “I don’t know. There’s been no sign of him, there’s been no word of him. What I do know, however, is that Ahtam Zahidov tortured you and intended to kill you. And you’ve never been the type to forgive and forget.”
“I’ve forgiven you.”
“I’d like to think you don’t group me and Zahidov in the same class.”
“No, of course not.” Chace leaned forward again, serious. “I’m not trying to make up an excuse to go back to Tashkent, boss. That’s not what this is.”
“I don’t think you are,” Crocker said mildly. “But you’re not beyond finding an excuse for me to send you there.”
Chace fell silent, thinking, then sitting back once more and looking away, to the bust of Winston Churchill that Crocker kept atop his document safe. It was one of the few appointments he kept in the office, the bust, a bookshelf filled with the latest in Jane’s titles, and a Chinese dragon print on one wall. He’d had the dragon for as long as Chace had known him to occupy the office, and she sometimes wondered at its significance, but she’d never asked.
He had her number, of course—but that didn’t mean that Chace was wrong about the possibility Ruslan had survived.
Since returning from Uzbekistan, she’d made a point of staying informed about what was happening in the region, and as much as she could claim the interest was operational, it clearly went to the personal. She’d spent dozens of hours reviewing files, viewing photographs, in particular attempting to identify the two men who had helped Zahidov torture her. She knew their names now. Tozim was Tozim Stepanov, the older man with the tools Andrei Hamrayev. She remembered them.
There were nights when she dreamed about Tozim Stepanov and Andrei Hamrayev and, worst of them all, Ahtam Zahidov. Memory had blunted nothing, and Chace recalled him perfectly. Zahidov’s thin-lipped smile and his insistent fingers, and the practiced nonchalance with which he’d hurt her. She remembered Zahidov’s hands burning on her as he had moved to strip the last of her clothes, his eagerness to rape her.
Chace didn’t just want Zahidov dead. She wanted to be the one to kill him. There would be a reckoning, she was certain. The only question was when.
And no one in the Firm who knew what Zahidov had done to her could expect her to do anything less when the opportunity came.
Crocker said, “I do understand, Tara, you know that.”
“I know.” She looked back to him, then got out of the chair. “I’ll be down in the Pit.”
“Tara.”
She stopped at the door, looking back.
“It’s been six months,” Crocker said. “You’re going to have to let it go.”
Chace thought about the terror of that room and the cruelty of the men who had filled it. There were still times, six months after the fact, when she would lift Tamsin or reach above her for a high shelf, when her right shoulder would send fire down her arm. When she touched the skin around her eye, she could feel a spur of bone, floating just above the orbit. And, condom bouquet notwithstanding, the only people she’d allowed to touch her in any way but the most formal or accidental since Tashkent had been her daughter and her physician.
“No,” she told him. “Really, I don’t. And you wouldn’t, either, boss.”
Time didn’t heal all wounds, not for her.
Especially not this one.
CHAPTER 32
Uzbekistan—Surkhan Darya Province—
Termez, “Friendship Bridge”
20 August, 0621 Hours (GMT+5:00)
Zahidov stood in the dawn light at the foot of the bridge beside an Uzbek army captain named Oleg Arkitov, took the offered binoculars from the man’s hand, and looked into Afghanistan. Across the Amu Darya River, past the newly built Customs houses and immigration offices staffed by the Afghanis, the Salang Highway joined the road that ran parallel to the tracks, cutting straight to Mazar-i-Sharif, and then on to Kabul, winding through the red hills in the distance. A train was rumbling up the tracks toward them, returning empty, Zahidov suspected, having been emptied of the UN relief supplies it had delivered earlier in the day. It would be stopped by the border guards on the Uzbek side and thoroughly searched before being allowed to proceed.
“You look upriver, Minister, you can see the barges coming, too,” Arkitov told him.
Zahidov swiveled, turning east to follow the river. The Uzbek side of the border was lined with a 380-volt electrified fence, and beyond it, land mines covered the banks down to the water. The fence and the mines had been laid in the late nineties in response to incursions from the extremists who then ruled Afghanistan. The bridge, at that time, had been all but permanently closed, reopened only in late 2001. Since then, the border operated almost at random, the Uzbek side shutting down whenever the government responded to a security alert or a bombing. Despite continued American insistence to keep the border open, there were still times when the border was ordered shut.
Zahidov lowered the optics, handing them back to the captain. “They hit before the bridge?”
“Last night, just after three in the morning, sir. We could see the muzzle-flashes and the rocket
