Afghan Resistance.
Ellis was fumbling in his kitbag, which was on the floor near his head. "I may be able to help you persuade Kamil and Azizi," he was saying. He drew from the bag two small packages and opened one. It contained a flat, rectangular piece of yellow metal. "Gold," said Ellis. "Each of these is worth about five thousand dollars."
It was a fortune: five thousand dollars was more than two years' income for the average Afghan.
Masud took the piece of gold and hefted it in his hand. "What's mat?" he said, pointing to an indented figure in the middle of the rectangle.
"The seal of the President of the United States," said Ellis.
Clever, thought Jean-Pierre. Just the thing to impress tribal leaders and at the same time make them irresistibly curious to meet Ellis.
"Will that help to persuade Kamil and Azizi?" said Ellis.
Masud nodded. "I think they will come."
You bet your life they'll come, thought Jean-Pierre.
And suddenly he knew exactly what he had to do. Masud, Kamil and Azizi, the three great leaders of the Resistance, would be together in the village of Darg in eight days' time.
He had to tell Anatoly.
Then Anatoly could kill them all.
This is it, thought Jean-Pierre; this is the moment I've been waiting for ever since I came to the Valley. I've got Masud where I want him—and two other rebel leaders, too.
But how can I tell Anatoly?
There must be a way.
"A summit meeting," Masud was saying. He smiled rather proudly. "It will be a good start to the new unity of the Resistance, will it not?"
Either that, Jean-Pierre thought, or the beginning of the end. He lowered his hand, pointing the needle at the ground, and depressed the plunger, emptying the syringe. He watched the poison soak into the dusty earth. A new start, or the beginning of the end.
Jean-Pierre gave Ellis an anesthetic, took out the bullet, cleaned the wound, put a new dressing on it, and injected him with antibiotics to prevent infection. He then dealt with two guerrillas who also had minor wounds from the skirmish. By that time word had got around the village that the doctor was here, and a little cluster of patients gathered in the courtyard of the farmhouse. Jean-Pierre treated a bronchitic baby, three minor infections and a mullah with worms. Then he had lunch. Around midafternoon he packed his bag and climbed onto Maggie for the journey home.
He left Ellis behind. Ellis would be much better off staying where he was for a few days—the wound would heal faster if he lay still and quiet. Jean-Pierre was paradoxically anxious now that Ellis should remain in good health, for if he were to die the conference would be canceled.
As he rode the old horse up the Valley, he racked his brains for a means of getting in touch with Anatoly. Of course, he could simply turn around and ride down the Valley to Rokha, and give himself up to the Russians. Provided they did not shoot him on sight, he would be in Anatoly's presence in no time. But then Jane would know where he had gone and what he had done, and she would tell Ellis, and Ellis would change the time and place of the conference.
Somehow he had to send a letter to Anatoly. But who would deliver it?
There was a constant trickle of people passing through the Valley on the way to Charikar, the Russian- occupied town sixty or seventy miles away in the plain, or to Kabul, the capital city, a hundred miles away. There were dairy farmers from Nuristan with their butter and cheese; traveling merchants selling pots and pans; shepherds bringing small flocks of fat-tailed sheep to market; and families of nomads going about their mysterious nomadic business. Any of them might be bribed to take a letter to a post office, or even just to thrust it into the hands of a Russian soldier. Kabul was three days' journey, Charikar two. Rokha, where there were Russian soldiers but no post office, was only a day away. Jean-Pierre was fairly sure he could find someone to accept the commission. There was a danger, of course, that the letter would be opened and read, and Jean-Pierre would be found out, and tortured and killed. He might be prepared to take that risk. But there was another snag. When the messenger had taken the money, would he deliver the letter? There was nothing to stop him "losing" it on the way. Jean-Pierre might never know what had happened. The whole scheme was just too uncertain.
He had not resolved the problem when he reached Banda at dusk. Jane was on the roof of the shopkeeper's house, catching the evening breeze, with Chantal on her knee. Jean-Pierre waved to them, then went inside the house and put his medical bag on the tiled counter in the storeroom. It was when he was emptying the bag, at the moment when he saw the diamorphine pills, mat he realized there was one person he could trust with the letter to Anatoly.
He found a pencil in his bag. He took the paper wrapping from a package of cotton swabs and tore a neat rectangle out of it—there was no writing paper in the Valley. He wrote in French:
To Colonel Anatoly of the KGB—
It sounded oddly melodramatic, but he did not know how else to begin. He did not know Anatoly's full name and he did not have an address.
He went on:
Masud has called a council of leaders of the Rebellion. They meet eight days from today, on Thursday 27 August, at Darg, which is the next village to the south of Banda. They will probably all sleep in the mosque that night and stay together all day Friday which is a holy day. The conference has been called for them to talk with a CIA agent known to me as Ellis Thaler who arrived in the Valley a week ago.
This is our chance!
He added the date and signed it Simplex.
He did not have an envelope—he had not seen one of those since he left Europe. He wondered what would be the best way to enclose the letter. As he looked around, his eye fell on a carton of plastic containers for dispensing tablets. They came with self-adhesive labels which Jean-Pierre never used because he could not write the Persian script. He rolled his letter into a cylinder and put it in one of the containers.
He wondered how to mark it. At some point in its journey the package would find its way into the hands of a lowly Russian soldier. Jean-Pierre imagined a bespectacled, anxious clerk in a cold office, or perhaps a stupid ox of a man on sentry duty outside a barbed-wire fence. No doubt the art of buck-passing was as well developed in the Russian Army as it had been in the French when Jean-Pierre did his military service. He considered how he might make the thing look important enough to be handed to a superior officer. There was no point in writing Important or KGB or anything at all in French or English or even in Dari because the soldier would not be able to read the European or Persian letters. Jean-Pierre did not know any Russian script. It was ironic that the woman on the roof, whose voice he could hear singing a lullaby now, was a fluent speaker of Russian and could have told him how to write anything at all, had she been willing. In the end he wrote Anatoly—KGB in European letters and stuck the label on the container, then put the container into an empty drug box which was marked Poison! in fifteen languages and three international symbols. He tied up the box with string.
Moving quickly, he put everything back in his medical bag and replaced the items he had used at Astana. He took a handful of diamorphine tablets and put them in his shirt pocket. Finally he wrapped the Poison! box in a threadbare towel.
He left the house. "I'm going to the river to wash," he called up to Jane.
"Okay."
He walked quickly through the village, nodding curtly to one or two people, and headed out through the fields. He was full of optimism. All sorts of risks attended his plans, but he could once again hope for a great triumph. He skirted a clover field that belonged to the mullah and climbed down a series of terraces. A mile or so from the village, on a rocky outcrop of the mountain, was a solitary
cottage that had been bombed. It was getting dark when Jean-Pierre came within sight of it. He walked
