THE RED CRESCENT SOCIETY AMBULANCE rolled up Islamabad's Peshawar Road, nearing Golra Mor and the newly opened hospital. It was just after midnight. Any time after ten o'clock, the well-ordered, tree-lined streets of Islamabad were empty, save the occasional white cab or two. It was not a town for night owls. The only restaurant open at this hour was a highly controversial Pizza Hut that had opened in a nearby shopping mall.
Up front, the ambulance driver, Imran, and his paramedic first aider, Ali, were smoking cigarettes and talking, what else, politics. In the darkened rear of the vehicle, the occupant inside the heavy-duty dark green body bag wasn't talking at all.
Imran took a right into the wide entranceway of the new Quaid-e-Azam International Hospital. The ultramodern four-hundred-bed facility had only opened recently after endless construction delays, political infighting, and infrastructure difficulties. Something having to do with an underground parking garage was the street gossip. The wait had been worth it, though, most people thought. The radical, blue-mirrored architecture resembled something one might find in downtown Dubai rather than the capital of Pakistan.
A gift from a national hero. A fierce warlord named Sheik al-Rashad.
The ambulance stopped under the covered entrance to the Emergency Room. The two men inside got out in a hurry. They'd been held up at a security checkpoint for more than two hours and both were eager to get home. The driver said hello to the armed security guard as he swung open the rear doors.
The guard, Muhammad, was an old friend to ISI operative Imran, another ISI agent who'd been disgraced and lost his job. This is where the poor bastard had ended up. Driving an ambulance was shitty enough. The graveyard shift at a hospital was the bottom of the barrel. The paramedic helped the driver slide the body onto the bright yellow collapsible gurney.
'Late night, Imran,' the guard said in English. 'Looks like cold storage for that one.'
The paramedic shook his head and whispered to the driver in Urdu, 'Now there's a blinding glimpse of the obvious. No wonder they threw this idiot out of the secret service.'
Imran said, 'How do you know the secret service threw him out? How do you know he's still not working for them? How do you know they are not working for him? Once ISI, always ISI.'
'I heard he got kicked out on his ass.'
'Did you now? Do not believe everything you hear, brother. You will live longer.'
The large-paned glass ER doors hissed open and the EMS team wheeled the gurney quickly past Registration, past the rows of elevator banks. And, finally, through a set of stainless-steel double doors above which hung a sign that read mortuary/restricted.
The morgue. The smell of death and decay. The myriad, nameless chemicals of the constantly processed dead. They passed through the dead-empty morgue and, as expected, no autopsies were being performed because of the late hour.
At the far end of the facility, beyond the morgue refrigerators, the grossing station, the histology supplies, and the necropsy equipment, there was a nearly invisible black glass panel in the wall. A card reader was next to the panel.
Imran swiped his card and the stainless-steel doors slid wide open. Once the gurney was inside, he swiped his card again, this time on an electronic reader that was the sole way to initiate descent.
The big Otis dropped smoothly at least three or four floors underground. Maybe more. The thing was so fast, so quiet, and so smooth, you really couldn't tell how far down you were going. Felt like a journey to the center of the earth.
They came to a soft landing. 'Lands like a butterfly with sore feet, this elevator,' the paramedic said. The driver placed the flat of his hand against the center of the door, a scanner read his palm print, and the glass panel slid silently into the floor, rising again after they'd passed through.
The doors opened with a soft electronic ping and they pushed the gurney out into the dimly lit space beyond. It was some kind of reception area, empty now except for one man sitting in the shadows.
'This all right?' the paramedic asked. The man was sitting at a desk with his feet propped up, smoking a cigarette. They'd parked the gurney about ten feet from a modern desk that looked like it had been carved out of a block of steel. The only light in the room was a desk lamp, and the man's face was not visible in the small pool of smoky white light it cast.
'Perfect.'
'Will that be it for tonight, sir?'
'You realize I've been sitting here for two hours.'
'Sorry, sir. Security checkpoint on the Rawalpindi Circle. Traffic was backed up for five miles.'
'Sure it was. Good-night. Thank you.'
They left without a word.
The man at the desk stared at the body bag in silence for a few seconds, puffing absently on his cigarette as if he had all the time in the world. He bent down and opened a drawer. Grabbing a liter of Johnnie Walker Blue by the neck, he unscrewed the cap and set it, and a Baccarat crystal tumbler, on the desktop. As he closed the drawer he caught a fluorescent glint of blued steel. The.45 automatic he always brought, no matter how cozy the circumstances.
He heard the sound of a zipper and swung his head around to regard the new arrival.
Looking at the body bag, he saw the wide nylon zipper sliding from the head down past where the waist would be, to just below the knees.
The corpse sat up and stared at him.
The man at the desk returned the stare, smiled, and said, 'You look like you just came back from the dead.'
'Two fucking hours,' the corpse said in English. 'I told that idiot Malik to route the driver on the back roads.'
'You knew about the checkpoint?'
'It was my fucking checkpoint! Of course I knew about it.'
'Scotch?'
'What is it?'
'Johnnie Blue.'
'How much did you bring me?'
'They don't make trucks that big.'
Abu al-Rashad, the lower half of his body still zipped into the body bag, was the most powerful man in Pakistan. He looked it, even in this ridiculous pose. Every inch the warrior, all six feet of him, his skin leathered and darkened by decades in the saddle and sun, his thick hair still jet black at forty, his white smile startling in the creases of his ruggedly handsome face. He was the kind of man who could take the skin off your hand with a simple handshake.
He threw back his head and laughed. 'It is good to see you bearing gifts, my brother. A sign you are up to something big. Are you?'
'Let's go into your office and have a drink, shall we. I will tell you my plans.'
'And then I will give you a tour of my new bunker. I have two other floors besides this one. Communications, battlefield command center, my bedroom suite with a suitably shy French maid, and a first-rate kitchen with a chef also from Paris. Even a movie theater.'
'Built beneath a hospital so the Americans won't bomb you to paradise.' Smith smiled. 'Nor the Israelis.'
'A little trick I learned from Hamas.'
'Amazing. The Israelis knew the Hamas HQ was under the hospital in Gaza City and yet they didn't bomb it. I would have.'
'You and me both, brother. Boom-boom.'
'Well. You certainly seem to have your life exactly the way you want it for now.'
'I do. Except for the fact that there's a fifty-million-dollar price tag on my head and I have to travel about my own country in a fucking rubber body bag.'
SHEIK AL-RASHAD LOOKED AT SMITH, the Arab's large black eyes gleaming in the lighting hidden in the ceiling crown moldings. His office, deep inside a bunker beneath a civilian hospital, was paneled in ebony. His desk was of intricately carved ivory, depicting the life of the Prophet. He leaned back in his deep black leather desk chair, placing his hands behind his head. Having just heard what Smith intended to do, al-Rashad now said, 'You, my
