“If we can get this asshole-or even get a little closer to getting him-I’ll be fine with that.” Mary Pat took a sip of her beer, then glanced sideways at Clark. “Does this mean Hendley’s footing the bill?”
Clark chuckled. “Call it a gesture of goodwill. So what’s it going to be? A onetime deal, or the beginning of a wonderful friendship?”
“Share and share alike,” Mary Pat replied. “Bureaucracy be damned. If we have to put our heads together to get our man, so be it. Of course,” she added with a smile, “we’ll have to take credit, seeing as how you guys don’t exist and all.”
Half a tablet of Ativan and a beer helped Clark pass the last five hours of the flight in a deep, untroubled sleep. As the plane’s wheels bumped and squelched on the Peshawar airport’s tarmac, he opened his eyes and looked around. Beside him, Chavez was stuffing his iPod and paperback into his carry-on.
“Time to work, boss.”
“Yep.”
Surprising neither of them, their passage through the airport’s customs and immigration line went slowly but without incident. An hour after entering the terminal, they were outside at the ground transportation curb. As Clark raised his hand for a cab, an accented voice behind them said, “I would advise against that, gentlemen.”
Clark and Chavez turned to see a lanky white-haired man in a powder-blue summer suit and a white plantation hat standing behind them. “The cabs are death traps here.”
“You would be Mr. Embling,” Clark said.
“Indeed.”
Clark introduced himself and Chavez, using first names only. “How did you-”
“A friend e-mailed me your flight information. After that, it was simply a matter of looking for two chaps with the appropriate air about them. Nothing obvious, mind you, but I’ve developed something of a… radar, I suppose you would call it. Shall we?”
Embling led them to a green Range Rover with tinted windows parked beside the curb. Clark got in the front passenger seat, Chavez in the back. Soon they were pulling out into traffic.
Clark said, “Forgive me, but your accent-”
“Dutch. A throwback to my service days. There’s a significant Muslim population in Holland, you see, and they’re fairly well treated. Much easier to make friends-and stay alive-as a Dutchman. A matter of self-preservation, you see. And your covers?”
“Canadian freelance writer and photographer. Spec piece for
“That’ll do in the short term, I suppose. The trick to blending is to look as though you’ve been here awhile.”
“And how do you do that?” This from Chavez.
“Look scared and disheartened, my boy. As of late, it’s the Pakistan national pastime.”
Care for a quick tour of the hot spots?” Embling asked a few minutes later. They were driving west on Jamrud Fort Road, moving toward the heart of the city. “A little who’s who of Peshawar?”
“Sure,” Clark replied.
Ten minutes later they pulled off Jamrud and headed south on Bacha Khan. “This is the Hayatabad, Peshawar’s version of your South Central Los Angeles. Densely populated, impoverished, very little police presence, drugs, street crime…”
“And not much in the way of traffic laws,” Chavez said, nodding through the windshield at the zigzagging stream of cars, trucks, man-hauled carts, and mopeds. Horns honked in a nearly continuous symphony.
“No laws at all, I’m afraid. Hit-and-runs are almost a sport here. In years past, the city’s made some effort to lift the neighborhood, mind you, but they never seem to get any traction.”
“Bad sign when the police stop showing up,” Clark observed.
“Oh, they show up. Two or three cars pass through twice a day, but unless they see a murder in progress, they rarely stop. Just last week they lost one of their cars and two officers. And when I say ‘lost,’ I mean they vanished.”
“God almighty,” Chavez said.
“Not around here,” Embling muttered.
For the next twenty minutes they drove ever deeper into the Hayatabad. The streets grew narrower and the homes more ramshackle until they were passing huts of corrugated tin and tarred-over cardboard. Vacant eyes watched Embling’s Range Rover from darkened doorways. On every corner, men stood clustered, smoking what Clark assumed wasn’t tobacco. Garbage lined the sidewalks and blew down the streets, pushed along by dust devils.
“I’d be a whole lot more comfortable armed,” Chavez murmured.
“No worries, my boy. As luck would have it, the Army’s Special Service Group is fond of Range Rovers with tinted windows. In fact, if you look behind us right now, you’ll see a man running across the street.”
Chavez turned around. “I see him.”
“By the time we reach the next street, doors will be slamming.”
John Clark smiled. “Mr. Embling, I can see we’ve come to the right person.”
“Kind of you. It’s Nigel, by the way.”
They turned yet again and found themselves on a street lined with a mixture of cinder-block stores and multistoried homes of unbaked brick and wood, many of whose facades were either fire-blackened or pockmarked with bullet holes, or both.
“Welcome to extremist heaven,” Embling announced. He pointed at buildings as they drove past, reciting as they went the names of terrorist groups-Lashkar-e-Omar, Tehreek-e-Jafaria Pakistan, Sipah-e-Muhammad Pakistan, Nadeem Commando, Popular Front for Armed Resistance, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen Alami-until he turned yet again, where the list continued. “None of these are official headquarters, of course,” he said, “but rather something akin to clubs, or fraternities. Occasionally the police or the Army will come in and conduct a raid. Sometimes the targeted group goes away altogether. Sometimes they’re back here the next day.”
“How many in all?” Clark asked.
“Officially… almost forty and counting. The problem is, the ISI is doing the counting,” he replied, referring to the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s version of the CIA. “Military intelligence to some extent as well. It’s the proverbial fox-guarding-the-henhouse scenario. Most of these groups either receive funding, or resources, or intelligence from the ISI. It’s become so convoluted that I doubt the ISI is counting wickets anymore.”
“That damage back there,” Chavez said. “From police raids?”
“No, no. That’s the work of the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. They are without a doubt the biggest dog on the block. Any time one of these guppies swims in the wrong pond, the URC comes in and swallows them up, and unlike with the local authorities, when that happens, the group stays gone.”
“That’s telling,” Clark replied.
“Indeed.”
Through the windshield, a few miles away, they could see a plume of smoke gushing into the sky. They felt the
“We’ve been known to,” Clark replied. “I have to tell you, Mr. Embling, you paint a bleak picture of Peshawar.”
“Then I’ve given you an accurate portrayal. I’ve been here on and off for nearly four decades, and in my estimation Pakistan is at a tipping point. Another year or so should tell the tale, but the country’s about as close to being a failed state as it’s been in twenty years.”
“A failed state with nuclear weapons,” Clark added.
