Dead or Alive

  “Come again?” This from Chavez.

  “Reconnaissance.”

  “Must have missed that over there.”

  “We spent a little time at Hereford,” Clark explained to Embling.

  “There’s a grim-faced bunch,” Embling replied. “Nice to see you haven’t lost your smiles. Okay, then, we’ll get you gentlemen comfortable with the territory, then start laying bait tomorrow. Otherwise, I fear we’ll run out of daylight today.”

  While the majority of the drops were well outside the cantonment, they decided to concentrate on the four within the Old City, first driving around its perimeter, roughly following the wall that enclosed the cantonment until the mid-’50s. “Used to be sixteen gates here along the wall, complete with turrets and ramparts for archers,” Embling said, pointing out the passenger window. “In fact, in Persian, Peshawar means ‘The High Fort.’”

  Clark liked Embling, partially because during his Rainbow tour he’d come to understand the British mind-set a little better, and partially because he was a genuine character—emphasis on the former. Given the way Embling waxed on about Peshawar, Clark half wondered if the man had been born a hundred years too late. Nigel Embling would have been right at home during Britain’s rule of the area.

  Embling found a parking space near Lady Reading Hospital, and they got out and walked west into the Old City. The streets of the cantonment buzzed with activity: bodies, moving elbow to elbow, darted in and out of alleys and beneath canvas awnings; on overhanging balconies, children peeked curiously through wrought-iron bars. The scent of roasted meat and strong tobacco filled the air, along with an overlapping babble of voices speaking in Urdu, Punjabi, and Pashto.

  After a few minutes walking, they entered a large square. “Chowk Yadgaar,” Embling announced. “All the drop-offs are within a half-mile of the square.”

  “Probably chose it for the crowds,” Chavez said. “Hard to be seen, easy to get lost.”

  “Another astute observation, young Domingo,” Embling said.

  “I have my days.”

  Clark said, “Let’s split up and check ’em out. Meet back here in an hour.” They decided who would take which, then parted company.

  They regrouped and compared notes. Two of the spots—one in a small courtyard between the jeweler’s bazaar and the Mahabbat Khan mosque, and one in an alley near the site of the Kohati Gate—showed the faintest traces of a single chalk mark, the gold standard for dead-drop pickup signals since the Cold War. Chalk weathered well and was easily dismissed as a child’s doodling. Clark got out his map, and Embling checked the two locations. “Kohati Gate,” he said. “Easiest to surveil, and closest exit out of the cantonment.”

  “Done,” Clark said.

  “It’s early yet,” Embling said. “How do you chaps feel about cricket?”

  46

  NOT WANTING TO RISK being seen placing the pickup mark, Clark and Chavez woke well before sunrise the next morning to find Embling already up, making coffee and putting together a cooler of rations for the day. So armed, they set out for the cantonment, this time in Embling’s other car, a shabby blue 2002 Honda City, and arrived at Chowk Yadgaar fifteen minutes later, where they split up in the predawn gloom—Clark and Chavez taking a walk to refamiliarize themselves with the area and to test the new earpiece/mic/push-to-talk portable radios with which Gavin Biery had equipped them; Embling surveying the Kohati Gate location and placing their mark. Forty minutes later, they met back at Chowk Yadgaar.

  “Bear in mind,” Embling said, “there’s a police station a couple hundred yards down the square. If you’re stopped—” He paused and laughed. “Listen to me prattling on. I imagine you two have done this sort of thing before.”

  “Once or twice,” Clark said. Or a hundred. Working dead drops wasn’t all that common a task, but the universal surveillance/ countersurveillance methods still applied. As they were waiting for their quarry rather than already tailing him, boredom would be their most potent enemy. Get bored, lose focus, miss something. In the back of Clark’s mind was a ticking clock; how long did they stay in Peshawar waiting for someone to service the drops before deciding the network was dead?

  “Right, then,” Nigel said. “I’m going to move the car closer to Kohati Gate. I’ll be about with my mobile.”

  As the day’s first vendors arrived to lift their awnings and put out their kiosks and carts, Chavez took up the first shift. “In position,” he radioed.

  “Roger,” Clark replied into his collar mic. “Let me know when you see Nigel pass by.”

  Ten minutes passed. “Got him. Just passed Kohati Gate. Parking now.”

  Now we wait, Clark thought.

  As the Old City came to life and the tourists and locals began streaming in, Clark, Chavez, and Embling rotated through the Kohati Gate area, smoothly and without so much as a glance, transferring surveillance to the next man, who did his best to loiter without making it obvious: stopping at nearby kiosks to haggle with the owners over a bead necklace or carved wooden camel, taking pictures of the architecture, and chatting with the occasional local who was interested in where he was from and what had brought him to Peshawar—all the while, keeping half his attention focused on the chalk-marked clay brick in the alley wall opposite the gate.

  At 11:15, Clark, who had the watch, felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see a cop. “American?” he asked Clark in broken English.

  Clark gave him a disarming smile. “No, Canadian.”

  “Passport.” Clark handed it over. The cop studied it for thirty seconds, then snapped it closed and handed it back. He nodded to Clark’s digital camera. “What pictures?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You photograph. What?”

  Clark waved his arm at the nearby buildings. “Architecture. I’m with National Geographic. We’re doing a story on Peshawar.”

  “You have permit?”

  “I didn’t know I needed one.”

  “Permit.”

  Clark understood. Baksheesh. In the Muslim world, the term could mean either charity to beggars, tipping, or flagrant bribery, which was the case here. “How much is the permit?”

  The cop looked Clark up and down, assessing his worth. “Fifteen hundred rupee.”

  About twenty dollars. Clark pulled a wad of crinkled bills from his “light” pocket and gave him three five-hundred-rupee bills.

  “Only day be here?”

  “I might be back tomorrow,” Clark said with a friendly smile. “Can I pay for that permit in advance?”

  This offer brought a smile to the cop’s face, which had so far remained stony. “Of course.”

  “Is there a discount for paying in advance?” Most commerce-minded Pakistanis were slightly insulted if their marks didn’t haggle a bit.

  “Fourteen hundred rupee.”

  “Twelve.”

  And then, predictably, “Thirteen.” Clark handed over the notes, and the cop nodded and walked off.

  “What’d he want, boss?” Chavez radioed from some unseen location.

  “Shaking me down. We’re good.”

  Embling’s voice: “We have a nibbling fish, John.”

  Clark raised his camera to his eye and turned slowly, a tourist looking for a good shot, until the alley and Kohati Gate were in frame. A boy of seven or eight, wearing filthy white canvas trousers and a blue Pepsi T-shirt, was stooped beside the chalked brick. After a moment he spit into his hand and vigorously rubbed the brick clean.

  “He bit,” Clark reported. “He’s heading out the gate. White pants, blue Pepsi T-shirt.”

  “On my way.” This from Chavez.

  “Moving to the car,” Embling reported. “Meet you outside.”

  Chavez reached Clark, who had moved just outside the gate, in less than sixty seconds. “He’s walked down the street. Our side, just passing that blue Opel.”

  “I see him.”

  Embling pulled up in the Honda, and they climbed in. The Brit pulled out, swerved to m
iss a delivery truck approaching the gate, accelerated hard for five seconds, then coasted back to the speed limit as they drew even with the boy and passed him. Embling took the next right, drove thirty meters down a side street, then did a quick U-turn and pulled back to the intersection, stopping ten feet short. Through the windshield they could see the boy turn left onto his own side street, then trot diagonally across the street and into a tobacco shop.

  “I’ll go,” Chavez said from the backseat, and reached for the door handle.

  “Wait,” Embling muttered, eyes fixed on the shop.

  “Why?”

  “Whoever he’s working for probably has a few at his disposal. It’s a practice here, little runners to do one’s trivial errands.”

  Sixty seconds later the boy reappeared on the sidewalk. He looked both ways, then called out to a man sitting on a bench two doors down. The man said something back and pointed directly at Embling’s Honda.

  “Distressing turn,” Embling said.

  Clark replied evenly, “Not if he comes this way. If we’re burned, he’ll go in the opposite direction.”

  He didn’t. Running at a sprint now, dodging a stream of honking and swerving cars, the boy crossed the street and ran past them. From the backseat, Chavez said, “One block up. Turned east.”

  Nigel put the car in gear and pulled up to the stop sign, waiting for a break in traffic. When it came, he turned right. “This will run parallel to him for two blocks.” At the next stop sign he turned right, then left, then pulled to a stop beside a school playground.

  “Got him,” Clark said, eyes fixed on the side mirror.

  The boy turned into a doorway covered in a red awning and reemerged a few seconds later with another boy, this one in his early teens, with curly black hair and a leather jacket. As the first boy talked and gesticulated, the teenager walked to a nearby streetlamp and began working a cable lock around a lemon-yellow moped.

  “Well played, Nigel,” Clark said.

  “We’ll see. Moped kids here think they’re bloody off-road bikers.”

  This one, they quickly realized, was no exception. Though his top speed never exceeded twenty-five miles per hour, the teenager weaved through traffic with a seeming irregularity that reminded Clark of a kite on a gusty day. For his part, Nigel did not follow the moped’s every lane change but rather continued straight, always keeping the yellow moped within sight and changing lanes only when necessary.

  The teenager headed southeast away from the cantonment, first on Bara Road, then northwest onto the Ring Road Bypass. The street signs, written in Urdu, were indecipherable to Clark and Chavez, but Embling kept a color commentary of their route.

  “Crossing Kabul Canal,” he announced.

  Chavez asked, “Closing in on the Hayatabad, aren’t we?”

  “Good eye. Yes, we are. Another two miles. Coming up on Gul Mohar.”

  At the last second the moped swerved right across two lanes and took the exit. Embling, already in the far right lane, simply put on his blinker and followed.

  For the next twenty minutes the teenager took them on what could only be a dry-cleaning run—and did a fairly decent job of it, Clark had to admit. They passed the University of Peshawar, the Department of Tourism offices, and the British Cemetery, until finally their subject headed north on Pajjagi Road, passed the Peshawar Golf Club, and again crossed the Kabul Canal. Soon they were on the outskirts of the city. Squares of green irrigated fields appeared on their left and right. Embling dropped back until the moped was a speck of bright yellow.

  After six miles, the moped turned west and followed a winding, tree-lined road before pulling into a narrow driveway. Embling stopped a few hundred yards down the road, did a U-turn, then shut off the engine. They waited. This far from Peshawar proper, there were no honking horns and no revving of engines. The minutes ticked by until a half-hour had passed.

  Down the road came the sound of a puttering engine. Embling started the car and accelerated for a quarter-mile to the next driveway and pulled in, coasting down the sloping dirt tract until the main road was barely visible through the back window. Ahead was an old barn, its roof partially caved in. Chavez turned around in his seat. A moment later, the top of the boy’s head drove past.

  “Your call, John.”

  “Let him go. I think we’ve found what we’re looking for. If the boy’s going to check the pickup spot, he’ll be back soon enough.”

  And he was, forty minutes later, flashing by their driveway. Moments later the moped’s engine went silent.

  “I’d say you’ve found your quarry,” Embling said.

  Clark nodded. “Let’s drive past and see what we can see.”

  An hour later, back at Embling’s house, Clark and Chavez sat and sipped tea while their host made three phone calls in rapid-fire Urdu. He hung up and said, “It’s a private security firm.”

  “Wonder who he’s afraid of?”

  What they’d seen as they’d passed the driveway was a white van bearing a white-and-red placard sitting in the dirt turnaround, and next to it a two-story white farmhouse.

  “That I don’t know, nor was I able to find out the client’s name. The firm is a fairly recent hire, however. Last week, in fact. Two men per shift, round-the-clock coverage.”

  Clark checked his watch. Nightfall was in five hours. He looked at Chavez, who’d already read his partner’s mind. “Let’s go get him.”

  “Nigel, I don’t suppose you have any hardware—”

  “I do. An alarming array, in fact.”

  47

  TWO HOURS AFTER SUNSET, Clark turned Embling’s Honda into the abandoned barn’s driveway. He shifted into neutral, shut off the engine, and allowed momentum to carry them down the slope and into the shadow along the barn’s wall. When the car came to a halt, he shifted into park, Chavez turned off the dome light, and they climbed out.

  Nigel hadn’t been exaggerating the extent of his weapon’s cache, which he kept in an old steamer trunk in his closet. They chose a pair of noise-suppressed SIG Sauer P226 9-millimeter pistols. Standard-issue sidearm for the British SAS. They’d both spent many hours on the range with the P226. At Embling’s urging, they each grabbed a lead-and-leather cosh. “Never can tell when you’ll have a merciful moment,” he told them with a smile.

  Now Chavez whispered, “What’s the plan?”

  “Probably be one guard outside, either static or roving, and another inside. We’ll take down the first, then deal with the other when the time comes. Ding, try the cosh first. The fewer bodies we leave, the better.”

  “Fine by me.”

  They split up, Clark moving west through the trees behind the barn and Chavez following the drainage ditch bordering the main road. “In position,” Clark heard through his earpiece.

  That was fast, Clark thought. Ah to be young again. “Stand by.”

  He took his time moving through the underbrush, checking for telltales underfoot and low-hanging branches too dark to see. After a quarter-mile the trees began thinning out, and he soon found himself at the north end of the turnaround, thirty yards opposite the driveway entrance.

  “In position,” he whispered. “Where are you?”

  “End of the drainage ditch, against the driveway berm.”

  “I see one sentry. Sitting in a lawn chair at the van’s front bumper.”

  “Come again?”

  “Sitting in a lawn chair, smoking, facing my direction.” Whoever had hired them was not getting his money’s worth. “Got a Type 56 leaning against the bumper on his right.” The 56 was a Chinese copy of the AK-47. Not the same quality, but certainly enough to worry about.

  Chavez said, “I’m seeing one light on, lower level, my side.”

  “Dark here. No movement. Go when you’re ready.”

  “Roger.”

  Even though he knew Ding was coming, Clark didn’t spot him until he was within ten feet of the van’s rear bumper. Ninjas own the night had been Chavez’s old unit’s motto. And
he still did, Clark knew.

  Chavez reached the bumper, took a peek around the quarter panel, then dropped into a crouch and waited.

  “Still nothing,” Clark whispered after a minute.

  He got a double-click roger in reply.

  Chavez eased back now, moving around the other side of the van and out of sight. Ten seconds later, a shadow appeared behind the seated guard. Chavez’s arm cocked back and came forward. The guard slumped forward, leaning sideways against the van’s grille. Chavez pulled him back upright and crushed out the fallen cigarette.

  “Down and out.”

  “Roger. Moving.”

  They met in the shadows along the house’s south wall. The porch and front door lay to their left. With Clark in the lead, they slid down until the entrance was in view. The inside door stood open, but the screen door was closed. They mounted the porch and got stacked on either side of the door. Now they could hear the faint sounds of television from inside the house. Clark, on the latch side, reached up and tested it. Locked. He reached into his back pocket, thumbed open his knife, and gently, carefully, inserted the tip into the mesh and drew the blade down until he had created a six-inch slit. He closed the knife and returned it to his pocket, then reached through and felt around until he found what he was looking for. There was a soft snick. He withdrew his hand and then sat still for a full minute.

  Clark nodded at Chavez, who returned it, then crab-walked across the doorway and slid into position behind Clark, who reached up and depressed the door handle. He opened the door an inch, stopped, then tried another couple of inches. No matter their age or condition, screen doors seemed prone to creaking. Maybe it was the exposure to the elements.