Cantor grabbed up his briefcase, tossed his worn mackintosh over his arm, and strode out to a chorus of hoarse cackles.
Darkness had fallen completely when he stepped through the library’s doors. The impersonal expanse of Chamberlain Square was hemmed in by the concrete monstrosity of the library on one side, the three-story classical Counsel House on another, and by the Greek temple-like Town Hall on a third. In the middle was the monument to Joseph Chamberlain, who’d been someone or another in this dreary city. To Cantor, the structure looked like thieves had made off with an entire Gothic cathedral and left behind the top sixty or so feet of one of its spires.
If the city fathers had intended to design a less harmonious space architecturally, he couldn’t see how.
Maybe throw in the odd zeppelin shed, he thought uncharitably, or an Eastern Orthodox onion-domed church.
The rain had slowed to a cold drizzle, and though Cantor raised his collar, icy water found its way down the back of his neck. He longed for a warm shower and a hot toddy, and for his sore nose to stop leaking.
His battered Volkswagen was parked over on Newhall Street, and he had just turned onto Colmore Row when the driver’s-side window of a sleek Jaguar sedan whispered down.
“Dr. Cantor, might I have a word?” The voice was cultured, with a continental accent—French, German, maybe Swiss, which to Cantor sounded like a combination of the two.
“Ah, I don’t have my doctorate yet,” he stammered when he recognized the black shirt and tie of Dark Suit sitting behind the wheel of the luxury sedan.
“No matter, you gave a compelling speech. I would have stayed for the rest, but I received a call I couldn’t ignore. Please, just a few moments, is all I ask.”
“It’s raining.” Bending to peer into the car sent a spike of pain through Cantor’s strained sinuses.
“Not in here.” The man smiled, or at least his lips parted and his teeth were revealed. “I can drive you to your car.”
Cantor looked up the street. There was no one about and his car was five blocks away. “Okay.”
He stepped around the long sloping bonnet and heard the electronic lock disengage for the passenger seat. He slid into the supple leather. In the glow of the dash lights, the sedan’s considerable woodwork shimmered.
The stranger slipped the car into gear and eased it from its parking space. The Jag was so smooth that Cantor hadn’t realized the engine had been running.
“An associate of mine heard the lecture you gave last week in Coventry and was intrigued enough to tell me about it. I had to hear for myself.”
“I’m sorry, you are?”
“Oh. My apologies. Tony Forsythe.” They shook hands awkwardly since Forsythe had to reach under his left arm so as to not release the steering wheel.
“And what’s your interest in Marco Polo, Mr. Forsythe?” Cantor asked.
He got an odd vibe from the man. He was around forty and had plain, unexceptional features, yet thick dark hair that was so dense it could have been a toupee. Still, there was something else. Cantor realized what it was. His hands had been large and callused. His grip hadn’t been overly forceful, but Forsythe’s hand had practically swallowed Cantor’s. In his experience, men in £1,000 overcoats and £60,000 cars didn’t have calluses.
“I’m a dabbler in history, you might say, and I’m interested in this folio and its contents.”
William Cantor had looked for a fish, but he had the sudden feeling he’d nabbed a shark. “Um, I’m down Newhall.”
“Yes, I know,” Forsythe said, which rather bothered Cantor, but the stranger added, “Have you there in a jiff. You mentioned the folio’s owner had no interest in selling, correct?”
“Yes, the man’s loaded. I think he asked me to pay to see his library just to get under my skin.”
“But no price was discussed?”
“Ah, no. It was all I could do to come up with the five hundred quid to see the damned thing for a day.”
“Pity,” Forsythe said almost to himself. “A simple cash transaction would have been preferable.”
To Cantor’s relief, the Jag made the left-hand turn onto Newhall.
Forsythe glanced at him for a second. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me the gentleman’s name?”
“I, ah, I don’t think that would be in my best interest, now would it?”
“Oh, but it would, friend William. It is most certainly in your best interest.”
The Jaguar suddenly leapt forward under hard acceleration. Cantor got a fleeting glimpse of his blue VW Polo as they raced past. “What the bloody hell do you—”
The arm of a person who’d been lying flat and unseen in the spacious rear seat snaked around Cantor’s neck with the strength of an anaconda, choking the words in his throat. A sharp jab to the neck, a strange metallic taste in his mouth, and three seconds later William Cantor slumped over in drug-induced unconsciousness.
With his parents long dead from an accident on the M1 and no siblings or a girlfriend, it wasn’t until his landlord knocked on the door to his tiny one-room flat a month later that anyone knew Cantor had gone missing. The handful of presentations he’d planned had been courteously postponed by a person claiming his identity. It would be another several days before a missing persons report was matched with the headless and handless corpse found floating in the North Sea of the fishing town of Grimsby about that same time.
There were two things on which all the police involved agreed. The DNA found in Cantor’s apartment matched that of the body fished from the water. The second was that before the man died he’d been tortured so severely that death would have been a blessed relief.
Because Cantor kept all his notes on the Rustichello Folio in his briefcase, which was never recovered, there was one more crime the authorities never realized was related to his disappearance. There had been a botched break-in of a Hampshire estate down in the southern part of the country near a town called Beaulieu. It happened two days after the last confirmed Cantor appearance. Forensic reconstruction showed that the burglars had been surprised by the widower owner during the robbery, bashed him over the head with a jimmy bar left on the scene—no prints—and fled in panic, not even bothering to take the pillowcases stuffed with sterling silverware they’d already gathered.
None of the police gave a second look at the slim gap in the rank upon rank of books that lined the estate’s paneled library.
2
TRIBAL REGION
NORTHERN WAZIRISTAN
TODAY
THE MOUNTAIN VILLAGE HADN’T CHANGED IN TWO HUNDRED years. Except for the guns, of course. They had long been around, that wasn’t the issue. Rather, it was the type of weapon that had changed. Centuries ago, the bearded men toted bugle-throated blunderbusses. Then came the Tower muskets, followed by the Lee-Enfield rifles, and finally the ubiquitous AK-47s, which flooded into the region thanks to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to the north. And so good were these guns that most were older than the men who carried them. Didn’t matter if he was defending the region from a rival faction or heading off to the outhouse, a man without an AK at the ready was no man.
All this ran through Cabrillo’s mind as he watched two Pashtun youths from the north, kids barely out of their teens, their beards just shadowy stubble on chin and cheek, try to wrestle a pair of goats onto an open-bed truck. All the while the assault rifles slung around their shoulders would slip and go across their chests, hitting the animals hard enough to make them fight the manhandling.
Each time a gun slipped, the boy would have to pause and redirect it back over his shoulder and then try to calm the satyr-eyed goat. The distance was too great to hear, but Cabrillo could imagine the goats’ frightened bleats and the young men’s earnest pleas to Allah for easier ways to handle livestock. It never occurred to them to rest their rifles against the rickety stockade fence for the sixty seconds it would take to load the animals unencumbered.
Take away the forty or so other a
rmed men in the village encampment and he would have found it comical.
He had to admire the kids for one thing. Though he was ensconced in the latest arctic gear, he was still freezing his butt off while they cavorted in a couple of layers of homespun woolen clothing.
Of course Cabrillo hadn’t moved more than his eyelids in the past fifteen hours. And neither had the rest of his team.
In Northern Waziristan, it was traditional that villages were built like citadels on the tops of hills. What grazing and farming was available was accomplished on the slopes leading to the town. In order for him and his people to find a suitable observation post that let them look down on the Taliban encampment, they had to find cover on an adjacent mountain. The distance across the steep valley was only a mile, but it forced them up a snow-and-glacial-ice peak and left them struggling to draw breath at almost ten thousand feet. Through his stabilized binoculars, he could see a couple of old men smoking a never-ending chain of cigarettes.
Cabrillo rued the last cigar he’d smoked, while his lungs felt as if they were drawing on the metallic dregs of an exhausted scuba tank.
A deep baritone came through his earpiece, “They wrangling them goats or getting ready to have their way with them?”
Another voice chimed in, “Since the goats aren’t wearing burkas, at least these boys know what they’re getting.”
“Radio silence,” Cabrillo said. He wasn’t worried about his people losing operational awareness. What concerned him was that the next comment would come from his second-in-command here, Linda Ross. Knowing her sense of humor as he did, whatever she joked about was sure to make him laugh out loud.
One of the young shepherds finally set his wire-stock AK aside, and they got the animals into the truck. By the time the rear gate was closed, the kid had his weapon back over his shoulder. The engine fired with a burst of blue exhaust, and soon the vehicle was chugging anemically away from the mountaintop village. This was an al-Qaeda stronghold, and yet life in the rugged mountains went on. Crops had to be raised, animals grazed, and goods bought and sold. The dirty secret of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban was that while their followers were fanatics, they still needed to be paid. With the money long spent from last fall’s lucrative poppy harvest, traditional means of support were necessary to keep the fighters operational.
There were roughly two dozen buildings in the town. Six or so fronted the dirt road that led down to the valley below, while the others rose behind them on the hill, connected by little more than footpaths. All were made of stone that blended in with the bleak surroundings, with low flat roofs and few windows. The largest was a mosque with a minaret that looked ready to topple.
The few women Cabrillo and his team had seen all wore dark burkas while the men sported baggy pants under jackets called chapans and either turbans or flattened wool caps known as pakols.
“Juan.” Linda Ross’s voice had an elfin lilt that went with her pixielike appearance. “Check out the mosque.”
Careful so as not to draw attention, Cabrillo swung his binoculars a few arc degrees and zoomed in on the mosque’s door. Like the other three members of his team, he was dug into the side of the mountain, with a dirt-covered tarp over the foxhole. They were all invisible from just a few yards away.
He adjusted the focus. Three people were coming out of the mosque. The one with the long gray beard had to be the imam, while the other two were much younger. They walked flanking the man, their expressions solemn as they listened to whatever the holy man imparted to them.
Juan tightened the focus. Both of them had Asiatic features and no facial hair of any kind. Their clothing was out of place for this impoverished region. Their parkas, though of muted colors, were top quality, and they both wore new hiking boots. He looked closer at the smaller of the two. He’d studied that face for hours before beginning the operation, committing it to memory for this precise moment.
“Bingo,” he said softly over their secure communications equipment. “That’s Setiawan Bahar. Everyone keep an eye on him. We need to know where they’re putting him up.”
The odd trio wandered up behind the main road, walking slowly because the imam had a pronounced limp. Intel said he got that limp when Kandahar fell back in 2001. They eventually reached one of the indistinguishable houses. A bearded man greeted them. They spoke at the doorstep for a few minutes and then the homeowner invited the two boys, both Indonesian, into his home. The imam turned to head back to his mosque.
“Okay, we got it,” Juan said. “From now on all eyes on that house so we know he hasn’t left.”
Cabrillo received a quiet chorus of “Roger that.”
Then, against his own orders, Juan swept his binoculars back to the main road as a white Toyota sedan that probably had a couple hundred thousand miles on the odometer swung into town. No sooner had it stopped than the four doors were thrown open and armed men leapt out. Their faces were buried behind the tails of their turbans. They brought their weapons to their shoulders as they circled around to the car’s trunk. One leaned forward and keyed open the lock. The door raised slowly on its hydraulics, and three of the gunmen leaned in with the barrels of their AKs.
Juan couldn’t see what was in the trunk, or most likely who, and waited expectantly as one of the fighters lowered his gun so it hung under his arm and reached into the trunk. He hauled a fifth man from where he’d been lying in a fetal position. Their prisoner wore what looked like standard American-issue BDUs. The boots looked military too. His mouth was gagged, and a blindfold had been cinched over his eyes. His hair was a little longer than Army regulation and blond. He was too weak to stand and collapsed into the dirt as soon as he was free from the car.
“We’ve got a problem,” Cabrillo muttered. He turned his binoculars back to the house where Setiawan Bahar was sequestered and told his people to turn their attention to what passed for the town’s square.
Eddie Seng said nothing, while Linda Ross gasped and Franklin Lincoln cursed.
“Have we heard anything about a captured soldier?” Seng then asked.
“No. Nothing,” Linda replied, her voice tightening as one of the Taliban kicked the captured soldier in the ribs.
In his basso voice, Linc said, “Could have happened in the thirty hours it took us to hump our butts into position. No reason Max would have passed on news like that to us.”
Without taking his eyes off the house, Cabrillo switched radio frequencies. “Oregon, Oregon, do you copy?”
From the port city of Karachi more than five hundred miles to the south came the immediate reply, “This is the Oregon. Hali here, Chairman.”
“Hali, has anything come over the transom since we started this op about an American or NATO soldier kidnapped in Afghanistan?”
“Nothing over the news wires and nothing from official channels, but as you know we’re a bit out of the Pentagon’s loop right now.”
Cabrillo knew that last fact all too well. A few months back, after spending nearly a decade enjoying high-level access to military intelligence through his old mentor at the CIA, Langston Overholt, Cabrillo’s private security company, known as the Corporation and based on a tramp freighter called the Oregon, had become a pariah. They had pulled off an operation in Antarctica to thwart a joint Argentine/Chinese bid to annex and exploit a massive new oil field off the pristine coast of the southern continent. Fearing the geopolitical risks involved, the U.S. government had told them in no uncertain terms not to attempt the mission.
It didn’t matter that they had succeeded spectacularly. They were seen as rogue by the new president, and Overholt was ordered not to use the unique services the Corporation provided. Ever again. It had taken all of Langston’s considerable influence in the corridors of Washington to keep his job following that episode. He’d confessed privately to Juan that the president had chewed off so much of his butt he hadn’t been able to sit for a week.
And that is what brought Cabrillo and this small team here, to one of the few pla
ces on earth never to be occupied by a foreign army. Even Alexander the Great had the sense to avoid Waziristan and the rest of the Northern Tribal Regions. They were here because a wealthy Indonesian businessman, Gunawan Bahar, had a son who ran away to join the Taliban, in much the same way youths of a few generations ago back in the United States ran off to join the circus. Only difference was that young Setiawan hadn’t developed mentally past the age of seven, and the cousin who’d brought him here had told the recruiter in Jakarta that Seti wanted to be a martyr.
American runaways became carnies. Setiawan’s fate was that of a suicide bomber.
Hali continued, “Stoney and Murph have been trolling every database they can lay their hands on since you left.” Eric Stone and Mark Murphy were the Corporation’s IT experts, along with their other duties. “Nothing much by way of news out of any of the ’stans.”
“Tell them to keep an eye out. I’m looking at a blond guy in NATO gear who looks like he’s in a world of hurt.”
“I’ll pass it on,” Hali Kasim, the ship’s chief communications officer, said.
Cabrillo switched back to the tactical net. “Recommendations?”
Linda Ross spoke up immediately. “We can’t leave him here. We all know that in a day or two he’s going to be the star of a jihadist beheading video.”
“Eddie?” Juan asked, knowing the answer.
“Save him.”
“Don’t even ask,” Linc rumbled.
“I didn’t need to.” Juan still had the target house under observation and wouldn’t shift his focus. “What are they doing now?”
“They have him up on his feet,” Linda replied. “His hands are tied behind his back. A couple of the village kids have come out to see him. One of them just spit on him. The other kicked him in the shin. Hold on. The captors are shooing the kids away. Okay, they’re leading him up behind the square, heading in the same direction as our target house. And they’re walking, and walking, and . . . Here we go. Three houses left of where Seti’s staying.”