It was a narrow crack and the image was reversed by the mirror and the corridor lighting was dim, but I recognized them easily enough. They were alone, as far as I could tell. And they were going to stay alone, unless they had brought more than nineteen people with them. No safety catch on the Steyr. Just a hefty double-action pull for the first shot, and then eighteen more. I took the slack out of the trigger and the chain off the door.
They were alone.
They came in, Sansom first, and then Springfield. Sansom looked the same as the morning I first saw him. Tanned, rich, powerful, full of energy and charisma. He was in a navy suit with a white shirt and a red tie and he looked as fresh as a daisy. He took the chair I had been using under the door handle and carried it back to the table near the window and sat down. Springfield closed the door and put the chain back on. I kept hold of the gun. I nudged the mattress off the box spring with my knee and pulled my clothes out one-handed.
‘Two minutes,’ I said. ‘Talk among yourselves.’
I dressed in the bathroom and came back out and Sansom asked, ‘Do you really know where that memory stick is?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I really do.’
‘Why do you want to know what’s on it?’
‘Because I want to know how embarrassing it is.’
‘You don’t want me in the Senate?’
‘I don’t care how you spend your time. I’m curious, that’s all.’
He asked, ‘Why won’t you tell me where it is right now?’
‘Because I have something else to do first. And I need you to keep the cops out of my hair while I’m doing it. So I need a way of keeping your mind on the job.’
‘You could be conning me.’
‘I could be, but I’m not.’
He said nothing back.
I asked, ‘Why do you want to be in the Senate anyway?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘You were a good soldier and now you’re richer than God. Why not go live on the beach?’
‘These things are a way of keeping score. I’m sure you have your own way of keeping score.’
I nodded. ‘I compare the number of answers I get to the number of questions I ask.’
‘And how are you doing with that?’
‘Lifetime average close to a hundred per cent.’
‘Why ask at all? If you know where the stick is, just go get it.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s going to take more resources than I could mobilize.’
‘Where is it?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Is it here in New York?’
I didn’t answer.
He asked, ‘Is it secure?’
I said, ‘It’s safe enough.’
‘Can I trust you?’
‘Plenty of people have.’
‘And?’
‘I think most of them would be willing to give me a character reference.’
‘And the others?’
‘There’s no pleasing some folks.’
He said, ‘I saw your service record.’
I said, ‘You told me that.’
‘It was mixed.’
‘I tried my best. But I had a mind of my own.’
‘Why did you quit?’
‘I got bored. You?’
‘I got old.’
‘What is on that stick?’
He didn’t answer. Springfield was standing mute, in the lee of the TV cabinet, closer to the door than the window. Pure habit, I guessed. Simple reflex. He was invisible to a potential external sniper and close enough to the corridor to be all over an intruder the second the door swung open. Training stays with a person. Especially Delta training. I stepped over and gave him his gun back. He took it without a word and put it in his waistband.
Sansom said, ‘Tell me what you know so far.’
I said, ‘You were airlifted from Bragg to Turkey, and then Oman. Then India, probably. Then Pakistan, and the North West Frontier.’
He nodded and said nothing. He had a faraway look in his eyes. I guessed he was reliving the journey in his mind. Transport planes, helicopters, trucks, long miles on foot.
All long ago.
‘Then Afghanistan,’ I said.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Probably you stayed on the flank of the Abas Ghar and headed south and west, following the line of the Korengal Valley, maybe a thousand feet from the floor.’
‘Go on.’
‘You stumbled over Grigori Hoth and took his rifle and let him wander away.’
‘Go on.’
‘Then you kept on walking, to wherever it was you had been ordered to go.’
He nodded.
I said, ‘That’s all I know so far.’
He asked, ‘Where were you in March of 1983?’
‘West Point.’
‘What was the big news?’
‘The Red Army was trying to stop the bleeding.’
He nodded again. ‘It was an insane campaign. No one has ever beaten the tribesmen in the North West Frontier. Not in the whole of history. And they had our own experience in Vietnam to study. Some things just can’t be done. It was a slow-motion meat grinder. Like getting pecked to death by birds. We were very happy about it, obviously.’
‘We helped,’ I said.
‘We sure did. We gave the mujahideen everything they wanted. For free.’
‘Like Lend-Lease.’
‘Worse,’ Sansom said. ‘Lend-Lease was about helping friends that happened to be bankrupt at the time. The mujahideen were not bankrupt. Quite the reverse. There were all kinds of weird tribal alliances that stretched all the way to Saudi. The mujahideen had more money than we did, practically.’
‘And?’
‘When you’re in the habit of giving people everything they want, it’s very hard to stop.’
‘What more did they want?’
‘Recognition,’ he said. ‘Tribute. Acknowledgement. Courtesy. Face time. It’s hard to know exactly how to characterize it.’
‘So what was the mission?’
‘Can we trust you?’
‘You want to get the file back?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what was the mission?’
‘We went to see the mujahideen’s top boy. Bearing gifts. All kinds of gaudy trinkets, from Ronald Reagan himself. We were his personal envoys. We had a White House briefing. We were told to pucker up and kiss ass at every possible opportunity.’
‘And did you?’
‘You bet.’
‘It was twenty-five years ago.’
‘So?’
‘So who cares any more? It’s a detail of history. And it worked, anyway. It was the end of communism.’
‘But it wasn’t the end of the mujahideen. They stayed in business.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘They became the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But that’s a detail, too. Voters in North Carolina aren’t going to remember the history. Most voters can’t remember what they had for breakfast.’
‘Depends,’ Sansom said.
‘On what?’
‘Name recognition.’
‘What name?’
‘The Korengal was where the action was. Just a small salient, but that was where the Red Army met its end. The mujahideen there were doing a really fine job. Therefore the local mujahideen leader there was a really big deal. He was a rising star. He was the one we were sent to meet. And we did. We met with him.’
‘And you kissed his ass?’
‘Every which way we could.’
‘Who was he?’
‘He was a fairly impressive guy, initially. Young, tall, good-looking, very intelligent, very committed. And very rich, by the way. Very connected. He came from a billionaire family in Saudi. His father was a friend of Reagan’s Vice President. But the guy himself was a revolutionary. He quit the easy life for the cause.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Osama bin Laden.’
&nb
sp; SIXTY-SIX
The room stayed quiet for a long moment. Just muted city sounds from the window, and the hiss of air from a vent above the bathroom. Springfield moved away from his position by the TV cabinet and sat down on the bed.
I said, ‘Name recognition.’
Sansom said, ‘It’s a bitch.’
‘You got that right.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘But it’s a big file,’ I said.
‘So?’
‘So it’s a long report. And we’ve all read army reports.’
‘And?’
‘They’re very dry.’ Which they were. Take Springfield’s Steyr GB, for instance. The army had tested it. It was a miracle of modern engineering. Not only did it work exactly like it should, it also worked exactly like it shouldn’t. It had a complex gas-delayed blowback system that meant it could be loaded with substandard or elderly or badly assembled rounds and still fire. Most guns have problems with variable gas pressures. Either they blow up with too much or fail to cycle with too little. But the Steyr could handle anything. Which was why Special Forces loved it. They were often far from home with no logistics, forced to rely on whatever they could scrounge up locally. The Steyr GB was a metal marvel.
The army report called it technically acceptable.
I said, ‘Maybe they didn’t mention you by name. Maybe they didn’t mention him by name. Maybe it was all acronyms, for Delta leader and local commander, all buried in three hundred pages of map references.’
Sansom said nothing.
Springfield looked away.
I asked, ‘What was he like?’
Sansom said, ‘See? This is exactly what I’m talking about. My whole life counts for nothing now, except I’m the guy who kissed Osama bin Laden’s ass. That’s all anyone will ever remember.’
‘But what was he like?’
‘He was a creep. He was clearly committed to killing Russians, which we were happy about at first, but pretty soon we realized he was committed to killing everyone who wasn’t exactly the same as him. He was weird. He was a psychopath. He smelled bad. It was a very uncomfortable weekend. My skin was crawling the whole time.’
‘You were there a whole weekend?’
‘Honoured guests. Except not really. He was an arrogant son of a bitch. He lorded it over us the whole time. He lectured us on tactics and strategy. Told us how he would have won in Vietnam. We had to pretend to be impressed.’
‘What gifts did you give him?’
‘I don’t know what they were. They were wrapped. He didn’t open them. Just tossed them in a corner. He didn’t care. Like they say at weddings, our presence was present enough. He thought he was proving something to the world. The Great Satan was bending its knee before him. I nearly puked a dozen times. And not just because of the food.’
‘You ate with him?’
‘We were staying in his tent.’
‘Which will be called their HQ in the report. The language will be very neutral. The ass-kissing won’t be mentioned. It will be three hundred tedious pages about a rendezvous attempted and a rendezvous kept. People will die of boredom before you’re halfway over the Atlantic. Why are you so worried?’
‘The politics is awful. The Lend-Lease thing. In as much as bin Laden wasn’t dipping into his own personal fortune, it’s like we were subsidizing him. Paying him, almost.’
‘Not your fault. That’s White House stuff. Did any sea captain get it in the neck for delivering Lend-Lease stuff to the Soviets during World War Two? They didn’t stay our friends either.’
Sansom said nothing.
I said, ‘It’s just words on a page. They won’t resonate. People don’t read.’
Sansom said, ‘It’s a big file.’
‘The bigger the better. The bigger it is, the more buried the bad parts will be. And it will be very dated. I think we used to spell his name differently back then. With a U. It was Usama. Or UBL. Maybe people won’t even notice. Or you could say it was someone else entirely.’
‘You sure you know where that stick is?’
‘Certain.’
‘Because you sound like you don’t. You sound like you’re trying to console me, because you know it’s staying out there for the world to see.’
‘I know where it is. I’m just trying to get a handle on why you’re so uptight. People have survived worse.’
‘You ever used a computer?’
‘I used one today.’
‘What makes for the biggest files?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Take a guess.’
‘Long documents?’
‘Wrong. Large numbers of pixels make for the biggest files.’
‘Pixels?’ I said.
He didn’t answer.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I see. It’s not a report. It’s a photograph.’
SIXTY-SEVEN
The room went quiet again. The city sounds, the forced air. Sansom got up and used the bathroom. Springfield moved back to his former position by the TV cabinet. There were bottles of water on the cabinet, with paper collars that said if you drank the water you would be charged eight dollars.
Sansom came out of the bathroom.
‘Reagan wanted the photograph,’ he said. ‘Partly because he was a sentimental old geezer, and partly because he was a suspicious old man. He wanted to check we had followed his orders. The way I remember it, I’m standing next to bin Laden with the mother of all shit-eating grins on my