Locked On

47

Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Charles Alden reached Paul Laska just after midnight. The old man was home in his bed, but he’d given Alden a number that would allow him to be contacted, no matter the hour.

“Hello?”

“Paul. It’s Charles.”

“I did not expect to hear from you. You told me you wouldn’t get involved past what you’ve already done.”

“It’s too late for that. Kealty has pulled me in.”

“You can refuse him, you know. He won’t be President for much longer.”

Alden thought this over for a moment. Then he said, “It’s in everyone’s interest that we capture John Clark. We have to find out who he’s working with. How he managed to catch the Emir. Who the other people are in his group.”

“I understand Mr. Clark has left the United States, and the CIA is working on this overseas.”

“Your network of intelligence assets rivals my own, Paul.”

A slight chuckle from the old man in his bed. “What can I do for you?”

“I am worried that despite my wishes and intentions, my colleagues at the Central Intelligence Agency will be disinclined to put the full might of their powers into the hunt for John Clark. The rank and file reveres the man. I’ve got everyone hunting for him, but these are hunters who are just going through the motions. And I … I mean, Kealty is on one hell of a time constraint.”

After a long pause Laska said, “You would like my help in bringing in outsiders to do the work that needs to be done.”

“That is it exactly.”

“I know someone who can help us.”

“I thought you might.”

“Fabrice Bertrand-Morel.”

The pause was brief now. Charles Sumner Alden said, “He owns an investigation concern in France, I believe?”

“Correct. He runs the largest international private detective firm there is, with offices all over the world. If Clark has left the U.S., then Fabrice Bertrand-Morel’s men will ferret him out.”

“He sounds like he will be a suitable choice,” Alden said.

Laska replied, “It’s six a.m. in France. If I call him now, I will reach him on his morning walk. I will arrange a late dinner for us this evening over there.”

“Excellent.”

“Good night, Charles.”

“Paul … We need him alive. We understand that, right?”

“Good Lord. Why would you even entertain the thought that I might—”

“Because I know Bertrand-Morel has hunted men down and killed them in the past.”

“I have heard the allegations, but nothing has ever gone past the inquiry stage.”

“Well, that is because he has been helpful to the nations where his crimes have been committed.”

Laska did not speak to this, so Alden rendered an explanation for his knowledge of this man and his company.

“I’m with the CIA. We know all about the work of Fabrice Bertrand-Morel. He has a reputation as capable but unscrupulous. And his men have a reputation around the CIA as cutthroats. Now … please understand. I need absolute clarity between you and me that neither President Kealty nor anyone working with or for him is advocating that Mr. Clark be murdered.”

“We have an accord. Good night, Charles,” Laska said.

Sam Driscoll found himself surprised and quite confused to see the sunrise. His guards did not communicate with him at all, so he never knew why Haqqani’s people did not follow General Rehan’s order to interrogate him and then stand him up against the wall and shoot him.

Luck is real and, once in a while, it is even good. Driscoll would never know, but the day before his capture in the FATA, twenty-five miles north of his location in Miran Shah, three senior Haqqani network chiefs were picked up at a roadblock in Gorbaz, a small Afghani town just south of the Haqqani stronghold of Khost. For a few weeks Haqqani and his men thought NATO forces were holding the men, and Siraj Haqqani himself, after learning of the fortuitous capture by his men of a Western spy, sent orders countermanding Rehan’s wishes. The American would be held in trade for his men, and he was not to be harmed.

It was not for another two months that the bodies of the three Haqqani network chiefs were found wrapped in burlap floor coverings and dumped in a garbage heap north of Khost. They were victims of a rival Taliban affiliate group. NATO had nothing to do with their capture or murder.

But this bought Driscoll a little time.

In the early morning after Rehan’s visit, Driscoll’s chains were freed from the eyebolt in the floor and he was pulled to his feet. He wobbled on his injured legs. His head was covered in a traditional patu shawl, presumably to make him invisible to UAVs, and he was shuffled out of his cold cell, pushed into the dawn’s light, and helped up into the back of a Toyota Hilux truck.

He was driven north, out of the compound by the Bannu Road bridge, up Bannu, and deeper into the city of Miran Shah. He heard truck engines and horns honking, at intersections he could hear men on foot as they walked the narrow streets, even so early in the morning.

They cleared the town minutes later. Sam knew this by the increase in speed, and the lack of noises from other vehicles.

They drove for almost two hours; as far as Driscoll could tell he was not in a convoy at all, just sitting in the back of a single pickup truck that cruised through open territory, seemingly without a care in the world. The men in the back with him — he had identified three distinct voices but felt sure there were more — laughed and joked with one another.

They didn’t seem to worry about American drones or Pakistani Defense Force ground troops.

No, this was Haqqani territory; the men around Sam in the truck were in charge here.

Finally they rolled up the North Waziristan road into the town of Aziz Khel, and pulled into a large gated compound. Sam was hauled from the truck as it stopped and then frog-walked into a building. Here his head covering was removed and he found himself in a dark hallway. He was led down the hall; he passed rooms full of women in burkas who did their best to stay in the shadows, and he passed long-bearded armed Haqqani network gunmen at the top of a stone staircase that led down into a basement level.

He stumbled more than once. The shrapnel wounds in his thighs and calves had caused muscle injuries that made walking uncoordinated as well as painful, and with the metal chains on his wrists he could not reach out to balance himself.

As he passed the locals here, he was somewhat surprised to see there was little interest in him from those around the compound. Either this place got a lot of prisoners or they were just disciplined enough to not make a show of someone new in their midst.

Down in the basement he had his answer. He entered a room at the end of a stone hall, then passed a long row of small iron-bar-fronted cells on his left. Looking into the dim cages, he counted seven prisoners. One was Western, a young man who did not speak as Driscoll passed. Two more were Asian; they lay on rope cots and stared blankly back at him.

The rest of the prisoners were Afghans or Pakistanis. One of these men, a burly older man with a long gray beard, lay on the floor of his cell on his back. His eyes were half open and glassy. It was apparent even in the low light that his life would be leaving his body soon unless he received medical care.

Driscoll’s new home was the last cell on the left. It was dark and cold, but there was a rope cot that would keep him off the concrete floor, and the guards removed his chains. As the iron bars clanged shut behind him, he stepped over the waste bucket and eased his sore body onto the cot.

For a former Army Ranger accustomed to living an austere life, these digs weren’t the worst he’d ever seen. They were a damn sight better than where he’d just come from, and the fact that it looked like he might be here for a while, while it was certainly not his first choice, caused his spirits to improve markedly from where they had been a day before.

But more than anything involving his own predicament, Sam Driscoll thought about his mission. He just had to find some way to get the word back to The Campus that General Rehan was working with Haqqani network agents on something that he very much wanted to keep shrouded in secrecy.