Private Wars

One left.

Being careful to stay out of the headlights to avoid casting a silhouette, Chace moved up the street, to the last car, in time to see the last walker sprinting toward her. She heard him call out, saw the pistol in his hand, and he called out a second time, and she realized he was shouting the name of the driver. She adjusted her grip on the hush puppy, holding it with both hands, low, breathing through her nose. The cold air burned, and she smelled exhaust and coffee and fried food, and a piece of her mind that had somehow remained detached from everything that had happened in the last two and a half minutes concluded that the driver had been having his dinner before she’d killed him.

When he was perhaps twenty-five feet away, the walker faltered, almost skidding to a stop, and Chace knew he had seen something, perhaps her silhouette, perhaps the body of the last driver. He started to bring his pistol up, but she had been ready, and beat him on the index, firing twice, then twice more. In the distance and the darkness, she couldn’t see her hits, but she saw the results, and the man twisted on his feet, a top in its final stages, then toppled.

Chace took a moment to catch her breath.

Then she turned back to her Volga, climbed once more behind the wheel, and drove up to the front of the house, parking at an angle, half on the driveway, half off. The lights on the ground floor were burning, but the lights above were all out. A single fixture burned above the door.

She left the engine running and walked up the path, setting the slide lock on the hush puppy as she made her way to the door. This time, silence would be more important than volume. The light dug at her eyes, killing off the last vestiges of her night vision. There was no peephole on the door, which was a marginal surprise, and no cameras posted above or around, which was not. Chace tried not to think about the men with the room-brooms on watch inside.

She knocked firmly, twice.

She raised the hush puppy in both hands, and waited.

Just need to use the toilet, she thought, and then found herself fighting a giggle, because, in fact, she was sure she did.

The door rattled, parted, and she saw a slice of a man’s face. She fired, stepping forward and shoving the door, and managed to catch him before he hit the floor. It struck her that he looked awfully young, and for a moment she was afraid she’d made a mistake and had the terrifying but fleeting fear that she’d done all this work only to enter the wrong house. But as she laid the body down on the carpet, beside the rows of shoes left by their owners, she saw the MP-5K resting on the sideboard.

Chace shut the door quietly, working the slide on the hush puppy and removing the empty casing, tucking it into her pants. She’d dumped the spent shells from the garage at the cemetery, so they wouldn’t collide and ring in her pocket. Then she slipped the hush puppy back into her jacket and brought out the knife at her back.

She listened, and for several seconds didn’t hear anything.

Then she heard distant waves rolling onto a shore.

She followed the sound, taking each step as its own movement, keeping her progress deliberate. A stairway ran to the second floor, carpeted, but she ignored it for the moment, pressing forward. The sound of waves disappeared, replaced by a man’s voice, speaking Russian, and she could make out enough to know she was hearing commentary to a football match. A second voice joined the first, and then both laughed.

She came off the hallway, through an open archway, into a kitchen, the sound of the television growing gently louder. She passed the light switch as she entered, and threw it, turning the room dark. A dining room opened up in front of her with a view of the backyard, a semidarkened hallway to her left. She took the hallway, still moving slowly, still hearing the television, now finally able to discern its light at the end of the corridor, beyond a half-opened door. Along the left-hand side were two doors, closed; on the right, one, partially ajar, and she could make out bathroom fixtures within.

Halfway down the hall, she heard movement from the room with the television, the creak of furniture springs losing their tension. She retreated as quickly as she could to the kitchen, then turned and put her back to the wall on the opposite side of the opening to the hall as the light switch. She spun the blade in her hand into a stabbing grip, trying to keep her breathing steady, steeling herself.

It was called wet work for a reason.

A man stepped through the archway. She saw him in profile as he squinted in the darkness, then muttered a curse. He half pivoted away from her, the MP-5K on a strap over his shoulder, reaching to turn on the light with his right hand. She saw he was perhaps an inch or two shorter than her, broad-shouldered, and bald.

Chace stepped behind him, bringing the knife up in her right hand, reaching around with her left to cup his chin, pulling it toward her. She stabbed horizontally into his neck, jabbing once, twice, and again and again and again in rapid succession, and blood sprayed out of the man, hot on her hand and face. She stabbed into his neck a sixth time, but he was deadweight on her now, and she had to kneel to avoid dropping him completely. A ragged breath broke through his perforated skin.

That was the last sound he made.

Chace got back to her feet, saw that the knife in her hand was jumping slightly, a tuning fork catching some stray vibration, and that her hands were trembling. She cleaned the blade on the back of the man’s shirt, then stepped over him and back into the hallway, dimly aware that her front, even down to her trousers, was stained and slick with blood.

She checked the television room first, and found no one there. Working back, she hit the rooms on the hall, opening each door with painful care, just enough to glimpse what was inside. Each room housed two more men, sleeping.

She let them sleep and headed upstairs.

Chace found Stepan first, the toddler curled in a crib in a room with balloon wallpaper, his bottom thrust up into the air, as if he’d fallen asleep while preparing to somersault. She hesitated, then backed out, finally locating the master bedroom after two more doors.

Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov slept in a king-size bed, but only on one side, the one nearest the door. The light from the hallway bled into the room, and Chace recognized him from the photograph Riess had shown her on his digital camera. A positive identification. The way he slept surprised Chace for a second, because she’d expected him to take the opposite side, that it would have been his wife who had wanted to be nearest their son. But of course, that was the reason, wasn’t it?

Chace wondered if Ruslan had changed the sheets since Dina had been murdered.

She approached the bed carefully, not wanting to wake him until she could make certain he’d stay silent, mindful of the four guards and their four submachine guns sleeping below. Reaching his side, she crouched down on her haunches, then put her right hand over his mouth, sealing it with her palm, but keeping his nose free.

He came awake almost instantly, and as soon as Chace saw his eyes open, she put her mouth to his ear and began whispering, “Friend,” in Russian, over and over. Ruslan surged upward, eyes bulging, and Chace couldn’t blame him for that; if someone had woken her like this, clapping a gore-slicked hand over her mouth, she’d have tried to scream bloody murder. She shoved him back down, rising up to add her weight to the press, trying to keep him relatively immobile.

“Friend,” she kept repeating.

Ruslan’s arms came up, straining to break her grip, one going to her forearm, one reaching for her face. Then, abruptly, they dropped to his side, and she saw the confusion come into his eyes, stealing away the panic.

“Understand?” she asked, sticking with Russian.

Ruslan nodded.

“Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov?”

He nodded again.

“I’m here to take you and your son to London.”

There was the briefest pause, the confusion again awash in his eyes, before he nodded a third time.

“Quietly,” Chace whispered. “Four still asleep downstairs.” She removed her hand, stepping back from the bed, showing him her empty palms.

Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov sat up gasping for air, staring at her, half in horror, half in amazement. She couldn’t fault him the look; her clothes were covered with blood, much of it still wet, and she stank of gunpowder, sweat, and death. She resisted the urge to touch her hair, to try to brush it back into place, gave him another second to stare, then stepped closer.

“I have a car outside,” she said in Russian. “Dress quickly, we get your son, and we go.”

Without a word, Ruslan started moving, rising and heading to the dresser on the wall opposite the foot of the bed. He stripped, back to her, began pulling on clothes, and Chace watched him for a half second longer, then stepped lightly back, toward the door, to listen at the opening. There was no sound from downstairs, only the shift of cloth and movement as Ruslan continued to dress. Chace took the time to draw the hush puppy, then shrug out of the flak jacket. When she looked back to Ruslan, he was almost fully, if hastily, dressed in dark trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, now working on his shoes.

“It’s cold,” Chace whispered to him.

He nodded, finished with his last shoe, moved to the closet. From inside he pulled a thick overcoat.

“You have to keep your son quiet,” Chace told him. “Can you keep Stepan quiet?”

He was pulling on his overcoat, and surprised her by answering in English, his accent more Russian than Uzbek, but not so thick as to make him unintelligible. “Yes, he’ll stay quiet.”

Chace held out the flak jacket for him. “Wrap him in this,” she answered, now speaking English, too. “It’ll offer some protection.”

Ruslan balked for a second, looking at the blood-soaked garment, then nodded, taking it.

“Follow me,” Chace said, and slipped out the door, back into the hall. There was still nothing from below, no motion, no noise. She covered the distance to the child’s room, feeling Ruslan close behind her, then let him pass her when they entered. Ruslan moved to the crib, scooping up his son and whispering a flood of Uzbek as he did, cradling the little boy against his chest, wrapping the flak jacket around him. The boy barely stirred, and Chace wondered if Ruslan could keep him asleep until they were out of the house.

“Stay close,” Chace told him. “The car is out front. When we reach it, get in the back, then lie down on Stepan.”

“Yes,” Ruslan whispered.

Chace pivoted, moved back into the bright light of the upstairs hall, to the top of the landing. She stole a glance over the railing, down to the floor below, and saw no one but the body she’d left just inside the doorway. She motioned for Ruslan to follow, and he emerged from his son’s room. When the light hit Stepan, the boy squawked in soft protest, burying his face further against Ruslan’s chest, and Chace thought of Tamsin without wanting to or meaning to, then turned away, leading father and son down the stairs.

She checked the entry hall, looking back toward the darkened kitchen, then turned to the front door and edged it open, the hush puppy held in low-ready, with both hands. No one was outside, and the sound of the unattended Volga, its engine still wheezing, was the only thing she heard.

“Now,” Chace said, and she ran for the car, Ruslan with his son still in his arms close on her heels. She reached the car first, whipping her head around, checking the street in both directions even as she pulled open the rear door. The boy was crying now, startled and unnerved as Ruslan bundled him inside, and Chace heard his father’s voice, low and calm and constant, speaking in Uzbek. She slammed the door behind them, jumped into the driver’s seat, and accelerated out, wheeling the car around into a one-eighty. She floored it, the Volga reluctant at first, then finally catching speed.

From the backseat, she heard Stepan’s sobs turn to howls.

Chace slid the Volga to a stop beside the Range Rover, jumped out, saying, “Wait here.”

“What—” Ruslan began, almost shouting over Stepan’s screams.

She ignored him, moving to the tailgate. Without the flak jacket, the cold was beginning to eat at her, finding the sweat and blood still wet on her skin and clothes. A wind was starting to rise, light, but enough to make her shiver.

Chace pulled the Starstreak from the Range Rover, switched on the power to the aiming unit and ignition, then hoisted it onto her shoulder, settling her right eye against the monocular. Sweat clung to her eyelashes, stinging her, and she blinked, trying to clear her eyes. A new anticipation swelled in her chest, a strange collusion of fear and excitement, almost arousing. She knew the Starstreak from reports, from technical papers and military analysis. She knew the Starstreak academically, what it could do, how it did it. But she’d never fired one herself, never seen the results in person. She lined up the aiming mark, exhaling slowly.

She depressed the firing stud, the small white button resting below her right thumb.

For a fraction of a second there was nothing, no response from the Starstreak, and her thoughts flashed on the possibility that the unit was dead, that the internal battery was incapable of engaging the first-stage motor and starting the launch sequence. Then, on her shoulder, she felt the tube rumble, the missile hissing, the sound of a kettle just before boil. Thrust drove the launcher hard into her shoulder, pressing her down, and she grit her teeth, fighting to keep the aiming mark steady on target. It all took an instant, and then, just as swiftly, the pressure was gone.

It all came back to her then, all of the clinical data, the briefings, the analysis. Starstreak, designed as a high-velocity extreme-short-range MANPAD, maximum distance five kilometers, minimum only three hundred meters. Composed of a two-stage rocket motor, capped with a three-dart kinetically driven payload guidance system. The electronic pulse delivered via the firing stud engages the first-stage motor, propelling the missile from its canister while canted nozzles on the side of the rocket force it to rotate, the rotation in turn causing its fins to deploy, providing stabilization in flight.

Missile clears launch tube, first-stage motor is jettisoned, second stage is engaged, providing full thrust, and accelerating the rocket to speeds in excess of Mach 4. Missile closes to target, the darts fire, each dart with its own high-density penetrating explosive payload, fuse, guidance system, and thermal battery. Dart separation from missile initiates the arming of each warhead, each dart guided independently via a double laser-beam riding system, controlled by the missile operator via the aiming unit.

That was the clinical, the academic, what she knew.

What she experienced was the roar of the launch, the shock of the missile leaving the launch tube, the flare of light, the wash of heat. White-hot fire streaking horizontally toward number 14 Uzbekiston, her arm shaking, her eye stinging, trying to keep the aiming mark on the door, left wide open in the wake of their flight.

The missile vanished, and for a fraction, nothing, not noise, not light, nothing.

Then the house exploded.

Chace felt the concussion throughout her body, dropped the launch tube, and turned her back to the flames and falling debris. From the back of the Range Rover, she scooped up the Kalashnikov, the spare magazines, and the blanket, then made her way to the Volga, climbing inside. Ruslan was staring at her, and Stepan, for the moment, had gone silent, held against his father’s shoulder, staring past him, at the ruins of the house.

She started the car and pulled away from the Range Rover.

In the backseat, Stepan said something in Uzbek, and Ruslan responded tartly. In the rearview mirror, Chace could see the man still staring at her. Stepan repeated the word, and Ruslan responded the same way.

“What’s he saying?” Chace asked.

“Again,” Ruslan said. “He wants you to do it again.”

This time, the urge to laugh was too strong, and Chace didn’t bother to fight it.

CHAPTER 23

London—Vauxhall Cross, Operations Room

20 February, 2324 Hours GMT

Crocker came onto the Ops Room floor, shrugging out of his overcoat, demanding, “What’s the latest?”

“Tashkent Station now confirms that there was an explosion at the home of Ruslan Malikov,” Alexis Ferguson told him from the MCO Desk. “Estimates the blast at twenty past three zone. Several dead, several missing and presumed dead. There’s been no indication if Malikov or his kid is among the fatalities. State-run radio has issued a statement, confirming that there was an explosion, and blaming Hizb-ut-Tahir for the blast.”

From his inside pocket, Crocker found his cigarettes, then abandoned the coat and crossed the room, heading for Alexis. “Anything more?”

“Station Number Two has a man inside the police department who reports that there’s been activity at the NSS, and that both the NSS and the police are engaged in a full-scale search for the perpetrators. Apparently there are two different vehicle descriptions being circulated at the moment, one for a blue Volga, late model, the other for an Audi. It seems they’re searching for both cars, though how they’re connected to the blast, the Station Number Two can’t say.”

“The blast, it wasn’t a car bomb?”

“Unclear one way or the other.”

Crocker nodded, then stepped back, looking up at the plasma wall for a moment before lighting his cigarette. From the Duty Ops Desk, he heard Ron stifling a yawn. He empathized, though only slightly; Ron had relief coming on-shift in two more hours. Crocker, who’d been at home and about to head for bed when the call had come informing him of what had happened in Tashkent, doubted he’d be getting sleep anytime soon.

“You think it’s a coup, sir?” Ron asked him.

“No. Not unless someone’s gone after the President and his daughter as well.”

“No word of that,” Alexis confirmed.

“So no, it’s not a coup.” Crocker frowned, then moved back to the Duty Ops station. “You’ve informed the DC, C, and the FCO?”

“As per usual, yes, sir. C hasn’t arrived yet, but the DC is in her office.”

Crocker lifted up the handset on one of the internal phones, held it out for Ron to take. “Inform her I’m coming up.”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned to face Alexis. “Signal Tashkent, get the Number One on an open line, and tell him to stay there. Inform him that I want updates every twenty minutes, and have him tell the Number Two that I’m especially interested in the pursuit, and any new information about the vehicles, however minor it may seem. Anything they get on those last, they’re to inform us immediately. I’ll be upstairs.”

“Understood, sir.”

Crocker grabbed his coat, and headed for Alison Gordon-Palmer’s office.

“Would Chace have blown up the house?” the Deputy Chief asked.

“It’s not a bad way to cover one’s tracks,” Crocker told her. “Creates one hell of a mess, and makes it difficult if not impossible to quickly determine if Ruslan and his boy are missing, rather than dead.”

She rested her elbows on her desk, folding her hands one over the other, resting her chin upon them, musing. “So it’s possible she did it.”

“Yes, it’s possible. She’s not one to go big if she can get away with small, but if the opportunity and means presented itself, yes, I can see her doing it.”

“Presuming that Chace is responsible in the first place?”

“I think she is. I think she’s made the lift, and she’s on the run to her RV.”

“But no way to confirm?”

“Not without informing Tashkent Station that Chace is there to begin with, no,” Crocker said. “Though you were right about Seale. I could check with the CIA.”

Alison Gordon-Palmer frowned slightly. “No, let’s keep the Americans out of it for the moment.”

Something in the way she said it struck Crocker as off, but before he could ask the question, the Deputy Chief had continued.

“The blast. Assuming it was Chace, and assuming she did it after getting Ruslan and his son clear, how would she have managed it?”

“Again, I can’t say. We don’t have enough details about the blast, if the house was leveled or if the reports are exaggerated. She was traveling light, and without support, so anything she’s using she must have acquired on the ground.”

She raised an eyebrow at him, and Crocker knew what she wanted to hear.

“It is possible it was a Starstreak missile, yes,” he conceded.

“Which she acquired in Tashkent somehow.”

“She didn’t bring it with her from London.” Crocker shifted position in his chair, leaning forward. “Isn’t it time you told me what you and Sir Walter are up to?”

The Deputy Chief considered, raising her head off her hands, then lowering her arms to lie flat on her desk. Her office, like Crocker’s, was spare, sparsely furnished and sparsely decorated. Unlike Crocker’s desk, though, hers was almost bare as well, devoid of almost all paper, and occupied with only the barest of office essentials.

“Barclay talked to you,” she said after a moment’s consideration. “He offered you my job, didn’t he?”

Crocker saw no reason to deny it. “Yes, he did.”

“And you’re willing to burn him?”

“I think that’s evident. And he thinks you and Sir Walter are moving to burn him, doesn’t he? That’s part of what this is about.”

“Paul,” Alison Gordon-Palmer said, “it’s all that this is about.”

He needed a second, which was long enough for the realization to both hit and sicken him.

“It’s a dummy run?” Crocker asked. “I’ve sent Chace on a dummy run?”

“Nothing so crude. If she can get Ruslan and his son out, so much the better.”

“But you’re saying there’s no plan for a coup?”

“Not anymore.”

“What changed?”

“The CIA got wind of it, and bless their souls, they promptly told the White House. And the White House came back to Downing Street and said in no uncertain terms that Sevara Malikov-Ganiev was to be the next President of the Democratic Republic of Uzbekistan.” She straightened in her chair, gauging Crocker’s reaction, seeing the distress. “It hardly matters, Paul.”

“It matters to Chace.”

“What would you have done if I’d told you this four hours ago? You have no contact with her, correct? You wouldn’t have been able to get her to abort even if you wanted to.”

It was true, but it didn’t make Crocker feel any better.

“We’ll get her back, don’t worry,” the Deputy Chief told him. “CIA knows she’s there, they’ll watch out for her.”

“Unless the White House decides otherwise.”

“Instruments of government, Paul. If they bend, break, or discard us, it’s their prerogative.”

“I’m sure that’ll be of some comfort to her daughter, though at the moment, I can’t imagine how.”

The Deputy Chief narrowed her eyes, began to respond, and then her phone rang, so she answered it instead.

It was C, informing them that he was in his office and ready to see them now.

“We’ll be right up, sir,” Alison Gordon-Palmer told him, then replaced the handset carefully in its cradle. “He wants us upstairs.”

Crocker got to his feet. “And what are you going to tell him?”

She shook her head, rising with him. “No, Paul, not me, you. You’re going to tell him exactly what you just told me.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. And you can tell him that Chace may well have found one of his missing Starstreaks.” She opened the door to the outer office, holding it for Crocker. “I think he’ll be particularly happy with that bit of news, don’t you?”

“I doubt it,” Crocker said.

CHAPTER 24

Uzbekistan—Syr Darya Province—

Samarkand Road, 63 km Southwest Tashkent

21 February, 0424 Hours (GMT+5:00)

One headlight was enough, it seemed, the xenon beam harsh on the two-lane highway that ran south from Tashkent to Dzhizak and then on to Samarkand, a memory of the Silk Road long past. At the edges of the light, the landscape siding the road glowed like the surface of the moon, the dirt and dust turning a blue-white. The wind that had come up on them in Tashkent was stronger south of the city, howling along the valley, and fingers of dust twirled along the surface of the road.

Chace drove fast, taking the Audi up to a hundred and forty kilometers an hour and then holding it there wherever the road would allow. The sound of the air rushing past the car clogged her left ear, but the vehicle’s aerodynamics were strong, and most of the wind stayed outside the car instead of climbing inside with them. Occasionally, a gust would break through, snapping Chace’s hair so hard she could feel it stinging her neck.

Ruslan sat in the front passenger’s seat, his eyes fixed on the road ahead of them whenever he wasn’t twisting himself about to check on his son, asleep in the back, the blanket Chace had taken from the Range Rover wrapped tightly around him. Chace marveled at it, that the boy could sleep through the racket of the wind and the car, with all that had happened so far. She envied Stepan. Right now, she wanted sleep, too.

The adrenaline crash was wicked, revealing a soreness throughout her body and a dull ache in her limbs. Her left bicep twinged regularly when she moved the arm, reminding her of the exertion required in holding a man’s throat exposed while stabbing him to death. The blood on her hands and arms had dried, and every so often a flake would come loose, caught in the wind, sending it spiraling in one random direction or another, a red snowflake that flipped through the car.

Chace checked her mirrors again, barely aware she was doing it, and saw Ruslan shift in his seat, either nervous, uncomfortable, or both. He’d ridden in silence ever since they’d switched to the Audi, and he hadn’t really been talkative prior to that, for the obvious reasons. What little he’d said had been directed at his son, and in Uzbek. But since they’d made the Audi and hit the road, there’d been nothing more from him. Surely he had questions—dozens of them, more than likely—but thus far, he was keeping them to himself.

“My orders are to take you both to England, sir,” Chace said, after another reflexive check of the mirrors, thinking that an explanation of one sort or another was in order. “We’re on our way to a landing zone where we’ll be met by a helicopter to fly us out.”

She hadn’t expected him to answer, and he surprised her when he did, asking, “Not America?”

“No.”

“My wife was working with the Americans.” He raised his left hand, rubbed his eyes, wiping sleep from their corners. “Before Zahidov raped and murdered her, she was working for the Americans. You are working with the Americans as well?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I don’t understand.”

Chace shook her head, barely. “I wouldn’t worry about it, sir.”

“But I must worry about it, I have no choice. My son and I are fleeing for our lives with a woman covered in blood in Ahtam Zahidov’s automobile. There is nothing more for me to do now than worry about it.”

“My orders are—”

“Yes, you said that,” Ruslan snapped, then added something softer in Uzbek, the shape of the words lost beneath the wind rushing past the shattered window. From the corner of her eye, Chace saw him shift in his seat once more, checking again on Stepan, then resume looking out the windshield. “My name is Ruslan, not ‘sir.’ ”

Chace nodded. “Tracy.”

“Tracy?”

“Tracy.”

Ruslan nodded, and neither of them spoke again for another half-dozen kilometers, and oddly, Chace found herself growing uncomfortable with the silence. She supposed it was because Ruslan’s doubts were her doubts, that he was asking questions that she had asked herself. Riess had said Sevara had White House support, and much as she was loath to admit it, she was having a hard time believing that her government would want to oppose the Americans, at least with regard to the future of Uzbekistan.

“How old is he?” She tilted her head to indicate Stepan in the backseat.

“My son is two and two months now.”

Chace hesitated. “I have a daughter. Almost ten months old.”

Ruslan reappraised her, mildly surprised, before saying, “Ten months was good for Stepan. He was walking at ten months.”

“Mine’s not walking yet,” she said. She considered his reaction to their newly discovered common ground, thought that it might help to put him more at ease if she continued. Tamsin had ignored crawling altogether until only the week before Chace had left Barnoldswick, at which point she’d begun pulling up and the first attempts at cruising. She was adept at it, could make her way around the living room, wobbling wildly, using her hands to find support wherever she could.

Ruslan looked away from the road to study her again. He said, “You are missing her.”

“Yes.”

“You should be home, maybe, with your husband and your baby.”

“I’m not married.”

Ruslan considered that, then said, “But the father, he is with your daughter?”

She heard it in his inflection, a wistfulness, and Chace knew Ruslan was thinking of Dina.

“No,” Chace said. “No, he died.”

Again he murmured something in Uzbek before saying in English, “You have my . . . is it condolence, that is the word?”

“Condolences, yes.”

“My condolences, then. I know that pain. Too well, I think that I know that pain. So your daughter, she is without her mother, and there is no father now.”

“She’s with her grandmother.” Chace bit back the urge to become defensive. “She’s fine.”

“This is not a good job for a mother.” Ruslan said it with conviction. “Killing and spying and stealing the cars of rapists and murderers. You should be with your daughter.”

“It may not be a good job for a mother, sir, but it’s the job I have. And it’s a job you want me to complete, I’d think.”

Ruslan grunted. “To what end? I will not lead Uzbekistan. Sevara has the Americans, and the British will not oppose the American plan. At the best, Stepan and I are merely being relocated.”

“It’ll keep you safe.”

“No doubt, for a time. But it doesn’t help my country.”

From where it rested on the armrest, its antenna deployed, the satellite phone chimed, its LCD lighting up.

“It helps you,” Chace said, sharper than she’d meant to. Keeping her left on the wheel, she picked up the phone, saw that a message had arrived. She thumbed the menu, bringing up the text.

15 MIN.

“Is there a problem?” Ruslan asked.

Chace dropped the phone in her lap, checking the odometer and doing the math. They’d covered seventy-three of the seventy-seven kilometers to the landing zone. It would be tight, but they’d make it.

“No,” she told him. “Everything’s fine.”

From his expression, Chace saw that Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov didn’t believe a word she was saying.

CHAPTER 25

Uzbekistan—Tashkent—14 Uzbekiston

21 February, 0440 Hours (GMT+5:00)

It was a goddamn mess, it was nothing but a goddamn mess, and as Ahtam Zahidov kicked at the broken pieces of the house, knocking burnt wood and blasted tile with his shoe, he swore aloud like a child having a tantrum. He cursed Ruslan Malikov and he cursed Aaron Tower and, most of all, he cursed a woman he had never seen before, a woman he’d never known existed until an hour ago, some bitch called Carlisle who had come to Uzbekistan to make his life miserable, who had come to Tashkent to hurt the woman he loved.

Because that’s what this was, as far as Zahidov was concerned. This was an attempt to hurt Sevara, and never in a million years would he stand for that.

“Motherfucking cunt spy,” he spat, then kicked again, this time knocking enough rubble clear to reveal the burnt body of yet another guard. From his size, it looked like Ummat, but there was so much damage, Zahidov couldn’t be sure. He doubted they’d even find the rest of them; like the house, they’d probably been blown to bits.

This made eight bodies, six of them left on the street, as if declaring their worthlessness as sentries. And they had been worthless, Zahidov thought, all of them shot dead dead dead, and only one of them with his fucking pistol even in his hand. Which meant all of the other cocksuckers had been caught entirely unaware. They weren’t sentries, they were fucking jokes, and he had hoped to find at least one of them with his pants around his ankles and his prick in his hand, because that, that would have explained how this had happened. Six dead outside, two dead inside, and no sign of that cowardly shit Ruslan or his whimpering little abortion of a son.

They’d found cars, for all the good that had done them, but even that was sour because they hadn’t managed to find his fucking Audi. No, they’d found a Range Rover that looked like it had been maybe brought into service around the time Khrushchev was getting into a pissing match with Kennedy, and they’d found the missing Volga, parked on the other side of town, outside of the Jewish cemetery, its interior splattered with Kozim’s blood and brains and nothing else. And nothing in the Range Rover, either. Zahidov had hoped it was the spy’s when he heard about the blood in the Volga, but he knew it wasn’t. No, just fucking Kozim the dead and useless, and he had gotten off lucky, in a way, because Zahidov would have done him himself if he’d lived through this.

He glared at the phone in his hand, willing it to ring, and like everything else this night, it defied him, staying silent. All he wanted in the world at this moment was a lead, something, anything on where they were headed in his car—and he was positive they were in his car now. Police and NSS throughout the country had been given the description of his Audi, ordered to find the vehicle and detain the occupants in whatever manner was required.

The border guards had been notified at the crossing into Kyrgyzstan, less than twenty kilometers north of Tashkent; Zahidov had taken care of that as soon as Tower had told him what had happened. But Zahidov knew the spy wouldn’t go north—that portion of the border was too closely guarded, too well watched, and if she was traveling with the brat along with Ruslan, they wouldn’t go on foot, they would stick to the roads.

So maybe they’d try for Kyrgyzstan via the northeast route, but that would take them into the Chatkal Mountains. The roads that way were bad, and it would take a lot of time, and time was everything now, both to him and to the spy. By the same logic, he doubted she’d taken them toward Tajikistan. There were only two real roads that would lead south to the country, and again, one of them would wind through the Chatkal. The other would be a trip of almost one hundred and fifty kilometers, too far. Turkmenistan was easily eight hundred kilometers by road, would take even longer. Considering escape through Afghanistan was absurd.

The cunt spy wasn’t going to take them out on the ground. No, she would fly them. Which meant either a plane or a helicopter. If a plane, they’d need a runway, and he’d already alerted the airports in Tashkent, Dzhizak, and Samarkand, and had heard nothing. No private liftoffs, no private landings, but Zahidov ordered men to those locations all the same, just to be certain. A helo would be harder to find, would be able to set down just about anywhere, though he was reasonably sure the landing zone was south of Tashkent, not to the north. There were too many sets of eyes to the north, too easy to be spotted.

If the pilot knew what he was doing, he’d come in low, to avoid radar, and if the helicopter was the right one for the job—and at this point, Zahidov was positive that it would be, because this fucking bitch spy knew what she was doing—it would have range enough to enter the country and then get out again, setting down just long enough to take on passengers. Coming in from Kazakhstan more than likely, then.

The police were on the roads now, scouring the countryside and setting up security checkpoints, but Zahidov didn’t hold out much hope for it. If she tried for Dzhizak or Zaamin or Chichak, they’d nail the bitch entering the city limits. But for precisely that reason, she wasn’t going to go city. She was going countryside, for a helo pickup.

He looked at his phone again, still resolute in its refusal to ring, then spun about on his heel, to the six men waiting on the street. They stood by the cars, engines idling, two of the Toyota Land Cruisers that the NSS preferred for their ability to go off-road. Six of his best plucked from the NSS, standing with their M-16s. Zahidov had even ordered Tozim to pull the two remaining Starstreaks from storage, loading one each into the back of the cars. All these men needed was a direction, a way to go, and he couldn’t give them one.

He shouted at Tozim. “Where’s the fucking Sikorsky? Where the fuck is it?”

“It’s coming, Ahtam! It’s coming, it should be here any second. We had to get a pilot out of bed, it’s taking—”

Zahidov spun away, waving his free hand to shut Tozim up. He needed to think, he needed to think like this spy. The helicopter, that was the key to it, that was the trick. He’d been hoping Tower would call, tell him where the LZ was for the bitch’s pickup, but it wasn’t coming, there was no call, and that meant that all of the U.S. forces on the ground and all of their radar and all of their technology and all of their talent couldn’t find the bird. Coming in low, coming in from Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan.

Coming along the river, Zahidov suddenly realized. Following the Syr Darya in its valley, to stay low.

This bitch, this spy, she would meet her helicopter along the river, somewhere south of Tashkent, that had to be it.

He tucked the phone in his pocket, closed the distance to Tozim, put a hand on his shoulder. Tozim was younger by perhaps two years, tall and strong and faithful and loyal enough that he’d been one of the men he’d chosen to help with Dina Malikov.

“Take three men and head south along the Samarkand highway,” Zahidov told him. “Fast as you can. Keep your radio at hand.”

Tozim nodded, the excitement visible on his face. “You’ve got them? You know where they’re going?”

“I think so, not exactly, but I think so. Take the road to the M39 bridge, where it crosses the river, start searching there. Take one of the Starstreaks. You see any helicopter that isn’t the Sikorsky, you bring it down.”

“I will.”

“Go.”

Tozim moved, grabbing the three men nearest, tumbling them into the first car, and they peeled out, the wheels whining as the car made a tight turn before accelerating out of sight. Zahidov could hear the Sikorsky now, looked up to see the lights on the helo’s fuselage coming closer.

“You two are with me. Bring the missile.”

The two hurried to comply.

Zahidov moved out into the street, raising a hand, and the Sikorsky settled into a slow descent. Prop wash from the blades stirred the dirt and dust and debris on the street, making it fly about. Zahidov turned his head away, to shield his eyes, saw that his remaining men had their hands to their faces. He heard the Sikorsky’s motor whine, then change pitch as the big machine settled on the ground. He ran for the door, making his way through the cabin to the cockpit phone.

The Sikorsky was an S-76, a commercial model, not military, used by Sevara and her father for quick trips in comfort around the countryside, spacious enough inside for five, plus another two in the cockpit. There were no armaments, but it did have the one thing that all Sikorsky helicopters had, from the military Black Hawks to the civilian S-92: it had speed.

While his men loaded the missile and then themselves, Zahidov grabbed the handset from the cabin wall. The pilot came on instantly.

“The river,” Zahidov told him. “Fast as you can, get us to the river, and then start following it south.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fast as you can.” Zahidov repeated, and before he’d even hung up, the rotors above were again gaining speed, the engine whine growing louder once more. He helped the last of his men in, slamming the door shut just as the Sikorsky begin to rise. The helicopter banked sharply, tilting as it gained altitude, then rocking forward as it gained speed. Zahidov swayed on his feet as if riding a wave. One of his men stumbled, falling against the couch and dropping his M-16.

Then the Sikorsky settled on its path, and Zahidov turned his attention to the crate and began preparing the Starstreak for launch.

CHAPTER 26

Uzbekistan—Tashkent—U.S. Chancery,

Office of the Political Counselor

21 February, 0443 Hours (GMT+5:00)

Riess sat, staring blankly at his monitor, not seeing and not much caring for the work that required his attention. He’d been unable to sleep following Tower’s visit, wandering around his home in the small hours, unsure of what to do, unsure of how to proceed. He’d tried reaching the Ambassador at the Residence just after two-thirty in the morning, had been surprised when his wife, Michelle, had answered the phone instead, telling him that Garret wasn’t in, that she thought he was at the Embassy.

He’d hung up and changed clothes, then headed for the Chancery. The gate Marines checked his pass, let him through, and he’d made his way to the Ambassador’s office, through corridors that weren’t nearly as empty as they should’ve been at a quarter to three in the morning. Riess had passed the Press Office, seen the lights on inside, and his mood had soured further. Lydia Straight was burning midnight oil, and the only reason he could see for that was damage control. What damage she was controlling was the only real question, and he hoped it wasn’t his or Garret’s.

He was stopped at the Ambassador’s office by one of the Marines, some kid from Georgia with the accent to prove it. “I’m sorry, sir, the Ambassador is not to be disturbed.”

“I need to speak to him.”

“Yes, sir. He’s not to be disturbed, sir.”

“You know what he’s doing in there?”

“I believe he’s on the phone, sir, but I’m afraid I don’t really know. He’s not to be disturbed, sir.”

Riess wanted to ask what the kid did know, if, in fact, the Marine knew anything at all, but he didn’t, just turned and made his way to the Pol/Econ office, doing time-zone math in his head. Past three in the morning in Tashkent put it past five in the previous day’s evening in D.C. With Lydia Straight in the Media Office and the Ambassador on the phone, Riess was sure that Garret was talking to Washington, getting lashed by either S or D or the White House itself.

Not good. None of it was good, and Riess felt something he hadn’t since the days following the bombing in Dar es Salaam. Not just lost, but adrift.

He’d brewed a pot of coffee, started on his first cup, when Lydia Straight came through the door, out of breath and looking like she’d sprinted the halls to reach him.

“There’s been a bombing,” she said.

Riess lunged for his desk, spilling coffee all over his hand, swearing. He flicked the radio on, hoping to find the news, saying, “Anyone injured?”

“Fuck if I know,” Straight said. “It literally just came on, I just heard it on the radio in my office. No idea how long ago it happened.”

“Suicide? Car? Both?”

She shrugged at him, and beyond her, down the hall, Riess saw a Marine run past, probably headed out to the gate to double up the watch. He shook coffee off his hand, reached for the secure telecom unit on his desk, started dialing the Operations Center at the State Department.

“The Ambassador’s in his office,” Riess told Straight. “Let him know what’s happened, I’ll deal with it here.”

“Right,” Lydia Straight said, and bolted off down the hall.

The radio babbled Uzbek at him, and he dropped the handset long enough to grab a pen and scrap paper, taking notes as fast as he could. Bomb. Uzbekiston. East part of the city. Unknown casualties. Home of a government official. More to come.

Jesus Christ, he thought. Ruslan. It’s Ruslan’s home.

He dropped the pen and went back to the phone. There was the hiss and ping of the satellite connecting, and the phone rang, or rather, beeped, and then the Duty Officer at the State Department Operations Center came on the line. Riess identified himself, his post, then gave the bullet on what he knew, which was, as yet, too little.

“Any American casualties?” the Duty Officer asked.

“Unknown.”

“How many dead?”

“Unknown.”

“It was a residence?”

“That’s what the radio is reporting. I’m going to head out, see if I can find something concrete.”

“Keep us posted.”

Riess killed the connection, dialed McColl, waking him with four rings. When the Political Counselor came on the line, he said, “Sorry to wake you, sir, but there’s been reports of a bombing on east Uzbekiston. You might want to come in.”

“Dammit to hell,” McColl grumbled, thoroughly annoyed. “You’re in the office?”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a pause, then McColl said, “I’ll be there shortly.”

Riess grabbed his coat, pulling it on as he went out the door, stopping only long enough to close and lock it behind him. He was trying to keep his head clear, trying not to make too much of the news, to not let his imagination run away with him, but all he could think was that it was Ruslan’s home, it had to be Ruslan’s home, and he wondered if this, too, wasn’t somehow his fault, the way he felt Dina Malikov’s death was his fault.

At least now he had something to do, something he could do, instead of sitting and waiting and dining on his liver.

There were Marines in the foyer, but Riess didn’t see any sign of the Regional Security Officer, for which he was grateful. Situations like this, the Department did its traditional two-directions-at-the-same-time dance. The RSO would try to lock down the Chancery as best he could, in case there were further bombings, anything that might be directed against the Mission or its staff. By the same token, staff on the premises would be expected to remain on post, where they could be safely looked after.

Which would be fine, except that a poloff, or at least a good poloff—and all the bullshit with Tower and Carlisle notwithstanding, Riess still hoped that he was a good poloff, and very much wanted to remain as such—would be expected to actually get out and hit the ground and rustle up some hard facts, instead of relying on state-run radio to feed him its canned version of events. Facts that could be fed back to both the Ambassador and the Ops Center, that would allow both to formulate the State Department response to what had happened. If things went very well, whatever intelligence gathered would be useful enough to offset the requisite ire of the RSO, who was sure to be pissed off beyond belief that the poloff had left the Chancery in the first place.

No sign of the RSO, just the Marines, and Riess blew past them, heading out, raising a hand and saying, “Be right back.” One moved, perhaps to stop him, but without the commitment required to do so, and then Riess was outside, smacked in the face by the cold. He ran to his car, a used Toyota he’d bought shortly after he’d been allowed to move into his home, got it started and to the gates. The guards had switched to flak jackets and helmets, and they stopped him, obviously worked up. One of the Marines kept an eye on the road while the other leaned down to speak to him in the car.

“Can’t let you leave, sir,” the Marine told him. Like all the others, he was young. “RSO wants all personnel to stay on the grounds.”

“I need to take a look at the sight,” Riess said. “The Ambassador needs to know what’s going on.”

Which was true enough. And Riess figured that if this twenty-two-year-old on the gate wanted to interpret his words to mean that Riess was acting on direct orders from the Ambassador, so much the better. Certainly, Riess wasn’t going to say anything to clarify the point.

The Marine hesitated, looking away, at the road for a moment. A Tashkent police car blew past, blue lights flashing, siren crying.

“It’s a short turnaround,” Riess told the Marine. “I’ll be back in no time.”

The Marine grunted, stepped back, waving him through, and Riess hit the gas, turning out onto the street.

He switched onto Uzbekiston as soon as he could, following the emergency lights in the distance, until he hit the roadblock, where the police stopped him. There were two cars, four officers, and one of them stepped forward as he approached, waving him to the side of the road. Riess pulled over and lowered the window. The officer was a stocky, middle-aged Uzbek who looked like he’d much rather be home and in bed.

“Please step out of the car,” the officer said.

Riess nodded and shrugged at the same time, stopped the engine, and climbed out.

“Identification.”

“I’m with the U.S. Embassy.” Riess pulled out his wallet. “What happened?”

The officer took the ID, then motioned to another policemen, telling him to check the car. Riess didn’t protest. The first officer used a flashlight, examined his identification, then shone it on Riess’ face. Apparently satisfied, he lowered the light, switching it off and handing the ID back.

“Bombing,” the officer said.

“Yeah?” Riess watched as the second policeman examined his car, popping the trunk. “Another one, huh?”

“IMU, probably,” the first officer told him, sighing.

“Bastards,” Riess said angrily.

The officer caught hold of the emotion, tying it to his own frustration. “They went after the President’s son, that’s how it looks. They’ve got us out all over the city looking for the bomber. All over the damn city.”

“They didn’t blow themselves up when they did it?”

“We’re looking for a couple of cars, so I don’t know. Maybe there was more than one. Maybe it wasn’t a suicide bombing. Who knows?”

“So they’ve got you out here in the cold, just in case.”

“Someone got away, one of the fuckers, they’re saying. They . . .”

The officer fell silent as a radio in one of the police cars squawked, and he turned his head, listening. The report was from someone on the scene, requesting an ambulance to remove the bodies. There was an answering call, a query, asking how many. Six. Maybe seven, replied the voice, dispassionately.

The officer sighed a second time, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and putting one into his mouth. “Fuckers.”

“May I?” Riess asked. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t even like to smoke, but it was a universal way to make friends. If it hadn’t been a suicide bombing, then it was something else, and for the first time, Riess had hope. After Tower’s visit, he’d figured the show was over for Carlisle. But now, now he had to think that maybe she’d actually pulled this off, that somehow she’d gotten Ruslan and Stepan away from the house, was driving them to safety even now.

Whatever she’d picked up at the arms bazaar, it must have been pretty damn big.

“You’re with the Embassy?” the officer asked.

“Yeah.”

“Out late.”

“I heard about the blast on the radio, wanted to take a look. See if it was like last time, in the market. You know, I have to make sure no Americans were hurt.”

“No, no Americans. Not unless they were staying at the house.”

“My boss will be relieved,” Riess said, then looked up, hearing the rotors closing in overhead. He could make out the helo’s belly lights, and from that knew it wasn’t military.

He flicked the remainder of his cigarette away, thanking the officer. “I should get back to the Embassy.”

The officer nodded, bored again.

The helicopter worried Riess. If they were using ambulances to remove the bodies, then the only reason for the helo was pursuit. It meant they had a line on Carlisle, where she was taking Ruslan and Stepan. Either that or they were desperate, and using every means they had at their disposal in their search.

He returned to the Embassy hoping it was the latter.

CHAPTER 27

Uzbekistan—Dzhizak Province—

Syr Darya River, 77 km SSW Tashkent

21 February, 0458 Hours (GMT+5:00)

Chace took the Audi off the road as soon as she could, on the northern edge of the bridge spanning the Syr Darya along the M39, turning southeast to follow the water. The Audi bumped and slid on the ground, spitting out chunks of earth and pebbles from beneath the tires. The Range Rover, for all its problems, had been built for off-road use. The Audi obviously hadn’t been, and now Chace was forced to slow in an attempt to keep from catching the car on the rocks and ruts that peppered the path down to the bank of the river. The darkness made the terrain look different, and Chace knew she was close to the LS, but was uncertain as to just how close.

With a free hand, Chace popped open the armrest, pulling the GPS from where she’d stored it, handing it to Ruslan without looking at him. “Turn that on, take a reading.”

Ruslan fumbled with the device, then read out longitude and latitude, degrees, minutes, seconds. The information confirmed what she knew, and Chace barely nodded, her focus on keeping the Audi moving in the right direction. She appreciated the fact that he didn’t try to hand the GPS unit back to her.

From the backseat, Stepan said, “Ota?”

Ruslan turned, answering in Uzbek, and Chace saw the boy sitting up on the backseat, bleary and confused and looking more than a little frightened. He babbled something in response, and Ruslan spoke again, soothingly but it wasn’t enough, and in the reflected glow of the one working headlight, Chace saw the boy’s eyes growing wet as he started to sob.

“We’re close now,” she said. “We’re almost there.”

She saw Ruslan nod, speaking again to his son, and she assumed he was repeating her words, but she had no way of knowing. The headlights caught the water, reflected it, and she downshifted, urging the car forward, feeling the Audi beginning to lose itself in the softer earth fed by the river. Then she saw the bend, a dry wash of shore cut by the water sometime long ago, spreading out in a crescent of river sand. She downshifted a last time, turning the car slowly about in the wash until they faced the way they had come, killing the headlamp as the Audi came to a stop. She left the engine running, put the car into neutral, and hit the trunk release.

“Stay put,” Chace said.

She climbed out of the Audi, went around to the trunk. She’d switched from the hush puppy to the Sarsilmaz when they’d changed cars, keeping the pistol at her back, but now she moved it around so it rested at her waist in the front. The Kalashnikov, hush puppy, and grenades were all in the trunk, but she took only the automatic rifle, throwing the strap over her shoulder. She shut the trunk.

The river burbled past on her left, the water sixty feet away at its closest point. To her right, the ground rose sharply, turning into a low cliff, describing the outer edge of the crescent. Chace looked up, saw thin strips of cloud whipping past, obscuring the stars. The wind had risen, both in strength and in altitude.

From inside the car, she heard Stepan sobbing, watched through the rear window as Ruslan contorted himself in the front seat, lifting the boy onto his lap. The crying subsided.

Chace checked her watch and saw it was oh-five-hundred, exactly.

Almost immediately, she heard the first echo of the rotors, the helicopter’s rumble bouncing off the Syr Darya. She took the Kalashnikov off her shoulder, racked the bolt, holding the automatic rifle in both hands. The copter’s sound was growing louder, but that was all there was—no visual, no telltale lights. She wondered if Porter was flying with NVG, if that had been one of the incidentals her seventy thousand pounds had bought him.

Then she saw the bird, almost skimming the river as it came around the bend, spray flying from the wash of the rotor blades, a big, old, ugly Russian Mi-8 helicopter, and she knew it was Porter. He’d picked a workhorse, one common enough in this part of the world to be easily acquired and maintained, one that would raise no suspicion. She let her grip on the Kalashnikov go to one hand and stepped out from behind the car, to make certain he could see her.

The helicopter altered course, slowing and descending, and now the sand was flying, too, and Chace brought her forearm up to protect her vision, moving to the passenger’s side of the Audi. She opened Ruslan’s door, and he peered up at her, Stepan wrapped in his arms, the bloodstained flak jacket still around him.

“Our ride’s here,” Chace shouted. She adjusted the strap on the Kalashnikov, letting the weapon lie against her back, then held out her hands. “Here.”

Ruslan nodded, bent his mouth to Stepan’s ear, then lifted the little boy to her. Stepan turned his head to her, eyes wide with suspicion and fear, his mouth closed. Chace took him in her arms.

“It’s all right,” she told him in Russian, and stepped back to give Ruslan room to exit. The Mi-8 was louder than ever, the sand it was throwing up stinging her skin. She put a hand on Stepan’s head, pressing his cheek to her shoulder to shield him from the spray, adjusting the flak jacket around him more for protection from the cold and sand than anything else.

Then she heard an echo, what she thought was an echo, the sound of the bird reverberating off the cliff to her right, but the pitch was wrong, too high, and she knew it wasn’t an echo. She raised her head from Stepan to the Mi-8, seeing Ruslan emerging from the Audi in her peripheral vision at the same moment, and caught a glimpse of Porter behind the stick in the cockpit just before the helicopter exploded.

Fire and metal blew through the air, the remnants of the helicopter pitching nose forward, flipping into the earth, and the rotors snapped free, and Chace felt herself knocked off her feet. The world cracked, and she felt pain race along her spine, and she knew she’d landed on her back, on the Kalashnikov. She was dimly aware that she still had Stepan in her arms, and that amazed her.

She opened her eyes and couldn’t see anything but the after-image of the blast. The sound of the second helicopter cut through the ringing in her ears. She forced herself to roll, still gripping the boy, managed to get to her knees. Her vision cleared to pinpoints of dancing white, and she stumbled, turning, disoriented.

Light flared over the ground, blasting daylight into an oblong that skimmed the wreckage of the Mi-8, running over the sand toward her. Chace could barely see the helicopter beyond the flare of its searchlight, hovering twenty-five feet off the ground, and she thought it was a Sikorsky, a civilian model, and she knew that was where the missile had come from, the second Starstreak in the same night, this one used to kill not only Porter, but their chances of escape, too.

Starstreak, Chace thought. Another fucking Starstreak, and Jesus, but how many of them do these sons of bitches have?

She was already running for the Audi, clutching Stepan to her with her left hand, using her right to draw the Sarsilmaz from her waist.

“Ruslan!” she screamed. “In the car! In the fucking car!”

She fired as she ran, squeezing off rounds, trying to hit the light, or above the light, and not having any hope of success. The Sikorsky bobbled, turning, and Chace had reached the driver’s door, had shoved the boy back into the car, and was yanking the Kalashnikov’s strap from her shoulder, when she saw what the searchlight saw, and for a fraction, she froze.

Ruslan was sprawled in the dirt facedown, fifteen feet from the car, his arms splayed out in front of him, one of his legs bent back across the other. The searchlight struck him at an angle, pushing shadows off his motionless body. Chace thought she saw blood, but she couldn’t tell how much.

“Ruslan! Ruslan, get up!”

He didn’t move.

“Get up! Damn you, get up!”

The searchlight broke away from the body, the Sikorsky swiveling as it hovered, playing its ruthless light across the Audi’s hood. The beam struck Stepan inside, then Chace, and she saw the port-side door of the helicopter was open, and two men were crouched there, automatic rifles in their hands. She raised the Sarsilmaz in both hands and emptied the gun at them, flinging herself back into the car. One of the men pitched forward and fell.

Chace rammed the car into gear, then stomped on the gas, and the car lurched forward. She floored it, feeling the tires desperate for traction, and beside her, Stepan was screaming, pressing himself to the passenger window. Bullets punched holes along the edge of the hood, and then the wheels caught, the Audi shooting forward. Chace saw the man who had fallen trying to get to his feet and out of the way, and she ran him down before he had the chance, feeling the car jump slightly at the impact. More bullets struck, now hitting the roof, and between her hands on the wheel, Chace saw the dashboard shatter, and wondered fleetingly how the round had missed her.

“Ota!” Stepan wailed. “Ota, Ota!”

She wrenched the wheel, fighting the Audi up the side of the bank, and the car popped onto harder ground. The searchlight flashed on them again, and she saw the orange blossoms of muzzle-flash in her mirrors, and the rear window exploded. The Audi hit the pavement, and Chace slid the car into a right, the rear wheels squealing as they bit into the asphalt.

Stepan had slumped, gone silent, and Chace glanced over and for a horrifying second saw only the blood on the flak jacket. She forgot the stick for a moment, reaching for the boy with her right hand, yanking back the fabric, and saw nothing beneath, no fresh blood. Stepan’s face was streaked with tears, snot running from his nose over his lips.

“Ota—”

“I’m sorry,” Chace told him, the ache in her chest sudden, making the words sound like a companion sob.

She put her hand back to the stick, her focus back on the road, trying to think of an escape.

The Sikorsky was fast, faster than the Audi, and she weaved on the road, trying to stay out of the searchlight. They weren’t shooting now, and they weren’t trying to get ahead of her, and she assumed that meant they liked where she was headed, and wanted her to keep going there. On radios, probably, she decided, maybe a roadblock, but the problem was that she didn’t have any other choice. She had to get back to Tashkent, Tashkent was the only option, and Chace cursed herself for not having planned a fallback exfil, no other way out of the country.

She had to get to one of the embassies, either the American or the British, it didn’t matter. To hell with Crocker and his secret plans, to hell with keeping things quiet, they’d gotten very loud now, and she’d run out of options. She’d lost Ruslan, she’d blown the mission, but she was damned if she was going to lose the son, too. She’d fucked it up, but she wasn’t going to lose the son, too.

Over her dead body would she lose Stepan.

Then she saw the headlights, and she saw the silhouette of the man standing in front of them, and more, saw the silhouette of what he was raising onto his shoulder.

“Oh, fucking hell,” Chace said.

Yanking the handbrake, she twisted the wheel, stomping the pedal. The Audi slid, spinning left, and Chace shot out her hand to catch Stepan before the boy could be thrown about the interior of the car. The car screeched to a stop and the engine lurched, then died.

Pulling Stepan after her, Chace shoved her door open and tumbled out of the car, onto the cracked highway. She wrapped her arms around the boy as she regained her feet, felt him clinging to her, whimpering. The searchlight found them both again, and she winced in its glare, half running, half stumbling for the side of the road, desperate to get away from the Audi. The Sikorsky was coming around on her left, trying to block her passage, descending, but keeping distance.

It knows what happens next, Chace thought.

The world split, and she felt heat sweep over her back, pain following after it, her legs knocked from beneath her. Everything turned around, surrounding her in weightlessness and vertigo, and Chace knew her feet weren’t on the ground anymore. She tightened her grip on the child, flashed for a final instant on his face pressed against her chest, his eyes squeezed closed, black hair shining in the light of the exploding car.

She saw Tamsin.

Then she saw nothing.

CHAPTER 28

London—Vauxhall Cross,

Office of the Chief of Service

21 February, 0016 Hours GMT

Frances Barclay looked like a man under siege. His shoulders were hunched inward, his hands laid flat on the blotter on his desk, his neck lowered, his chin thrust forward, and his eyes behind his glasses brimming with hatred. And for once, that hatred wasn’t being directed at Crocker himself, but rather at the Deputy Chief standing beside him, though Crocker knew it was only a matter of time before he became its focus again.

“You knew about this, you knew about all of this, and you failed to inform me?”

“The operation was undertaken in response to a directive by the FCO,” Alison Gordon-Palmer said evenly.

“Not an official directive!”

“The PUS acted with both the Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister’s blessing, sir. If PUS felt it necessary to omit you from the conops, then you’ll have to take it up with him. But D-Ops was acting as ordered, and the paper trail exists to prove it.”

“Placed after the fact, no doubt.”

Gordon-Palmer didn’t respond, and Crocker, for his part, continued standing in silence beside her. Another chapter to be written in his manual of desk usage, Crocker thought. In any other instance, the Deputy Chief and the Director of Operations standing at C’s desk while C himself railed at them from his chair would have been the perfect portrait of subordinate reinforcement, more akin to the dressing-down of ill-mannered children than not. Yet this time, with C seated and the two of them standing, it seemed the players were entirely reversed.

Barclay seemed to sense it, as well, because he chose that moment to get to his feet and lean on the desk.

“I know what this is,” he told the Deputy Chief. “This is a coup d’état. Don’t think I won’t fight it.”

“If that’s how you see it, sir,” she replied.

“There’s another way I should see it?”

“The disposition of the operation is still in question. Should it be successfully concluded, you’ll certainly be entitled, even expected, to take full credit for it.”

“Which is your way of saying that, when it fails, I’ll be expected to own it?”

Crocker was impressed that Gordon-Palmer managed to sound mildly indignant. “Not at all, sir. Should the operation fail, you have the perfect scapegoats.”

“You.”

“And D-Ops, yes, sir.”

It didn’t reassure Barclay in the slightest. If anything, the look on his face hardened further. “So you say. Yet you’ve also said that the White House is adamant that Sevara Malikov and not her brother becomes Uzbekistan’s next President. Even if the operation is successful, it will be a failure.”

“Not necessarily,” Crocker said. “If Ruslan and his son are lifted, they can be positioned for an eventual return to the country and an attempted ouster of the sister.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Barclay snapped. “The operation is pointless, at least as declared. It does nothing but expose Ruslan and force his sister and her supporters to move against him, perhaps overtly, and the results of an overt move will do nothing but damage U.K. relations with Uzbekistan. In the final analysis, it solidifies her power, not diminishes it.”

Crocker held his tongue, mostly because he couldn’t argue the point. Until three hours earlier, he would have argued that Ruslan had every chance to become Uzbekistan’s next President, especially with Seccombe’s promised support for the coup. But that was no longer the case. According to Gordon-Palmer, in fact, it never had been.

So he stayed silent and let Barclay and the Deputy Chief continue their bitter dance, all the while struggling with his own guilt. It was one thing to have failed Chace before, in Saudi Arabia, to have been boxed both politically and professionally, and thus prevented from helping her. In that case, he had done everything in his power to protect her, and had, quite simply, been defeated. He had never, however, lied to her.

This time he had, and he had known he was lying when they stood in the Pendle churchyard. A lie of omission rather than deceit, but a lie nonetheless, because Crocker had known—he had known—that Seccombe was using him. But he had permitted it, desperate to keep his job. And in so doing, he’d put himself and his career ahead of Chace’s safety and well-being.

Espionage was ultimately a game of sacrifice. Truths revealed to protect lies, relationships twisted to steal secrets, lives surrendered in exchange for gains that could range from the incremental to the absurd. But sacrificing Chace had never been in Crocker’s plans, and now, more than anything, he feared he’d done precisely that. He would argue until the day he died that what happened to send Chace to Saudi Arabia was not his fault, that Tom Wallace’s death, as much as it pained him, was not his to own. Her anger, while righteous, he still believed was misplaced.

But if Tara Chace managed to come back from Tashkent alive, Paul Crocker was sure that she would never forgive him.

And at this moment, standing in Barclay’s office, listening with half an ear to Gordon-Palmer’s soothing falsehoods and Barclay’s rapidly dwindling patience, Paul Crocker knew that if Tara Chace didn’t come back from Uzbekistan, he would never forgive himself, either.

“And you,” Barclay was snarling at him. “I offered you a hand in friendship, and you returned it with betrayal.”

Crocker blinked, looking at his C. “As the Deputy Chief has said, I was acting under orders from the FCO. And as for your hand of friendship, if I may be so blunt, you offered nothing of the sort. You were blackmailing me.”

The red phone on Barclay’s desk began trilling for attention. “And now the both of you are blackmailing me.”

Turnabout is fair play, thought Crocker.

Barclay answered the phone, listened, then thrust it out to Crocker. “For you.”

Crocker took the phone. “D-Ops.”

“Duty Ops Officer,” Ronald Hodgson said. “Latest from Tashkent, sir.”

“Give it to me.”

“It’s just come in, sir. State media has issued a statement saying that Ruslan Malikov and his son were kidnapped from their home early this morning by members of Hizb-ut-Tahir, possibly the same cell responsible for the kidnap and murder of Dina Malikov earlier this month. The statement goes on to say that the terrorists used a surface-to-air missile to destroy the Malikov home in an attempt to cover their tracks, but that police and state forces were able to recognize the misdirection and engage in an immediate pursuit along the M39, the main road out of Tashkent toward Samarkand.

“During this pursuit, a second SAM was used to shoot down a state helicopter, killing twelve. State forces surrounded the terrorists and attempted to negotiate. The terrorists then executed Ruslan Malikov, at which point state forces moved in and rescued the son.”

Crocker felt his throat constricting, closed his eyes. “Confirmations?”

“None as yet, sir.”

“I’m coming down.”

He replaced the phone on Barclay’s desk. Both C and Gordon-Palmer were watching at him, waiting.

“Ops Room, Tashkent,” Crocker said. “State media reports that Ruslan Malikov is dead.”

“Paul—” Alison Gordon-Palmer began.

“Later,” Crocker said. It was petulant, and he believed it was unintentional, but he slammed the door on the way out.

“Call Grosvenor Square,” Crocker ordered as soon as he hit the floor. “Have them wake Seale and get him over here, now.”

Ronald Hodgson put his headset over his ears, began dialing, saying, “What do I tell him?”

“Just tell him it’s about Chace.”

Ron faltered for a second, and all movement in the Ops Room came to a halt as the staffers who knew the name reacted to it, and those who didn’t wondered at the sudden silence. At the MCO Desk, Alexis turned in her seat, the same look of confusion now on her face that the rest of the room seemed to be wearing.

“You heard me,” Crocker barked at Ron. “Do it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Crocker strode to the MCO Desk, where Alexis was still staring at him. Her astonishment might have been amusing in any other circumstance. Now it just made Crocker all the more anxious. “Anything?”

She took a second, almost dithering, then nodded and punched at her keyboard. “Yes, possibly related.”

“Are you going to tell me or do I have to take you out to dinner first?”

Alexis stiffened. “There are reports that President Malikov is dead, and that both chambers of the Oliy Majlis are being called into session for later this morning. That’s unofficial—the Number Two picked it up from a contact in the NSS, who apparently heard it from a man named Ahtam Zahidov.”

Crocker swore, moved his glare from Alexis to the plasma wall. “Name the operation, put it up on the wall, and tag it as pending, bring in a control.”

He heard the clattering of her keyboard, scowled as the central quadrant of the plasma screen redrew its picture of Central Asia, a red highlight outlining Uzbekistan, with a red dot now pulsing brightly on Tashkent. On the map, to the south, a yellow dot appeared over Khanabad, marking the Karshi-Khanabad air base, Air Base Camp Stronghold Freedom, where the Americans launched their missions from the country into Afghanistan. The callout came up next, and he watched as the text Alexis was typing at her keyboard translated to the screen, filling the information box.

Operation: Crystalgate.

Status: Pending.

“Allocate Chace.”

Alexis stared at him blankly.

“Allocate Chace, she’s the agent of record. It’s a Special Op.”

“But—how? As what? What designation?”

“Don’t be a fucking fool, Alex,” Crocker snarled. “She’s Minder One.”

At Duty Ops, Ron called out, “Sir!” and Crocker turned away from the MCO station to see that he was holding out a telephone. He grabbed the phone, pinning it between his ear and shoulder, leaving his hands free to find his cigarettes.

“Crocker.”

“Seale. What the fuck is this about?”

“You damn well know what it’s about. Get on to your people in Tashkent and find out what the hell’s happened there, and find out where my agent is. I’ve got nothing, I’m getting bits and pieces, and they’re no use at all.”

There was a silence for a moment as the American digested what he’d said, and Crocker took the opportunity to feed a cigarette into his mouth. Ron held out a light, and Crocker leaned into it, accepting the flame.

“We’re on the same page about this now?” Seale asked.

“If you mean the page where I’ve got an agent caught in the cold and quite possibly dead, then yes, we’re on the same fucking page, Julian.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Seale said, and hung up.

Crocker handed the phone back to Ron, pivoted, looking back to the plasma wall. Nothing had changed. Nothing would change, not for a while yet. He could stare at it for another hour, and it would tell him nothing he didn’t already know. The anxiety that had propelled him into the Ops Room began to wane, and the seething in his veins began to settle into the familiar queasiness of uncertainty. He tried to think of what else he could do, what else he should do.

“Lex? The line still open to Tashkent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Put me on.”

She nodded, quickly plugging in a second headset to her coms station, handing it over to Crocker as soon as he reached her. He settled the earpieces, adjusted the boom.

“Craig? D-Ops.”

“Good morning, sir,” Craig Gillard said in his ears. There was a hiss on the line, and beneath Gillard’s voice a low, regular beeping, indicating the communication was being scrambled.

“Not very,” Crocker said.

“No, sir. I’m a little unclear as to what to make of things here.”

“I can imagine. You’ll receive a proper directive from me later this morning, but for now I need you to proceed as if you’ve already received the appropriate authorizations, do you understand?”

Gillard hesitated before answering, and Crocker didn’t blame him. He was thirty-six, and Tashkent was his first posting as a Number One, after twelve years within SIS. He’d been in-country for eleven months, with another year scheduled on his tour. It was a well-earned posting—Crocker wouldn’t have endorsed the placement if he’d felt Gillard couldn’t do the job—and one of priority, for all the same reasons the Americans made Uzbekistan a priority. Gillard was looking at coming back home to a senior desk position under Rayburn’s eye, and then possibly further promotion within SIS. All of that incumbent, of course, on his doing his job not just well, but discreetly.

And Crocker had yet to meet a Station Number One who ever was well pleased when things started exploding on his or her watch.

“Yes, sir, I understand,” Gillard said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“I’ve heard the Hizb-ut-Tahir nonsense. Do you know what really happened?”

“Hayden’s been beating the bushes,” Gillard answered, referring to the Station Number Two. “Got himself a contact in the NSS he’s been working on for the last few months, since November, name of Jamshid Nalufar. Nalufar says that it wasn’t the extremists, but Ruslan’s people trying to get him out of the country, he thinks in the wake of President Malikov’s death. Problem with that, sir, is that Ruslan doesn’t have much in the way of people, and those he does have are all in the south, mostly centered in Qashqa Darya Province, cities like Karshi, Shakhrisabz, and Samarkand. It’s not making a lot of sense.”

Crocker exhaled smoke, then said, “No, it’s not Ruslan’s people, it’s ours. The operation is called Crystalgate. You’ll get the brief on it in the morning, as I said.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Still with me?”

“Jesus Christ,” Gillard repeated. “You’re running a bust-out in Tashkent, you didn’t bother to notify me?”

“Believe me when I tell you it was not by choice,” Crocker said. “No one was looking to burn you, Craig. The agent has had no contact with either you or your Number Two. The orders were to steer clear of the Station.”

“For all the good that’s going to do. The operation’s a bust, it’s completely blown. Hayden says the NSS shut it all down, they’ve got the kid, Ruslan’s reported dead—”

“I don’t care,” Crocker interrupted. “There are two things I need from you, and I need them immediately.”

“Go ahead.”

“The explosions, the SAM that took down the helicopter and the one that blew up the house, I believe those were both caused the same way, with a Starstreak. I need you to confirm that, and then get that confirmation to me, that’s one.”

“We’re arming the Uzbekis with MANPADs now?”

“That’s one, Craig. Second, I need to find out what happened to the agent. I need to know if she’s dead, if she’s been captured, or if she’s still running.”

“She?”

“Tara Chace. She’s running under the name Tracy Elizabeth Carlisle. It’s vital I know what’s happened to her.”

“Yes, sir, I understand.” Gillard paused, then added, “All right, Hayden and I will get on it right away. I’ll have him hit his contact again, though God knows he’ll resist communicating with him twice in the same night.”

“Soon as possible, Craig.”

“Yes, sir, that’s understood as well. I’ll contact you as soon as we learn anything.”

“London out.” Crocker pulled the headset off, dropped it back on the MCO Desk, then dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out with his toe, frowning. He had to get back upstairs, to inform Barclay and Gordon-Palmer what had happened, and he needed Seale to arrive, and soon. But that was it for the moment, that was all he could do. If Chace was dead, the Station would confirm it soon enough.

“I’ll be with C,” he told Ron. “When Seale arrives, ring me. Have him escorted to my office, I’ll meet him there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And find me the number of Valerie Wallace, Barnoldswick, Lancashire.” Crocker hesitated, then added, “I may need it later.”

He headed back upstairs to rejoin the battle in C’s office.

CHAPTER 29

Uzbekistan—Tashkent—Yunus Rajabiy,

Ministry of the Interior

21 February, 0955 Hours (GMT+5:00)

Something stabbed Chace in the nose, rising sharp and hard into her sinuses, and it tugged at her mind, trying to pull her awake. She moved her head, trying to escape, and the pain stopped, and she felt her hair being pulled and then it returned, stronger, and she gagged, coming fully conscious with a start. She tried to raise an arm and bat the offense away, but her arm barely moved, and a fresh ache tore along her shoulder.

Chace blinked, tasting blood and dust. A man in a suit was stepping back from her, looking at her, tossing aside the ammonia ampoule he’d held beneath her nostrils. Her vision was blurred, and one of her eyes, she couldn’t tell which, was seeing nothing but a milky white haze. The right side of her face felt tight, as if encased in dried wax, and when she moved her mouth to lick her lower lip, she felt it crack, and guessed the dried wax was blood, and probably her own. A pain ran in a circle from temple to temple, as if someone had wrapped her skull in wire and then decided to pull, just for the fun of it.

She wondered how badly she’d been hurt when the Audi exploded, if anything had broken.

It was cold in the room, very cold, and Chace saw her breath, and she shivered, and heard chains rattle as she did so. They had taken most of her clothes, her boots and socks and pants and jacket and sweater and shirt, everything but the underwear. They’d left those for later, she knew, the threat implicit.

She was sitting in a chair in what she thought at first might be a basement storage space or perhaps a boiler room. She tried moving her arms again, more carefully, and felt metal around her wrists and heard the clink of the handcuffs on the chair. They’d used two sets, one for each wrist, twisting her hands up to the middle of her spine before securing the other end of the cuffs to the back of the chair. The chair was metal, too, and conducted the cold from the concrete floor. Her feet felt like they’d already been soaked in ice water, and she realized they hadn’t bothered to restrain them, and she wondered if that’s where they would start, first.

Chace turned her head, taking in the room, trying to catalogue it, trying to find a means of escape. She saw a bathtub in the corner, and a tripod with a video camera. The camera appeared off. Lightbulbs hung naked overhead, high wattage so bright she winced when she looked at them. There was only one door into the room that she could find, metal and rust-stained, and she’d been positioned directly in line of it, just to make sure she could see how close it was, and how far away.

And so she could see that between her and the door there was a table, and at that table sat Ahtam Zahidov, looking at her like she was meat on a butcher’s hook, and he was deciding where to begin cutting.

He’d brought two others with him to wherever this was, both dressed in similar suits, both looking tired and angry. One of them lit a cigarette as she watched, staring at her the whole while. He was tall, looked young, perhaps mid- to late-twenties, broad-shouldered and big-handed, and there was nothing approaching sympathy in his expression. She guessed the beatings would come primarily from him.

The other one, the one who’d roused her with the ammonia, looked to be at least ten years older, shorter and fatter. Now he was ignoring her, more concerned with the contents of the red toolbox that rested open on the table, by Zahidov’s left elbow.

Chace tried not to be afraid, and found it impossible.

Zahidov stared at her without speaking, then removed his glasses and held them up to the lights, making a grimace of displeasure. He took a handkerchief from inside his coat and, leisurely, began cleaning the lenses. By Chace’s guess, it took him over a minute to complete the job.

Then he replaced the glasses on his face and nodded slightly, and the big one, the bruiser, moved forward, toward Chace in the chair, while the older one removed a short length of pipe from the toolbox.

“Don’t,” Chace warned.

Zahidov barely shook his head, and the bruiser came closer, bending as he reached for her legs. Chace twisted in the chair, feeling the cuffs trapping her arms, lashing out with a kick. The bruiser had expected it, blocked it with his forearm, then tried to grab her ankle again, and she kicked with her other foot, and caught him in the face. The bruiser grunted in anger, and the cold and the impact with bone made pain ride up Chace’s leg like fire. She kicked again, but this time he caught her, trapping her calf between his chest and arm.

She brought her free leg up, firing off obscenities without realizing she was even speaking, not hearing herself, and thrust with her toes into his crotch. He tried to catch the foot, missed, and groaned as she felt the kick sink into him. He lost his grip on the leg he’d been holding.

“Don’t you fucking touch me!” she yelled, hearing her voice rebounding off the concrete. “I’m a British citizen, don’t you fucking touch me!”

“You’re a British spy,” Zahidov answered in English.

The bruiser was trying to right himself, gritting his teeth, and Chace planted her feet on the floor and pushed off, taking the chair with her, lunging at him. She hit his nose with her head, felt the collision snapping cartilage, the ache in her head expanding. She staggered back, bending and turning as fast as she could, striking him with the legs of the chair. Her arms felt like they would tear free from their sockets.

Suddenly she saw red, even through the eye that wouldn’t work, and she heard a scream. Her air left her, blowing out over her lips, and she felt her gorge rising to follow it, and then she was hit again, and she knew she was on the floor. Something pressed down on her neck, and her vision swam, then cleared, and she was being righted in the chair. Another blow struck her stomach, and she pitched forward, and then another blow, higher, and again, and she skipped consciousness for a second, swimming in icy darkness. She felt hard hands grabbing her ankles, lifting her legs, and then forcing her thighs apart, and she struggled against the grip, but didn’t have the leverage or the strength or the air.

Vision returned enough for her to see the bruiser licking at the blood running down over his lips from his nose. He held her ankles at his waist, her calves pinned at his hips. The posture was obscene, and the bruiser knew it, and when he saw that she was seeing him clearly now, he rocked his pelvis toward her in a mock thrust, fucking the empty air between them. Chace saw the lump in his pants, realized he was aroused, and the fear and the disgust expanded inside her, and she wondered if she would be sick.

Zahidov’s chair scraped back on the floor, and she saw him come around, between the older man and the bruiser. The older man offered him the length of pipe, and Zahidov took it, his eyes fixed on Chace.

“That was stupid,” he told her. “Now Tozim wants to hurt you.”

She tried to free her legs, failing.

“Of course, I want to hurt you, too,” Zahidov continued. “That’s interesting, because mostly what I want in this room is information, and pain and humiliation, those are only tools to get it.”

“So ask your questions already,” Chace spat.

“No, you don’t understand. Mostly I want information, and you’ll give it to me, because everyone eventually does. But right now, I want to hurt you.”

He swung the pipe at the bottom of her right foot, almost casually. The pain that shot through Chace’s leg was extraordinary, and brought tears to her eyes.

“Where is he?” Zahidov asked.

The question didn’t make sense. She shook her head, choked out a response. “What?”

He hit the right foot again, twice, the arch and the base of her toes. Chace tried to stay silent, but it hurt too much, it hurt more than anything, and she heard herself whimpering, and that made it even worse.

“Where?”

She managed to shake her head, saw his arm draw back, tried to work her feet free and failed. He hit her left foot this time, four times along the arch, each blow harder than the one that preceded it. She screamed, struggling, and he struck the right again, and she was trying to move, to break free, anything to stop it, and nothing worked.

He had stopped hitting her, letting the lingering pain do his work for him. She was out of breath again, her lungs aching. She heard herself sobbing, fought to control it.

“There are other places that will hurt more.” Zahidov said when he thought she had calmed enough to hear him. “Places that will tear, places where bone is barely covered by skin, places that will rip and scar. Where is he, where is Ruslan?”

Chace blinked back tears of pain, trying to clear her vision from the eye that still worked, and trying to keep what she was thinking off her face. Either Zahidov was toying with her, or Ruslan hadn’t died by the Syr Darya. She didn’t know which to believe—if he was asking her a question she could never hope to answer satisfactorily because Ruslan was dead, or if he’d escaped.

Both seemed just as likely.

“Dead,” she managed to say. “You killed him.”

Zahidov frowned, examining her leg, then running his fingers along it, over her shin to her knee, stopping at midthigh, close enough that she could feel his breath on her face. She fought the shudder caused by the touch, not wanting to give it to him. He lifted his hand, then brought it down again on her bare shoulder, tracing the strap of her bra with a finger.

“Where is he?” he whispered in her ear.

Chace pulled her head away, again struggling against the bruiser’s grip on her ankles, again to no avail. Despite the chill in the room, she felt herself beginning to burn with the humiliation of the posture, the helplessness, the touch.

“I told you, you killed him, he’s dead. The last I saw of him he was lying in the dirt by the river.”

“You planned the escape.” Zahidov continued to stroke her shoulder. “Where did he go? After the river, where did he go?”

“There was no after the river, he fucking died at the river. He died, I ran, you caught me and his son.” She turned her head, meeting his smiling eyes. “Where is he? Where’s Stepan?”

“With his aunt.”

“She likes them that young, does she?”

Zahidov swore at her in Uzbek, bringing the pipe down on her shoulder once, twice, then a third time, and Chace screamed from the pain of it, swearing in return, thrashing against the cuffs and the chair and the fingers gripping her. She kicked herself free, felt her foot hit the bruiser again, and screamed louder from the impact. Something hit her alongside the head, a fist, and her vision went again. There was cursing in Russian, in Uzbek, and she was struck alongside the head this time, and this time both she and the chair went over onto the floor. She felt blood leaking from her mouth.

And she wanted to laugh. They were going to torture her, and they were going to do it until she was dead, Zahidov had said as much. They were going to rape her and beat her and mutilate her, do everything in their power to destroy her entirely. She had no illusions, she knew the purpose of this room, and she knew she couldn’t resist. At the best, one survived torture, but no one ever endured it. It was why torture was ultimately useless as an interrogation technique; hurt someone enough, and they will tell you that, yes, they murdered Kennedy, Princess Diana, and Thomas More, just please, God, please, make it stop.

Chace was terrified, but that was all right, because she’d have to have been insane not to be. Yet in the midst of her terror, she’d found her anger, and that was what she wanted to hold on to now, what she needed now. To be angry, and to stay that way. To stoke it and fuel it and tend it so that when the worst came, she could still find it.

This ends only two ways, she told herself. You tell them everything and then they kill you, or they kill you before you can.

She didn’t want to die. She absolutely didn’t want to die. At that moment, more than anything, what Tara Chace wanted was to live, to go home, to her home. Not Barnoldswick and its alien world but Camden and London, and to have her daughter there with her. She wanted her job and her life, and to find a way to make them both work together. She wanted to be Minder One again, Head of the Special Section again, and then one day to leave the field and become D-Ops. She wanted to watch Tamsin grow and learn and live, and to see Tom Wallace in her every time she looked her daughter’s way.

She did not want to die being tortured in Tashkent.

But if she had to, she would. And if Ruslan was alive, if he was on the run, she hadn’t failed. The more Zahidov and his brutes stayed focused on her, the better it was for Ruslan, the farther away and safer he would become.

Zahidov had given her a way in, had shown her the exposed nerve. All Chace had to do was keep her anger alive long enough to fully ignite his.

The bruiser came around, righting her in the chair once more. Chace shook her head, trying to clear it, then spat out a mouthful of her own blood. Zahidov watched her, the older man still at the table, waiting by the toolbox. When the bruiser came around to grab her legs again, Zahidov motioned him back with the pipe.

He extended his free hand again, running his fingers over her shoulder, then down across her chest, tracing the edge of her bra along the swell of her breasts. He kept the touch light, watching her for a reaction, and Chace stared back at him. The bruiser laughed, said something in Uzbek.

“He says you like this,” Zahidov remarked. “That it’s making you wet.”

“No, but clearly it’s how you get your rocks off.” Chace met his eyes. “What’s the matter, Ahtam? Not getting any at home, you have to keep feeling me up?”

He backhanded her across the face, striking near her wounded eye. She saw blood on the back of his hand as he brought it around again.

“You really think Sevara’s going to let you keep fucking her after she’s President?” Chace taunted him. “What’s the endearment form—Sevya, is that it? You think little Sevya’s really going to let you bang her in the big house in Dormon?”

His expression flickered, and she saw the hand coming up again, the one without the pipe, and Chace turned her head to roll with the blow. It hit hard, rocking her in the chair, and she realized he’d pulled it at the last moment, that he’d almost lost it. The pipe would do it, she realized. If she could get him to hit her in the temple with the pipe, that would do it, that would end it.

“We’re not talking about her,” Zahidov said. “We’re talking about Ruslan. You’re going to tell me where he went, who his contacts are.”

Chace tried to laugh, a sound that came out like a croak. “Little Sevya, she’ll find two dozen more just like you but younger, ones that don’t need yohimbe to keep them going at night.”

He brought his fist up again, and she braced for the blow, but he didn’t strike. “Where did he go? What was the route? Was there a second helicopter?”

“Maybe he went to see his sister.”

“Why? Why would he do that?”

Chace grinned at him, feeling blood rolling off her lower lip. “To get shit on his dick.”

It took him a second to parse the language, and then Zahidov roared, throwing down the pipe so it clattered on the floor, ringing throughout the room. He punched her in the side, grabbing hold of her hair, shouting in Uzbek. Chace tried to shift forward, to get to her feet again, and this time he shoved her, and she went down face-first, feeling the cement ripping her skin. He was still shouting, and she saw the bruiser’s—Tozim’s—feet coming around, the Adidas sneakers he was wearing navy blue and new. There was a clattering of keys, and Chace tried to rise, then felt the air being crushed out of her as someone, Tozim or the older one or Zahidov himself, bore down on the chair.

They freed one of her hands, then twisted it, cuffing it to her other wrist before unlocking the second set. The chair was knocked away, she heard it bounce, then slide, and the bruiser jerked her to her feet, then dragged her to the table.

Zahidov was still swearing at her in Uzbek, yanking off his jacket. The older man had moved around to the other side of the table, and he grabbed her wrists by the chain of the handcuffs, yanking her forward. Chace twisted, trying to roll, and felt Tozim’s hands on her shoulders, pinning her down.

She felt another pair of hands on her skin, Zahidov’s, and they ran along her sides, down to her hips, and she howled in outrage, kicking back at him. Through her blurred vision she saw the metal door past the older man slam open, two figures, out of focus. One stayed outside, turning away, but the other entered, big, blond, out of focus, in a suit like the others but somehow not like the others.

The man said something in Uzbek, and everything in the room froze. The blond man spoke a second time, more bite in the words, and the hands holding her down left her body. First the bruiser, Tozim, then the older man, and then, finally, Zahidov.

Chace tried to right herself at the table. She heard herself wheezing for breath.

The blond man cast his eye around the room, and through the distortion of her vision, Chace thought she saw naked disgust on his face. He pointed in the direction of the video camera, speaking once more. Zahidov came past Chace, caught in her periphery, smoothing his shirt and tie. He spoke to Tozim, and Tozim moved to the camera.

Chace pushed herself upright, trying to stand, and the pain of using her feet was too much to bear, and she dropped again, trying to catch the table to arrest the fall, and missing. She hit the floor on her side, rocking back and forth.

More words in Uzbek, the new man speaking to Zahidov, furious. Zahidov responded, his voice rising, and then the man shouted, and whatever the debate was ended then, because there was nothing more said. Chace lifted her head, trying to see what was happening, watched as Zahidov stormed out of the room, the other two men following in his wake.

Leaving the new man, the blond man, to kneel down beside her as he removed his coat. He wrapped it around her shoulders, and Chace’s mind flickered on the thought that this, too, might be a trick, some mind game played by Zahidov. She tried to pull away, but the man took hold of her upper arms, then closed the coat around her front.

“You’re a fucking mess,” the man said. “Do you think you can walk?”

Chace blinked at him, perplexed, then realized he’d actually spoken in English, his accent American.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

The man frowned, drawing creases along his face.

“You’re going to need to try,” he said.

Chace nodded, and the man slipped an arm around her waist, helping her to her feet. The pain was as intense as before, and Chace gasped and faltered, but he caught her, pulling her upright again. It felt like she was walking on a thousand splinters of glass, but somehow she managed to stay on her feet this time, using the man as a crutch. Slowly he began walking her to the door.

“I’ve got a car outside. Just make it to the car, hon, you can do that, can’t you?”

Chace nodded again.

They entered a hallway, now empty, then reached a flight of stairs. The stairs were hard, and it seemed to Chace it took them an eternity to climb them together, coming through a door and into another hallway. Like the one below, this one was empty.

It took another eternity to make it down the hall, turn, and then reach the exit of the building.

The sun was out, shockingly bright to Chace’s eyes, and it was cold, colder than it had been in the basement, and she felt it sinking through her bare legs, striking for bone. The car was a Mercedes-Benz, old and dented along the front panel, and the man guided her to it, then opened the rear door and helped her inside. He shut the door, and Chace lay down on the backseat, shivering. She heard the driver’s door open, then slam shut, and the engine started, and she felt the vibration through her whole body. The car started to move.

Chace forced herself upright, catching a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror and not recognizing the woman she saw there at all. The right side of her face was scraped and caked with dried blood, and her eye had swollen closed. Her lower lip had split, and a bruise of angry purple and red was glowing on her left cheek. Her hair was stringy, matted with blood and dirt.

She looked out the window, at the Interior Ministry, wondering how she’d gotten out of there alive.

Standing in the entrance, watching her go, she saw Ahtam Zahidov, and it looked to her like he was wondering the same thing.

CHAPTER 30

London—Vauxhall Cross, Office of D-Ops

21 February, 0649 Hours GMT

Crocker was sitting at his desk, watching a cigarette burning down in the ashtray, when the red phone rang. He looked across to where Seale was sitting, waiting with him, then answered the call. He listened to the Duty Ops Officer, asked him to repeat, then thanked him and hung up.

“She’s alive,” Crocker told Seale. “Your man found her at the Interior Ministry, brought her to the British Embassy. A doctor is tending her now, they’ll fly her home as soon as they think she can make the trip.”

Seale nodded, clearly sharing Crocker’s exhaustion, if not his immediate sense of relief. “They were working her over?”

“I believe the term they use is ‘interrogation.’ ”

“How bad?”

“Bad enough that she won’t be traveling until tomorrow at the earliest, according to the Station Number One.”

“Could’ve been worse. My guy could have gotten there too late.”

They were each silent for several seconds, then Seale sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Paul.”

“Hmm?”

“We have to figure this thing out, what you and I are doing, how we’re going to trust each other.”

“We don’t have to trust each other, Julian.”

“Look, I know you were tight with Cheng. And I know you don’t trust me. But if you’d come to me at the start of this, told me you had an agent running in Tashkent, it would have saved a shitload of grief.”

Crocker shook his head, then stubbed the half-dead cigarette out and started a new one, this one to actually smoke. The relief he felt regarding Chace was beyond words, and maybe, because of that, he was less inclined to be combative, or even antagonistic.

“It was never about Tashkent,” Crocker said.

“You were jockeying for Ruslan—”

“You think Ruslan was our idea? You’re the ones with an air base in the south of the country, you’re the ones who negotiated the overflight and land-use deals, not us. The last member of our team to speak out about Uzbekistan got canned, remember? McInnes was out of his job within a week of his outburst.”

Seale frowned.

“This didn’t start with us,” Crocker said. “It started with you, in your house.”

“You should have come to me with it anyway.”

“As Barclay has been anxious to point out to me in the past, I don’t work for you.”

“No, but you don’t work against us, either.”

“Not if I can help it. The plan was never to screw you or yours, Julian.” Crocker picked up his internal line, punched a key, waited for a response. “Escort out for Mr. Seale.”

“I’m leaving, am I?”

“For the time being.” Crocker indicated the ceiling with his cigarette. “It was never about Tashkent, Julian. Tashkent was the excuse.”

Seale looked up, toward the sixth floor, then looked back to Crocker, then shook his head. He put his hands on the arms of his chair, pushed himself to his feet.

“I’m glad your girl is okay.”

“Her name’s Chace.” Crocker tapped ash into the tray. “I owe you for this.”

Seale smiled. “I know you do. And I know you’ll be good for it.”

“I will.”

“You mind if I ask? What’re you going to do with Fincher?”

“We’ll find a Station for him. He was fine as a Station man. He just wasn’t made to be a Minder.”

“The Thousandth Man.”

Crocker raised an eyebrow. “Kipling?”

“Yeah, you know the poem? ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine can’t bide the shame or mocking or laughter, but the Thousandth Man will stand by your side to the gallows-foot and after.’ I had to memorize it in the Boy Scouts.”

“You were a Boy Scout?”

“I was an Eagle Scout, mister, so don’t fuck with me.”

“Never again. Neither you nor I would count Fincher in that number.”

“No,” Seale agreed.

There was a rap on the office door, and then it opened, revealing one of the wardens from downstairs. Crocker nodded to him, then got to his feet and offered Seale his hand. Whatever the reason, it was clear then that he and COS London had reached a mutual understanding.

“When I get Chace’s after-action, I’ll let you know,” Crocker told him.

“It’d be appreciated.” Seale turned for the door and the waiting warden. “Should’ve been called ‘The Thousandth Woman,’ huh?”

He left, the warden closing the door after them.

Crocker turned his chair, opening the blinds to look out at the dawn over London. The sky had already begun to lighten, and the clouds were low, and behind the tinted windows, they looked a gangrenous green. He snorted, swiveled back around to his desk, wondering when Kate would arrive and how long after that he could coerce her into preparing a pot of coffee, and there was a knock on his door.

“Come,” Crocker said, then got to his feet as Sir Walter Seccombe entered the room, umbrella and hat in his hand and a smile on his face. “Sir. Can I offer you a seat?”

“No time, I’m afraid. I have to brief the Foreign Secretary so he can inform the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. But I wanted to stop by and let you know how things are shaking out. You still have your job, Paul.”

“I’m relieved.”

“Sir Frances will be tendering his resignation this morning, with no explanation given. Best that way, for all concerned, I should think. Certainly he has no desire to explain how it was that four Starstreak MANPADs ended up in Uzbekistan. Nor does HMG wish to see a public inquiry into the same.”

“And our involvement in Uzbekistan?”

“Will be kept quiet as well.”

“I see.”

Seccombe lifted his chin slightly, regarding him with a smaller smile this time. “Any news on Chace?”

“She was taken by the Interior Ministry, but we’ve got her back now. She should be home in the next few days.”

“And you’ll reinstate her?”

“If she still wants it.” Crocker ran a hand through his hair. “The irony is, she’s going to come back thinking she blew the mission. She doesn’t know that she did exactly what you wanted.”

“This wasn’t solely about Barclay. It began exactly as I presented it.”

“When did it change?”

“When the Prime Minister thought better of antagonizing the White House. And as Chace was running without contact, we couldn’t rightly abort the op, could we?”

“We could’ve,” Crocker said. “If I’d notified the Station.”

“Hmm,” Seccombe said. “I’m afraid I didn’t think of that.”

Liar, Crocker thought.

“It all worked out in the end, regardless, Paul. I think you’ll get along well with your new C. You share a great many traits.”

“It’s confirmed, then?”

“Not officially. Alison will step up as acting C following the resignation. Should confirm the posting by the end of the week.”

“She’ll need a Deputy Chief.”

“Yes,” Seccombe said, nodding. “You should probably talk to Alison about that.”

CHAPTER 31

London—Vauxhall Cross, Office of D-Ops

18 August, 0858 Hours GMT

Time didn’t heal all wounds, not for her, but in some cases it helped. Chace had come back from Tashkent thinking she was repeating her return from Saudi Arabia, expecting to find Crocker and another trip to the Farm, and then an uncomfortable and unceremonious discharge, this time once and for all.

Instead, she’d returned home to find Crocker acting as if she’d never left; not for Tashkent, not for Saudi, as if she’d been Minder One all along. He’d given her two weeks leave to recover and get her things in order, and to move from Lancashire back to London. So she’d continued on to Lancashire as she’d done for over a year and a half, taking the GNR to Leeds and then changing to Skipton, finally hiring a cab to take her the rest of the way to Barnoldswick.

People either stared at her as she went or studiously avoided looking at her. The bruises on her face had swollen, and she’d been given an ointment for the scrapes, which made the wounds appear still wet and fresher than they were. The sight in her right eye was beginning to return, clearest when she stood upright, worse when she lay down. The doctor who’d tended her at the British Embassy, hovered over by a concerned Station Number One, had explained that there was blood in the eye, and that was what was occluding her vision. It would stop and be reabsorbed soon enough, he assured her. As for her feet, luckily nothing had been broken, but the blunt trauma was severe enough that he’d advised her to stay off them as much as she could. He’d given her a set of crutches.

When Chace finally hobbled through Valerie Wallace’s door in the late afternoon of the twenty-fourth of February, she found Tamsin and Val in the front room, playing with a sorting set, plastic pyramids, spheres, and cubes that could fit into an elbow-shaped tube. Val came to her feet quickly, unable to completely hide the dismay and concern on her face, or the sharp inhale she made at the sight of Chace.

Tamsin merely looked at her blankly, eyes wide and blue and curious.

Chace thought her heart would break then, that her daughter couldn’t remember her. But Val saw it, too, and understood.

“It’s your face, love,” Val told her softly. “She doesn’t recognize you.”

Chace propped her crutches against the side table, nodding, still drinking in the sight of her daughter. Ten days had passed since she’d seen her last, and Chace was stunned by how much Tamsin had grown.

“Hello, Tam,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

Tamsin dropped the ball she was holding, struggling to her feet, her face lighting with an openmouthed smile. She wobbled like a drunk, then lurched forward, arms out, a miniature Frankenstein’s Monster, babbling happily.

Chace knelt and caught her in her arms, and held her until she was certain her heart wouldn’t break.

She stayed in Barnoldswick for the week, and one night, after putting Tamsin to bed, sat with Val at the kitchen table, and explained her intentions. She was going to return to work, and that required her moving back to London, and she wanted Tamsin with her. She would hire a nanny, someone to live in and take care of her daughter during the day and sometimes the night, if need be.

Valerie nodded, failing to hide her disappointment or her hurt. “If you think it’s best, then.”

“It’s what’s best for me, and in the long run, I think that makes it best for Tam as well,” Chace said. “I’ll be traveling again, though. I don’t know how much, and I’ll never know when. But if you’re around, I’d like it so that Tamsin stayed with you while I’m away.”

“Here? Or in London?”

“Whichever you’d rather, Val.”

“Don’t much care for London.”

“Then here, by all means.”

Val considered, then nodded. “She’s my granddaughter, and far as I’m concerned, Tara, you’re my daughter-in-law. You’ll always have me, the both of you.”

“You’ve been generous beyond reason, Val, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

Val reached for her hand on the table, resting beside her mug of tea. Her touch was warm and soft and dry, and the look she gave Chace was grave.

“And this is what you want? What you truly want?”

“It is.”

“And it’s the same work, the same work you and my Tom were doing before?”

“Yes.”

“Either you’re good at it, or you’re a glutton for punishment, Tara. For Tamsin’s sake, and for yours, I hope you’re good at it.”

“I’m very good at it,” Chace told her.

And so she returned to London.

Her feet had recovered enough that she could walk on them without the crutches for short stints. It made it easier to go about the shopping, the acquisition of those things that would be required to turn her bachelorette’s house into a home for a single mother. She contacted a service, set about interviewing nannies, and before the end of the second week had spoken with three she liked the looks of, forwarding their names to the Firm’s Security Division for the appropriate checks. Two of them came back clean, and Chace hired them both, a young woman from Salisbury named Missi, twenty-one years old and studying art history, and an older girl who’d grown up in Bristol, named Catherine, who was planning on a career in early childhood education.

Then she called Val and asked her to bring Tamsin down to London, to be with her mother.

By the time she reported for work on the thirteenth of March, the shakeout had already occurred, and she entered the Pit to find Lankford and Poole already there, greeting her with applause. The Minder One Desk had been cleared of the previous occupant’s personal belongings, and a bouquet of flowers sat at its center, waiting for her. Chace had brought her go-bag, and as she felt her cheeks redden with the applause, turned and put it up on the shelf, beside Poole’s and Lankford’s.

“Like your bouquet?” Lankford asked.

“His idea,” Poole said. “He’s a romantic.”

Chace moved to the desk, took a closer look, then burst out laughing. They weren’t flowers at all, but rather an artfully arranged display of condoms in red, purple, yellow, green, and blue, most of them out of their wrappers, folded and tied to appear as blossoms. A card was taped to the vase, reading, “For God’s sake, be careful!”

“We got you the extra-big bouquet, boss,” Lankford told her. “Forty-eight, jumbo-size.”

“She’ll go through them in a week,” Poole said.

“I’m not like that anymore,” Chace said, mildly. “I’m a mother, I have to set an example.”

“Half a week, then,” Poole said.

The internal circuit on her desk rang, the same infinitely annoying bleat she remembered, and all of them, Chace, Lankford, Poole, stared at the phone.

“Minder One,” Chace said when she answered, and she felt herself smiling, and saw Lankford and Poole quietly laughing at her as a result.

“Come and see me,” Crocker said, and hung up.

So she’d gone to Crocker’s office, and he’d given her a seat, and had redrawn the map of the Firm for her. There was no Frances Barclay, there was Alison Gordon-Palmer. Simon Rayburn was no longer D-Int, but instead was awaiting confirmation of promotion to Deputy Chief. Paul Crocker was D-Ops, Tara Chace was Minder One, and Kate Cooke still believed she ran SIS.

“I’m sorry,” Chace told him when he was finished.

“For? You did your job, you did it damn well, and you didn’t even know what the bloody job really was.”

“About Rayburn. I know you wanted the promotion.”

Crocker took out a cigarette, then offered her the pack. Chace hesitated, then accepted.

“I can live with it,” he told her. “Besides, you’re not ready to take over for me yet, and if I move on, I want you to fill this desk.”

“I’m flattered,” Chace said. “I think.”

“It’s not because I like you,” Crocker said. “It’s because you can’t be any worse at it than Fincher would have been.”

“And where is Mr. Fincher now?”

“Out at the School, taking a refresher before his reassignment.”

“He’s being reassigned?”

Crocker pulled a face. “Our new lady mistress on the floor above feels he is a damn fine officer. For that reason, he’ll soon be off to parts unknown to head up the station there. As long as he doesn’t end up as the new D-Int, I’ll be content.”

“Is that all, sir?”

“No.” Crocker shoved the stack of folders on his desk toward her. “This is homework. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do, Minder One.”

Chace laughed, taking the stack and getting to her feet. “Then I’ll start reading. You know where to find me.”

“Yes,” Crocker agreed. “I do.”

So it was that, six months after she’d returned from Tashkent, Tara Chace waited in D-Ops’ outer office, two blue internal distribution folders in her hand, joking with Kate Cooke and waiting for Crocker to see her for the morning brief.

“It’s a new perfume,” Chace said. “There’s a boy.”

“There is not a boy,” Kate responded, indignant, offering her a cup of coffee.

Chace took the cup, sipped at it, grinning. “It’s Lankford, isn’t it? You’ve got a thing for my Minder Three.”

Color crept into Kate’s cheeks, and she settled at her desk, putting her attention on the files she’d been sorting before Chace had entered. It seemed to Chace that she was trying very hard to avoid eye contact.

“I do not.”

“Well, it’s not Poole, and it’s not me, and I can’t much figure who else comes through this office that you’d try to capture with a new scent. So I’m thinking Lankford.”

“It’s not Chris.”

“Oooh, Chris, is it?” Chace moved toward the desk, reaching for the internal phone. “I’ll call down to the Pit, shall I, see what he thinks of that?”

Kate swatted at Chace’s hand. “Don’t you dare.”

Chace stopped, looked closer at Kate, who held the stare for a fraction before again turning her attention back to her work. The younger woman’s expression had tightened, the joke taken too far, and Chace realized three things in quick succession. First, Kate wasn’t trying to catch Lankford; she’d already caught him. Second, Kate Cooke had been in this office long enough to know the directorate’s opinion of staff/Minder fraternization. Relationships weren’t forbidden between most SIS staff, but between SIS staff and members of Special Section was a different story. One thing to tandem-couple with the new lad on the Argentine Desk, another thing entirely to tandem with an agent who might be asked to kidnap a general from his home in Tehran, a job he or she might not come back from, ever.

Third, Chace realized that she was living in her own glass house, that there was nothing she could say to dissuade either Lankford or Kate. Even if her affair with Wallace didn’t strictly fall into the same category—Wallace had left the Section at the time, to teach at the Field School—she’d done the same herself with Minder Three Edward Kittering when she’d been Minder Two. In the rankings of sin, Chace was the winner, and both of them knew it.

“Just keep it quiet,” Chace told Kate. “You don’t want D-Ops getting wind of it.”

Kate’s expression was a mixture of gratitude and hope.

“Don’t look at me like that. I don’t approve, but I won’t obstruct.”

“You did it.”

“Yes, I did.” Chace finished her coffee, moved around to the pot for a refill. “I was astonishingly stupid.”

Kate started to respond, but the door from the inner office opened, and Simon Rayburn emerged, bearing a folder of his own, this one red. He smiled at Chace.

“Tara.”

“Good morning, sir.”

“All well?”

“For the moment at least, yes, sir.”

“Very good.” Rayburn made for the exit, back onto the hall. “You can go on in, I think.”

“Thank you, sir,” Chace said, and went through to the inner office, to find Crocker seated behind his desk, as ever he seemed to be, scribbling his signature at the bottom of the memorandum he was reviewing. Chace stood, waiting while he shuffled the memo back into the stack, and when he looked up, she held out the folders she was carrying.

“Report to the FCO on the viability of recruitment in Guangdong Province as prepared per your request with input from the China Desk, with notes. And request for operational oversight regarding travel and incidental expenses to operational theater, prepared for submission to the Finance Committee. I almost handed it to the Deputy Chief on his way out, but thought it’d be better coming from you.”

She dropped the second folder on the first, and Crocker reached for it, flipping it open. “Sit.”

Chace barked, once, sounding less like a dog than like a woman trying to sound like one, then pulled up the chair. She leaned forward and lifted his pack of Silk Cut, freed a cigarette, and Crocker slid his lighter across the desktop absently, without looking away from his reading. Chace lit, exhaled, and sat back, waiting for his verdict.

Crocker closed the folder, then reached for his pack and lighter, sitting back himself. “You were diplomatic.”

“I thought honey rather than vinegar.”

“Probably wise. All right, I’ll send it up to C. If she approves it, she’ll have Rayburn present at the meeting.”

“He’ll sell it? We need more money.”

“We always need more money, Tara.”

“On Operation: Lanyard, Mission Planning couldn’t secure seats for Poole and me on the same flight, sir. We ended up flying into Hanoi sixteen hours apart, and that put me sixteen hours in theater without backup. The last time Lankford went out, he flew economy because Budget wouldn’t authorize a first-class ticket.”

“He did all right.”

“He did, but that’s hardly the point.”

Crocker lit his own cigarette. “C will give it to Rayburn, and Rayburn will bring it to Finance. It’ll be taken care of.”

“Nice to have a Deputy Chief we can trust.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” Crocker told her. While he didn’t actually grin, he came close.

Tara laughed, then reached into her jacket pocket and removed the printout she’d been carrying there, folded widthwise. “You see this?”

“I’m still working through the ‘Urgents,’ so unless it was graded ‘Immediate,’ no, I haven’t. What is it?”

“It’s about Tashkent.”

“Will it make me happy?”

“It’s not about the last Starstreak, if that’s what you’re asking, no.”

Crocker took the next paper waiting for him at the top of his stack, readying his pen. “You’re still certain they only used three of them?”

“Technically, they used two of them, I used one,” Chace clarified. “And yes, I am certain, as certain as I can be considering that I was unconscious for a time.”

“I don’t like loose ends.”

Chace grunted agreement. In the past sixth months, there’d been no sign nor whisper of the fourth of Barclay’s four missiles, and try as Tashkent Station might, they’d heard nary a whisper of its whereabouts. If it was still in Uzbekistan, in Ahtam Zahidov’s possession, perhaps, there was no proof of the fact. If it wasn’t in Zahidov’s possession, then God only knew who had it, and what they were planning to do with it. Neither Chace nor Crocker nor the DC nor C doubted it would come back to haunt them. Where and when were the only questions.

Chace handed the sheet over, watched as Crocker unfolded it. It was a simple printout out of a news piece Chace had pulled from online earlier that morning, a Reuters story carried on the wire, with a photo. The printer in the Pit was a cranky old laserjet, and incapable of color, though it had tried its best to reproduce the graphic. The photo had been taken in Tashkent the previous week, outside the Bakhor Concert Hall in Tashkent, and showed President Sevara Malikov-Ganiev speaking to the American Ambassador, a man named Michael Norton.

Crocker skimmed the article, examined the photo, then sent it back to her across the desk. “I do not see the missing Starstreak.”

“As I said, this isn’t about the missing Starstreak.”

“Then please explain the operational significance of this photograph.”

Chace pushed it back toward him, this time tapping an index finger on the photograph. “There.”

Crocker looked again, and either didn’t like what he saw or didn’t like where he suspected Chace was going with this. “That’s the boy?”

“Stepan, yes.” Chace took the paper back. In the photo, Stepan was in the background, in the cluster of bodyguards behind Sevara. The boy had been dressed up, wearing what passed for formal clothing for a two-and-a-half-year-old. Chace had looked for, but hadn’t seen, Zahidov in the shot. “I’m wondering if she knew they’d be photographed.”

“It looks unstaged,” Crocker said.

“So maybe the Ambassador didn’t know the camera would be there. But maybe she did.”

“You think she’s parading the boy? Why?”

“I don’t know.” Chace put out her cigarette. “But you read my after-action, you know what I was asked during the torture. If Zahidov was trying to play psychological games along with the physical ones, that’s one thing. But if Ruslan actually escaped, that’s something else. Sevara brings his son out for a photo op, that’s a warning to him. ‘Hey, look—hostage.’ ”

Crocker scowled, tilting forward in his chair. “You could just be paranoid.”

“There’s that, too.” She smiled thinly, to show that she didn’t think she was. “But no one ever confirmed Ruslan’s death, boss. I didn’t get a good look at him, and no one from our team ever saw the body.”

“There were two state funerals held in Uzbekistan the week after you got home. One for President Malikov, one for his son.”

“Closed casket,” Chace pointed out.

“For Ruslan, yes. And if he died the way you thought he died, that would make sense, because he would have caught a faceful of shrapnel.”

“You don’t think he’s alive?”

Crocker exhaled smoke. “I don’t know. There’s been no sign of him, there’s been no word of him. What I do know, however, is that Ahtam Zahidov tortured you and intended to kill you. And you’ve never been the type to forgive and forget.”

“I’ve forgiven you.”

“I’d like to think you don’t group me and Zahidov in the same class.”

“No, of course not.” Chace leaned forward again, serious. “I’m not trying to make up an excuse to go back to Tashkent, boss. That’s not what this is.”

“I don’t think you are,” Crocker said mildly. “But you’re not beyond finding an excuse for me to send you there.”

Chace fell silent, thinking, then sitting back once more and looking away, to the bust of Winston Churchill that Crocker kept atop his document safe. It was one of the few appointments he kept in the office, the bust, a bookshelf filled with the latest in Jane’s titles, and a Chinese dragon print on one wall. He’d had the dragon for as long as Chace had known him to occupy the office, and she sometimes wondered at its significance, but she’d never asked.

He had her number, of course—but that didn’t mean that Chace was wrong about the possibility Ruslan had survived.

Since returning from Uzbekistan, she’d made a point of staying informed about what was happening in the region, and as much as she could claim the interest was operational, it clearly went to the personal. She’d spent dozens of hours reviewing files, viewing photographs, in particular attempting to identify the two men who had helped Zahidov torture her. She knew their names now. Tozim was Tozim Stepanov, the older man with the tools Andrei Hamrayev. She remembered them.

There were nights when she dreamed about Tozim Stepanov and Andrei Hamrayev and, worst of them all, Ahtam Zahidov. Memory had blunted nothing, and Chace recalled him perfectly. Zahidov’s thin-lipped smile and his insistent fingers, and the practiced nonchalance with which he’d hurt her. She remembered Zahidov’s hands burning on her as he had moved to strip the last of her clothes, his eagerness to rape her.

Chace didn’t just want Zahidov dead. She wanted to be the one to kill him. There would be a reckoning, she was certain. The only question was when.

And no one in the Firm who knew what Zahidov had done to her could expect her to do anything less when the opportunity came.

Crocker said, “I do understand, Tara, you know that.”

“I know.” She looked back to him, then got out of the chair. “I’ll be down in the Pit.”

“Tara.”

She stopped at the door, looking back.

“It’s been six months,” Crocker said. “You’re going to have to let it go.”

Chace thought about the terror of that room and the cruelty of the men who had filled it. There were still times, six months after the fact, when she would lift Tamsin or reach above her for a high shelf, when her right shoulder would send fire down her arm. When she touched the skin around her eye, she could feel a spur of bone, floating just above the orbit. And, condom bouquet notwithstanding, the only people she’d allowed to touch her in any way but the most formal or accidental since Tashkent had been her daughter and her physician.

“No,” she told him. “Really, I don’t. And you wouldn’t, either, boss.”

Time didn’t heal all wounds, not for her.

Especially not this one.

CHAPTER 32

Uzbekistan—Surkhan Darya Province—

Termez, “Friendship Bridge”

20 August, 0621 Hours (GMT+5:00)

Zahidov stood in the dawn light at the foot of the bridge beside an Uzbek army captain named Oleg Arkitov, took the offered binoculars from the man’s hand, and looked into Afghanistan. Across the Amu Darya River, past the newly built Customs houses and immigration offices staffed by the Afghanis, the Salang Highway joined the road that ran parallel to the tracks, cutting straight to Mazar-i-Sharif, and then on to Kabul, winding through the red hills in the distance. A train was rumbling up the tracks toward them, returning empty, Zahidov suspected, having been emptied of the UN relief supplies it had delivered earlier in the day. It would be stopped by the border guards on the Uzbek side and thoroughly searched before being allowed to proceed.

“You look upriver, Minister, you can see the barges coming, too,” Arkitov told him.

Zahidov swiveled, turning east to follow the river. The Uzbek side of the border was lined with a 380-volt electrified fence, and beyond it, land mines covered the banks down to the water. The fence and the mines had been laid in the late nineties in response to incursions from the extremists who then ruled Afghanistan. The bridge, at that time, had been all but permanently closed, reopened only in late 2001. Since then, the border operated almost at random, the Uzbek side shutting down whenever the government responded to a security alert or a bombing. Despite continued American insistence to keep the border open, there were still times when the border was ordered shut.

Zahidov lowered the optics, handing them back to the captain. “They hit before the bridge?”

“Last night, just after three in the morning, sir. We could see the muzzle-flashes and the rocket grenades.”

“How many trucks made it?”

“One.”

“And how many were coming?”

“Three.”

Zahidov felt his frustration well. This was the fourth time the heroin had been hijacked before reaching the border. Twice in May, once in July, and then again this morning. Four times, and there could be no doubt in his mind any longer. He was being persecuted, he was being targeted specifically.

When it first happened, he’d been angry, but willing to accept the loss. The north of Afghanistan was populated by warlords and drug lords, each leading a private army of Pathan soldiers eager for nothing more than a chance to fight. The Pathans’ favorite sports, the saying went, were dog racing, horse racing, and fighting each other, not in that order. If Zahidov’s heroin was lost in this cross fire, it wasn’t ideal, but it was survivable, it was the cost of doing business with the Afghanis.

But when it happened again, less than two weeks later, and the replacement shipment had also been lost, he had become immediately suspicious, and just as quickly considered the possibility that it was Ruslan Malikov behind it all. No proof, of course, except for the fact that the man had escaped him in February, and when he thought back to that, all of his rage returned. He’d been a fool, so filled with hatred for the bitch spy he’d ordered the Sikorsky in immediate pursuit of her, instead of commanding the pilot to set down first, to allow him to finish what they had begun with Ruslan.

The fact was, he’d been so eager to catch and kill the spy that he hadn’t even considered the possibility that Ruslan wasn’t dead. It had been almost two hours later, after he’d brought Stepan to Sevara and was making his way back to the Ministry to begin the interrogation, that he’d received the call. Ruslan had vanished, there was no sign of him.

And there had been no true sign of him since then, Zahidov’s suspicions notwithstanding. But there was logic to the idea that the President’s son had gone south. His support had always been strongest there, in Bukhara, Samarkand, Qashka Darya, and Surkhan Darya provinces. He would have been able to find some aid, some shelter, at least enough to provide for his immediate needs. It was even possible he had jumped aboard a UN relief shipment, either hiding in one of the train cars or riding in one of the trucks that traveled the thousand meters across the river alongside the tracks.

Why he’d gone to Afghanistan was the question, and it wasn’t a terribly difficult one to answer. There were few places better in the world for a man to hide, the terrain placed by God, it seemed, only for that purpose and no other. Add to that the central government’s lack of actual power in the outlying regions, the scores of bickering warlords and tribesmen, all of them bound by their peculiar code of honor, what they called Pashtunwali, the Law of the Pathan. And first among the laws was the demand that they provide sanctuary and hospitality to any and all who request it. It was how bin Laden’s people had survived when the Coalition had come for their blood.

Sanctuary was given to any and all who asked for it. The Pathans would shelter Ruslan, if the bastard asked. They would have to: their culture allowed them no other choice.

So Zahidov had become convinced it was Ruslan persecuting him, stealing his heroin. And it wasn’t simply to hurt him or Sevara, no, though that was certainly an added benefit. Zahidov was certain Ruslan was selling it, perhaps to the same Moscow buyers that Sevara and he dealt with. Ruslan was selling it, and making a lot of money. Money he could use to pay the warlords and their men, money he could use to raise an army.

It wasn’t far-fetched. In 2000, taleban-backed extremists had poured over the border from Afghanistan in an attempt to overthrow the country. They had closed to within one hundred kilometers of Tashkent before they’d been stopped by Uzbek forces. If Ruslan tried to do the same, he stood an even better chance. He knew the land, and if his support in Uzbekistan still held, if those in the military rose to join him, it would be either a coup or a civil war.

These were Zahidov’s fears, and watching as the rising sun turned the already red hills of Afghanistan bloody, he gave them their due. A coup, or worse, a civil war, would destroy Uzbekistan, and at the end of the day, despite everything he did or had done—or perhaps because of it—Ahtam Zahidov was a patriot. He saw no conflict in wishing to do himself well in the process of serving his county, he saw no fault in the viciousness he showed his enemies. He wanted what was best for his nation, and he did what he did to ensure it. All his love for Sevara notwithstanding, it was why he had supported her as President in the first place. It was why he continued to serve her, despite their troubles.

It was why he was in Termez now.

The problem was—or had been, until that morning—there was no proof at all it was Ruslan behind these attacks.

Then Andrei had woken him before dawn, rousing Zahidov from a lonely, fitful sleep. He’d told Zahidov that the Ministry had received a call from Captain Oleg Arkitov in Termez, that the captain had in his custody a Pathan who swore he’d seen Ruslan Malikov to the south of Mazar-i-Sharif, enjoying the hospitality of General Ahmad Mohammad Kostum, an ex–Northern Alliance commander and one of the more notorious warlords of the region. That the Pathan in question, a man using the name Hazza, had successfully identified Ruslan Malikov from a set of photographs.

Proof, at long last, but Zahidov needed to hear it for himself.

He turned to Arkitov, saying, “I want to speak to Hazza.”

They went by armored personnel carrier from the bridge to the barracks, Zahidov riding with Arkitov and four of his rangers. The soldiers sat on their benches, their automatic rifles in hand, bored. After the extremists had tried to overthrow the country in 2000, the Uzbek Army had been redeployed and remodeled, breaking away somewhat from its Soviet antecedents. Now the soldiers here in the south, the rangers, imitated the Americans, in training, unit composition, and tactics.

Zahidov looked back at the bridge, the only ground route joining Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Friendship Bridge, the Soviets had called it, although the Americans had tried to rechristen it “Freedom Bridge” once their war against the taleban began. It was the Soviets who had built the bridge, who had established this sole land crossing of the 130-mile-long border between the two countries, formed by the Amu Darya. It was over this bridge the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and it was over this same bridge that they had limped back ten years later, defeated. It was a refugee bridge, had seen thousands of Afghanis cross it, fleeing both the taleban and the Coalition. It was a terrorist’s bridge, one of the ways al-Qaeda foot soldiers used to infiltrate his country.

When the Americans had secured the rights to use Karshi-Khanabad, they’d argued for the bridge to be reopened. The UN kept offices in Termez, both for UNICEF and UNESCO, and the organization continued to use the city as a staging point for distribution of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. The International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, resided in Termez as well, its efforts more focused on the military than the humanitarian. Staffed by the Germans, Airlift Detachment 3 had supported Operation Enduring Freedom since the war’s start. The Germans had renovated the old Soviet airfield, built their own infrastructure, pouring millions of euros into Uzbekistan in the process.

The APC jostled Zahidov as it made its way back into town. He was sweating already, could feel beads of it trickling down from his hair along his spine, inside his cotton shirt. Nowhere in Uzbekistan got hotter in the summer; the temperature today was liable to hit 49 Celsius, over 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and that was cooler than it had been for a week.

Just another of the thousand reasons that Zahidov hated Termez.

They disembarked at the Border Watch HQ, a cluster of Soviet-era buildings that had served as command post, once upon a time, for the ground soldiers being deployed into Afghanistan. Now it was staffed by Arkitov and his rangers.

The captain led him from the garage into the air-conditioning of the dormitories, entering a common room with television and tables. The television was on, broadcasting the news, but the room itself was unoccupied. They moved into a hallway, and Arkitov led him to a door, knocked once on it, then opened it.

There were three men inside, two of them rangers, and both of them were coming to their feet before the door had fully opened. Both snapped salutes to Arkitov, and he dismissed them, then nodded to Zahidov and stepped out after them, closing the door once more, leaving Zahidov alone with the man who remained.

“Hazza?” Zahidov asked.

The man nodded to him, eyeing him with blatant suspicion and fingering the Kalashnikov resting across his thighs. Zahidov guessed him to be in his late thirties, perhaps older, but with the Pathans, after a certain age, it was hard to tell. They were the ethnic Afghanis, sometimes called the Pashtun or Pushtun, a collection of peoples that together constituted the largest patriarchal tribe in the world, and a fierce enough enemy to have driven the Soviets out of their homeland.

“When do I get paid?” Hazza asked.

Zahidov pulled out his PDA, brought up the picture of Ruslan he’d stored there. “This is the man you saw with General Kostum?”

Hazza squinted, and Zahidov wondered if his eyes were bad, if his ID would be useless. In July, Zahidov had ordered Arkitov to begin circulating rumors of a reward, paid to anyone who could prove he had seen Ruslan Malikov. If it was greed that had brought Hazza here, then his information was, by necessity, suspect.

“Looks like him,” Hazza said, after a second. “But he has a beard now, and covers his head.”

Zahidov considered, tucking the PDA back into his coat. “When did you last see him?”

“Yesterday. He took tea with the General.” Hazza’s suspicion had not eased. “When do I get paid?”

“When I believe you.”

Hazza’s expression clouded with anger, and he gripped the handle of his rifle. “You insult me.”

“Prove to me that you’ve seen the man.”

“My word is not enough? You insult me again.”

“You will get paid after I have proof.”

Hazza scowled, scratched at his beard with a filthy fingernail. “He limps. His left leg, it has a brace. I asked once how he was wounded, and he said it came trying to protect his son from the godless.”

“More.”

“I asked about the battle, and he said Allah smiled on him but also turned away, because he lived, but his son was taken from him. He said his wife and his son both were taken from him by a godless man.”

“He speaks like a good Muslim. Is he a good Muslim?”

“He tries to be.”

Zahidov ran his tongue along the back of his teeth, measuring the words. It sounded possible, it sounded like Ruslan, self-righteous and simpering, taking shelter in religion in the face of his losses.

“And Kostum?” Zahidov asked. “What is his relationship with Kostum?”

“Kostum has Uzbek blood, they are brothers. They talk as friends, and the money Kostum gets makes him like Ruslan all the more. He will not betray your man, he has given him sanctuary. If Kostum betrays him, his life is worth less than a goat’s.”

Zahidov digested that. “Thank you. I’ll see that you are paid.”

“Soon,” Hazza said. “I must return before they can learn where I have been.”

“You’re going back there?”

“Yes, as soon as I can.”

“I will see you are paid immediately then,” Zahidov said, and stepped out of the room, to find Arkitov and the two soldiers waiting in the hall.

“He had what you needed, Minister?” Arkitov asked him.

Zahidov nodded, then indicated over his shoulder at the closed door. “I don’t want him warning Malikov or Kostum. Kill him.”

Arkitov nodded, and signaled to the soldiers, then joined Zahidov walking down the hall. They heard the shots before they were back in the common room, and neither of them looked back.

“He’s building an army, I’m more sure of it than ever, Sevya,” Zahidov said. “He will wait until he has the men and the guns, and then they will come over the border, and they will come here, and they will try to kill you.”

“You believed this man?”

“Yes, I did.”

Sevara frowned, shook her head slightly, then waved past him at the secretary standing in the doorway of the office, dismissing the man. Zahidov watched him go. The secretary was in his mid-twenties, and far too attentive to the President for Zahidov’s comfort.

“Could there be another reason?” she asked him when they were alone.

“Why else take the heroin, Sevya? He’s selling it and keeping the money, using it to fund his eventual offensive. There is no other explanation.”

She shook her head again, this time with more certainty. “No. It would be too foolish.”

“Why?” He struggled, managing to keep the frustration from his voice.

“In 2000, there was no ISAF, no Coalition. In 2000, it was possible to come from the south and meet little to no resistance. Now if you come from the south, you meet the Germans in Termez and the Americans in Karshi. No—it makes no sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Zahidov countered. “For just those reasons. Think how such a move would humiliate you, think how it would look to the rest of the world. It would make us—you—look insecure, even incompetent. And if Americans or Germans died as he came north?”

“Then the Americans and the Germans and all the rest, they would join us in destroying him.”

“And every extremist from Pakistan to Chechnya would come and join him. There is no way this is good, Sevya, there is no way we can continue to ignore this! We must act.”

“How? How do you suggest we do that, Ahtam? You let him get away once, and now he’s in Afghanistan. Are you going to send one of your men after him? You think that man would stand even the slightest chance of success, assuming he could find Ruslan, assuming he still is somewhere around Mazar-i-Sharif? If you know all these things about his plans, then surely Ruslan must have considered that. No. As long as he remains in Afghanistan, we cannot touch him.”

Zahidov stepped closer to where she stood by the windows of her office, looking out at the courtyard of the Presidential Residence in the Tashkent suburb of Dormon. It was late afternoon, the sunlight slanting through the glass and making her hair burn like copper.

“If we wait for him to leave Afghanistan, it will be too late,” Zahidov said. “You could use Stepan.”

Sevara shot him a look of warning. “No.”

“Just take him out in public with you, have pictures taken of the two of you together. The President and her beloved nephew. Ruslan will get the message.”

“I won’t use the boy that way,” she said. “Bad enough that he was photographed at the concert last week.”

“It does him no harm—”

“He wakes crying every night, Ahtam! He has nightmares, he still calls for Dina, he calls for my brother! I won’t hurt him any more, I can’t do it. He’s my nephew, he’s the only family I have left.”

It struck at Zahidov, and he spoke before he meant to, saying, “So divorce Deniska instead of promising me that you will. Let me give you the child you want, let us make the family we talk about having! It’s been three months since you were elected, you can do it now, no one would dare say anything!”

“Soon, not yet.”

“When?”

“Soon,” she repeated sharply. “And we will not discuss using Stepan again, Ahtam. Is that clear?”

“Then we have nothing to hold over Ruslan.”

Sevara moved away from the window, nearer to him. “There must be a way to remove him.”

“If you had let me, I would have removed him long ago,” Zahidov reminded her. “You would never be threatened like this. I could remove Denis, too.”

She slapped him, and the blow surprised more than it hurt, knocking his glasses askew, and he stepped back, shocked.

“Don’t even think of it,” she hissed at him. “Do you know what trouble you have made for me already? Do you know how the Americans watch me now? Watch us? You cleared the way for me to sit in this office, but you left a mess behind you, Ahtam.”

He touched his cheek, feeling it burn. The first time she had touched him in weeks, and it was to strike him, and for a moment, he thought he felt tears trying to rise, and that both shamed and enraged him.

“I did it for you, Sevara.”

She took a breath, then spoke to him again, her voice softer. “The man from the American Embassy, the one who took the woman spy away. Do you know what would have happened if he had arrived five minutes later? Or ten? Or an hour? Can you imagine the nightmare for me that would have been? The Americans and the British both, can you imagine it?”

She touched his cheek where she’d struck him, her fingertips light on his skin. He could feel the cool of her enameled nails against the burning of his cheek.

“You pick your targets badly, Ahtam,” Sevara said. “It makes you look like a thug.”

She pulled her hand away. “Go back to work,” she told him. “I’ll find a way to handle Ruslan. I’ll speak to the Americans; they don’t want to see him opening the south to extremists.”

Zahidov stood for a moment, reeling, in the grand space of her office, then did as she’d instructed. He looked back to her as he went through the door, hoping she would raise her eyes to his, that he would see some forgiveness, some sign of her love.

But Sevara never looked up.

CHAPTER 33

London—Victoria Street, Number 75b, Pret a Manger

22 August, 1301 Hours GMT

“Salmon or Thai chicken?” Seale asked.

“Salmon,” Crocker said.

“The salmon’s for me.”

“Then why’d you offer?”

“I was being polite.” Seale handed the Thai chicken sandwich over, along with a can of Coke. “You want to eat here?”

“We could find a bench.”

“It’s air-conditioned in here.”

“You’re offering me choices where you’ve already determined the response,” Crocker observed, following the American to one of the square metal tables in the corner of the eatery.

The table had just been vacated, and Seale swiped crumbs from its surface with his left hand, holding his own sandwich and soda together in his right. Satisfied the surface was now clean enough to eat off, he sat, spreading a paper napkin like a small tablecloth, then unfolding another onto his lap before tearing open the plastic container that held his meal.

“You keep making the wrong choice,” Seale said.

“Story of my life.” Crocker sat opposite, cracked open his soda. “What’s up?”

“Ruslan Malikov is in Afghanistan, somewhere in the northern part of the country, we think near Mazar-i-Sharif.”

“You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Chace will be pleased,” Crocker said, tucking into his sandwich. It wasn’t bad, just not what he’d have chosen for himself.

“She won’t be for long,” Seale said, around his own mouthful. “We’ve got a problem, Paul. It looks like Ruslan’s recruiting and arming his own militia in an attempt to overthrow his sister. He’s been cozying up to one of the local warlords, Ahmad Mohammad Kostum, as well as working with some of the dope peddlers, selling heroin for financing.”

“Someone should tell him to knock it off.”

“Yeah, we’re thinking the same thing.” Seale wiped his mouth with the napkin from his lap. “So who are you going to send?”

“Me? You found it, it’s yours. Besides, you’ve got your set crawling all over Mazar-i-Sharif.”

“And we’ve worked long and hard to earn the trust and cooperation of the people there, so we’re not looking to foul it up. Besides, we didn’t turn Ruslan loose, that was you.”

“Foul it up how?”

“Telling him to knock it off is the nice way to put it, Paul. Ruslan’s got to be firmly dissuaded, if not permanently.”

Crocker stopped his can halfway to his lips, staring at Seale. “You want him removed?”

“Me, I don’t know the guy. But, as has been said twice already, he’s got to knock it off. He charges at his sister, he’s going to be kicking the door into Uzbekistan wide open for every extremist in the region to follow. And despite Tashkent’s eagerness to blame everything that goes wrong in their country on terrorists, there is a legitimate threat there.”

Crocker thought, then took the drink he’d paused on, set the can down, shaking his head. “I’m not going to get authorization to hit Ruslan.”

“You don’t have to hit him, you just have to get him to—”

“—knock it off, yes, I understand. But you’ve just told me it’s going to have to stick. Which means we’re not talking about possibly removing him, we’re talking about definitely removing him.”

Seale tucked the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth with an index finger, chewed, swallowed. “Dammit, these are good. I love this country—you get salmon and butter sandwiches as fast food.”

“Julian.”

Seale wiped his mouth again with the napkin, crumpled it into his fist, making it vanish. “I know you don’t like it, Paul, but I’m getting stick from Langley. The sentiment there is that this is your mess, you guys need to clean it up.”

“How legitimate a threat is he?”

“Legitimate enough that it has to be addressed.” Seale checked his watch, then rose. “I’ve got to get back to the office. Call me when you’ve got good news.”

Crocker watched him go, threading out of the little restaurant through the lunch hour crowd. He thought about finishing his lunch, but discovered he’d lost his taste for it.

“No, he’s right,” Alison Gordon-Palmer told him. “It is our mess, and we do have to clean it up.”

“We’re talking about putting an agent into Afghanistan to kill a man under the protection of Ahmad Kostum. A man whose life, six months ago, we were trying to save.”

C nodded. “And if Chace had been successful, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

If she had been successful, Crocker thought, you wouldn’t be sitting in that chair right now, either.

“We can hardly blame Chace for this,” he said.

C rose, capping the pen in her hand as she did so and dropping it on the blotter. “I’m not blaming Chace, Paul, nor am I blaming you. But the fact remains, the situation with Ruslan Malikov would not be what it is if we hadn’t become involved. The Americans expecting us to clean it up isn’t an unreasonable request.”

“I think that it is. We’ve had to clean up plenty of their messes.”

“Don’t be petulant. You’re my Director of Operations, not some pubescent teen. You’ve spoken to Simon?”

“I brought it to the Deputy Chief first, yes.”

“And?”

“And his assessment agrees with yours.”

“Then why are you here?”

“In the hope that you would disagree with him. It’s a betrayal.”

“A betrayal it may be, but it’s now also a directive,” C said. “Consider it a Special Op, and task a Minder for it, two if you think it’s necessary. I’ll contact the FCO, speak to Seccombe about authorization, but for the moment, you may safely assume the mission has Downing Street’s blessing.”

“The Prime Minister will authorize an assassination?”

“The mission objective is not to assassinate, but to dissuade by all means necessary. Conops will be very clear on that.”

“It’s a dodge.”

She raised an eyebrow at him, the kettle returning the look from the pot.

“Well,” Alison Gordon-Palmer said, “I suppose you’d know.”

CHAPTER 34

London—Vauxhall Cross, Operations Room

22 August, 1519 Hours GMT

Crocker was waiting for them when Chace led Poole and Lankford into the Ops Room, and she thought he looked more than his usual unhappy. He was standing—actually, Chace thought it was closer to slouching—with his hands thrust deep in his pockets and his cigarette burning between his lips, glowering at the plasma wall. Behind him, at Duty Ops, Bill Teagle was in the throes of mission planning with Danny Beale. She nodded to them both and they acknowledged her, then continued poring over the map unfolded between them.

Chace glanced to the wall, feeling more than seeing Lankford and Poole doing the same behind her. There was a highlight around Afghanistan, which immediately struck her as a bad thing, and Mike Putnam at MCO was busy typing up the information that would go onto the screen.

“Who has the control?” Putnam asked.

“I’ll take it,” said Beale.

“The operation is designated Sundown.”

“Boss?” Chace asked.

Crocker ignored her, still looking at the plasma wall, and then he turned sharply to face Beale, saying, “Minders One and Three allocated.”

“Yes, sir,” Beale said.

“They’ll need to connect through a military flight,” Crocker said. “Put them on the ground as close to target as possible. What do we have in the area?”

“NATO activity is primarily focused on the hinterlands, sir, but there’s a forward support base at Mazar-i-Sharif staffed by our troops.”

“Get onto the RAF, see what they have headed that way and when, and if that doesn’t give us anything for the next twenty-four hours, work your way through the rest of the Article Five powers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re to draw weapons. If travel is via RAF, they can draw them before departure; otherwise we’ll have to arrange for a delivery by the Station in Kandahar when they hit the ground.”

“Kandahar’s been having communications difficulties,” Putnam said from the MCO Desk. “We may not be able to get the cable to them in time.”

“Islamabad, then. But they’re not wandering around the countryside unarmed. Clear?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

Crocker finally looked to Chace. “You and Chris are going to Afghanistan.”

“So I’d gathered,” Chace said.

“Not me, too?” Poole asked.

“You get to stay here and look after the store, Nicky.” Crocker motioned them toward the map table. On the plasma wall, the word “Sundown” had appeared in a callout over Mazar-i-Sharif.

Chace couldn’t help but notice how close the city was to the Uzbekistan border.

“Ruslan Malikov has been found in Afghanistan,” Crocker told them, stabbing out his cigarette in the tray on the table. He focused on Chace, and she saw in his expression the acknowledgment that she had been correct, that Ruslan was still alive, and that Crocker also didn’t need her going on about it here and now.

Chace couldn’t argue with that. It didn’t seem the time for an I-told-you-so.

“Ruslan’s cozied up to one of the local warlords,” Crocker continued. “There’s a fear that Malikov is gathering troops and matériel for an attempted coup in Uzbekistan. I’m sending you two to deal with it.”

“Deal with it how?” Chace asked.

He ignored her. “Warlord’s name is General Ahmad Mohammad Kostum, he’s an ethnic Uzbek from the region, fought against the Soviets and then against the taleban with the Northern Alliance. He’s got a stronghold somewhere south of Mazar-i-Sharif, in the Samangan region. Intelligence is that Malikov is staying with him there.”

“Warlord’s stronghold, there’s going to be a lot of guns about,” Lankford observed.

“It’s Afghanistan,” Poole said. “The babies have AK-47s—I think they get them for their first birthday.”

Lankford snorted, and Chace shot Poole a look, silencing further comment from the peanut gallery, before turning her attention back to Crocker and repeating, “Deal with it how?”

“How do you think?” he snapped. “Find him, make contact, do what you need to do to ensure he won’t stir things up north of the Afghan border.”

“Wait a second—”

“I’ll be in my office,” Crocker cut in. “Minder One to see me on completion of briefing.”

He headed out of the room, leaving her to stare after him. And she knew already how she was supposed to “deal” with Ruslan Malikov.

Kate buzzed Crocker the moment Chace entered the office, and Chace heard the answering buzz immediately, and Kate said, “You can go on in.”

She pushed into the inner office, let the door slide shut behind her, and then said, “You can’t really expect me to go and kill him.”

“That’s why I’m sending two of you,” Crocker said, eyes on the papers on his desk.

“Boss . . .”

He looked up, angry. “If you can’t do the job, Tara, you shouldn’t have come back.”

That stung, and she let him know it. “It has nothing to do with my ability to do it, it’s my willingness. It’s a bad op.”

“If you’re twitched—”

“It’s not mission twitch! Jesus Christ, Paul, it’s my bloody fault Ruslan’s there to begin with!”

“I’m not certain I agree.”

“If I’d gotten him and his son out of the country as planned—”

“You did everything you could.”

“I didn’t have a fallback!”

“A fallback wouldn’t have helped, and you know it.”

“Why send me? Why aren’t you sending Nicky with Chris?”

“You’ve met Ruslan, you’ll be able to get close to him.”

“I’ve met him, he’ll see me coming, and he’ll know exactly why I’m there! Chris and I’ll end up shot before I get a word in edgewise. Aside from the fact that Western women don’t just wander around the Afghan countryside.”

“Find a burka.”

“I don’t find that remotely amusing.”

“I don’t find any of this remotely amusing, Tara,” Crocker snarled, slamming a hand down on his desk. “As the CIA has so eagerly pointed out, and as our dear new C has cheerfully confirmed, the Powers That Be consider Ruslan Malikov our problem, and they want it swept under the carpet, and they want it swept there now.”

“He won’t be convinced, sir. I won’t be able to talk him out of anything.”

“You’re authorized to use any means necessary to dissuade him.”

“I heard the conops—I was present for the briefing.” Chace paused, caught her breath, realizing that her heart was pounding. She didn’t mind being worked up over this, but she was vaguely embarrassed to find that she wasn’t even bothering to try to hide the fact.

“You realize that if he’s under this warlord’s protection then he’s more than likely protected by Pashtunwali?” she asked. “You know what that means?”

“Yes, I seem to recall that particular issue of National Geographic, Tara. December ’03, was it?”

“The mocking is good, I like that a lot. Ruslan’s been granted sanctuary. It’s why bin Laden got away in the first fucking instance, boss, it’s the same bloody thing.”

“Bin Laden was trying to stay hidden. It’s quite obvious Ruslan isn’t. Besides, Kostum is ethnic Uzbek, not Pashtun.”

“Which doesn’t mean he isn’t beholden to Pashtunwali! If he was fighting the Soviets, he’s an Afghani, not an Uzbek, he’s going to be part of the culture. And if Kostum has given Ruslan Malikov sanctuary, then Kostum and all of his men are now duty-bound to protect him. That means that if I so much as try to harm a hair on Ruslan’s head, they’ll kill me.”

“Then let’s hope it won’t come to that.”

“I’m not seeing any other option!”

Crocker shot out of his chair as if on a wire, sending the seat banging back into the wall, beneath the window. “Then you’d damn well better find one!”

Chace caught herself, turned away, as embarrassed by his outburst as by her own. She heard Crocker moving, the chair being righted and replaced at the desk. She looked out the window at the late-summer afternoon, the traffic on distant Lambeth Bridge.

“This stinks,” she said. “And it’s wrong.”

“No,” Crocker said. “What was wrong was sending you into Tashkent in the first place so Seccombe could spring his MANPAD surprise on Sir Frances Barclay. That was wrong. What this is now is the endgame, it’s the resolution of something that started in February—hell, of something that started five years ago. So, yes, maybe it’s wrong, but it’s not a different wrong, Tara, it’s the same wrong it always was. And it’s come home to roost, and I’m sending you to deal with it because I can’t send Chris alone and because you know Ruslan.”

“We exchanged perhaps five hundred words,” Chace said.

“That’s five hundred more than Nicky and Chris combined.”

“Shit,” Chace said emphatically.

“I concur.” He held out his pack of cigarettes.

After a second, Chace grabbed one, then his lighter. She dropped the lighter back on his desk, then began pacing around the room.

“You have time to get Tamsin squared away?” Crocker asked.

“There’s a Tristar scheduled out of Brize Norton at oh-four-twenty tomorrow morning, troops and supplies,” Chace said. “Two stops before landing in Mazar-i-Sharif to resupply the support base there. Mission Planning is checking with MOD, and you’ll have to get onto the Vice Chief of the Air Staff most likely, but unless someone suddenly comes to their senses, it looks like Chris and I will be on the flight. I’ve already called Val, Missi will stay with Tam until Val can come down to stay with her.”

Crocker didn’t speak for several seconds, then said, “I was thinking. If you ever need a sitter in a hurry, Jennie could watch her.”

Chace stopped her pacing, staring at him in disbelief. “Did you just offer your wife as a babysitter for my daughter?”

“She taught nursery school for twenty years,” Crocker said, lamely. “And there’s Sabrina and Ariel, they’d be glad to help.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Is this your way of apologizing for handing me a bag of shit?”

Crocker considered, then said, “I suppose.”

“You realize that it’s still a bag of shit?”

“Yes,” Crocker agreed. “Yes, it most certainly is.”

CHAPTER 35

Uzbekistan—Tashkent—Yunus Rajabiy,

Ministry of the Interior

23 August, 1055 Hours (GMT+5:00)

It had taken him a while to decide what he should do, how it was he could regain her favor, but when Zahidov hit upon it, the idea seemed so simple and so correct and so right that he was certain Sevara would have approved. He understood what she had tried to tell him in her office, that things had changed, and that he would have to change, too. She had accused him of being a thug, but if he could find a way to take care of her problem with Ruslan, and to do it right, to do it clear, without anything that could be laid at her feet, she would be able to forgive that. It wasn’t simply a question of how he picked his targets, as she had said, but of where.

The fact was, Sevara needed him to be a thug. But she was also correct in that he could have been more discreet in the past. Before her father had died, discretion had been unnecessary, even counterproductive. It diminished fear, and Zahidov had always felt fear was his most powerful tool. Now, however, Sevara Malikov-Ganiev was President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and discretion was more than required, it was mandated. Whatever he did to remove Ruslan would have to remain far away from her, and far from the prying eyes of the Americans and their allies.

In Tashkent, Zahidov couldn’t be a thug. In Termez, perhaps. But in Afghanistan, where thugs were called soldiers or warriors and were as common as rocks, that was a different story.

So that was the solution, and it was all so very simple. He would take care of Ruslan for her once and for all, the way he should have done back in February, when he’d removed Dina. With the information he’d learned from Hazza, it wouldn’t be that hard to find Kostum’s stronghold, or that difficult to wait until Ruslan exposed himself enough to be killed. It could be done quite easily, he was sure of it.

What was harder to reconcile was his own participation in the matter. His preference was, of course, to go and do it himself. As a general rule, he preferred to handle these kinds of things personally. He told himself this was not because he enjoyed it, but rather because he was a perfectionist and wanted these sorts of things done right. It was why he participated in the most important interrogations, such as with Dina and, after that, the British spy.

But it was Wednesday morning before Zahidov resolved that, this time, he would have to delegate the task in its entirety. It would demonstrate to Sevara that he was not a thug, that he could keep his hands clean while still doing what needed to be done. Perhaps more important, it would allow him to remain in Tashkent, and close to her.

He remembered all too clearly the male secretary who had attended Sevara in her office, and he remembered, too, the way the man had looked at her.

So Zahidov would stay in Tashkent, close to Sevara, just in case she needed him. He would send Tozim and Andrei and some of Captain Arkitov’s men to go south of Mazar-i-Sharif, to murder her brother.

He briefed them in his office at the Ministry of the Interior late Wednesday morning.

“Get yourselves to Termez by tomorrow morning,” Zahidov said. “I’ll let Arkitov know you are coming. Take four of his men, whatever weapons and ammunition you will need, and then head south tomorrow night.”

Andrei pinched his nose, cleaning his nostrils, thinking. Unlike Tozim, he was a deliberate man, more of a thinker, and it was one of the reasons Zahidov liked him. Smart, but not so smart as to be a problem, and with an easy handle for Zahidov to grab and control him. Andrei had money problems, most of it lost to online gambling, the rest to women.

“The crossing won’t be easy,” Andrei said. “They watch the border closely.”

“Leave it to Arkitov to arrange,” Zahidov answered, dismissing the concern. “He’ll be able to bribe your way across.”

“Where are we going?” Tozim asked.

“Someplace south of Mazar-i-Sharif. There’s a warlord there, Kostum. He’s harboring her brother.”

Andrei and Tozim swapped glances, then looked back to him, nodding in understanding.

“This is the General? The one with Uzbek blood?” Andrei asked.

“That’s him.”

“If the brother’s with him, he’ll be well protected.”

“That’s why you’ll take some of Arkitov’s rangers with you.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Not enough,” Zahidov said. “So do whatever you need to.”

Tozim sighed. “I wish we had one of those missiles. That would help.”

“There were only the three, and all of them have been used,” Zahidov said. “Arkitov will be able to give you explosives, antitank weapons, even, if you think they will help. As I said, use whatever you need, but make damn sure he’s dead. I don’t want a repeat of the river.”

“We’ll bring you his head,” Tozim vowed.

Ahtam Zahidov thought he might like that, then shook his head.

“No, Tozim,” he said. “We are not thugs.”

CHAPTER 36

Afghanistan—Mazar-i-Sharif

24 August, 1707 Hours (GMT+4:30)

It meant “Tomb of the Chosen One,” the city named after the Great Blue Mosque that had been built both as a house of prayer and as a tomb to Hazrat Ali, the Fourth Caliph of Islam, son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Mohammed. Sometime in the thirteenth century, as Genghis Khan had ravaged his way through Central Asia, the mosque had been buried in dirt in an attempt to preserve it—no small undertaking—and apparently those who’d buried it had been slaughtered and Mazar-i-Sharif razed, because the mosque remained hidden for over two hundred years. In the late fifteenth century, reconstruction of the city began, the ancient mosque was rediscovered, excavated, and restored.

It was, to Chace’s knowledge, the first great slaughter in the city’s history, but by no means the last. Much as Mazar-i-Sharif was known for its Afghan rugs and its fine horses, it was known mostly for death.

In the years leading up to Operation Enduring Freedom, when the taleban had been opposed solely by the Northern Alliance, Mazar-i-Sharif was a Northern Alliance stronghold. Or at least it was until 8 August 1998, when the taleban finally succeeded in sacking the city. By many accounts they came into town shooting anything that moved, including women and children, before deciding on a more systematic approach. They targeted the male members of the various ethnic groups that had lived in the city, specifically pursuing the ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazara. The Hazara saw the worst of this persecution—they were a Persian-speaking Shi’a sect, and thus anathema to the taleban regime. When all was said and done, at least 2,000 people had been murdered.

Compounding this infamy came another incident, this time at the Jala-i-Qanghi prison on 25 November 2001, where taleban and al-Qaeda fighters were being held by members of the Northern Alliance. What has been alternatively described as both an uprising or a riot broke out, and the prisoners engaged in a pitched battle with their captors, one that lasted several days until U.S. and U.K. Special Forces arrived on scene and brought with them air strikes that resulted in the deaths of over four hundred. Among the Northern Alliance forces had been two CIA officers. One of them, Johnny Michael Spann, was killed in the riot.

Chace remembered that fact especially, because it was the first time that the CIA had disclosed to the media the death in the line of duty of one of its officers. There was still some question as to whether the Company had actually wanted that information disclosed, or if it was released as the result of an overzealous White House Press Secretary. Spann became a martyr, the first American casualty of the War in Afghanistan. Apparently, there was now a memorial marker at the site of the prison, commending his soul to God.

These were the things Chace knew about Mazar-i-Sharif, the things she remembered about the city as she stepped off the RAF Tristar transport and onto the airport tarmac. The sun was already up, as was the temperature, yesterday’s heat rising from the concrete beneath her feet. She heard Lankford cursing softly behind her as he fumbled for his sunglasses.

Mazar-i-Sharif, Chace thought. An appropriate place to come for a murder.

She’d traveled in the Islamic world enough to dress for it, with long sleeves and long pants, and a tan ball cap she could tuck her hair into to preserve her modesty. There were places where it wouldn’t have been enough, and God knew that before the taleban had gone, Afghanistan had been one of them.

Just before 9/11, there’d been a job to come up in the south, in Kabul. Operation: Morningstar, and Crocker had refused to send Chace, dispatching instead Wallace and Kittering. Chace had been bitter about it at the time, but Crocker had been right; she’d have been useless on the ground then, a woman surrounded by the taleban.

It struck her as vaguely ironic that here she was now, herself Minder One as Wallace had been then, with Lankford, Minder Three as Kittering was at the time. Even the operation names—Morningstar and Sundown—seemed to parallel one another. She wondered if there was a significance in that, some subtle computer error back at Vauxhall Cross that needed to tie stellar phenomena and time of day with the word “Afghanistan.”

With Lankford beside her, Chace fell in with the cluster of personnel moving off the airfield, toward the collection of prefab buildings and huts assembled in support of the military’s operations. Mission Planning had arranged cover for them as a BBC team, with the MOD in on it, of course, just to make their entry into the country that much easier. They went through without a hitch, the RAF Staff Sergeant who reviewed their papers finding them both appropriately permissioned and permitted.

“First time to Mazar-i?” he asked as he handed Chace’s passport back.

“Yes, it is.”

“You’ve arranged for a guide?”

She looked accusingly at Lankford, who said, with convincing defensiveness, “I tried, I did, but everyone I contacted fell through on us.”

Chace snorted, looked back to the sergeant, leaning forward slightly over his desk. “Do you think you could recommend someone? Or someplace to hire someone, perhaps?”

She watched the man struggle, trying to decide if he would focus on her chest or her face. Her chest won.

“If you’ll wait a moment, miss, I’ll see what I can do.” He raised his gaze, earnest and helpful.

Chace gave him her friendliest smile. “I’d be very grateful.”

The sergeant mumbled something unintelligible, then rose from his desk and headed around the corner, calling for one of the other soldiers. Chace glanced to Lankford, saw that he was looking at her, grinning.

“Wish that trick would work for me,” he said.

“Try a tighter shirt,” Chace suggested.

An hour and twenty minutes later they had not only a guide but a guide with a car, or more precisely, a taxi and its driver. They negotiated a fee of sixty pounds per day with a long-faced Pathan named Faqir, whose English was weak but “improving,” and whose French was not quite as good. The first thing Faqir did was drive them to his home, to meet his family, and offer them dinner. There were seven, including Faqir, living beneath one roof in a modest but well-kept new house. As Chace stepped out of her boots, she found herself wondering how much of a windfall the British troops in the region had been for Faqir.

They accepted the hospitality offered them graciously, mindful of where they were and of the customs of the land, sitting around a low table with Faqir’s wife, his younger brother, his father, and his three children, two boys and a girl. Chace let Lankford do most of the talking, remaining modestly silent, and from Faqir they got what was, without a doubt, a better briefing on the lay of the land than they had received in the Ops Room. She used the camera in her photo bag to take pictures, with permission first, of course, trying to get used to carrying the thing and using the bag. In it she had several rolls of film, as well as a loaded Walther P99 with two spare magazines.

The conversation was lively, Faqir and his brother, Karim, doing most of the talking. Faqir’s eldest son was missing his left arm below the elbow, replaced with a prosthesis that didn’t quite fit. Faqir explained that the boy had lost the arm during the Northern Alliance assault on the city post-9/11. The prosthesis had been courtesy of the British, though clearly the boy needed a new one.

Lankford used English and French alternately to eke out more and more information, little by little, until finally, as the meal was finished, he slid up to the name Ahmad Mohammad Kostum and gave it a nudge into the open.

“Have you heard of him? An Agence France Presse team spoke with him a month or so ago, and said he was quite friendly.”

Faqir and Karim exchanged hasty words.

“I know this man,” Faqir told Lankford. “But he is not . . . not . . . très amiable? Yes?”

“Perhaps it was someone else, then. The one we’re looking for, he’s not Pathan, but Uzbek.”

“No, that is Kostum.”

“We’re hoping to interview him.”

Faqir ran his fingers through his beard, pulling at it, apparently deep in thought. “Kostum is south, Samangan. Up in the mountain, Kargana, I think. Far away. Very dangerous to travel there.”

“Hmm,” Chace said. “Perhaps we should hire some guards?”

Faqir looked at her and smiled, putting an arm around Karim’s shoulder. “My brother would make excellent guard.”

“When can we leave?” Lankford asked.

“Oh, tomorrow, in’shallah,” Faqir replied almost absently. “Tomorrow, yes. You can stay here, dormez. Tonight. Please stay with us here.”

The table was cleared, leaving Chace and Lankford alone. Outside, they heard a muezzin call from one of the nearby mosques for the last prayers of the day.

“What do you reckon?” Lankford asked her.

“He knows where he is,” Chace said. “Kostum isn’t trying to hide. Few of these warlords do. It’s just a matter of finding someone who can take us to him. Either Faqir can, or Faqir knows how to reach someone who can.”

“He’s just figuring how much to charge us, then.”

“That, and how dangerous the trip is. There’s still a lot of banditry about. Weighing his options.”

“As long as they’re not planning on robbing us.”

“The least of our worries, I should think,” Chace said.

Chace slept in the daughter’s room that night. The girl was perhaps eleven years old, maybe twelve, and very shy. When Chace removed her ball cap, she made friends with her by leaning forward and letting the girl touch her hair.

The next morning she woke early, the daughter still asleep, and took the momentary privacy to open the camera bag and retrieve the Walther. She tucked the weapon into her pants, again at her waist, covering the butt with her shirt, then ventured out to find that Lankford, Faqir, and Karim were already up and waiting for her. They shared a quick breakfast, dried fruit and goat cheese, then made their way out to Faqir’s cab, which was in actuality a rather sad and beaten Jeep Cherokee, dented and bruised by use. Karim and Faqir both carried Kalashnikovs, and Karim brandished his for their benefit, demonstrating his effectiveness as a bodyguard, before they climbed into the vehicle and set off.

They drove out of Mazar-i-Sharif, heading south on a freshly repaired road that served them well for fifteen kilometers before beginning a steady deterioration that ended some thirty kilometers after it began. They passed herds of goat and sheep, watched over by shepherds with Kalashnikovs dangling from straps at their shoulders. The lowlands surrounding Mazar-i-Sharif fell away behind them, and they began to climb. The greenery disappeared and the heat intensified, and the earth around them grew hard and yellow, as if baked one too many times. Chace supposed that it had been, at that.

Faqir switched over to four-wheel drive, and they began a torturous series of switchbacks, alternately climbing and falling, so Chace felt her teeth rattling in her skull. They passed clusters of houses, seemingly built of the same stone as the mountains. Once, Chace looked out her window into a valley, saw a shock of green below, dotted with buds of red and pink, small figures moving among the poppies, collecting the opium from the still-closed buds. A chatter of Kalashnikov fire rose up at them, warning them to mind their own business and move on.

The mountains began to rise around them, and beside Faqir in the front passenger seat, Karim fingered his own rifle, hunching forward, peering out the windows on all sides, leery of an ambush. Beside her, Lankford mirrored the action, and she was tempted to follow suit, but then saw no point in it. This was what Afghanistan was known for, this terrain, this unforgiving land, with its thousands upon thousands of places to hide, cliffs and ravines and canyons. If there was an ambush coming, they wouldn’t see it until it was upon them.

After four and a half hours and perhaps eighty-odd kilometers of travel, the road ran out on them altogether. Faqir slowed, exchanging words with his brother, and beside her, Lankford leaned in to whisper in her ear.

“There’re tracks,” he said. “You see them?”

“Problem is telling how recent they are.”

“Too right.”

The Jeep stopped abruptly, and Chace looked up to see both Faqir and Karim raising their hands. Twenty feet ahead, four men had emerged from the boulders, all with their Kalashnikovs pointed at the car. All wore white knit prayer caps to cover their heads, some with vests over their heavy shirts, some with robes. For a moment, Chace feared they’d wandered into an ambush by taleban remnants, but their garb was wrong, for lack of a better word, not devout enough, or at least she hoped so.

One of the men, his beard beginning to show gray, shouted at them, and Faqir and Karim opened their doors slowly, and Chace and Lankford followed suit. Chace caught Lankford’s eye as they moved to their own doors, shook her head slightly, warning him to keep off his weapon.

Fariq and the graybeard were speaking, the remaining three watching them, their weapons still leveled, but casually now, as if they’d quite forgotten they were doing it. That Karim hadn’t been asked or ordered to drop his own gun gave Chace hope they were on the right track, and then she heard the name “Kostum” in the litany of Pashto spoken between them. Fariq gestured back in her direction with his right hand, then at Lankford.