The Devil's Banker

Chapter 10

It was early morning, and as Sarah Churchill strolled the grassy strip overlooking the Bay of Bengal, she marveled at the sapphire sky, the emerald sea, and the hordes of tiny fishing craft bobbing like pearls as they made their way into port after a night’s work. It was beautiful. All of it. She smiled crazily-giggled, even. It was a natural reaction-a rebound high from yesterday’s events in the Smugglers’ Bazaar. She couldn’t have controlled it if she’d wanted to.

Leaving the Hotel Midway House on the grounds of the Karachi International Airport, she’d decided it was to be a day of superlatives. Never had she walked beneath so blue a sky, on so beautiful a day in so beautiful a city. If the tuk-tuks screaming past showered her with a foul spray of dust and exhaust, she chose not to see or hear them. In her world, it was Mozart playing “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” and Monet doing the landscapes. For a few hours, she wanted nothing more to do with the CIA, the Secret Intelligence Service, or their battle to root out the seemingly inexhaustible scourge of terrorism.

Her first debrief had ended at midnight. Step-by-step she’d dissected the past three days, reviewing each leg for ways to improve her skills, to blend in more seamlessly, to penetrate the psychological guise of her target. The only question left unanswered was the one everyone was afraid to ask: Why hadn’t she surmised that Sayeed would take his own life rather than be captured? Still, they’d tracked the money to Paris, and that was her primary goal. If her masters’ smiles weren’t all they should be, it wasn’t her fault. What happened in France didn’t concern her. Sad? Yes. A tragedy? Absolutely. But it was Treasury’s op, and if their failure rankled her, she was to keep it to herself. Sarah’s side of things was graded a success. An A-plus. If a few innocents got shredded in the process, the collateral damage was within acceptable limits. She was being put up for a meritorious conduct medal and could expect a warm reception when she made it back to England-which wouldn’t be too soon. The Agency had adopted Sarah as one of its own, and wanted her back in the field within a month.

Pending her return to Washington (and the more extensive debriefing that would follow once she arrived at Langley), she’d been posted off duty. She had a day and most of the night in front of her to walk the city, see the sights, and keep her nose out of trouble.

Sarah turned in a semicircle, exchanging the blue of the ocean for the sun-bleached limestone of the city. The burqa was long gone. They could burn the damned things as far as she was concerned. In its place she settled for a pair of old 501s, a faded pink Polo button-down, and some Tod moccasins as soft as butter. A pair of Ray-Ban aviators had replaced her decidedly unfashionable commo gear. If her hair needed a cut and a trim, a shampoo, blow-dry, and some Sebastien mousse had done nicely in the meantime. In the war of cultures, America could claim her as another victim, and for the moment, that’s exactly how she wanted it. She was a lone tourist doing one last tramp around Karachi before catching her flight home. If she got up the guts, she’d even try the local McDonald’s.

Once, Karachi had served as Pakistan’s capital, but to Sarah’s eye it still belonged to the Raj. Monuments to Britain’s rule beckoned at every corner. The broad, grass-lined boulevards, the Victorian architecture of the High Court and the Legislature, the local population’s precise, polite English. Forty years ago, the capital had moved inland to Islamabad, to a spot deemed more central to administering the country’s far-flung frontiers. The army had insisted on the move. It preferred the country’s elected officials to be closer to Central Military Command, where rational minds might make themselves heard. Three coups later, a general once again ruled the land.

From the port, she ventured into the heart of the city. Turning down Club Road, she found herself looking at a tall, modern hotel, painted the brightest of whites. A large “S” adorned one wall, and she recognized it as the Sheraton Hotel, where in May 2002, a car bomb had killed fifteen French engineers shipped in to help Pakistan’s submarine development efforts. Quickly, she turned the other way and headed back toward the diplomatic quarter.

Walking had always been her therapy. She’d grown up north of London on a family estate that grew smaller with each passing generation. Somewhere back in Wellington’s time, a cavalry general on her father’s side had been awarded a nice chunk of Shropshire farmland in exchange for doing some rather gallant and (she’d later learned at Cambridge) beastly things to Napoléon’s army at Waterloo. By the time Sarah was born, The Meadows, as home was called, was down to forty acres and had taken to boarding horses for urban equestriennes, whom her father described as women who liked to ride without getting any shit on their boots.

But Sarah had always preferred lone treks across the rolling countryside to the care, saddling, and endless grooming that went with riding. Slipping out of bed at dawn, she’d pull on her Wellingtons and rain slicker and disappear for hours on solitary reconnaissances of the surrounding meadows, trudging through marshes, dashing up hillocks, and navigating her way through dense woods, thick with thistle and pine. Returning at dusk, she’d sit at the table, quietly sipping her evening’s tea, resisting her mother’s and brothers’ entreaties about where she had been. “Out,” she would say with a secret smile, and savor their ignorance.

But when Daddy, home for one of his all-too-brief leaves, inquired, she would share her adventure with him from the first footstep beyond The Meadows’ immaculate white fences, and leaven her tales with nuggets of scurrilous information about their neighbors. She was first to know that Ben Bitmead was growing pot plants in the middle of his father’s corn plot. (The police found out a year later, though not from her, and Ben spent six months “on vacation,” as her Daddy told her.) She caught Ollie Robson siphoning the gas out of Mrs. McMurtry’s pickup on two occasions, and this time, she’d called Mary McMurtry to tell her, or at least her father had. On the matter of Mrs. Milligan, and why her Mini-Cooper was parked behind Father Gill’s parsonage at six in the morning three days’ running, her father had pledged her to secrecy. Every human being needs a little love in their life, he’d said. Leave it at that, kitten. And tousling her hair with his broad, calloused palm, he’d hauled her up on his shoulders and carried her to the kitchen singing, “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo,” the Royal Marines’ anthem.

Even then, Sarah had been a clandestine agent with a divided loyalty.

She’d also learned that silence often led to tragedy, and that the hardest job was not collecting intelligence, but in knowing who to tell it to, and analyzing it afterward for meaning.

She was thinking of Mr. Fenwick, the village grocer. Day after day, she’d spied him in his bedroom measuring the distance from his dresser to a rocking chair she recognized as Mrs. Fenwick’s, who’d passed away only a month before. He’d walk from the dresser to the chair, sit down, have a long stare straight ahead, then get up and set out the distance with a yardstick. Then one day, there was an ambulance parked in his drive, and Sarah found out that he’d laid a shotgun across the dresser, tied a string to the trigger, and taking a seat in his wife’s favorite rocker and making things right with the Lord, blown himself to kingdom come.

It was hardly a surprise when Sarah joined MI6, fresh out of Cambridge with her first in Oriental languages and a blue in crew. She had the brains and the brawn they were looking for, and God knew, the ambition to top her brothers, two of whom were military men, in the battle for her father’s accolades.

Already six years, she thought, stopping at a corner for a red light, and Daddy gone four of them. A melancholy breeze swept over her, and she found herself whistling “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo,” and wanting more than anything else to share this latest and most dire adventure with him. Not exactly Goose Green, but she’d cut it close just the same. She’d been blooded. “Not bad, kitten,” he’d say succinctly, but his hidden smile would give her all the satisfaction a devoted daughter could ever want.

The day had grown hot and muggy. In the space of ten city blocks, the blue sky curdled to gray. Mozart had taken five, and the only music playing in her head was the choppy, unmelodious rhythm of her own humming as she tread to keep her head above water. The giddiness was gone, vanished as quickly as it had arrived. A dark menace lurked behind her every thought. And so she hummed louder.

It was when she decided her mouth tasted funny that the panic came on full-force. It was the cyanide. She’d had a peroxide rinse to clear out the poison, but suddenly she was sure the stuff was still in her system. Hurrying to the side of the road, she broke at the waist, spitting repeatedly until her mouth was parched, her breath coming fast and her heart beating madly. Lowering herself to a knee, she struggled to calm herself down. You’re just a little in shock, she told herself in a rational voice. It’s to be expected. You’ve suffered a “traumatic event”-as if watching a man cut his throat from ear to ear and bearing witness to the pulverization of a half dozen others, all after preparing your unwashed soul to meet your maker, could be made to fit into two words.

That was how they found her: on a knee, catching her breath, the color just beginning to return to her cheeks. It was a black Chrysler from the consulate.

“Miss Churchill,” asked a clean-cut man she recognized as a junior counselor. Bill or Bob or Brian. “Are you all right?”

“Hello,” she said, waving, putting on that irrepressible grin, the one that said You know us Brits, we never give up, never complain. Cheerio, and all that bleeding crap. “Brian, isn’t it? Yes, yes, I’m fine. Must’ve eaten something dodgy.”

“Brad,” he corrected her, the smile firmly in place. “I’m afraid we’ve been asked to bring you back to the embassy.”

Straightening, she knew immediately that Brad and the local driver had been following her the entire route. Cui custodiet custodian. Who spies on the spies? Now she knew. The other spies. She just hadn’t expected them to be from her side.

“But my flight doesn’t leave till two this morning,” she said, a little unsurely.

“Change of plan, I’m afraid. There’s a plane waiting for you at the airport right now.”

“To Washington?”

“No, ma’am. To Paris. Admiral Glendenning’s orders.”