Читать книгу State Of Honour - Gary Haynes - Страница 21

Tom was slumped forward in a grey, blow-moulded plastic chair. His head was in his hands, his elbows resting on a Formica table centimetres from an untouched cup of coffee. The interview room at the embassy was no more than twice the size of a suit closet; stuffy and windowless.

He’d been questioned by a fresh-faced counterterrorism agent who’d looked as if he’d belonged to a college fraternity for tiddlywinks. Tom recounted the attack outside the hospital, sucking in air to calm himself. The kid repeated the questions too often for his liking, as if he were trying to trip him up. Tom didn’t have anything to hide. What he’d done was standard procedure, although he felt sick to his stomach. If the lead agent had to neutralize a threat, the support agents took his or her place. He’d acted professionally at all times, even though he’d failed. But when the kid had said that he’d recommend a psychological report be obtained, Tom had felt like punching the wall.

After the debriefing, he’d cleaned up in a restroom as best he’d been able. He’d put ointment on his forehead to heal the splinter wound, and checked his multiple bruises, which were deep-red blemishes covering a quarter of his body. He’d noticed that his angular features had hardened, the long shifts and many time-zone changes ageing him. But there was something else in the olive-skinned reflection that stared back from the restroom mirror: guilt at escaping almost without injury. He’d learned that all of the MSD agents were dead or seriously wounded. A total of twenty-three locals had died, another sixty-eight needing surgery of some sort. A third of the Pakistani police deployed there had died also.

Apart from the carnage, the secretary’s GPS tracking devices weren’t working. She could be anywhere, and as yet no one had a clue. He didn’t even know if she was still alive. No ransom demand had been made. Jennings had been right. It was a disaster.

After changing into a sports jacket and fawn-coloured slacks, he’d returned to the interview room as ordered.

Still slouched in the chair, he awaited another round of questions. He fingered a small wooden Buddha he kept in his breast pocket. It wasn’t a good-luck charm, but rather the symbol of a personal philosophy he’d cultivated over time.

Get it together, he thought. Just get it together and take it from there. He resolved to stop being so maudlin and see if at least he could do something positive to help find her. No, scratch that, he thought. I have to find her. He’d made a promise and he wasn’t going to renege on it. But how? In truth, he had no idea where to start. Then it struck him. The guy he’d shot on the roof had to have been found and recovered. If he was still alive, that might be something. And the two people who assaulted him might have been found by now. He’d been told that the man had escaped in the confusion. He already knew the woman had. But they were known. They were on a list.

He heard the door open. A man with massive hands sat in the chair opposite him, struggled to get comfortable in the confined space.

“They build this place for midgets?” he said.

Tom looked up. It was Dan Crane, a near-legendary CIA operative. Crane smiled, the skin on his wide face crinkling around his robin’s-egg-blue eyes.

“You look like shit,” he said.

“You don’t want to know what I feel like.”

“I can guess.”

Tom had come across Crane when he had spent two years in New Delhi, protecting the US embassy eight years ago. He’d seen him a couple of times since; once in DC and another at Langley when he’d been guarding the secretary. Crane had a reputation for sardonic humour of the un-PC variety, but he knew the Middle East and South Asia better than anyone else in the agency. He spoke five languages and had an encyclopaedic mind. He’d been held hostage by Hezbollah for three months back in the late eighties. He still had the remnants of scars on his neck and hands, off-white blemishes that looked like skin grafts. Tom didn’t want to think about where else he might have scars. His fame had been assured after he’d overseen the analysts who’d pinpointed bin Laden in Abbottabad. That also meant that he could get away with a lot of things that for others would’ve led to a reprimand, or worse. Crane was an offbeat kind of guy to say the least.

“So they all got away. Even the sonofabitch you say you shot on the roof and the one who fired the Stinger,” Crane said, waving his hand through the air.

“Wait, the man on the roof was incapable of walking. How the hell did he disappear?” Tom asked, straightening up.

Crane held up his hands. “You tell me?”

“You don’t believe me?” Tom wondered if Crane had been sent to do what the kid hadn’t had the experience or guile to accomplish: make him say something to incriminate himself.

“I didn’t say that. I just said he wasn’t there when the command centre asked the police to pick him up.”

“What about the man and the woman in the official line-up? They were all supposed to be vetted.”

“They were,” Crane said. “The Pakistani police raided their houses. Guess what? They weren’t there. Now, let’s go through it again.”

Jesus Christ, Tom thought. Back to square one.

Tom was questioned for a further fifteen minutes. Crane nodded his approval for most of the time, and never once lost his temper or even appeared irritated. When he finished, he looked genuinely sympathetic.

“That’s it. Same as I told the kid,” Tom said.

“Don’t beat yourself up too bad. The guys on the Kennedy detail let it affect their whole lives, even though everyone knows they did all they could. Now it’s home for you. There’s a flight taking the Under-Secretary of Defense and some brass back at fifteen hundred. You’ll be on it.”

“I wanna stay. Help out.”

Crane sighed. “It’s outta the DS’s hands. POTUS’s orders,” he said, using the acronym for the president. “It’s down to the spooks now.”

“She’s still my responsibility. I got a week left as head of the detail. A guy like you can understand that.”

“It’s not up to me. Besides, you’re probably still in shock. And don’t assume you know what makes me tick. You don’t,” Crane said, pushing the chair back against the wall, attempting to ride it.

“Whatever. But I’m not leaving.”

“You disobeying a direct order from POTUS?”

“He’s at the top of the food chain. He don’t concern himself with cleaner fish.”

Crane raised his thick eyebrows. “Wow, you got some self-esteem issues there, Tom. You gonna sprout gills?”

Tom smiled, weakly.

“Seriously, you’ll get through this. You’re a nice guy, Tom. Go home.”

They batted the issue around for a further five minutes. Finally, Crane agreed to pass it by Deputy Director Houseman, who was staying behind to coordinate matters on the ground.

“Appreciate it,” Tom said.

Crane struggled to get his bulk out of the chair. “Interview rooms for midgets. Jesus. They’ll be ordering us to carry stepladders next so they can climb up and feel less intimated.”

“Technically they’re called dwarves. Back home they like to be called little people. And they are the same as you and me,” Tom said.

“I’m joking with ya. You know that, right?”

“Sure I do,” Tom said.

“I know they’re the same. They just come up to your goddamned waist.”

Tom rubbed his temple and sighed. Crane was smart, but he was a jerk, too. He glanced up. “So come on. How do you figure that guy on the roof disappeared?”

Crane was looking serious, his eyes narrowing. “He was evidence. I guess the Leopards had some plainclothes guys on the ground, who cleaned up before the Pakistani cops got there.”

“Yeah. Sure they did.”

“A conspiracy theorist, huh. Well, it won’t come as any surprise to you when I say that if the deputy director lets you stay, don’t trust anybody. You hear me, Tom?”

Tom thought for a moment. “That include you?”