Dead or Alive (25 page)

Still, he was mostly shown respect, and that had nothing to do with lingering deference to the Raj but rather his own history. He had, after all, been in Pakistan longer than many of the people you might find in the Khyber Bazar market on any given day.
How many years, exactly?
he thought. Give or take holidays or brief assignments to Pakistan’s neighbors . . . Say, forty-plus years. Long enough for his former (and sometimes current) compatriots to have long ago labeled him as “gone native.” Not that he minded. For all its shortcomings and all the near misses and dodgy spots he’d seen, there was no place for him but Pakistan, and in his secret heart he took it as a point of pride that they thought him so well integrated that he was “more Paki than Brit.”

Embling, at the tender and naive age of twenty-two, had been one of MI6’s many postwar Oxford recruitments, having been approached by the father of a schoolmate who Embling had thought worked as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Defence but who was in fact a scout for MI6—one of the few, in fact, who had warned his superiors that the infamous traitor Kim Philby was a less-than-stellar catch who would in time either muck up so badly he would cost lives or be tempted and slip over to the other side, which he did, working as a mole for the Soviets for many years before being exposed.

After surviving the rigors of MI6 training at Fort Monckton on the Hampshire Coast, Embling was assigned Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, or NWFP (or Pakhtunkhwa or Sarhad, depending on who you were talking to), which abutted Afghanistan, at the time just becoming a playground for the Russian KGB. Embling had spent the better part of six years living in the mountains along the border, making inroads with the Pashtun warlords who ruled the gray area of overlap between Pakistan and Afghanistan. If the Soviets put out feelers in Pakistan’s direction, it would likely come over the mountains and through the lands of the Pashtuns.

Save the occasional trip home to the UK, Embling had spent his career in the Central Asian Stans—Turkistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—all of which fell in varying degrees and in various times under the rule or at least the sway of the Soviet Union. While the American CIA and his compatriots in MI6—officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, a term Embling had never taken to—were fighting the Cold War in the fog-shrouded streets of Berlin and Budapest and Prague, Embling was traipsing the mountains with the Pashtun, living on
quabili pulaw dampukht
(rice with carrots and raisins) and bitter black tea. In 1977, unbeknownst to his superiors in London, Embling had even married into a Pashtun tribe, taking as his bride the youngest daughter of a minor warlord, only to lose her two years later in a Hind airstrike when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Her body had never been recovered. He often wondered if that was why he’d stayed in Pakistan long after he’d retired. Was some sad part of his heart still hoping to find Farishta still alive somewhere? Her name, after all, when translated into English, meant “Angel.”

A pipe dream,
Embling now thought.

A pipe dream, just like the idea of a stable Pakistan.

 

 

 

S
even thousand miles away in Silver Spring, Maryland, Mary Pat Foley was having a similar thought over a similar beverage—her one cup of half-caf/half-decaf reheated and salted coffee she allowed herself in the evening—but on a wholly different topic: the Emir, and the two questions that had plagued U.S. intelligence for the better part of a decade: where he was and how to catch the bastard. With few and only fleeting exceptions, and despite being the White House’s Public Enemy Number One, a position with which Mary Pat mostly disagreed. Certainly the guy needed to get caught or, better yet, put down for good and scattered to the winds, but killing the Emir wasn’t going to solve America’s problem with terrorism. There was even some debate over how much, if any, operational intelligence the Emir possessed; Mary Pat and her husband, Ed, now retired, tended to fall on the “not a hell of a lot” side of the argument. The Emir knew he was being hunted, and while he was a grade-A sonofabitch and a mass murderer, he sure as hell wasn’t stupid enough to put himself in the operational need-to-know loop, especially nowadays, with terrorists having stumbled onto the beauty of compartmentalization. If the Emir was an acknowledged head of state sitting in a palace somewhere, he would likely be getting regular briefings, but he wasn’t—at least no one thought so. He was, as best the CIA could tell, holed up somewhere in the badland mountains of Pakistan, along the border with Afghanistan. But that was the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack scenario, wasn’t it? Still, you never knew. Someday someone would get lucky and find him, of that she was certain. The question was, Would we get him alive or otherwise? She didn’t really care either way, but the idea of standing toe to toe with the bastard and looking him in the eye did hold a certain appeal.

“Hi, honey, I’m home. ...” Ed Foley called out cheerily, coming down the stairs and into the kitchen in his sweatpants and T-shirt.

Since retiring, Ed’s commute consisted of thirty or so feet and a half-dozen stair steps to his study, where he was working on a nonfiction history of the U.S. intelligence community, from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan. His current chapter, a damned good one if she said so herself, was about John Honeyman, an Irish-born weaver and perhaps the most obscure spy of his time. Tasked by none other than George Washington with infiltrating the ranks of Howe’s fearsome Hessian mercenaries stationed around Trenton, Honeyman, posing as a cattle dealer, slipped through the lines, scouted the Hessians’ battle order and positions, then slipped out again, giving Washington the edge he needed for an all-out rout. For Ed, it was a dream chapter, that little bit of unknown history. Writing about Wild Bill Donovan, the Bay of Pigs, and the Iron Curtain was all well and good, but there were only so many twists you could put on what had become old chestnuts of the espionage nonfiction genre.

Ed had certainly earned his retirement many times over, as had Mary Pat, but only a handful of Langley insiders—including Jack Ryan Sr.—would ever know to what degree the Foleys had served and sacrificed for their country. Ed, Irish by birth, had graduated from Fordham and started his career in journalism, serving as a solid if undistinguished reporter for
The New York Times
before slipping into the world of bad guys and spies. As for Mary Pat, if ever a woman had been born to do intelligence work, it was her, the granddaughter of the riding tutor to Czar Nicholas II and the daughter of Colonel Vanya Borissovich Kaminsky, who in 1917 had seen the handwriting on the walls and slipped his family out of Russia just before the revolution that would topple the Romanov dynasty and cost the lives of Nicholas and his family.

“Hard day at the office, dear?” Mary Pat asked her husband.

“Grueling, absolutely grueling. So many big words, such a small dictionary.” He leaned in to give her a peck on the cheek. “And how are you?”

“Fine, fine.”

“Pondering again, are we? About you know who?”

Mary Pat nodded. “Got to go in tonight, in fact. Something hot in the pipeline, maybe. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Ed frowned, but Mary Pat couldn’t tell if it was because he missed the action or because he was as skeptical as she was. Terrorist groups were growing more intel-savvy by the day, especially after 9/11.

Mary Pat and Ed Foley had both earned the right to be slightly cynical if it suited them, having witnessed firsthand the CIA’s internal workings and convoluted history for nearly thirty years, and having served at Moscow Station as husband-and-wife case officers back when Russia was still ruling the Soviet Union and the KGB and its satellite agencies were the CIA’s only real bugaboo.

Both had risen through the ranks of Langley’s directorate of operations, Ed ending his career as DCI, or director central intelligence, while Mary Pat, once the deputy director for operations, had requested a sub-lateral transfer to the NCTC—the National Counterterrorism Center—to serve as its deputy director. As expected, the rumor mill had gone into overdrive, speculating that Mary Pat had in fact been demoted from her DDO post and that her position at the NCTC was merely a waypoint on the road to retirement. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. The NCTC was the tip of the spear, and Mary Pat wanted to be there.

Of course, her decision had been helped by the fact that their old home, the DO, wasn’t what it used to be. Its new name, the Clandestine Service, while it grated on both of them (although neither was under the illusion that the term
directorate of operations
fooled anyone,
Clandestine Service
seemed just a tad too flashy for their tastes), they also knew it was just another moniker. Unfortunately, the change had come at roughly the same time they felt the directorate had become less about covert operations and intelligence gathering and more about politics. And while Mary Pat and Ed each had his and her own unique—and frequently contrary—political views, what they both agreed on was that politics and intelligence were a bad mix. Too damned many in the CIA’s upper echelons were simply civil servants looking for a ticket punch on their way to bigger and better things, something the Foleys had never fathomed. As far as they were concerned, there was no higher calling than to serve in defense of your country, whether in uniform on the battlefield or behind the curtain of what CIA Cold War spymaster James Jesus Angleton had dubbed the “Wilderness of Mirrors.” Never mind that Angleton had very likely been a delusional paranoid whose witch hunts for Soviet moles had eaten Langley from the inside out like so much cancer. As far as Mary Pat was concerned, Angleton’s nickname for the world of espionage was dead-on.

As much as she loved the world in which she worked, the “Wilderness” took its toll. Over the last few months, she and Ed had started chatting about her eventual retirement, and while her husband had been characteristically tactful (if not subtle), it was clear what he wanted her to do, going as far as leaving copies of
National Geographic
open on the kitchen table, turned to a picture of Fiji or a history piece on New Zealand, two places they’d put on their “someday” list.

In those rare moments when she allowed herself introspection about something other than work, Mary Pat had found herself dancing around the critical question—
Why am I staying?
—without really tackling it head-on. They had plenty of money to retire on, and neither would lack for things to keep them occupied. So if money wasn’t the issue, what was? It was simple really: Intel work was her calling, and she knew it—had known it from day one with CIA. She’d done some real good in their time, but there was no denying the CIA wasn’t what it used to be. The people were different and their motivations obscured by ambition. Nobody seemed to be “asking not what their country could do for them.” Worse still, the tentacles of Beltway politics had wound their way deeply into the intelligence community, and Mary Pat feared this was an irreversible condition.

“How long will you be?” Ed asked.

“Hard to say. Midnight, maybe. If it’s going too much past that, I’ll give you a call. Don’t wait up.”

“You hear anything juicy about the Georgetown business?”

“Not much beyond the newspaper stuff. Lone gunman, got a single shot to the head.”

“I heard the phone ring earlier. ...”

“Twice. Ed Junior. Just called to say hi; said he’d call you tomorrow. And Jack Ryan. He wanted to see how the book was coming. Said to call when you got a chance. Maybe you can squeeze some details out of him.”

“Not holding my breath.”

Both men were writing recollections of a sort: Ed a history, former President Ryan a memoir. They commiserated and cross-referenced memories at least once a week.

Jack Ryan’s career, from his rookie days at the CIA to his being thrust into the presidency by tragedy, was intertwined with Mary Pat’s and Ed’s. Some wonderful times and some downright shitty times.

She suspected Jack and Ed’s weekly phone sessions were ninety percent war-story talk and ten percent book-related. She had no complaints. They both had earned the right—in spades. Ed’s career she knew by heart, but she felt certain there were portions of Jack Ryan’s career only he and a couple of others knew about, which was saying something, given her access.
Oh, well,
she consoled herself.
What is life without some mystery?

Mary Pat checked her watch, then downed the last of her coffee, scrunched up her face at the tang of it, then stood up. She kissed Ed on the cheek.

“Got to run. Feed the cat, huh?”

“You bet, babe. Drive safe.”

M
ARY PAT DOUSED HER headlights and pulled up to the guard shack and rolled down her window. A grim-faced man in a blue windbreaker stepped out of the shack. Though he was the only one visible, she knew half a dozen other eyes were on her, along with just as many security cameras. Like the rest of the facility’s protection force, the gate guards were drawn from CIA’s internal security division. Nor did the lone Glock 9-millimeter pistol on the man’s belt fool Mary Pat. Under the man’s windbreaker, within easy reach of his well-trained hands, would be a specially designed lumbar pack containing a compact submachine gun.