CHAPTER SIXTEEN

London, England

After finishing his morning prayers, Mukhtaar Abdullah stood in the middle of his one-room flat lost in indecision. He wasn’t well and these periods when he was unable to formulate a thought were coming more frequently. He was very weak. He ate little more than a crust of bread and an egg every day, convinced that living the existence of an ascetic would make him fit for the important work he had to do. He didn’t have much choice, anyway. He had no money and lived off the charity of his brothers at the mosque. His beloved mosque. Thank Allah he had found it. It was his salvation. And his room, a dirty hovel in Hackney, a slummy East End neighborhood, was only about two miles from the mosque. His thin legs carried him there every day even when he thought he couldn’t take another step.

Mukhtaar sat down carefully on the threadbare, spindly

couch. The room had come furnished or he’d be sitting and sleeping on the floor. Not that he would mind. He didn’t mind anything. Except that he felt his body was failing him and he feared he wouldn’t be much use to his mentor, Abdul-Haafiz al-Katib, who had great plans for him. He lifted his T-shirt and looked at his ribs, prominent against his thin skin. He seemed to be wasting away. It wasn’t always like this. When he first came to London, he was strong and never had the lapses of memory or concentration he had now. What was wrong with him? He was finally living the life he knew to be good and true. Maybe he just needed to take better care of himself.

He went to the cooler by the door where he kept his food. He would need to get ice soon. Two eggs, his last, had slipped out of their carton and floated, bobbing, in the icy water. He fished one out and broke it in a dish. While the pan heated he inspected the egg for any sign of disease. He was very careful not to break the yolk. He spotted a cloudy area and, before he began dry heaving, he slipped the offending egg down the drain, running hot water so that every trace of it was washed away. He had better luck with the second, his last egg. Frying it without oil—he had none—it blackened quickly in the heavy pan. He ate it standing at the stove, mopping up the yolk with a quarter of a slice of bread. His mind began to clear.

He had always been troubled by food, resorting to precise weights and measures whenever something worried him. Like a woman, his father had said. It started again after he added Abdullah to his name. When he converted to Islam, he had taken the name of Mukhtaar, the Chosen, never to use Jonathan again, never to be Jonathan again. Jonathan was a non-person, someone who was never meant to exist. But after leaving the States he knew he had to rid himself of Garrison, too. Nothing could tie him to his former life. Abdullah it had been. The ultimate renunciation.

He had once read of the Malaysian custom of giving the surname Abdullah to Muslim children born out of wedlock, when no claim could be made to the name of the father. He was a bastard child now, no son of his father’s. Allah was his only father now. His

true father. And always had been, only Mukhtaar hadn’t known it when he was living the life of lies at home.

He would eat more. Brother Abdul-Haafiz had begged him to take better care of himself, had pressed money into his hand at every turn, but Mukhtaar would always drop it in the collection box as he left the mosque. He searched his mind trying to discover anything else that might be bothering him, that would bring back the issue with the food. He couldn’t imagine. He was happier than he had ever been. It must be the thing with the name. It was like him to take the blame for things he shouldn’t.

Like his mother.

His mother had taken him to see her shrink in D.C. when he first began to get weird about his food. It was the time when he had begun to be obsessed with his father’s guns. He had always been horrified by violence of any sort, but suddenly the knowledge that a gun was present in the house fixed in his mind and he could focus on nothing else. He had known for years that there were guns in his father’s life. He had walked in on him once as he was dressing, standing before the wardrobe and bending to reach into the bottom drawer, the one that was always kept locked. The boy had seen not just one gun, but many. It was years before he understood why and that lack of understanding made it all the worse. He would ask his mother: Why do we need guns? We have a security system. We live in a nice neighborhood. Nothing ever happens here. That was before he had been able to see the value of weapons.

As the protein continued its restorative work on his body, Mukhtaar thought of things he fought to keep hidden from himself. Things that made him doubt what he was doing in London. He knew Brother Abdul-Haafiz didn’t truly care for him. Mukhtaar was valuable to him only as an American who would rouse no suspicion in anyone. An American who was willing to betray his country. Soon he would shave his beard and don his American clothes again. And then fly home and begin the revolution.

Mukhtaar finished cleaning his pan and went to the window.

He peered through a small tear in the blind. Something wasn’t right. His mind was clear now. He went to his trunk and got the gun. The door to his flat was cheaply made and hollow. A jagged hole, the size of a medium-sized London mouse, was about a foot from the floor a few inches from the hinge. He had made another hole, just large enough to see through, a half-foot above it on the inside of the door and a larger one in the outside panel.

He crouched to it now. Peering through, the barrel of his gun in the lower opening, he saw nothing unusual but his view of the hall was limited.

They were coming for him. He could feel it. He knew he wouldn’t hear them, but there was only one way to his apartment door—up the stairs and straight down the hall. He could see the landing of the stairwell from his spot.

Then he saw legs, black booted. Mukhtaar fired, hitting the lead man in the thigh before the rest scattered.

He left his position and went to the narrow iron bed next to the window. He was glad he had eaten the egg. A thick knotted rope was tied around the joint of the bed. He didn’t have much time and this was his only chance. He peered around the blind again. No sign of anything out of the ordinary, just the usual street traffic and junkies on every corner, but that didn’t mean anything.

He lifted the blind, tossed the rope over the window ledge and leapt over, shimmying down the side of the building, the toes of his tennis shoes scraping against the brick. His feet had just hit the sidewalk when he heard the splintering sound of his door being ripped from its hinges. They would see the rope in a moment. An alley ran along the side of his building, but he needed to blend with the street traffic as much as possible. They couldn’t fire on him if he was surrounded by pedestrians.

Out of habit he turned in the direction of the mosque, jogging down the pavement. So far, so good. He might just make it. He kept close to the storefronts along the street to avoid being seen from his window. He was almost at the corner. He would turn there and cross the street and then dart into an alley mid-

block. Running, his cheap tennis shoes slapping the concrete, he clipped a massive leather-clad man with his shoulder.

“Watch yourself, wanker!” The man grabbed him by the collar of his shirt pulling him close and breathing hot, oniony breath into his face before shoving him away and staggering down the street.

Mukhtaar was nearly at the corner. He turned and looked back at his building expecting to see a black-suited figure leaning out of his window with a scope trained on him. Nothing. He turned the corner and exhaled in relief. Then an arm shot out of a recessed doorway and grabbed him by the arm.

“Going somewhere, Jonathan?”

The bearded man, who wore a sport jacket and looked like any average Londoner, swung Mukhtaar roughly against the wall and cuffed his arms behind his back before he could think to struggle. A useless thought anyway. The egg could only do so much.

Martin Garrison had the features and complexion that could pass for almost any ethnicity. Today he was a Frenchman. It had been years since he had played the role. Not too much of a stretch. A lot of it was in the expression, especially the set of the mouth. Though he changed his hair and beard only slightly, anyone who knew him would be hard-pressed to recognize him.

Sometimes when he slept deeply, which was rare, the names of all the men he had been ran together in a kaleidoscopic whirl, twirling through his sleeping brain. He would wake and for a moment have no idea who he was. Fortunately it only happened when he was safe in his own bed in Virginia, never in the field, and the familiar setting of his own bedroom quickly brought him back to himself. The histories of the men he had been ran through his veins, were stitched into his musculature, instantly accessible, each detail catalogued in his mind.

Deep cover wasn’t something everyone could handle. Most agents burned out in a few years. It takes a particular personality to be able to completely subsume your own identity. It had been

early in his career when the Agency discovered Martin Garrison’s aptitude for transformation and dissembling, the two talents most required for an undercover agent. That and a kind of fearlessness that can’t be taught.

Garrison was sitting in the café again, his legs crossed at the knee, reading the same copy of Le Monde he had taken from the plane out of Paris. He had read every inch of it and now resorted to the classifieds. He hoped Armin’s men would turn up before he resorted to the advertisements. They would be in perfect French, of course. The French government’s stranglehold on the language and its purity always struck Garrison as autocratic, a long hidden tendency in the French breast. He wondered when it would emerge and in what form. Garrison motioned for the café proprietor to order breakfast. He was achingly hungry.

If Armin’s men didn’t show up today, he might scout around for a newspaper in his native tongue before going back to his boarding house. Surely some shop in the village must carry a New York Times or a Guardian. Even a more recent edition of Le Monde would satisfy his need for news at this point. He was already thinking of what he might do next if Armin didn’t come through for him. He would have to resurrect some of his old contacts, sketchy characters he preferred to have no dealings with and who the CIA might already be watching, anticipating his next move. But he would do whatever he had to do to find Jon. He blamed himself for Jon’s conversion to Islam a few months after his mother’s suicide. On assignment at the time in Berlin, he had known nothing of it until he returned. By then it was too late. Jon was already attending a mosque in nearby Falls Church and had grown a patchy beard. He was still taking classes at George Mason, but only sporadically. Garrison had hoped it was just another phase, that it would wither before taking root. But he’d been home only a few weeks before he had to go back out and was focused on his next assignment. He should have taken a leave of absence, taken the boy in hand and shaken some sense into him. But he’d left, as he always had, and by the time he was

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home again, Jon was gone. He could be anywhere now.

Garrison had a friend look into the Falls Church mosque.

It had a handful of extremists, militant figures who raised the spectre of jihad on the quiet to those who were sympathetic and who had connections all over the world. Jon could be in Paris, Hamburg, Syria, Palestine, London or, God forbid, Afghanistan.

Or countless other places where fanatical Muslims sowed their hatred of America and the West, distorting their religion for political purposes. So, Martin Garrison had played the easiest card in his hand. Ahmad Armin.

Garrison reached into his suit jacket and touched the envelope, secure in his inside pocket. The photographs. The incontrovertible proof that Ahmad Armin’s outrageous claims that the CIA had murdered his brother, Nasser, were absolutely true. By stealing them Garrison had betrayed his country and committed an act of treason that would put him in prison for the rest of his life. If he got caught. But he would do anything for his son. He was a little late coming to the game, but it was time to make up for the past.

He had contacted Armin a week before and made him the offer. Armin was suspicious at first but Garrison explained his situation and finally convinced him that it wasn’t a ploy to capture him. It was a nasty business, the story with Nasser Armin, and Garrison was glad he hadn’t been involved. Just one more misstep in a long line of mistakes the CIA had made with Iran.

The café proprietor’s teenage son, a handsome boy with black eyes, served Garrison his breakfast. Garrison nodded his thanks and whispered a prayer that today would bring the document with Jon’s whereabouts. And then he ate.

Hannah took another of the little white pills that Rennie handed her and thought it was too bad she didn’t have them in grad school. Her mind was active and alert on a level she hadn’t felt in years. It was like she was finally waking after a long and torturous nightmare. Light in her stall at the camp had always been muted, weak rays slipping through the dirty pane high on

the wall of the stable. She knew now that the absence of sunlight had had its effect, causing her mind to enter a place of near hibernation. She had slept a lot. What else was there to do? To make the days pass and avoid thoughts of the future and all that was lost.

Now, finally, she was beginning to see things, as if nature’s palette had been restored after a long monochrome dream.

Summer was coming to a close and the woods were still lush and full and verdant. Her eye took in everything—veins of leaves set in relief, patterns and varying shades of gray and white in the rocks speaking of their long history, soft beds of moss at the base of a tree, the shocking reds and yellows of wildflowers. The woods, with the sunlight filtering through the trees, were so fine it made her ache to think how long it had been since she had taken in beauty.

Hannah always yearned for beauty but had never tried to attain it in such an undiluted form as nature. She was thoroughly urban and natural beauty had seemed to her too benign, too banal and prosaic, as if it had slipped into a hackneyed stereotype. Such thoughts seemed absurd to her now. She had always sought man-made beauty. Pigment on canvas gripping her like a panic. But no romantic landscapes or impressionist confections for her. She had discovered a young artist whose work spoke to her like no other. Paintings bright and light using the colors of summer but the addition of raw flesh tones, rendered ambiguously—meant to be living or dead?—cast a darkness of mood over the work. So it always was with Hannah—everything good tempered with dark.

But here in the woods, those old conceptions retreated in the face of summer in full bloom. She was alive and free and, for the moment, no taint was able to sneak into her vision.

Rennie, too, loomed larger than ever before her. She was finally struck by the awareness that here was a woman she felt drawn to in a way she had never experienced. With anyone.

Something was being forged between them, had been in the process of being forged ever since she had come back to herself as they ran down the hillside from the camp. Something she

didn’t want to name and couldn’t if she tried. Whatever it was, it was entirely new.

She remembered birthdays as a child. Her parents always waited to give her her gift after dinner just before she went to bed. She would finish brushing her teeth and crawl into her pajamas. Sitting cross-legged on the worn living room rug, she was unable to sit still with excitement, wagging her knees and wriggling her shoulders. She would have an hour with her new toy before bedtime. The magic hour. Finally tucked snug in her narrow bed, she would lie grinning, suffused with absolute happiness. The next morning when she woke and remembered the gift, she wouldn’t rush to it, but lay warm in her bed turning it over in her mind. This was when the magnificence of the toy reached its zenith, never to be had again. Her joy over its novelty imbued it with qualities it almost certainly didn’t have. In her sleepy imagination, it was perfect, becoming almost cinematic in her mind, taking on a luster that real life never had. She had never had this experience with people, only things, and not since she was small. Until now. She felt foolish, realizing that Rennie had taken on that indescribable hue. Glancing at her, Hannah wondered if it was the drug. And she wondered if, like the toy, it would pass as quickly.

“You okay?” Rennie said, noticing her look.

Hannah nodded. “Yeah. I’m good.” She smiled. “Really good.”

Hannah looked at Rennie, taking her in fully. She was tall and angular and intensely beautiful. Hannah felt foolish, responding to beauty in such a simple form. Sharp bone met muscle in a way not often seen in a woman. Her muscle curled over her body like a snake, rising and dipping over her frame as if she had shed every ounce that wasn’t necessary to maintain herself. Hannah wondered briefly if it was something akin to masculinity that she was drawn to. No. That wasn’t it and she swore to herself at that moment that she would never again mistake something for what it wasn’t, no matter how much it made her afraid. She wanted something pure and unadulterated, something devoid of her

past. No more false connections built upon a foundation riven with hollows of rot. Whatever this was she would approach it with an open heart.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking how absurd it is that I’m actually enjoying this moment. Walking through these woods. With you. On a gorgeous sunny day.”

“And carrying a high-powered weapon.”

“There is that,” Hannah said, lifting the AK-47.

“It works for you,” Rennie said with a trace of irony in her eyes.“You think?”

“Yeah.” Rennie paused. “You’re doing great, you know? I know this hasn’t been easy.”

Hannah stared at the ground before casting her eyes back to Rennie. “Thanks.”

They continued picking their way through the forest in silence, Hannah walking next to Rennie but slightly behind, watching her. Rennie never wavered. Every moment she was scanning the woods for danger. Keeping them safe. Hannah knew without a doubt that she owed Rennie her life. And she knew that even in the absence of that monumental fact, she was still drawn to her.

Rennie broke into her reverie again. “We’re going to make it, you know?” she said, looking back at Hannah.

“I know.”

It hit her then. She knew it was true and knew it was all Rennie. She could have shot Armin and gone on her way, as was surely her mandate. But she had risked her life to bring Hannah home.

Hannah reached out and took Rennie by the arm, stopping her.Rennie looked concerned. “Everything all right?”

“Yes.” Hannah let go of her rifle, letting it dangle from its strap and slipped her arms around Rennie.

“Yes,” she said again. Rennie was nearly half a foot taller and

Hannah stood, her face buried in the hollow of Rennie’s neck just above her collarbone, taking in her scent. Their bodies still close, she pulled her head away and looked into her eyes.

“Thank you.”

Rennie shook her head. “It’s okay.”

Hannah reached up and kissed her lightly on the cheek, her hand on the back of Rennie’s neck. “Yes. It’s okay.”