He did as he was told, looking at the other men before returning his attention to Palance. This was the moment he’d been waiting for, the time for the words that he’d been reciting in his head ever since he’d been imprisoned. “I’m an Indian intelligence officer, code name Trapper. My role in Afghanistan has been to operate deep cover to infiltrate terrorist cells.”
All of the men frowned.
“Indian intelligence?” Mitchum looked unsettled. “Research and Analysis Wing?”
The R&AW was India’s primary external intelligence agency.
Trapper nodded. “My cover’s been intact for three years since I’ve been in the country. Now I’m not so sure. Who sold me out to you?”
Fonda answered, “We got ourselves a source. Says you’re a bomber, among other things.”
“A source?”
“Yeah, but you ain’t getting his name.” Mitchum looked at the rag he was holding. “If what you’re saying is true, it sounds like your cover’s still intact. People still think you’re a terrorist. But I’m thinking you could be spinning us a crock of bullshit. We’re going to need to check you out with R&AW.”
Trapper had anticipated this and responded carefully. “Only R&AW senior management is cleared to know my code name and what I’m doing here. They’re going to be very pissed you grabbed me. You could call them. But if I were you, I’d send someone in person to smooth waters.”
Marvin leaned closer to Trapper’s face. “That could take hours to arrange, maybe days.”
“I’m prepared to wait; I urge you to do the same.”
The room was silent. The four men were clearly thinking through options.
Fonda broke the silence. “Alright.” He pointed at the bottle of water. “No more of this stuff while we get your story checked out.” He said to his colleagues, “Put him back in his cell.”
When the Indian was on his feet, he said in an imploring tone, “Would whoever you send to R&AW headquarters please be kind enough to relay to my bosses that I didn’t break cover until the fifth waterboarding?”
Fonda nodded. “I’ve not seen anyone hold out this long. I respect that. We’ll make sure your management knows you kept your mouth shut longer than we thought possible.”
“Thank you.”
By the time his captors had received confirmation from R&AW that Trapper’s claim was a complete lie, Trapper would have escaped his cell and vanished.
“There’s one more thing.” Trapper looked directly at Fonda, deciding that he was the highest-ranking officer in the room. “I know from one of my terrorist affiliates that a senior CIA officer is being targeted for assassination. It’s revenge for the officer’s assassination of a high-ranking Taliban leader. I was about to relay that to R&AW so that they could pass on the intelligence to you guys, but then,” he shrugged, “you guys stormed my house and brought me here.”
Fonda, Palance, Mitchum, and Marvin stared at him.
Fonda asked, “Does the CIA officer have a name?”
Trapper rubbed water off his face, hair, and chest while wondering if the Agency torturers would grab him for doing so without their permission. Instead, they were motionless and expectant. Just as he’d imagined they would be when, weeks ago, he’d constructed his plan to get to this moment, had made an anonymous call to the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, and had given the secret location of an Indian Muslim terrorist who was hiding in Afghanistan and who happened to be him. Nearly everything the Agency operatives in the room thought was real was in fact an almighty sleight of hand. But two things were not false: the very real threat to the CIA officer and his name.
Trapper was motionless in the center of the room, water still dripping off his thin but strong body. He imagined his captors’ surprise when they realized he’d escaped from his cell using a penknife he’d stolen from Mitchum’s pocket while the agent had been pouring water down his throat. “His name is Will Cochrane.”
Chapter 2
My earliest memory of feeling gut-wrenchingly scared was on a sweaty Virginia day when a rotund nag of a lady, who we called Eat Less, locked her puffy eyes on the other kids in my class before pointing at me. “Will Cochrane,” she said with the solemnity of an executioner, “I have absolutely no doubt that you will fail in adulthood just as much as you’re failing in school.” The other children sniggered as they looked at me; my face flushed red with embarrassment. But worse was the feeling in my gut: a cascade of demented pulsations that had made me think I should run to the school nurse and tell her to stop making me a failure. Two years before, age five, I’d made the decision to be man of the house because my American dad had been captured and subsequently killed while working for the CIA in the Middle East, and my English mom and sister needed me. Being a failure was therefore not an option.
But I couldn’t run, because Eat Less waddled across the room with speed that didn’t look fast but was — a bit like a running hippopotamus. She grabbed my thin arm and put her pimply nose against mine, an act that coupled my fear with revulsion, and repeated, “Failure, failure, failure.” Later, I gained solace when my mom explained that this was deemed inappropriate and Eat Less had been sacked. But in the classroom at the time I was a quivering wreck because I was a flop and apparently always would be.
I felt another kind of fear, but no less intense, as I walked through a subterranean tunnel in Washington, D.C., pistol in hand, sewage up to my calves; rats, shit, and piss everywhere. A man, somewhere ahead, would happily gut me with his knife before using it to gouge out my eyes and slice off my head.
People who knew my background could be forgiven for thinking that abject fear was anathema to a person like me. I was, on paper at least, not only an example of why Mrs. Eat Less’s prophecies were wholly inaccurate but also living testament to the fact that teenagers who play viola in their school orchestra are not necessarily going to grow up to be pushovers, contrary to what the high school jocks believed when they kicked in my head and called me a faggot.
When I was seventeen, I knifed to death four criminals who’d killed my mother and were about to do the same to my sister. The next day, I fled to France and spent five battered and bruising years in the French Foreign Legion. After completing my tour with the Legion, I studied at Cambridge University and gained a first class honors degree before catching the attention of MI6, who recruited and trained me. For the last nine years, MI6 deployed me as a top-secret joint MI6-CIA operative combating the very worst of the world’s secret ills. One might deduce that all of that experience should have numbed my nerve endings, much like the nerves that die beneath a scab that is picked over and over again.
But I needed my nerves to stay sharp, because without them I couldn’t achieve anything, much less any sense of happiness. The trade-off, however, was that attuned nerves begot other emotions, such as loneliness, sorrow, and fear.
So be it, I thought as I walked though near darkness that was only alleviated by occasional wall lights. This was what I’d been trained for. This was what I do, time and time again. Kill bad guys, steal secrets, stop genocide, protect the West, go places other men refuse to go.
But men, or at least their excrement, had gotten here before me; plus, somewhere ahead, was a Russian guy called Abram, who — among many achievements in his life — had covertly fought in the Bosnian conflict as a Russian special forces operative, earned millions extracting blood diamonds from Africa and selling them to line the pocket of the Russian premier, sung “Nessun dorma!” pitch perfect at a Carnegie Hall Russian-American charity gala, volunteered his services to me because he believed Russian foreign policy was as likely to bring world peace as the Eurovision Song Contest, and turned out to be a lying, duplicitous bastard who’d tried to murder me nine minutes ago on a day that signified I’d been on earth for exactly thirty-five years.