Just like he’d done when he’d been a captive in the U.S. base in Afghanistan.
He closed the trunk and smoothed his hand over its surface. The sturdy piece had been handcrafted by him, and he was pleased with the result, because he was sure that there was no other trunk like it in the world. The box was large enough to contain a big man, and Sahir had designed it so that even he would be unable to escape the container if he was locked inside it.
Will Cochrane would slowly die in the coffin, chains wrapped around him, the garrote slicing his neck if he moved his head. It would be an agonizing death but one that was justified, because Cochrane had murdered his father.
Chapter 6
On my first day of special forces airborne training in the Groupement des Commando Parachutistes, a jump instructor told me that my existing Foreign Legion qualification as a static line jumper meant shit compared to what he was going to teach me.
In his Gauloises-gravelly voice, he said, “Caporal Cochrane: The only way you can die during a static line jump is if you’re shot while descending. Free-fall jumps are different because you have a one-in-thousand chance of your chutes not opening.” He winked at me when he added, “I’ve got seven hundred and forty-one jumps under my belt, and so far my chutes have opened every time. But I’m getting closer to jump one thousand, and that means each free fall is taking me closer to death.”
As I drove my newly acquired rental car west, away from D.C., I pondered the instructor’s observation and decided that it had parallels to my existence, because statistically, one day I would fail. It had to happen — confronting a person who’s smarter and more proficient than me, making a wrong decision, hitting a stroke of bad luck, or simply giving up the will to keep fighting. Of course, I’d no crystal ball or sixth sense to predict when that day would be. But I knew with certainty that I wouldn’t die of old age, and that every day I went to work brought me closer to that one thousandth jump.
Maybe that day would be tomorrow, sometime after Trapper called me at 10:00 p.m. Or perhaps it would be today, because the man I was driving to see was a bloodthirsty lunatic who was a ten out of ten on my scale of nasty people I’ve had the displeasure to know. But I had to meet with him because he was a former Pakistani intelligence officer who had a brain the size of a small planet and the memory of an elephant, and knew pretty much all there was to know about terrorists in Afghanistan. And that meant he might know something that would help me nail the identity of Trapper.
Aside from his psychopathic tendencies, two things were against my winning over his cooperation: the first was that I’d outwitted him by setting him up to look like a CIA spy, forcing him to flee from Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency for fear of being executed; the second, that shortly after his arrival in the States I’d had to plunge a knife into his arm to stop him from strangling me.
I hadn’t seen him for five months and eighteen days, and I’d cherished our time apart. But all good things come to an end, I thought as I stopped my vehicle at a remote farm in Jefferson National Forest. This was his home, chosen for him with care by the CIA because the Agency didn’t want him to cohabit too close to other citizens and stupidly hoped the stunning location might placate his egregious desires. I knew it would have the opposite effects. Isolating him gave him space to breathe and kill — since he arrived here, West Virginia had suffered eleven unexplained murders — and seclusion would enhance his warped but clear thinking in the same way that humbler men gain greater understanding of the world by becoming monks and retreating to monasteries. But Langley thought it knew best, and I was ignored by the bureaucrats who made these decisions and had never been up close and personal to thoroughbred evil.
Part of me wanted to put the car in reverse and get the hell away from here, but there was no point. Our meeting was by prior arrangement, he knew I was here, and I would have been dead by now if he wanted me to be.
I got out of the car and walked over the yard toward a huge clapboard farmhouse that was encircled by outbuildings and dense woods. I wanted the man I was meeting not to be an operative who’d once stood in an interrogation cell in Islamabad, recited W. B. Yeats’s “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead,” and slashed a naked Islamist terrorist’s stomach. But he was that person, as well as a craftsman of beguiling wooden toys, a student who’d taught himself the Choctaw Native American language in four weeks, an academic who’d deciphered the book of Revelation, a proficient anesthetist, and a man who could easily bench-press a three-hundred-pound frozen human torso.
As I knocked on the door, I told myself that I was nothing like him, even though I suspected that we’d killed nearly the same number of people, had identical intellects and espionage talents, and were only differentiated by purpose and sanity.
He called out from somewhere in the house. “Come in, Mr. Cochrane. My door is always open to you.”
Instinctively my hand moved to my concealed sidearm, just to check it was still where it should be and to give me slight reassurance that I might walk out of this place in one piece. As I moved through the property, I noticed the interior had changed since I was last here. Back then, the home had been undergoing reconstruction and decoration; now it looked like the interior of a sheik’s palace.
I had no idea where he was, but I soon found out. As I entered a large living room, I saw him sitting in the center of an expensive Oriental couch that was big enough to seat eight adults. He was barefooted, his legs in the lotus position, and he was wearing black trousers and a collarless white shirt and was grinning with ivory-white teeth. I guessed most women would find him sexy in a back-in-the-day-Omar-Sharif kind of way.
“Mr. Cochrane,” he said in an accent that suggested he might have served as an officer in Her Majesty’s Colonial Service, “are you hungry?”
“What are you offering?”
“Something unique.”
“Then I’ll pass.” I sat in a chair opposite him. We were divided by an ornate Omani coffee table, on which sat a rare 1972 edition of Playboy magazine, his best-selling book about perpetual motion, a stuffed mongoose, and a dagger that I knew had once belonged to a disreputable Venetian prince. “Are you well?”
“Physically?”
I shook my head. “Mentally.”
“You’re prone to posing rhetorical questions?”
“I’m just breaking the ice.”
“By asking about my mental health? You should learn some manners.” The man, whose name was Zakaria, giggled like a successful prankster. “Why are you afraid?”
“I’m not.”
“You are, as evidenced by a fact. What is that fact?”
“I’m armed.”
“Correct. You bring a gun to my home; that’s further testament to your bad manners.”
We sat in silence for a while. I hated the quiet. Zakaria didn’t.
When I could no longer bear the feeling that Zakaria was mentally raping me, I said, “I need your help.”
Zakaria smiled wider. “Of course you do. But what do I get in return?”
I smiled back. “You get to keep living… here.”
Zakaria glanced at the dagger. “How long are you intending to stay in the United States?”
“Not long.”