Maria zoomed in on this last figure. He wore a combat jacket over his tribal clothes and carried what looked like a briefcase, holding it close to his side.
“That’s him,” the coordinator said. “That’s our guy.”
Daniel felt his pulse quicken. There were now nine men out of their vehicles on the ground. They were moving towards one another, bunching.
“Sweet target,” Maria said in confirmation.
Daniel breathed deeply, trying to control his adrenaline. He remembered the list of alleged offences below Hafiz Mehsud’s photograph on the wall. Not the detail, just the length. And now here he was, the same man, joining these two meeting groups. In a few minutes they’d move inside, or some of them might begin to leave. He scanned the territory of his screen for any others. Which is when he saw a movement in the minivan, a light patch in the dark of its opened door.
“Minivan door,” he said.
“Check, sensor,” Maria replied, tightening focus on the van.
“What’s the problem, Major?” the coordinator asked. For the first time he sounded urgent, pressed.
“Was that a woman in there?” Daniel asked.
“A woman?” the coordinator replied. “No way. Not at a meet like this.”
“Screeners?” Daniel asked. The van’s open door was filling half his screen now, but all of it was dark.
“No way to tell,” one of the Florida voices said.
“I saw something…,” said the other.
“I saw a man,” the coordinator said, cutting in. “Possible tenth pax.”
“Eyes front,” Maria said. The two groups had come even closer together. They were talking, the armed guards hanging back a few feet. The man from the courtyard had also come round to the front of the compound now, to watch.
“What you got, Creech?” the coordinator asked.
“Two times Hellfires confirmed,” Daniel replied.
“Okay, Major, you have Intel clearance.”
“Permission to engage?” Daniel asked, slipping into his kill protocol.
The observer’s voice was in his ear before he’d finished the question. “Good to go, Major. Permission to engage.”
There was no word from Florida, so, pulling the joystick hard left, Daniel brought the Predator tight around into an attack trajectory. Soon, somewhere in those hills, the faint hum of its blades would be heard.
“Missiles armed.”
“Check, sensor.”
“Paint target.”
“Check, sensor.”
“Target lock.”
“Check, sensor.”
“In three, two, one. Missiles deployed.”
The two Hellfires disappeared from their rails in a diagram of the Predator on Daniel’s monitor. As he watched the scene of their destination — the shadow of the tree, the stilled pickups — the low buzz of his headphones filled his ears, and beneath that, six sets of breaths held on the lines. The counter to his left descended. Through ten, through five. The man feeding the chickens had moved closer. A lighter patch appeared in the van’s door again. Four, three, two. It was a headscarf. One.
The visuals flashed white, blanking in the glare.
“Impact,” Maria said beside him.
Daniel watched as definition slowly returned to the screens. Maria zoomed in close. The vehicles were burning. The few bodies left were prone. The hum of the servers, the conditioned air of the control station, a surfer’s voice, close in his ear. “Good job, Major. Well done.”
CHAPTER NINE
AS MICHAEL REACHED the turn in the stairway a floorboard flexed under him, its creaking making him pause. Without going any farther, his heart a tight fist in his chest, he leant forward and looked around the corner.
There was nothing. Just more stairs, then a landing carpeted in the same deep red as the runner descending behind him. No ghost. No intruder. No Caroline. Just a part of the Nelsons’ house he’d never seen before.
He thought about turning and going back down the stairs. But now that he was there, higher in the house, shouldn’t he at least check the rooms on this floor? For whoever might have come in through the back door, if not for whatever had conjured that sudden essence of Caroline. This is how Michael convinced himself to take the last few steps up to the landing. But in reality he knew the only intruder he was searching for now was her. The resonance of the sensation he’d felt was still fading in him, as if she’d only just vacated the air on the landing before him, leading him on an impossible game of hide-and-seek.
This, at least, was what Michael’s body was telling him. His mind, still trying to keep a rational purchase on what had happened, was already dismissing what he’d sensed as no more than grief, still having its way with him after all these months. Caroline was dead. All that remained of her was in his memories, and so this, his mind cautioned him, was all he was feeling. Memory, triggered by some unseen, unheard association. Michael wanted to believe the certainty of this rational voice. But he could not. It was a voice winnowed of mystery, and devoid of that most seductive of drugs, hope.
Stepping onto the landing, Michael found himself standing between three wooden doors, one on either side of him at the ends of a short corridor, and a third ahead of him, just off to his right. This last door was closed, as was the one to his left. The door on his right, though, was open. As he walked towards it Michael saw the foot of a bed in the room beyond, the corner of a rug, and, as he got closer, an armchair collapsed with clothes — a pair of trousers, some tights, a tangle of shirts and blouses, as if their wearers had evaporated mid-embrace. Entering the room, he stood before the bed, studying its heaped duvet for the shape of a body. But there was none. Just as there never had been. Just remains, that was all that had been left of her. And that’s all they’d buried too. Not Caroline as Michael had known and loved her, but just her remains.
―
Michael had never been a violent man. The tinder he’d witnessed fire up in others was an unfamiliar fuel to him. Over the years he’d spent with Nico and Raoul in Inwood he’d learnt the contours of violence, but as an observer only. The way it entered a room, or took possession of a man’s face, drawing the tendons in his neck, flushing his cheeks with blood. He’d seen the suddenness of its flaring, too — the staccato jerk of a punch, the sardine flash of a blade. And more than once he’d been in the presence of the weight of its threat, the heaviness of a pistol on a table, the tightly bedded bronze of an ammunition clip. But never, even when he’d been threatened himself, had he felt its compulsion to harm. Until they’d killed Caroline.
The desire had risen in him a few hours after he’d discovered Peter waiting for him by the porch of Coed y Bryn. It was evening, the woods across the valley already a swathe of darkness. The sky above them was showing its first stars. Peter was still in the house, cooking them both dinner. He’d said he thought it best if Michael wasn’t left alone. But for a few minutes, when Michael had gone upstairs to change, he had been.
On entering their bedroom he’d seen the chair on Caroline’s side of the bed, piled just like this chair in Samantha and Josh’s room with her discarded clothes. Dropping to the floor beside it, Michael had slowly pushed his hands under their weight, as if reaching for eggs under a sleeping hen. Drawing them to him with both arms, he’d pressed his face into Caroline’s dresses, T-shirts, and the jumper she’d worn on the first night they’d met, its neckline falling from her one bare shoulder.
He wanted to kill them. These faceless men who’d murdered his wife from the air. The planners and officers and spies who’d played with her fate like gods. He wanted to find them, expose them, turn their hidden warrens and nests inside out. He wanted to make them pay.
For the following weeks these thoughts spread through Michael like a virus, an anger masking his pain. As the story broke across the world, as the comment pieces mounted, as Caroline’s name was spoken again and again on radio and TV shows, he learnt all he could about the U.S. drone programme. Long into the night and the early morning, ignoring advice to sleep, to rest, Michael trawled blogs, forums, and chat rooms for information. About the bases from which the Predator might have been operated. About the innocents killed or unmentioned in mission reports. About the missiles that blew apart his wife.