Page 143 of Whisper

Ahmad held up his hands. “He is cautious. He says not soon. And he says that he cannot travel far. We cannot fly him anywhere. He cannot go to Kabul.”

“Fuck.” Kris groaned and slumped against the wall. “You tell him we need to meet him immediately. Or the money is off the table.”

Ahmad’s eyebrows shot up.

“If he won’t come to Kabul, then we’ll have to meet him someplace in the middle.”

“Your base. Camp Carson. Meet there.” Ryan, on the video call, stared Kris down. “You’re right over the border from Pakistan. He can slip through and you can bring him on base for your debrief. He only has to travel an hour from the border.”

“Plus wherever he is in Pakistan.” Kris mulled Ryan’s suggestion over. “It’s a good idea. I’ll start putting everything together.”

“You make damn sure that you keep everyone safe.” Ryan glared, the grainy video connection somehow making his scowl even uglier. “I want your base locked down tight. All nonessential personnel cleared from your meeting location. And you make sure this guy is legit. I don’t want to end up with egg on our face in front of the White House. We have enough problems as it is. Looking like giant assholes who can be duped by some goat fucker isn’t the image rehab we’re going for.”

“Cute, Ryan. You always were the culturally sensitive, politically correct one. It’s nice to know your concerns are all about how you’ll look when this operation is reported up. I take it Kabul station has taken over running Hamid?”

“You report to me on this, Caldera. Everything goes through me, before it goes up. Understand?”

It took two weeks of back-and-forth negotiations with Hamid to get him to agree to come to Camp Carson. He refused at first, demanding to meet at Miranshah, a mean border town that sold drugs and weapons and everything else just across the mountains in Pakistan’s northwestern frontier. Kris refused and threatened to walk from their association. Hamid relented, but refused to stay at overnight.I only have seven hours I can be away from our camp, he said.Sunrise to sunset. And what will I tell my brothers?

David put together a local package of medicines and natural remedies, teas and creams, for Hamid to carry back to his camp. “He can say he was picking up medical supplies,” David said. “These come from Miranshah. It will all be legitimate.”

Finally, Hamid agreed. He would come in one week, for one day.How will you get me into your base? he asked.And how will you protect me? Spies are everywhere. I will not get my throat cut because you let one of the spies see who I am.

It all came down to Kris.

Seven years after September 11, after his failure to stop the attacks, here he was, asked to create a plan to train and equip an undercover agent in al-Qaeda, the best possible lead they had in finding and destroying Zawahiri and Bin Laden. He could practically taste victory, could almost feel the vindication, glorious, righteous fury singing in his blood.

But first, he had to get Hamid to Camp Carson. Debrief him. Equip him with a small mountain of tech and gear. And then release him, all in just under six hours.

Hamid could get to the border crossing, but he needed an escort across the border and to the base. Using any of the Afghan military or police wasoutof the question. Their ranks were infested with spies for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and blue-on-blue attacks, where an Afghan soldier would kill American forces on a joint operation, were on the rise. The Afghans, CENTCOM and Langley warned, werenotto be trusted.

Sending Special Forces to meet Hamid was also out of the question. The muscle-bound, dip chewing, action hero stereotypes stood out in Afghanistan, a land of deprivation of privation. Most Afghans were skinny and small, short statured from childhoods of malnutrition. Special Forces soldiers came in big and bigger, and had the attitudes to match.

David. David had been crossing the border for a year now, weaving in and out of the northwestern frontier, in and out of the border towns and villages, crisscrossing farms and rivers and streams. He’d built a small network of human sources and he’d become a familiar face to the scattered communities. Here, he was Dawood, an itinerant farm hand, a laborer for hire. He could pose as a taxi driver and pick up Hamid from the border, bring him back to Camp Carson.

How many people should be at the meeting? Six hours wasn’t long. In Iraq, he and David had run informants and human sources as a two-man team while driving around. They traded off who drove while the other sat in the back seat with the informant, driving in circles through Baghdad or Mosul or Ramadi. Whoever was in the back seat led the interrogation, checking for weapons or hidden bombs before launching into questions.

Would that work here? Could he and David handle Hamid alone?

His pride and ego warred with his common sense. He needed his best people. The best analysts. Interrogators. Men and women who could dive deep into Hamid in a short time, turn his mind inside out. Study his body language. He needed the best al-Qaeda expert to corroborate Hamid’s information and extrapolate based on the new intelligence he was going to provide. Hamid was going to be bringing them a gold mine.

Technical agents from Islamabad and Kabul were flying in with their whiz-bang gadgets. Kris had been sent a suitcase of flip phones, identical to the cheap knockoffs found on the streets of Pakistan, that could take pictures and text them instantly via a hidden, embedded satellite link. The pictures also had geotags coded within the image, invisible to the naked eye. But once at Langley, analysts could identify exactly where on the vast, vast globe the picture had been taken.

Get a picture of Zawahiri. Or Bin Laden. Make him smile for the camera.

Ahmad, as the Jordanian Mukhabarat officer in charge of Hamid, had to be there, too.

At this point, if he did a vehicle meet, he’d need a school bus to keep everyone in, drive everyone around in circles outside Camp Carson.

No, keep the meeting on base. Everyone would be together, maximizing time, expertise, and equipment. Darren, his deputy, would take the al-Qaeda angle. Three interrogators and an analyst were being flown in from Langley. Ryan was sending his deputy. And a team of CIA SAD officers, former Special Forces, would provide security for the meeting, in case anything went wrong.

But nothing was going to go wrong. This wasit. This was their big break. Hamid was coming to Camp Carson.

What then? Hamid was right about the spies. Afghan national police helped guard the base perimeter, but no one trusted them. More than one was most likely a spy for al-Qaeda. If they saw Hamid’s face, they would instantly report back to their commanders, and Hamid would be tortured and killed when he returned to his camp. And, they would lose their chance at getting Zawahiri and Bin Laden.

When David and Hamid approached the base, the Afghan guards would have to leave their posts. Preserving Hamid’s identity, his safety, was most important. The guards would leave the gates open, and David would drive Hamid through. David would be in charge of the car, so they wouldn’t have to worry about a car bomb. They could skip the car inspection, drive Hamid right up to Camp Carson’s command center.

Kris thought of David. What would David put into this plan? What would he suggest? How did the world look from Hamid’s eyes? He’d been undercover with al-Qaeda for two years, roughing it in the most inhospitable landscape on the planet. What would David recommend?