The Prisoner's Wife (4 page)

“No evidence,” said Shawn. “I mean, no evidence they got to al Qaeda.”

“Not yet.” Abbasi stood to check that his car was still parked in the lane. “Still, Abdul Qadir Khan spreading the word of God through nuclear fission—”

“Through ISI.”

“Elements in our intelligence service. Yes, indeed.”

In Manhattan, Shawn had worked on proliferation.

“This device Osmani claims he found in Afghanistan—if it exists—would be shipped from Peshawar by our friends the invisible soldiers.”

“I've gotten more plausible tales,” Shawn said, “out of fortune cookies.”

Ayub Abbasi stood and stretched his arms. His double-cuffed shirt was striped, with a starched white collar. “Your payment, Mr. Maguire, is structured like this. We double the amount of the deposit if you find Osmani.”

“Alive?”

“Preferably. The same amount again if you supply a precise location for Dr. Khan's device. Which you doubt exists.” Abbasi began to walk toward the garden's gate. Shawn, setting down rifle and cat, kept pace. “You may know, Nashida Noon is now the most popular politician in Pakistan. Odd: Attractive young woman, Oxford educated, wishes to rule a Muslim country. A failed state. Or close.”

“She'll win this election?”

“No question.” Abbasi was looking across the lane, trying to locate his driver. “If she lives—a real question, of course. If she lives, she will be prime minister. When she dismantles ISI, she will remove our president.”

Shawn could see the driver. He was in the churchyard, under an oak, near Martha's grave.

“Langley won't like that. President's on the payroll. Our boy in Islamabad.”

“This,” said Abbasi, “is one reason why Nashida wants to be rid of him. Also, of course, there is the fact that he hanged her father.”

He waved. The driver came slowly from the churchyard. Holding open the passenger door of the Lexus, the chauffeur said to Shawn, “Beautiful place you have here, sir.”

“Full of ghosts.”

Abbasi was listening. “Go to Paris, Mr. Maguire. Find the wife. Find Osmani. A change will do you good.” Half in and half out of the car, he took Shawn's wrist between thumb and finger. “The fact is, the truth is, my friend, I am running for my life. I have bad dreams. Reality is no better.” Shawn tried to see the young woman sitting in the car's backseat. He wondered if this might be Nashida Noon. Her covered head was turned away from him, toward the graveyard. “If I may say,” Abbasi added, “take care of your own life, Mr. Maguire. I hear a former colleague looks for you.”

“Do we have a name?”

“It is all gossip,” Abbasi said. He left open the car's bulletproof window. “As ever. Although I heard mention of Mr. McCord. Mr. Calvin McCord.”

Shawn watched the driver start the Lexus. In these last weeks he'd had the sense of being watched—though who in this village would watch him, he had no idea.

“One more thing,” he said. “Where would I look for Osmani?”

“That,” said Abbasi, “is the problem. Osmani disappeared. Or was disappeared.” He began to raise his window. “Start with the wife.”

When the Lexus had gone, Shawn walked across the lane to the churchyard, to where Martha lay. Forget-me-nots blossomed blue on her grave.

“I've done it now,” he said. “Taken his cash. I could be tried for this.”

At times, since Martha died, he'd heard her voice. Now, in the shade, she lay quiet.

“Tell me this,” Shawn said. “What do I do about Abbasi?” He waited a moment in silence. Then he asked, “And Calvin McCord?”

 

6

NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 2000

Shawn first met Calvin McCord at the turn of the century, which was also the turn of the millennium. The meeting was the moment Shawn's career began its path downhill. This was not something he knew. At the time, he had more immediate concerns.

Working for the Agency, Shawn was living alone in New York, overdrawn, drinking too much, sharing himself among three women, hearing radio chatter, convinced his country was about to be attacked by Saudi fanatics. Calvin McCord was the least of his worries.

Hugh Rockford, Shawn's supervisor, took him aside on a day when he, Shawn, had a whisky-related migraine. Rockford pointed out a man with a small mustache and brilliantined hair, leaning against an office wall, looking cool. Shawn guessed that he and the stranger were of similar ages—forty-something—though this man looked somehow young. Maybe just unformed. He was thin. He carried a brown hat in a hand that shook with a barely perceptible tremor.

“Calvin McCord,” Rockford said, pointing. “He's yours, son.”

Shawn stopped making notes on his PDA. “He's mine? Meaning what?”

“Meaning you're going to be a good daddy. Think Papa Bear. Think Goldilocks. You housebreak the guy, train him, make him a useful specimen, whatever he's useful at.”

“What
is
he useful at?” Shawn asked then, genuinely curious. “Does he have analytic skills? Foreign contacts? Does he know languages?”

Rockford was losing interest in this conversation. “What I hear, he don't know diddly. Doesn't matter. He has local contacts. Daddy's Claiborne McCord. Name mean anything? Claiborne, the chicken hawk? Used to run this place? Kid's got Pappy. What else does he need? Go say hi, Shawn. Make nice, why don't you?”

Calvin was given a desk next to Shawn's. His hair was thinning; his left leg twitched. He wore a hat until he was told to take it off.

Making conversation, Shawn said, “Guess they call you Cal?”

“They call me Calvin,” said Calvin.

After that, conversation languished. From time to time, Calvin produced a string of beads, counting as his lips moved.

Shawn paused in his own work to watch the new recruit. “Some sort of hippie trick you got there?”

Calvin checked to see if Shawn was serious. “It's a rosary. Five decades of prayer.”

“I don't want to seem intolerant,” Shawn said, “but maybe try praying on your own time.”

Calvin slipped the beads into his breast pocket. “God has his reckoning,” he said, “and his own time. God knows who is a patriot, and who is not.”

This was more information than Shawn could deal with, given the way his head felt just then. He went back to tracing the itinerary of the nuclear peddler A. Q. Khan. However, his next confrontation with Calvin came less than an hour later. Making early-morning calls to his mistress and to Martha, whom he wanted to marry, he noticed the aroma around Calvin's desk.

“Son,” Shawn said, “go pick yourself another perfume.”

Calvin's face contused. He rubbed his still-new mustache with the back of his hand, thinking that through. “It's called aftershave. It's expensive.”

“I believe it,” Shawn said. “Find something else, or go without. If you're sitting this close, I need to like the way you smell.”

After that, Calvin went pale and worked away quietly. Shawn discovered that he was, at his daddy's suggestion, drafting a position paper estimating Iraq's nuclear arsenal. Shawn, who didn't believe Iraq had such an arsenal, killed the draft before it could be circulated.

Calvin argued that everyone had a right to his own opinions.

“True enough,” Shawn had said, “but not his own facts.”

“You shouldn't dis me,” Calvin told him. “Down the line, you'll find it's not a good idea.”

Despite the way his head felt, Shawn laughed and went back to work. In later years, he would have cause to remember the comment. Beyond that one exchange, there was little conversation—apart from a disagreement over invading Pakistani tribal areas—until budget day. Calvin worked long hours. He seemed to have no life outside the Agency: no women, no whisky. Shawn had an unwise interest in both.

Things changed on budget day (the tenth of each month) when Shawn found there had been no transfer of funds to his operating account.

He checked with Rockford.

“It's okay,” Rockford said. “You got the budget. McCord's holding it.”

Shawn was silent a few moments. Then he said, “You lost me. Why in hell would McCord be holding my money?”

“Tells me he's good with figures. Which you're not. Least, not on a bank statement.” Rockford searched through a pile of papers. He came up with copies of credit card bills, some of which Shawn had not seen in the original. Rockford pointed with a pen. “You say you can handle money? There, the red print, see? With the minus sign? Current expenditure. A lot of it, I notice, bar checks in places you can't afford, 'less you got some private income I never heard about.”

Shawn's voice was quiet. “You're telling me, if I need operating expenses, I have to go ask the little dipshit sits next to me? The snotty kid smells like a whorehouse?”

“For the moment,” Rockford said, “this is exactly what I'm telling you.” With the nail of his left index finger he pried dry flakes of skin from the arid plane of his right cheek. Pausing this operation, he said to Shawn, “Word of advice. You want to go easy with McCord.”

“Because?”

“Because your daddy's name's not Claiborne McCord. Because all the time you've been here, Shawn, you've had woman trouble, which, I notice, it's not getting better. Because you drink too much. Because McCord don't do any of the above. Because he's on promotion track, Maguire, and you're not.”

This last sentence made Shawn feel he'd been sucker-punched. He felt nauseous. There was a perceptible time before he spoke. Then he said, “I was, last time I looked. I was on promotion track.”

Rockford produced a pocketknife, a gift from a recent security conference on a Swiss ski slope. Using the smallest blade, he began cleaning beneath his nails. “That was then,” he said, suggesting to Shawn that the meeting, interview, whatever it was, had ended.

 

7

PARIS, 21 MAY 2004

Not quite four years after meeting McCord, and three days after meeting Abbasi, Shawn Maguire rode through Paris with his buddy Bobby Walters, his overweight brother-in-arms. They were in the backseat of a lengthened Maserati, driving down rue de Bretagne. The car had a smoked-glass screen between them and Alfred Burke, a South London fixer currently on loan to the CIA, the agency for which Bobby Walters still worked. Being, by Agency standards, an older person, he called it the Company.

Unlike Shawn, Bobby had stayed on salary. His life was a mess. He was three years away from retirement and, God willing, full pension. By then, in regard to the Agency, he'd be KMA. Kiss my ass. These days, though, he wondered if he'd make it to the wire.

One of Bobby's reasons for doubt was the fate of his companion. Shawn had also worked for the Agency until the day he was dishonorably discharged. Canned, in fact. Fortunately, Vice President Cheney—then planning to invade Iraq—was out of love with the CIA. Despite the spies' best efforts at telling him what he wanted to hear, the VP established other, more docile, networks. The good news for Shawn was that one of them—Counterintelligence Field Activities—struggled to find people who were even halfway competent at manufacturing the kind of data the VP wanted. CIFA employed the aging misfit Maguire.

That was when the good news ended. CIFA later suspended Shawn while internal tribunals investigated his record of inappropriate violence and failures in anger management.

“Shawn,” Bobby said in the car that day, “did you ever tell me why they put you on hold?”

Shawn was looking through a darkened window as the limo turned into rue Charlot. “CIFA? Suspended me? No.”

The driver made a sharp right turn.

“No, you didn't tell me?” Shawn nodded yes, that was correct. “Are you going to?”

“One of the guys I worked with had a knee replacement.”

Bobby thought that through. “Which affected you because?”

“I'm not proud of this,” Shawn said. “I was why he needed one.”

“Jesus,” Bobby said. He checked his watch, an aging Tissot. “You kneecapped an agent? No wonder they're pissed. How much time have you got?”

“On leave or right now?”

“Right now.”

“Four, five minutes. Why?”

“Something I need to tell you. Calvin McCord's unhappy.”

“With?”

“You.”

Shawn stared. “McCord? He's unhappy with me? Why do I keep hearing this? You know what McCord did?”

“I do,” Bobby said. “Believe me, I do.” He knew the tale by heart.

“Son of a bitch. Tattles to teacher. Rats me out to Rockford.”

Bobby nodded. “I remember. Night you lost your laptop.”

“Right.” Shawn tried to keep his voice level. “Screwed me with the Company. Got me canned. Listen, bottom line here, McCord took my job. It's how I got in debt.”

The driver slowed to let a girl in a brief pink dress run across the road.

“Shawn,” Bobby said, “please. Getting in debt, that's not McCord. That's Jack Daniel's. You were up to your ass in bar bills way before McCord. Going out with what's-her-name.”

“Ellen.”

“Ellen Reynolds, am I right?” Bobby shook his head. “Big-ticket chick. I have to tell you, that's a problem McCord doesn't have.”

“McCord's a eunuch.”

“Looks like a horse with one horn?” said Bobby. “It's maybe why he's working and you're not.”

“What's the subtext here?” Shawn asked. “I don't have a woman problem. I was fine with Martha.”

Bobby laughed.

“Meaning what?” Shawn asked.

“It means give me a break,” Bobby said. “You've never been fine, Shawn, not with any woman. Even Martha. Whoever you're with, you want someone else. Story of your life.” He swiveled to look at Shawn, turning something over in his mind. “Ellen,” he said. “Man, was she ever out of your league. Never figured—how's a guy like you meet a piece like her?”