Midnight Empire Read online

  ‘Okay, well, keep up the good work,’ Sett concluded. ‘We knew you were the perfect man to send.’

  Daniel hadn’t seen Raul since the failure at Ma’rib. Then one afternoon he was suddenly in the briefing hut, searching for Gray. The news slowly filtered through the unit: the inside source, Protonic, had word that Abu Yamin would be on a plane that had been chartered, departing Sana’a for somewhere in the Maghreb.

  ‘This makes sense,’ said Moore. ‘Northwest Africa is where to take anti-aircraft missiles if you want to smuggle them into the West.’

  Protonic was said to be working hard to learn the name of the pilot, the time of the flight. There were only a handful of aviators the network regularly used. There was talk of altitude detonators, of smuggling a package on board. Raul was for, while Gray was against: it was too risky, he said, it would take too long to get that kind of equipment deployed.

  Nothing happened until the evening, when Protonic sent a further message. He hadn’t been able to identify the exact plane, but it had been arranged that he would be there, at the airport, to help ensure that Abu Yamin and his cargo got away smoothly. They had five or six hours before the flight.

  Raul repeated this to Gray and Wolfe while Daniel was in the room. The pair gave the news a wary silence. Wolfe then asked what Raul was thinking. Raul said the point was the missiles: if Protonic saw missiles on that plane then it was worth it, him trying to put a device on board. It would hardly take anything to rip a light plane apart; C-4 and a simple timer. The risk was of Protonic getting caught.

  Would he do it, Gray wanted to know.

  Anything for money, Raul said. But it would take a hefty sum.

  There was a further period of silence. At the edge of his hearing Daniel detected what he thought was the slow beat of a helicopter coming their way but it failed to materialise. The men were looking at the ground, looking at the whiteboard, looking at the walls. The silence felt like a consensus building; the longer no one spoke, the more certain the plan. Was it worth it, endangering the source?

  Eventually, Raul produced his phone. The others watched him select a number and raise it to his ear. He walked slowly to the door of the hut, opened it, and, because no one had stopped him, walked out.

  After that, they waited. Daniel wondered if they might launch a drone to surveil the airport but they did not. Instead, the coffee pot was reloaded. Everyone drank and Wolfe sat with Gray, waiting for Raul to come back. An hour passed.

  When Moore went outside for a cigarette, Daniel followed to get some air. They stood watching the black fringe beyond the airfield’s lights.

  ‘Who is Protonic exactly?’ Daniel ventured.

  Moore paused. ‘Don’t know his name. But he’s top shelf. Probably half the reason this unit even exists.’

  Inside, Wolfe now had a laptop out but didn’t appear to be doing much on it. More time passed. When Raul finally came back, Daniel understood the complete silence in the room to mean that the plan was in train.

  He poured himself another coffee. The three CIA men sat quietly on chairs by the whiteboard. Slumped in their flight suits, Moore and Ellis went to sleep at the back of the room.

  There was the heavy whine of something substantial landing on the strip. A large digital clock with a red display marked out time, and Daniel attempted to stay awake.

  When he woke in the first instance it was because Raul was speaking to Gray and Wolfe. When he woke the second time it was the hut door squeaking, Wolfe returning from somewhere. He woke next to a phone beeping. Some time following that he woke to complete silence.

  Finally, he woke to dawn light. He raised his head to see the hut’s door wide open, the CIA men standing out there, the sky a cold and early blue. He turned to find Moore awake and looking at him.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Moore quietly, watching the figures outdoors. ‘No one has seen anything fall out of the sky. And after giving Protonic a fairly incriminating package, they haven’t heard a thing from their man.’

  Late the next day, Gray and Daniel sat outside the communications hut.

  ‘These are the afternoons,’ Gray said. ‘High sun but not too hot, shadows in the west, relief coming. A long time ago it would have been hunting weather. You’d be out there in the canyons with your sinew-backed bow, waiting for something to cross downwind.’

  ‘What would cross?’

  ‘A bighorn sheep. Any kind of squirrel.’

  ‘People lived there?’

  ‘Sure, all across.’

  ‘I don’t know why they’d choose to.’

  ‘How could you?’ Gray said. ‘He’s modern man but how is it possible to know how he thought? What can you say about his relationship to this—the rocks, the desert springs?’

  ‘You can’t imagine.’

  ‘You precisely can’t.’

  ‘You could walk there.’

  ‘But it would mean nothing. Earth, rock, sun. When the hunter passes, they go too.’

  ‘Even if they’re still out there.’

  ‘The rocks are the rocks? The heat is the heat?’

  ‘Science might say.’

  ‘Not every science.’ Gray paused. ‘We think about what it was to be him but we know we can’t. Nostalgia. I do this but I’m supposed to have a logical mind.’

  They watched for a time. The air seemed to cool. A large figure in a white shirt—Wolfe—emerged from the briefing hut and crossed the gravel towards them.

  ‘Still nothing?’ Gray asked.

  Wolfe nodded.

  ‘What does Raul say?’

  Wolfe turned towards the hills. ‘Raul says nothing. Raul calls Dupont. Dupont says nothing.’

  ‘It’s not looking good for him.’ Daniel understood Gray to mean Protonic.

  ‘Not if he got caught,’ said Wolfe.

  ‘I think we had to try. I think it was the right call.’

  ‘It’ll be ghastly, what happens to him.’

  ‘He may still turn up.’

  ‘Dupont’s across the fallbacks.’

  ‘What about Langley?’

  ‘It’s quite the fuck-up.’

  ‘They say that?’

  ‘They don’t say anything.’

  Gray looked at his feet. ‘Well, he may turn up.’

  He didn’t. Five days passed in which they heard nothing from their source. Moore said that he’d definitely been ‘cut to bits’. It was something he felt, as much a fact as this blistering, near-shadowed heat. Protonic had been caught red-handed getting the explosives onto the plane, or Abu Yamin had figured it out. Even in the War on Terror, only so many people could die around you before the suspicious turned something out.

  The mood in the hut was low. There were other missions to fly, but it felt as if someone had switched the main game off, mid-broadcast, with the scores tied. They were reduced to checking airports and radars in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, looking for traces of chartered Yemeni planes.

  Daniel wondered if there shouldn’t be more urgency about this; wondered if the next thing they would hear about the missiles was a passenger plane exploding over Heathrow. He was glad when Raul turned up on the Friday morning and assembled himself, Moore and Ellis in a control station with a mission: reconnaissance over Peshawar.

  The brief was simple. They’d be watching the movements of men who were part of Abu Yamin’s network and when they found Abu Yamin they would take him out, either with the drone or by local means.

  The mission would last as long as required. The source of their intelligence was a signal intercept. Something had been said on a mobile phone and it had made Raul suspect that Abu Yamin was in Pakistan.

  There was a local team, a group of paramilitaries they could call upon as required. The point was to have the drone in the air before sunrise each day. And if they thought that Abu Yamin was moving at night, they’d fly then too.

  It was imperative that they be invisible. They were to keep high over the
ir target and hide in the sun. If there was cloud, they’d ghost within it. And when Raul said he suspected that Abu Yamin was in Peshawar, he meant exactly that. They’d be searching the city for a rumour.

  Daniel had seen Peshawar before, a city with a two-–thousand-year history, population two million. From the sky it was a dense platelet of rooftops, buildings and streets that had grown unchecked over centuries: it looked like something living, the occasional planned reprieve of a garden at the end of a winding bazaar. His first thought was that finding any particular person there would be impossible. Especially in the old city; the alleys were narrow, the buildings so close together that you would be able to walk for miles without exposing yourself to half a radian of open sky. But Raul said that he had certain, specific targets. Safe houses that weren’t as safe as those who used them believed: a shop off the Meena Bazaar; a private home to the south of the gemstone market; another home on a thin road to the east of a police station; the top floor of a building just north of the telephone exchange.

  And Dupont would be in Pakistan soon. He’d be taking a room at the Pearl Hotel, and he would run their operation on the ground.

  Pictures were again posted of Abu Yamin. This time they went on the side wall of the control station, hard to make out without looking carefully, the wall lit dimly by screen glow. There were many more now. Photos of Abu Yamin standing at street level, of him crossing a market somewhere in Asia where meat was being sold. Images in small sets of three or four: the terrorist in front of a stony landscape; in front of a mosque or a car. Sometimes he was smiling. Other times he appeared withdrawn, cold-eyed, as if he was not in the moment being captured but elsewhere. In a few shots it was hard to be certain that it was even him: many of the features were right but others seemed to have morphed. There were more aerial shots now too—the figure on an open plain, on a dusty street at what appeared to be a bus station. One picture, Daniel recognised, showed Abu Yamin at Tarnak Farms.

  ‘Watch for a car the network uses,’ said Raul. ‘A maroon Toyota Crown.’

  As they connected to and began to warm the MQ-9 on the apron, Daniel configured his screen and, for the sake of safety, ran his diagnostics. While they waited, he thought about Dupont in Peshawar. A man in a hotel room with a gun and a satellite phone, several passports and probably thousands of dollars in cash. This was the first time Daniel had heard of someone physically going from Creech to the field. It was something Daniel knew he could never do, sit in a room and manipulate others, enforce his will on situations, the will of the state. He didn’t have the belief—if belief was in fact what it took; indeed, he wouldn’t have been able to say exactly what gave anyone the strength.

  5

  Violence in America. One of the Creech pilots, Second Lieutenant Anthony Schultz, was beaten to death on the street outside his house, a road rage incident, struck about the head with a metal rod that was left at the scene. There were no witnesses but a man saw Schultz’s car being followed aggressively by a white Dodge pick-up which seemed to want to overtake him, honking its horn.

  This was in a suburb called Canyon Gate. Schultz and his second wife had recently bought there, a house with a triple garage, a lawn they were going to rip out for the cash rebate, and a pool. He’d been found by his neighbour, a woman named Nina Friedman, who’d approached his car, screaming, blood splashed all over the windows and Schultz hadn’t even managed to get out of his seat.

  At Creech, everyone said how pointless an act it was, how pointless a death.

  Daniel hadn’t known Schultz. It seemed that few people had. The details that came to them about him—a perfect jump shot, a collapsed marriage in New Jersey—were third-hand, information gleaned from armourers said to have known him, from nameless members of his squad, from his nameless operator.

  Daniel wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that both Schultz and his death were an elaborate rumour, a hoax or a joke that had gone collective. But at day’s end a sign had gone up advertising his funeral service at the Desert Memorial Chapel, 2 p.m. on the coming Monday.

  In the lead-up to the day, new stories were told about the incident. The white Dodge had had Jersey plates. The blows had cracked Schultz’s skull in four places. He’d had a pistol in the glove box, its unprised latch marked by his bloodied thumb prints. But afterwards, as if by base-wide announcement subliminally received, all talk of the episode ceased.

  After his mugging, Daniel decided that when he walked at night he would go the other way—towards and along the Strip. In these hours the boulevard was less busy but still busy enough, drunken gangs of tourists, sole figures walking fast or casino workers waiting for the Deuce bus line. He heard all kinds of languages: French, German, Italian; what he recognised as Mandarin. The lights of the casinos lit whatever hung in the vacant space above them, smog probably, giving the sky a white bent.

  He walked from end to end, trying to tire himself out. He was never threatened on these walks, but underneath there did seem to hang a ready frontier violence; he always seemed to arrive in its slowing aftermath, men angry and panting and handcuffed and being made to stand against walls. He tried to pass such scenes quickly. If warned by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, he crossed the street. For one thing, they were too much action if he was trying to settle his mind. For another, they led him to think about what had happened in the cul-de-sac, and whenever that happened he was able to smell the man again.

  Once, when he heard the wail and saw the lights of police and paramedics up ahead, he diverted into the nearest casino, the MGM Grand. It was one of the more modern ones and the gambling floor was clean and cavernous, seemingly endless clusters of blackjack tables and pai gow and money wheels. The custom didn’t seem to be waning at 3 a.m.: the games were full, some people in evening wear, in suits or dresses. He knew that had been how it once was in Vegas, around the time of Howard Hughes when the casinos had really started, crowds turned out in their golden best, a proper era, everybody smoking. And maybe the times hadn’t been as good and as fine as they appeared in the photographs, but there seemed a gulf between then and now: in the early photographs he approved of the dressing up but in modern times it felt only cheap and conceited, and he thought that people shouldn’t allow themselves to be so taken in.

  The poker room at the MGM was large—fifty or more tables in an open space with a bar on a mezzanine above. If anything it felt corporate, modern and bland, a place designed by the invisible hand of private equity in which everything was aimed at the masses and in which themes, because they aged, were shunned.

  He watched for a while from the bar, and then he figured that he might as well play. If he sat snug and folded almost everything, there wasn’t much difference between the two anyway.

  He played for an hour. The following night he came back and played for an hour again. That became his rule. It was a good rule and he discovered that if he had a Budweiser halfway through then back at the loft he found immediate sleep. And so he played to relax. He didn’t try to steal pots, to bluff or make fancy moves. He only played the cards as they fell, and he didn’t worry about being up or down: he was only playing for an hour, for thirty-five hands at most, and whether you were a bad player or a good one, there was no way to judge from a sample like that.

  Because he folded so much, he spent a lot of time watching the other players. They were mostly quiet people who took themselves seriously, silent abstractions of whatever they were wearing, brash sunglasses or trucking caps or casual shirts. Only occasionally was there banter and what passed for personality; often it had gone sour by the time Daniel arrived and the mood at the table would be indecipherably tense and somebody would be sitting on his final warning.

  Daniel would raise with pocket aces, fold with jacks to a re-raise and a call.

  He would fold small pairs under the gun, flat call with kings in the cut-off.

  Not everyone would be thinking hard. Often their hands were easy reads; they’d made the flush they’d bet at
or they were pushing with an over-pair; or if they were pushing and you couldn’t figure it out they had trips.

  It was rational poker and it was by the book; it was how Daniel played as well. They all played the same but thought they could beat each other doing it. And they also hoped to capitalise on the money-givers: the beginners who overvalued everything; the European tourists spending their last cheque; the men, usually Asian, proving to themselves their bad luck. Each of these were more myth than fact, fabled animals believed to roam the hills.

  But it worked for Daniel. He got home and got to sleep, and he kept his bankroll in a wall safe to keep track of it, to not mix it with his regular cash. And it shrank and grew, thinning and swelling, but that wasn’t really the point.

  •

  After a time he began to play elsewhere. At Treasure Island, at Circus Circus, at Mandalay Bay. At Caesars Palace the poker room was literally a room. At the Bellagio, it was a zone near the sports betting with a series of low mezzanines. He went back to Bally’s. Went across the street to the Flamingo. These were places of slight and unremarkable difference—worlds of shifted furniture, variations on livery and trim.

  One night at the Bellagio he went up in stakes to five dollars/ ten dollars. The players in this game tended to speak to one another, to not be so serious. They were mostly regulars, he discovered. They chatted during the hands and knew each other’s names and sometimes the details of their former lives. He met some of them. Oskar, a Swede who lived in the casino three months a year in a room provided by the management. Gil, a retired Israeli civil engineer who was supposed to be travelling America in a Winnebago, meeting his son in New York, but was yet to leave Vegas. A WSOP bracelet–winner named Luis Otero, a big, smiling poker pro who’d once crossed from Havana to Florida by improvised raft, and who seemed genuinely pleased if you took a pot from him, happy to congratulate you.

  Nobody seemed to play the same at these stakes and it was a much better, much more open game, with lots of raising, and nobody seemed too sad if they lost. This encouraged Daniel to make some crazy plays. He had to table his entire bankroll just to sit down, but he found himself check-raising all-in with pocket fives on an ace-high board. This was against big Luis Otero, and when Daniel said those words, all in, it was as if someone else, a killer, had said them, had made a decision that Daniel knew was the right decision but one that he would never make, not for a stack of one thousand and twenty dollars. And it was only after Otero had nodded and thrown away his cards that the blood in Daniel’s body grew heavy, entered a second, stranger state of pulsing weight and for a moment it was a small mystery, the question of who he was.