Authors: Matthew Dunn
T
HE REAL NAME
of the Indian man who called himself Trapper was Sahir.
It means “magician.”
Sahir had often wondered how his parents could have known that their newborn son would develop into someone who would excel in trickery. Perhaps they hadn’t known and it was mere luck that his name had matched his subsequent hobby, or maybe he’d unwittingly developed his talents to give meaning to his identity. He’d never asked his parents for their opinion on this, and now he’d never know, because his father had been shot in the head, and his grief-stricken mother had thrown herself off a sheer face of the Guru Shikhar mountain.
That had happened one year ago, and it had left Sahir alone in the world. He had no siblings, and his extended family had turned their backs on him in disgust after his parents had decided that their wealth should be inherited by their only son. But being alone had never bothered Sahir because he liked being the gray man; the person who could move unnoticed amid throngs of people and do things that they would least expect.
Now was going to be one of those times, for the benefit of his amusement and the nearby homeless amputee war veteran who was lying on a sidewalk, fruitlessly begging for a few dollars.
Sahir was sitting at a table in an alfresco D.C. café, wearing a silk shirt, expensive slacks, and shoes, sipping black tea, and enjoying the early morning sunshine wash over his smooth skin. He fit in here because every table around him was occupied by other rich people who looked good on the outside, though they didn’t appear to share Sahir’s inner sense of calm. To him, they seemed brash, angry with life, and they spoke only in negatives. As a child, Sahir had heard about the American Dream and had marveled at the notion that an entire nation could have a collective notion of happiness. It had made him envious and confused, because in India there are so many different visions of success. But now that he was in the States, he decided that if the American Dream was true, the people around him hadn’t experienced it yet.
One tall and well-groomed man, three tables away from Sahir, seemed particularly affronted with life. He was talking loudly to four friends, all of whom—like him—were wearing thousand-dollar suits and watches that would have cost ten times that much. He was using racist language to declare that D.C. was going to shit because liberal jerks on Capitol Hill wanted all American cities to turn into faggoty, tree-hugging social experiments.
Sahir decided that the man was a pernicious idiot savant, because he was clearly gifted at garnering wealth but had a mental blind spot when it came to the joy that can be derived from being compassionate. That meant Sahir had to punish him.
Sahir finished his tea, left a tip on the table for the waiter, and moved to the angry man, who was now jabbing his finger on the table in time with each embittered word he spoke.
“Sir, I would like to perform a trick and was wondering if you’d participate?”
The man looked flummoxed. “A trick?” He glanced at his friends before returning his gaze to the Indian. “You’re joking me, right?”
Sahir smiled in a confident yet respectful way. “I am an amateur magician.” He waved his hand in a flourish. “I need a participant and an audience to practice my craft.”
One of the man’s female friends giggled and said, “Go on, Carl. Sounds fun.”
No doubt Carl didn’t agree. “You live here?”
“No, sir. I’m visiting your country, and when I’ve finished doing so, I will return to my country and will never bother you again.”
The woman was now laughing and said, “Come on, Carl, he’s obviously not one of
them
guys you’re talking about. Give it a go.”
Carl looked cornered. “What do I have to do?”
Sahir smiled wider. “Simply stand in front of me and extend your hand.”
“Err, okay.” Carl did as Sahir requested.
Sahir withdrew a dime, placed it in the palm of his hand, and showed it to Carl’s friends. “Please don’t take your eyes off the coin.” Sahir moved his hand slowly, keeping it flat so that the coin was visible right up until the moment he embraced Carl’s hand. He asked Carl, “Can you feel the dime?”
Carl nodded. “Yeah, of course.”
“Excellent. I’d like us to shake hands and then, after the count of three, quickly turn our hands flat so that your friends can see our palms.”
It happened exactly as Sahir had requested, and Carl’s friends gasped when they saw the coin had vanished.
Carl rubbed his head, dumbfounded. “Well, I’ll be damned. That’s some trick.”
Sahir bowed and said, “My sincere gratitude.” He walked to the homeless man, who was forty yards away and out of sight of Carl and his friends, and dropped Carl’s Rolex watch and wallet in the man’s lap.
Sixty minutes later, he entered a tiny rental apartment in D.C.’s Upper Northwest. The place was clean and pleasant, but also cheap, nondescript, and one of many in the block. Unlike Sahir, who’d chosen the accommodation because it was discreet, occupants of the other apartments had a tight budget in common, but otherwise they were a diverse bunch of tourists, summer students, and employees on temporary assignment to the capital. Most of them took no notice of each other, and the only person Sahir had spoken to was his neighbor—a young and pretty Argentinian woman called Isabella, whose parents had paid for her to come to the States to improve her perfectly adequate English, when in fact she seemed to spend most of the day in her apartment smoking weed. Isabella thought Sahir was a PhD student from the Bengal Engineering and Science University who was participating in a Georgetown University summer semester. She had no inkling that her neighbor might be a man capable of murder.
He entered the kitchen and opened a bag of masala peanuts while listening to Mr. Conrad and The Excellos sing “I’m Dissatisfied” on a CD he’d earlier purchased from the blues section of a record store because he wanted to understand how it was possible for American musicians to be unhappy in the land of hope and glory.
Six spiced peanuts, juggled high into the air before landing in quick succession in his mouth, abated all feelings of hunger, and he moved to the living room, opened a trunk containing chains, ropes, saws, shackles, and a razor wire whose sole purpose was to garrote a man, and withdrew a leather pouch containing sterilized needles of varying widths. He pulled out one that had been used by early-twentieth-century Quaker explorers to insert stitches into the paw of an injured tiger, and thrust the needle through the same palm that had earlier held the dime. Avoiding bones and veins was key, and as Sahir saw its tip emerge through the top of his hand, he imagined an audience who would be disgusted yet fascinated by what he’d done but wouldn’t see the real reason behind the grotesque act, which was to increase his pulse rate to that of a frightened animal, sweat, and appear to everyone that he was a victim of his own machismo when in truth he was calculating facts about his emotionally vulnerable audience so that he could use their secrets against them.
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.
O
N 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.”
Zakaria kept his eyes on the knife. Then he placed his manicured fingers together, dropped the smile, and locked his gaze on me. “Do you still fantasize about the erroneous possibility that your father might be alive, incarcerated in Evin Prison, a broken old man whose long hair and beard make him unrecognizable but one who’s not dead?”
I was motionless because I didn’t want to give the bastard the satisfaction of knowing that his question unsettled me. “He’s dead. An Iranian general killed him in his prison cell after he was captured and taken to Tehran.”
“My question doesn’t pertain to the issue of whether he’s alive or dead, but rather the fantasy.”
“I know, and I chose to ignore it.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a parasite.”
“Always trying to categorize me, Mr. Cochrane. That’s a flaw in you.”
“Actually, I do it for fun and to annoy you.”
“Rather crude objectives, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “I don’t care. Keeps me happy.” This was true. Baiting Zakaria was the only good thing about being in his presence. I repeated, “I need your help.”
“And if I don’t acquiesce, you’ll kill me?”
“Maybe, or perhaps I’ll tell the feds that the CIA is illegally harboring a very dangerous criminal.” I swept my arm across the room. “Let them take you away from all this luxury, and watch them put you in solitary confinement. For life.”
Zakaria laughed. “That would mean you’d have to step out of the shadows in order to testify against me. I can’t see you liking that one bit.”
I nodded. “Well, I guess that just leaves the option of killing you.”
The glisten in Zakaria’s eyes vanished, replaced by a darkness that made me wonder if I’d gone too far. To my relief he asked, “What help do you need?”
I leaned forward so that I was closer to the dagger if Zakaria attempted to grab it. “A young Indian man who calls himself Trapper wants me dead.” I gave him what little data I had. “I’m wondering if you might know him, or know of him?”
“I wish him good luck.” He tossed his head back and stared at the ceiling. “Appearance?”
“Slight, but wiry and strong.”
“What is your colleagues’ assessment of his intellect?”
“They thought he was clever.”
“Demeanor?”
“Brave.”
“And what is your assessment of your colleagues?”
“I think they’re dumb and cowardly.”
Zakaria drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Of course they are. And that means they’re not credible assessors of a man’s character. That said, perhaps by chance, or more likely because their stupid brains realized they’d been outmaneuvered, on this occasion they’re right.”
“I agree.”
“I’m glad you do.” Zakaria’s smile had returned. “Trapper’s an educated man, privileged, yet courageous and an independent thinker. What does that tell you?”
“He comes from a wealthy family, but I suspect he’s been alone for some time; had to make decisions on his own.”
“And therefore . . .”
“He no longer has a family.”
Zakaria bared his teeth. “Heartbreaking, isn’t it?”
“Not to you.”
“But it is to you, for obvious reasons.”
“Shut up and keep thinking and talking.”
“Tut tut, Mr. Cochrane. Do you always feel the need to expedite our conversations?”
“Yes. You’re mad, so I need to keep your mind on track.”
“Your track, not mine.” Zakaria lowered his head and looked at me. “Trapper is an unusual nom de plume, don’t you think?”
I agreed.
“What image does it conjure in your head?” Zakaria was looking at me with his professor look.
I indulged him by pretending to be his student. “Many. Mark Twain. Old America. Frontier land. Guys in bearskins trying to survive alongside meandering rivers. Nothing remotely South Asian.”
“And what can you extrapolate from that?”
“The code name’s been chosen with care. It’s specific to geographical location and me.”
“Indeed, it is.” Zakaria flicked a finger against the fangs of the dead mongoose. “I don’t know who he is.”
I made no effort to hide my disappointment.
Zakaria placed an electronic cigarette in his mouth. I was surprised, because he’d always been a devout smoker of Balkan tobacco. “You know what that means?” he said.
“It means he’s not who he says he is.”
“Probably, though new terrorists appear all the time. Even I can’t be expected to keep up with all their identities.”
“But you believe Trapper has the wrong profile to be a terrorist?”
“I wouldn’t be so bold as to make such an assumption. But I do think there’s more to this than meets the eye.
Your
eye.”
“And your eye?”
I knew Zakaria wasn’t going to answer me.
Instead, he checked his watch and said, “I’ve told you the truth that I don’t know who Trapper is. Do you feel that I’ve in any way been uncooperative on that point to the extent that I need to be incarcerated or murdered by the
great
Will Cochrane?”
“No. You’ve done what I’ve asked of you.”
“Good.” Zakaria stood. “I’m afraid our time’s up, because in one hour I need to be fifty miles away from here to have a rather forthright chat with a man who owes me money.”
I tried to object, but Zakaria raised his hand. “I hope I see you soon, perhaps under different circumstances. But for now, I’ll leave you with one observation.”
I was silent.
Zakaria’s grin was back on his face. “The fact that Trapper wants you dead isn’t your biggest problem. What should concern you the most is that he’s told your colleagues and you that he wants that outcome.”