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“Mitch? Is that you?”
“Listen to me, Fahran. You need to get to extraction point Delta. Do you understand? Delta. We’ll have people there waiting for you.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Can you not move? How long will you be able to hole up? I can be on a plane in half an hour.”
“It’s good to hear your voice, M
itch,” Hotaki said, sounding infuriatingly unconcerned. “How long has it been? Two years? You’ve been well?”
“We’ll talk about it when you get stateside.”
“Oh, no. You have a beautiful country, I’m sure. But my home is here.”
“You like desert hellholes? How about Arizona? We’ll get you a crappy house right on the border near the drug violence. You’ll never even know you left.”
“That’s very generous, but is it what you’d do, Mitch? If it was America and not Afghanistan being taken over by radicals? Would you have the Europeans pick you up and give you a new home and a comfortable pension? No. Like you, I’m alone. My family is dead. Taken from me by the people I’ve sworn to stop.”
“Okay, forget the house. How about a job? A really dangerous one with lousy pay. I can almost guarantee you’ll be dead in a year.”
Hotaki laughed. “I would like very much to fight with you again, Mitch. But I must decline. It’s been a privilege to have known you.”
The line went dead, and Rapp threw the handset hard enough to drag the phone off Kennedy’s desk.
“Rickman’s mixing it up like we thought,” she said as Rapp stalked back and forth across her office floor. “With Safavi, he picked a critical asset and didn’t give us time to get to him. Hotaki is the opposite. A relatively unimportant asset with—”
“Unimportant asset?” Rapp shouted. “He’s an important man, Irene! I’ve bled with that guy. I watched his brother die in his arms.”
“I understand, Mitch, but you have to ask yourself why Rickman chose this particular Afghan fighter. There’s no question that he’s courageous, but there’s also no question that he’s largely inconsequential. I’d say it’s because of your feelings toward him. Rick wants to hurt you. And he needs to keep you off balance.”
Rapp stopped pacing and forced Hotaki out of his mind for the moment. “If the ISI’s behind these releases now, who are we talking about specifically? This feels like something Durrani would pull, but I saw him die.”
“What would you say about Ahmed Taj?”
“I’d say I’ve never been impressed.”
“Were you impressed when you first met me?”
It was an interesting question. The intelligence behind her eyes had been immediately clear but would he have thought she was capable of the things she’d done since? No way. She hid behind that cool, polite exterior better than anyone else he’d ever met.
“So you’re saying there’s more to him than he lets on?”
“I have no proof. But we both know that the ISI is operating too smoothly to be run by a man everyone agrees isn’t up to the task.”
Rapp considered the theory and found the ramifications hard to fully wrap his mind around. If a bunch of jihadists got those files, it would be a disaster but not Armageddon. The likelihood that they’d ever succeed in decrypting them was remote, and even if they did, they’d just dump them all onto the Internet in one chunk. Unimaginably destructive, but mercifully quick. The ISI was a completely different animal. Their chance of actually accessing the files was sky-high. And worse, they had the resources to wield them to maximum effect. They’d keep the information close to their vest, using it to undermine America’s intelligence efforts and sow the seeds of distrust between the United States and its allies. The Agency would spend the next quarter century with no idea who to trust.
She slid a single sheet of paper across her desk. “I want you to take a look at this.”
He sat and scanned the names it contained. Only about two-thirds of them were recognizable, but it was enough to understand the importance of the list’s order.
“So the people at the top are noncritical assets that Rick would definitely know about. At the bottom, you’ve got critical assets who he probably wouldn’t have had access to.”
She nodded. “I’m not sure it’s worth much, though.”
“Fahran Hotaki’s name is near the top. That proved right.”
“But Sitting Bull and the Iranian ambassador are near the bottom. We still haven’t been able to determine how Rick got hold of their identities. On the surface, it seems impossible.”
