Chapter Forty-Nine

SHAUNA NOTICED THE car following hers as she headed out of a gas station in Ipswich, taking Route 133 back toward Gloucester. She’d spent the rest of the day before lying low, thinking and plotting, conserving her energy for what lay ahead. She imagined Henry had been trying to contact her, but she kept her phone off so that her mind was clear and her location couldn’t be tracked. Then she’d spent the night in the car near Daniel Boone Park, sleepless, watching the still, flat water through the windshield and thinking about Norman Driver and his crew.

The man tailing her was young. He was close enough that Shauna could make him out in the rearview mirror; his short, scrubby beard and sunglasses. He held the steering wheel of his truck with one hand and dialed a cell phone over and over with the other, cursing and shaking his head when whoever he was calling didn’t answer. When Shauna could see the spire of City Hall in Gloucester, the young man fell back a little, some half-formed instinct reminding him perhaps that the best kind of tail didn’t involve the threat of running up the back of the mark if she stopped suddenly at a traffic light.

Shauna wondered how a man who looked to be in his twenties came to be working for someone as criminally advanced as Norman Driver. Did he see himself reaching “boss” status when he got to Driver’s age, with a crew of underlings dealing drugs or running women or hitting banks or whatever? Or was working for Driver just a temporary gig, the same kind of desperate grab for good money at minimal effort that drove college girls to moonlight as exotic dancers? As Shauna led the young man into Dogtown Commons, the open view of the marshlands yielded to thick winter woods. She took a dirt road past a collapsed farmhouse and pulled over, watching as the young man’s truck stopped a hundred or more yards back.

Shauna reached down and cranked the heater up. Warm air gushed over her, and soon the windshield was beginning to fog against the icy morning. The vehicle had a good heating system, just one of many features she knew cops valued in their vehicles, a desire born of long nights on stakeout. It also had good suspension, sound gas mileage, and plenty of cup holders—all requirements Mark had demanded of their vehicles over the years. Shauna gripped the wheel and watched the mirror, looking for her follower, wondering if the receiver of his frantic calls had finally picked up yet.

She unclipped her seat belt.

It was three full minutes later that she heard the faint crunch of his boots on the fallen leaves, perhaps twenty yards behind. Then she heard the shunt of his pistol action only a couple of yards beyond the driver side door.

Shauna heard the gunshots puncture the side of the car and smiled. He’d shot twice into the door, it sounded like, before even opening it. Seemed like he was indeed an ambitious baby-criminal hoping to rise through the ranks. Shauna pushed the trunk lid open and stepped out quietly, taking the shotgun with her. She stood behind the boy and, while he tore open the driver’s side door of the car, she waited for him to put it all together: the empty driver’s seat, the flopped-down panel in the middle back seat leading through to the trunk. The path through which Shauna had made her escape. Another cop feature. Bill would have attended enough road accidents in his career to know how useful an escape route through the trunk could be. The young man with the gun turned around just as Shauna was trying to decide if she should say something powerful, a movie villain’s one-liner, like “See you in hell.” Something that would make it all clear for him: how ignorant, selfish, and wasteful he had been to arrive where he was now at the end of his life, alone with her in these woods.

In the end, she said nothing. The boy opened his mouth in shock, taking in the sight of the gun in her hands, and Shauna could see he knew very well how stupid he had been.

She shot him in the chest.

Desert Outside Bagram, Afghanistan, 2010

Nick allowed himself to be pulled and shoved away from Karli Breecher. Some part of his mind couldn’t comprehend that Rick Master had just shot her, that she lay writhing on the ground outside the goat farmer’s house while Master tended to the wound he’d just created. Nick was walking in a nightmare, begging himself to wake up, his jaw clenched and step locked as Roger Dorrich pushed him back up the hill. They stood side by side, spraying their own truck with gunfire from the guns they found in the house, and Nick felt blinded by the flashes in the dark. Before he could catch up with his own mind, try to decipher what was happening and what would happen next, he was back at the house, standing alongside Dorrich, as Master applied field dressings to Breecher’s stomach.

“You shot her,” Nick panted, his voice sounding completely foreign to him. Numb. “I… I don’t understand what’s happening. What are you—”

“We need it to look legit,” Dorrich said. “If we’re going to tell them there was a firefight here, it makes sense one of us at least would get tagged. No one’s going to question this. She’s a colonel’s daughter, for chrissake.”

Breecher’s eyes were big and wild, her bloody hand gripping Master’s shoulder, her eyes on Nick, pleading as she fought to speak through the pain.

“I’m sorry, Breecher,” Master said. “It’ll all be worth it. I promise. It’ll all be worth it.”

“Come on,” Dorrich said and grabbed Nick’s shoulder and pushed him toward the house. “We have to keep moving.”

Nick entered the house and walked through the room full of dead family members. His eyes were fixed on his own feet, and yet small clues to the horror intruded into the edges of his vision. A tiny hand flopped open, unmoving. A bare foot. Someone lying on their side, hair splayed over the stained rug. Dorrich led Nick into a large room filled with rugs, blankets, pillows. He shoved back a few, searching for something on the ground. All the while, Dorrich had one hand pressed against the radio on his helmet.

“Delta 6 receiving fire at a structure approximately five miles north-northwest of base, requesting immediate assistance. One man down, over.”

Finally Dorrich’s finger caught on a structure in the bare earth. He lifted a wood panel and flipped it over, then started dragging dusty duffel bags out of a wide hole in the ground.

They were faded camo-print bags marked with big black block letters.

U.S. ARMY.

Nick came when Dorrich beckoned him, receiving the bag Dorrich tossed him.

“Hurry up. Grab and go, Jones! Grab and go!”

Nick bent and opened the bag. Dirty, wrinkled bills, thousands of them, secured in bundles with elastic bands. American dollars. In his dreamy, disassociated state, he reached into the bag and felt the corners and edges of the stacks of cash creep up his arm. A depthless bag of money trying to suck him in by the wrist.

“Ghost money,” he said.

Dorrich nodded.

Nick had heard rumors fluttering around base ever since he arrived, about CIA payments to village elders, local non-Taliban warlords, and agents who channeled money all the way to President Hamid Karzai’s palace. Six months earlier, outside Tezin, he’d lain on his bunk listening to Dorrich reading a New York Times article aloud to his team. The article claimed that Americans were paying cash for safe passage through Taliban red zones. The reporter had described plastic shopping bags, briefcases, duffel bags full of cash being delivered in the dead of night. Army patrols were marking their vehicles with safe codes provided by the elders, so that rebels could see them with binoculars and know not to engage. Master had been in a fury as he listened, pacing the room, his fists balled and tucked into his armpits as though to stop himself beating the shit out of someone.

“I didn’t come here to hand American tax dollars over to the goddamn Taliban!” he’d raged. “I came here to kill those motherfuckers!”

Dorrich was shoving another bag at Nick now, loading two bags onto his own shoulders.

“How much is here?” Nick asked.

“Should be about four million,” Dorrich said. “There’s been a bottleneck further up the line. One of the guys who’s supposed to bring this money to the higher-ups in Kabul has been skimming off the top, so all the money’s pooled here until they can figure out who the thief is. This represents nine months’ worth of safe passage payments.”

“Jesus,” Nick said. Dorrich grinned and slapped his back, thinking, Nick supposed, that he was marveling at the money. At what a million dollars could mean for someone like him, a high school dropout from West Baltimore with few prospects back home except more deployments to this desert wasteland to fight in a war he didn’t half understand.

But Nick wasn’t marveling at that. He was marveling at the wastefulness of it all. The lives snuffed out in the other room. Breecher, and what a gunshot wound at close range to the abdomen would mean for her chances of survival. He marveled at Master and Dorrich’s apparent complete disregard for the danger this would put Americans into in the coming months. Safe passages now unsafe again. He marveled at the years he saw stretching outward and away from him in this moment, years in which he would have to keep quiet somehow about what he was doing.

Nick could hear choppers on the wind.

“Let’s go.” Dorrich pulled at him. “We gotta stash the bags before they get here.”