Escaped from custody. He heard the anchor’s words echo in his head. Ben touched his own face on the television screen. He was now a hunted man.
16
Vochek didn’t much like kids; but she could never forget the two dead boys.
She had first seen the small, crumpled bodies when she stepped into a bullet-blasted living room, six months ago, in Kabul, Afghanistan.
As she entered the ransacked house that awful gray morning, she had pulled tighter around her face the hijab she wore out of deference to tradition. The scarf masked the burnt smell of gunfire, and hid the trembling of her own mouth as she stood over the pitiful bodies. She reached to touch the children, but her fingers stopped just short of their dark mops of hair. One was nine, the other ten, both boys. If they had been American children their pajamas would have featured Scooby-Doo or Power Rangers or Spider-Man. But these two boys wore PJs with a repeating pattern of soccer balls, with rainbow arcs of speed drawn behind each ball to suggest a powerful and accurate kick.
They lay on their stomachs and she realized that they’d been shot in the back.
There was no sign of the children’s parents, people she knew, freelance translators who worked with the State Department. She knew them because she was here to help the Kabul government shape and refine its own version of Homeland Security. The boys’ father had called her an hour earlier, waking her from a deep sleep. I wonder, Ms. Vochek, if you could come by and talk to me and my wife. We have information of value. Time is critical.
“It’s two of your people,” the Afghan officer in charge of the scene said.
“My people.” She tore her gaze away from the children. “I don’t understand.”
“Yes. The killers. Two men from the State Department.”
“The people who killed these kids work for State?” Horror filled her voice.
“Yes. In the security division. They grabbed the parents, stuck them in a trunk after they shot the family. Wife is dead, husband is wounded. May not make it through the night.” The Afghan officer shrugged. “What is wrong with you people?”
She was placed in charge of the interrogation of the two State Department employees. The Afghan government fed the media a careful fiction, announcing that two unknown gunmen had attacked the family.
Vochek’s questioning of the two State Department employees showed yes, they worked for State—but they were taking orders from a secret group within State, operating in Kabul, as a private information network. This group was driven by its own agenda to spy on the insurgent Taliban. The group believed the parents knew of the locations of key Taliban figures. One of the two gunmen, trigger-happy, cut down the children as they fled from their parents’ attackers.
“Didn’t mean to,” one of the men told her. “We were just going to take the parents to force them to talk. The kids freaked. Ran. We couldn’t have them waking the neighbors”—as if gunfire wouldn’t shatter the quiet— “and I just shot them.” The man wept. “Because no one could know what we were doing. No one.”
The idea that a small rogue group could be operating independently, secretly, and illegally inside the vast maze of the government made her sick. Washington smothered the story; the two State Department employees, who worked in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, were sent back to the United States, charged with far less serious crimes. Vochek protested. She was told to forget the incident. And she had no idea what had happened to any other members of the rogue cadre inside State—if they had been charged, or dismissed, or told to proceed a bit more cautiously with their under-the-table work.
It was grossly unfair, and she complained about it in memo after memo to her supervisor.
The only response was a maddening silence, until Margaret Pritchard appeared in her office one afternoon.
Pritchard was in her late fifties, a carefully groomed woman with ash blond hair and slightly oversized eyeglasses. She introduced herself as being from a Homeland task force in Washington that Vochek had never heard of. She shut the door of Vochek’s office. “You don’t like the idea of these unapproved covert groups.”
“No, I don’t.”
“They offend you.” It was a dry observation. “I’ve read your memos and your e-mails. You certainly love your outraged adverbs.”
“I don’t love outrage, but it serves a purpose.”
Pritchard leaned forward. “Would you like to help me shut these groups down?”
“No, thank you.”
“Why not?”
“Because the government doesn’t want these dirty dogs shut down. They had their chance. I saw two men who killed a family get slapped on the wrist. I don’t want to participate in another charade.”