Donna Andrews - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

“You’re crazy,” Morgan scoffed.

“Let me finish, please. I want the complete story — to be released after it happens. After you’ve done what you’re planning to do, after you’ve gotten away with it — if you get away with it—”

“We’ll get away with it.”

“Fine. After you get away with it and have safely escaped. When everyone is running around, pointing fingers, blaming everyone else, trying to figure out who did it, how it was done — that’s when I want to reveal everything.”

“What do you expect to get out of that?”

“A reputation. Stature as a broadcast journalist. A move from radio to television. Perhaps even a position with CNN International.”

“I see. You want to be famous.”

“I want to be successful.”

“You want to be another Christiane Amanpour.”

She shrugged. “Perhaps.” From her expression, Morgan knew he had nailed it.

Before they could converse further, an older man entered the restaurant, followed by two younger men, an older woman, and two younger women. They walked in single file, toward a family section in the rear that was configured with larger tables. But as they started to pass the table where Morgan and Lee sat, the older man abruptly stopped, as did everyone behind him. Standing ramrod straight, he glared down at Lee. He did not speak. Lee looked down at the table. Morgan saw that the five people behind the man also had their eyes downcast.

The silent confrontation lasted perhaps forty seconds, but it somehow seemed much longer. Presently, the older man moved on, his entourage following.

“What was that all about?” Morgan asked.

“That was my family,” Lee replied quietly. “My father, my two brothers, my mother, my two sisters.” She looked over at him woefully. “I have been banished from my family, you see. When I took up Western ways, Western dress, got a Western job as a radio broadcaster, my father ostracized me. I am not allowed to go around any member of my family, or to communicate with them in any way, or they with me. None of them may cast eyes upon me except my father, and then only to revile me with his look.”

Morgan saw a sadness in her eyes, but it did not seem to be for the painful scorn of her father and the loss of her family. Rather it was a sadness of fear, the kind Morgan had seen in the eyes of many who were about to die; it was a sadness not of something that had already happened to her, but of something that was going to happen to her, and she knew it.

At once, as he looked at her, she became appealing to him, her despair coupled with a longing, all of it concealed to some degree by her effervescent aggressiveness — no, not aggressiveness, he rethought it — more like assertiveness, an anxious assertiveness. Morgan felt something emanating from Liban Adnan that he could not define or understand. But he knew he had to respond to it.

“All right, I’ll help you, Lee,” he told her, suddenly deciding. “I’ll give you your story.”

A glimmer of a smile came tentatively to her lips. “Thank you, Mr. Tenny.”

“Call me Morgan,” he said.

Later that night, back in the office of the Dingo Club, Morgan again sat across the desk from Michaleen Donahue.

“I want a hundred thousand for myself,” Donahue said.

“You want it now?”

The Irishman’s thick black brows went up. “That would be nice.”

Morgan unlocked and unzipped the bag that constantly hung from his shoulder, and from it counted out ten banded sheaves of hundred-dollar bills, fifty to a sheaf, and twenty sheaves of fifty-dollar bills, also fifty to a sheaf. “That leaves me with nine hundred thousand, Donny. Will that do us?”

“I think so. I put a pencil to it earlier—” He pushed a yellow lined pad across the desk, which Morgan picked up and began to study. “I figure twenty thousand each for the two guard contacts we’ll need on the inside,” he told Morgan. “Four explosives men at forty each is a hundred-sixty. Two rocket-launcher men at thirty-five apiece is seventy. Six ground troops to back up you and me at—”

“You and me?” Morgan interrupted. “You’re coming along?”

“Certainly,” Donahue said, taken aback slightly. “You think I took a hundred thousand just to sit on my ass?”

Morgan shrugged self-consciously. “Well, I–I mean — well—”

“Well, hell! A well’s a hole in the ground, lad! Your brother’s a friend of mine. And so are a few others in that hellhole of a prison. Yeah, I’m coming along. You bet your ass I am.” Donahue cleared his throat. “Now, as I was saying: Six ground troops at twenty-five per is another one-fifty. The half-track, used but in good condition, will cost us two hundred thousand. And the two armored Humvees will run seventy-five each, that’s one-fifty.” Donahue got out a bottle and poured drinks for them while Morgan studied the figures. Taking a long sip of his own, he sat back and licked his lips appreciatively at the taste. “I make it seven-seventy,” he concluded. “That leaves one-thirty for weapons and ammo.”

“One-thirty will be a stretch,” Morgan guessed, frowning.

“Might, might not,” said Donahue. “Depends on where I have to buy. If I can run at least half of what we need from Uzbekistan, we’ll be okay. If I have to deal with the Pakistanis, those bloody bastards will try to rob us blind.” He paused for a moment, then said, “It might be possible to steal some ammo from the U.N. forces arsenal down in Qandahar. I don’t know how you’d feel about that, you being a Yank and all—”

“Steal it anywhere you can,” Morgan said flatly. “I don’t owe the U.N. anything.”

“Right. Well, then.” Donahue rose and drained his glass. “I’ll get the ball rolling first thing in the morning. You want to interview personnel?”

“Not unless you want me to.”

“I’ll do it meself then. How do you plan to get Virgil out of the country?”

“Same way I got in. Billy Cone.”

“Billy might not be up for anything that heavy. What if he says no?”

Morgan locked eyes with the Irishman. “Then I’ll kill him, take his plane, and fly it myself.”

The next night, Lee invited Morgan to her apartment, where they would have the privacy to talk more openly.

Lee lived in one of the older, modest buildings in a more or less grubby section of south Kabul, but she said she liked the location because it was convenient to the traditional Afghan food markets as well as a newer, Western-style superstore that sold canned items imported from the U.S. Plus, the sparsely but comfortably furnished apartment offered a parking shed for her little green Volkswagen. Morgan noticed at once that the apartment’s cracked and pitted walls were colorfully concealed with a variety of posters: Emiliano Zapata, Muhammad Ali standing over a prone Sonny Liston, Mother Teresa touching the forehead of a sick child, Roy Rogers with six-guns blazing.

“Roy Rogers?” Morgan said in surprise.

“Yes. I watch his old films on the new satellite station. They have subtitles, of course. I think his horse is nice. And I like the way he sings.”

She had prepared a cold supper for them.

“Samboosak,” she told him. “Cold meat pies with leeks and mild spices. And there are boiled eggs and a spinach-and-chickpea salad with pine nuts. And,” she added proudly, “just for you—” She produced a bottle of Australian wine. “Another reason my father has disowned me: I like a glass of wine now and then.”

As they ate, Morgan outlined for Lee in detail his plan to breach Pul-e-Charki prison with a small armed force, an armored vehicle, and two armed Humvees, to liberate his twin brother Virgil from Block One, where the high-profile prisoners were kept, and then how the two of them would escape the country in Benny Cone’s plane.