Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [109]
“Then how did they know we would attack the village?” Anatoly demanded.
“They must have guessed. . . .”
“How?”
Jean-Pierre racked his confused brains. “Was Skabun bombed?”
“I think not.”
That was it, Jean-Pierre realized; someone had found out that there had been no bombing at Skabun. “You should have bombed it,” he said.
Anatoly looked thoughtful. “Somebody there is very good at making connections.”
It was Jane, thought Jean-Pierre, and for a second he hated her.
Anatoly said: “Has Ellis Thaler got any distinguishing marks?”
Jean-Pierre wanted to pass out, but he was afraid they would hit him again. “Yes,” he said miserably. “A big scar on his back shaped like a cross.”
“Then it is him,” said Anatoly in a near-whisper.
“Who?”
“John Michael Raleigh, age thirty-four, born in New Jersey, eldest son of a builder. He was a dropout from the University of California at Berkeley and a captain in the U.S. Marines. He has been a CIA agent since 1972. Marital status: divorced once, one child, whereabouts of the family a closely guarded secret.” He waved his hand as if to brush such details aside. “There’s no doubt it was he who outguessed me at Darg today. He’s brilliant and very dangerous. If I could have my pick of all the agents of the Western imperialist nations to catch I would choose him. In the last ten years he has done us irreparable damage on at least three occasions. Last year in Paris he destroyed a network that had taken seven or eight years of patient work to develop. The year before that he found an agent we had planted in the Secret Service in nineteen sixty-five—a man who could have assassinated a president one day. And now—now we have him here.”
Jean-Pierre, kneeling on the floor and hugging his battered body, let his head fall forward and closed his eyes in despair. All along he had been far out of his depth, blithely pitting himself against the grand masters of this merciless game, a naked child in a den of lions.
He had had such high hopes. Working alone, he was to have dealt the Afghan Resistance a blow from which it would never recover. He would have changed the course of history in this area of the globe. And he would have taken his revenge on the smug rulers of the West; he would have deceived and dismayed the establishment that had betrayed and killed his father. But instead of that triumph, he had been defeated. It had all been snatched from him at the last moment—by Ellis.
He heard Anatoly’s voice like a background murmur. “We can be sure he achieved what he wanted with the rebels. We don’t know the details, but the outline is enough: a unity pact among the bandit leaders in exchange for American arms. That kind of thing could keep the rebellion going for years. We’ve got to stop it before it gets started.”
Jean-Pierre opened his eyes and looked up. “How?”
“We have to catch this man before he can return to the United States. That way nobody will know that he arranged the treaty, the rebels will never get their arms, and the whole thing will fizzle out.”
Jean-Pierre listened, fascinated despite the pain. Could it be that there was still a chance of wreaking his revenge?
“Catching him would almost make up for losing Masud,” Anatoly went on, and Jean-Pierre’s heart leaped with new hope. “Not only would we have neutralized the single most dangerous agent the imperialists have, but think of it: a real live CIA man caught here in Afghanistan. . . . For three years the American propaganda machine has been saying that the Afghan bandits are freedom fighters waging a heroic David-and-Goliath struggle against the might of the Soviet Union. Now we have proof of what we have been saying all along—that Masud and the others are mere lackeys of American imperialism. We can put Ellis on trial. . . .”
“But the Western newspapers