The Night Letter

Chapter 33

Chapter 33

By the morning, Soni thought she needed a break from Cindy and ate breakfast alone. Sadiqullah and his family were thrilled to find a new guest, especially one who looked as they did, although her Western clothes and manners fascinated them. They right away noticed her silver bracelet that identified her as Sikh.

"My mother is Sikh but I was raised Hindu," she said. "I am only Sikh when I eat beef."

After a few minutes. Ward walked by and asked to sit down. She knew him from Washington and thought he was shy. Most people would not have asked first.

"Have you seen the way the local national men look at me? It's like they're saying, 'what are you doing here? You're supposed to be one of us. How did you get away?'"

"I have noticed. Like they're not used to seeing a woman without a veil."

"In the U.S. everyone thinks I'm Mexican. Here they think I'm Afghani. No one ever thinks Hindu."

"Maybe they think you are a converted Muslim. I think the penalty for that is death. I knew you were Indian when I first met you. There's a difference. Mostly the eyes and the nose," Ward said. When he looked at her he couldn't help but think of temple carvings.

"I can recognize their tribes from the way they dress. It's funny because that's how the villains in all the old Indian movies used to dress. It's like if you were a cowboy and you went to work in a place where everyone was dressed like a Sioux."

"When you're an American abroad you assume everyone is hostile. But I get it; they think you are doubly evil. Not only are you one of us; you used to be one of them."

"Triple: I'm a woman," she said. They agreed to meet later in the day to tour the base. Soni was eager to get to the office and start validating their sources.

She went to her assigned desk, careful not to kick Cindy's chair. She opened the source files and started in order of their National Source Registry file numbers. Some of the sources still had one time source numbers even though they had had several contacts. She skipped over Dr. Faraz because they already knew he was dead. Ted had a source that Phenisee used to call the best collector in Kandahar. He used to be a member of Department 34 so he used all his old network of sub sources to provide very reliable intelligence on Taliban logistics and command and control. He had gotten three cash awards in the past twelve months. She saw that Phenisee had a point. He was like a salaried employee rather than a controlled asset. Now he was presumed dead. Ted's sources seemed to die a lot. He was very responsive to taskings but he had not answered his phone or tried to contact them in any way in over a month. She thought one of the reasons Ted was so eager to surveil the existing sources was that he didn't have enough to do. Even though Ted disdained publishing in favor of the capture kill mission, he usually published the most reports and got the most evaluations. "I have confirmed kills," she remembered him saying more than once. But now his production was falling off. Getting out into the population would also allow him to recruit new sources, although he claimed he already had a few new sources, "in the cone." Real spy stuff. Where did he get these terms?

Ward's source, Talal, the truck driver, was a tricky one. His information wasn't usually actionable, although it might have been of interest to some other intel cells or the DEA but every time they were about to terminate and refer him to another agency, he would come up with some choice bit of information about one of their objectives. His sense of timing was impeccable. Was he trying to get away with as little as possible and still get paid or was he more concerned with maintaining his access to the FOB? Was the information his own or was he being fed? He was too much of a Baluchi wild card or perhaps joker to figure out easily. If he was just in it for the money, she didn't hold it against him. If the richest country in the world started buying information in the poorest country in the world, you sold information. It was just logical. There was no evidence of a connection to the national Police. Would he be capable of attacking the FOB? She thought he could be. But she couldn't find anything specifically derogatory about him. He passed his ops tests. She looked at the information he provided. It was pretty low level stuff. None of it had been actioned yet so she could not say any of it was false. She knew he knew more than he was telling, probably trying to drive up his price. None of it appeared to be second hand or circular but there was not enough context to declare it accurate. She suspended judgement on that one.