Major Kiyani doesn’t carry a briefcase or a file or a weapon. I look hungrily at his packet of cigarettes and gold lighter lying on the dashboard in front of him. He sits back, his hands resting lightly on the steering wheel, ignoring me. I study his pink manicured fingers, the fingers of a man who has never had to do any real work. One look at his skin and you can tell he has been fed on a steady diet of bootleg scotch, chicken korma, and an endless supply of his agency’s safe-house whores. Look into his sunken cobalt blue eyes and you can tell he is the kind of man who picks up a phone, makes a long-distance call, and a bomb goes off in a crowded bazaar. He probably waits outside a house at midnight in his Corolla, its headlights switched off, while his men climb the wall and rearrange the lives of some hapless civilians. Or, as I know from personal experience, he appears quietly at funerals after accidental deaths and unexplained suicides and wraps things up with a neat little statement, takes care of any loose ends, saves you the agony of autopsies and the foreign press speculating about decorated colonels swinging from ceiling fans. He is a man who runs the world with a packet of Dunhill, a gold lighter, and an unregistered car.
•••
As the outriders switched their sirens on one by one, General Akhtar and Bill Casey got into the fourth limousine, a posse from the CIA’s Special Operations Group, wearing suits and carrying no visible arms, and a group of Pakistani commandos with their sleek little Uzis got into the other limousines, and the journey to the Army House started. It was a forty-minute drive for civilians. The VIP convoy, with all traffic and pedestrian crossings blocked, could make it in twelve minutes, but General Akhtar seemed to be in no hurry. “Would you like a drink before dinner, sir?” he asked, both his hands in his lap. “Are we going straight to dinner?” Bill asked wearily. “Prince Naif is already there, sir.” “And my friend”—Bill mimed General Zia’s moustache with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand—“ is he really having these visions?” General Akhtar smiled a coy smile, puffed out his chest, and said in a very concerned tone, “Eleven years is a long time. He’s a bit tired.” “Tell me about it.” Bill slumped into his seat. “Go ahead. Get me drunk.” General Zia never served alcohol at his dinners, even state dinners, not even for known alcoholics. General Akhtar Abdur Rehman considered it his duty to keep his guests in good humour, either at his office or during the drive to the Army House. He tapped the driver’s seat, and, without looking back, the man passed him a black canvas bag. Akhtar produced two glasses, a silver ice bucket, a bottle of Royal Salute whisky and poured Bill half a glass and himself a glass of water; he asked the driver to slow down and said, “Cheers.” “Cheers,” said Bill. “Cheers to you, General. Nice country you got here.” He flicked open the curtain on the limousine window and watched the crowd gathered along the roadside, straining against the security police and waiting for this convoy to hurry up and pass so that they could get on with their lives. “Sad, though, you can’t sit down somewhere and have a goddamn drink. Cheers.” Behind the cordons set up along the road by the police for this VIP procession, people stood and waited and guessed: a teenager anxious to continue his first ride on a Honda 70, a drunk husband ferociously chewing betel nuts to get rid of the smell before he got home, a horse buckling under the weight of too many passengers on the cart, the passengers cursing the cart driver for taking this route, the cart driver feeling the pins and needles in his legs begging for their overdue opium dose, a woman covered in a black burka—the only body part visible her left breast—feeding her infant child, a boy in a car trying to hold a girl’s hand on their first date, a seven-year-old selling dust-covered roasted chickpeas, an old water carrier hawking water out of a goatskin, a heroin addict eyeing his dealer stranded on the other side of the road, a mullah who would be late for the evening prayer, a gypsy woman selling bright pink baby chickens, an air force trainee officer in uniform in a Toyota Corolla being driven by a Dunhill-smoking civilian, a newspaper hawker screaming the day’s headlines, a Singapore Airlines crew cracking jokes in three languages in a van, a pair of home-delivery arms dealers fidgeting with their suitcases nervously, a third-year medical student planning to end his life by throwing himself on the rail tracks in anticipation of the Shalimar Express, a husband and wife returning from a fertility clinic on a motorbike, an illegal Bengali immigrant waiting to sell his kidney so that he could send money back home, a blind woman who had escaped prison in the morning and had spent all day trying to convince people that she was not a beggar, eleven teenagers dressed in white impatient to get to the field for their night cricket match, off-duty policemen waiting for free rides home, a bride in a rickshaw on her way to the beauty salon, an old man thrown out of his son’s home and determined to walk to his daughter’s house fifty miles away, a coolie from the railway station still wearing his red uniform and carrying in a shopping bag a glittering sari he’d change into that night, an abandoned cat sniffing her way back to her owner’s house, a black-turbaned truck driver singing a love song about his lover at the top of his voice, a busful of trainee Lady Health Visitors headed for their night shift at a government hospital. As the smoke from idling engines mixed with the smog that descends on Islamabad at dusk, as their waiting hearts got to the bursting point with anxiety, they all seemed to have one question on their minds: “Which one of our many rulers is this? If his security is so important, why don’t they just lock him up in the Army House?”
