“Moving to the car,” Embling reported. “Meet you outside.”
Chavez reached Clark, who had moved just outside the gate, in less than sixty seconds. “He’s walked down the street. Our side, just passing that blue Opel.”
“I see him.”
Embling pulled up in the Honda, and they climbed in. The Brit pulled out, swerved to miss a delivery truck approaching the gate, accelerated hard for five seconds, then coasted back to the speed limit as they drew even with the boy and passed him. Embling took the next right, drove thirty meters down a side street, then did a quick U-turn and pulled back to the intersection, stopping ten feet short. Through the windshield they could see the boy turn left onto his own side street, then trot diagonally across the street and into a tobacco shop.
“I’ll go,” Chavez said from the backseat, and reached for the door handle.
“Wait,” Embling muttered, eyes fixed on the shop.
“Why?”
“Whoever he’s working for probably has a few at his disposal. It’s a practice here, little runners to do one’s trivial errands.”
Sixty seconds later the boy reappeared on the sidewalk. He looked both ways, then called out to a man sitting on a bench two doors down. The man said something back and pointed directly at Embling’s Honda.
“Distressing turn,” Embling said.
Clark replied evenly, “Not if he comes this way. If we’re burned, he’ll go in the opposite direction.”
He didn’t. Running at a sprint now, dodging a stream of honking and swerving cars, the boy crossed the street and ran past them. From the backseat, Chavez said, “One block up. Turned east.”
Nigel put the car in gear and pulled up to the stop sign, waiting for a break in traffic. When it came, he turned right. “This will run parallel to him for two blocks.” At the next stop sign he turned right, then left, then pulled to a stop beside a school playground.
“Got him,” Clark said, eyes fixed on the side mirror.
The boy turned into a doorway covered in a red awning and reemerged a few seconds later with another boy, this one in his early teens, with curly black hair and a leather jacket. As the first boy talked and gesticulated, the teenager walked to a nearby streetlamp and began working a cable lock around a lemon-yellow moped.
“Well played, Nigel,” Clark said.
“We’ll see. Moped kids here think they’re bloody off-road bikers.”
This one, they quickly realized, was no exception. Though his top speed never exceeded twenty-five miles per hour, the teenager weaved through traffic with a seeming irregularity that reminded Clark of a kite on a gusty day. For his part, Nigel did not follow the moped’s every lane change but rather continued straight, always keeping the yellow moped within sight and changing lanes only when necessary.
The teenager headed southeast away from the cantonment, first on Bara Road, then northwest onto the Ring Road Bypass. The street signs, written in Urdu, were indecipherable to Clark and Chavez, but Embling kept a color commentary of their route.
“Crossing Kabul Canal,” he announced.
Chavez asked, “Closing in on the Hayatabad, aren’t we?”
“Good eye. Yes, we are. Another two miles. Coming up on Gul Mohar.”
At the last second the moped swerved right across two lanes and took the exit. Embling, already in the far right lane, simply put on his blinker and followed.
For the next twenty minutes the teenager took them on what could only be a dry-cleaning run—and did a fairly decent job of it, Clark had to admit. They passed the University of Peshawar, the Department of Tourism offices, and the British Cemetery, until finally their subject headed north on Pajjagi Road, passed the Peshawar Golf Club, and again crossed the Kabul Canal. Soon they were on the outskirts of the city. Squares of green irrigated fields appeared on their left and right. Embling dropped back until the moped was a speck of bright yellow.
After six miles, the moped turned west and followed a winding, tree-lined road before pulling into a narrow driveway. Embling stopped a few hundred yards down the road, did a U-turn, then shut off the engine. They waited. This far from Peshawar proper, there were no honking horns and no revving of engines. The minutes ticked by until a half-hour had passed.
Down the road came the sound of a puttering engine. Embling started the car and accelerated for a quarter-mile to the next driveway and pulled in, coasting down the sloping dirt tract until the main road was barely visible through the back window.