in various times under the rule or at least the sway of the Soviet Union. While the American CIA and his compatriots in MI6—officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, a term Embling had never taken to—were fighting the Cold War in the fog-shrouded streets of Berlin and Budapest and Prague, Embling was traipsing the mountains with the Pashtun, living on quabili pulaw dampukht (rice with carrots and raisins) and bitter black tea. In 1977, unbeknownst to his superiors in London, Embling had even married into a Pashtun tribe, taking as his bride the youngest daughter of a minor warlord, only to lose her two years later in a Hind airstrike when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Her body had never been recovered. He often wondered if that was why he’d stayed in Pakistan long after he’d retired. Was some sad part of his heart still hoping to find Farishta still alive somewhere? Her name, after all, when translated into English, meant “Angel.”
A pipe dream, Embling now thought.
A pipe dream, just like the idea of a stable Pakistan.
Seven thousand miles away in Silver Spring, Maryland, Mary Pat Foley was having a similar thought over a similar beverage—her one cup of half-caf/half-decaf reheated and salted coffee she allowed herself in the evening—but on a wholly different topic: the Emir, and the two questions that had plagued U.S. intelligence for the better part of a decade: where he was and how to catch the bastard. With few and only fleeting exceptions, and despite being the White House’s Public Enemy Number One, a position with which Mary Pat mostly disagreed. Certainly the guy needed to get caught or, better yet, put down for good and scattered to the winds, but killing the Emir wasn’t going to solve America’s problem with terrorism. There was even some debate over how much, if any, operational intelligence the Emir possessed; Mary Pat and her husband, Ed, now retired, tended to fall on the “not a hell of a lot” side of the argument. The Emir knew he was being hunted, and while he was a grade-A sonofabitch and a mass murderer, he sure as hell wasn’t stupid enough to put himself in the operational need-to-know loop, especially nowadays, with terrorists having stumbled onto the beauty of compartmentalization. If the Emir was an acknowledged head of state sitting in a palace somewhere, he would likely be getting regular briefings, but he wasn’t—at least no one thought so. He was, as best the CIA could tell, holed up somewhere in the badland mountains of Pakistan, along the border with Afghanistan. But that was the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack scenario, wasn’t it? Still, you never knew. Someday someone would get lucky and find him, of that she was certain. The question was, Would we get him alive or otherwise? She didn’t really care either way, but the idea of standing toe to toe with the bastard and looking him in the eye did hold a certain appeal.
“Hi, honey, I’m home. ...” Ed Foley called out cheerily, coming down the stairs and into the kitchen in his sweatpants and T-shirt.
Since retiring, Ed’s commute consisted of thirty or so feet and a half-dozen stair steps to his study, where he was working on a nonfiction history of the U.S. intelligence community, from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan. His current chapter, a damned good one if she said so herself, was about John Honeyman, an Irish-born weaver and perhaps the most obscure spy of his time. Tasked by none other than George Washington with infiltrating the ranks of Howe’s fearsome Hessian mercenaries stationed around Trenton, Honeyman, posing as a cattle dealer, slipped through the lines, scouted the Hessians’ battle order and positions, then slipped out again, giving Washington the edge he needed for an all-out rout. For Ed, it was a dream chapter, that little bit of unknown history. Writing about Wild Bill Donovan, the Bay of Pigs, and the Iron Curtain was all well and good, but there were only so many twists you could put on what had become old chestnuts of the espionage nonfiction genre.
Ed had certainly earned his retirement many times over, as had Mary Pat, but only a handful of Langley insiders—including Jack Ryan Sr.—would ever know to what degree the Foleys had served and sacrificed for their country. Ed, Irish by birth, had graduated from Fordham and started his career in journalism, serving as a solid if undistinguished reporter for The New York Times before slipping into the