The Prince of Bagram Prison by Alex Carr

following week she'd called the nursing agency. A week later, Marina had moved into the little guest room. Susan's very own angel of mercy and death, and a constant reminder of how Morrow had failed her.
    He often wondered just what kind of contract the two women had, for he knew Susan well enough to be certain there was one. Unwritten, perhaps, but a contract nonetheless: the terms of her suffering, of just how much she was willing to bear. Surely, not much more than this.
    The phone on Morrow's bedside table rang, jolting him from his sleepless meditation. Not quite seven, he thought, as he turned and fumbled with the receiver. An hour reserved exclusively for bad news.
    “Sorry to wake you, Dick.” Peter Janson was immediately apologetic on the other end of the line. “But I thought you'd want to know. We've had some news from Madrid.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “It turns out some friends of ours in Spain had a line on the phone at the butcher shop where the boy was staying. They've been listening in since the train bombings.” Janson paused dramatically. “The boy made a phone call the night after the meeting in Malasaña. You won't believe who to.”
    Morrow didn't say anything. It was too early, and he was too tired to indulge Janson.
    “Harry Comfort!” Janson revealed finally, sounding just slightly deflated by Morrow's apparent lack of enthusiasm. “Well, not Harry but his ex-wife. Evidently Harry's gone and retired to Hawaii, of all places. I have to admit, I never would have expected that from him.”
    Harry and his goddamned card games, Morrow thought, remembering what Comfort had said when they spoke the night before. His last posting as a field man and he'd committed the number-one sin: he'd given the boy his number.
    “In any case,” Janson continued, “they didn't talk for long. She seemed to think it was a wrong number at first. But the kid said something about an S. Kepler. It's probably nothing, but I've got some people looking into it.”
    “Not S. Kepler,” Morrow corrected him. “Johannes Kepler. The astronomer. You remember Harry and his ridiculous telescope. It's nothing.”
    “Still,” Janson persisted, “the kid might try to contact him some other way. Should we put someone on him?”
    The prospect seemed unlikely to Morrow. Even if Jamal did manage to track down his old handler, there was nothing Harry could do. He'd been half-drunk when Morrow called the night before, as he no doubt was most of the time. Hardly a threat. But still, if the boy did call again they would know exactly where he was.
    “Yes,” Morrow agreed. “And put a line on the ex-wife's phone, too, in case he tries there again.”

 
    “I thought the war was over,” Harry had remarked, looking dubiously out over the dark countryside to which he was to be stationed.
    It was July of 1973, six months after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, four full months after the last American troops had left Vietnam, and from the roof of the Caravelle Hotel the flash of artillery was clearly visible in the distance.
    “Tell that to the Vietnamese,” somebody quipped, and everyone at the table laughed.
    It was Harry's first night in Saigon after five years on what was commonly and gruesomely referred to as the night-soil circuit, for the Third World custom of draining septic tanks at night. Sweating it out with a permanent case of the runs in the worst of the backwater bases in Asia. And somehow he'd expected something different from Vietnam.
    The usual welcoming committee had turned out for the free meal in Harry's honor: Jack McLeod and Steve Robinson, both case officers at the Saigon base; Peter Janson, the deputy chief of station; Dick Morrow, who was chief of base at the time. Plus two pretty secretaries to round out the crowd.
    “You won't be up there for long,” Jack McLeod remarked. “The ARVN are losing a good thousand troops a month to the Vietcong.”
    Pete Janson skewered an escargot with his tiny silver