Leo took his eyes off the road, regarding this beautiful young woman with her large pale-green eyes. Quite unlike Raisa, she was naive and earnest – it was impossible to imagine Raisa ever being so gullible. Raisa was a survivor and the shrewdest woman Leo had ever known. He was unsure if Nara Mir wanted him to contradict her. Without answering, Leo turned back to the dirt road. Though the swirls of dust, coming into view directly ahead, was the outline of Pul-i-Charki prison.

Though the plans and design for the prison predated the Communist Revolution, the completion of the flity coincidentally corresponded with the arrival of the Revolution, creating the impression that one could not exist without the other: an infamous political prison required a revolution as much as a revolution required an infamous political prison. Remarkably, this was Leo’s first time here. He’d avoided Pul-i-Charki, declining any assignments connected with it. There was no need for him to go inside to know what kind of place it was. Conditions would be inhumane. Degradation and humiliation would be institutionalized. Under the reign of the former president, guards preferred broken soda bottles as a torture instrument of choice, displaying an inexplicable loyalty for an American soda brand that could be bought in Kabul, a type of fizzy, orange-flavoured sugar water called Fanta. There were the more familiar methods, some lifted directly from the Soviet model, including electrodes, bare knuckles and truncheons. Savagery had its clichés too.

The familiarity was not limited to the instruments of terror but extended to the lines spoken by its lead players. Aarif Abdullah, one of the former guards in charge of Pul-i-Charki, had boasted to Leo:

A million Afghans are all that should remain alive – a million Communists, and the rest, we do not need. We’ll get rid of all of them.

This indifference to human life, this absurd and chilling pomposity, could have been the anthem of authoritarianism. These grandiose proclamations were made by men drunk on the power of life and death, unaware that they were behaving more or less exactly the same as the Soviet guards and prison governors who’d lived thirty or forty years before them, thousands of miles away, surrounded by snow and ice, rather than dust and desert. Despite their supreme power they expressed no trace of individuality or personality, as if power possessed their minds and made puppets of them, these would-be gods.

As Leo came to a stop, Nara became even more flustered, her hands fidgeting. She opened the glove compartment. There was a pistol and a clip of ammunition. She shut the glove compartment. Briefly, Leo wondered if she was going to be sick. She looked at Leo, utterly lost.

—But I’m their daughter.

Leo took out his sunglasses, glancing at the dirt on the lens and not bothering to clean them. They’d arrived.

Greater Province of Kabul

10 Kilometres East of the City of Kabul - Pul-i-Charkhi Prison

Same Day