The Caliban Program

by Richard Fox

“Maybe I can still help you find him.”

  Ritter couldn’t see, but a cruel, half-smile crept across her face. Sometimes, this is just too easy, she thought.

  Shannon half-looked over her shoulder, the smile hidden, and said, “No, Mr. Ritter, you’ve done all that we require.”

  Ritter jogged down the hallway and stopped in front of her. “Look, I joined up to fight. If you send me back to Huachuca it will be months before I finish the course. Then more months before I’m integrated into my new unit and who knows if there will even be a war to fight by then! Let me do something now…here.” He chewed his lower lip, waiting for a response.

  His face flashed with inspiration, “I know Haider! I can do more than pick him out of a line-up. I know what he likes, how he acts, how-“he stopped as Shannon held up her hand.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking for. If you stay on you’ll see more of our methods. We’re not sure this is right for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are a Soldier. That means rules and honor.” Her face hardened. “We have no rules. We have no honor. Can you accept that?”

  Ritter thought of the man hanging from the chains; that violated everything that the army had taught him in his brief career. A cold, still voice deep inside of him told him to walk away from this woman and her methods. He remembered Haider on 9/11. He remembered how he had cheered as the towers fell then joined the celebrations in the Palestinian refugee camps. The fury of that day boiled inside of him.

  “Let me help you find him.”

  She squeezed her lips into a thin line as she looked away. “God damn it…Come with me.”

  Shannon opened the door to what was once a large dining room. Plastic folding tables lined the walls, burdened with monitors and crowded with computer cases. Multi-colored wires ran up the walls and across the ceiling, dropping down to a conference table covered with laptops and maps of the city. Carlos and Mike turned from a large map board as Shannon and Ritter entered the room. Men Ritter didn’t recognize manhandled a huge plasma TV onto a wall mount.

  An overworked coffee pot shared space with cardboard boxes overflowing with Pakistani take-out on a corner table. Plates of half eaten food nestled against keyboards.

  A fat man pushed his chair back from his computer workstation and jabbed a finger at Ritter. “What’s this un-cleared doing in here?” He spat the words ‘un-cleared’ as though Ritter were some sort of vermin that had crawled into the room.

  “Settle down, Tony. Mr. Ritter is read on and will help us out as best he can. We’re short a native Arabic speaker and maybe a fresh set of eyes is what we need.” Shannon said.

  Tony shook his head and pulled his chair back to his computer. Ritter did his best to not notice the ring of fat peeking out from under Tony’s shirt, or the gaping plumber’s crack. Tony typed furiously at his computer; Ritter saw a picture of Haider pop up along with several passport type photos of Arab-looking men.

  Carlos cracked open a lap top and slid it to Ritter. “Don’t mind him. Feed him a couple pop-tarts and he’ll be your friend forever.”

  Tony’s middle finger shot up.

  Shannon cued a video on the lap top. A frozen security camera feed of an apartment complex filled the screen. “Here’s what we know.” She hit play and a man with a bowl haircut and round glasses exited the building. “He's one of ours. His name is Jeremy. Three days ago Jeremy left one of our safe houses after a source meeting.”

  On screen, a man came around the corner of the house and closed on Jeremy. Carlos shook his head as Jeremy continued oblivious to the approaching threat. “We should never have put him out there. Analysts aren’t field agents,” he said. Carlos pushed a picture to Ritter, a screen capture from the video with the face of Jeremy’s attacker digitally enhanced. Ritter recognized his friend Haider in the photo.

  “How do you know this is Haider?” Ritter asked.

  Carlos glanced at Shannon, who nodded.

  “Tony fed the picture into a facial recognition database. Haider’s passport photo was a hit.” Carlos said.

  “And not one ‘thank you’ for that little miracle!” Tony said. Carlos and Mike both gave him the finger.

  Ritter thought for a moment. Haider had never been to the States, why would they have his photo? “So, how big is this database?”

  Shannon chuckled. “It has every single passport photo used for international travel in the last ten years. No, foreign countries do not knowingly or willingly share this information, so keep it to yourself.”

  Ritter did the math, “This program got a match in…hours?”

  “This is the big leagues, kid. Now pay attention.” Carlos flicked the lap top with his finger.

  The video continued as the man ran up behind Jeremy and smashed something into his back. Jeremy arched back and fell as a van pulled up next to them. Moments later, the van pulled away leaving no one behind.

  “A day later, a DVD with this video was delivered to our embassy,” Shannon continued. The video switched to Jeremy sitting in front of a blanket, hands clutching a legal pad. A rifle barrel pointed at his head. “If this looks familiar it’s because it is almost exactly how the Daniel Pearl kidnapping progressed.”

  Jeremy held the legal pad towards the screen, the words CIA AGENT were scrawled on the yellow paper. Jeremy’s fingers tapped against the pad.

  “My name is Jeremy Regland, and I’m accused of being a CIA agent. I’m just a journalist on assignment to Pakistan, if the United States government will free all Muslim prisoners held in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, I will be released. If three hundred prisoners aren’t free within two days—” Jeremy’s voice quaked with fear as he glanced up at his captor “I will be killed.” Ritter watched Jeremy’s fingers tapping, and mimicked the short and long pauses on the table.

  “He’s signaling with his fingers.” Ritter said.

  Carlos huffed, “Not bad, it’s the license plate from the van.”

  “We traced it to the house where we picked up—” Shannon paused “—the guy we thought was Haider.”

  The camera swung towards a man in a ski mask. A red headband with the al-Qaida logo in script hung low over his brow. The man ranted in Arabic and gesticulated with an AK-47. Ritter leaned in, listening intently. “That’s Haider speaking. Not the Haider I knew, but that’s him, Iraqi accent and everything. He’s complaining about the ‘illegal Zionist state of Israel’ and America’s crimes against the—“

  “Yes we’ve had it translated.” Shannon interrupted.

  “How do they know he’s CIA?” Ritter asked.

  Carlos rolled his eyes. “We don’t know for sure. It’s just some jihadi fantasy that every Westerner in Pakistan is somehow in the CIA—“

  “Or the ISI sold us out.” Shannon interrupted, invoking the Pakistani secret intelligence agency. “Or it was bad tradecraft on Jeremy’s part. Or his lack of resistance training made it easy for him to break under duress.” She looked at Ritter. “We have to operate under the assumption that our entire team is compromised. That’s also why we abandoned our last safe-house; we lost valuable time relocating here.”

  “How much time do we have left?” Ritter asked. Tony’s tapping stopped.

  Shannon glanced at her watch. “The deadline—“ she winced at the word “—his time ran out six hours ago. Now you understand our haste.”

  Ritter nodded, then stood and examined the map of Peshawar. Blue flag pins dotted the map. “What do these pins mean?”

  Tony called over his monitor “Possible al-Qaida safe houses based off phone records, bank transfers and our very poor informant network.” Ritter took in the map and looked for any rhyme or reason to the smattering of pins.

  “Wait,” he turned to Shannon “why isn’t this all over the news? Doesn’t al-Qaida want some publicity for all this trouble?”

  Carlos snorted as he dipped his flat bread into a bowl of orange colored stew, “Perceptive. Maybe he can be trai
ned.” He half-mumbled to Mike, barely loud enough for Ritter to hear. Carlos raised his voice and motioned at Ritter with the corner of his flat bread, drooping with sauce. “They don’t want any heat from the Paki police. When the tape of Pearl went on every news channel in the planet the Pakis were embarrassed enough to get off their asses and shake the tree. This time they sent the tape straight to our embassy.”

  Ritter’s brows furrowed, “Why don’t you pass the tape to CNN? Force the Pakistanis to get involved?”

  Carlos and Ritter glanced at Shannon. She cleared her throat, “It was,” she rolled the next word out of her mouth slowly, glaring daggers at Carlos, “decided by the program managers that releasing the tape could compromise our presence in Pakistan. If the kidnapping goes public, the government will deny it ever received the tape.” Shannon pushed her chair away from the table and rummaged through a pallet of shrink wrapped water bottles.

  Ritter kept quiet as his mind raced. He knew how the Pearl kidnapping ended, that man was dead. If Jeremy had been captured by the same group, then every effort should be made to get him back, according to Ritter’s logic. How could the secret of CLB be worth more than Jeremy’s life? Ritter opened his mouth to object, to argue, to make Shannon see reason, ‘program managers’ be damned.

  Mike snapped his head towards Ritter and locked his ice-blue eyes on Ritter. Mike shook his head. Do not pursue.

  Ritter’s shoulders slumped in resignation. He looked