by Steven James
Sometimes interviewers are so committed to getting a confession that they manipulate the conversation toward that end, but the goal should never be making a suspect confess. Rather, it always needs to be about, and only be about, uncovering the truth, whatever that is. If you leave an interview believing something other than the truth, you’ll also be on the pathway toward something other than justice.
I walked toward the suspect as Ralph stood to the side.
Ali was cuffed and his ankles were shackled. The handcuffs were also locked to a bolt in the steel table.
He was nervously eyeing the video camera in the corner of the room.
Most people try their best to act calm in a situation like this. I saw no acting here. This guy was rattled.
“I’m Agent Bowers,” I said. “This is Agent Hawkins. First of all, you were injured. Those bruises on your face—are you okay?”
He said nothing.
“Can I get you anything? Coffee? Coke? Water?”
Silence.
“The men who fled the restaurant—where did they go?”
No reply.
“We’re here to find out what you know about Fayed and about the potential release of the virus.”
++++
Ali debated his options.
If he simply stalled, he would be able to carry out his mission, and that would mean all of these people would die.
However, if he could trust these two men, maybe he could figure out a way to save his sister, save innocent lives, and also take out the true Fayed Raabi’ah Bashir. The man had lied about who he was, lied from the start, and Ali thought he might also have lied while guaranteeing the safety of his sister.
He’d memorized the phone number.
Fayed had mentioned a suicide vest.
He needed to play this smart, and he needed to make every word he said count.
++++
“We know all about your work back home. Your work as a translator.” I was thumbing through the pages in the top file folder. They were simply timesheets and work rosters and had nothing to do with this case. I pretended to study them, hoping he wouldn’t call my bluff. “Why are you in this country, Ali?”
“To see relatives.”
There’s something deep within the human psyche that knows it’s wrong to deceive—and even when another part of your brain tries to convince you that in this instance it’s okay to lie for your best interests, or for someone else’s—there’s inner dissonance that plays itself out in microexpressions that you aren’t even aware you’re making, and other people aren’t even consciously aware of seeing.
Unless you start to look for them.
They’re best noticed on video recordings, but a trained eye can start to pick them up as they happen. And in this case, they happened. The flick of his eye. The quiver of his cheek. Since we already knew he wasn’t here to see relatives, it gave me a baseline to discern when he was lying.
Ralph shook his head. “Yeah, you know, we have a record of your conversation with the border control agents in Atlanta and we looked into your ‘relatives’—Gregor and Tatiana, wasn’t it? They don’t live here in Michigan, do they? They don’t even exist.”
Ali was silent.
I held up the file folders. “Do you have any idea how much information we have on you already?” Even though we’re not required by law to tell the truth during an interview, personally I default back to it, as I did now. “I’m holding three file folders full of papers.”
Ali remained quiet and sat staring past us, occasionally glancing up toward the camera in the corner.
I closed the folder. “Ali, we know about the tests. We know about what happened in Kazakhstan.” I was stepping out on a little bit of a limb here, but I wanted to at least get a response out of him one way or the other.
At the mention of the country, his eyes moved toward me, and he said, in remarkably good English, “What do you know about Kazakhstan?”
Think, Pat. Say the right thing, but not too much.
“We know about the bioweapons scientist, about Fayed, about Maria. Dr. Kuznetsov is dead. Murdered. Did you hear about that?”
Now Ali began to rub two fingers together and his tongue came out to wet his lips, both signs of nervousness. I took them as an indication that he was getting closer to telling us something we could use.
I flopped the pile of manila folders onto the table out of his reach. I was about to mention something about Blake, but before I could, Ralph said to Ali, “You’re looking at conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, a list of charges as long as my arm.” Ralph tapped the files and let out a long, slow whistle. “Man, I can’t see you getting out of here for at least fifty years. We’re probably talking life without the possibility of parole. You will be charged. And you will be convicted.”
“I don’t want a lawyer.”
“You don’t?”
“No. I don’t want anyone else to hear what I have to say.”
“Go on.”
“Turn off the camera.”
“I’m afraid in here, everything is recorded.”
“What time is it?”
“One thirty. Why?”
“I have something to tell you, but I won’t do it unless that camera is turned off. And believe me, this is something you’ll want to hear. And you need to hear it now. There is no time to waste.”
I glanced at Ralph and then, when he nodded, I walked over to the camera and clicked off. The operating light went dark.
“Okay,” I said to Ali. “What’s so important that you need to talk to us without the camera on?”
++++
Ali wasn’t sure if he should trust these men, but at this point he didn’t have much of a choice.
“There were girls taken from a village,” he said. “In Nigeria. There were tests done. That doctor that you mentioned, he was in charge of everything, and Fayed . . . well, the man who called himself Fayed, I understand now that his name was really Turhan, he and the doctor gave me something to take.”
I thought back to the footage that we’d reviewed of Ali at the Atlanta airport.
“You don’t have asthma, do you?” I said, anticipating where this was going. “It was the inhaler.”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the inhaler now?”
“It is gone. After it was empty, I put it in the sharps container in the airport’s bathroom.”
“The video of Maria,” said Ralph. “Did you shoot it?”
“I don’t know anything about a Maria. Was she one of the girls?”
“No. She was one of us. FBI.”
“I want someone protected. If you can assure me that she’s okay, if you can give her a new life, a new identity, I can help you.”
“Who do you want protected?” I asked.
“My sister.”
“I don’t know.” Ralph shook his head. “If we protect her, what will you give us in return?”
“It’s what I won’t give you,” Ali said.
I looked at him curiously. “What’s that?”
“Smallpox.”
79
1:34 P.M.
Dispersal in 1 hour
I stared at him. “Are you contagious?”
“I will be later this afternoon, and when I am, and when this virus gets out, there will not be any way to stop it. It’s too late for me.”
“The director of the CDC is on her way here. There might be a treatment strategy that—”
“No. I was told there is no treatment. Not for this strain of the virus. We need to take action and we need to do it now before I become contagious, and before Fayed gets out of the city. I can give him to you, the real Fayed Raabi’ah Bashir, but only if you guarantee me that my sister is going to be safe.”
“Where is she now?”
He
told us an address in the city of Ust-Kamenogorsk in eastern Kazakhstan.
“I’ll put some calls through,” Ralph said. “CIA. Military intelligence. A few people owe me favors. We can make it happen.”
“No one there must know,” Ali told him.
“No one will.”
“Also, there’s a woman named Faatina who is with my sister, who is watching her. Faatina is sympathetic to their cause. She’s a member of The Brigade of the Prophet’s Sword.”
“Look,” I said, “we can help your sister. We can get her to a safe place. Bring her to America, if you want. Protect her. Everything. But you have to tell us what you know about this attack and where we can find Fayed.”
“Get her to safety, make sure she’s okay, and then I will tell you what you need to know. But only when she is safe.”
“That’s gonna take time,” Ralph said impatiently. “And that’s something neither one of us has right now.”
“Then you both should move quickly,” Ali replied.
++++
Sharyn and Detective Schwartz were about ten minutes from the house where she was anticipating that Dylan would meet her. Hopefully they would arrive early enough for Ted to get into position without being seen.
A text came in from Christie asking if she could meet up one more time if possible. Sharyn was glad to talk things through some more if necessary, but replied that it probably wouldn’t work today. Maybe they could talk on the phone tonight.
++++
For the last five minutes, while Ralph was reaching out to his contacts in the military and the CIA to see if they could locate the girl, Ali had been filling me in on his mission and what he’d been sent here to do.
“So,” I said, “you don’t know what happened to Maria Aguirre? You really don’t?”
“No.” He looked at me introspectively. “Are you a man of faith, Agent Bowers?”
“I’m a man of science. But I do believe in some things that I can’t prove. I suppose that counts as faith.”
“What are those?”
“That justice will win in the end, that truth matters more than anything, and that love is more than just a biological response to certain environmental cues.”
“What about God?”
“That’s a hard one. When I look at the pain in the world, I can’t understand how a loving God could allow it, but when I look at the glory of the world, I can’t imagine how it all could’ve developed by chance, from nothing. Our universe both shouts out that it has no meaning and also that it has unimaginable meaning at the same time, every moment.”
“So for you, existence points to God, but suffering makes it hard for you to see Him? The mist of the world’s agony obscures your view of the Almighty?”
“Look,” I said, “I’m not here to argue about religion. I’m just here to stop innocent people from dying. That’s all I care about right now.”
“It is not my religion that brought me here. It is my beliefs.”
“What do you mean?”
“Religion is how we pursue God. But sometimes, because of our beliefs, we will pursue something better than being with God.”
“What’s better than being with God?”
“Sacrificing for the ones we love.”
“The woman I’m seeing would say that that’s what God did for us: sacrifice for those he loves so that we could be with him.”
“So, she is Christian.”
“You say that with a lot of certainty.”
“By what you just said, it sounds like what a Christian would believe.”
I didn’t feel comfortable discussing Christie’s faith. He didn’t seem to be judging her, or speaking derisively, and I wasn’t sure where he was coming from. “A lot of Muslim extremists still blame Christians for the Crusades.”
“I was taught to do so as well,” he replied, “but I do not believe that the Crusaders were Christian.”
“Why would you say that?”
“They didn’t follow the teachings of Isa, Peace Be Upon Him. They didn’t emulate his life. They didn’t pursue his ways. They were not taught the true tenets of Christianity. They were compelled by those in power to pursue power, not by an adherence to the Scriptures to seek meekness. They had not read the Holy Bible for themselves or been taught it in their own language. Christians aren’t told to conquer the world, but to deny themselves and serve others. And the way of Isa, Peace Be Upon Him, is not to kill in the name of God, but to die in the name of love.”
80
Ali watched Agent Bowers carefully throughout the conversation.
The man appeared to have striking resolve as well as deep convictions, but Ali wasn’t sure how much faith had to do with it, and how much it was simply a pursuit of the truth and belief in compassion. But then again, Ali wasn’t even sure about his own faith in God.
“Why smallpox?” Agent Bowers asked him.
“Surah Al-Fil.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It is from the Holy Qur’an.”
“Go on.”
“In 570 BCE, in what some people refer to as the War of the Elephants, an army from Ethiopia, it was called Abyssinia at the time, surrounded Mecca. They hoped to enslave the people and destroy a shrine that was sacred to them.”
“What does it have to do with elephants?”
“The king of Abyssinia, Abraha, had some of his soldiers ride on elephants when he led his army to besiege Mecca. According to the Qur’an, Allah sent a flock of birds. They carried small rocks in their talons and their beaks and dropped them onto the invaders. The rocks stuck to the soldiers’ skin and soon killed them off one by one, saving the Holy City.”
“Rocks?”
“Yes. The decreed stones.”
++++
I thought of the photos Ralph and I had found in Dr. Kuznetsov’s house and the sores that were visible on those people, as well as the dark pustules that appeared on Maria. Yes, they did look like small black rocks stuck to her skin.
“So was it an outbreak of smallpox that killed the soldiers?” I asked.
“Perhaps the rocks in the story were metaphorical, or perhaps they were real. From what I understand, scientists and those who study the history of disease . . . um, what would be the English word?”
“You just mean historians?” I suggested. “Or epidemiologists maybe?”
“Yes, I believe so. Some epidemiologists do believe it was smallpox. Then, later that year, Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him, was born in Mecca. According to some Ulamas, Allah saved the city through that disease so that His Prophet could be born there.”
“So, in essence,” I said, “they believe that God delivered his people from the hand of an infidel army by sending a plague of smallpox.”
Ali nodded. “And now The Brigade of the Prophet’s Sword wishes to once again fulfill the will of Allah by destroying the infidels through the same disease He used fourteen centuries ago against those who would attack the land of His coming Prophet.”
As I was considering his words, I heard a single rap at the door and Ralph pressed it open, returning to the room.
“Alright, listen,” he said to Ali. “We have an extraction team that’s gonna go and rescue your sister. They’re on choppers now, they’re heading to the city, but we won’t know for sure that we have her for at least twenty minutes. You gotta trust me on this. I’m on your side. Help us out here. Our superiors want to transfer you to a black site. If that happens, you might never see the light of day again and I can almost guarantee you that you won’t ever see your sister. We only have a few minutes. We need to make a decision and we need to move. Where’s Fayed? Are there more people infected with smallpox?”
“As far as I know, I am the only one.”
“But why?” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense. If their goal is spreading
smallpox, why have only one martyr? If they have the capability to pull this off, why wouldn’t they go all the way?”
“They are planning to go all the way.”
“What’s the endgame, then?” Ralph pressed him.
“I do not know it all. I only know that it was part of the plan for me to get arrested.”
++++
Ali tried to anticipate how this could work, what he would need to do in order to make sure that the smallpox did not spread and that Fayed would face justice for what he had done.
But you must also make sure Azaliya is safe. You cannot reveal all until you are certain.
But there isn’t time! Of course it will take an American team a while to get into the city and find her. The only way to save her, to help her, is trusting these men now.
“Alright,” Ali said to them. “I will give you his location, but it must be only you two. I will tell you as soon as we are out of this building, and I will trust that you will protect my sister.”
“So, the deal is you give us Fayed, you tell us about the virus, we rescue your sister, and we get you into quarantine. Then prison,” Ralph said. “You understand that, right?”
Ali knew he would not be spending very long in prison. He would be dead within the next five days. But he didn’t say that. “I understand,” he told the agent instead. “We should go now.”
“Hang on one sec.”
Agent Hawkins indicated for Agent Bowers to join him in the hall, and Ali wasn’t sure if they were going to agree to his offer or not.
81
Sharyn parked just down the block from the abandoned house near Palmer Park, the property that the man on Hook’dup, who she believed to be Dylan, had given her as the location.
From what she could tell right now, no one was in the area.
The walls of the house were sagging, almost as if they weren’t made out of wood but some other, more pliable material. The windows, rather than being broken, were all in various states of being opened—some halfway, others a quarter of the way.
It reminded Sharyn of the teeth of a boxer, a weird flat-faced, tooth-slatted thing grinning at her in this deserted corner of the city.