“Can you at least give me a light and something to read?” she asked.
“I’ll see what I can do,” her kidnapper replied. “We’re going to leave now. If you need anything, just call. Someone in the next room will hear you.”
The first two men exited, and her “friend,” as she was beginning to think of him, was about to walk out as well when Nancy called out, “What’s your name?”
He turned to her and smiled.
“Just call me Ram,” he replied. He went out, and she heard the click of a lock after the door closed. The room became dark.
A while later (she had no sense of time, because they’d taken her watch as well), the door opened again, this time letting in an artificial light. She assumed it was nighttime. It was Ram, and he had a small flashlight and three books. “Here you go,” he said, handing them to her.
“Thank you,” she said.
He left and she turned the flashlight on and examined the volumes he’d brought in. One was an English copy of the Koran. She knew the book well, having studied it before she came to the Middle East. The other books were cheap Iraqi novels, written in Arabic. Well, at any rate, she could spend a little time trying to decipher them, she thought, and brush up on her language skills. She picked one up and began reading, trying to ignore the dread feeling in her stomach. As she read, she wondered what her parents and daughter might be reading about her now, and shuddered at the thought. Her conversation with her mother back in September played in her mind. She’d assured everyone she’d stay safe. But she’d been unable to keep her promise. She gave up trying to read the book, and gave in to tears.
CHAPTER 8
Flight to Chicago
Alev sat in her coach seat on the Lufthansa jet, looking out the window somewhere over the Atlantic. Her face, which she had made up carefully, looked tan and healthy. Her smartly-ironed light blue shirt made her bright blue eyes look even bluer than ever under their dark brows, and she wore her dark hair smooth and long over her shoulders. The sun shone brightly into the cabin, and she could see tiny white waves far below in the endless ocean. She’d brought several books on the flight, including the newest Jane Smiley novel. She loved American literature and was fascinated with the country, which she’d only visited twice. But she couldn’t concentrate on reading. Even now, her mind raced, and she wondered why she’d agreed to go in the first place. Part of her wanted to stay at the airport after landing and look up the next flight back. But she knew she wouldn’t do that.
What future could there be with this man, who had left her without warning five years ago and disappeared into another country? A man she knew had contacts and friends who may have been involved in terrorist plots?
But something she couldn’t fight drew her toward him at the same time. There was something so different about Jarrah. They’d had such good times together in Germany. He wasn’t like other Muslim men from the Middle East whom she had met; he had a fun-loving side, and he enjoyed a good beer and a good meal. He never acted fanatical about religion, which was good because she felt no interest in the subject whatsoever, and he knew it. She had never been able to understand why he hung around with religious fanatics, or his habit of mysteriously disappearing for months at a time without warning. Her friends teased her about her infatuation with the “dark stranger,” and she supposed they had a point. It just wasn’t in her nature to fall in love with someone conventional.
Besides her very real attraction to him, she wondered if her decision to take the trip reflected cultural baggage she’d absorbed from growing up in her immigrant Turkish community. Although her own parents had been rather liberal, there was a lot of pressure in the community for women to assume old-fashioned gender roles and find men to take care of them. She was one of many educated Turkish women who moved comfortably in the modern world and took on a professional career. But it’s hard to escape old traditions, and lately, her mom and dad had made it pretty clear that they were disappointed she was still single.
Her parents had liked Jarrah back in the old days, and had joined her that fateful afternoon in the Berlin coffeehouse when they’d begged him to stay in Germany and make a new life with her instead of going back to his friends in America. She could still remember the look on his face at that moment in August 2001. She’d read in novels about a “shadow crossing” a character’s face, but until then, she hadn’t known what it meant. Two days later, he had left again and never come back.
“Would you like something to drink?” the uniformed male flight attendant asked in German, interrupting her reverie. He looked at her with a polite but bored smile, hands on the drink cart.
“Just water please; thank you,” Alev replied back in German, with a quick smile that revealed her rather small teeth. Alev often passed for German with her light brown hair and blue eyes, and she’d lived there so long her accent was almost native.
The plane flew on, and clouds built up beneath it as the jet approached the U.S. coast.
CHAPTER 9
Chicago Interlude
“Earlier this week, I observed several ground crew members at O’Hare acting suspiciously. Are these men doing their jobs, or are they attempting to help criminals load drugs or other materials onto airliners? As I’ve written in the past, the airline security here in the U.S. is a joke. It’s far too easy for a rogue grounds crew member to put dangerous materials onto planes, and we may be seeing just that in these photos.”
Adam nodded to himself after re-reading his entry and clicked, “post,” making his latest blog entry live on line. He slapped his laptop closed and lay back on his bed.
He was a facile writer, and loved the craft. You could look on Adam’s site and find restaurant reviews, movie reviews, album reviews and the odd political rant, all delivered in the humorous tongue-in-cheek manner Adam specialized in. The blog attracted a loyal audience of readers around the country who enjoyed Adam’s irreverent style and weighed in with comments below his posts.
The site now featured photos he’d taken at O’Hare with Bob last week of what appeared to be O’Hare ground crew workers putting packages into a waiting 737. It was hard to tell from the photos what exactly was in the packages, but the men certainly didn’t look comfortable. It looked like they were trying to hide what they were doing. Bob was certain that he and Adam had come across some sort of drug deal, but Adam wasn’t exactly sure what was going on.
However, it certainly reinforced in his mind the hypocrisy of current airline security regulations, which forced everyone to wait in ridiculous lines and go through sophisticated scanners to get on a plane, even while airport workers had access to the same planes without any checks at all after their initial security clearance. He’d written before about the utter foolishness of this system, and now he had photos to back up his views.
He’d titled the post, “Funny Business at O’Hare?”
The nice thing about a blog, he thought, as he lay on his bed listening to heavy metal blast away on the stereo, was that he didn’t have to back any of this up with real evidence. If he suspected something was going on, he could build his case over time. He remembered working at his college newspaper, and realized he could never have published something like this back then without doing a lot more fact checking. He’d read somewhere that nowadays, with the Internet, everyone could be a journalist. So true, and so rewarding!
• • •
Across town later that same December night, Jarrah stopped his cab in a parking lot outside a Dunkin’ Donuts and pulled out his laptop. Rain tapped steadily against the cab’s windows. He clicked on Adam’s website, “Aircrash.com” and looked at the latest photos. He frowned. There was no doubt. He’d have to disable the site and take care of this guy right away. He began typing quickly in the dark of the car, NPR still quietly playing on the radio.
“We have a further update tonight on the disappearance of New York Times journalist Nancy Hanson, who’s been missing since going on assignment on Thursday in east Baghda
d, where she was present at the school bombing that killed four Iraqis and two U.S. soldiers,” the NPR announcer said, and Jarrah listened more carefully as he expertly worked to remove the offensive blog post from Adam’s site. “According to a message we obtained, it appears Hanson survived the bombing and was kidnapped by a militant group. The group released a photo of Hanson holding today’s newspaper and wearing a cast on her leg. The group said Hanson is safe and in good condition, but they will hold her captive until the United States agrees to release 200 militants from U.S.-controlled Iraqi prisons. We talked today to Ron Kolarik, the New York Times’ bureau chief in Baghdad, and he said it’s likely that Hanson was captured by a group that’s affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the terror organization that’s claimed responsibility for the school bombing, which was apparently aimed at Shiites and American and Iraqi soldiers. Kolarik spoke with us earlier today, and here’s what he said.”
Kolarik’s voice, which had a faint British accent from his many years living in that country, came on:
“We’re glad to hear that Nancy survived the bombing, but we have it on good authority that the group holding her is affiliated with Al-Qaeda, which obviously has us very worried. Nancy is a valuable member of our reporting staff here, and we will work closely with the U.S. military to find out where she’s being held and to get her released. We know this is very hard on her family, and it’s also hard on our New York Times family. We urge Nancy’s kidnappers to release her immediately.”
The NPR announcer returned.
“The U.S. embassy in Iraq has also demanded that Ms. Hanson be handed back over, but said it won’t meet the kidnappers’ demands. An embassy spokesman told us, ‘The United States doesn’t pay ransom to terrorists.’ Still, we believe that behind the scenes, the U.S. will work to get Hanson released, as it has in other recent kidnappings of U.S. citizens in Iraq…”
Jarrah stopped typing for a moment, wondering which militants had captured the American. It was quite possible that the Director was behind this. The Director had lots of side projects besides the one Jarrah worked on, and maintained close contact with the Sheik. But Jarrah knew he’d never hear the full story, as the Director played things very close to the vest. Jarrah’s mind returned to the project at hand, and though again of how much work they still had to do between now and May 2008, just 17 months away. “Are you sure you want to delete this entry?” the server asked him. Without pause, he clicked the “OK” button and sat back and waited for confirmation.
CHAPTER 10
Virgil Returns to Government
In his new closet-sized, windowless office at the Pentagon, Virgil had NPR on to the same report and listened intently until it ended. The desk in front of him was littered with papers thrown about haphazardly. The office featured no personal mementos, only the laptop and the scattered papers. Virgil’s tattered raincoat hung on the hook of the closed door.
Congress had quickly approved Harry’s nomination as Defense Secretary, and here Virgil was, back in the Department of Defense, with an office just down the hall from Harry. As promised, Harry had greased the screws with Bush and Cheney to allow Virgil back into the government. But he still had to keep sensitive documents far from Virgil, which might make Virgil’s job difficult. Unbelievable, Virgil thought, that even back in government, he still couldn’t get the information he wanted. The White House continued to be paranoid that he’d leak something important. Evidently, an office with a window was also out of reach. Well, he was grateful for the paycheck, anyway.
Ostensibly, he was Harry’s adviser on Al-Qaeda, but that left a lot of room for interpretation regarding his job responsibilities. He had latitude to do whatever he thought might uncover threats from the group, using his contacts in the Middle East and the CIA. And although he didn’t have access to some documents, he did have access to a database of research that the government had compiled on Al-Qaeda since he’d left in 2001, and he found it both fascinating and frustrating to comb through.
For example, one document detailed the government’s attempts, shortly after the hijackings, to determine if other terrorists had been aboard planes in the United States at the same time that day, the very observation Virgil had given the president the morning of the plane collision. The searchers had compiled the passenger manifests of every airplane that was on the ground or in the sky at the time of the collision, and had honed in on some names of interest. It appeared there had been groups of men with Arab-sounding names on aircraft that took off from Dulles and Newark that morning, bound for Los Angeles and San Francisco. Both planes had normal flights and landed as planned. The researchers had interviewed the flight crews of both planes shortly after Sept. 11, and the crews had reported nothing abnormal about the flights. The only abnormal thing – if it could be considered all that abnormal – was the preponderance of Middle Easterners on board the planes.
The researchers had done background checks of those Middle Easterners, and their criminal records were clean. The odd thing, however, was that most of them had only recently arrived in the United States – some as recently as earlier that same summer – and none seemed to have jobs or other reasons to be here. Also, two of the men – Jarrah and Hanjour – had taken flying lessons during the previous year. It appeared most of the men had left the United States shortly after the plane collision, and the government had lost track of their whereabouts. All red flags.
Virgil, even in his new position, didn’t have access to the government’s final conclusions on the men, and bitterly he realized why. It was quite likely that Hanjour and Jarrah had connections to the hijackers on American Flight 11 and United Flight 175, and the information was top secret. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. He had no way of knowing if they remained in the United States. He hoped that someone in the FBI kept tabs on them. Perhaps they’d been arrested and were in some secret prison, maybe in Iraq. He wouldn’t put that beyond the capabilities of a guy like Tenet and his team at the CIA, and it would renew his faith in Dick Cheney if it turned out the VP had indeed followed the mens’ tracks and gotten them locked up. A Google search of their names turned up nothing consequential.
It occurred to him he should take the information to Harry to make sure he had it, and let Harry look into the matter to get a sense of whether the two men were under lock and key or still on the loose somewhere. The whole thing was so damned frustrating! Why bring him back if he couldn’t access the information he needed to do his job? How odd to be back in the government, working for a man he respected, and still be dealing with the same type of roadblocks he’d had back at the White House.
“I understand how you feel,” Harry had told him earlier in the week. Harry had been dressed in a new dark suit and sitting behind an antique wooden desk in his vast new office, but still managed to look casual and comfortable, leaning back in his brown leather chair with one cowboy-booted foot up on the desk. “We just have to be patient. I used up some of my good graces with them arguin’ to get you back in the first place, so now we have to live with some limits, I guess. I reckon we’ll have ‘em eating out of our hands in a little while. You just do what you can now, and trust your instincts. Bring me anything you find and I’ll try to polish the wheels so we can get it up the chain.”
Another report he’d found in the database made some vague references to the shadowy figure who had worked with Bin Laden to direct the hijackings. This appeared to be the same Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, whom Virgil’s own contacts had spoken of. Further information on this character and his whereabouts were classified.
He was still searching through the database to see what else he could find when the NPR report came on about the New York Times reporter’s kidnapping. It was the first he’d heard of it, and he immediately thought back to the conversation he’d had with Nancy back at the Thai restaurant five years ago. He hadn’t talked to her since, but now her pleasant but somewhat intense face came to his mind. He had no idea Nancy had ended up in Baghdad,
but the news report shifted his thoughts from the aircraft collision to his network of contacts in Iraq. One reason Harry had brought him in was to help get a better sense of who was behind the constant sectarian attacks in that country.
Al-Qaeda was obviously at the core of it, but the organization was a spider web of different affiliated groups, all working under its large tent but with their own leaders and sometimes their own intentions. Virgil, who had worked for the CIA and the Department of Defense during the 1980s and 1990s, when the U.S. funded militant groups to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan and had fought the Gulf War, had strong connections in the region, even with groups that were now fighting against the U.S. He sat back in his chair, ran his hand through his thinning hair and wondered who in Iraq he knew might be able to help rescue the reporter. He thought about notifying Harry before taking on this new project, but didn’t want to bother the man, who was no doubt slammed with meetings as he adjusted to the new position. He didn’t think Harry would mind much if he did a little digging on this.
His mind turned to an Iraqi friend of his, a man who had lived in both the U.S. and Iraq, and made a good living trading stocks on the Iraqi stock exchange. He hadn’t talked to the guy in years, and now he fished out his huge old Filofax (he’d never gotten used to keeping track of contacts electronically) and flipped through the battered hand-written notecards, some of them stained by long-ago coffee spills. Ah, here it was. Aban Kanaan. He smiled when he saw the notecard, thinking about the fellow, an irascible jokester whose sense of humor got him through his country’s hard times.
Kanaan had been a good source for him back in the days of the U.S. food for oil program in the 1990s, as Kanaan had contacts with Iraqi food companies that he invested in and could give Virgil a sense of whether U.S. food deliveries were getting to the right people. He knew Kanaan had a pretty wide network across various business groups in the country, but he’d also dabbled in some more interesting (and lucrative) products than food, including weapons and military gear.
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