The Prisoner

by Alex Berenson

  Despite sarin’s deadliness, the process to make it was hardly secret. The second-to-last step in producing it was making a chemical called methylphosphonyl difluoride—which chemists called DF. DF was tricky stuff. It could eat through glass, and if it mixed with water, it released deadly hydrofluoric acid. But if treated with respect, DF could be stored for years.

  Until the moment when its keepers mixed it with isopropyl alcohol, what civilians called rubbing alcohol, available in any drugstore. DF and isopropyl alcohol combined to make sarin, no special steps needed.

  And sarin was death. Like other nerve agents, it worked by blocking an enzyme called cholinesterase. With cholinesterase unable to work, muscle cells couldn’t turn themselves off. They fired until they destroyed themselves.

  The best-known recipes to synthesize sarin started with two simple chemicals. The first was methanol, alcohol’s lethal cousin, the stuff that contaminated bootleg moonshine. The second was phosphorus trichloride, a common industrial chemical. Heating those together produced a molecule called trimethylphosphine.

  Getting from trimethylphosphine to DF took three more steps. None needed advanced technology, though they did require other chemicals. After Saddam Hussein killed thousands of Kurds in 1988 with chemical weapons, industrial countries tried to control trade in what chemists called precursors, chemicals important to making sarin and other deadly agents. The closer a precursor was to an actual chemical weapon, the more tightly regulated it was. Buying or selling DF was impossible, for example.

  But governments couldn’t stop the export of basic industrial building blocks like phosphorus trichloride. Worldwide, chemical companies made three hundred thousand tons of the stuff every year. Kassani needed only a few hundred kilograms. The Turkish traders who bought oil by the tankload from the Islamic State were happy enough to sell it.

  The equipment was harder to come by. But because Kassani was working on laboratory rather than industrial scale, he didn’t need Teflon-coated pipes or expensive process control systems. He did splurge on respirators and full-body chemical handling suits. He didn’t mind dying, but not until he’d succeeded.

  A month after meeting Baghdadi, Kassani stumbled across an auction liquidating the laboratories of a bankrupt Indian generic drugmaker. A lucky break. Through an Istanbul trading company whose owner supported the Islamic State, he bought a mass spectrometer, a diesel-fired electric generator, and two fifteen-hundred-millimeter fume hoods. Plus basic lab equipment like beakers, pipettes, and Bunsen burners. They all had legitimate commercial purposes and faced no export controls. Shipping them to Turkey took six weeks, clearing them through customs and smuggling them to Raqqa another month. By the time Kassani finished buying everything, he had spent ninety percent of his budget. He hoped he hadn’t missed anything important.

  Meanwhile, he visited the Islamic State oil fields, looking for true believers, men who wouldn’t fear the work ahead. He chose three men: a mechanical engineer, a welder, and a tanker driver who had been studying for a chemistry degree at Mamoun University when the war started.

  Together, they moved the equipment from the hospital’s basement to a ten-by-ten-meter room on its top floor. The space had been the dialysis ward before the Islamic State arrived. Shelves of books and magazines still sat against one wall, reading material for patients. A tourist guide for Italy, a biography of Queen Rania of Jordan. Kassani tossed everything. Whatever this place had been before, it belonged to the jihad now. It belonged to him.

  Kassani had no money for fancy air filtration systems. He ducted the fume hoods straight to the roof. He put the generator in another room and vented it through the windows. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration wouldn’t have approved, but then its inspectors would have faced more immediate problems if they’d visited Raqqa.

  Routing the exterior ducts took a week. Finally, Kassani and his men finished and coupled the fume hoods to the blowers. The preliminaries were finished, the real work about to begin.

  “Now we pray.” Kassani went to his knees. “Allah, we beg You to grant us health with faith, faith with good conduct, success followed by further success, mercy and healing, and Your forgiveness and Your satisfaction.”

  —

  PRAYERS OR NO, making sarin proved harder than Kassani expected. Reading about the right ways to handle hydrofluoric acid or chlorine gas was easy enough. Following through hour after hour, reactor load after reactor load, was harder. A single mistake could be fatal.

  The men learned that truth in the worst possible way. It was a Thursday night, the end of a long week of work. Kassani was looking forward to their day off. Friday was the holiest day of the Muslim week, and they always observed it.

  They were slowly making progress. Their most recent cooks had produced a sixty percent yield of trimethylphosphine. Yields were crucial. Even with an eighty percent yield per step, their overall yield of DF at the end of a five-step process would be barely thirty percent, and the DF itself would be impure and unstable.

  Normally, they worked in two-man teams, one team at each fume hood. But the generator had shorted the night before, and the truck driver had stayed up all night fixing it. Kassani had given him the day off. Now he and the welder, a Turk named Ahmed, worked at one fume hood while Bashir the engineer was at the other.

  Suddenly Bashir screamed. Kassani turned to see him hopping foot to foot, scrabbling at his waist with his polyvinyl gloves. The motion would have seemed comic if not for the sound he was making. The noise filled the room like Bashir was a human air-raid siren.

  Bashir tugged down his pants and underwear. His thighs and penis were bubbling—no other word would do—the skin furling on itself like a blanket. In the fume hood behind him, a beaker lay half melted. Kassani knew at once what had happened. Bashir had been pouring hydrofluoric acid into a beaker. But he hadn’t realized the beaker was glass, not plastic, and vulnerable to the acid.

  As the liquid ate through the beaker, Bashir had foolishly tried to pick it up and throw it into a plastic safety box. Instead, the glass broke and acid poured out. Bashir was leaning forward and couldn’t jump back in time. Hydrofluoric acid was among the most corrosive chemicals ever created. The acid hit him waist-high, and his clothes offered no protection. His agony would only worsen as the minutes passed. The acid would eat Bashir’s muscles and organs until it killed him.

  Bashir staggered for the bathroom, leaving a trail of blood.

  Kassani had never told the others, but he kept a 9-millimeter pistol in the backpack he brought to the lab every day. He grabbed it.

  “Soufiane—” Ahmed said.

  “You think he wants to suffer this way?”

  —

  IN THE BATHROOM, Bashir had turned on the taps in a hopeless effort to wash off the acid. His blood was flowing more steadily now, pink-tinted water covering the floor. Kassani had never seen such pain in a man’s face. The skin in Bashir’s groin was entirely gone, exposing the fat and muscle beneath.

  “Help me—”

  Kassani lifted the pistol. “Allah will help. Do you want to pray?”

  “Please, Soufiane—”

  Kassani aimed at the center of Bashir’s chest and squeezed the trigger twice. The Iraqi went to one knee. He tilted sideways against the sink, trying to keep himself upright. Kassani put the pistol beside Bashir’s temple and shot him once more. Bashir’s face stilled instantly, the muscles relaxed, the agony gone. Kassani knew he’d made the right choice.

  He closed his eyes and offered the prayer for the newly dead: “Oh Allah, Bashir al-Umrauk is under Your care and protection, so protect him from the trial of the grave and torment of the fire . . .”

  —

  THEY STUFFED Bashir’s corpse and clothes into trash bags and buried them in a palm grove a few kilometers from Raqqa.

  The accident slowed them. Kassani cut their hours, giving them Saturda
ys off as well as Fridays. The accident had proven the value in two-man teams, so Kassani went back to the oil fields for another worker.

  Yet, for all their difficulties, they made progress. Kassani found he enjoyed lab work, the precision and care that handling chemicals required, the breaks when the batch reactors were working and they had nothing to do but trade stories.

  Week by week, they increased their yields. The DF that came out of the reactors was clear, with a pungent acid odor, as the textbooks promised. Yet Kassani hesitated to take the final step, to combine the methylphosphonyl difluoride with isopropyl alcohol. To make sarin.

  He told himself he didn’t want to distract himself with a test. They would need a space that was sealed, with its own vents, and, ideally, a window so they could watch.

  But Kassani knew a deeper fear was holding him back, a fear he had overreached, made a mistake somewhere along the way. So they kept cooking, adding to their DF stockpile, until they had almost four liters.

  Then Ghaith showed up. The big Iraqi stood in the center of the room, took in the hoods and reactors, the fire extinguishers in each corner, the thick black electrical cable taped to the floor. “The Division of Special Projects.” The sarcasm in his voice was unmistakable.

  “I’ve missed you, Ghaith.”

  Ghaith recited the months that had passed since Kassani met Baghdadi.

  “Your year’s almost up, Soufiane.”

  “We’re ready.”

  Ghaith’s thick eyebrows rose. “Show me.”

  They kept the DF locked in a steel cabinet. Kassani wore the key around his neck as a constant reminder of their work. He extracted it now, opened the cabinet to reveal the bottles inside.

  “All your work for that?”

  “That can kill a hundred people. More.” Kassani didn’t see any reason to explain that the liquid in the bottles wasn’t actually sarin.

  “You’ve tested it, then?”

  “We’ve checked it, we know it’s pure—”

  “I don’t know what that is, but it doesn’t sound like a test. Do I need to tell you what a test is?”

  “You don’t need to tell me anything, Ghaith.”

  “So have you?”

  “We will. Come back tomorrow.” He could start with a dog. The wild dogs were gone from Raqqa. The jihadis had shot them for sport. But a few survived in the groves.

  “Playing for a year, you don’t even know if it works.”

  “We don’t have a sealed space up here. If we just use a regular room, we’ll contaminate the floor.”

  “We can fix that.” Ghaith explained.

  Kassani wished he’d thought of the idea himself. “Fine. We’ll start tomorrow with a dog?”

  Ghaith grinned. “This afternoon. And a dog? I don’t think so.”

  —

  THE PRISONERS wore red jumpsuits and had empty eyes. One had a Libyan’s dusky skin. The other was local. Kassani didn’t know, didn’t want to know, what they’d done. Their arms were cuffed behind their backs, but the precaution seemed unnecessary. They stood under the desert sun looking almost bored. Resigned to their fates.

  This ravine was eighty kilometers southeast of Raqqa. Kassani and Ghaith had driven separately from the prisoners and their guards. Kassani had left his men in the lab. Success or failure would belong to him alone.

  He’d brought a respirator, gloves, an apron, plastic plants. He knew he’d look ridiculous if the stuff didn’t work. And he couldn’t be sure. It should. His mass spectrometer showed these batches of DF were eighty-five percent pure. But he wished he’d tested it. Instead, he would be mixing and hoping.

  Kassani tried not to wonder what Ghaith would do if he was wrong. He wasn’t afraid. He just didn’t want to disappoint the caliph.

  He was a little afraid, too, though.

  —

  THE CARS were boxy Korean compacts, one gray, the second black. The guards stuffed the prisoners in the front passenger seats, cuffing their ankles, shackling their arms, wrapping one final chain around their waists. The prisoners protested only mildly. Not that it would have mattered. They were test subjects now. Subject A and Subject B, doing their part to advance science in the Islamic State.

  Kassani opened the front passenger door of the gray compact and sliced a ten-centimeter-by-ten-centimeter square off the right shoulder of the prisoner’s jumpsuit to expose the skin. Now the prisoner—the subject—began to beg. “Please, sir, I am a good Muslim, I pray every day, give the zakat—”

  The prisoner who died without begging was rare indeed, and the pleas for mercy were always more or less the same, Kassani knew. In fact, the words had a certain rote quality as if the speaker knew they wouldn’t help. Kassani taped a gauze pad to the prisoner’s shoulder.

  “Whatever they’ve told you about me, it isn’t true—”

  At the hospital, Kassani had split his highest-purity DF batch into ten smaller bottles, each with about one hundred milliliters—a little less than four ounces of liquid, half a glass of water. He took out a DF bottle now, poured it into a wide-mouthed plastic beaker. He wanted to offer a prayer for success, but there wasn’t time.

  He opened a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, gently poured the clear liquid into the beaker. The mixture bubbled and fumed as the liquids mixed. Kassani swirled the liquids in the beaker with a long-handled nickel stirrer. He could almost see the chemicals coming together, the isopropyl doing its work, displacing a fluorine atom, bonding with the phosphorus at the center of the DF.

  Making something new and beautiful. A molecule that hadn’t existed before.

  Kassani had learned to love chemistry.

  The bubbling increased, though it remained controlled. The prisoner had fallen silent, as if he, too, were an interested bystander. Kassani smiled through his respirator and slowly poured the liquid onto the pad, soaking it completely. When he was done, he threw the empty beaker into the car and shut the door.

  By then, the liquid had reached the prisoner’s skin. Despite his lack of formal training, Kassani had proven a capable chemist. Standing just outside the passenger’s window, Kassani could see the prisoner’s pupils constrict pinpoint tight and a stream of clear mucus pour from his nose. He screamed, or tried to, but his mouth opened wide and drool dripped from the corners. The fabric of his jumpsuit darkened at his groin as his bladder failed, the beginning of the sarin’s systemic effects. He heaved and jerked against the chains that held him, rocking the seat against its frame.

  Kassani stepped back from the window, half afraid that the prisoner might break free and somehow kick through the glass. He stole a quick look at Ghaith. The Iraqi watched impassively from ten meters away, hands folded across his chest.

  Sooner than Kassani expected, the prisoner’s convulsions slowed. His eyes were open and unseeing. Mucus and blood covered his chin. He’d bitten off his lower lip. Kassani backed away from the car, pulled off his gloves and respirator. He looked down to see how long the experiment had taken, but he’d forgotten to start his stopwatch.

  His only mistake. He’d fix it next time.

  Ghaith peered inside the car. “You’re sure he’s dead?”

  A silly question, as they both knew. “Not too close. It’s not airtight.”

  Ghaith stepped back, all the proof that Kassani needed of the power of what he’d just done.

  “So that’s sarin.”

  “I don’t have to put it on the skin either. I can leave it in the beaker and it’ll turn into gas on its own. It’ll take longer, but it’ll work.”

  Ghaith nodded at the prisoner in the other car. The man’s eyes were wide, mouth slack in terror. “Let’s see.”

  7

  NORTH CONWAY

  ANNE HAD baked Emmie a Hello Kitty cake, pink-frosted, with black jellybean eyes and tented purple ears.

  “Can I have a piece, Momma?
Please?”

  “When your friends come.”

  “A tiny piece?”

  Even at age two, girls were natural coquettes. Wells had to smile. “She said ‘please,’ Mommy.”

  “Don’t encourage her.”

  “A teeny-tiny piece—”

  “When your friends come.” Talking to toddlers: Wash, rinse, repeat. “Come on, help me with the plates.”

  Emmie looked at Wells, big pleading eyes underneath long eyelashes. A born heartbreaker.

  He shook his head. She dropped the protest, followed Anne to the cupboard, stood impatiently with her hands turned palms up in front of her, waiting for Anne to give her paper plates. Little kids did everything with intent, no secrets, nothing hidden. Emmie didn’t even know how to lie yet. A world in every way the reverse of the one Wells knew.

  —

  FOUR HOURS LATER, Wells had cake under his fingernails and an ache in his knees from crawling on the floor. He’d spent the afternoon playing nanny, an easy excuse to stay apart from the other parents, Anne’s friends. He was never sure what they knew. Not talking was easier than lying.

  Anne washed up as Wells threw away cake-smudged plates. The house was a happy mess, toys under the couch, wrapping paper balled in the corners, a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table. Tonka prowled around, lapping up crumbs. Emmie was already asleep. As the last car pulled away, she’d said, Can I have my birthday every day? and conked.

  Wells finished cleaning, thought about his own bag of goodies, the one in the safe-deposit box in the Chase branch downtown. He put his hands on Anne’s hips. “Can I have my birthday every day?”

  She’d been quiet as they tidied. Now she swiveled away, stared at him.

  “You don’t even know if you’re selling or buying, do you? Get home in time for the birthday, so everyone can see what a great dad you are. Pretend you’re the happy family man, pretend you’re Muslim, pretend you love that girl—”

  A sting as real as a slap, and Anne must have seen she was wrong. “That wasn’t fair.”