The Prisoner

by Alex Berenson

  “It wasn’t true.”

  “I know you’re about to saddle up. You spent the party looking at her like she was made of glass. Like you wanted to store every memory you could.”

  “You must be a detective.”

  She didn’t smile.

  “I’ll be undercover. First in Afghanistan and then somewhere else.”

  “Undercover?”

  “In the system.” Wells knew he was trying to explain without really telling her.

  But she wasn’t fooled. “Pretending to be one of them, you mean. How long?”

  “A month or two.” Wells hesitated. “Three, four at the outside.”

  “You think you can make that work? After all these years?”

  “These guys, they’re paranoid, but at the same time they want to believe that the cause brings in believers from all over.”

  “Put on your turban, and welcome to the jihad.”

  Wells knew she knew Muslims didn’t wear turbans. “Ellis and I think there’s a traitor at Langley. High up.” More than he should tell her. Justifying himself.

  “And how does this—” She shook her head: I don’t want to know. “So you’ll be completely dark. Can’t break cover.”

  “Ellis will know how to reach me. If there’s an emergency with Emmie or something.”

  “You think I’d come to you?”

  Wells opened his mouth, shut it again.

  “What are you planning to tell your daughter?”

  “That I’m going to Daddy School and I’ll be back soon with presents.” The line didn’t sound as good out loud as it had in his head.

  “What if you don’t? You’re the only one who knows the rules here, John.”

  “I’ll come back.”

  Anne wasn’t prone to displays of temper or emotion. The winters in New Hampshire chased off or broke anyone who wasn’t strong and solid. She wasn’t crying, but Wells saw just how much this trip would cost her. He could have said something like, You don’t want me to go, just say so, but making her ask would have been cheap. His decision. He’d own it.

  She searched his face. “Sure you want to do this? I’m not asking for me. Or even Emmie. I’m asking for you. It’s easy enough when you have nothing to lose. Different now.”

  A snippet from U2 came to Wells: All that you measure / All that you feel / All this you can leave behind . . . And he could. He knew why, too, though he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. Spoken, they would sound like a Memorial Day speech. But he’d seen enough of war to know that peace had to be earned.

  “I’ll come back.”

  “Keep saying it, maybe it’s true. When do you go?”

  “Tomorrow.” He’d agreed to meet Kirkov in Munich. Then Washington. Then east.

  Anne turned to the sink. “I need to finish cleaning,” she said. “You can say your good-byes when she wakes up, and I’ll do what I can to help, but after that I don’t want to see you anymore.”

  Until I’m ready to get home? Or ever? Wells looked at the set of her shoulders and thought better of asking.

  —

  NO PARK WALKS this time. To save time, Wells and Kirkov met at the airport Hilton. Wells found the Bulgarian in his room, leafing through papers. The German-subtitled version of The 40-Year-Old Virgin played in the background, Steve Carell cursing as his chest hair was pulled off in two-inch-wide strips. No translation necessary.

  “Hilarious,” Kirkov said.

  Wells waited for Kirkov to turn the television off. And waited.

  “Didn’t know I was here for movie night.”

  Kirkov reached for the remote with real regret. “I will tell you, I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

  Wells walked him through the evidence of a mole, the failed operation in Raqqa, the earlier lost missions. “The pattern’s obvious, once you look. We haven’t wanted to.”

  “This proves what I said in London. Whoever it is must be very senior. You have suspects?”

  “Targets. People who had easy access to the prisoner lists and the ops details.”

  “No evidence. Guessing.”

  Wells conceded the point with a nod.

  “Now what? You come to the Castle, ask Hani? It won’t work. These Daesh prisoners, I don’t know if it’s they’re afraid for their families or they believe all the nonsense, but they don’t help. Ever.”

  “No.” Wells explained Shafer’s plan.

  When he was done, Kirkov shook his head. “Hani won’t believe. Too smart.”

  “I lived this, Oleg.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Exactly. I can tell them stories about fighting Americans while they were knee-high.”

  “I can’t protect you.”

  “I don’t expect you to. Only way it works is if I go in dark. We won’t tell the guards, just the warden and one or two others, men you really trust. They bring me in from Afghanistan, my file looks normal, you treat me like a regular high-value prisoner—”

  “You know how we treat those men?”

  “I can guess.”

  “Even now, even with the EU watching. Not a hotel. No movies.”

  “Give me the chance to talk to them. When I get what I need, I ring the bell and you’ll let me out.”

  “Unless Hani figures it out and kills you. Or the guards decide they don’t like you, beat you until you can’t walk. Or the man you’re looking for finds a way to get a message inside—” Kirkov stopped. Wells realized he’d seen the other side of the scheme. “What you want, isn’t it? That the traitor knows you’re after him, he gets nervous, makes a mistake.” Kirkov said something in Bulgarian. “I don’t know the word in English.”

  “Bait. Yes. I’m bait.”

  “You get killed, big mess.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “Why not from your end?”

  “Investigate our top guys? Without hard evidence?”

  “This should be your last move. Not your first.” Kirkov picked up the remote, tossed it idly. He was going to agree, Wells saw. Agree so he could get back to Steve Carell while he waited to fly to Sofia. Or wherever he was going next.

  The windows rattled as an A380 took off. “Vinny okays this?”

  Wells nodded. Maybe. Why wouldn’t he? “You’ve known all along we can’t do this the easy way, Oleg.”

  Kirkov didn’t answer for a while. “Crazy, but your choice,” he finally said. “But you need to find a way to make them trust you quickly.”

  “Have any ideas?”

  “In fact, yes.” Kirkov explained.

  “Not bad,” Wells said when Kirkov was done, “if you can do it without being obvious.”

  “Leave that to me. After Vinny says okay, tell me, we’ll work out the details.” Wells’s face must have shown his surprise because Kirkov smiled. “Of course you come to me before your president.”

  “Thank you for this, Oleg.”

  “You tell Vinny that this doesn’t just make us even. He owes me now.”

  —

  SHAFER WAS WAITING at Dulles when Wells landed that night. As he lead-footed his way down 267, he told Wells that his first pass through the electronic records of Peter Ludlow and the other targets had turned up nothing of interest.

  “I had a long talk with a woman named Danielle Chen,” Shafer said. “DAD”—deputy assistant director—“for operational records management and systems control. A blast at parties, I’m sure. She told me the desks grade active ops into six broad tiers, based on risk and importance. Tier 1 is for stuff like bin Laden, though of course that one wasn’t in the system at all. Those stay secret forever—”

  “Unless somebody from SEAL Team 6 writes a book.”

  “Tier 2 includes anything where our own officers are on the ground in what we rather
euphemistically call uncontrolled territory. Tier 3 is ops in places like China, dangerous but probably not lethal if they go bad. The bottom three tiers are more or less routine. Drone stuff is graded separately because the risk to our officers is lower but the risk of blowback is higher.”

  “So the Raqqa op—”

  “Tier 2.”

  “Who could see it?”

  “Desk heads and senior officers have unlimited access to ops on their own desks. They can see all tier 4, 5, and 6 ops worldwide without leaving an audit trail. Some tier 3 ops, too. Next level up is more closely guarded. Anybody who isn’t directly involved needs approval. There’s an automatic audit trail, too. The only people who are exempt from all the restrictions, who can see anything at any tier, are the director and the DDO. Ludlow and Pushkin.”

  “What about the other two?”

  “Let me finish, please.” Occasionally Shafer spoke with a prissiness that betrayed his age. “I said every op. That includes Russia, wherever. Green and Crompond have unlimited looks at anything classified as a counterterror op. Whether against the Islamic State or al-Qaeda or anyone else.”

  “Even though Gamma Station goes after IS, not AQ?”

  “Correct. There’s so much overlap that arbitrarily restricting him wouldn’t make sense.”

  “Do his deputies have that much freedom?”

  “No. Crompond is the only Gamma Station officer who sees everything.”

  Wells thought he understood, but he wanted to hear Shafer say it. “So the final takeaway—”

  “After all that, we’re back to the big four. Ludlow, Pushkin, Green, Crompond.”

  “Good.”

  “I think so. Gives us a place to focus. Meantime, check the back seat.”

  Wells came up with a thin manila file. Shafer had found a jihadi for him to impersonate, an al-Qaeda fighter nicknamed Nassim al-Beiruti. As his name suggested, al-Beiruti was a Lebanese who had joined the group in 2000. After the United States invaded Afghanistan, he’d fled to Pakistan. He had never been senior enough to rate serious drone attention, a key to jihadi survival.

  Al-Beiruti had last shown up in 2004. The Pakistani army arrested him at the Afghan border. By the time the CIA learned of his detention, the army had let him go. Bureaucratic miscommunication, it said. More likely, al-Beiruti had bribed his way out. He’d never been heard from again.

  Wells flipped the file into the back. “No. He’s even more likely to get me killed than your driving.”

  “How is anybody going to say you’re not him? He’s dead, or so deep in hiding he might as well be.”

  “Unless he quit and went home.”

  “Lebanese haven’t seen him.”

  “Because their border controls are so good. Went home, quit, and then unquit. Wound up over the border in Syria. I say I’m him, but these guys know what he looks like. Tough to explain that.”

  “He was the best candidate, John. By far.”

  “Then let’s make up a file that matches me better and slip it into the databases. Make the guy American or Canadian, so the language isn’t such an issue.”

  Shafer hated to admit he was wrong as much as anyone Wells had ever met. He didn’t speak as he made his way through the suburban Virginia streets. But as they turned in to his driveway, he nodded. “Fine. I’ll talk to the techs, we’ll figure out how to get it in with no fingerprints. You win.”

  “America wins, Ellis.”

  —

  WELLS’S GOOD MOOD didn’t survive the night. He dreamed he was watching a ten-year-old Emmie kicking a soccer ball into a tiny net, over and over. You can do something else, he told her. You can do whatever you like. She ignored him, kept kicking. Go, Emmie, a woman shouted behind him. The voice was Anne’s, but when he turned to look, he saw Exley. She looked the same as she had when they’d first met at Langley almost twenty years before. Before September 11. Before everything.

  How do you know her name?

  Of course I know her name. I’m her mother.

  You aren’t.

  If I’m not her mother, how do I know her name, John? Exley smiled at her own irrefutable logic. Watch your daughter, John.

  Wells turned back to the field. Emmie was gone.

  He blinked himself awake in the dark and lay on the lumpy pullout bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering if Anne was right, if love was the enemy of soldiering. And whether Exley would ever leave him. Or come back to him. Then he closed his eyes and thought of the Hindu Kush until he slept.

  —

  SEEING DUTO in the Oval Office the next afternoon was a relief. Duto wasn’t big on talking about feelings.

  “Miss it that bad, do you?” Duto leaned back in his chair. Relaxed behind the big desk. “I still say you’re wasting your time.”

  “When I come back, you can tell me how wrong I was.” Wells didn’t bother to point out that if Duto really thought so, he would have stopped them.

  “These guys will buy you as an overage jihadi who went AWOL in the Kush?”

  “Long as the mole thinks they might—” Shafer said.

  “Fine. Kirkov on board?”

  “If you are,” Wells said.

  “Seventh floor won’t be happy.” Duto quieted for a moment, seemingly calculating the potential agency fallout. “What do you need from me?”

  “Two findings,” Shafer said. A finding was White House jargon for a presidential memo that explained why a secret operation was either legal or illegal but necessary for national security.

  “So much paper, Ellis.” Duto liked written records only when their contents suited him.

  “One authorizing the mission, the real mission. Two copies, one for you, one for me.”

  “What, you don’t trust me?”

  “The second to Langley with the official cover story. I’ll keep a copy of that one, too. Wouldn’t want John to get lost over there.”

  Duto had big, heavy eyelids, the heart of any caricature. They sank now as he squinted at Shafer, then Wells. “Long as they both say clearly that this whole thing was your idea.”

  “Your lawyer’s writing them, have ’em say whatever you like. Put in a recipe.”

  “In that case, done and done. Now what? You go to Langley, talk to the boys? Fun.”

  “After we get John’s identity right.”

  “Next week,” Wells said. “After my hike.”

  Duto and Shafer looked at Wells like he’d made a joke that they’d missed.

  “You’ll see.”

  —

  THAT AFTERNOON, Wells had Shafer drop him in Harpers Ferry, a tiny town sixty-five miles northwest of Washington, where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers came together. In 1859, the abolitionist John Brown had raided an armory in the town, then known as Harper’s Ferry. Brown hoped to arm local slaves with the stolen weapons and spark a rebellion. His quest turned out to be a suicide mission. He had fewer than two dozen fighters and no way to bring the weapons to the slaves. Townsfolk pinned him and his men in a factory beside the armory. Marines led by Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart, soon to be famous Confederate commanders, captured Brown two days later. He was convicted of treason and hanged.

  Since reading about Brown in ninth grade, Wells had always felt an odd kinship for the man, a big-bearded preacher who gave stem-winding sermons straight from the Old Testament. Wells distrusted that degree of fervor. The jihadi camps were filled with fanatics convinced that they had direct lines to God.

  Yet Wells admired the clarity of Brown’s vision. Unlike so many prophets, Brown fought alongside his followers rather than staying safe in the rear. He sacrificed his life to make other men free—not metaphorically but actually free of slavery’s chains. And he didn’t fear death. After being convicted of treason, he asked for punishment rather than mercy, telling the judge, “[If] it is deemed necessary that I shoul
d forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children”—two of his sons had died in the raid—“. . . so let it be done.”

  Wells only hoped to be as cool when he met the man on the pale horse.

  —

  AFTER SHAFER DROVE off, Wells stopped at the brick building where Brown had made his last stand. Fittingly, it could have passed for a church. Wells imagined Brown preaching even as Lee moved his Marines into place for the final charge.

  Back outside, Wells followed the signs for the Appalachian Trail, the real reason he’d come. Harpers Ferry lay near the midpoint of the trail, which stretched twenty-two hundred miles from Maine to Georgia. Along the way, Wells and Shafer had stopped at a Walmart so Wells could buy a cheap backpack and camping supplies—a tarp, a sleep sack, water purification tablets, caffeine pills, and a box of energy bars.

  “That all you’re getting?” Shafer said.

  “Yes.”

  “Gonna be cold.”

  “And hungry.” All the years back in the United States had softened Wells, softened his hair and skin and hands. He needed to make himself less obviously American. He could think of no faster way than a hard week in the mountains. He planned to hike to Roanoke, two hundred miles by car but almost three hundred by trail. Forty miles a day was a grueling but not impossible pace. The world record holder had hiked the entire Appalachian in only forty-six days, averaging almost fifty miles a day the entire way. But Wells intended to keep himself to near-starvation rations, twelve to fifteen hundred calories a day. The hiking would burn between six and eight thousand calories a day on top of his core needs. He figured he would lose at least two pounds a day.

  —

  HE NEEDED eight days to reach Roanoke, and his weight-loss math proved conservative. He wound up down nineteen pounds by the time he stumbled off the trail. Wells had always kept himself in fighting shape, never had anything close to a gut. Now all the fat had disappeared from his stomach and arms, giving him an almost wasted look. He hadn’t been so hungry since his years in Pakistan. Within twenty-four hours of walking out of Harpers Ferry, he had the ever-present ache that most Americans couldn’t even imagine, not just in his belly but his legs, arms, and even his shoulders. Worse than the hunger was the sure knowledge that the next meal wouldn’t defeat it, only take the edge off for a few minutes until it returned with reinforcements.