The Prisoner

by Alex Berenson

  “You come here for drugs?” the agent said abruptly. Wells wondered if the mole had tried the same trick here as in Pakistan. Probably not. He would know that if Wells beat Pakistani Immigration, he was clean.

  “Just to see your country.”

  The agent didn’t hide his sneer. “Welcome to Kabul.”

  —

  AS WELLS stepped out of the airport, his heart leapt. He wanted to feel sorry that he wouldn’t see Emmie for months, and part of him did . . . But he felt more alive in the field than anywhere else.

  The threat of kidnapping and terror overshadowed every aspect of life in Kabul for Westerners. To move around the city, they either had their own drivers or called cabs from a handful of taxi services known to be safe. But Wells needed to get away from the Western infrastructure—and practice his Pashto—as quickly as he could. He needed to become Samir Khalili, even if for only a few days, before his capture.

  The first cab he saw was a battered Toyota Corolla station wagon with a Tax sign screwed to its roof, the i gone. Wells sat up front, shoving the seat back as far as it would go. Photos of two boys and a girl were taped to the dashboard, as clear a signal as Wells could have hoped that the driver was not a Talib. Religious militants didn’t show off pictures of their children, especially not their daughters.

  “Yes, where to?” the cabbie said in English.

  “Just around,” Wells said in Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns, who dominated southern Afghanistan and formed the core of the Taliban. Wells had learned the language during his years here. But he’d rarely had reason to use it during his years in the United States. He wondered how bad he sounded. Pashto had a stuttering, rhyming cadence. To the untrained ear, it sounded a lot like Arabic, which Wells did speak fluently.

  “Nowhere in particular?” The cabbie’s words were in Pashto. Wells knew he sounded better than he’d feared. No one would confuse him for a native, but Samir Khalili wasn’t a native either.

  “I want to see how it’s changed. I was here years ago.”

  “When the Americans first came?” With the CIA?

  “Your children?” Wells said in answer, pointing at the dashboard.

  “Yes. You have any?”

  “Two. A boy and a girl.”

  The cabbie stared at Wells a few seconds more before shoving the Toyota into gear. They spent the afternoon on Kabul’s cramped streets. Wells had seen the city during his years as a jihadi. He remembered it as desperately poor, its buildings shell-torn and crumbling, its residents destitute, amputees everywhere. The Russian invasion and the Afghan civil war had shredded it. The Taliban hadn’t had the money to rebuild it, and they considered Kandahar their real capital anyway.

  But the building boom that came with Western aid after September 11 had swept away the wreckage. Concrete mansions now filled the hills of the Sherpur neighborhood, west of the airport. “This one, forty-seven bedrooms,” the cabbie told Wells, pointing to one monstrosity. A block farther on: “This one has nightclub. In basement.” The houses belonged to drug traffickers, politicians, and the contractors who had made billions supplying the United States military. Many were empty now, as the Taliban closed in. Their owners had laundered every dollar they could and fled to Dubai.

  Southeast of Sherpur was Wazir Akbar Khan, the city’s international center. Ironically, the district was named for the emir who forced the British from Afghanistan in 1842, not the first or last time that an invading army had come to grief here. Wazir was home to the American embassy, the Presidential Palace, and the biggest non-governmental organizations. The aid groups had spent years fighting for causes dear to Western hearts, like women’s rights and the rule of law. Most locals remained indifferent, if not openly hostile, to those grand ideas. Terror attacks had forced the aid workers behind blast walls and checkpoints manned by Nepali mercenaries, whose grim faces offered stark proof that the NGOs had failed to win over the population they claimed to serve. The checkpoints meant that much of central Kabul was barred to civilian traffic. Delivery trucks and the overstuffed minibuses that served as the city’s public transportation system fought for space on the few open streets.

  Meanwhile, outside the center of town, Kabul now sprawled for miles. When Wells had first seen it, its population had totaled about one million. Now it had more than four million residents. Some had come for work during the boom. Others were rural refugees driven from their homes by the war.

  The growth had stretched Kabul’s limited infrastructure far past its breaking point. The city didn’t even have an underground sewage system. Waste drained into concrete ditches alongside the roads. During the dry season, the stuff had nowhere to go except into the air. Meanwhile, slums had grown up the mountains that surrounded the city. To survive Kabul’s cold nights, their inhabitants burned waste oil, scrap wood, and whatever coal they could scrounge. On windless days, the smog made a mockery of the pure snow to the east.

  Yet the city was wealthier and saner than it had been when Wells had known it. Despite the Talib attacks on hotels, government ministries, and aid organizations, it was mostly peaceful. Women no longer had to wear the veiled blue burqas that the Taliban had required, though many still did. The bustling stores testified to the fact that some Western cash had escaped politicians’ bank accounts and reached the streets.

  After a half hour fighting the traffic in Wazir, they finally made their way to the highway that led to Pakistan. “Where now?”

  “Stay on this a while.”

  “You want to go to Peshawar?”

  “You’re full of good advice.”

  The cabbie laughed. Wells liked this guy. Trusted him, too, for no obvious reason except those pictures on the dash. Wells had learned over the years to go with his first read, positive or negative. Most civilians weren’t great liars.

  They drove east another fifteen minutes. When Wells was sure they weren’t being tailed, he told the cabbie to turn around and take him to Pul-e Khishti, the city’s biggest mosque, which was known for its pale blue dome.

  “You want to pray?”

  “Shop.”

  For centuries, the streets around the mosque had served as a giant open-air bazaar. The Soviets had demolished the bazaar’s wooden storefronts, but the Afghans had replaced them with concrete buildings after September 11. Like the rest of Kabul, the market was uglier but busier now. It sold everything from fresh vegetables to live sheep, burqas to laptops.

  “For a kite?” Kite flying had been an Afghan pastime for centuries, made famous in the book The Kite Runner.

  “A phone.” Among other things.

  A half hour later, the cabbie parked in the giant plaza between mosque and bazaar. Between worshippers and shoppers, the spot looked overdue for a truck bomb to Wells.

  The bazaar’s streets were crowded and noisy. A woman in a canary yellow headscarf fingered a bolt of fabric, murmuring, “Too much, too much,” to a tailor who stood a respectful four feet away. A chicken squawked as a farmer shoved it at shoppers walking by. “Nice and fat.”

  After fifteen minutes of searching, Wells found the street he wanted, shopkeepers selling cooking supplies. Including knives and propane tanks. The stalls in the center looked to have the best stuff. At one, a green-eyed Tajik sent sparks flying as he sharpened a carving knife against a whetstone. Strangely, the stone was perched atop a massive oak desk that looked like it belonged in a white-shoe law firm in New York. Beside the grinding stone, a dozen blades were lined up neatly.

  “My friend,” the Tajik said. “Sharpest knife in Kabul.”

  Wells saw a forest of tiny white scars on the Tajik’s hands, proof of the dangers of the trade. He picked up the smallest of the knives, plastic-handled, the blade barely two inches long. Too small to be much use at dinner, but handy as a last-ditch weapon for close-in combat.

  “For sheep.” The man grinned. “Or whatever else you nee
d to cut.”

  Wells edged his thumb along the blade—

  “Careful—”

  Too late. The steel sliced through his skin.

  “How much?”

  “Thirty dollars, very good price. With this, too”—the Tajik reached under the desk, came up with a battered black leather sheath.

  Thirty dollars for a tiny blade was an extortionate price in a country where much of the population survived on a dollar a day. Wells picked up a second knife, this one five inches long, with a dagger’s sharp tip. And a long-handled plastic butane torch, the kind that Americans used to light barbecues. “Thirty for all of it.”

  “Sixty. You want junk, go somewhere else.”

  Knives were a poor substitute for pistols, but until the British made their delivery, the blades would have to do. Wells put three twenty-dollar bills in the Tajik’s scarred hand.

  —

  WELLS SPENT another hour buying mobile phones and shalwar kameez, the standard outfit for Afghan men, loose linen pants topped by a matching tunic and a sleeveless vest. As the sun vanished behind the city’s western mountains, he found his way back to the cab.

  Inside the Toyota, Wells strapped a knife to each leg, under his jeans and just above his boots. Kinda cowboy, he’d admit. “Let’s go.”

  Naturally, Kabul had expensive and well-guarded hotels for executives and aid workers. Wells had instead picked the Winter Inn, a modest guesthouse west of the city center that catered to Pakistani traders.

  “How much?” Wells said as they arrived. They hadn’t settled on a price for the afternoon.

  Greed and fear were visibly battling in the cabbie’s face. Wells was a lone American and normally would have been ripe for fleecing. The day’s itinerary and the knives on his legs suggested otherwise.

  “Four hundred dollars.”

  Wells shook his head.

  “Two hundred.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “One hundred. Fair price.”

  Wells gave him the hundred, plus a twenty-dollar tip, received a torn piece of paper with a phone number in return. “If you need me tomorrow—”

  —

  THE BIG HOTELS had blast walls, guards in body armor, airport-style X-ray scanners to check bags. The Winter Inn had three scrawny locals outside the front door, wearing AK-47s and bored faces. Inside, two more guards. One patted Wells down as the other poked through his bag.

  “You have guns?” the first said in English. “No guns here. We protect you.”

  “Naturally.”

  Halfhearted as it was, the pat-down probably would have found a pistol if Wells had been carrying one. But the knives got through.

  The front desk manager gave Wells an insincere, too-wide smile when he saw the Mitch Kelly passport. The smile meant either I wish you’d picked somewhere else. The Taliban know we don’t have Americans, so they don’t bother us—

  Or Hello, stranger. I’ll be right back, soon as I’ve called my friends so I can collect a commission on your ransom.

  Either way, Wells wanted Samir Khalili’s passport and pistol. He wanted to be wearing his new shalwar kameez instead of a T-shirt and jeans. Mitch Kelly was bound for trouble. Wells remembered what Shafer had said to him before his very first trip over here: We’ve been trying to buy their loyalty since 1980. Every year, the price goes up.

  Shafer said those words almost twenty years before. The price was still rising.

  “How long, sir?”

  “One night.”

  “Passport, please?” Wells handed it over, wondering if he would have to argue to get it back. But the clerk merely flipped through, checked the visa page, and returned it.

  Rooms started at thirty-five dollars. Wells spent an extra ten so he could splurge for a single with its own bathroom.

  “You pay cash, Mr. Kelly? Five-dollar discount.”

  Wells passed over forty dollars. The too-friendly clerk gave a too-friendly smile and slid across a key attached to an old-style brass plate. “Number 18. First floor”—meaning the second, as Afghans used the British system and called the street-level floor the ground floor.

  Number 18 was long and narrow. Its barred window looked out on a chimney-sized air shaft. Its bathroom consisted of a dirty toilet and sink, separated from the rest of the room by a thin blue curtain. The best evidence that the room wasn’t a prison cell were the plastic skis glued to the walls, a nod to the hotel’s name.

  Wells powered up his new phone, texted Here to the Afghan number Shafer had given him. The British officer must have been waiting because the response came back in minutes: Have your kit. Tomorrow 0900 turnoff TV Hill Road. 4R.

  TV Hill, officially named Mount Asmai, was a Kabul landmark southwest of the city center. Dozens of television antennas sprung from its long ridgeline. Though they claimed to love traditional culture, Afghans had a voracious appetite for television. Mud-brick slum houses stretched along the sides of the mountain, but the only road to the top came from the west, near Kabul University.

  Wells wasn’t sure what 4R meant. British spy slang? Read, react, ride, and roll . . . Didn’t sound much like MI6 to him. The rest of the message was clear enough. K, he texted back. He was happy enough not to have the pickup at the hotel. Mitch Kelly would walk out of this room in the morning and vanish, never to return.

  Wells stretched out on the floor to sleep. No reason to get comfortable. He gave the butane lighter the bed.

  —

  HE WOKE TO footsteps coming down the hall, two men at least. His room was blackout dark. He checked his new phone: 02:35. Outside, a low voice in Pashto. “Eighteen.” That fast, his head cleared. The clerk had sold him out. That the kidnappers had come for him inside the hotel surprised him. But unprotected Americans were a rare and precious commodity. These guys didn’t want to lose him to someone else.

  Now Wells understood why the clerk hadn’t made a copy of the Mitch Kelly passport, why he had offered Wells a discount for cash. The clerk hadn’t even registered him. The rooms around him were silent. The kidnappers must figure they could take him in the dark, drag him into a car. No one would connect him to this hotel.

  How many? Two, three at most. More would be in the way in a room this small.

  The footsteps were almost at the door now—

  How would they get him out? Blind him with flashlights, control him with a pistol. They knew he’d been searched at the entrance. They’d figure he was unarmed. Still, they wouldn’t come at him physically unless they had no choice. The clerk would have warned them that he was a big man. They wouldn’t want to risk a fight that might wake the other guests.

  The footsteps stopped outside his door. “Remember, let me talk,” the first man said.

  Then Wells knew. They would tell him that they were police. Most Americans instinctively trusted the police. They would expect him to give them the benefit of the doubt. He’d do the opposite. No slow play. He needed to distract them.

  Fire.

  Wells flicked on the butane torch, waved it at the curtain that separated the toilet from the rest of the room.

  A knock rattled the door—

  The curtain caught, the flames kissing the filmy blue fabric, throwing the devil’s own light into the darkness, the smoke fouling Wells’s throat—

  “Police,” a man said in heavily accented English from outside. “Afghan police.” Wells needed to move before the smell of smoke was obvious. He tugged the mattress onto the floor beneath the curtain—

  A key scraped in the lock.

  Wells pulled the bigger of his new knives with his right hand and crossed to the door. He opened it with his left hand while hiding the knife behind his right leg. Two men stood outside. Wells looked at them, knowing the ball had already been snapped, the players were moving. He had to decide now whether to kill them. Without identifying hi
mself. Without giving them the chance to explain themselves. If he was wrong, if they were really cops . . .

  They wore the uniform tops of the Afghan National Police, which meant nothing. They had Makarovs stuffed into their waistbands.

  Real police would have had Glocks.

  The flames grabbed the men’s attention. They looked past Wells. “What is this?” the man nearer Wells said in Pashto. He reached for his Makarov. Too late. Wells was already coming. He wrapped his left arm around the Talib’s back, pulled him close. With his right hand, Wells drove the knife into the Talib’s stomach. The sharpest knife in Kabul ripped through clothing and skin and fat into the intestines underneath and the big blood vessels that fed them. The reason for the phrase weak underbelly. The man’s eyes popped wide in disbelief. Wells ripped the knife upward for maximum damage and turned to the second Talib, who was trying to pull his Makarov—

  Wells didn’t waste time going for the pistol. He stepped forward and put all of his two hundred ten pounds into a right cross that caught the Talib flush in the jaw. The man sprawled backward, would have gone down if the hallway wall hadn’t propped him up. He reached again for the pistol, but his eyes were cloudy and his movements slow.

  Wells used his left hand to pin the Talib’s gun arm and raised his right elbow and slammed it into the man’s temple. The bone-on-bone crack echoed in the hall as lightning surged up Wells’s arm. The Talib’s eyes rolled back in his head and his tongue lolled from his mouth. He slumped to the floor, in a dark world all his own.

  The smoke poured from the room’s doorway now, but Wells had attacked so fast that the men hadn’t had time to yell for help. The first Taliban was trying to pull the dagger out of his stomach but didn’t have the strength. His blood-smeared hand came off the knife. He raised his fingers to Wells, a fluttery wave. Look what you’ve done.

  Wells stepped over him, looked inside the doorway. The mattress had ignited and the fire was raging. He hated to lose the Afghan clothes and run out of here dressed like an American, but he had no choice. Anyway, nothing would connect him to the hotel. His passport and wallet were in his pocket, and now the clerk’s decision not to copy his passport worked for him. The clerk would hardly want to tell the police that he’d tried to sell an American to the Taliban. Not that Wells expected much of an investigation. Most Afghan cops preferred committing crimes to solving them.