Wells ignored the stares of the other passengers as he stepped back into the minibus. He’d sold himself a little too convincingly. He hoped the picture wouldn’t come back on him. He couldn’t stay in Asadabad tonight either, not after telling the man he was headed for Pakistan.
When the bus stopped again, he found a rickety taxi. “Where to?”
“Nangalam.” Twenty miles west of Asadabad. Wells remembered hiding there in early 2002 as the jihadis fled east toward Pakistan. The town had about five thousand people. Big enough to have a hotel, or at least a guesthouse, but small enough that the Talibs would hardly care about it.
Wells hoped.
—
NANGALAM’S ONLY HOTEL was a mix of wedding cake and Motel 6, four stories that formed a U around a central courtyard. Its concrete walkways were held up by pillars tiled with intricate geometric patterns. The place had seen better days. Harsh mountain sun had faded its yellow paint almost to white. Trash littered the courtyard. No doubt the hotel had been built to serve the Afghan contractors who supplied Camp Blessing. With the Americans and their money gone, it limped along.
At the front desk, the clerk’s eyes were half closed in an opiate trance. He told Wells that the rooms were two thousand afghanis a night, payable every day in advance. No identification required.
“Can I pay for more than one night?”
The clerk looked at Wells like he’d asked if the place took Discover cards. “If you like.”
Wells handed over eight thousand afghanis. “And give me a room on the top floor.” The operators would come by helicopter. A top-floor room would make the capture much easier.
“Are you sure? There’s no one up there.”
Even better. “I’m sure.”
“Some space to yourself, I understand.” The clerk handed over the key to room 404.
The room had a narrow metal bed and a knotty prayer rug. Wells knew he’d found the right place. The last place anyway. From here he could only go into the mountains, villages that didn’t even have guesthouses.
Outside, the sunset call to prayer sounded. Wells went to his knees, made his devotions. He didn’t feel much like praying this night. He couldn’t help but think of the shahada on the Talib flag, the way jihadis used the Quran’s words to justify all they did. Maybe he’d been away for too long. Maybe he couldn’t go back.
But as long as he was here, he had to pray. Samir Khalili would pray whenever he could.
The string of Arabic soothed him, as it had so often. When he was done, he unzipped his bag. Laid the AK and the Makarov on his cot. Stripped and rebuilt them both to be sure they were working. Tucked them away, found his new phone, dialed a Kabul number. A high-pitched chirp answered, another, then silence. Fifteen seconds later, Shafer picked up. The agency had arranged a local relay so that if the Taliban were monitoring local cellular towers they wouldn’t see a call to the United States.
“John.”
“Nam”—Yes in Arabic.
“Long speak no time. Tell me you’re not still in Kabul.”
So Shafer had heard about the Winter Inn. “Nangalam,” Wells murmured so quietly he could barely hear himself. Even with no one around, he didn’t like speaking English here.
“My knowledge of Afghan mudvilles is not exhaustive.”
“West of Asadabad.”
Faint clicking came through the line. “I see it. There’s only the one hotel, right? U-shaped, looks like a palace for the criminally insane?”
“Room 404.”
“Four-zero-four. Top floor?”
“Nam.”
“Good. Don’t suppose you want to tell me about last night.”
Wells didn’t answer.
“Guessing you don’t want to talkee the English much, but the big man and I agree that the quicker we get you to your final destination, the better.”
“Nam.”
“But it’s at least two nights away. You cool for that long?”
“Nam.” He would stay in his room, leaving only enough that his lack of movement wouldn’t seem suspicious. Afghanistan’s drug problem would work in his favor. The clerk would assume he was a fellow junkie.
“Fine. Now that we know where you are. COS Kabul has a meeting at Bagram tomorrow. He’ll put you at the top of the capture list. Say we have new intel from the ISI”—Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency—“on a high-value target with knowledge of Qaeda networks in Pakistan. The ISI’s been looking for you for a while, too, just got its own report that you’re in Nangalam.”
More or less what Wells and Shafer had talked about before. But sourcing the report to the ISI was smart. Every CIA officer knew that Pakistan was—to be polite—an unreliable ally. The ISI could have protected Samir Khalili for many years, not even telling the United States that he existed, and for its own reasons decided to give him up now. Maybe it was sacrificing him to protect someone else. Maybe he’d angered a Pakistani Taliban leader who had asked the ISI to make him disappear.
In other words, the ISI provided the perfect excuse for the fact that Khalili hadn’t been on the CIA’s target lists before. Better yet, Wells and Shafer wouldn’t even have to invent a reason why Khalili had come to Nangalam. If the Pakistanis decided to toss Khalili aside, they would do so in just this way, shuffling him over the border and telling the United States to come for him. The ISI wouldn’t care if Khalili ultimately told his American capturers that he’d worked with them for years. It would simply deny what he said—and take credit for helping the CIA catch another jihadi.
Best of all, the chief of station wouldn’t have to explain these subtleties to the operators on the rendition team. They already knew.
The most effective lies answered questions that hadn’t even been asked.
“Nam.” Wells wondered if he could get away with saying only Nam for the rest of the conversation. Maybe the rest of his time in Afghanistan.
“Glad you like. Only one problem. All three takedown teams at Bagram are on the hook for an op tomorrow night near Ghaznī. We can’t resched it without raising too many questions. So the night after tomorrow is the earliest. Then they process you for a couple of days.”
Process. A polite word for not letting him sleep more than fifteen minutes at a time, until he would do whatever his captors said if they would just let him rest. The travel teams liked their prisoners docile.
“Then they kick you to the travel team. You should be in Bulgaria a week from now. Ten days at most. Bet you never thought that idea would sound so good. Okay?”
Wells heard footsteps shuffling up the concrete stairs.
“Nam.” He pulled his pistol.
Shafer didn’t catch his urgency. “Okay—”
The steps stopped outside. His door was little more than plywood. An AK would tear it up.
Wells hung up, went to the door, pulled it open with the pistol low at his side—
Instead of Talibs, he saw only the clerk, pupils pinprick-tight, head wobbling on his skinny neck, a half smile creasing his lips. “I bought what you wanted. Do you want to pray with me?”
Wells was having lousy luck with hotel clerks. After Wells asked for the top-floor room, the guy had decided Wells had given him the money to buy drugs for them both—even though Wells specifically said that he was paying for extra nights. Another cultural cue missed, another mistake.
This one he could turn to his benefit.
“You know what the Prophet, peace be unto him, told us about drugs?” Wells shouted in Arabic, making sure everyone else in the hotel would hear. “Satan’s plan is to sow hatred among you with drugs and gambling. Haram, haram, haram”—Forbidden, forbidden, forbidden.
“You—”
“I paid you in advance. So you wouldn’t bother me. Because I saw what you were.” Wells pushed his pistol into the clerk’s chest. “Do you know
the penalty for drugs? For abusing the body that Allah has given you? Death. Then eternal torment.”
The clerk’s head bobbed metronomically as he looked at the pistol.
“Eternity in hell. Pray that Allah forgives you.” Wells shoved him with the flat of the pistol. The clerk stumbled back, almost went over the railing, whimpered like a kicked dog.
“Don’t bother me again.”
The clerk was still mumbling as he turned for the stairs and his next fix.
Wells watched him run. Guy probably hadn’t moved so fast in years. One problem solved. And everyone else staying here would have heard him yelling. Samir Khalili, who quoted the Quran and hated heroin. An aging Lebanese-Canadian jihadi who had become more trouble to his Pakistani handlers than he was worth.
Soon enough, men would come for him. He would hope they were American, not Talibs.
He went to sleep as Samir Khalili.
—
BUT WHEN he woke, he was John Wells again. He wanted more than anything to hear his daughter’s voice. Not even to speak, just to hear her call him Daddy.
His phone told him it was 2:12 a.m., the emptiest hour. Dawn a dozen dreams away. The room was cave dark and cold. Wells stared at the ceiling, reminded himself why calling New Hampshire would be a mistake. Nothing would take him farther from the place he needed to be. Emmie would be confused and upset. Anne would be furious. And if the Talibs did happen to be monitoring the mobile networks—
He found himself reaching for the phone, thumbing in the number, deleting it, thumbing it in again, like a sixth grader who couldn’t decide whether to call his crush—
Enough.
As long as he had this phone, he had a lifeline. To Langley, to New Hampshire, even to Dilshod the cabdriver. A way out.
The last time he’d been undercover here, he’d given himself no escape.
Destroying the phone would be a mistake. He should check in with Shafer once a day, make sure the chief of station had briefed the capture team, that the plan was moving ahead. He should have a way to tell Shafer if he changed rooms or had to leave this hotel to escape the Taliban.
But Wells no longer cared about the practicalities. The team would come for him, in two nights or in two weeks. He would stay until it did. If the Talibs came for him, he’d have no way to escape anyway.
So a mistake, yes.
But the right mistake. The only way to leave Emmie where she belonged. To leave John Wells, too. He laid the phone on the floor, smashed it until its screen darkened and its shell cracked and it gave out a sad electronic sigh and fell silent. Then he had the pistol beside his bed and slept.
—
THE NEXT DAY PASSED. The next night. He didn’t leave his room. Neither the clerk nor anyone else bothered him. He prayed, read the Quran, stared at the photos and identity cards and Canadian passport that were no longer pocket litter but instead the proof of the life he had lived as Samir Khalili. He wondered why his Inter-Services Intelligence handlers had left him in Nangalam. He had known them for years and always trusted them, but this trip felt different.
On the second day, he wandered to the town’s grubby outdoor market, which had a no-name restaurant selling plates of lamb and rice. At noon, the meat tasted fine. By sunset, he knew it wasn’t. John Wells’s stomach had forgotten the rigors of these mountains. Samir Khalili would pay the price.
He tried to read the Quran as he waited for the ache to pass. Instead, it twisted on itself, doubled him over. The minutes piled like bricks. He couldn’t keep anything down, not even water. Finally, he pulled off his shalwar kameez and lay naked and shivering on his bed, dreading the ten-foot trips to the toilet. By the early morning, he was flushed and dehydrated and feverish all at once. The little room stank like an outhouse in July.
The part of him that was still John Wells knew that the illness might help him if the capture team came tonight. The operators would see he wasn’t a threat.
But he couldn’t count himself lucky.
He thought he might be hallucinating when he heard the helicopters sweeping overhead. He dug his fingernails into his palms, made himself focus. The copters seemed to be gone, if they’d been real at all. He staggered up, turned on the tap, wiped down his face with a dribble of cold water.
Now he heard them again. This time, he was sure. So the Americans and not the Talibs had found him first. After your adventure-filled trip to Afghanistan, what’s next for you?
I’m going to Bulgaria!
Above him, the helicopters closed until their engines set the room vibrating. They weren’t as loud as he expected until he realized that they must be the modified Black Hawks the Special Ops teams flew, with special cladding to keep their engine noise down.
—
SAMIR KHALILI didn’t care about cladding, though. He wanted out. He stumbled for the door, then realized he was naked. The ultimate humiliation. He reached for his underwear and pants, hoping his gut wouldn’t betray him yet again. But it did. This time, he barely reached the toilet.
Why had Allah visited this stomach curse upon him tonight of all nights?
Above he heard the chick-chick of ropes kissing the roof. The Americans would slide down those ropes. They were coming for him. After so many years. Why had the Pakistanis betrayed him? He’d always done what they asked. He wondered if he should reach for his AK, let the Americans make a martyr of him, take one or two with him. But he had no chance. They were barely even human in their armor and their night vision goggles.
Besides . . . he didn’t want to die in this room. He sat helpless as the thumps began above, men sliding down the ropes to the roof. How long had passed since he’d first heard the helicopters. Two minutes? Three?
They were outside his door now. For the first time, he wondered if they’d just shoot him and be done with it. He heard three low puffs. The lock gave and the door inched open and a grenade rolled inside.
Oh, come on, not another flashbang, they’re the worst—Wells now.
Samir Khalili squeezed his eyes shut, clapped his hands over his ears, and the room exploded in lightning and thunder, as though Allah Himself had come to express His displeasure.
When he opened his eyes, the door was open. The flash from the grenade had nearly blinded him. But he could make out shadows. The men were inside, the Americans. They swept him onto the floor. They pulled his arms behind his back, cuffed him tightly, sat him up. They were speaking, but he couldn’t hear them. A thousand calls to prayer filled his ears. They held him fast and pulled a bag over his head.
The darkness swallowed him. He closed his eyes and didn’t fight as they pulled him to his feet and looped fabric straps to him, under his arms and between his legs. They dragged him out, a man on each side. When he was outside, they clicked hooks to the harness they’d made. The metal swiped his chest and back.
His ears cleared just enough for him to hear them laughing, the last sound before the harness tightened and he rose, dragged though the air like a puppet in the hands of a child, naked, his humiliation complete. He rose toward the helicopter, which would take his freedom, and he hated these Americans, hated them, hated them—
—
THE ROUGH, gloved hands bundled him into the helicopter, and Wells knew Samir Khalili was real to him, and always would be. The men in Bulgaria would believe him, too. He smiled under his hood as the Americans trussed him in a blanket and threw him to the floor and the Black Hawk rose and turned west, to Bagram, his first stop on the long journey home.
13
RAQQA
NEITHER GHAITH nor Soufiane Kassani spoke much on the drive back to Raqqa the afternoon after what Kassani thought of as Experiment No. 1. Ghaith handled the SUV more carefully. Like he wanted to be sure he wouldn’t have an accident. Every so often, his eyes strayed to the bags in the back seat that held the bottles of DF.
For himself,
Kassani couldn’t stop remembering how that first prisoner had died. How his body flailed like he was trying to escape his own flesh.
Kassani was surprised the death bothered him at all. He had killed men in terrible ways before. He had once filled his stomach with lamb and rice an hour after burying a Kurdish prisoner alive. But the apparent lack of cause and effect with sarin made its effects harder to take. When you shot a man, or hit him over the head with a shovel and poured sand in his mouth until it came out his nostrils, his pain made sense. But this stuff looked like water. Yet there was no stopping it, no hiding from it.
The human body was a miracle. That it could be erased so quickly by the product of a few chemical reactions seemed proof of the devil’s existence.
Nonetheless.
Nonetheless, from a practical point of view, Kassani’s experiment had succeeded. The sarin worked. And even after the experiment, Kassani had nearly four liters of DF.
Viewed one way, four liters wasn’t much. Bashar al-Assad had tons of the stuff stockpiled in bunkers in Damascus, a final insurance policy if the Syrian army crumbled and the caliph’s men came to his gates.
Still, spread through a rush-hour subway train in New York or London, four liters of sarin could kill hundreds of people. The horror would be unimaginable. If Kassani couldn’t get his mind off the dying men, what hope did softheaded American civilians have? Smartphones would carry the images everywhere.
In its own way, September 11 had been a fluke. Pilots would never again open their cockpit doors to hijackers. A jumbo jet would never again be turned into a flying missile. But for all their power, the kaffirs couldn’t stop what Kassani had unleashed today. Not even if an American drone killed him or bombed his laboratory to rubble. Kassani had saved his work for posterity. He made digital videos of each step. He kept meticulous notes. Of course he had hidden all the files. He didn’t want to tip the Americans to his progress. But someday—probably after the first attack, probably soon—he would put everything he’d done online. It would live forever in the cold bosom of the Internet.
The Prisoner Page 20