“What now?” Paco asked.
“I thought we might get some coffee. We can come back in an hour and check for replies.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Falk slapped his palms on his thighs and stood, a little stiff after the intense session at the keyboard. He supposed he was still weary from the long cruise across rough seas.
“Oh, my,” the librarian exclaimed, glancing out a window, “this is as busy as we’ve been all week.”
Two more customers had just emerged from a familiar black Suburban. One, a woman in a navy skirt and white blouse, peered through the window of Paco’s Ford. The other, a man in a polo and khakis—Falk knew the uniform well—was already coming up the steps.
“I guess this means no coffee,” Paco said.
“I’m sure they’ll have some at the office in Bangor.” Falk sighed as the door opened, bringing with it the noise of the highway and the cry of a seagull. “Welcome to your new life, Paco. Hope it’s what you really wanted.”
EPILOGUE
THE STORY NEVER MADE the papers. Too many denials and too few confirmations.
There was also the matter of the so-called Gitmo spy ring to divert the media’s attention. Two more military interpreters were arrested in the week following Falk’s escape, and even though all but a few minor charges were eventually dropped, it captured the public’s attention for weeks.
But four months later Falk and Gonzalo were still free men, which Falk supposed was victory enough for their Nation of Two.
Gonzalo’s debriefing took up most of that time, leading to yet another flurry of deportations from Cuban interest sections in Washington and New York. The Bureau then relocated Gonzalo under a new name. Just as well, since Falk would always think of him as Paco. Falk asked around about possible whereabouts, but no one would admit to knowing anything, although one agent dropped strong hints that it was out west, perhaps near Scottsdale. Apparently a woman had joined him, and Falk wondered if it might be the mysterious Elena until someone offered the tidbit that she was Venezuelan.
Falk still had his job, at least in name, even if the Bureau had stripped him of his security clearance and stuck him behind a desk in the Hoover Building where he could be watched at all hours.
There were casualties, of course.
One was Adnan, swallowed into the belly of a transport plane the day after Falk reached Navassa Island. The best Falk had been able to determine, based on covert communications with Tyndall and a few others sympathetic to his predicament, Adnan had vanished into a Yemeni dungeon for a lifetime of either torment or neglect, hidden away as one of those minor national embarrassments who could do harm only if allowed back into the light of day.
Whenever Falk thought of Adnan now—an almost daily occurrence—he remembered the propaganda poster taped up in the interrogation booth, the stylized photo of the grieving mother wishing her son would come home.
Falk’s father died three weeks after their reunion, without getting to see his son a second time. The debriefers told Falk they were too busy to spare him, although he was able to phone a few times. They did let him out for the funeral. It took only a day to settle the estate. Someone appraised the lot the trailer was on, and by the time the funeral home had totted up the charges both parties agreed to call it even if Falk signed over the deed. His father was buried on a hill with a view of the island’s old granite quarry, where he had worked his first job when he was young and single and hadn’t yet put out to sea.
But that was in late August. Now it was a Wednesday in early December, and as Falk sat at his desk in Washington opening mail, another name from among the wounded leaped out at him from a return address atop the pile:
“Doris Ludwig, Buxton, MI.”
He carefully tore open the envelope, as if the fragile remnants of her grief might spill out and shatter on the desk. Her handwriting was neat and plain, the earnest penmanship of someone taking care not to ask for too much.
Dear Mr. Falk,
After all this time, it pains me to say that I have been unable to get anyone to answer my many questions about my husband’s death at Guantánamo. I was hoping to enlist your help, since you were the investigator who called me last August. A Lieutenant Carrington from the Judge Advocate General’s office tells me that you are no longer assigned to the case, and he repeated their earlier conclusion that Earl’s misfortune, as he called it, has officially been ruled a “death by misadventure” due to a boating accident in an unauthorized craft.
But after speaking with you, and also with Ed Sample at my husband’s bank, I am not satisfied that the Army has adequately looked into matters. May I ask if you are satisfied with their findings? I don’t remember your words exactly, but you said something like, “I’ll stay on top of it.” So I guess that is what I’m asking you to do now. My e-mail address is below, in case you wish to respond in that manner.
Yours truly,
Doris Ludwig
P.S.—This is NOT about money. The Army has been more than generous in that respect. But at this point I no longer know who else to turn to.
So they’d paid her off, but not enough to buy her silence. Well, good for you, Doris, even if there was little Falk could do in his current position. That much had been clear only two days ago, when Bokamper had broken a long silence to phone and suggest a meeting. They had burned each other pretty badly, but Bo sounded interested in starting over, or at least coming to terms. So, they settled on a bar in Georgetown—no starched tablecloths this time—and agreed on 9 p.m.
Bo, who had never arrived on time and probably never would, walked in with his usual swagger.
“How’s your gal?”
“We’re hanging in there,” Falk said. “She asks about you all the time, of course.”
“I’ll bet. But I’m glad to hear you’re still together. I guess she proved me wrong.”
She hadn’t, actually. Pam and he still wrote every week, but the passionate tone of their earliest letters had cooled. Falk supposed distance was partly to blame. She was now stationed at Fort Bragg, just far enough to make a weekend drive impractical. But Falk suspected that Bo’s earlier hunch was closer to the heart of the problem. Once she learned of his past, she seemed to step back a little, as if trying to decide if this sort of man could ever fit comfortably with her own ambitions. They had twice planned to meet for a weekend, but both times a last-minute assignment came up. At her end, not his. Falk hadn’t given up, but he was beginning to wonder if maybe she wanted him to.
“Never got to tell you how impressed I was with the way you made it out of there,” Bo said. “I mean, I knew you were a sailor, but Jesus, a tropical storm?”
“Tropical depression. Downgraded almost the minute I put in. No need to make it a bigger deal than it was.”
“Whatever you say, Captain Ahab.”
“Besides, Endler is the real escape artist. I hear he’s getting all sorts of credit now for having averted a major embarrassment.”
Endler’s two main coconspirators hadn’t come out of the affair too shabbily, either. One, a deputy secretary of state, probably got the worst of it, receiving an early retirement with a nice pension. The other, a ranking civilian at the Defense Intelligence Agency with a tendency for bombast, had been more problematic, until some bright light came up with the idea of turning him loose on the United Nations as the next U.S. ambassador. Confirmation was pending.
“What can I say?” Bo shrugged. “Another reason the Doc’s so great to work for.”
“I might agree, to a point, if he hadn’t set that slimeball Van Meter free.”
“Van Meter’s not out of the woods yet. You watch. He’ll get active time and a dishonorable discharge.”
“But not on a murder charge.”
“Not without the whole mess coming out in a court-martial. You take what you can get.”
“Meaning he’ll do a year or two, then join some security firm that will let him go shoot Iraqis for three times what the A
rmy would have paid.”
“It’s a growth industry. Maybe you should get your résumé out.”
“I’ve considered it. At least the Arabic’s still marketable.”
They talked a while longer. Drank a few beers. Falk was genuinely interested in hearing about the wife and kids, and Bo seemed genuinely interested in telling him.
But not until they paid the tab did Bo finally broach the question that had hovered between them throughout the conversation.
“So what are we now, Falk? Friends, maybe?”
“Why don’t we leave it at comrades in arms? You proved that much, I guess, back at the marina.”
“I can live with that for now.”
“Yeah, but can you still sleep at night?”
“Hey, you know me.”
“All too well.”
Bo must have taken the remark in the best possible light, because he smiled. Or maybe not, because he then launched into a short lecture that Falk later figured was the message he had intended to deliver all along.
“Something like this never really dies, you know.”
“Something like what?” Did he mean friendship?
“This whole mess down in Cuba. After a while people will stop talking about it, but that won’t mean it’s dead. It’ll just be in remission. Like a tumor. Do something to stir it up and it’ll be as malignant as ever.”
“Are you warning me?”
“The warning’s for everybody. Me included. So just lie low. Let it rest. ’Cause it’s just not worth it. Start poking around again and you might wake up one morning in your very own Gitmo, one of those places without a name where no one knows the latitude, the longitude, or even the time of day.”
Bo was smiling, as if to say this was all hyperbole, or some kind of a joke. Falk didn’t see the humor, and said nothing.
“C’mon, man, you don’t think I’m serious, do you? It’s not like I’d ever help them pull off something like that.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t need to.”
“Like I said. You’re the one who controls your future. Just don’t give them an excuse to make it otherwise. Is that too much to ask, one friend to another?”
Bo smiled again, then held out his big mitt for a farewell shake. Falk gave a halfhearted wave and walked out of the bar without looking back.
And now, with Doris Ludwig’s letter staring up from the desk, he finally saw her plea for help for what it really was—an opportunity to either poke at the tumor or leave it in remission, perhaps for good.
Falk drafted six different replies, striving each time for that delicate balance between compassion and passing the buck. In one he even implied that perhaps something hadn’t been on the up-and-up about the investigation, and urged her to keep digging.
Then he imagined her flying out to Washington, using her kids’ Christmas money so she could spend a few days traipsing down the marble corridors of Congress, shunted into undersized and overcrowded anterooms with earnest young staffers who would nod and take notes and promise action, while striking that delicate balance between compassion and passing the buck. Then they would forget her name and face by the time they had downed their afternoon lattes.
It was with that despairing image in mind that he logged on to the Internet, clicked over to the server for his personal e-mail account and called up the menu for the “Sent” basket. And there it was, still alive, even if buried beneath four months of other correspondence, less like a tumor than a piece of unexploded ordnance. He supposed Paco wouldn’t mind if he fired this bombshell of theirs on one last flight of fancy, so he clicked on the Forward prompt and typed in Doris Ludwig’s e-mail address. Then he added a brief preface:
Dear Mrs. Ludwig,
These are the facts as I know them. As you will note from the original date and the listed recipients, the relevant authorities have already been notified. You are welcome to pursue further action, but I can tell you from personal experience that your efforts will be likely only to produce further grief for you and those you love. But that decision is yours, and yours alone. At the very least you are entitled to know these things.
Sincerely,
Revere Falk
After hitting the Send button he finally relaxed, wishing for a moment that Paco had been there to enjoy it with him.
Then he decided he had better get to work on that résumé.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MANY THANKS to Torin Nelson, Mark Jacobson, and numerous others who would rather not to be identified by name, for offering helpful insights on the workings of interrogations at Guantánamo, and also for their observations on the strange atmospherics of the place. And without the tireless work of the American Civil Liberties Union in prying loose hundreds of Camp Delta documents through the Freedom of Information Act, I would have missed out on many valuable insights.
Thanks also to Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, the Army public affairs officer in charge during my trip to Guantánamo in the summer of 2003 for the Baltimore Sun, as well as to the many officers and enlisted personnel who agreed to speak with me then. Although Pentagon rules greatly limited my access and freedom of movement, the soldiers who assisted me were at all times as courteous and professional.
Several employees of the FBI, who shall remain nameless at their request, were invaluable in educating me on the workings of Cuban intelligence agents in the United States.
The descriptions of all things nautical in this book would have been hopelessly at sea without the help of my dad, Bill Fesperman, who could outsail Revere Falk. Thanks also to my good friend Chip Pearsall for insights from his Coast Guard days.
And, for those who were wondering, yes, those “OPSEC Corner” excerpts from Camp Delta’s weekly newspaper, The Wire, are authentic.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAN FESPERMAN is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and worked in its Berlin bureau during the years of civil war in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in Afghanistan during the recent conflict. Lie in the Dark won the Crime Writers Association of Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel, and The Small Boat of Great Sorrows won the association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller.
ALSO BY DAN FESPERMAN
Lie in the Dark
The Small Boat of Great Sorrows
The Warlord’s Son
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2006 by Dan Fesperman
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Map by MappingSpecialists
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fesperman, Dan, [date] The prisoner of Guantánamo / Dan Fesperman.—1st ed. p. cm.
1. Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba)—Fiction. 2. Prisoners of war—Fiction. 3. Military interrogation—Fiction. 4. Yemenites—Fiction. 5. Intelligence service—Fiction. 6. War on terrorism, 2001—Fiction. I. Title PS3556.E778P75 2006 813'.54—dc22 2006003197
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26529-6
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