Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  Ronnie talked about alerting the authorities, and Adam assured her they were already on the case. She promised she would carry on taking care of the children as long as this thing took. She agreed to share Adam’s oath of secrecy, accepting his echo of Gary’s argument that if it were true that Morgan had been kidnapped, any public leak would increase the chances they might never see her again.

  On the doorstep, she hugged him tightly. “You can call me any time, day or night. I’m going to be here for you, now and when after this problem is over, and however it ends.”

  Adam stood in the porch, watching her get the kids in her car before setting off for home. His stomach tingled from the warmth of her breasts where she’d held herself against him.

  Before turning in, he checked his email. There were messages of congratulation from Estelle and the bigwigs at the office, and from just about every constitutional rights lobby group in America. Apparently his argument in court hadn’t been so dismal at all. He counted twenty-seven requests for interviews before he gave up, some from important TV shows: all the US networks, as well as Jon Stewart and good old BBC Newsnight. He hadn’t turned his cell phone on again since the hearing: no doubt his voicemail was jammed. Ordinarily, the attention would have made him euphoric. Now his only sensation was relief that he hadn’t had had to deal with this shit, and that all the people who really mattered knew how to reach him at home.

  But there was one email he knew he couldn’t ignore: a message from his mother-in-law. “Hi sweetie been trying to reach my darling daughter and you. Kisses and congratulations. You’re a superstar.

  “Would love to see the little ones. I was thinking of coming up for a few days next Wednesday. Would that be okay with you? Peace and love to all, Sherelle xxx.”

  As he wondered how to reply, Adam was lost for words.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Thursday, April 5, 2007

  She knew it must be still very early, because although her cell had no natural light, the sounds from the world outside the building were audible, and she had not heard the Fajr, the pre-dawn call to prayer. Eight days in and counting, and still the movie was running through her head, sometimes fast, sometimes in slow motion. Each time it started, she wanted to stop the projector, but try as she might, she couldn’t.

  It always began so peacefully, with memories of Akram: his genial presence; his addiction to Egyptian cigarettes; his preternatural skill at dodging Gazan roads’ many obstacles. But then it swiftly degenerated: the indelible image of his body on the apartment landing, with the jagged, bloody hole that had permanently destroyed his smile. Khalil and Omar strewn lifeless across the stairs. And then the moments—the whole thing could only have lasted seconds—of her abduction, and the crippling of Abdel Nasser. The dark red of his blood, and its unexpected viscosity as it flowed across the tiled floor. The final blow from the rifle butt that had silenced his terrible cries. Her own nauseating, suffocating journey, trussed and gagged in the trunk of the black Mercedes, where they had kept her until long after dark, forcing her to soil herself. Each time the parade of images finished, there was a pause, in which she fought her own consciousness to stop it coming back. Sometimes she managed to think about Charlie and Aimee for many minutes, long enough to picture them vividly and to hope that this time, the movie wouldn’t be coming back. But then it always started again. Against this inner projector, she seemed powerless.

  Nights of trying to sleep on thin plastic matting on the floor had left her muscles sore. But today, she could feel something different, a familiar ache in her belly. “Oh my God,” she said aloud. “I’m getting my period.”

  Morgan still had little idea who had taken her, nor where she was. Her room—her cell—was less than eight feet square: she guessed it had been some kind of storeroom or walk-in closet. Before she could use the toilet each morning, she had to await the arrival of the only female guard, who would apply a blindfold and escort her through the building. Morgan sensed that the corridors were narrow, the walls thin, and suspected she must be deep in one of Gaza’s refugee camps, teeming mazes of concrete shacks thrown up after the Israeli-Arab War of 1948, each box separated from the next by narrow, dirt-floored alleys.

  After the abduction she had been driven, cuffed and shackled in the Mercedes trunk, for more than half an hour. That meant she might be somewhere in Jabaliya, the huge camp next to Gaza City. She might just as easily be miles to the south, in Rafah or Khan Younis. The best she could hope for today was that the female guard, a woman in her early thirties whom Morgan had heard called Zainab, would arrive in time to prevent her soiling her orange, Guantanamo-style jumpsuit. Somehow she had to make her understand she needed some sanitary protection.

  Morgan heard the muezzin’s call at last: it must be close to five in the morning. Only another two or three hours before Zainab’s arrival. How come they never covered menstruation at SERE school? The answer was obvious: because the course was designed by men. Her mind drifted back to the Farm, and the faraway autumn of 1993. Her syndicate’s instructor for SERE training—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—was a Vietnam special forces veteran who went by the deceptively cuddly name of Bud, and who made no secret of his view that the Agency should not even consider deploying women in locations where they might need his skills. “Bud, you were a bastard,” Morgan said to herself. “And why the fuck did you never show us how to make a tampon from a piece of plastic matting?” Despite everything, she had made herself laugh.

  Bud told his students at the start of their course that it would rank as one of the most stressful experiences of their lives, and having been mock-kidnapped, deprived of food and sleep, subjected to relentless interrogation, and tied for hours in stress positions that cut off their circulation and made their muscles feel as if they were being eaten by fire ants, Morgan and the rest of her class agreed. Yet however tough it was, it was also only make-believe.

  “I can deal with this,” she told the walls of her cell. “I’m a professional.” She knew that psychologists had conducted studies which showed that those who had been prepared for captivity and taught to recognize its perils, tended to cope with it better, and could recover more quickly afterward. Yet every day she experienced times when she felt the proximity of a black, gnawing terror, a bottomless lake of fear opening up beneath her.

  The worst moments tended to come when the movie had stopped and she had been thinking about the children. One night she had awoken in the cell from a dream in which Adam was telling Charlie and Aimee that their mother was dead. Even after she wrongly thought herself fully conscious again, the dream had continued, the lurid scene playing out, its characters grieving though she tried to yell at them that she wasn’t dead at all. She saw their tears and heard their sobs, but there was nothing she could do that would make them stop. When she finally awakened for real, at first she dared not embrace her own relief, in case it, not the nightmare, were imaginary. There was no CIA course on earth that could have prepared her to deal with such visions. She simply had to fight to banish them.

  She must have dropped off, because Zainab had turned on the bulb in the ceiling and was shaking her awake. As ever, she was wearing a long dress and an Iranian-style manteau, a waistcoat that covered any lurking signs of femininity, while her head was wrapped in a scarf. “Toilet now. You go. You wash. Clean clothes.” She was holding a neatly folded pile: a new orange T-shirt, orange jumpsuit, and a pair of orange, men’s boxer shorts. With impressive attention to detail, her captors had also provided a pair of orange flip-flops. Morgan had been wearing the previous set of clothes for three days. Before that, she recalled with a shudder, she had spent almost three days and nights in her own blouse and slacks, their fabric spattered with gobs of Abdel Nasser’s blood.

  “Please,” said Morgan. “I need sanitary towels. It’s my time of the month.”

  Zainab looked blank. “Time? It is morning time. You wash.”

  Morgan mimed a pain in her stomach, holding her belly, bendin
g over, and grimacing.

  “You sick? No doctor. No having doctor today.”

  “It’s my period! Sanitary towels!” Morgan could not prevent herself from raising her voice. She mimed again, pointing to her crotch, trying to enact the idea of liquid flowing from between her legs. She fought the tears: “There’s no point in giving me a new fucking jumpsuit if you can’t get me some sanitary protection!”

  Recognition dawned in Zainab’s eyes. “Ahh! Kotex! Yalla. When you come back, we have.”

  Morgan submitted herself to the blindfold, and held out her hands for the cuffs. As Zainab propelled her toward the grubby bathroom, she was docile again. Zainab handed her a towel and some soap, removed the cuffs, pushed her inside and locked the door.

  “Ten minutes,” she said. “You have ten minutes. You wash.”

  There was a plastic chair. Morgan disrobed, draping her uniform over it. Quickly she used the lavatory, then stood beneath the shower. The water was barely warm, but for a precious little while, she could try to wash away her predicament.

  For the rest of the day, as during the days before, there was nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to read, nothing to do except pick at the trays of food that Zainab brought twice each day and, when Zainab allowed it, to pay visits to the toilet. There was no one to talk to: when she wasn’t directly attending to Morgan’s needs, Zainab was elsewhere, beyond the cell’s locked door. Morgan knew there were always others. Sometimes Zainab didn’t tie her blindfold quite securely, and she would catch a glimpse of a man’s broad back in the corridor. She would hear the thudding of their boots, and sometimes their voices; what sounded like arguments in loud, guttural Arabic. But none of them had once tried to speak to her, not even during the kidnapping.

  The cell was too small to pace around, and fearing that she might be under clandestine observation, Morgan felt too embarrassed to attempt any kind of workout. So she sat, cross-legged, on the bare floor, surrounded by bare, peeling, light-green walls, or she lay on the plastic mat, using her single thin blanket as a pillow. Sometimes she sang softly to herself, remembering songs from summer camps long past, or the traditional country and western tunes beloved by her father. She wished that her education had extended to learning poetry, but it hadn’t. So she lapsed into reverie, brooding on her children, her marriage, the likely identity of her captors, and her chances of release.

  Years earlier, Morgan had read Brian Keenan’s account of the five years he spent as a hostage in Beirut. He had called his book An Evil Cradling, a title that had left her slightly puzzled. Now she knew what he meant. Just as he had done, she felt as helpless and bewildered as a baby, with the sights and sounds of her restricted universe as strange as the sensations that entered the consciousness of a newborn. She remembered with a grimace that back in America, in a life impossibly remote, she used to complain so bitterly about her sense that she had no control over her destiny, and that circumstances—her children, and marriage to a driven, workaholic lawyer—had left her subordinate to other people’s wishes and needs. How strange that now seemed. Here she had no control over anything. If Zainab decided to be cruel to her, there was nothing Morgan could do; if she were to be pleasant, then that would be her gift. Somehow Morgan had to get her talking. But the only thing to look forward to now was that point in the evening when Zainab would come to turn off the light, whose switch lay behind the locked door. If she was lucky, the cumulative effort of hours of inactivity might be sufficient to bring sleep.

  At some point after the second call to prayer, she thought about Adam, reflecting on his own ordeal with a tenderness that felt unfamiliar. By now it would be clear to him that something had gone very wrong. Had the Agency been in touch? Almost certainly. No doubt Gary and one of his blue-eyed acolytes would soon arrange to meet him, exuding a breezy, bogus confidence that they knew how to rescue her. Like so much in their lives of professional duplicity, their attempt at reassurance would be based on lies. They would have no greater idea as to her kidnappers’ real identity than she did. What had Adam told the kids? How had he coped with his long-sought date with the Supremes?

  She felt herself beginning to disassociate herself from her surroundings, as if her mind had left her body and she were somehow floating free. So vivid was this waking dream that she seemed to be hallucinating. She was at home again, the floor shaking from the vibration of Adam’s clumsy footfall as he clumped down the stairs. Then she was smelling his fresh perspiration as he came in from a run, and hearing his effortless, English baritone, the first of several reasons why Morgan had decided the very first time she laid eyes on him that she would definitely be seeing this slightly awkward young man again.

  A week after that first coffee in Harvard Square, they had gone to bed together for the first time: a night of revelation. Any sign of awkwardness Adam Cooper might have had had vanished entirely the moment he became her lover.

  “So this has never happened before?” he said as she recovered, moist and glowing, the first time he gave her multiple orgasms. “Not even once with the boys you knew in Texas?”

  “No,” she mewed. “It hasn’t.”

  She doubted there was anyone in the world with whose body her own was so naturally compatible. How sad it was that in almost every other way, they had grown so far apart.

  Morgan had noticed that Zainab’s spoken English was variable. There were times when she barely seemed to grasp what her prisoner was trying to communicate, and others when she seemed quite competent. Cautious as Morgan knew she had to be, Zainab’s chattier moments were nonetheless a relief.

  “You have childrens?” Zainab said, standing in the cell with a tray of food.

  “Yes. I have two. And they need me.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Aimee and Charlie,” Morgan said. “Aimee and Charlie.” Her voice caught. “She’s ten. He’s eight. They’re good kids and I know they miss me. Do you have children, too?”

  Zainab ignored the question. “You like boy or girl childrens best?”

  “I like them both. I love them. I must see them soon. Can I call them?” A momentary surge of hope filled her heart. “When will your friends let me go?”

  “Maybe you don’t see them soon. I think it’s not possible. I think to call is also not possible. You know, in Arabia is many childrens whose father is in Guantanamo. Long time he doesn’t see them. He doesn’t talk on the phone. Maybe for you is long time, also. And in Gaza, many childrens don’t see their mother because she is dead, because the Israelis, they kill her.” She put down the tray. “After now, you eat. But why you leave your childrens to come to Palestine? This is not your war.”

  Morgan struggled to control herself. Why had she left Aimee and Charlie to come to this place, in pursuit of a mission she could barely understand? And why had she spent so many years when she should have been enjoying her comfortable life in Bethesda just longing for the chance to put herself back in harm’s way? She mustn’t let Zainab see she had got to her. “Get a grip,” she told herself inwardly—a phrase from Adam’s oh-so-English mother. She touched her face. Thank God. Her eyes were still dry.

  “You know why I’m here,” Morgan said, trying to smile. “I am here to investigate human rights abuses. The people of Gaza are my friends and I am trying to help them.”

  “Friends? Your friend is Mr. Abdel Nasser. He is collaborator. He help no one, only Israelis. Why you his friend?” This was beginning to sound like an interrogation.

  “He knows many people. He works with me.”

  Zainab raised her head and clicked her tongue: a gesture of contemptuous disbelief. She left and locked the door.

  Alone once again, Morgan found herself remembering the time Adam met Gary Thurmond. Adam would probably not remember him. Poor dear Adam had never been good with faces: another reason, as if one were needed, why he would not have been much use as an intelligence officer. But he and Gary had been introduced after the SERE course, when most of the class had joined their tutors
at a cheerless tavern near the Farm. They had even conducted a brief, spiky dialogue on the uses of the death penalty, which left neither of them much impressed with the other’s opinions.

  Gary had been standing at the bar, in those days much slimmer, sipping Coors Light from the bottle, getting a read on the students’ performance from Bud and the other instructors. “That was the day I decided that you and I were made for each other,” Gary told her months later. “They said you knew how to keep your mouth shut—even if you were hell-bent on sleeping with that pinko young lawyer.”

  Morgan had been assigned to work for Gary a few weeks after the SERE course. “Normally, the hardest part is making your cover credible,” he told her. “With you, it’s going to write itself. From now on, human rights ain’t gonna be just an academic exercise. It’s your job.”

  The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor conducted investigations, issued reports, and sent staff to testify at Congressional hearings. But unlike most of its far-flung personnel, Morgan’s section had been entirely the CIA’s creature. It had consisted of just four people: besides Morgan, just Gary, Eugene, now her colleague in Tel Aviv, and Alicia Phillips, a cheerful, fresh-faced woman from Milwaukee.

  Gary was their leader and point man, a veteran of behind-the-lines operations in the 1991 Gulf War and the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. But while he mostly stayed in the United States, Morgan, Eugene, and Alicia spent months at a time in the Balkans, living an intense, comradely life in a shared apartment in Sarajevo. Enabled by their cover, they soon developed an enviable network of contacts among the Muslim victims of Serb aggression. Gary was convinced that what they were seeing in former Yugoslavia—a new generation of young Muslim fighters, many of them veterans of Afghanistan—was the start of something that would one day threaten America. For Morgan, gathering intelligence about atrocities was a noble end in itself, and she wanted to see it influence American policy. For Gary, as he put it one day during one of his flying visits, that was simply “bullshit.”