Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  He was already feeling a little hunted when he noticed an envelope had been pushed underneath his door. The card inside was signed by a man named Colonel Yitzhak Ben-Meir. “Mr. Cooper, I would like to meet you in order to discuss your visit to Gaza. You should know that I met your wife before she was kidnapped. I will call you in the morning.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Thursday, May 3, 2007

  After two solid days locked in her room in the basement, Morgan was relieved to be outside again in the open air. But from the moment she sat down with Abu Mustafa in their usual place beneath the date palm, she could see he was troubled. He seemed distracted, and had none of his usual appetite.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You’re not yourself. Trouble at home?”

  “As I told you before, I don’t know what’s happening at home, because I cannot speak to my family. And I don’t know what you mean. I am fine.”

  “You sure don’t look fine. Well, I’m sure you must be missing them. I do know exactly how you feel.”

  Abu Mustafa shrugged.

  “So why don’t you let me go? If you did, you could go home too.”

  Before he could reply, the real source of Abu Mustafa’s unease was apparent. Today, they would not be on their own. Morgan felt the ice enter her veins as a third person strode imperiously out of the house and across the yard to join them: Karim. A guard followed him with another plastic chair, and he sat down at the table, dressed in a Bedouin robe.

  “Hello Morgan. Is nice to see you. You are thirsty today?” He giggled artificially, an unpleasant, high-pitched gurgle. “Hallas. Is time now for real questions.” He gestured toward Abu Mustafa. “My friend he explain what I am saying.”

  Abu Mustafa cleared his throat. He did not look happy, but his words betrayed no sign of disloyalty. “As you would expect, I have been keeping Karim informed of our talks. But we feel we need to move now to matters of more substance, such as the true nature of your mission to Gaza. We have also been talking to Abdel Nasser. But we need to hear it from you.”

  If anything, Morgan felt surprised that Abu Mustafa had already spent so long on what could only be described as distant background. It was finally time to put her strategy into effect: to try to protect the secrets she could never divulge by giving up what was safe. “I was here to observe, and to make reports on what I saw. My mission was really no different from when I was in the Balkans. My government is heavily invested in the peace process, but in order for its diplomatic efforts to be effective, it needs up-to-date and accurate information from Gaza. We no longer have personnel stationed here permanently. The Agency knew I was anxious to return to fieldwork, and so it asked me to begin making frequent visits, while continuing to spend most of my time at home. So it suited us both and, well, here I am.”

  “Here I am,” said Karim, aping her accent. “No different from Balkans.” He snorted.

  “Mrs. Cooper, it is all very well saying you came here to observe,” Abu Mustafa said, trying to regain the initiative. “But observe what? Al Jazeera television is here all the time, and there are other correspondents. What did you need to find out that was so secret it needed the skills of an officer of the CIA’s clandestine service, and the recruitment of Abdel Nasser?”

  “Governments like to do their own reporting on the ground. But while it’s true I work for the Agency, the kind of reporting they wanted from me here was much the same as it would have been if I had been working for the State Department.”

  Karim got up, crossed the narrow distance to Morgan’s chair, then bent down, placing his face just inches in front of hers. “You are lying,” he said. “And you lie, you know what happen.”He moved his fingers across his throat not once but several times, as if demonstrating a wood saw.

  Morgan did not get the chance to reply, because Karim’s features were suddenly frozen with terror. In the distance, she heard what sounded like the throaty engine of a grass mower trimming a college softball field. It rapidly grew louder. Karim yelled at Abu Mustafa in Arabic and they both stood up and started to run, Abu Mustafa pausing only to grab Morgan’s wrist and drag her with them.

  “An Apache,” he yelled, “an Israeli Seraph! We must get undercover! Down the stairs, into the basement!” As they rushed for the house, Morgan caught sight of the helicopter’s dark fuselage looming over the edge of the palm tree, as if seeking out its target. But it carried on moving, and they dashed down the narrow steps into the cellar and along the corridor, ending up in the only too familiar room where Morgan had been tortured.

  There, moments later, she heard the muffled impact of a guided Hellfire missile. Wherever it was, it had not landed on their compound. Morgan remembered what Karim had been through in the Montenegrin forest. His reaction did not seem so disproportionate.

  He looked at her sternly, still breathing heavily, apparently trying to recover his composure and authority, and brushed a fleck of imaginary dust from his robe. “Now I go,” he said. “But we talk again later.”

  Yitzhak Ben-Meir followed up the note he had left at Adam’s hotel with a phone call early the following morning. His voice, Adam noted, sounded unexpectedly hesitant; as soon as he had seen the note, he had assumed Ben-Meir must be some kind of Israeli spook. Adam invited him to the hotel for a late breakfast, and they met in the lobby at a quarter to ten. Loading their plates with hummus and salads from the buffet, they made their way to the back of the terrace. “This is excellent,” Ben-Meir said. “We can chat without being overheard.”

  Adam was in no mood for small talk. “I think you owe me several explanations,” he said as they sat down, “so let’s deal with them. Why the interest in me, all of a sudden? Morgan’s been missing for more than a month, and yet this is the first sign of interest I’ve had from any Israeli. Oh, don’t tell me. I can guess. You want to know what I discovered in Gaza. Well, that part’s easy. I almost got killed.”

  “Mr. Cooper—may I call you Adam?—the truth is, we didn’t get in touch with you before because our American colleagues asked us not to. Or so I understand. As for nearly getting killed: I am sorry to hear this, but I’m sure you knew that Gaza is a dangerous place. I heard there was a bombing yesterday. The militants were also firing rockets at us—one hit a house in Sderot. Anyhow, I’m glad you managed to get out in one piece. What happened?”

  “I got caught up in the aftermath of the bombing,” Adam said. “A funeral for the victims where there were soon more dead bodies. One was the driver of the car I was sitting in when he was shot. But never mind about that now. You said in your note you met Morgan before she was kidnapped. How was that? And how was she?”

  Ben-Meir sighed and played with his coffee spoon. “Look, I really would like to tell you. But you have to promise that you will treat everything I say in confidence, and that means not telling your CIA contacts at the US embassy. So far as they are concerned, this meeting isn’t happening.”

  Adam looked at him quizzically. “Why? What’s the big secret you’re trying to hide?”

  “There’s no big secret. I just don’t think it’s in either of our interests for them to know. Officially I’m retired, and that gives me more latitude. I feel it incumbent on me to help you find your wife. But actually, my own colleagues do not know I have sought you out. So do I have your word?”

  Adam nodded. “But my assurance that I keep this confidential comes with a condition,” he said, “that you don’t give me bullshit. If you can’t give me answers for reasons of operational secrecy, fine. I get that. But don’t fucking lie to me, okay?”

  “I won’t lie to you. You have my word.”

  “We’ll see how much that’s worth.”

  “Look, as I told you, this isn’t business. It’s personal. I liked your wife. You can have no idea how sorry I am that she’s missing, and I feel partly responsible. I have had comrades taken prisoner, and I know a little of what it’s like.”

  Adam could feel his eyes were wide. This he had not expected. �
�So,” he said. “How’d you meet her?”

  “For the first time, on the beach, the day before she went to Gaza. She had been out for a jog, as I had been told she does most mornings. One of my colleagues had asked me to do him a favor.”

  “A favor? What kind of favor? You mean, he asked you to check her out? To see what the gringos were doing in Gaza?”

  “Of course, that was part of it. The Americans share a lot less with us than you might think, and I was asked to approach her because we needed to know what she was doing. Experience has taught us that we cannot allow foreign intelligence agency operatives to run around in the Occupied Territories without a degree of, how shall I put it, supervision.”

  Adam snorted. “She’s a professional. I bet she didn’t tell you much. She certainly never tells me.”

  “No. She didn’t. But you see, finding out about her mission wasn’t really my main purpose, though I’m sure she thought that it was. Actually it was rather different.”

  “Different? I don’t understand.”

  “She had encountered a certain problem the previous day. For some reason, when she got to Erez, although it had been open earlier that morning, she found the border was closed.”

  “And? I still don’t get it.”

  “My colleague had told me there was a substantial risk that, having been refused, she’d just give up and fly home—she couldn’t afford to wait here in Israel. Something to do with being back in time for you to fight a court case. My job was to figure out a way to make sure that didn’t happen, that she did make another attempt to enter Gaza. I don’t know why it was so important. But that’s why I feel guilty, and the reason why I’m telling you far, far more than I should.”

  “Why didn’t you just call her at her hotel and tell her and say, ‘it’s okay, you can go to Gaza?’”

  “My colleague wanted me to find some way of making her think that she was using her skills as an officer, and so creating her own opportunity. I know that sounds strange, but I suppose the idea was to stop her realizing how much we knew about her. So when I first talked to her at the beach, I gave her a business card. I knew she’d find it easy to confirm I’d been in intelligence. And I gambled she’d call me later, to ask what I could do for her.”

  “And she did.”

  “Yes, she did. So later we met for dinner. She told me a lot about her life, about you and your kids. We had a pleasant evening. And then she asked me if I could use my contacts to have Erez opened the next morning—so she could fulfill her assignment, and not get home too late. Well, of course I could do just that. It was the whole point.”

  Adam was horrified. It seemed that this man had played his wife, manipulating her sense of urgency in order to consign her to the place where she had been kidnapped. But he tried to look deadpan; it was vital he find out as much as he could.

  “But why? Why all the subterfuge, Yitzhak?” Adam said. “You’ve told me what happened, but none of it makes any sense.”

  “It doesn’t really make sense to me, either. But I thought you should know. Look, this is a guess, just speculation. But the colleague who asked me to do this, he knows a lot of Americans. He worked with them years ago, in the same region that your wife was last in the field, the Balkans. My hunch is that one of his American friends was especially keen that she should make this visit, and asked him to do what he could. The little charade with me was a way of bypassing official channels. But like I say, it’s speculation.”

  “Who is this colleague? What’s his name?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you that.”

  “You have any idea who his American friends might be?”

  “If I did, I couldn’t answer.”

  “I see. So how did Morgan seem?”

  “She was excited about her trip. It was clear she took her mission very seriously, and was delighted to be back in the field. At the same time, she was desperate to get home, not just to see you and the kids, but because she knew you had this court case. She didn’t want to let you down.”

  Adam stood up. His eyes looked moist. “Just give me a moment while I think about this.” He paced around the terrace, then sat down again.

  “Part of me says I should just walk out and leave you to finish your breakfast on your own,” he said. “And you must surely realize I don’t trust you an inch. But you have to tell me this. Why did your people put a tracker chip in my passport? Why did you have me followed when I met Bashir al-Owdeh in Lod? Surely you must have realized that when I got to Gaza, that could have got me killed?”

  Ben-Meir looked baffled. “Followed? Tracker chip? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I had no idea you’d ever been to Lod, and as for al-Owdeh, my understanding is that his arrest was a simple operation by the local police, acting on an anonymous tip-off. I assumed it must have come from someone on his own side—someone who’d fallen out with him.”

  Adam’s face was white. “And the chip?” he asked.

  “You say there was a chip placed in your passport. I’ll take your word for it. But ask yourself this: how would we have got hold of it? I’m sure you haven’t been stupid enough to leave it in your hotel room. And why would we have gone to such lengths, anyhow? Of course, we knew you were going to Gaza with Mr. Reilly. After all, he applied for the paperwork to get you in. But why imperil your safety?”

  Adam appeared to be swallowing hard. “I have another question,” he said.

  Ben-Meir gestured for him to continue.

  “Have you ever heard of the Janbiya al-Islam?”

  “Yes. I believe they might accurately be described as a Gazan branch of al-Qaeda. They don’t just want a Jew-free Islamist state, but a restored caliphate, run like early medieval Arabia.”

  Adam nodded. “That’s what I’ve been told, too.”

  “Well, what about them? Are you saying that they could be the ones who kidnapped Morgan?”

  “You mean you don’t know? Haven’t you seen the DVD?”

  “What DVD? My role in all this is very limited—as I’m sure you understand.”

  “I was shown it at the US embassy. They told me it was hand-delivered there. Morgan was speaking, wearing an orange overall, like the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and in the background was a Janbiya al-Islam flag. She looked really terrible.” Adam’s voice filled with emotion. “I’m pretty sure she’d only just been tortured. She confessed to the camera that she was a CIA officer. She’d never have done that willingly. I don’t know what’s really going on here, but tell me this. So far as you know, is this group real? I mean, is it possible they’re some kind of front—that really they’re a part of Hamas, which set up the kidnap because what they actually wanted to do was to claim the credit for eventually releasing her?”

  “I don’t understand. Why would they do a thing like that?”

  “Well, if Hamas facilitated her release, it would earn them credit with the international community. It would encourage the diplomats and policy makers to start doing business with them. But I admit: it does sounds pretty convoluted.”

  “Mr. Cooper.” Ben-Meir sounded solemn. “I can’t commit myself to an answer here. I am not, as you say, in the loop. But what you suggest is most improbable. In intelligence, it’s often wise to employ a version of Occam’s razor. If you have to choose between competing explanations, the simplest one is usually—though alas, not invariably—correct. Believe me, Hamas has much easier ways of gaining acceptance abroad than setting up a bogus kidnap. The risks would be enormous for them, because the truth, as it so often does, would probably get out. I would have to conclude that whoever told you this is lying.”

  Ronnie looked a little drawn, and had lost some weight. Her sister Rachelle lived up the coast, in a villa in the wealthy town of Ramat Hasharon, and she had asked Adam to take a taxi and meet her there in a restaurant close to the beach. She had already warned him when he phoned her after his meeting with Ben-Meir that she had spent the morning accompanying Rachelle on a visit to her oncologi
st. Two years earlier, Rachelle had had cancer, and though this had been only a routine checkup, such things were always stressful.

  Ronnie had made an effort, nonetheless. She was wearing a green cotton minidress and a dark bolero jacket, with high-heeled sandals that emphasized her long, firm legs. She slipped the jacket off once they sat down, revealing tanned, bare shoulders.

  “So, mortality,” said Adam, after they had ordered. “It’s a bummer, I guess. How is she?”

  “For the time being, thanks to God, she’ll live. She’s had another scan, and there’s absolutely no sign of it coming back. Her general health and fitness have always been excellent, and that’s definitely helped her beat it. But it doesn’t look like she’ll ever be able to have kids, and you just don’t expect that to be happening to your little sister, especially when she’s only thirty-five.”

  Rachelle, Adam knew, was married to a somewhat older man who had made a considerable fortune by organizing investment in some of Israel’s high-technology start-ups. They had met when she was working on Wall Street.

  “So how about you? The kids driving you mad?”

  “Oh, it’s the kids who keep me going. I didn’t see it that way at the time, but when Theo died, having Ben and Sarah was the only thing that stopped me falling apart. But I did need a break. Speaking of which, I’m going to order a cocktail, and my diagnosis is that you need one too.”

  Adam had not eaten since breakfast, and the two large mojitos they both downed before ordering their food went straight to his head. “I’ve never actually told you that Morgan has been kidnapped,” he said. “But since that’s what you seem to have told my mother-in-law, you’ve obviously guessed.”