by David Rose
“Hey. Long time,” he said. “How are you doing?”
“In the circumstances, just fine.”
“We need to talk. I’m coming to London—I’m due in late Monday. Can we meet? Would Wednesday work?”
It seemed that Mike would not be his only transatlantic visitor. Late in the evening, after Adam had taken the children swimming and put them to bed, he opened an email from Rob. “I’ve got a business trip to Europe,” it said. “It’s time we talked face to face. I’m going to make a little detour—see you next week, in Oxford.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Wednesday, June 20,
and Thursday, June 21, 2007
Over the preceding weeks, Morgan had come to appreciate something for which she was thankful: that Abu Mustafa was not an effective interrogator. Since the day of the helicopter they had seen each other many times, almost always in the basement, and only once in the wonderful fresh air. He had been able to figure out that while the children were small, she had been a capable CIA desk officer. However, despite his questions, she had been able to hide the fact that she had been part of a specialized, counterterrorist unit. More important, she had revealed none of her deeper, more sensitive secrets. Arranging logistics for clandestine operations had given her a patchwork of knowledge about undercover officers and their agents in several countries. Should this knowledge fall into the wrong hands, at best those sources would be compromised, forcing the Agency to terminate whatever operations they might be involved in. At worst, lives would be jeopardized. In most cases, she did not know clandestine sources’ real names. But as an intelligence officer, she was only too well aware of the jigsaw effect: the risk that if she were to give up something apparently innocuous, the enemy might put it together with some other piece of information gleaned elsewhere, and so use it to wreak grave damage.
However, rather to her surprise, she was confident that her discussions with Abu Mustafa really had been harmless. Once she had managed to waste most of a day discussing encrypted satellite burst radio communications, with Abu Mustafa seemingly unaware that the Agency had been using such methods since the eighties. Another time, she diverted him into an involved discussion of the bureaucratic procedures governing payments to clandestine agents. It could, she mused, simply be that with the facts of her mission in Gaza already disclosed, he didn’t really know what to ask. But she also wondered whether his behavior might be deliberate: whether for some unknown reason he did not wish to probe more deeply.
Although they had spent hours together, there had sometimes been gaps lasting days between their meetings, and so far as she could ascertain, Karim was often not at the farmhouse, either. She suspected they were making plans to move her: the longer they stayed where they were, surely the greater their risk. Maybe their plan was that the real interrogation would start somewhere else at a later date.
Whatever the truth, the tedium and background anxiety remained intense. Her interest in solo chess was waning, and when another orange gave her the chance to make a set of checkers, she found that this too soon palled. There were power outages every day. They had left her with the same floor-standing battery lamp as before, but even when the batteries were fresh, its light was dim.
The only other way she had of passing time was exercise. Every morning, she did the Canadian Air Force routine she had used as a student on days when it was too cold to jog, as well as Pilates. The possibility of escape was always at the forefront of her mind, and should a chance present itself, she would need to be fit. But so far as she could see, there had not been a single opportunity. Altogether, she had noticed at least eight guards, none of whom seemed to speak English. They followed a varied rota, and when she was allowed out of her cell, two or three of them were never far away. All but one of them treated her as a non-person, never looking her in the eye.
The exception was a sallow, overweight man with strange green eyes named Aqil, whom she had sometimes caught staring at her with undisguised sexual longing. It made her shudder. The one ordeal for which she still felt unprepared was to be raped. If Aqil were ever to be given his chance, she felt sure he would leap at it.
In some ways she felt proud of herself: she was still holding up. At the same time, she felt numbed and disoriented, and filled with a dread that this ordeal might continue for months, or even years. At night, in the hot, dark hours she spent wide awake, she sometimes felt the absence of Charlie and Aimee as a sharp, visceral pain. But for much of the time, the normalization of her captivity had grown so all-encompassing that she actually looked forward to such moments of sadness, because they reminded her that inside, she was still fully alive.
Sometimes she thought of Abdel Nasser. She reflected on the fierce, transgressive thrill that went through her when they first became involved, and his unexpected skill as a lover. She remained profoundly fearful of Abdel Nasser’s fate, and blamed herself again and again for his predicament: that an agent for whom she was responsible had suffered in the way that he had she regarded as a crushing failure, a breach of her basic case officer’s duty. But though she was aware that long before the affair had started, her marriage had been in trouble, she now felt baffled as to why she had decided to risk her career and her marriage on a fling that, so it seemed to her now, meant little to her. If she did see Adam again, she would have to tell him: the only way to rebuild their relationship would be on the basis of honesty. But what if he were to learn of her affair while she remained a captive—or died as one? If he had, it must surely have caused him pain. How would that affect their reunion, or the way he would remember her? If only she could explain it all to him, and ask for his forgiveness.
She had loved Abdel Nasser’s attentiveness. He had made her feel wanted, not merely needed. The thought that he might be falling in love with her left her electrified. But she did not love him. Through the long watches of her incarceration, she had come to grasp what it meant to “repent at leisure”—having slept with the man, she reminded herself, a total of just three times.
Aside from Abu Mustafa, the only person she saw was Zainab, who, ever so slowly, was beginning to open up about herself. She too must have been bored, for instead of thrusting Morgan’s food into the cell and leaving as fast as she could, had started to linger. Zainab, it transpired, was from Khan Younis, and her brother, Khalid, a hero of the first intifada, had fought the Soviets toward the end of the jihad in Afghanistan, but then, as Karim had already told her, died fighting overseas, on that trail through the Montenegrin woods. Zainab made clear that his death had left her shattered. But, unlike Karim, she did not blame Morgan. “Is war,” she said simply. “Bad things happen.”
As the weeks went by, Zainab had started to ask her questions, too—not about her work and her mission, but her childhood, and life in America. Where had Morgan been to school? Who was her father, and what did he do? Did everyone there like George W. Bush? Some of her inquiries suggested that her indoctrination about the West had been very peculiar. One evening, a little embarrassed, she had asked Morgan something which had apparently been on her mind for some time: “Tell me, why is normal in your country that men make sex with animals?” When Morgan had responded with horrified denial, she giggled nervously. Maybe, Morgan mused, she had picked this up from a Muslim televangelist. The Arab TV stations were full of such creatures, some of them saying extraordinarily bizarre and offensive things.
Their longest conversation had taken place on a hot afternoon, when both Karim and Abu Mustafa were absent. Placing her finger to her lips in the universal gesture of confidentiality, Zainab smiled and winked, then led Morgan up the stairs and into the sunlight. “The mens not here,” she said. “Come, we sit.” As ever, two of the guards were lurking, clutching their Kalashnikovs as they lounged by the door to the villa. But Zainab seemed to have obtained their cooperation, too, for at one point one of them disappeared, coming back with his gun slung over his shoulder and carrying a tray of cookies and fragrant Palestinian tea. For more than an hour, t
hey sipped it beneath the palm tree’s fronds and chatted. Zainab managed to communicate that her family had once been prosperous, and that in years gone by, before the waves of suicide bombing, the second intifada and the building of the security fence, her father had commuted daily from the Gaza Strip to a well-paid engineering job with an Israeli company in Ashkelon. But he had died young from a heart condition, leaving the family impoverished.
That same afternoon, Zainab revealed that as a teenager, she had harbored powerful feelings for Karim, and before Khalid’s death, had assumed she would one day marry him. But since his return from the Balkans, he had changed, becoming fractious and withdrawn. “In old days, we laugh,” Zainab said. “After Khalid die, with Karim, he talk now always jihad, always jihad.” These days, she said, he usually called her “akht sagheera,” little sister, so making clear he had no romantic interest in her. That, she added, explained how it was that she, a woman, had been allowed to join a group of Salafist kidnappers led by a man who was not a close blood relative—something which should have been unthinkable. “If Karim not think I am his sister, you have your food from a man,” Zainab told her. She blushed and giggled, remembering an earlier embarrassment: “And maybe he not know Kotex!”
Morgan heard a knock and soon the door was being opened; another new morning. Zainab entered with a tray.
“Hello Morgan. You sleep okay?” Zainab smiled.
“Not too bad,” said Morgan. “Not too bad.” Lately the food had deteriorated again: today there was only flat bread, a bottle of water, and some olives. “Zainab. I want to ask you something. I hear a lot of shooting. Has something happened? Not here, but on the outside?”
Zainab looked nervous, and her eyes scanned the room, as if someone might be hiding there. She lowered her voice to a whisper and looked at the floor. “Yes. In Gaza, Fatah finished.” She drew her finger across her throat. “Many people die. Much fighting. My cousin, Hamad, he only 18, he is dead. He is not fighter, he die because he is in wrong time, wrong place. Hamas now king in Gaza. You not tell Abu Mustafa I say this, okay?”
“I promise. But what do Karim and Abu Mustafa think about this? They are happy, no, because they are strong Muslims and Hamas are strong Muslims too?”
Zainab shook her head. “No, no, no. Not happy at all. Karim very unhappy. He is say now is very dangerous here, in this place.” She dropped her voice still further. “I think they move you. We go from here. Is new place, very secret.”
Morgan had always believed that the last thing her kidnappers wanted was a Hamas coup, and though she knew it might also bring danger, she had to struggle to stop her face breaking out in a grin: at last, this must be her opportunity. Hamas could not countenance a radical Islamist rival; once their power was consolidated, they would surely hunt them down. She touched Zainab’s arm. “What time are we leaving? How can we move if Hamas has set up roadblocks?”
Zainab shook her head again. “I not know anything more. Please, now eat. I go.”
Adam had arranged to meet Mike in the grand, high-ceilinged dining room at the Randolph Hotel on Beaumont Street. With relief, he noted it was empty. He was a little early, and as it turned out, Mike was late: his train from London, he explained apologetically, had been delayed by a signaling fault for more than thirty minutes.
“No surprises there, I’m afraid,” Adam said. “I should have warned you. The service is appalling.”
“Shall we get some coffee?”
“Actually I’m hungry. I skipped lunch. Why don’t we have an afternoon tea? Earl Gray, scones, and clotted cream? And iced cakes and cucumber sandwich triangles, if you really want to push the boat out.”
“Since Uncle Sam is paying, that would only be appropriate. After all, it is one of your country’s two greatest culinary gifts to the world, along with the full English breakfast. Outstanding. Just outstanding.”
“If you say so. Though I’d like to remind you that actually, I’m a US citizen.”
“Of course you are. My apologies.”
Adam summoned the waiter, and within a few minutes, their tea arrived. It was time for an end to the small talk.
“So where have you come from?” Adam asked. “Washington, or the Middle East?”
“Both places. I stayed in Tel Aviv until just after the Hamas coup, then flew to DC. That’s where I came in from. Look, I want to say that what happened that day before you left Tel Aviv, I’m really, really sorry, and Eugene should never have—”
Adam raised his hand. “Enough. It’s done. I’d really rather not discuss it. And right now, if you don’t mind, it’s not the fucking issue. But I’d like you to tell me a little about what is. Now that Hamas is in control of Gaza, exactly what do you plan to do to rescue Morgan?”
Mike appeared to be in the throes of some inner struggle. But if he had been debating whether to disclose anything of substance, he appeared to have thought better of it.
“Adam, I happen to think you’re a good guy, and I also respect your work,” he said. “But I can’t tell you anything that’s classified. You know that.”
“You don’t have to tell me everything. It’s just that after everything that’s happened over the past few days, I can’t help feeling your chances of making progress now are round about zero.”
“You’re wrong, Adam. Gary would say this more forcefully, but with respect, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh really? You got a contact with one of the Hamas senior commanders, have you? With one of those guys who’ve been all over the news media claiming CIA had been planning a Fatah coup?”
“There are always back channels. That’s how this business works. There are channels not only to us, but to the Israelis.”
“Like that slob you introduced me to, Amos? The guy who told me Hamas was about to get whacked? That wasn’t such a brilliant call, was it now, Mike?”
“There’s really no need to get personal here.” Mike paused, and then his words came in a rush. “As I said, I like you. So I’m going to say more than I should, and you’re going to have to respect my confidence, because if Gary finds out I’ve told you this, he could make my life very difficult. We’ve made a genuine breakthrough. I’m not going to give you all the details, but you can expect to see Morgan alive again very soon.”
“How soon?”
“I can’t be specific. But soon.”
“Can you give me evidence for that?”
“No. It’s classified. Adam, you don’t have to believe me. It’s your choice. But if you don’t, you need to consider the downside.”
“What downside, Mike?”
“You seem to think you can do the Agency’s job better than we can. I know what that means: that you’re thinking of going back to Gaza. Well, see, here is the risk. Right now, we’re in the middle of a very delicate negotiation. There’s always a danger that something might leak, and that could cost Morgan her life. And our judgment is that if you go in, you increase that danger merely by your presence. I’m sorry to be blunt, but for Morgan’s sake, I have to ask you: cease and desist.”
“Gary put you up to this, didn’t he,” Adam said softly.
“He’s my boss.” Mike shrugged.
“Yes. But that’s not what I meant. I meant, he put you up to all of it, this whole fucking charade. You show up at my Supreme Court case, make out like you’re the guy who shares my values, and who really has my back, pretend you’re taking me into your confidence. And then you come here and threaten me.”
Adam could see he had got to him, but Mike remained outwardly calm. “Think about what I said,” he said evenly. “And let me make a suggestion. If Morgan isn’t free by the end of next week, or if we can’t show you concrete proof of our progress, by all means, make another visit to Gaza. Eight days is all I’m asking for—but for that period, stay away, or be prepared to face the consequences.”
Adam stood. He had left his scone was untouched. “Sure, Mike, I’ll think about it. I’ll think about it very
carefully. Jesus, you people. You really know how to pile on the pressure, don’t you? In the meantime we’re done. Why don’t you finish your afternoon tea on your own.”
Rob had told Adam he planned to come straight to Oxford on his way from Heathrow to an agribusiness convention in London. He must have taken a shower and spruced himself up at the airport, for the lean figure in pressed khakis, dress shirt, navy blazer, and cowboy boots who rang the bell at Adam’s parents’ front door at ten the following morning did not look like a man who had just endured a transatlantic flight. Gwen and Jonathan stood side by side to greet him, with Adam just behind. Gwen gave him a hug, and Jonathan shook his hand firmly.
“It’s been too long,” Jonathan said. “Come in and have some coffee. Leave your bag in the hall.”
They sat around the Coopers’ red oak kitchen table, and Rob promised that when the convention finished, he would come to stay for the weekend, to spend some time with the kids—“I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s nigh on two years since I’ve seen Aimee and Charlie,” he said. But all the while, Adam sensed that Rob wanted to talk to him alone, and he could see his mother had picked up the signal, too. After a decent interval, when their mugs were drained, she stood.
“Well, I’d better get off. My students await,” she said, gesturing with her eyes at Jonathan.
“Yup, me too,” he said. “It’s been a pleasure, and we look forward to seeing you properly.”
They left the room. Rob sat in silence for a moment, only starting to speak when he heard the front door close. “Well, here we are, son. How are you doing? I mean, how are you really doing?”
Adam shrugged. “What can I say? It’s all pretty shitty, which you already know. And now it seems that the CIA have fucked things up even more than I thought they had, because whatever it was they were planning for Gaza appears to have backfired. I’m struggling to think of a silver lining.”