Mind Virus

by Charles Kowalski

  “Come on now, there must have been some message you were trying to send by doing this. What’s the point of it all, if no one knows what the message was supposed to be?”

  Silence.

  “Or is there another who, when, and where that we don’t know about yet?”

  Harpo’s face was as impassive as ever, but his breathing quickened slightly.

  “Are there more of you out there? Is there one more? Are there three more? Two? Five? Four?” Fox called the numbers out of sequence, to keep him off balance.

  He thought he observed a slight twitch on the number “five.”

  “If there are, you know how it works,” Kato said. “The first one to talk gets the best deal.”

  Silence.

  “Very well,” Fox said. “We can keep playing this game for as long as you like. But you’ve noticed that there are several of us and only one of you. We can take turns. We can keep this up night and day until you finally get tired of it.”

  He nodded to Kato. She rose.

  “Think it over,” she said to him. “I’ll see you later.”

  They left the interview room and went back to the conference room, where Adler was waiting.

  “You weren’t kidding,” Fox sighed. “That’s the toughest nut I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “Me, too. And I’ve seen a few.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “He goes back to his cell and has dinner.”

  “Can you order in from some local take-out place? Give him a menu and let him make a choice. Even if he only points, at least you’ll have gotten him to communicate.”

  “All right, we can try that.”

  “Can you put a hidden camera in his cell?”

  “It’s already equipped with one.”

  Of course. “Let’s give him a box of books tonight, then. Copies of the Qur’an in Arabic and English, and some novels in English, Russian, any other languages you can get your hands on. See what he chooses. Find out something about where his interests lie—or, at the very least, what language he speaks.”

  Adler nodded. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Have you given him a polygraph test?”

  “We have. Of course, he didn’t say anything, but we gave him the Silent Response Test. And got nothing measurable.”

  “We had a video camera on him,” Kato interjected, “so that I could run a FACS analysis later. If you’re not familiar, that means…”

  “The Facial Action Coding System,” Fox finished for her.

  She looked at him with a slightly surprised expression. “You know it, then?”

  “I learned the rudiments of it in interrogation training, but that was a decade ago. I’m sure your knowledge is much more up-to-date.”

  “But we got nowhere with that either,” Adler continued. “And besides, that system was designed in America. If he turns out to be from some other country, all bets are off.”

  “Not necessarily,” Fox said, noticing out the corner of his eye that Kato was just drawing a breath, presumably to make a similar reply. “Facial expressions of emotion are pretty much the same everywhere. Different cultures have different rules about what you can show and what you should hide, of course, but just about everyone reacts the same way when they think no one’s watching. Am I right about that, Agent Kato?”

  “Exactly.” She favored him with a slight nod.

  “Can we run another polygraph on him?” Fox asked.

  “If you like,” Adler said with a shrug. “We can set it up tomorrow.”

  “And when we do, can we have a guard in the room?”

  “What for?”

  “I have an idea. But if I’m to put it into practice, I’ll want some extra protection.”

  “All right. And speaking of protection, I’m recommending that everyone on this team be vaccinated against Zagorsk, just as a precautionary measure. I can arrange a shot for you if you want.”

  Fox grimaced. He had always been wary of the side effects of vaccines for exotic diseases, and thoughts of a certain individual in Iraq made him more so.

  “Has the vaccine been proven effective?” he asked Adler.

  “It’s bound to be better than nothing.”

  “And just out of idle curiosity, is there any treatment for Zagorsk?”

  “Rid has been working on an antiserum, but…”

  “Who has?”

  “Sorry. USAMRIID—the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. But as I was saying, it’s still in the experimental stage. They’ve gotten good results with monkeys if they got the treatment before symptoms started to appear. But the incubation time for Zagorsk is very short, so the window could be as narrow as a day. And they’ve never had the chance to test it on humans.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “As you like.”

  “Oh, and Agent Kato? Did I hear right that the FBI was investigating the murder of Thom DiDio?”

  “The Civil Rights Division is handling that, jointly with the Metro Police.”

  “My friend and I were at his book signing, the last night before he died. We had a look at someone there who might be of interest to you. We can probably give you a description or help you create a composite sketch. We’ll gladly offer any help we can. Thom was a good friend of ours.”

  “Thank you. I’ll pass that on to them.” She nodded again, hesitated a moment, and added: “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Yeah, sorry to hear that,” Adler chimed in. “And by the way, thanks for the tip about Venera Goridze. We’ve been in touch with the Georgian Intelligence Service, and they’ve launched a full-on search for her.”

  “Good luck to them in finding her. She’s managed to stay under their radar for the past ten years.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised at what they can do when they put their minds to it.”

  3

  MOSUL, IRAQ

  2005

  When Fox first heard the name of Venera Goridze, it was an ordinary afternoon, or as close as they came in Iraq. He was sitting at his desk in the “gator pit,” the interrogators’ bullpen, a cavernous octagonal room in a base that had once been one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. With the marble walls, fluted columns supporting the high ceiling, and Qur’anic inscriptions around the inlaid dome, it could have been a copy of the Taj Mahal, if not for the plasma screens and mismatched desks that the U.S. Army had contributed to the decor.

  He had just refilled his coffee cup, to keep himself awake as he slogged through the mind-numbing task that occupied most of his time: writing IIRs, Interrogation Intelligence Reports, and then rewriting them when they were sent back for breaking one of the myriad rules in the Army’s byzantine style manual, such as using quotation marks around anything other than the name of a ship. Years later, his dissertation review board would prove lenient by comparison.

  Corporal Mendes stormed into the gator pit, slammed a file down on his desk, and collapsed into his chair. “Asshole!” he muttered to no one in particular.

  “Ibrahim?” asked Staff Sergeant Newcomb.

  Fox could think of several words to describe Ibrahim, but that one would not have made the list. A mild-mannered imam who spoke English like an Oxford don, he was one of Fox’s favorite detainees, someone he could always count on for a stimulating discussion over the chessboard—although so far, he had managed neither to extract any useful intelligence from him nor to win a single game.

  “You’ve got to show him who’s boss,” Newcomb told the fuming Mendes. “Break him down. Interrogation is all about control. Power is the only language these hajjis understand.”

  Fox looked over at him. “How did you know about his pilgrimage?” he asked. “Did he tell you?”

  “Huh?”

  “You referred to him as a hajji. How did you know that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca?”

  “Is that what it means?” Mendes asked.

  Fox resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Breaking a detainee,�
�� he said, “is like breaking a wild horse. You have to get him to trust you—make him want to cooperate with you. Trying to get his cooperation by force only makes him dig his heels in harder.”

  “Breaking a horse,” snorted Newcomb. “I can just see the movie now. The Hajji Whisperer.”

  “Well, guys, let me ask you this. You’ve been on the receiving end of this stuff, at the Schoolhouse.” He used the common nickname for the Army’s interrogation training facility at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. “Did it make you want to open up and tell your interrogators all you knew?”

  Newcomb scoffed. “Those pussies didn’t dare dial it up on me anywhere near as hard as I would on a real hajji.”

  Fox debated whether it was worth pressing the issue any further, and decided it wasn’t. Newcomb was an old hand who had enlisted straight out of high school during the first Gulf War, and Fox, a young captain fresh out of an Ivy League school, was exactly the kind of person he most resented having to salute and call “sir.” It didn’t help matters that he was built like one of the steamrollers his father drove, and could probably flatten Fox with the same ease.

  Neither for the first nor the last time, Fox thought to himself: There must have been a simpler way to piss the old man off. His father, an Annapolis graduate and Navy officer before he joined the Foreign Service, had refused to put up any money for his college education unless he joined ROTC, insisting that he “give something back to the country that’s given so much to you”—and in his mind, the only way to do that was in uniform. Seeing no alternative, Fox had given in, and chosen the Army out of spite.

  At the time, it hadn’t seemed to make much difference which branch of the service he chose. When he was commissioned, the most action he expected to see was a UN peacekeeping mission somewhere—maybe in Bosnia where, rumor had it, the soldiers were allowed two beers a day and the civilian interpreters were all young and beautiful.

  And then the bolt came out of the blue, in the form of four planes diving out of a clear September sky.

  Language skills were suddenly at a premium. The Army had promptly packed Fox off to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey to whip his Arabic back into shape, and then to the “Schoolhouse” at Fort Huachuca for interrogation training. Then Guantanamo, then Afghanistan, and now here to this mausoleum with Newcomb and Mendes for company.

  The arrival of the officer in charge, Major Browning, snapped Fox out of his reflections. He was a mountain of a man with the face of a bulldog, and even though the gator pit was a non-smoking area, all of Fox’s later recollections of him inexplicably featured a fat cigar clamped between his teeth.

  “We got a call from a concerned citizen,” Browning announced. “He was driving by a farmhouse just north of Mosul, one that he thought was abandoned, when he saw a man get out of a blue sedan with three armed bodyguards. The man’s face was hidden, with a headscarf and sunglasses.”

  A stir ran through the gator pit. Fox set down his coffee mug. This news had jolted him out of his afternoon drowsiness more effectively than caffeine.

  “Special Forces hit the farmhouse as soon as we heard,” Browning continued, “but they came up dry. Aerial surveillance picked up a blue Volkswagen Passat heading south on the road to Kirkuk, and our boys on the ground intercepted it, but there was nothing in it of any interest. We’ve brought the driver in.” He scanned the room for civilian interpreters and saw none. “Looks like all of our terps are busy, so I need an Arabic linguist. Captain Fox, that means you.” He held out a manila folder in Fox’s direction.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Fox could manage without an interpreter, although he always preferred to use one when he could. The Iraqi dialect was different from both the variety he had picked up during his father’s posting in Egypt and the supposedly region-free MSA the Army taught—Modern Standard Arabic, better known by its tongue-in-cheek name of “Monterey Standard Arabic.” Besides, there was always the chance that a detainee would make an off-the-record remark to the interpreter, not meant for the interrogator’s ears, that would later prove valuable.

  He automatically checked to make sure his uniform blouse was properly “sanitized”—name and rank insignia removed—and headed to the interrogation booth, leafing through the file as he went. When he reached the door, he paused for a moment to collect himself, and then walked in, trying to exude reassurance and authority, like a surgeon entering the consultation room.

  A balding man with a mustache was waiting inside, and he did indeed look as nervous as a patient before a major operation.

  “Assalam aleikum,” Fox greeted him, with hand over heart.

  “Wa aleikum assalam,” came the surprised reply. By speaking to him in his own language, Fox had cleared the first hurdle.

  “Hassan al-Tamimi. What would you like me to call you?”

  “I usually go by Abu Hakim.”

  “That means ‘father of Hakim,’ doesn’t it? How old is your son?”

  “Seven.”

  “Is that right? My boy just turned five.” Fox had never been married and had no children. But interrogation was theater, and a good interrogator was a combination of actor, director, and stage manager. His training had included exercises straight out of drama school: mirroring facial expressions and gestures, speaking in synchronicity, and numerous techniques for improvising themselves into whatever role might help them build rapport with the subject. If Abu Hakim was a family man, then Fox would have no trouble becoming one for the duration.

  “Your family must miss you when you’re away,” Fox continued.

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “Don’t worry. If you’ll answer my questions, we can finish up here and get you home before they start to worry. Do you know why we stopped you?”

  Abu Hakim shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “Home. To Kirkuk.”

  “What were you doing in Mosul?”

  “Visiting a friend.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Abu Rahim.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “At a restaurant.”

  “You know, I love Iraqi food. I’m always looking for new places to try when I get the chance to go off base. What’s the name of the place? Do you recommend it?”

  “It’s called Ninawa. It’s our favorite place to meet, right on the bank of the Tigris. They do great kibbeh, and pretty cheap too.”

  Fox quizzed him for a while on details: what they had ordered, how they had liked it, what they had been talking about, which table they had been sitting at, who was in which seat. Abu Hakim answered all the questions confidently, but often paused longer than necessary to recall details that should still have been fresh in his mind. Soon, Fox had heard enough to satisfy him that Abu Hakim was describing a meeting that had actually happened…but a good deal longer ago than this afternoon.

  “All right, Abu Hakim,” Fox said with an air of finality, “sorry to take up so much of your time.”

  Abu Hakim smiled broadly. His shoulders slumped and he breathed a sigh of relief.

  Truthful subjects always brightened up a little when they heard that the ordeal was over and they were free to get on with their lives. The ones who looked excessively relieved were the ones who had been lying and thought they had made it through the interview without being caught.

  “Now all I need from you is a way to get in touch with Abu Rahim. Once we confirm your story with him, and with the owner of Ninawa, you’ll be a free man.”

  Abu Hakim’s smile flagged.

  “Or,” Fox continued, his voice taking on a graver tone, “you could save us both a lot of time and trouble by simply telling me the truth. Four men, three of them armed, were seen getting out of your car at a farmhouse just north of Mosul.”

  He shook his head. “That wasn’t my car.”

  “Our eyes in the sky followed it all the way from the farmhouse to the place where the soldiers stoppe
d you.”

  “I swear on my life and on the lives of my family and on my eyes, you have me confused with someone else!”

  The subject doth protest too much, Fox thought. In particular, the last oath seemed superfluous in light of the first. If he were to forfeit his life, what use would he have for eyes?

  “Give it up, Abu Hakim! I don’t know which makes me angrier: your lying, or your thinking I’m stupid enough to fall for such a clumsy lie. Do you want to go home to your family, or don’t you?”

  Abu Hakim broke into a sweat, and started trembling and breathing harder. His fear of Americans was entirely understandable, and it was common practice for interrogators to exploit it, but Fox had always found that subjects who were too frightened to think clearly were unreliable. He needed to do something to put the subject’s mind at ease.

  “Abu Hakim,” he said in a softer voice, “I don’t know what you’ve heard about us, but I want you to understand that as far as we’re concerned, you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s the men who were riding with you that we’re interested in. Answer our questions about them, and you’ll be on your way home to your wife and son.”

  In spite of these reassurances, Abu Hakim’s fear showed no signs of diminishing. Something else was frightening him more than the Americans.

  “Abu Hakim,” Fox asked in as gentle a voice as he could, “did they threaten your family?”

  He kept his eyes downcast, but gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  “We can protect them.”

  Abu Hakim scoffed. “Do you have any idea how many people I’ve known who worked with you and ended up dead? You can’t even protect the people on your own payroll! How could you keep them from getting to my family?”

  “By getting to them first.”

  Abu Hakim shook his head. “You’ll never get them all. And they would know I was the one who gave them away.”

  “That doesn’t have to be true. No one needs to know that you talked to us.”

  “They would find out.”

  “Well, Abu Hakim, the way I see it, you have two options. Option one: You tell us what you know. You’ll be home by dinnertime, and the men who threatened you will be out of the picture by morning. Option two: You keep lying and stalling, and we’ll have no choice but to keep you here for however long it takes—days, weeks, months. In the meantime, we’ll have to move based on the intelligence we’ve gathered ourselves. Of course, it will be much less accurate. And if we strike at them and miss, they will howl for blood and they will know you’ve been with us. I know, it’s not much of a choice, but it’s what you’ve got.”