by Alex Carr
It was Kat's second day at Bagram, her first live shift at the facility, and already she could see that it was a whole different world at the northern base. The prisoners were harder, for one thing, angrier and less cooperative than any of the detainees Kat had encountered at Kandahar. There was an undercurrent of hostility among the interrogators as well, a recklessness Kat had never seen before, a willingness not just to bend the rules but to break them.
“It's a whole different ball game up here,” one of Kat's former team members from Kandahar had told her when they ran into each other in the mess the night before. “It takes some getting used to, but once you do it feels good to be in charge.”
This shift in attitude wasn't the only difference Kat noticed at Bagram. There had been only a handful of non-military personnel at Kandahar, civilian intelligence men who went by the collective moniker of Other Government Agencies, and who, for the most part, kept to their cramped and makeshift offices in the old terminal building. At the Bagram base the OGAs were suddenly everywhere, including the in-processing facility.
Most of these civilians came from the alphabet soup of the intelligence world—the CIA, the FBI, or their foreign counterparts. But there were others whose loyalties were less easily identifiable, and for whose services the military had clearly paid.
Such arrangements were not unusual. A good portion of the army's support staff, including many mess and transportation workers, were civilian contractors. But the idea of intelligence contractors was something else altogether, and Kat wasn't quite sure what she thought of it. At the very least, it would take some getting used to.
In the world outside, it was frigid early morning, the bald half-moon glaring down on the dark and dusty expanse of the Shomali Plains, but the oversized watch on the wrist of the young MP who'd been assigned to Kat blinked a stubborn 6 pm. Mountain time, Kat observed, home time. Somewhere in Wyoming or Montana, the kid's family was sitting down to dinner without him.
Inside the facility, under the stuttering glow of the perpetually failing fluorescents, it might as well have been high noon. Two Special Forces teams had just returned from the mountains, and the old Soviet machine shop that served as the facil-ity's in-processing center was crowded and chaotic, the air thick with stale sweat and urine—the stench of hundreds of unbathed bodies in an airless space.
Kat's post, at the far end of the cavernous room, was the detainees' final stop before the mammoth cages in the main prison, the last in a series of humiliations in which they'd been stripped of their original clothes and repackaged in bright-orange jumpsuits and rubber slippers, and the men's final hope at a chance for freedom before they were caught permanently and inextricably in the web of military bureaucracy.
The Special Forces raids had been routine at Kandahar, and Kat was familiar with their results. The ostensible purpose of the sweeps was to ferret out the last of the holdouts. But the raids, conducted under the cover of darkness, were by definition indiscriminate, and more often than not the majority of prisoners were neither Taliban nor Al Qaeda but luckless peasants. Not good men, necessarily, but not bad men, either, fathers and grandfathers whose only loyalty was to their own survival. To Kat and the other interrogators fell the impossible task of separating the former from the latter. It was a job that was made all the more difficult by an insurmountable and nearly constant language barrier.
Kat was muddling through an intake interview in her halting Pashto, trying to calm the toothless old man across the table from her enough to get his name and age, when she saw Kurtz coming toward her through the crowd. She shouldn't have been surprised to see him. In the wake of September 11, Arabic speakers were a rare and precious commodity in the intelligence community, and she had thought of Kurtz more than once, but she had never given serious thought to the possibility that their paths might cross. Now here he was, just as she remembered him.
“Sergeant,” he said, stopping in front of her and making a stiff demi-bow. It was a gesture Kat remembered clearly from Monterey, an aspect of Kurtz's awkward formality that had made him seem vulnerable at the time. “I believe you have an Arabic speaker in the medical line.”
He still hated her, Kat thought. Nearly a decade had passed, and he still hadn't forgiven her for rejecting him.
“Hello, David,” she said. And then, because it seemed ridiculous to say nothing, “You look good.”
Kurtz nodded. “I was sorry to hear about your brother.”
So he knew, had already known she was on the base. “I didn't realize I was a celebrity.”
“I was at Major Greeley's press briefing this morning,” Kurtz explained. “He's quite honored to have you here.”
Kat had heard about the Major's daily briefings from some of the other interrogators, how he started each session with a canned obit of one of the September 11 victims.
Kat rose from her chair and glanced at the young MP. “See if you can find him something to drink,” she said, gesturing to the old man. And then, to Kurtz, “Your Arabic speaker?”
The medical line was the prisoners' first stop after the initial trauma of having their clothes cut off. It was touted as a safety measure, a way of ensuring that no weapons or harmful diseases made their way into the facility. But both the prisoners and the interrogators understood that the real purpose of the examination was to establish exactly where and with whom all control lay, to cement the contract of power and powerlessness between prisoner and jailer.
Normally, Kat made it a point to stay away from this part of the intake process. There was a vulnerability about the male body that she found disturbing, and she didn't want her feelings to get in the way later, during interrogations. As she and Kurtz approached, the few prisoners who didn't already have their hands over their genitals moved quickly to cover themselves.
“There,” Kurtz said, pointing to a young boy near the back of the line.
Kat's first thought was that Kurtz was obviously mistaken. She had seen her share of foreign fighters, but they were all grown men. This prisoner was barely more than a child, his face smooth and unshaved, his thin body that of an adolescent. Though anyone under sixteen was strictly off limits, a few underage locals were often swept up in the raids. Standard protocol was to release them back to their villages with a consolation bag of chocolate bars and hot tamales from the PX. No doubt that's what would happen to this boy.
“He's just a kid,” Kat said dismissively.
The two burly MPs at the front of the line yelled for the next prisoner to step forward, then grabbed the man by his neck and forced his head down for the cavity search. Kat saw the boy's stomach convulse.
“I'm telling you,” Kurtz insisted. “He's not local.”
Kat moved to turn away, then stopped herself. The last thing she wanted was to prove Kurtz right, but she wasn't altogether convinced that he was wrong. “Step forward, please,” she said in Arabic, and to her surprise the boy did.
“What's your name?” she asked. For a moment, when he didn't say anything, she thought she had been mistaken, that the previous response had been just a coincidence.
Then he blinked up at her. “Jamal,” he said through chattering teeth. He was shivering wildly, from fear or cold or both, and his upper lip was glazed with snot.
Kat turned to Kurtz. “Get me a blanket.” And then, to the boy, “It's okay, you're going to be okay.”
The boy nodded, clearly unconvinced, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“How old are you, Jamal?”
He paused before answering, aware, Kat thought, as she was, of just how much rested on this one piece of information. A year in either direction the difference between a one-way ticket to Guantánamo and the rest of his life.
“Fifteen,” he said at last, and Kat thought, Good boy, right answer.
She scanned the room, searching for Kurtz among the tsunami of bodies. A blanket, she told herself, glancing at the boy, at the wings of his collarbones protruding from the top of his gaunt tors
o. How long does it take to find a goddamn blanket?
But when she looked up again her eyes caught not Kurtz's but Colin's. He was watching her, as he obviously had been for some time.
THE RIGHT ANSWER or the wrong one, Kat thought as the plane touched down on the runway at Barajas and taxied toward the terminal.
I suggest you take a look at that, she could hear the man say. Morrow, he'd finally told her his name was, the same name as the signature on her orders. And, on the floor in front of the car's passenger seat, Jamal's file, Kat's own words oddly unfamiliar to her after three years.
I suggest you take a look at that. And she had understood, correctly, that the three-hour drive to Dulles would be her only chance to do so.
The plane braked to a stop and the passengers leaped from their seats, smoothing the creases from their clothes, jockeying for position, taking what few extra inches they could get. Kat squeezed into the aisle and slid her bag from the overhead bin. After a long, sleepless night, she'd made the mistake of dozing for an hour at the tail end of the flight. Now she felt as if someone had rubbed a handful of sand into her eyes.
You will find someone waiting for you at the hotel in Madrid, Morrow had told her on the curb at Dulles before handing her a small brown envelope. Plane tickets and a hotel reservation. Five hundred euros in medium-sized bills. Put the money in your billfold, please. It looks better that way. Better to whom? Kat had wondered.
Someone jostled Kat from behind and she felt herself being swept forward, down the aisle, out through the narrow abattoir of the ramp, and into the terminal.
Pleasure, she reminded herself, sliding her passport from her purse, repeating her lines in her head one last time. A Spanish vacation. Tapas and dancing. The obligatory afternoon at the Prado.
Nothing to worry about. But, as she handed her passport to the young man at immigration, she had to fight to keep her hands from shaking.
“WELCOME TO PARADISE,” Kurtz's roommate, a fellow Agency recruit whose real name was Jonathon Pope, but who went by the unfortunate nickname of Digger, had remarked on their first night at Monterey.
Kurtz had heard plenty of stories about the Defense Language Institute, about the after-class beach parties and the women, but he hadn't really believed any of them. With the exception of a handful of older students, State Department civilians like Kurtz and Pope, most of whom were actually destined for intelligence careers of one form or another, the majority of the students appeared to have come straight from boot camp. It was an odd mix, the military's brightest, kids who hadn't necessarily shown promise in the civilian world but who had been handpicked from the sea of recruits. They were all young and tan, their bodies military lean.
“You gotta feel sorry for those assholes in Spanish,” Kurtz observed, taking a swig of his beer. Spanish was one of the shortest courses at the institute, while Arabic, to which both Kurtz and Pope had been assigned, was notoriously long. From where Kurtz stood, a year's stint at the institute didn't look so bad.
“You think if we screw up badly enough they'll make us repeat the course?” Pope asked hopefully.
“I have a feeling these girls are just a bit out of our league,” Kurtz said, realizing too late that Pope was the kind of man who undoubtedly had never felt such a thing in his life. “Agewise, I mean.”
Pope shook his head and squinted, showing his Kennedyesque wrinkles—a sign, in his world, not of age but of luxury: summers on the water and winters at Stowe or Chamonix. The well-earned ravages of a perpetual tan.
Kurtz let his eyes drift with Pope's toward the far end of the beach, where a group of female students were playing volleyball.
“That one, for instance,” Pope announced, pointing to a brunette in an orange bikini who had just stepped up to the service line.
She couldn't have been more than eighteen, Kurtz thought, tall and lanky, with the lingering awkwardness of a teenager, her hair pulled back into a long dark braid. When she tossed the ball into the air and jumped to meet it, her body arced perfectly, legs and chest and arm in one fluid and graceful motion of power.
It was Kurtz's first glimpse of Kat, and he would never forget it. He had an undeniable urge to possess her, as if by doing so he could claim a portion of her self-assurance.
“I'll bet she likes older men,” Pope mused.
Kurtz was suddenly defensive. “Don't be an asshole,” he snapped.
“YOUR KEY, SIR,” the front-desk clerk said, patronizing Kurtz one final time with her impeccable English before sliding his key card across the narrow counter. She was attractive in a decidedly Iberian way, with a long neck and a slim nose, dark eyes set beneath carefully arched brows.
Kurtz turned gratefully from her gaze and made his way across the glass-and-steel lobby, toward the hallway that the woman had indicated led to his room. Spare and soulless, the hotel Janson had chosen was an homage to European modernity, part of a movement of designer bullying that Kurtz found especially unfortunate.
It was a style not unlike the architecture of the Gulf States, though there, against the sparse backdrop of sea and sand, such masculine simplicity, perfectly and richly executed, made a kind of sense, while here on the Continent it seemed merely gratuitous. A reaction, Kurtz thought, to centuries of culture.
Kurtz found his door off the first-floor hallway and let himself inside, surveying the space as he turned the lock behind him. There was a shabbiness to the room that sheer force of size had camouflaged in the hotel's common areas. The white walls were scuffed, the cheap veneer on the bed and dresser curling away at the edges. Time, Kurtz thought, had already been unkind to the establishment.
Setting his sample case on the bed, Kurtz opened the leather flap and emptied the contents. Tiny bottles of orifice guard. Miniature sample urns and autopsy gloves. A stack of prayer cards addressing the various gods. Deterrent for even the most ambitious customs officer.
Any reason this is going to be a problem? he could hear Jan-son say as he lifted the false bottom from the case. And for the briefest of moments, looking down at the Beretta nestled there, he wasn't sure.
Almost as if to reassure himself, he picked up the gun and set it against his palm, slipped the spare clip into the stock.
Mother and child, Harry Comfort thought as he settled into his deck chair and scanned the horizon, contemplating the unobscured terror of the universe. The moon was not yet up, the sky as clear as Harry had seen it for some time. In the distance, Mauna Kea's humped back rose from the dark plain of ranch land. Above her, Cetus the whale slipped westward through the krill swirl of stars like a calf surfacing for air.
Harry took a sip of his vodka, then balanced the tumbler on his stomach and scanned the sky, letting his eyes come to rest on the green planet cradled just below Aquarius. Harry had been tracking Uranus for several weeks now, sketching the planet's slow progress with the diligence of a schoolboy, using his old Leica binoculars while he waited for his Celestron to arrive.
It wasn't glamorous work, but it was the kind of repetitive task Harry needed. His first months on the island, the night sky had been so overwhelming to him that he'd been unable to look at it for more than a few moments at a time, and Uranus had given him something to which he could tether his mind. He'd always had a soft spot for the crater-pocked planet, the sort of sentimental attachment one might feel for an old boxer who had once been great but had hung on too long and taken one too many beatings at the end.
Down in the pasture that abutted the Tamarack Pines, one of the steers lowed a mournful protest and the rest of the herd shifted gracelessly in reply, their hooves scuffling the soft earth.
Hawaii, is it? Heinz, the new European DO had remarked as they'd cleared up the last of Harry's paperwork. Lots of retired Agency men there. I'll have Karen get you a list. Can't hurt to have some contacts. Show you around the island, treat you to a game of golf.
Harry had agreed, smiling his usual accommodating smile. But in truth he hadn't been able to imagine anything worse. F
or a moment he'd even thought about changing his plans. But then he'd realized just what such a step would mean, how much he'd sacrificed for them already, and how he wouldn't be able to forgive himself if he gave them the rest of his life as well.
Harry finished his drink and set the empty glass on the lanai, then reached for his sketchbook and flashlight. How slow it all seemed from here, the progress of the planet across millions of miles of space nearly imperceptible. A few lines on paper, the relation of a handful of dim points of light. And yet this was the only way the mind could even begin to make sense of it all.
From somewhere inside the apartment came the muted sound of the phone ringing, but Harry didn't move to answer it. Char was the only person whose calls he cared to take, and she was asleep inside. It was too late for solicitors, which left only the possibility of a wrong number, or worse, one of those long, vacant calls filled with satellite chatter which Harry knew were not wrong numbers at all but vulgar reminders of everything he could not leave behind.
The kitchen light switched on, obliterating the sky, and Harry saw Char's shadow skate across the lanai. He had told her several times not to bother with the phone, but she was the kind of person for whom such a concept was entirely impossible to grasp. In Char's world, Harry was learning, a ringing phone was meant to be answered, even at one o'clock in the morning. Especially at one in the morning, for the likelihood of disaster was so much greater then, the prospect that the caller might need help.
It was this same impulse that had drawn Char to him, her innate desire to be of use in some way, to fix things that were broken—something, Harry couldn't help observing, that she appeared to be unable to accomplish in her own life. One day she was cleaning his house and the next she was in bed with him, as if his need for intimacy were as easily fulfilled as his desire for a clean bathroom.