Dead or Alive

by Grant Blackwood

“You never want to find that out. We gave him the equivalent of a massive heart attack. The pain would have been intense-I mean, really miserable. For him, maybe that’s just too damned bad, but it would have been pretty fucking awful. We’ll see how he responds to it in a couple of minutes, guys, but he’s been through something that nobody will ever want to repeat. He probably thinks he’s just seen the bottom floor of hell. I guess we’ll see what that does-did to him-in a few minutes.”

  It took four minutes and thirty seconds before the legs moved. Dr. Pasternak looked at the EKG readout on the resuscitator and relaxed. The Emir was out of the influence of the succinylcholine, and his muscles were now under the control of his nerves, the way they were supposed to be.

  “He’ll be unconscious for a few minutes, until his brain is fully suffused with oxygenated blood,” the anesthesiologist explained. “We’ll let him awaken normally, and then we can talk with him.”

  “What’s his mental state going to be?” This was Clark asking the question. He’d never seen anything even remotely like this before.

  “That depends. I suppose it’s possible that he might remain strong and resistive, but I would not expect that. He’s been through a singular and very, very adverse experience. He will not want to repeat it. He’s been through pain that makes childbirth seem like a picnic in Central Park. I can only speculate how dreadful it’s been for him. I don’t know anyone who’s been through this-well, maybe some people who’ve been through massive coronaries, but they don’t usually remember the intensity of the pain. The brain doesn’t work that way. It erases great pain as a defense mechanism. Not this time. He will remember the experience of it, if not the pain itself. If that experience doesn’t frighten him beyond anything he’s ever experienced, well, then we’re talking about John Wayne on amphetamines. People like that do not exist in the real world. There’s the complication of his religious beliefs. Those can be pretty strong. How strong, well, we’ll have to see, but if he resists us from this point on, I will be surprised.”

  “If he does, can we repeat the experience?” Clark asked.

  Pasternak turned. “Yes, we can-almost indefinitely. I’ve heard around the shop at Columbia that the East German Stasi used this technique to interrogate political and espionage prisoners, and that it was uniformly successful. They stopped using it-I don’t know why. Maybe it was too evil even for them. As I said yesterday, this is off the syllabus from the Josef Mengele School of Medicine. The guy who ran the Stasi was Jewish, as I recall-Marcus Wolf, I think his name was-and maybe it affected him on that basis.”

  “How are you feeling, Rich?” Hendley asked.

  “I’m fine. But he isn’t.” The doc paused. “Will they still execute this guy?”

  “Depends on who ends up getting him,” Hendley replied. “If the FBI gets him, he’ll go through the federal court system, and if he does, then eventually he goes night-night at Terre Haute, Indiana, after due process of law. That’s not our concern, really.”

  Because what he’s just been through was quite a lot worse than that, Pasternak didn’t say. His conscience was under control, but it was making noise. This really was out of Josef Mengele’s play-book, and that wasn’t something calculated to make a New York Jew happy. But his brother’s body had never been recovered, squashed to atoms by the collapsing WTC tower. He didn’t even have a grave that he could visit with Mike’s kids. And this bastard had made that happen, and so Rich Pasternak told his conscience to be quiet. He was doing if not God’s work, then his family’s work, and that was fine with him. His conscience would have to be quiet about it.

  “What’s this guy’s name exactly?” Pasternak asked.

  Clark handled the answer: “Saif Rahman Yasin. He’s child number fifty-plus of his father, a man of commendable vigor, his dad was, also tight with the Saudi Royal Family.”

  “Oh? I didn’t know that.”

  “He hates the Saudi Royals more than he hates Israel,” Clark explained. “They tried to whack him about six years ago, but they blew the mission. He hates them because of corruption, so he says. I guess they have some-I mean, a huge amount of-money controlled by a relatively small number of people, and you’re going to get some, but compared to Washington, it isn’t all that bad. I’ve been there. I learned the language there back in the 1980s. The Saudis I’ve met are pretty good people. Their religion is different from mine, but hell, so are the Baptists. The Saudis want this mutt dead more than we do, believe it or not. They’d love to drive him to Chop-Chop Square in Riyadh and take his head off with a sword. To them, he’s spit on their country, and their king, and their religion. Three for three, and that’s pretty bad over there. Doc, the Saudis are not the same as we are, but neither are the Brits, okay? I’ve lived there, too.”

  “What do you think we ought to do with him?”

  “Above my pay grade, sir. We can always kill him, but better to do that in public-hell, do it at halftime at the Super Bowl with instant replay and color commentary from the network TV crew. I could live with that. But it’s really a bigger question than that. He’s a political figure, and his removal will be a political act also. That always screws things up,” Clark concluded. He had little in the way of political instincts, and didn’t really want any. His world was a simpler one: If you did murder, then you died for it. It wasn’t elegant or very “sensitive,” but it had, actually, worked once. As the legal system had worked a lot better before his country had been overrun with lawyers. But there was no going back, and he could not make it so. Clark had no illusions about ruling the world. His brain just didn’t stretch that far. “Doc, what you just put him through, was it really that bad?”

  “Far worse than anything I’ve ever come close to experiencing myself, worse than anything I’ve ever seen in twenty-six years of medical practice, worse than anything you can inflict on a person without killing him all the way dead. My knowledge of this is, really, theoretical, but it’s not something I’d want to go through myself for any reason.”

  Clark thought back to a guy named Billy, and his time in Clark’s recompression chamber. He remembered how coldly he’d tortured that little rapist fuck, how it had not touched his conscience one little bit. But that had been personal, not business, and his conscience still didn’t care much about it. He’d left him alive in a farm field in Virginia, later to be driven to a hospital and treated futilely for a week or so before the barotrauma had stolen his worthless rapist life. Part of Clark wondered occasionally if Billy liked it in hell. But not often.

  So this was worse than that? Damn.

  Pasternak looked down and saw the eyelids flutter. Okay, he was coming all the way back. Good. Sort of.

  Clark walked over to Hendley. “Who’s going to interview him?” John asked.

  “Jerry Rounds, to start.”

  “Want me to backstop him?”

  “Probably a good idea if we all stand in here. I mean, it would be best if we had a psychiatrist handy-best of all, an Islamic theologian-but we don’t. We’re always shank’s mare here, aren’t we?”

  “Cheer up. Langley would never have had the balls to do what we just did, not without a whole law school handy to kibitz, and a reporter from the Post to take notes and build up his moral outrage. That’s one thing I really like about this place: no leaks.”

  “Part of me wants to discuss this with Jack Ryan. He’s not a shrink, but I like his instincts. But I can’t do that. You know why.”

  Clark nodded; he did. Jack Ryan also had been known to experience conscience problems. Nobody was perfect.

  Hendley walked to a phone and punched in a few digits. Just two minutes later, Jerry Rounds came in. “Well?” Rounds asked.

  “Our guest has had a bad morning,” Hendley explained. “Now we need to talk to him. That’s your job, Jerry.”

  “Looks unconscious,” Rounds observed.

  “He’ll be that way for a couple of minutes,” Pasternak clarified. “But he’ll be okay,” the doctor promised.

>   “Jesus, do we have enough people in here?” Rounds observed next. More people than the regular board meetings. Then the TV camera came in, set up on a tripod by Dominic, and the tarpaulin curtains they’d duct-taped together the night before were erected around the workbench. At his nod, Dominic hit the camera’s record button, and Hendley took over, announcing off camera the time and date. Gavin Biery would, of course, later digitally alter Hendley’s voice. Dominic replayed the sequence and pronounced the recording clean.

  “Head games?” Rounds asked, almost to himself, but Clark was standing right next to him.

  “Why not?” Clark responded. “No rules on this, Jerry.”

  “Right.” Clark had a way of cutting down to the bone of the issue, the intel chief noted.

  Clark wondered if everyone should wear cowboy dress, jeans, gunbelts, and ten-gallon hats, to distort him all the way, really to play head games with Saif. But it was better, probably, to keep it simple. Thinking too much about anything usually obfuscated everything and ended up leading nowhere. Simple was usually better. Almost always.

  Clark walked to the table and saw that Saif was moving now, moving and twisting in his sleep. About ready to wake up. Would he be surprised to be alive? Clark wondered. Would he think he was in hell? For damned sure it wasn’t paradise. He looked closely at the face. Little muscles were moving now. He was about ready to rejoin the world. Clark decided to stay where he was.

  “John?” It was Chavez.

  “Yeah, Ding?”

  “It’s really been that bad, eh?”

  “That’s what the doc says. He’s the expert.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Wrong deity, man,” Clark observed. “He’s probably expecting to see Allah-or maybe the devil.” I guess maybe I can stand in for him, John thought on reflection. He looked around. Jerry Rounds looked uneasy. Hendley had sent him up to bat in the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded and a full count. Well, he’d be inhuman not to be a little tight, John thought.

  He felt himself being drawn into this. It was coming his way, and he suddenly knew it.

  Oh, shit, Clark thought. What was he supposed to say to this bastard? This was a job for a psychiatrist. Maybe a serious Islamic churchman, or theologian-what did they call them? Mufti? Something like that. Somebody who knew Islam a hell of a lot better than he did.

  But was this guy really a Muslim? Or was he a would-be politician? Did he himself even know what he was? At what point did a man become what he proclaimed himself to be? Those were deep questions for Clark. Too damned deep. But the man’s eyelids were fluttering. Then they opened, and Clark was looking into them.

  “Feels good to breathe, doesn’t it?” Clark asked. There was no answer, but there was confusion on the man’s face. “Hello, Saif. Welcome back.”

  “Who are you?” the man asked, somewhat drunkenly.

  “I work for the United States government.”

  “What have you done to me? What happened?”

  “We induced a heart attack, then brought you back. They tell me it’s an agonizing procedure.”

  To this Clark got no response, but he could see the flicker of terror in the Emir’s eyes.

  “You should know this: What you just went through can be replicated-indefinitely and without long-term damage. Fail to cooperate and your days will consist of nothing more than one heart attack after another.”

  “You cannot do that. You have-”

  “Laws? Not here we don’t. It’s just me, you, and a syringe, for as long as it takes. If you don’t believe me, I can have the doctor back here in two minutes. Make your choice.”

  The Emir’s decision took less than three seconds. “Ask your questions.”

  Clark and Rounds quickly discovered that their interaction of the man known as the Emir wasn’t going to be an interrogation but rather a cordial debriefing. Yasin had clearly taken Clark’s warning to heart.

  The first session lasted two hours and covered the mundane to the significant, questions to which they already had the answers, and mysteries they’d yet to unravel: How long had he been in America? Where and when had he undergone plastic surgery? His route after leaving Pakistan. How was the house in Las Vegas purchased? How big was the URC’s operational budget? The locations of bank accounts; the URC’s organizational structure, cell headquarters, sleeper agents, strategic goals…

  And so it went, into the early evening, until Hendley called a halt. The next morning the group gathered in the kitchen of the main house to do a postmortem and to plan the day’s questioning. Their time was limited, Hendley explained. Whatever their personal inclinations, the Emir didn’t belong to The Campus, and justice was not theirs to dispense. The man belonged to the American people; justice to be dispensed according to their laws. Besides, once Yasin was in the hands of the FBI, months and years could be spent wringing from him every last drop of information. In the meantime, The Campus would make hay with what the Emir had so far disclosed. They had plenty of leads to run down, and enough intel to keep them busy for eight months to a year.

  “I’d say there’s just one last thing we need to get out of him,” Jack Ryan Jr. said.

  “What’s that?” Rounds replied.

  “The why of it all. This guy’s thinking is too layered. All the pieces and parts of Lotus-Yucca Mountain, the Losan, the attacks in the Midwest… Was the whole point terror, or something bigger? It has to be more than Nine-Eleven writ large, right?”

  Clark cocked his head thoughtfully and looked to Hendley, who took a beat, then said, “Damned good question.”

  By mid-morning they had what they wanted; they turned their attention to the tricky matter of turning Yasin over to the FBI. As symbolically and visually appealing as the idea might be, trussing up the Emir like a Christmas goose and shoving him from a moving car onto the steps of the Hoover Building was a nonstarter. The Campus had for weeks been skirting the gray line between remaining in the shadows where it was designed to operate and attracting the attention of the U.S. government.

  So the question became how to “regift” the world’s most wanted terrorist without having it blow back on them. In the end, Dominic Caruso, having learned the lesson from Brian, came up with the solution.

  “KISS,” he said. “Keep it simple, stupid.”

  “Explain.” This from Hendley.

  “We’re overthinking it. We’ve already got the perfect cutout: Gus Werner. He tapped me for The Campus, and he’s in tight with Dan Murray, Director of the FBI.”

  “This is a damned big gift horse, Dom,” said Chavez. “Think he’ll go for it? Better question: Think he can make it work?”

  “How would it go down?” asked Jack.

  “He’ll be arrested immediately and locked up in a very secure location. You know, read him his rights, offer him an attorney, try to talk to him some. Get a U.S. Attorney involved. They’ll tell the Attorney General, who’ll tell the President. After that, the snowball starts getting big. The press gets involved, and we sit back and watch the show. Listen, Gus knows how we work, and he knows how the Bureau works. If anybody can sell it, he can.”

  Hendley considered this for a few moments, then nodded. “Call him.”

  In the Hoover Building, Gus Werner’s phone rang. It was his private line, and few people had access to that. “Werner.”

  “Dominic Caruso here, Mr. Werner. You got a few minutes this afternoon? Say, twenty minutes.”

  “Uh, sure. When?”

  “Now.”

  “Okay, come on down.”

  Dominic parked a block from the Hoover Building and went into the main lobby, showing his FBI ID to the desk guards. That allowed him to walk around the metal detectors. FBI agents were supposed to carry sidearms. In fact, Dominic wasn’t at the moment. He’d forgotten and left it at his desk, rather to his surprise.

  Augustus Werner’s office was on the top floor, complete with a secretary that he rated as a full assistant director of the FBI, just a few doors away from Dan Murray�
��s rather larger director’s office. Dominic announced himself to the secretary, and she whisked him right in. He took a seat across from the AD’s desk. It was exactly 3:30 by his watch.

  “Okay, Dominic, what do you want?” Werner asked.

  “I have an offer to make.”

  “What offer is that?”

  “You want the Emir?” Dominic Caruso asked.

  “Huh?”

  Dominic repeated the question.

  “Sure, okay.” Werner’s expression said, What’s the punch line?

  “Tonight, at Tysons Corner. Upper-level parking area, say at nine-fifteen. Come alone. I know you’ll have people close by, but not close enough to see the transfer. I’ll personally hand him over to you.”

  “You’re serious. You have him?”

  “Yep.”

  “How the hell did that happen?”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell. We’ve got him and you can have him. Just leave us out of it.”

  “That’d be tough.”

  “But not impossible.” Dominic smiled.

  “No, not impossible.”

  “Anonymous tip, unexpected break-whatever.”

  “Right, right… I have to talk this one over with the director.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Stay by your phone. I’ll be in touch.”

  As everyone knew it would, the call came quickly-within ninety minutes, in fact-and the time and place of the meeting was confirmed. Eight-thirty came soon enough, and then it was time to get ready. Dominic and Clark walked out to the workshop to find Pasternak giving the Emir a once-over under the watchful eye and ready Glock of Domingo Chavez.

  “He good to go, Doc?” Dominic Caruso asked.

  “Yes. Careful with the leg, though.”

  “Anything you say.”

  Clark and Dominic stood Yasin up, and Dominic took the flex-cuffs from his back pocket and attached them to his wrists. Next, Dominic took out an Ace bandage, which he wrapped around Saif’s head half a dozen times. It would make a good blindfold. With that done, Clark grabbed him by the arm and walked him to the door, then across the backyard and through the back door to the garage. Hendley, Rounds, Granger, and Jack were standing beside the Suburban. They remained silent as Dominic opened the Suburban’s rear passenger door and helped Yasin inside. Clark went around to the other side and slid in beside him. Dominic got in front and started up. The drive would be down U.S. 29 to the D.C. Beltway, and then west into northern Virginia. Dominic stayed right on the posted speed limit, which was unusual for him. The addition of an FBI ID in his wallet usually absolved him of all speed limits in America, but this evening he’d play everything strictly by the rules. Across the American Legion Bridge into Virginia, which turned into a sweeping left uphill turn. Another twenty minutes and Dominic took the right-hand exit to Tysons Corner. Traffic picked up, but mostly away from the shopping center. It was 9:25 now. He took the ramp to the upper level on the south side of the shopping center.