The Secret Soldier jw-5

by Alex Berenson

  “The Second Directorate.” The Second Directorate was the mukhabarat arm that dealt with internal subversion. Saudis sometimes called it the “Torture Directorate.” Though never loudly.

  “Bring them to muk headquarters. I’ll tell Ibrahim where they are. Then he’ll give us the answers we need. If he has them.”

  Mansour turned to leave. “There’s one last thing, father. The camp in the Bekaa that Bakr ran was attacked three days ago.” Mansour spoke quickly now, as if he feared another eruption. “I only learned about it this morning. I was going to tell you this afternoon, but then the ambush—”

  “What happened?”

  “Everyone in it was killed.”

  Saeed tried to process this new disaster. “Could this man Bakr have done it himself? To cover his tracks?”

  “It’s possible, but I don’t know why he would. He could have closed the camp himself, dismissed everyone quietly, if he didn’t need them. This attack made a lot of noise. The Lebanese police are investigating, and they have suspects. Two Americans.”

  “John Wells.”

  “I’m not sure, but one of the photos looks like him.”

  “They haven’t released it publicly?”

  “No. I think the Americans are pressing them to keep it quiet.”

  “For the first time in my life, I’m glad I’m old,” Saeed said. “If I were young, I couldn’t keep myself from hurting you, Mansour. I warned you about Wells.”

  “Yes, father.”

  “Do you see what this means? If this man Bakr is as big a fool as you, the Americans may already have connected the camp to the attack on Kurland, and us to the camp. Or Bakr may be waiting to tell the world that we’re paying him. What would you like me to tell the president, then? Yes, we financed this bombing in Bahrain and assassinated the princess, but of course we didn’t attack your ambassador. We would never do that. Even though the same man is behind all the attacks. And he’s a former officer in our own army. Do you think the Americans will believe that?”

  “I understand, father.” Mansour had called Saeed father more in the last ten minutes than he had in the last ten years.

  “I’m so glad you do, my son.”

  “What should—”

  “Give me some time. Maybe I’ll find a solution. Anything else you’ve forgotten to tell me?”

  Mansour shook his head.

  “Call Ibrahim, then. And leave me. I need to think.”

  BAKR’S HEZBOLLAH GENERAL HAD told him about the attack in Lebanon the morning after it happened. The news worried Bakr greatly, especially when he heard that Americans were involved. How had they found him? He wished he could go back to the Bekaa and see for himself what had happened, but he had no time.

  He reminded himself that no one important was still in Lebanon, and that as far as he knew, he’d removed any information that might point to his safe houses in Saudi Arabia. The camp didn’t even have computers anymore. He communicated with Talib only by cell phone. When he learned of the attack, he switched to a new prepaid phone and made his men do the same.

  Bakr figured he would be safe for a few days at a minimum, probably weeks or months. The Americans wouldn’t attack inside Saudi Arabia without asking permission, or at least telling the Saudi government in advance. He could count on General Ibrahim — and Ibrahim’s hidden masters — to warn him if the Americans got close. After all, until now he’d done everything they’d asked. And they had no idea of what he was planning next.

  So he went ahead with his preparations for the ambush, positioning men and vehicles, finishing his safe house, making sure his lieutenants understood every detail. From his years in the National Guard, he had a good idea how the muk, the army, and the Guard would react. Since the terrorist attacks of 2003, the Sauds had invested tens of billions of dollars improving their police and Special Forces. They would begin by closing roads and imposing a curfew. Within a few days, they would be searching entire cities house to house.

  Still, government bureaucracy and mutual distrust between the Interior Ministry and the National Guard would slow the initial response. Bakr figured they would need several hours before it shut the highways and airports. By then, he’d have Kurland hidden.

  His enemies had a huge advantage, though. Mansour knew who he was, knew about the Bekaa and about the safe houses in Suwaidi. They would quickly track the vehicles and explosives and weapons he’d used in the ambush. They even knew the names of some of his men. And they would respond with overwhelming force. As carefully as he’d hidden his connection to the house he planned to use as a prison, as carefully as he’d built the cell inside, Bakr knew he wouldn’t have long before the muk found him.

  But he didn’t plan to wait.

  THE CALL FROM THE Diplomatic Quarter came sooner than Bakr had expected. He briefly wondered if he should let this chance go, wait until all the pieces were in place. But he realized that he’d be worse than foolish to pass up this opportunity. He might never have another. So he’d ordered his men into battle.

  Thanks be to Allah, he’d succeeded. Of course, the attack hadn’t gone perfectly. Once they’d recovered from their initial shock, the Americans had fought hard. One of the ambassador’s guards had killed his best lieutenant. But the bombs had done their work, and Bakr would always remember the shock on the ambassador’s face as he realized that the police who’d come to save him weren’t police at all.

  After he bundled the ambassador in the back of his Tahoe, he drove north from Riyadh. He’d passed the turnoff to the king’s palace and watched Jeeps and Humvees flood south onto the highway, sirens screaming. He couldn’t help but smile. All those reinforcements for a battle that had already ended. Two booms tore the air behind them, two pillars of black smoke reached the sky, the last of Bakr’s bombs, the two panel trucks that had blocked the road. They would add to the confusion.

  Forty kilometers north of Riyadh he turned off the highway, headed west, and reached a wadi between dried, crumbling hills. A small aquifer ran beneath the land here. Recently, wealthy Riyadhis had bought plots in this valley and become gentleman farmers, installing wells to feed plots of cucumbers and oranges that loved the winter and hated the summer. Before Riyadh’s bourgeois had found it, the valley had been home to a brick factory, now abandoned.

  Bakr and his men left the Tahoes in the factory’s garage and moved the ambassador to the trunk of a white Mercedes sedan. Then they drove southwest to an abandoned date farm in a wadi deep in the Saudi desert and waited for nightfall. Now Bakr was about to make his final move. The transfer was risky, and arguably unnecessary. But the police would never expect it. And Bakr believed with all his heart that Allah wouldn’t let him fail in this mission. “Come on,” he said to the pilot. “It’s time.”

  Together they carried the ambassador’s limp body to the helicopter.

  AT FIRST KURLAND WASN’T sure he was awake at all. He opened his eyes, but the world around him didn’t change. He couldn’t find a hint of light. Then the day came back to him, scene by scene, as though he was watching a slideshow in his mind. The meeting with Abdullah. The ambush. The car bombs. The men grabbing him. Maybe he was having a nightmare. Once or twice he’d dreamed of attacks on the embassy.

  “Wake up,” he whispered.

  But he was awake, he knew. He felt the chair under him and the bite of the cuffs on his wrists. His mouth was dry and clotted from the sedative they’d given him. He thought he’d been unconscious for at least twelve hours, probably longer. His body ached, as though he’d been handled and moved roughly and repeatedly.

  He tilted his head left and right, trying to make sense of his surroundings. The walls were several feet away. The air was cool, not too stuffy, and he heard the faint hum of ventilation. Despite its darkness, this was a cell, not a tomb.

  Time went by, he wasn’t sure how much. The darkness terrified him, the darkness and the anticipation. His heart thumped wildly, and he warned himself to relax. He concentrated on controlling his bre
athing and pulse. Pretty ironic if I die before they can kill me. Though it might be for the best.

  He heard the grind of metal on metal. A hatch above slid back. An overhead bulb flicked on, and Kurland saw the cell around him, maybe fifteen feet square and nearly as deep. It had a concrete floor and walls, and in place of a ceiling were big metal plates, one with a hatch cut into it. He was chained to a chair near the back. In place of a ladder, simple steel rungs had been mounted on the front wall.

  A man climbed down, a bag over his shoulder, his face unhooded. He was Saudi, early thirties, short, with brown eyes and the thick legs of a baseball player.

  Kurland remembered a lesson from the cursory survival training that State provided its ambassadors, cursory because no one believed an ambassador could be kidnapped. Don’t panic if your captors are hooded. Hoods may mean they don’t want you to see their faces because they plan to free you and don’t want you to recognize them later. Until now, Kurland hadn’t understood the corollary of that proposition: If they’re not wearing hoods, they don’t care if you see their faces. Because they’re not planning to free you.

  Kurland thought back to the hour of advice he’d gotten in that conference room in Foggy Bottom: Build a rapport. Establish your common humanity. Don’t panic. Don’t make threats. Don’t push them for personally identifying details. Answer whatever questions they have. Don’t lie. Try not to give up classified information, but don’t worry if you do. Look for clues to where you are. Consider possible escape routes. The tips struck him as worse than useless. His captors, whoever they were, had destroyed a convoy of marines to get him. They were going to do what they liked.

  But he was going to follow one rule, no matter what: Don’t beg. Begging was counterproductive, the survival expert said. It widened the gap between captive and captor by reminding the captor of his power. Kurland promised himself that even if he had an ironclad guarantee that begging would save his life, he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t give these murderers the pleasure.

  Easy enough to say now.

  The Saudi brought out a camera and a tripod. Seeing the camera loosened Kurland’s bowels. Nothing good would happen on camera. The man set up the camera, taking his time, and then reached again into his bag—

  And pulled out bottles of Coca-Cola and water, and two pieces of pita bread. Despite his fear, Kurland felt a tremor of anticipation. He hadn’t realized until now that he was famished. The man uncuffed Kurland’s hands and gave him the water bottle. He left the Coke and the food against the wall behind him. Kurland wondered if the water might be spiked with something but couldn’t keep himself from drinking.

  He had never tasted anything so good. He sipped slowly, trying to savor each mouthful. He wasn’t sure whether to drink it all at once or save some, but the question answered itself. Before he could stop himself, he’d finished. He carefully put the empty bottle down next to his chair. “Thank you.”

  To Kurland’s surprise, the man responded. His voice was soft, his accent vaguely English. “You’re welcome.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Kurland could have asked any number of questions: Where am I? How long have I been here? And, of course, What do you plan to do with me? But the cool way the man had said “Don’t be silly” stopped him. He felt as if his captor had warned him with those three words that the ground rules were obvious, that if he pressed too hard he would be mistreated, and that if he behaved they’d be fair. The warning was a lie, of course. By definition, these men could change the rules on him anytime, treat him however they wanted for any reason or no reason at all. Still, Kurland felt better than if the man hadn’t spoken at all.

  “We have a speech we want you to make.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Please don’t argue. We just want you to say a few words, and then you can eat. I’m sure you’re hungry.”

  “No.”

  “Your wife will want to see you’re all right.”

  Barbara. Kurland was ashamed to realize that he’d forgotten her these last few minutes. She must be terrified. A place beyond panic. Even if he was already dead, he had to hang on as long as possible for her.

  “What is it you want me to say?”

  CHAPTER 20

  JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA

  EVEN FROM FIVE MILES OFFSHORE, THE CRISIS WAS UNMISTAKABLE. Graham Kurland had been kidnapped a day earlier. Now police and National Guard helicopters circled low and slow over downtown. A Saudi navy destroyer sat at anchor outside the harbor, broadside to the city, its radar winding slowly. Wells wasn’t sure what good the destroyer would do in finding Kurland, but he didn’t have to worry about it. He and Gaffan had their own escort, two Saudi National Guard speedboats armed with.50-caliber machine guns. They were bound for Abdullah’s giant palace on the Red Sea.

  Gaffan steered the boat between two jetties and into a basin outside the palace’s high gray walls. An officer in a khaki dress uniform waved them toward a pier, as a machine gun tracked their progress from a turret atop the wall.

  “Happy to see us,” Gaffan said. He brought the boat to a bobbing halt by the pier, and Wells hopped out.

  “Good to be back on solid ground.”

  “Is that where we are?” Gaffan said.

  The officer stepped toward them. “Salaam aleikum.”

  “Aleikum salaam.”

  “I’m Colonel Gharib. Your passports, please.”

  Wells handed them over. Gharib flipped through them, nodded at Meshaal.

  “Who’s this?”

  “We found him in Lebanon. We’re bringing him home.” Meshaal shrank backward, toward the cruiser.

  Gharib shook his head at the explanation, but all he said was, “This way.” They followed him into the compound through heavy black gates. A golf cart waited. Gharib waved them in and motored south, past date palms and the largest swimming pool Wells had ever seen. The southern edge of the compound held buildings that looked to be staff quarters and infrastructure. Wells picked up the faint odor of a sewage treatment plant. Gharib stopped outside a windowless one-story building, unlocked the door, motioned for them to go inside. “You wait here—”

  “There’s no time—” But the door had already closed, and the dead bolt thunked shut from the outside.

  THEY’D SAILED FROM CYPRUS two afternoons before, less than two days after reaching the island. Within twelve hours of their landing, Wells knew they couldn’t stay long. The local papers reported that the police were investigating three men who had attacked a couple on a deserted beach and stolen their car. And the boat they’d ditched had a Lebanese flag and registration. The cops had no doubt already asked the police in Beirut for help in tracking it down.

  Soon enough, the Lebanese would discover Gaffan’s name on their ship registry and connect the boat to the attack in the Bekaa. Then the Cyprus police would be after them for murder. Cyprus wasn’t big enough to hide them from a full-scale manhunt. As the Mossad agents who had recently assassinated a Palestinian guerrilla leader in a hotel in Dubai had learned, international passports, databases, security cameras, and facial matching software had made black ops harder and harder to pull off cleanly.

  The Dubai police had now issued bulletins for the Israelis involved in the hotel killing, including photos, aliases, and in many cases real names. Of course, the Mossad agents had carried out the assassination on Israeli government orders. They were safe from extradition as long as they stayed in Israel. They could even travel on diplomatic passports without too much hassle, though they would be wise to avoid connecting through Dubai.

  But Wells and Gaffan couldn’t count on government protection. So far, the CIA hadn’t stepped up for them. “Still waiting,” Shafer said, when Wells called him the night after they landed.

  “Ellis. Maybe I haven’t been clear enough about what we found.” In fact, Wells had told Shafer exactly what he’d discovered, the passports, manuals, and fake uniforms. Even “42 Aziz 3,” the myst
erious code he’d found in the notebook. “You need to get it in the system so you and the NSA can look it over.”

  “Then leave it at the embassy. And the kid, too.”

  But doing that would cost Wells his only leverage. He needed a guarantee that the CIA would provide clean papers for him and Gaffan, or even a presidential finding that would backstop the killings as acts of war justified under U.S. law — no different than drone strikes in Pakistan.

  “You know I can’t. Not until we have a deal.”

  “It’ll happen, John.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. I don’t know.”

  “Duto’s enjoying letting me twist, isn’t he? Never gets old for him.”

  Shafer’s silence was answer enough.

  * * *

  THEY COULDN’T COUNT ON Abdullah for help, either. Wells had hoped that in a worst-case scenario they could stay in the king’s palace in France while they planned their next move. The morning after they landed, Wells called Kowalski.

  “Tell him we found the place we were looking for.”

  “I hate to tell you. I don’t think he cares. Our mutual acquaintance”—Kowalski meant Miteb—“says that when his granddaughter died, it knocked the fight out of him.”

  Wells thought of the way Abdullah had acted in Nice. The king had been furious, desperate to put his son on the throne. Alia’s killing should have made him angrier. Not broken him. “That’s not possible.”

  “Our friend was surprised, too. Said he expected the opposite. But you know, a man who’s nearly ninety, a shock like this — nature takes its course. Even the tallest tree falls eventually.”

  “Spare me the circle-of-life wisdom. Just give me Miteb’s number so I can talk to him directly. I should have had it from the get-go.”

  WELLS COULDN’T HELP FEELING personally betrayed. He’d risked his life and Gaffan’s for the king. Now Abdullah was dismissing Wells like a servant who had outlived his usefulness.