The Towers

by David Poyer

  He felt a small, distant thrill; almost the way a normal person might feel when it looked as if his movie, about combat and manhood and what it did to you when a friend died, might get made.

  He picked up the bottle again. Weighed the glass in his hand, one of the heavy cut-glass tumblers his grandmother had served Cary Grant and Bette Davis out of. Discipline, he thought. Duty. Above all, teamwork. All those words pounded into you at Coronado.

  But what about when the team was dead? Where did a guy go then?

  The first words on-screen would be the names. The dedication.

  Sweat broke out over his back. He looked at the tumbler again, forced his hand to put it down. Weighed the bottle too. Throw it through the window? No. No, Obie. Set it down too. Gently. There.

  The bed creaked as it took his weight. The mattress stank of mold. He needed new furniture. Tear out the seventies shag. The woman flinched when he threw the covers off. Silvery hair. Smooth shining breasts. Large, dark nipples. Oh yeah. A songwriter; just another wannabe.

  “Hey there,” he said, and pushed her over on her back.

  “I don’t want to. You’re too rough. I was asleep—”

  “Nobody asked if you wanted to,” he grunted, twisting a fist into her hair. Get them by the hair, they didn’t fight long. Pulling her head back as his hand clapped between her legs and twisted. He set his knees and followed his fingers with his prick, driving it in with his full weight. She cried out and fought, striking his back with hard little fists. She connected with a lucky blow to his ear and he started to choke her, but restrained himself just in time.

  Holding her down, his other hand over her mouth, Teddy Oberg plowed toward the only personal forgetting left. Knowing even as he triggered, pale neon lancing behind his eyes, that as soon as it was over, the images would return.

  6:05 A.M., EST, PORTLAND, MAINE

  Two Middle Eastern men check in to their flight to Boston, with a connection to LA. One, an Egyptian architect, sets off an automated screening system as a flight risk. Security holds his bags until they confirm he’s actually boarded.

  In Boston, one flier takes a cell call from a traveler at Logan waiting to board another aircraft. As he and other men check in for the next flight, the security system flags more of them. Again, the security people hold their bags. But they all pass through the metal detectors and security checkpoints and quietly enplane.

  At nearly the same time, five other men are boarding a flight in Washington, DC. A ticket agent finds two of them suspicious. She holds their bags until they’re on the plane.

  In Newark, four more young men board United Flight 93 for Los Angeles. One gets additional screening. Security inspects his bag for explosives. They find nothing suspicious. The others pass preboarding screening and all four enter the aircraft.

  By 7:50, nineteen men are safely aboard four transcontinental flights.

  4:15 P.M., YEMENI TIME, SANA’A, YEMEN

  The armored SUV growled through empty streets, the blazing afternoon heat boiling up off uneven asphalt and ancient cobblestones. Another Suburban sped ahead, with the protective detail. In the center car, FBI SWAT members rode passenger-side front and in the back.

  Special Agent Aisha Ar-Rahim was ensconced in the center seat in a bright hibiscus-patterned abaya with long sleeves, low heels, and a headscarf, a loose shawl over her shoulders. Her round face was bent to a notebook screen. A little girl with hair in braids smiled up. A link chart occupied the rest of the screen, with boxes and arrows and phone numbers in red, green, blue. Under her abaya ar-Rahim wore a Kevlar ballistic vest. Beside her slumped a large carpetbag purse.

  The heavyset guy sitting too close was Scott Doanelson. Every federal agency had a trademark, and Doanelson fit his: scuffed oxfords, Wal-Mart suit, button-down white polycotton shirt under his Kevlar. He wore the suit even when they went out—which wasn’t often, since kidnapping foreigners had become the Yemeni national sport. He wore a holster, though it had been empty since the week before, when Doanelson had called the ambassador “Sweetie.” But Aisha’s SIG was in in her purse, along with her badge, Mace, a spare magazine of Cor-Bon +P+ hollow points, and a small red prayer rug she’d picked up on Hajj.

  Doanelson had been in-country for two weeks. Aisha had been here for six months and had worked counterterror throughout the Mideast for years. Had two Civilian Service Awards, one for Bahrain, one for Ashaara, and the Julie Cross Award for Women in Federal Law Enforcement. But none of that seemed to rival the luster of an FBI badge. At least from Doanelson’s point of view.

  “Think we’re getting anywhere with this guy?” he grunted, pulling a Sprite out of the SUV’s cold box.

  “I’m establishing rapport.”

  “We’re wasting time and dollars. Coddling fucking Islamic terrorists—”

  “They’re not Islamic terrorists,” she said sharply. “Just terrorists. Islam doesn’t condone what they’re doing.”

  “I don’t see them pushing back. These moderate Muslims you keep telling me about.”

  “We recruited these people, Scott. Trained and armed them, to fight the Soviets. Sixty thousand just from Yemen.”

  “You saying we should’ve left the Russkis in Afghanistan? That would have been better?”

  She didn’t answer, just turned her face to the colorful façades passing by. Sana’a wasn’t Somalia. Yet. The rabid fundamentalists, the Salafis, only had a toehold, backed by Saudi millions. With luck, they could save this country.

  The frame of the SUV rattled; dusty wind scratched at the windows. Behind it the follow car growled, another heavy vehicle with more grim-faced, heavily armed men. The threat condition had been upped to Delta. Even here, in the heart of the capital, the desert filled the streets with sandy, tan fog. The howling wind scudded trash along the road. She yearned out at colorful shopfronts, vendors’ stalls. She’d felt perfectly safe walking these streets, as long as she wore the hijab. For the first few months she’d frequented the Salt Market and worshipped with Yemeni women in the Jami al-Kabir, the Grand Mosque, and no one had said a word other than friendly salaams.

  Aisha Ar-Rahim had been a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent for twelve years. The NCIS looked into any crime involving naval personnel, grand theft to murder. It conducted criminal-investigation, contract-fraud, counternarcotics work. Being one of the few agents who spoke Arabic, she’d found herself more or less permanently assigned to force protection, especially since she’d helped bring to justice the leader of a raging insurgency in a country on the Red Sea. Al-Maahdi was dead now, shot in a fracas among his bodyguards. A huge thorn in the side of US policy in the region plucked out, and all but one of the hostages safely returned. Based out of Bahrain as the Yemeni referent, Aisha had worked in-country for the last six months as part of a joint FBI/NCIS team.

  At the moment, she was assisting in the interrogation of a suspect Islamic Jihad member. Abu-Hamid Al-Nashiri had been identified as a phone contact of men involved both in the USS Cole bombing the year before, and in a plot to attack Western-flag oil tankers. Working out of El-Hadida and Makullah, the joint team had helped the local authorities break up the bombers. They’d found an abandoned speedboat with Semtex residue, although the explosive itself had been removed.

  But the perpetrators had escaped. Now phone records transferred by NSA, combined with her patient work on intelligence from local authorities, were uncovering not just a network, but a Yemeni hub to a wagon wheel of Al Qaeda in Sudan and Afghanistan. And also an as-yet-unclear effort that seemed pointed somewhere outside the Mideast, possibly even at the United States.

  It was slow work. Jigsaw puzzling moved like lightning compared to building an effective case.

  She leaned back and stretched, locking gazes with the little girl on-screen. Tashaara was home in Harlem. Aisha saw her every time she got back, which wasn’t nearly often enough. Well, day after tomorrow, she’d be on her way. To her mother, to Tashaara—and to a wedding.

  She sm
iled, then sighed and bent again over the keyboard, trying to boil down eighteen hours of Arabic interrogation into a one-page report in bureaucratese.

  * * *

  YEMEN’S president had been a close buddy of Saddam Hussein’s, if anybody was Saddam’s buddy. The president bought antitank missiles from North Korea. He’d played the Soviet Union off against the United States, back when there’d been a Soviet Union, and was now trying the same game against Saudi Arabia, his giant neighbor to the north.

  Aisha had to admit the country didn’t have much else going for it. In ancient times the fabled Sheba had been wealthy, exporting the frankincense and myrrh of the Bible. These days it was one of the poorest states in the Middle East, with little water, constant warfare among desert tribes, a secession movement in the south, Shiite unrest in the north, and six Kalashnikovs for every adult male. One thing she’d brought out of her experiences in Ashaara was not to expect high standards from governments only one notch above anarchy.

  Her eyes went again to the picture. She’d saved one child, yes. But hundreds of thousands more … no one had been able to save them.

  Her own experiences here had been mixed. On her second visit to his mosque the imam had invited her to chai with him and his wife and eventually asked her to hold a women’s English class. The Yemenis loved guests; soon she’d had dozens of invitations, to shop at the Bab Al’Sabah, the fruit souk, the Rock Palace, to drive to Shibam to see the fortifications of Koukabanb. Dressed local, she’d shopped with a chattering throng of sisters, the darkest among a dozen. Yemenis didn’t wear burka. Just black abayas, the hijab—headscarf—and sometimes (the older ones mostly) the slit-eyed niqab. Hundreds of women wandered among gaudily bedecked stalls and shopfronts. Colorfully costumed proprietors called, “Shoof, shoof”—look, look—from trays of silver jewelry, cheap gold she was warned was alloy, fabrics, spices, trinkets, shoes. And the wonderful food: peaches, apricots, walnuts, almonds, honey-filled pastries, date cookies, chocolaty mokha, shawarma eaten hot off a stick. She bought an embroidered headdress for her mother, a curved, wicked-sharp jambiya for Albert, tiny silver earrings and carved animals for Tashaara.

  But Yemen also hosted people its neighbors considered terrorists. The man they were going to see tonight, Abu-Hamid al-Nashiri, had been crossing the border back and forth even as Saudi intelligence was demanding his arrest for plotting to attack the armored limousines of their princes with North Korean antitank missiles. Not long before, the Saudis said, al-Nashiri had been drinking tea in a café here in Sana’a, and not alone, either—he’d been laughing and joking with the deputy director of the Yemeni police. Now he was in custody, but that didn’t seem to mean the same thing here as it did elsewhere. The Amna Siyasi—the Political Security Organization, the main intelligence service—was riddled with Al Qaeda sympathizers.

  Which led to the question, why had the president allowed American law enforcement into his country at all, after stonewalling them for years? She guessed he was hedging his bets. Angling for aid, and cooperating just enough not to become a U.S. target the way Saddam had. So far, though, the PSO had treated her with respect. Mainly, she suspected, because they hadn’t quite figured her out. What was a black woman, an Arabic-speaking Muslim, doing working for the Americans?

  Sometimes she wondered herself.

  A blare of horns, a screech of brakes. She looked up. They were at the palace.

  * * *

  THE usual holdup at the high iron gates while the guard asked why they were there, who they were there to see. He knew perfectly well, of course. All part of the ritual, and she kept typing while they sat there, although feeling vulnerable. The GrayWolf security men had dismounted and stood around, weapons out, scanning the upper floors of the buildings across the street. An antitank rocket would go through the Suburban’s armor like a bullet through cottage cheese. “Why do we have to travel in such obvious vehicles?” she muttered.

  “The air-conditioning works,” Doanelson said.

  “We don’t need it. It’s not even hot.”

  But finally the gate swung open.

  Lieutenant Colonel Abdulaziz Al-Safani was in his usual thobe, slacks, the little white keffiyah beanie under a red-and-white-checked shemagh. His jambiya, the ceremonial dagger all male Yemenis wore, was slung over his right leg, half-covered by a gray-and-olive Harris tweed jacket that would have looked at home in Mayfair. His holstered Makharov hung reversed on the other side. He nodded to Doanelson but came right to her. Didn’t take her hand, didn’t hug or kiss her, the standard greeting between men. Instead he bowed. “Salaam aleikum.”

  “As-aleikum salaam, Mûqoddam. You’re looking healthy today,” she continued in Arabic, not bothering to interpret for Doanelson. “And what a handsome blazer. Your family, they’re well?”

  “Very well, praise Allah. You too look healthy, Special Agent Ar-Rahim. Your daughter, she is well?”

  “Very well. Your son’s eyes are better?”

  “Much better, praise Allah. And your wedding—it’s still on? When are you leaving?”

  “Day after tomorrow, Allah willing. I’m all packed.”

  “He has converted, yes? Last time we spoke you were not sure he would.”

  She smiled. “I want Albert to say his Shahadah at the masjid where I grew up. Where my father and mother went, the girls I went to school with. Where my family still goes.”

  “In New York, yes? In your village of … Harlem?”

  She wondered how Al-Safani would react on seeing the “village” of Harlem. “Yes—in my village. On 113th, between Malcolm X Boulevard and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.”

  “And he said yes?”

  She caught Doanelson’s eye. He looked irritated. Shut out of the conversation, with his hesitant, schoolbook Arabic. “Well, we had a discussion. I told him he couldn’t do it just because he wants to marry me. I said that’s not a worthy reason.”

  “He has to want it just from loving God.”

  “That’s what I told him. And he said, ‘I can love God without being a Muslim. I can stay a Baptist,’ he said.”

  “Then he can’t marry you.”

  “He’s a man. That means he’s stubborn.” And, although she loved him, it was true; Albert did sometimes assume things about a woman’s place.

  Al-Safani looked shocked, then chuckled. A month ago he’d have just stared. She smiled at him. “But he says now he loves God enough to marry me.”

  The colonel threw back his head and laughed. “Let’s get out of this dust! What news do you bring? I’m still hoping for the electronic package the general spoke to madame ambassador about.”

  Inside, Doanelson trailing, and up two flights of dusty, echoing stairs to the colonel’s office. Spacious but casually dirty, furnished like a 1940s private detective’s sanctum. Rusty file cabinets, scruffy metal folding chairs, tarnished brass ashtrays full of stale butts, a swaying overhead fan stirring a miasma of tobacco, coffee, sweat. A half wall with a swinging door partitioned a nook that must once have held a private secretary’s desk. For the next hour they sat drinking cups of strong coffee and discussing the news. Aisha always read the Times Online before coming over. Al-Safani hung on anything about Mideast policy. Grist for the reports he no doubt had to submit on his dealings with the Americans, and she supplied it patiently, though Doanelson frowned and fidgeted. She’d told him before not to check his watch, it insulted your host, but he didn’t seem to care.

  They couldn’t afford to tick off the Yemenis. Al Qaeda—“the foundation” or “the base” in Arabic—seemed to be the nickname of the loose confederation that’d attacked USS Horn in Bahrain, USS Cole in Aden, and U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Those attacks had put Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri on the Most Wanted list.

  Unfortunately, Saudi intelligence had reported that the man whose office they were in, Colonel Abdulaziz Al-Safani, had been seen socializing in a café with the suspect that same Al-Safani now held in custody.

  She lowere
d her third tiny cup of sickly sweet, molasses-thick coffee. “Have you made any progress with our friend?”

  Al-Safani beckoned to the guard. Apparently he’d been waiting in the hallway, because a shuffle and a sharp order ensued.

  A short, heavily-bearded man in dirty pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved yellow shirt slouched in. He wasn’t shackled or manacled. He walked with a limp, and sharp dark eyes met hers for just a moment but avoided Doanelson’s. He settled in the chair on the far side of the half wall. As she pulled her own seat to the partition, she caught his smell: tea and cologne and old sweat. A junior PSO officer clicked a ballpoint above a yellow notepad.

  Abu-Hamid Al-Nashiri was a veteran of Afghanistan and Bosnia. He was fifty-one, his beard streaked with gray. After two months of interviewing, she knew him better than she had her father. Al-Nashiri had two wives in Yemen and one in Afghanistan. His limp came courtesy of a Russian mine. A dangerous killer, almost certainly a link between Al-Zawahiri and the Yemeni branch of ALQ. She flipped open her computer, which had been powered up and was recording everything already, and looked at the next question. The rules, negotiated between the ambassador and General Gamish, were strict. She said politely to Al-Safani, who’d perched one buttock on the partition between her and Al-Nashiri, “The prisoner was having problems with his back. Is he feeling better?”

  Al-Safani bent his head to light a Pall Mall. The PSO smoked only foreign cigarettes, no doubt seized from smugglers. Without looking at the seated man he said, “Is the prisoner’s back feeling better?”

  “It still hurts.”

  “The prisoner’s back still hurts.”

  “The surgery was probably done wrong. We could fly him to the US and have it looked at.”

  Al-Safani repeated this, but Al-Nashiri didn’t answer. Doanelson muttered, “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”