The Towers

by David Poyer

  “Aisha?”

  She closed her eyes, visualizing his kind brown eyes, his hound-dog face. They’d met aboard USS John C. Stennis, during the battle group’s deployment to the Arabian Gulf. Albert had been a Programs Afloat College Education instructor, teaching algebra and beginning calculus. As the only civilians aboard, it had seemed natural to sit together in the wardroom, or carry their trays to the same table on the mess decks. Over the weeks between ports, a friendship had grown. They’d kept in touch afterward by e-mail and made a date to meet again when they were back in the States.

  She knew the statistics. Not many brothers wanted to commit. But Albert had been worth waiting for. “It’s me. You sound so far away. I can hardly hear you.”

  “Oh. Where … where are you? Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m still in Yemen.” She checked her watch again; the team was going to meet in seventeen minutes, discuss what to do. The world had gone upside down. The images were appalling. The tremendous towers disintegrating, turning to dust before their eyes. Thousands killed, the Early Bird and Times Online said. She rubbed her forehead, eyes squeezed shut. Even though intel had predicted it for years—nonstate actors, weapons of mass destruction, nerve-gas attacks, dirty bombs—it still felt unreal.

  And it seemed that Muslims, or rather, fanatics who called themselves Muslims, were responsible. “Are you still there?” she asked, though she could hear him breathing, and a tinny, excited voice behind him. Was his television on?

  “Yeah. Still here.”

  “The news? Is that what I hear?”

  “Yeah.” Patterson seemed to shake himself. “Did you talk to your mom? She’s worried about you. And worried you might think she was hurt, or Tashaara. They’re both safe at home. Tashaara’s not going to school today.”

  “I talked to them. Got through half an hour ago. We didn’t talk long, though. Did they say anything about the mosque?”

  “Maryam said there were cops there. Protecting it, I guess.”

  Aisha seized the nettle, but gently. “I might have to stay out here, Albert. We might have to put the wedding on hold.”

  “Your mom’s already done that. Called the cake people, and the caterer, and the, uh … the imam.”

  Aisha closed her eyes. Forced a resignation she didn’t feel into her voice. “Well, that’s probably the best decision. For right now.”

  A hand on her shoulder. Tim Benefiel, embassy security. She resisted the impulse to shove the hand off. “Meeting, Aisha. Ambassador’s office.”

  “Be right there.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just talking to somebody here. We’re going to an increased level of … never mind.”

  “Higher security? Are you on alert there?”

  “Forget I said that.”

  “You’re not in danger, are you?”

  She remembered the hatred in Al-Nashiri’s eyes, his threat. She rubbed her cheek; it still ached where he’d slapped her. “No, we’re safe here. You can tell Maryam that. But even if we have to postpone, that doesn’t mean you can’t do your Shahadah, Albert. You and Imam Sala’am can do that without me.”

  “Yeah, I know. But if you’re not here—”

  “It’s very low-key, Albert. You just say the vows in front of witnesses. Accept God, and they’ll all help. They’ll be your family. You said you missed having a family.” She checked her watch again. Five minutes. “And you’ll have me, and Tashaara, and we’ll all be together. And maybe someday—we’re not too old yet—”

  “Aisha. You don’t get it.”

  The sinking feeling intensified, as if she were in an elevator, dropping fast. “What’s wrong, Bert?”

  “I’m not converting.”

  “But you were going to—we agreed—”

  “That was before. I talked to a preacher here. He strongly recommends I not do this. Not now. Not ever.”

  “Meeting, Aisha.” Doanelson, the FBI man pushing past.

  She pressed the phone to her ear. “I don’t understand, Bert. If you don’t convert—”

  The distant voice hardened. “Why does it have to be me? Get baptized. There’s Baptists in Harlem, aren’t there? You said your people in Carolina were Baptist. And your grandmother in Detroit. You’d only be coming home.”

  She inhaled, but there didn’t seem to be any oxygen. “So you mean—you’re not marrying me?”

  “We can get married. But you have to convert. Not me. I’m not going to join a bunch of religious murderers. Those people who hijacked those planes, Aisha. They didn’t just kill white folks. My cousin knows a woman who died in the South Tower. I’m not joining any religion like that.”

  “We’re not all—”

  “Aisha, meeting! Right now!”

  “I’ll call you back, I have to go,” she said rapidly, and hung up. Pushed her fingers into her eyelids, took a deep breath. Searched blindly for her purse, before she realized it was under her chair, right where she’d put it.

  * * *

  THE ambassador wasn’t in residence. Mrs. Bodine had left, Mr. Hole wasn’t yet in-country, so Fontanelle, the DCM, deputy chief of mission, chaired. She barely heard his first few sentences, but forced herself to tune in, to forget her shaking hands. She wasn’t going to weep. Not about her own little concerns, when so many had just died.

  It might not even be the attack, or the religious issue. Asking anyone to be part of your life, as a law enforcement professional, was asking a lot. From what she heard from the other women, it was even chancier for a female agent, with a signed mobility agreement underlining that “home” was where the NCIS sent you. Finding a man willing to put his own career second … but she’d thought Albert, with his footloose, ship-following lifestyle, might be able to cope.

  Now, it seemed, he wasn’t even going to try.

  When the meeting ended, she cupped her elbows in her palms and walked slowly back through the embassy. Through a disturbed buzz of voices, the electronic emoting of television; every set was on. Staffers were cleaning out desks and packing briefcases and taking pictures of each other in front of the windows. Every screen was replaying the same footage. The silver-black blur of an approaching aircraft. The towers, subsiding like melting sand castles. Screaming people running, pursued by a formless, light-sucking void. A blizzard of paper and ash.

  And falling bodies.

  Today, for the first time, photographs of young men; swarthy, clean-shaven, or with mustaches, scowling into passport cameras. She went into the women’s room and locked herself into a stall. Stood, then knelt. The tile hurt her knees. She waited, staring at her face in the water.

  When she was done throwing up, she cleaned herself up and went back out. Stood in the door of an office, making herself watch the coverage. Trying for professional objectivity. This was a crime. Perhaps the greatest in American history. She was a trained investigator. Sworn to serve.

  The DCM had said they had twelve hours before the evacuation. All dependents had been sent out of Yemen after the car bomb at the British embassy. Now the rest of the staff was pulling out. Except, of course, for the joint team.

  We’ll stay, she thought. But what will we do? Yemen’s a long way from Manhattan.

  But not that far from Saudi. “At least two of the suspected hijackers held Saudi passports,” the screen was saying.

  The Saudis. After the bloody occupation of the Holy Places in 1979, they’d bought off the Islamicists with cash and jobs. Promoted their fundamentalist, intolerant Wahhabism with billions of petrodollars for new mosques, madrassas, institutes of Islamic jurisprudence from Morocco to Indonesia. They preached against women’s rights, democracy, and secular law. Not all fundamentalists were terrorists. But when they rubbed up against the modern world, a certain minority, already primed with paranoia, would detonate.

  Now the chickens were coming home to roost. Bin Laden was the shadowy heir to construction millions. His family was Yemeni, his father a Saudi confidant. The son had fough
t in Afghanistan, befriended dictators in Sudan, then gone back to Afghanistan to finance and support the one-eyed Mullah Omar and his rabid Taliban.

  This wasn’t the Islam she knew. But it was the face the world was seeing now.

  The man in the office, a passport control officer, turned from his screen and saw her. They were acquaintances. Had drunk coffee together in the little cafeteria with its shelves of plastic pastries and pots of hot soup and glass-fronted soft-drink machine. She smiled. But now his face closed. He didn’t greet her. Just looked away and began packing his briefcase. Ignoring the dark-skinned, too heavy woman in the generous abaya and the headscarf that might well be taken for a hijab, out in the streets of Sana’a.

  She clenched her fists, nausea rising again at the back of her throat. And turned away.

  * * *

  BENEFIEL and Doanelson were in the task force office, for a wonder not on the phone. She went for it immediately and got to it a second before the FBI man. “I’m calling Washington,” he growled.

  “So am I.” She punched in numbers and waited for the hiss and beep of the sync.

  “Executive assistant director for CT. Special Agent Coates.”

  “Jeremy? This is Yemen Joint Task Force, Special Agent Ar-Rahim. Aisha—we met at the Arabic seminar. I guess I shouldn’t ask how it’s going today.”

  This conversation went better than the one with Albert, but not much. Did they want her back in Washington, to help with the investigative effort? The answer came after a hesitation: not just now, they were reorienting, calling back recently retired agents. She should stay where she was; the task force might even be beefed up. She offered to help translate. If they e-mailed documents, she’d turn them around overnight. The service was short of Arabic speakers, she knew that. Again, the hesitation. No, the FBI would take the lead on that. Force protection, that was what they needed from the Yemeni Resident. Keep the channels open to local law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

  Doanelson was striding back and forth. Glaring at the phone. She frowned at him. Mouthed, Find another one.

  “I’m seeing on TV, they’re saying the attackers were Saudi and Egyptian Muslims. Is that the official word?”

  “Still an open question, Ar-Rahim. I understand your concern. But that’s all I can say right now. The Pentagon’s still on fire. We can see the smoke in the sky from out front by the cannons. I’ll keep you in mind if we need you. Otherwise, just sit tight.”

  The other phone rang, the local outside line. Doanelson eyed her. He didn’t like to answer it because usually whoever was calling didn’t speak English. She waved to him to pick it up. He folded his arms and looked at Benefiel. The junior NCIS agent got it. He listened. Held it out. “Aisha. For you.”

  Doanelson sighed and left the office. “Have them call back,” Aisha told Benefiel.

  “It’s General Garmish’s office. Colonel Al-Safani.”

  Thoughts leapt through her brain, driving out disappointment and resentment. Al-Safani. Whose office she’d been slapped in. Whom Saudi counterintelligence had reported deep in discussion, at a café, with the man the PSO now held in their dreaded cells deep below the headquarters. Who almost certainly had links with ALQ.

  She wrapped up the call to DC and accepted the other phone. “Saheeda, Mûqoddam Al-Safani.”

  “Mahabtain.”

  “Khayf halick, sadiki?”

  “Quayssa, shukran. Your Yemeni accent improves each time we speak, Special Agent.”

  “I will say the same for your English.”

  “You are too nice,” he said and giggled. Then sobered. Went back to Yemeni. “We are shocked at this news from New York. These are the same criminals we are fighting here. These dangerous killer elements of bin Ladenism. Will your president remember we offered aid against them? When the time comes?”

  What aid? she thought, but said only, “We will remember our friends. And also those who sheltered the ones who drew the sword against us.”

  “General Gamish wishes to personally offer our openhearted assistance. This is on the order of our president.”

  “Shloon.” Please tell me more.

  “Gladly. May I invite you to headquarters, and discuss what concrete form our cooperation will take?”

  “When?”

  He said as soon as possible, even that night. She took him at his word and said they’d be there shortly. “Mumtaaz. Fee aman Allah. Ma’a salama.”

  “Fee amman Allah. Ma’a salaama.”

  Doanelson came back in as she hung up. She squinted at him, wondering what was in the mind of the shifty, cunning man who sat in the hot seat of Yemen’s presidency, to make him suddenly declare his allegiance. Or had he? Playing it straight had never been Ali Abdullah Saleh’s style. Why such a sudden change?

  She told the FBI man, “The general wants to see us. Right away.”

  * * *

  AS it turned out, Gamish had called the DCM first, who’d handed him to the regional security officer. Who was scheduled for a video-teleconference and said he’d send his people and come as soon as he could. Meanwhile Gamish’s second-in-command, Al-Safani, had called Aisha.

  Which left her in charge of the three agents who careered out of the embassy in armored Suburbans, lights flashing, sirens wailing, rifles at the ready in the lead vehicle and even, this time, one of the Yemeni army’s jeeps out in front. The time for discretion was past. Now anyone who neared the convoy or attempted to block it would be fired on. She didn’t like it. It would just make everyone hate the American intruders the more. But it couldn’t be argued with now. She’d just have to do things the embassy’s way.

  At least, when she was on official business.

  Sana’a street life wound down after midafternoon, but though it was nearly dusk, the streets seemed even emptier than usual. As if everybody were inside. Both Al-Jazeera and the state channel were playing footage of the collapse nonstop. As the cars howled down the ancient streets, jolting and rattling on cobbles, Doanelson told her he’d reached FBI headquarters. “And?” she said, watching men watch them from the shadowy doorways of closed storefronts. The rifles and heads of their escorts moved restlessly, scanning the rooftops as the call to prayer sounded. She ignored Doanelson’s and Benefiel’s glances. Said a short du’a, for missing prayer, but kept her eyes straight ahead.

  “That was what I wanted the damn phone for. Good thing I got through. We got new orders. Whatever’s necessary.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “The interrogation. Al-Nashiri. They said, use whatever means necessary. Find out what he knows about the hijackers. Their plans. Any other operations. He’s the highest recently active ALQ in custody. At least, that we have access to—the Paks and Russians might have some, but so far they’re not sharing. Vacuum it out of him and send it back.”

  She rocked as the speeding SUV took corners. “Whatever means necessary.” She’d never heard the phrase used before. Not in federal service. What did it mean?

  The gates of the castle were open. The barrier was up. The guards were ranged along a newly sandbagged emplacement from which the flared barrel of one of their big Russian machine guns poked out. The lead jeep turned into the courtyard. A slim figure silhouetted against floodlights—the colonel—waved the white cars through. “Putting on the dog, this time,” Doanelson murmured.

  Gamish’s office was large, with a queerly-carved gold and veined marble fireplace in the old Ottoman style. Another of so many offices she’d sat in across the Mideast, playing chess with so many spymasters and police chiefs. Or maybe poker was the better analogy. Accepting another of how many thousands of cups of bitter coffee. Plowing through the chitchat that had to be endured before anything substantive could be addressed, however tangentially.

  This time, though, the formalities were brief. Gamish was in full uniform. He took her hand, surprising from an Arab male. Bowed over it. “This is an evil day for your country. And, I fear, for ours.”

  “Thank you, Gene
ral.”

  He waved a hand. “Another call from the prime minister. People think he is powerless, in our system, but believe me, that is not so. We are prepared to cooperate in your investigations. Completely. We will also extend refueling facilities for your navy once again.”

  “Thank you, General. And for these very helpful arrangements…?”

  “There will be no price. No haggling.” His narrow face sharpened. “We too are beginning to realize there are no limits to which these people will not go. We accepted Saudi money. Saudi religion. But you should not swallow honey without inspecting it for ants. Al-Nashiri is yours.”

  She glanced at Doanelson. He took a step forward, and she hastily turned back to Gamish. “Ours? How do you mean that, General?”

  “Direct interrogation. With all the assistance at our command.”

  “About time,” Doanelson muttered. “Let’s take the gloves off.”

  “The gloves indeed, Special Agent Doanelson, are about to come off. I hope you will like what you see and hear, when they do.” Gamish looked grave; Benefiel apprehensive; Al-Safani grim. Understandable, if he’d backed or helped these people. It had to have been with Gamish’s consent, or even President Saleh’s; but backblast always seemed to take out the level just beneath the higher-ups.

  She caught a glimpse of her own face in an age-freckled, marble-and-gilt mirror. She looked neither frightened nor vengeful. Only determined.

  “Shall we get to it?”

  She nodded reluctantly, and followed Al-Safani to the marble steps leading down.

  * * *

  AFTER Al-Nashiri’s interrogation, no one said anything in the SUV on the way back through the dark streets. It was 4:00 a.m. Close to dawn. Her ears were still ringing, knees still shaking. She gripped her purse. Across from her Doanelson and Benefiel did not meet her eyes. Each seemed sunk within himself.

  They’d split the interrogation. First, her and the FBI. The implication being that they were the good guys, or at least the ones who wouldn’t get their hands dirty. But this time, when Al-Nashiri stayed defiant, the PSO had taken over. Doanelson had wanted to go down to the basement with them; she’d had to read the riot act to keep him from sitting in. And seen the unspoken question in his eyes: Why are you so concerned?