“You say so.”
“Joke. Greeks too lazy to emigrate. They starve first.” An Eastern European chuckle rippled out of the handset. “But you are wondering why I call you at this hour. We must talk, John. And this is not a joke. It’s very serious.” Suddenly Kirkov’s accent was almost gone. “In person. Face-to-face.”
Don’t tell me you had my baby, too. “I haven’t been in the game for a while.”
Kirkov laughed, a laugh that said Guys like you never quit.
“Call Virginia.”
“When I tell you, you see why I can’t.” A pause. “I do this as favor, I promise. To you and your friends.”
If Kirkov said he had something, he did. Had the Bulgarians discovered a nuclear terror plot? A Kremlin plan to invade Eastern Europe? Why not go right to the agency, then? Or maybe Kirkov’s men had stumbled across an attack directed at Wells personally. Wells had given the Russian intelligence service a sharp poke on his last mission. The Russians had long memories and didn’t like losing. But they reserved their most poisonous venom for one another.
Whatever it was, Wells couldn’t say no. “Face-to-face. In Sofia?”
“I don’t make you come to Bulgaria this time of year.” Now that Wells had agreed, Kirkov’s accent was creeping back. “We meet halfway. London. Lunch at the Dorchester. One p.m. tomorrow. Very civilized.”
“You’re not the one taking the red-eye.”
“You remember what I look like?”
“Without you, I’d still be doing laps in the Black Sea, Oleg. I remember.”
Wells hung up, reached for the light on the bedside table. The bed was queen-sized, too small for him; the condo, water-stained and low-ceilinged, overlooking a Target parking lot. The traffic never stopped. Even at this hour he heard tractor-trailers unloading. For a year, Wells had promised himself he’d buy a house near Anne’s. He’d never looked. He’d told himself that he was waiting for Anne to ask him to move in.
Maybe he’d been waiting for this call.
Yet now that it had come, he felt unready. Age, maybe. Wells was closer to forty-five than forty now and all the push-ups and sit-ups and running in the world couldn’t save him from losing a little muscle every month or keep his reflexes from slowing. Only fractionally, but he was only too aware that fractions meant life and death in his business.
But not just age. He didn’t want to leave Emmie. For toddlers and dogs, absence was absolute. She wouldn’t understand why he’d left or when he’d be back. He’d miss her, too, the toothy grin she offered when she was about to misbehave, the way she scrambled up the slide at the tot park, yelling, Look, Daddy! I not scared.
Or maybe he feared the opposite. That as soon as he met Kirkov, he would forget his daughter, that the last two years would prove to be nothing but a pleasant dream.
—
SIX HOURS LATER, he let himself in the farmhouse’s back door, found Anne in the kitchen, spooning yogurt into Emmie’s mouth. He didn’t usually show up on weekday mornings, but she didn’t seem surprised.
“When do you leave?”
Wells found himself with nothing to say.
“You think I don’t know that face?” She reached down for another spoonful. “Don’t worry about me. Worry about your daughter. What you’re going to tell her.”
But the more he explained, the louder Emmie cried, a two-year-old’s depthless anguish, until her chest shook and the house echoed with her grief and Tonka whimpered, until Anne shook her head and pointed at the door and Wells raised his hands in surrender and backed away.
—
LONDON WAS raw, gray and wet. Wells hadn’t slept on the plane. Instead of an umbrella and mackintosh, he wore a cowboy hat against the rain. Effective, even if the doormen eyed him disdainfully. He shook the water off the brim, stepped past the Bentleys and into the polished marble lobby. The hotel epitomized what the English capital had become in the twenty-first century, a city that gladly accepted Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, anyone and everyone. Everyone except its own natives, who no longer could afford to live here. The cheapest rooms at the Dorchester ran a thousand dollars a night. Suites overlooking Hyde Park started at five thousand.
Wells found Kirkov by the concierge desk.
“A walk in the rain?”
Amen. Wells wasn’t in the mood to spend a hundred bucks for lunch. Kirkov unfurled an umbrella and led Wells into Hyde Park, nearly empty today, the rain chasing away joggers and nannies. They found a bench, sat side by side.
“You know we still have a prison.”
Wells needed a moment to understand. “A rendition site.” After September 11, the CIA had worked with American allies to open secret prisons for suspected terrorists. But over the years, pressure from human-rights groups had caused the host countries to close the prisons. The agency moved some captives to the American base at Guantánamo Bay and sent others home. These days, the United States preferred to assassinate rather than capture suspected terrorists anyway. “I thought they were all gone.”
“Technically speaking, we closed the old one, but three years ago we opened another. An annex, we call it. Inside a prison called the Castle, where we keep our own criminals, too.”
“In Sofia?”
“The mountains. The foreigners are present for holding and transit. The lawyers tell me if we do it that way, it’s legal. Don’t ask me why.”
Kirkov stopped. He seemed to expect congratulations.
“Of course we only get one or two a month now,” he said after a few seconds. “Al-Qaeda from Yemen. Islamic State from Syria, Libya, Iraq. Mostly, Islamic State.”
“How many in all?”
“Twenty-eight. We were up to thirty-three a few months ago, but the lawyers said if we went over thirty-five, it would be a problem. We have to tell the EU more. So we warn the agency and they take some. Always, we find the things the laws don’t know about.”
As if not just the lawyers but the laws themselves were hunters Kirkov needed to evade. The paradox of trying to run a secret prison, a place that existed at the edge of legality, in a European country. Even before Kirkov came to the heart of the story, Wells saw why he was in no rush to send an official report to the agency.
“Lot of work for twenty-eight prisoners.”
“The agency helps us, too,” Kirkov said almost primly.
Wells thought of a song from an animated kids show called Daniel Tiger that Emmie had just started watching: Friends help each other, yes they do, it’s true. No doubt the CIA was expressing its friendship in its preferred form, suitcases of fresh hundred-dollar bills. Wells decided not to ask how much the United States paid Bulgaria every year for the prisoners at the Castle, if Kirkov kept any for himself. “And all twenty-eight are under CIA control, not the military?”
“Yes. They send me file on everyone, not long, page or two. Some the CIA catch, some the Deltas. Either way, our deal is with Langley, they notify us, they deliver and take them away.”
“Anyone senior?”
“Two. Both Islamic State. One came six months ago, the other three months. Hani, he’s on the Shura Council”—the group of men who oversaw the Islamic State. “In charge of the religious police, someone fooled him into going to Turkey and handed him over. I have his real name, but he calls himself Hani and that’s what we call him. Latif al-Jelloun, the other one, was a commander in Homs. I don’t know how your people caught him or where. We kept them mostly separate from the others.”
“Kept?”
“Your people moved Latif again two weeks ago. I think to Morocco, where he’s from. Planned transfer, nothing to do with this.”
“So he’s gone.”
“He’s gone, but we have Hani. And you’ll hear on the tape, Hani’s the important one.”
“You ever interrogate them?”
“We don’t question anyone, we d
on’t know what to ask, and, technically, they’re not our prisoners.”
“The agency does.”
“Another rule the lawyers made is the Americans can only talk to each prisoner for two days a month. Stupid rule. With most of them, it doesn’t matter, but with the important ones we need to change it.”
Of course if the agency wanted more quality time with those men, it could keep them in its own custody. But no one wanted to bring more detainees to Guantánamo, which had become a worldwide embarrassment.
“Another stupid rule, we let them pray together on Fridays. Half one week, half the next.”
“Nice of you.”
“But one thing we do that isn’t so stupid, we have microphones in the prayer room. The annex isn’t new but the prayer room is, we built it for this. Your people gave us money.”
“The lawyers are okay with taping prayers?”
“It’s a prison, we can watch and listen wherever we like. No expectation of privacy, even in the bathroom. Of course we don’t tell them that when they come. So we make these tapes. Nothing on tape anymore, all digital, but we call them tapes still.”
“You send the files to Langley?”
“We haven’t.”
“Because of the lawyers?”
Kirkov seemed embarrassed. “No one asked. Besides, only two, three guards speak Arabic, and the last time they checked, a few months ago, the tapes are all praying.”
In other words, both the agency and the Bulgarians had more or less forgotten the files existed. The problem wasn’t a new one. Conversations were expensive and time-consuming to translate, and ubiquitous surveillance meant that innumerable calls and face-to-face conversations were recorded every month. The National Security Agency had spent a billion dollars on software to translate Arabic and Pashtun, and flag suspicious phrases for priority review by human translators. But as anyone who had recently called an airline 800 number knew, voice recognition software had a ways to go. So unheard recordings piled up on hard drives in data centers in Utah and Maryland and the Australian desert.
“But last month, one of our men, a senior guard, he speaks Arabic, getting divorced, his wife kicked him out. He moved into an empty office at the prison. Nothing to do at night, so he decided to listen.”
“Instead of drink?”
“Lucky us.”
Kirkov pulled an iPhone from his pocket. “You speak Arabic.”
Wells nodded.
“Seven weeks ago, the first time that Hani and Latif were together.” Kirkov opened a file, gave Wells the phone. “The first one who speaks is Latif, then Hani. You can listen to all of it, you can come to Sofia and listen to all the files we have, but he tells me this is the one that matters.”
Wells clicked on the file. He heard prayers in the background and then two men murmuring.
—
THEY told me this is Bulgaria. Is that true?
Yes.
Where is that?
Hani laughed. His voice was assured, his Arabic more graceful than Latif’s. Probably from the Gulf. Their voices took Wells out of bare-branched Hyde Park and into a white-walled room filled with men bowing toward Mecca.
Near Turkey.
But it’s the Americans who have us.
Better them than Assad. Hani laughed again. Already Wells didn’t like him.
Does anyone know we’re here?
The Red Crescent, you mean? I haven’t seen anyone.
Do you think they’ll bring us to Guantánamo?
I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter.
It does to me. My family doesn’t know what happened to me. No one knows.
They’ll find out.
How?
They will.
What if they think I’m a traitor? That I defected. Maybe they make martyrs of my sons.
Don’t worry, Latif.
The ones who vanish—
Listen. A snap in Hani’s voice. Wells didn’t need an Islamic State org chart to hear that Hani outranked Latif. I’m telling you, they know where we are. And what happened to us.
How?
Someone tells them.
Someone here? Latif said. A guard?
Silence, the silence of someone who feared he’d said too much. Don’t worry about it, Hani finally said.
Another pause.
So it’s true? About the gay. I didn’t believe it.
Wells paused the playback to consider what he’d heard. In this case gay probably had nothing to do with sexuality. Arabs used the term as slang for informant or spy. The usage had sprung from the Mossad’s success in forcing homosexual Palestinians to spy for Israel or be outed. Now, all over the Middle East, moles were routinely called gays.
Latif’s words implied that someone with access to the CIA’s worldwide database of its secret prisoners was helping the Islamic State. Of course that person wasn’t necessarily inside the agency. The CIA disclosed some information to the Red Cross. But the word gay implied a mole, not just a third-party source.
Wells returned to the playback.
Let’s say that it is.
He’ll know about me?
A laugh from the other man, Hani. He knows everything. When you were taken, where you are, if they move you. But let me ask you, my friend, what did you hear? Because no one should know. Only a few of us on the Council. And even we don’t know everything.
I didn’t hear, not really, Latif said. But in the spring I told Abu Yusuf—the commander of all Islamic State’s fighters in Syria—I thought the Americans might send their own men to strike us. He said that the Americans didn’t trust the Shia enough to do that. Then he said if the Americans made a big attack, we would know before their soldiers did. Not just Homs, anywhere in the caliphate—the Islamic State’s word for its territory. I asked him how and he told me don’t worry about it.
That’s all, Latif? Nothing more?
Nothing. I swear in Allah’s name. I never told anyone. The way he said it made me feel I shouldn’t. I wondered for a few days and then I forgot it, I had battles to fight. But when you spoke of someone who knew where all of us are held, I remembered.
A relieved sigh.
I’ll forget everything we spoke of today, Hani.
Yes. Let’s pray.
—
PRAY THEY DID, until Wells turned off the playback and came back to London and Kirkov. The soft Arabic voices vanished, leaving him with the drizzle tapping off his cowboy hat, that ridiculous but useful accessory.
The first question, always: Is the other side setting up one of your officers, faking and trapping? A successful dissimulation operation could drive a spy agency to madness chasing its own nonexistent moles. But for this conversation to be part of that game, Hani and Latif would have to know that they would have a chance to meet, even though they were captured months apart in different countries. They would have to know that they would wind up in the same prison and have a chance to talk in a taped prayer room.
“You’re sure they hadn’t spoken before?”
“This is real, John. Even the old KGB, the masters, they couldn’t have set this up.”
The conversation sounded real to Wells, too. He understood why Latif was worried about what might happen to his family if the Islamic State believed he had defected. The jihadis were known to drag spies behind trucks until their bodies snapped apart. To reassure Latif, and possibly to put him in his place, Hani had said too much. Then Latif had realized something that both men wished he hadn’t.
Next question: If the men were telling the truth, how senior was the mole inside Langley? That question was easier to answer. He was someone who knew about the covert ops the CIA and Pentagon ran inside Syria. Someone who could dive into the agency’s detainee program without raising questions. Wells would check with Shafer, but he suspected only a handful
of officers in the agency had those clearances. The director himself. The deputy director of operations. The assistant deputy director for counterterrorism. Also, the agency had created a desk dedicated to fighting the Islamic State. Whoever ran that would have full access.
Those four. Maybe others. But not many.
“Someone senior.” Kirkov seemed to read Wells’s mind.
“If it’s real.”
“You know it’s real.”
“Someone on the seventh floor”—where the agency’s top executives worked—“an American, betraying the United States to the Islamic State.”
“Don’t act so surprised.” Kirkov smiled. “It’s what they thought about you and al-Qaeda.”
Wells took off his hat, tilted back his head, let the rain wash his face. More than a decade before, Wells had come back to the United States from Pakistan and found the agency didn’t trust him or his conversion to Islam. It had kept him under house arrest. Even Shafer had doubted him. Only his handler back then, Jennifer Exley, had believed. Exley. His handler, and his lover, too. He rarely let himself think about her anymore. About what they’d been. She was part of the past, and Emmie seemed to have sealed her there. Hard to imagine a past or a future with a woman you hadn’t seen in almost a decade when you were raising a daughter with another.
Even so, her name burned his heart.
Kirkov misunderstood his silence. “John Wells the traitor. Isn’t that what they thought?”
“They were wrong.”
An answer, true but incomplete. Wells had been loyal, yes, but he’d also been deeply alienated after all those years in the Kush. Part of him had hated his fellow Americans for their wastefulness, their inability to understand their luck. Wells had never gone over, but he’d stood at the edge of the cliff, looked at the ruins below.
“Tell me it’s impossible,” Kirkov said.
Wells stared into the blank gray sky and tried to remember his daughter’s voice. Instead, he heard Hani, a man he’d never seen, in a secret prison two thousand miles from here, murmuring, Someone tells them . . .
“Nothing’s impossible.”
The Prisoner Page 4
