“Samir.”
“Sir.” Wells was glad for the bars that split them. He wanted to put his hands on the commander’s throat, whatever the punishment.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t get you a doctor.” The commander grinned. “Though you seem to have recovered on your own.”
He unlocked the gate, slid it back. Wells understood. The commander was playing, trying to provoke him. He made himself relax. “I’m feeling much better. Sir.”
“Now you’ll have the chance to thank Allah for your quick return to health.”
The commander muttered in Bulgarian to the other guards. They trotted away. When they were out of sight around the corner, the commander pulled a knife from his pocket. A shiv, with a rough-hewn wooden handle and a whet-sharpened blade.
Wells tightened up, waiting for the strike, wondering if he could take away the knife without hurting the commander too much. Instead, the man offered the shiv to Wells.
A new trap, far more dangerous. Wells shook his head.
“Take it—”
“So you call your guys back, tell them you found it on me?”
“Take it. Or I’ll stick it in you.”
No good choices here. Wells extended his arm unwillingly, an inch at a time, until the commander pressed the handle of the shiv into his palm. Wells waited for the man to snap the baton over his head or yell that he’d found a weapon. But he only stared until Wells eased the shiv into the single pocket of his uniform pants. “You probably want to lose it. Don’t.”
“You say so.” Why this? Why now? Wells knew he couldn’t ask.
“Come on, Samir. You’d better pray.”
—
HANI WAITED in the prayer room. “As-salaam alaikum.”
“Alaikum salaam, my friend.” They sat against the back wall as the others began their ablutions. Wells felt the knife pressing against his thigh. He decided not to mention it. For now.
“Are you all right? You were moaning in your sleep.”
“As long as I’m alive, I’m alive.”
“Tougher than a stone.” A famous Arab proverb.
“Stupider than a camel.” Not a famous Arab proverb.
“I asked them to let me see you. They said no, the beasts.”
Even before the commander pressed the shiv on him, Wells had planned to turn the conversation to escape. Now Hani had given him the chance. Wells leaned close. “We need to get out.”
“I told you, impossible. Concrete cells. No tools.”
“We’re not always in the cells.”
“Then the guards are with us.”
“I could take out a guard. Or two. I’d like to take out a guard or two. Say, next Friday, on the way over here.”
“And we’re still inside the block.”
“We climb the walls. They’re brick. Plenty of handholds. To the windows and out.”
“Eight, nine meters up. Jump down, even if you don’t break your legs, you land in barbed wire. You’re not outside. There’s another wall to climb, higher, and it’s concrete, not brick. Now you try to climb it with the guards shooting at you. This isn’t a plan, Samir. It’s fantasy—”
“Maybe for you.”
Hani gave Wells the smile of a doctor humoring a mad patient. “Say you get out, somehow. In the middle of Bulgaria. No money. Don’t speak the language. Wearing a prison uniform. Every soldier and policeman chasing you. What then? You sneak on a plane, go back to Afghanistan. So the Americans can catch you again?”
They’d wound up where Wells had hoped. “Not the mountains. I’ve changed my mind. We’re in Europe, we stay in Europe.”
“I didn’t know you knew so many people in Europe.”
“You do.”
“So, what, I take you to Sevran, introduce you, he used to be Qaeda but now he’s one of ours?”
“Why not? Anyway, what’s Sevran?” Though Wells knew. Sevran was a poor Paris suburb, one of the most troubled of what the French called the banlieues, its residents nearly all Muslim, North African, and Middle Eastern.
Wells knew, but Samir Khalili didn’t. So he asked.
“Sevran? Paris. On the train to the airport.”
“Paris. This is where your friend lives? The one you called the Lion?”
“Puma.”
“Right. Puma.”
Hani had just given Wells as big a clue as he could have hoped. The target area wasn’t the Paris metro area anymore. Or even the banlieues. It was a single suburb. Wells didn’t know how big Sevran was. But even if it had twenty thousand Muslim men, Hani had shrunk the target pool for the Islamic State’s commander by ninety-five percent. He’d turned the search from impossible to manageable. Difficult but manageable. And if the Puma—a/k/a Abu Najma—had any extremist history at all, he would be in an NSA or CIA or French database. Maybe all three. If not, Wells would go to Sevran himself and find him.
“Puma, Lion—I was close.”
“Have you ever seen a lion?”
“Have you? So the Puma-Lion-Rhinoceros—after I escape, I go to his kebab stand in this place Sevran and tell him you sent me.”
“Not a kebab stand.”
“Shawarma, then?” Wells hoped to annoy him into giving up more.
“Forget it, Samir. This is stupid. No one’s escaping.”
“You Gulf Arabs don’t have any sense of humor.”
“Maybe if you didn’t joke so much, the guards wouldn’t hit you.”
Wells decided he’d reached the moment to press hard. Even at the risk of raising Hani’s suspicions. The Islamic State’s commander in France was a huge prize, worth aborting the mission to uncover the mole. Anyway, the knife in his pocket suggested that his time in the Castle would be ending soon, one way or another.
This might be his last chance to find the mole.
“Maybe they’d hit me harder. Anyway, I wonder if the guard hurt me more than I thought two weeks ago. I don’t remember much of what we said. Weren’t we talking about September 11? The Americans?”
“Your favorite subject.”
“How we fought them? And the CIA. How they’d attacked us, it was time for us to attack them—”
Hani tilted his head, gave Wells a searching look. More puzzled than suspicious. As if he’d just realized how little they knew about each other. “For someone who says he can’t remember, you remember well.”
“So we were talking about that?”
“Mostly, you. Just like now. Tell you what, when you see the Puma, you can ask him.” Hani laughed. “Come on, let’s pray—”
Hani stood, stepped away from Wells. He didn’t turn back, didn’t offer Wells a hand, and Wells knew that he’d blown his shot. Maybe he had pushed too hard. Or maybe Hani was just being cautious, especially since Latif had guessed at the mole’s existence so quickly.
Hani’s new suspicion gave Wells another reason not to hang around much longer. Not that he needed one.
—
BEFORE the mission began, Kirkov had told Wells that if he needed to get out, he should tell a guard, Samir Khalili must speak with Colonel Zogrin about Radka and Bilyana.
“Which guard?”
“Any guard.”
“Zogrin’s the warden?”
“Yes. Don’t worry, we can trust him.”
“Radka and Bilyana?”
“His daughters. Which isn’t something any of the prisoners know. That’s how I’m sure the guards will pass the message, even though they don’t know who you are.”
“Beat me to bits, too, until Zogrin hears it and stops them.”
“Never. They’re softies. Anyway, they’ll pass it quickly.”
Kirkov’s blasé confidence in the guards no longer seemed funny. Yes, they probably would speed Wells’s words along. No one would want to endanger the warden’s kids. But t
he message would need an hour or two to move up the chain of command. More, if Zogrin happened to be away from his office. Plenty of time for the guards to hurt Wells.
Yet Wells had no other way to reach Zogrin. The guy wasn’t exactly hanging out on the cellblock.
—
THE GUARDS ordered them out, lined them up at the block’s main gate.
“Outside for you. Even insects need fresh air.” Two guards took their places at the front of the line, one behind. They led the jihadis into the corridor. The guard at the cellblock gate smirked at Wells at he passed and slammed the gate shut behind them. “Have fun,” the guard muttered under his breath.
That fast, Wells understood why the commander had given him the blade.
“Hani. It’s coming. Pass the word.”
“What?”
“It. In the yard—”
Wells was wrong. It came before the yard.
As the jihadis turned left down the short corridor that led to the yard, Wells saw that the door ahead was open. Suddenly the two guards in front ran for it. At the same time, Wells heard a rumble behind them. He looked back to see a dozen Bulgarian prisoners piling down the wide tiled hallway. The big one with the scythe on his cheek led the way, holding something silver and shiny, a short metal bar that looked to have come out of a weight room. The rear guard had disappeared. He must have peeled off into the corridor that led to the administration wing.
“Run—outside—” Wells yelled in Arabic.
But the guards ahead had vanished into the yard. Instead, more Bulgarians were coming through the door at them. Wells turned back again. The big man was locked on Wells, running hard, nearly out of control, the same brute-force attack that he’d used in the yard. Wells squared his shoulders, kept the knife low where the guy wouldn’t notice it, hoping he would aim high, and not low, with the club.
Five feet away, the Bulgarian raised his right hand. Wells lifted his left arm, not trying to avoid the blow, only trying to deflect it from his head. He wanted the guy close.
As the man brought the bar down onto his forearm, Wells stepped forward, the move no one ever expected.
The metal rod crunched into the meat of his left arm and shoulder, muscles and bone that had taken shots before. But Wells’s adrenaline was flowing. The pain was pleasure to him now. He brought up his right arm, drove the knife into the man’s neck, not a slash but a single deadly sideways strike. They locked eyes for a moment before the man tried to jerk his head away, but too late. Wells forced the blade deep into the muscle, and a jet of arterial blood covered his hand and he knew he’d severed the carotid.
The giant screamed. The metal bar clattered from his fingers. He reached for his neck and tried hopelessly to stanch the blood. Wells pulled the blade, shoved it into his chest, wrenched it out. Death shaded the Bulgarian’s eyes then like a squatter walking through an empty house. The man tilted sideways and toppled, slowly, grudgingly, his blood painting the wall.
Wells stepped away and looked for someone else to attack.
But the other Bulgarians weren’t coming anymore. They stared at Wells as if he were the devil himself. Behind him, the fighting went on. But even without turning his head, Wells knew that it had slackened into a scuffle. The giant’s collapse had shocked everyone around him, made their battles seem tame and childish.
They stood that way a few seconds, in suspended animation, as the big man’s blood streamed and his hands fluttered and he flew to a land only he could see.
Until a guard ran from the central junction toward them and pulled a gate shut, the hard clank of metal on metal echoing down the hall. Now the only way out was behind Wells, into the yard. But even as the prisoners turned, the door slammed shut and heavy bolts slammed home.
The prisoners muttered in two languages, their fight, and even the giant’s death, already subsumed in this new threat. A minute later, four new guards appeared in the hallway behind the gate. They wore gas masks, the full-face black kind that made aliens of their wearers. Three carried yellow canisters with long black hoses. The fourth had an AK. He pointed it at the mass of prisoners. He lifted his mask and shouted in Bulgarian and fired at the ceiling, three quick pops. Then he yelled some more. Wells didn’t need a word of Bulgarian to understand: No more warning shots.
The local prisoners went to their knees. Wells and the jihadis followed. The guard with the AK pulled his mask on tight and nodded to the three guards holding the canisters. They pointed the hoses through the gate and fired a yellow-orange mist. It wafted toward the prisoners, and when Wells took his next breath, his throat caught fire.
For a few seconds, Wells couldn’t breathe at all. He lay on the floor, closed his eyes, forced air into his lungs. Around him, men coughed and gagged, Bulgarian or Arab, Christian or Muslim, no matter. Whatever this chemical was, it made pepper spray seem like perfume.
After a while, the gate slid open. A guard yelled a name—Samir! Samir! Finally, Wells realized it was meant for him. He crawled forward, smeared his hands in the dead Bulgarian’s blood. When he reached the open gate, the guards kicked him, sent him sprawling. Then they cuffed his hands and pulled him up and dragged him away.
—
THEY BROUGHT HIM into the administration wing, threw him into a shower fully dressed. The freezing water washed the mucus off his face and the blood off his hands, so he didn’t complain. He wanted to feel something other than empty. Lucky to be alive, maybe. Or sorry to have killed once more.
Empty was all he could manage.
The water slowed to a trickle and the pustule-faced guard commander came to him.
He unlocked Wells’s cuffs. “Clothes off.”
When Wells was done, the guard looked him over with a butcher’s appraising eye. “Don’t move.” The water blasted him again, and by the time the commander came back with a gym bag and a towel, Wells was as cold as he had ever been.
“I need to see Colonel Zogrin. About Radka and Bilyana.”
The commander handed him the towel.
“Please. He’ll understand—”
“Don’t you get it?”
Then Wells did.
Kirkov had told him at least one person at the Castle besides the warden would know about him. Wells had figured on someone senior. A deputy warden. The commander of the jihadi cellblock. But this guard was senior, too, and he spoke Arabic. Wells imagined him divorced, sleeping inside the prison, listening to tapes of the prisoners to pass the nights.
“You?” Wells felt the ache in his groin. All this pain inflicted by the man meant to be watching out for him.
“It worked, didn’t it? No one suspected. Not even you.”
Yeah, you should have killed me. Really topped up your cover. Why had the guard hurt him so badly? To make Wells pay for having a face that wasn’t covered in boils? For being American, having the chance to leave this place after a few weeks, while the guard was stuck here forever?
We are all just prisoners here, of our own device . . . “Such a lovely place,” Wells said.
“I gave you what you needed.”
So the guard had known the fight was coming. Why hadn’t he stopped it instead of letting Wells and the other prisoner fight to the death, dogs in a cage?
Slowly, the answer dawned. “You hoped I’d kill him for you.”
The guard shrugged.
More than ever, Wells wanted to throttle this man, to squeeze his ruined face until pus flowed down his cheeks. He knew he had to control his anger, but he was glad for it. It swept away the fatigue and the pain and whatever remorse he felt for killing a man at another man’s whim.
“How did you know I’d win?”
“I didn’t.” The guard grinned. “But he didn’t know you had the knife. And you’re tough. My money was on you. Want to see what I bought with the winnings?” He unzipped the gym bag. Inside, civilian clothes an
d shoes. Plus a Bulgarian identity card and passport, both with Wells’s photo. And ten crisp one-hundred-euro notes. “Want to keep talking or would you rather get out before somebody arrests you for killing him?”
—
AND Wells’s time in the Castle was over.
He believed he’d found all he could. Convincing Hani to tell him more about the mole would have been next to impossible. Still, he felt he hadn’t been given a fair shot. If he and Shafer had insisted Kirkov be more involved . . . if the warden had put him closer to Hani . . . if the commander hadn’t been such a sadist . . .
But Wells couldn’t worry about his mistakes anymore. Even without the mole, he had a strong lead on the head of the Islamic State in France. The most important terrorist in Europe. Even better, Hani had implied that the man knew who the mole was. Tell you what, when you see the Puma, you can ask him.
At least he had no doubt about his next move.
Paris.
20
WASHINGTON, D.C.
SHAFER watched Duto’s aides enter and leave the Oval Office in precise five-minute intervals. Rarely did more than a few seconds pass between the exit of one visitor and the entrance of the next. A president’s time was his most valuable resource. Duto didn’t waste his.
He did enjoy wasting Shafer’s, though. At least today. Could be a while, Duto’s senior admin, a fortyish man who had a pickpocket’s roaming eyes and a too-pretty suit, had said when Shafer checked in. Big man’s running late. An obvious lie.
Admittedly, Shafer had called only that morning, telling Duto, “It’s about Wells.”
“He’s out.” Duto wasn’t asking. Kirkov must have told him already, Shafer realized.
“And he’s got something.”
“Come by at eleven.”
Now it was past noon. For as long as Shafer had known Duto, he’d swung between treating Wells and Shafer as his equals—near equals, anyway—and as problems to manage. Their knowledge of his secrets annoyed him, Shafer thought. Duto knew better than anyone that secrets were power. Maybe they’d grown even more precious in the age of Twitter and TMZ because keeping them was so hard.
The Prisoner Page 28
