TYNDALL WAS INDEED AT HIS usual evening perch, holding court near the bartender with another Agency geek and a raptly attentive female officer from a unit of Kentucky Reservists. Falk didn’t waste time with preliminaries. He planted a hand on Tyndall’s right shoulder, exerting a little extra force.
“Hey, what’s with the Vulcan nerve grab?” Seeing Falk, Tyndall colored immediately.
“A word, if I might. In private.”
“I was going to tell you, but the orders were expedited and I couldn’t find you.”
“Likely story. C’mon.”
The Kentucky MP’s mouth was agape, but Falk ignored her. When the Agency colleague made a move to intervene, Tyndall waved him off.
“Save it, Don. It’s personal. Keep my beer warm, will ya?”
Falk steered Tyndall to the periphery of the tables. It wasn’t yet late enough for much of a crowd.
“Okay. What the fuck have you done with him?”
“Easy. I was going to tell you everything, but I couldn’t get you at home last night, and this afternoon you were out on a boat or something.”
“Convenient. So you were going to wait ’til I came back, I guess.”
“Came back from where?” He frowned. If it was an act, it was a good one.
“Long story, but I’m out of here for the weekend. So where’s Adnan?”
Tyndall looked around. Don was still watching from the bar. The pretty MP looked like she might not get over this for weeks.
“C’mon. Let’s go down by the water.”
“This place will do. Just whisper in my ear, like we’re inside the wire.”
Tyndall frowned again but complied, keeping his voice low enough that Falk had to bend closer.
“They’ve moved him to Camp Echo.”
Camp Echo was off-limits to Falk. It was the CIA’s prison within a prison, Gitmo’s house of ghosts, where, officially speaking, no one had a name or a future. For a moment, he was too thunderstruck to reply. Then he boiled over.
“Jesus, Mitch. They’ve made him a ghost? Why?”
Tyndall shook his head.
“Keep it down. Please. He’s no ghost. It’s too late for that. The Red Cross already has his name. He’ll be accounted for, one way or another.”
“Then you’re playing with fire.”
“Tell me about it.”
“So why do it?”
“Orders from upstairs.”
“Trabert?”
He shook his head.
“My shop. Special request from the clientele, apparently.”
“Which customer?”
Tyndall looked around again. Falk had never seen him so antsy. Tyndall waited while a couple of drinkers strolled past to another table, then spoke again, in a voice so low Falk could barely hear him.
“This can’t go beyond you. And definitely not to Whitaker or anyone else at the Bureau.”
“Go ahead.”
“It was Fowler. Him and his lapdog Cartwright. They’ve been busy little beavers. Adnan’s not their only acquisition.”
“How many others?”
“Two that I know of.”
“Names?”
“Adnan’s the only one I know. Somebody else signed for the other two. It might have been Don. But they’re all Yemenis, like Adnan. Maybe it’s got something to do with Boustani.”
“Boustani never handled Yemenis. He did Lebanese, a few Syrians.”
“The detainee letters, though, the ones he was going to mail. They might have been from anybody.”
“Maybe.”
“Either way, this didn’t come from me. But I figured I owed you from the other night.”
“The way I see it, now you owe me another one.”
“Whatever. As long as this stays between us. The last thing I need is to piss off those two.”
Pretty impressive when you could scare a CIA man, but Falk could hardly blame him. He, too, was feeling the heat. He knew that the odds of Boustani’s collecting letters from the Yemenis were slim and none. Only a handful of interrogators and analysts at Gitmo regularly had access to those detainees, and Falk was one of them. If Fowler and Cartwright were zeroing in on Yemenis, then he was almost certainly on their radar.
Getting out of town was starting to sound like a pretty good idea.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE SUN WAS BARELY UP, but Pam Cobb was already dressed in her morning uniform—Army shorts, fatigue T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes that had carried her across miles of dusty, hardened trails. She sat on her rump to stretch, long legs splayed across the linoleum of the kitchen floor. It was the corner of the house farthest from the bedrooms, and she always stretched there to keep from waking her roommates.
Pam yawned, then bent forward at the waist and arched her neck, reaching slowly for her ankles as her calves tightened. She could have used some extra sleep, but there was strength to be found in this daily routine, a reassuring rhythm that kept her moving in the right direction even when everything else was veering off course.
The strategy had served her well on several occasions at Gitmo. She recalled the morning after she first heard about General Trabert’s plan to sexually taunt some of the detainees. Pam spent all evening worrying about the possibility she would be roped into the effort, and managed only a few hours of troubled sleep. The next morning she ran six miles through the creeping heat of dawn and emerged with enough focus and determination to finagle a meeting with the general. She spent nearly an hour arguing against the plan’s insanity, although she never dared use a word as impolitic as “insanity.”
She instead took the subordinate officer’s customary approach, deeming the plan a potentially fine idea that deserved a fair shot—just not the sort of shot that required her participation. Not right for her playbook, she told the general. Disruptive to her game plan. She had learned that in conversations with military superiors, especially males, it always helped to use football metaphors, just as it always helped in football conversations to use military metaphors.
Trabert let her off the hook, but made it clear that the dispensation was conditional. If the strategy worked for others, then she, too, would have to add it to her playbook. Yes, he said “playbook.”
This morning, conditions at Gitmo again called for some grounding as she set her course for the day ahead. Boustani’s arrest had shaken her. Either the investigators had screwed up or Boustani had hoodwinked her completely along with the rest of her tiger team. To top it off, Revere Falk, the only other dependable aspect of her life here, was about to depart for the weekend for God knows what reasons, and she wouldn’t even see him at breakfast.
She bent forward again, fingers reaching the soles of her shoes and feeling a pebble caught in the tread. Above her, the sink dripped, a loud plop into an oily pool of dishwater. Did sinks in these billets ever do anything but drip? There was something inherently depressing about military-issue kitchens. She’d known several from officers’ housing at earlier postings. Always the same outdated box of linoleum and Formica, as if stamped out at a munitions factory in the seventies. Avocado refrigerators and countertops. None of the appliances ever quite up to par. Stovetop rings that glowed brightly in some places and dimly in others, like dying stars. Not at all like the big farm kitchen in the house where she grew up, with its ceramic sink and propane burners, a stout wooden counter piled in a clatter of cast-iron skillets and stockpots, plus an oven large enough to roast whatever beast her father and brothers dragged in from the hunt. She thought of them on a fall morning, faces dewy and flushed, everyone smelling of damp leaves and warm blood.
What would they think if they could see her here, talking tough to generals and speaking earnestly to surly young Arabs, then dating an FBI man by night, fooling around in his car like a date at the town drive-in? She wondered what Falk was up to this morning. He had mentioned a vague errand that would keep him away from the mess hall. Doing it for his buddy, Ted Bokamper. What an asshole. Supposedly another suit from W
ashington, but more like half the officers she dealt with daily. From the way they sometimes treated her you’d never guess she was their equal or better in rank—their free and easy innuendos, the offhand sexual humor, always trying to get a rise out of her. She knew better than to take the bait. Well, most of the time.
But Bokamper wasn’t in her chain of command, so she had cut loose for a while last night. Her reaction obviously made Falk uncomfortable, and for a moment she regretted her sharp words. Then she remembered Bo saying, “I don’t poach,” just loud enough for her to hear, and she swore under her breath. Her hands gripped hard against the soles of her feet, calf muscles stretched to the limit.
She let go, then stood up and leaned against the countertop, legs straightened behind her at a slant, feet flattened to the floor. Almost ready to roll. Well, with any luck, Bokamper and the other new arrivals would be gone soon enough. A few more arrests to further muddy the waters and generally make everyone’s lives miserable, then they’d grow tired of the heat and the midges and fly away.
Falk offered a more complex set of worries. She recalled something the general had said a week ago at a beach bonfire after he’d spotted Falk and her strolling hand in hand. Her first instinct had been to pull away, like she’d been caught smoking in the girls’ room. She recalled with embarrassment her flush of anger when Falk refused to let go—the dangerous boy determined to show defiance. Trabert had made a joke about “fraternization,” then laughed. But she had seen his jaw tense, as if it pained him to make light of it. He then turned on his heel in the hard sand like a squad leader on a parade ground. Had that been a caution, a warning not to let things get out of hand? She knew the Bureau and the brass were at war over tactics. In Trabert’s mind she was sleeping with the enemy, and Falk wasn’t exactly the company man most people expected when they thought of special agents. That was part of his appeal, she supposed. That, and the way he saw through the shell she had built for professional survival. Most guys never got past that, or tried to taunt their way around it, like Bokamper. Falk had recognized it right away as a bluff, maybe because he had his own facades. She wondered again about the tale she’d heard in interrogation, the odd story of the Marine with the Cuban connection, the Marine who had become a fed.
“He talks with the Cubans, sells them secrets,” Niswar had insisted. “He is one of your people, and he talks to the Cubans.”
It would have been more disturbing if it weren’t so ludicrous on the face of it. How the hell would a bunch of jihadists who had spent their entire lives in Arabian deserts and Afghan mountains know anything about Cubans, much less an American who talked with them? She well knew how easily rumor and fantasy took flight among the fevered imaginations inside the wire. Only three days ago yet another prisoner had told her about the cabal of Jews that was secretly advising the Saudi royal family.
All the same, maybe it would be safer to put it on paper somewhere official, strictly as a matter of housekeeping. But she would wait until Monday, after Falk returned. She had promised him that much. By then Niswar would probably have changed his story anyway.
Her stretching was done, and she looked out the window. It was already a half hour later than she usually set out, and here that could make a world of difference. She’d need a sweatband for her forehead now, so she padded down the hall to her room, passing a roommate who was stumbling bleary-eyed toward the kitchen.
“Made any coffee?”
“Sorry, Patty. Just heading out for a run.”
Patty grunted in reply. She always needed a few cups to reach full consciousness.
Pam pulled open a drawer and rummaged through her socks for the sweatband. As she pulled it on she thought she heard a door shutting. Probably a kitchen cabinet, Patty on the prowl. Then Patty appeared at the bedroom doorway, her eyes as wide as if she’d already downed a full pot.
“What is it?”
“You’ve got company.” Her voice was high. A visit from Falk would never have prompted this reaction. Was it Bokamper, then, already sniffing around before his “little brother” even left town?
“Who is it?”
“Three of them. A couple of MPs, plus one of the new guys from Washington. Fowler, I think he said.”
Disdain gave way to alarm. Then she steadied. Boustani. They must be making the rounds with everyone on his team. Pretty strange time of day for a house call, though. And so much for setting herself back on course with a nice long run. At this rate, she might not get out of the house for hours.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE CUBAN HANDYMAN known around Gitmo as Harry was sixty-seven, and he had been working on the base since he was nineteen. His real name was Javier Pérez. A few decades ago an overly familiar ensign had begun calling him Harry instead of Javy, and the label stuck. Not that it bothered him. He was trained to be accommodating, having been hired by the Directorate of Intelligence only a few months before he acquired the nickname. A man earning two salaries for one job learns to be flexible.
Despite what Doc Endler smugly believed, Harry had worked with other Americans besides Falk—a naval officer during the eighties, and another Marine not long after Falk departed. Both had been lured to Havana in a manner similar to Falk’s. Three customers in two decades wasn’t exactly brisk business, but Harry’s clientele nonetheless became the object of a small shrine in the Havana cubicle of his handler, who posted compromising photos of the three soldiers in a place of honor above his door.
For all that, Harry’s value had always been largely symbolic. His bosses at the Directorate liked the idea of placing someone in the middle of a U.S. military base, even though it was a base where they could already see and hear most of what was going on. And even though Harry never yielded much in the way of useful intelligence, they figured his presence would eventually end in one of two ways: he would produce an unexpected dividend through sheer luck—by having a former client return to the base as an FBI agent, for example—or he would be unmasked by military authorities. Either would be a coup, the former for obvious reasons, the latter by throwing the base into a tizzy of entertaining embarrassment. His bosses worried little about the possibility of betrayal, since Harry’s only contact with the Directorate was through the man who had recruited him. There were no other operatives whom he could identify, with the possible exception of his neighborhood pharmacist, who Harry had always suspected was an informant for the Interior Ministry.
Harry put in long hours for his two salaries, and he began the morning of his rendezvous with Falk like every other workday. He rose at four at his small home in Guantánamo City and dressed while his wife brewed coffee and buttered a slab of bread for the skillet. She went back to bed while Harry tore off pieces of the crusty tostada to dunk in his mug of café con leche. He left the house just as the roosters were crowing, walking six blocks to the bus stop on a route that took him past the homes of six of his children and a dozen of his grandchildren. Two other sons lived in Union City, New Jersey, and a daughter was in Miami Lakes. They mailed letters to him through the base, letters that he knew better than to bring home—one of the few secrets he had never shared with the Directorate. Having learned to memorize information from his operatives for reports back to his handler, he had no trouble reciting the letters to his wife.
The bus picked up nine commuters. Four would be retiring by year’s end, but not Harry. It then headed southeast from town on a twenty-mile journey, skirting the north end of the bay and bypassing the village of Boquerón before arriving at its final stop nearly a mile short of the North East Gate. By then it was around five thirty, and the summer sun had crawled above the cactus hills. They walked the last mile on a dusty, hilly path bordered by land mines, a passage known as “the cattle chute.”
In the distant past, especially in the 1960s during the first years after the Revolution, the guards of the Frontier Brigade had made life miserable for the commuters as they approached the North East Gate. They jostled and jeered and searched everyone head to
toe. Some of them used to spit, or take a swing, give a shove in the back. The dollar salary made up for it, barely, but as the years passed and the number of commuters dwindled, so did the abuse. Now the daily walk and frisking passed in tranquil silence. When Harry and the other eight cashed their U.S. Navy checks at Gitmo’s bank every two weeks, they did so knowing that Cuba wouldn’t be charging any taxes. They were perhaps the world’s only employees simultaneously benefiting from the economic theories of Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
Once they reached the American side of the gate there was another security check, and by the time Harry cleared that—around 6 a.m.—a Marine was waiting to hand him the keys to a white Dodge van. Two other commuters climbed aboard with him. He dropped them off at the Naval Hospital before continuing to his final destination at a maintenance shed of corrugated metal. Years ago Harry had sprayed “Abato Fidel”—Demolish Fidel!—on the side of the shed in white paint. A fine bit of cover, Falk had always thought, even if Harry did it guilelessly. At the time he had been upset about food and pharmaceutical shortages in Guantánamo City. Another little quirk for the secret annals of Gitmo.
His job was as an all-purpose repairman, sometimes for household appliances, at other times for the cars, trucks, and buses operating on the base. Being a Cuban, he knew all about keeping old things running despite minimal access to replacement parts. He had kept his own 1959 Chevy running for more than four decades—how hard could it be to keep a seven-year-old Chrysler in mint condition?
About the time Harry reached the North East Gate that morning, Falk was awakening from a troubled night’s sleep. He thought first of Adnan, now residing among the ghosts, shut away at Camp Echo beyond Falk’s reach. He wondered what Adnan had said or done to merit such treatment. Or was it merely his status as one of Falk’s subjects that put him in jeopardy? He had scarcely had time to think about Harry. If it hadn’t been for Bo he might have left the matter until after the weekend.
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