Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  “You need to remember something,” he told Morgan, his finger jabbing toward her chest. “Your cover is not the same thing as your mission. You need to remember what we really want to know—who are these Muslims who keep showing up to fight with no discernible link to Bosnia-Herzegovina? Where do these motherfuckers come from? Telling us that is your mission. Where do they get their arms? Who is their emir? Is that understood?”

  “Yessir. Understood.”

  It wasn’t long after that conversation that Morgan managed to get herself embedded with a unit of the fledgling Kosovo Liberation Army, ostensibly to document the first stirrings of what threatened to be the last and worst wave of ethnic cleansing. For three grueling weeks, she shared their camps, their marches, their hideouts, constantly at risk of discovery by Yugoslav army or Serbian irregular patrols. The KLA guerillas came to see her as one of their own, and showed her an audacious new smuggling route, a supply line for weapons and ammunition purchased from corrupt Yugoslav National Army contacts at bases in Montenegro. It ran through networks of trails in the forested mountains by the side of the Tara river canyon.

  By the time she got back to Sarajevo, Morgan felt triumphant. She’d done everything Gary wanted and more: among her KLA companions had been several veterans of the Afghan war, citizens of countries such as Sudan and Syria who seemed to have become Islamist soldiers of fortune, devoted to never-ending jihad. Her sense of glory lasted only hours. On the day of her return to the Sarajevo apartment, Alicia was hit by a sniper in the plaza outside on her way to buy food and plum brandy for a celebration dinner. Morgan and Eugene saw it all from the apartment: her puzzled half-turn as she heard the sound of a rifle shot, and then the flower of blood spreading on her cheesecloth blouse as she fell. They rushed down the stairs and tried to stanch the flow, kneeling at her side as she moaned. She managed to get a few words out: “I’m sorry to spoil your party.” By nightfall, Alicia was being treated at an American military hospital in Frankfurt. But a bullet had lodged in her spine, and she’d been in a wheelchair ever since. The following summer Morgan visited her in St. Paul. Still cheerful, Alicia had explained that her fiancé had decided he couldn’t face a life with a paraplegic, but her parents had helped her convert an apartment. She’d gone back to school, and was working on a doctorate about the most effective way to protect human rights in the Balkans.

  The menu was the same as the previous day, and the days before that: hummus, rice, beans and a few gritty vegetables, and a small triangle of baklava, washed down with half a liter of water. The seal on the bottle had been broken: Morgan could only hope it really was bottled. If she was lucky, Zainab would be back once more before nightfall with another sanitary towel, and to take her to the toilet. The evening prayer call had come and gone.

  Hours passed, and then the door was unlocked again. But for once, Zainab was not alone: with her was a man, his face wrapped in a red keffiyeh scarf. They were carrying a cheap foam mattress and an olive-colored sheet. They maneuvered the mattress into the cell and laid it on the floor.

  “You sleep better now,” said Zainab. “This is bed.”

  The man left them alone, and once again Zainab tied the blindfold and led her to the bathroom. She must have been feeling generous: she gave Morgan not one but two new Kotex, as well as a plastic bag in case she needed a change before morning. Soon enough Zainab was gone again, leaving her back in the cell, with the door locked and the only light a thin line from the corridor through the gap beneath the door. In fact, the mattress made it no easier to sleep. If anything, it seemed more difficult, as if the bed were a sign that her detention had become more settled, less temporary. The other Westerners who had been kidnapped in Gaza had all been released after less than a week. This was the end of her sixth day, and somehow, it didn’t seem very likely that she was about to be freed.

  As she tossed and turned in her restlessness, she picked up a sound from the streets outside that she hadn’t heard since the day of her abduction: high-velocity weapons. She guessed that the clashes between Hamas and Fatah had restarted. It was oddly comforting to be reminded of them, because Gaza’s violent, unsettled politics meant her own situation was less likely to be permanent.

  She had done better today. For some of the time, she had kept the movie at bay, but as she faced the night it returned. Again Morgan saw the blood, heard the blows and Abdel Nasser’s screams, felt the pressure of the duct tape gag inside the trunk of the Mercedes. As sleep finally came, she consoled herself with the thought that having lived through that reality, she really ought to stop being frightened of nightmares.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sunday, April 8, 2007

  Adam hadn’t slept properly for days. He knew he had to reply to Sherelle’s message, but he didn’t even know where to start. He scrolled through the possibilities in his head: “Hi Sherry, it would be lovely to have you come to stay but this isn’t a great time because your daughter has been kidnapped. CIA says it’s doing all it can but not yet sure how this is going to pan out. Love Adam. P.S., don’t tell a soul about this, okay?” That didn’t seem quite to do it. “Sherry! No, please, stay at home! My nerves can’t quite take it right now.” Not so good either.

  He stared at his computer screen and, as he had so often since his wife’s disappearance, felt powerless. That he, Adam Cooper, rising star of the human rights bar, should have to be reliant on the CIA was intolerable. Mike, the young African American, had at least struck him as sincere. Only yesterday, in the course of a long phone call, he had impressed on him the Agency ethos: that no officer must ever be left behind. “Think of it as Saving Private Ryan, but with almost unimaginable technology. It may take time, but I promise you, we’re going to find her.”

  But there were things about Gary, who was evidently much higher in the CIA hierarchy, that made Adam deeply uncomfortable. His anal, restrictive approach to information; his insistence that the “trust” he kept on talking about seemed to require total inaction on Adam’s part. The mere fact that his wife had been kidnapped meant that, ultimately, Gary had fucked up. Why hadn’t he done more to ensure her security? And yet the man was still pretending that she might not have been abducted after all. On top of it all, he was asking Adam to tell a series of elaborate lies about Morgan’s unexpected absence to everyone he knew, including his own children: lies which would surely unravel the longer time went on. He remembered the case of William Buckley, the CIA chief in Lebanon, who was kidnapped and tortured to death after fifteen months in captivity in 1985. For all Gary’s talk of working his lines and assets, Adam feared that he and Mike knew no more about what had happened to Morgan than he did.

  The inaction was all the harder to take because Adam had always seen himself as a person of action, someone who tried to direct and influence events, rather than merely be swept up in them. He’d never been scared of taking risks: hence his record as a mountaineer. In the courtroom, he had always been equally bold. Sometimes the outcomes of trials and appeals left him saddened or disappointed. But at least he would have tried, fought the good fight. All Gary seemed to want him to do was to be passive, to wait.

  At the same time, Adam felt pretty certain that Mike and Gary had not met many Islamists. He had. He had a network: a web of contacts stemming from his work that made it much more likely he could find sources in Gaza than any Agency officer. His deliberations over how to reply to his mother-in-law subsided, and in their place, he began to devise a plan. He picked up his cell phone and thumbed a message to Nuha, Ahmad Mahmoud’s sister. “We need to meet,” was all it said. “I’ll be at your apartment at nine o’clock this morning.”

  Afterward, Adam dozed, waking as soon as it was light. The kids had been expecting a lazy morning, but he had them out of bed, breakfasted, and dressed early. He told them he had to meet someone involved with his Supreme Court case, and because their mother was still away and Mila didn’t come on the weekends, they’d have to accompany him. By eight fifteen, they all were piling into th
e Volvo.

  “Dad!” said Aimee as they headed onto the Beltway. “Why are we doing this? And why now? What if Mom calls? And how come she hasn’t sent us emails?”

  “I’m sure she will very soon. I guess she’s been busy. And maybe she can’t use the Internet.” He knew how lame his words must have sounded.

  Aimee snorted. “But she usually stays in hotels! Dad, she’s on a business trip, right? You ever stayed in a hotel where you can’t get onto the Internet?”

  They spent the rest of the journey in silence. The kids were tired and sullen, and Adam felt too distracted to say anything that might reassure them. Then, responding to their fears and anxieties had always been more Morgan’s role. She would know what to say. He frankly didn’t.

  Nuha, who worked as an emergency room nurse, lived in a functional but humble apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, on the edge of the housing projects. By now, she had once told Adam, at the age of twenty-seven, she should have been married, with children of her own, but while her brother remained a prisoner, that was impossible. “How can we celebrate while he is being tortured?” she had asked. Her building stood in an open area of scruffy grass and earth. An abandoned plastic tricycle lay on its side next to the elevator, which appeared to be broken.

  “Is this safe, Dad?” asked Aimee.

  “Sure it is, honeybunch. Apart from anything else, at this time of day, anyone dangerous around here is still asleep.” He offered a fake laugh, but it only seemed to make Aimee more anxious.

  The lobby and the bare concrete stairwell were plastered with graffiti. Four flights up, they knocked at Nuha’s door. Entering, Adam blinked, trying to get used to the gloom: the curtains were closed. The room was almost bare of adornment, the only decoration a small oriental rug and a few pieces of Syrian brassware that rested on cheap, self-assembly furniture. Adam knew that Nuha gave a substantial portion of her wages to help support Ahmad’s children. As usual, dressed in dark trousers and a hand-knitted sweater, she looked well groomed. But each time he saw her she seemed thinner than the last.

  The children sat quietly on a sofa, close together and uncharacteristically meek.

  “Why don’t you watch the TV while Nuha and I talk?” Adam said. Nuha passed Aimee the remote, and she found a Scooby-Doo rerun. She kept the volume low.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting you,” Nuha said. “I only picked up your text half an hour ago. So what’s up? Is it about the case? Has something happened?”

  “No, no—it’s all going fine. All we can do is wait for the judges to make up their minds. But actually, this visit is about me. I need to ask a favor. But first, please promise me that whether or not you find out anything, you’ll be discreet. You mustn’t tell anyone we’ve even spoken about this.”

  She turned up her palms. “Of course. You have my word.”

  “Do you have friends, relatives, anyone, who is close to the struggle in Palestine? Anyone you could put me in touch with who might be in a position to lead me to people who know what’s going on?”

  Nuha’s expression was unmistakable: unadulterated fear. “Adam, you know that since Ahmad’s arrest, I have had nothing to do with politics. I do my job, I practice my religion, I try to help my family. I support Ahmad, but that’s all.”

  “I only need a name, a number—”

  “Please don’t ask me this.”

  Adam felt he had no alternative. “I wouldn’t ask you unless I honestly believed I had to. It’s just that I think my wife may be in trouble. It’s possible you can help.”

  “Your wife? What kind of trouble?”

  Adam had already said too much. “Well—it would just be useful for me to be able to talk to someone who could help me check something out.”

  Nuha breathed deeply. “Maybe I can get you a name, a number. But I don’t want to talk about such things on the phone.”

  Adam had already created a new, web-based email address for himself. He wrote it down on a scrap of paper and gave it to Nuha. “If you get something, make a new email account on a computer you don’t normally use, at an Internet café or wherever. Then send me a message to this address here. Put ‘Russian lady seeks business opportunity’ in the subject line and I’ll know it’s from you.”

  Adam had not noticed that all the time he was talking to Nuha, Aimee had been listening intently. They were barely back in the stairwell before he grasped his mistake.

  “Dad,” she said, “what’s happening? You told that lady that Mommy might be in trouble. What did you mean? What trouble? Is she going to be okay?”

  “We were talking privately. I think you misheard.”

  “Dad. Do you think me and Charlie are deaf?”

  “Look, I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.” Adam said. “But I’m hoping that my friend might be able to help us bring her home.”

  “I don’t get it. A woman who lives in a housing project in Alexandria, Virginia? What do you mean?”

  “I know some things are hard to understand right now. Let’s get back to the car.”

  Aimee had evidently been working herself up to this for days. Her anxiety and wretchedness served only to underline that Gary’s demand he keep the truth from the children was ridiculous and unsustainable.

  “Dad, we’re not toddlers anymore,” she said as they walked back across the grass. “You’ve got to level with us. You send us to the best schools and you help us with our homework and talk to our teachers and you know we’re actually both pretty smart. So stop treating us like we’re dumb. What trouble is she in?”

  Adam glanced at Charlie. He was walking, his eyes fixed straight ahead, as if trying not to listen. But the tears were watering his cheeks.

  “Just get in the car,” Adam said. “Then we’ll talk.”

  He had no alternative. They had to know the truth. Once they were all inside the vehicle, he twisted around to face them from the driver’s seat. “Aimee, Charlie, I’m sorry. I should have told you this earlier. But what I’m going to say has to stay our secret: you mustn’t tell anyone else. Is that understood?”

  Aimee could only nod, suddenly silent. Her eyes widened. She was trying not to cry, and bit her lip.

  “As you know, your mother works for the US government. Right now, her boss has asked her to make trips to a place called Gaza. It’s next to Israel, and the people there are called Palestinians. We—that’s me and the people Mom works with—think it’s possible she may have been kidnapped: captured by someone and locked up against her will, like in a prison. We’re going to do everything we can to find her: not just the people she works with, but me. I think I may be able to help, because of the people I know from my job. That’s why we came here to see my friend. Her family are Palestinians too, and I think she can put me in contact with someone who might know something.”

  Charlie’s eyes betrayed a mixture of pain and amazement, and for a moment, amazement held the upper hand. “Do you mean cool secret agent people are looking for our mom—like from the CIA?”

  “Yes, Charlie. That’s exactly what I mean. And I’m telling you, these guys are good!”

  “Wow, Dad.” A few moments passed while Adam’s words sank in. But then Charlie started to sob. “Daddy, Daddy.” He was wailing. “What if they can’t find her? I want Mommy home!”

  “So Mom has been kidnapped by terrorists,” Aimee said. “The kind of people who hate America and attacked us on 9/11. Is that what you’re saying?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes sweetie. We can’t be sure yet, but that’s what may have happened.”

  Now Aimee started weeping, too. With his children buckled into the back seat of the vehicle, Adam couldn’t even given them a proper hug, but watched in the rearview mirror as Aimee reached across and held Charlie’s hand in hers. Adam had to swallow hard to compose himself.

  Morgan came around from her nap with the maghrib, the sunset prayer call, a little after seven o’clock. It had been the hottest day yet: inside the cell, over ninety degrees Fah
renheit. She hadn’t been given a shower for two days, but the heat was the least of her worries. As she lay on her back, she felt the room gently heaving, as if she were standing on the deck of a ship, while the ceiling started to spin. She sat up and breathed deeply, struggling to contain her rising nausea by focusing intently on a spot on the wall. Minutes passed and it didn’t seem to be working. Apart from a half-empty bottle of water, there was nothing in the cell but her bedding; nothing she could use to vomit in, but several times she heaved. At last the dizziness began to lift. She had been prone to vertigo—the doctors called it labyrinthitis—ever since a teenage infection had left her with scar tissue in her left middle ear. Sometimes her bouts lasted only hours, but sometimes several weeks.

  For a few more minutes she stayed motionless, the only noise her own subsiding hyperventilation, as she fought to take control of the panic within her. When it really seemed that all was still she stood and banged on the door. “Zainab!” she yelled. “Zainab! Please, come, I need help!”

  Silence. There were no sounds of footsteps, no voices, anywhere in the house. For the first time since her capture, she was really alone. She yelled again, and as she did so, heard again the clatter of automatic fire outside, sounding very close to the house, then the cries and groans of someone, apparently a man, who’d been hit, followed by shouts.

  “Zainab! Help!”

  Again nothing. As she shouted, Morgan had lost concentration. Her mistake was to look at the floor, in the hope of detecting a slight flicker of the light that came through a narrow gap at the bottom of the door: the sign of someone passing. It brought a new wave of dizzy nausea surging through her head and stomach, and this time, Morgan could not contain herself. As she heaved, first hot bile, then her wretched, half-digested lunch poured from her stomach onto the floor. There was still no Zainab, but now Morgan was trapped amid her own filth and stench.