Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  “How much longer do you intend to keep me? You must surely know this can’t go on much longer.”

  “Mrs. Cooper,” Sal said wearily. “Let’s not go there. How and when this ends is entirely up to you. Is there anything else?”

  She thought of the murderous Karim, and the longing she had sensed in his eyes when he had been about to cut the throat of Abdel Nasser. “Just one. You and Karim. The man who knows me from Kosovo. It doesn’t seem you have very much in common.”

  “Mrs. Cooper, you are mistaken.” Sal looked solemn. “Our parents inhabited different lands. I have had much greater material and educational opportunities. But both of us have dedicated our lives to this struggle, which we believe may well be al-Malhamah, the great, last battle between Muslims and Romans of which the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, foretold.

  “And next to Karim, I am only a footsoldier, his servant. I have sworn bayat to him, an oath of allegiance, and he may do with me as he pleases. Karim is my leader, my emir.”

  When he left Eugene’s office, Adam’s mind was in tumult. While he was still in front of him, he had managed to restrain his feelings, but once he was back in the brilliant Tel Aviv sunshine, they threatened to overwhelm him. He was relieved that now at last there was proof she was alive—or had been when she made the video. But as he made his way back to his hotel, the horrifying mental picture of the Morgan he had just seen was all the while in front of him. Intellectually, he had always known it was likely she was being maltreated. Emotionally, he had clung to the hope that she was still in reasonable shape, that the kidnappers had merely been trying to make some symbolic political point, and once they had done so, would let her go unharmed. Seeing the reality had been far worse than he had feared. Her voice, usually so clear and mellifluous, had emerged on the recording as a grating rasp, as if the mere act of speaking had been causing her physical pain, and she looked as if she had been sick. Her eyes were opaque, devoid of their usual vivacity. And then there had been that violent, horrible shudder halfway through her statement. What had those bastards done to her? The video had no date stamp: how long ago had this happened? Was she being tortured still? And what was this shadowy group, the Janbiya al-Islam? Adam had researched the many varieties of Gazan extremism on the Internet, but he had not come across any mention of them.

  As soon as he got back to his room, he called Rob, and told him everything.

  “I’m talking to my friends,” the colonel said, his voice an icy calm. “We can’t let them do this to her without suffering consequences.”

  Adam did not inquire who those friends were. His cell phone and hotel landline were probably being eavesdropped.

  “Be careful what you tell Sherry.”

  “Don’t worry. I will.”

  Afterward, Adam felt drained. He had not slept through the five hours spent sitting upright in British Airways economy the previous night, and when he lay on his bed to rest, he soon sank into oblivion. By the time he awoke, it was dark. It was almost time for his rendezvous. At their second meeting in London, Imad had given him precise instructions, and he followed them to the letter.

  He put on a black T-shirt, black jeans, and running shoes and walked down to the seafront. He went across the sand to one of the beach bars, where he sat in a deck chair under the black, Levantine night, a sputtering candle on the little plastic table beside him. He ordered a soda and sipped it until his eyes were accustomed to the darkness. When he arrived, the only other customers had been a pair of American tourists, talking loudly about a trip they were planning to make to Bethlehem next day, but soon three others joined them: a pair of young lovers, who looked utterly absorbed in each other, and a middle-aged man in khakis and a dark, plain T-shirt. Finishing his drink, Adam got up and walked to the shoreline. After a few moments he could see that the couple had also left their seats. Could they be following him? Adam increased his pace and turned away from the water, heading back toward the road. When he reached it, the man in the T-shirt was already there, leaning against a parked Mercedes, smoking a cigarette.

  Imad had warned him he was likely to be watched, but Adam had not expected it to be so blatant. He hailed a taxi, and asked to be driven the handful of blocks to his hotel. But when the car was almost there he leaned forward and told the driver he had changed his mind: instead he wanted to be driven in the opposite direction, to the flea market in Jaffa. There he got out and walked past some trendy restaurants further into the market, along the lines of empty pitches where the stalls would be next morning. The street was almost deserted, and he could detect no sign of pursuit. At last he spotted a three-story Ottoman building, its walls covered with peeling yellow stucco. A man in a Yankees baseball cap lurked at the entrance to an alley beside it and beckoned to Adam.

  “You are Cooper?” he asked.

  Adam nodded, then followed him down the narrow passageway. It opened out into a square where another taxi was waiting. Adam got into the back seat. The man was the driver. As the vehicle began to move, Adam instinctively ducked his head until it rested on his knees. To a casual observer, he would not have been easy to recognize.

  By snatching glances through the window, Adam could see they were heading out of the city toward Lod, the industrial town near the airport. At last they stopped outside a concrete apartment tower. The driver punched a code into a keypad to admit them to the lobby and summoned the elevator. He held the door while Adam entered, then reached around the side and pressed the button for the seventh floor. He shook Adam’s hand. “Yalla, bye-bye, sir,” he said.

  When the elevator doors opened, Adam found himself looking at a sallow-skinned, clean-shaven man in his early thirties, dressed in pressed blue jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt. He looked like an off-duty IT sales rep.

  “Welcome,” he said. The door across the landing was already open, and they entered a clean studio apartment. While Adam sat down in a leather armchair, the man plugged an iPod into a dock and selected some Rachmaninoff.

  “The music is in case there is anyone trying to listen,” he said. “You can call me Bashir. I wish I could offer you coffee or tea, but this is not my apartment and there doesn’t seem to be any. How was your journey?”

  “It was fine, thanks.”

  “Your first time in Palestine?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are missing your wife?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “And your children? They are okay?”

  “As well as can be expected. My parents are taking good care of them.”

  “You are lucky. So. I think you went to the US embassy this morning. Did they tell you anything?”

  For just a moment, Adam wondered what Eugene would say if he knew he was about to pass on the contents of their talk to a member of the Hamas underground in Israel. The thought did not detain him long.

  “They showed me a video. It had been sent by the kidnappers. She looked as if she had been tortured, waterboarded, and on it she confessed to being a CIA agent.”

  “Is that true?”

  Adam said nothing.

  “From your silence, I suppose that it is.” Bashir whistled. “You must know that merely by agreeing to meet you, I am taking an enormous risk. If the Shin Bet knew anything about my associations, they would lock me up in a heartbeat. And you, Adam Cooper, are asking me to help free an American spy. Just be aware that if you were anyone else, I would refuse even to speak to you.”

  “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “No, maybe you can’t.” Bashir’s eyes flashed with anger. “Do you know what is happening in Gaza? Hamas has offered a ceasefire with Israel. We contested the elections last year, and we won. But when we tried to form a government, the foreign aid that should have funded its salaries was stopped. Israel complains that rockets get fired from Gaza, but most of them land in empty fields. But every so often, the Israelis decide to retaliate. They send in their tanks and their aircraft and they kill people. And we do not face only the external
enemy. We are also forced to defend ourselves against armed Fatah gangsters, collaborators with Israel, friends of America. They set up roadblocks, arrest young boys on their way to school and university, and torture them. Even when they do not kill them, we find them afterward, shot with bullets in their kneecaps. And the CIA is part of this chaos.”

  “But I am not responsible, and neither is my wife.” Adam said. “Anyhow, on the video, the group that has kidnapped my wife calls itself the Janibiya al-Islam. Have you heard of them?”

  Bashir looked pensive. “Yes. We know who these people are. They are followers of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. I will make sure this information gets through. It is important.”

  “Can you give me a contact inside Gaza? Someone I can link up with?”

  “I don’t think you should try to enter Gaza now. The situation is very dangerous, so dangerous we cannot promise to protect you. Your children have already lost their mother. What will they do if they lose you, too?”

  “I can’t just do nothing. I have to try.”

  Bashir stood. “I must be going. Wait here ten minutes, then leave. You will see a driver outside who will take you to your hotel.” He took a piece of paper from his pocket, scribbled on it and handed it to Adam. “This is the number of someone in Gaza. His name is Khader. Do not call him unless you are in Gaza too. Make sure you remember it, then put this paper in the toilet.”

  As he left the apartment tower, Adam’s spirits sank as fast as the elevator. He had traveled five thousand miles, and was physically much closer to his wife. But what was left of the road ahead still seemed long, and the only thing he knew for certain was that nothing he had ever done in his life had prepared him for such a journey.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Thursday, April 26 – Sunday,

  April 29, 2007

  After so many days in darkness and gloom, Morgan had almost forgotten what sunlight looked like. But now, early on a gleaming, breezy morning, the world was drenched in it. They sat facing each other in white plastic chairs, in the shade cast by a huge, spreading date palm—“it won’t just keep us cool,” Sal had said, “it will prevent us from being seen from above.” The guards were hidden around the side of the building, a spacious villa, which had three stories above the ground as well as the basement she knew so well. On the table between them, Zainab had left plates of hummus, flatbread, olives, tabbouleh, boiled eggs, pastries, and dates, and two large glasses of Palestinian mint tea. She could not see over the compound walls, but she sensed the proximity of the sea, feeling its tang in her nostrils. They must, she reasoned, be somewhere north of Rafah, the least densely populated region of the entire Gaza Strip. Occasionally she made out the noise of vehicles or an aircraft, but they sounded distant; the house must be set back some way from the road. Her defenses remained on alert. But if this was Sal playing the “good cop,” it was something she could learn to live with.

  “It’s time I told you a little about myself,” Sal said, finishing the last of several pastries. “You do not yet know my name: you can call me Abu Mustafa. Maybe you have guessed that I have spent time in the West. In fact, I studied in America. I am forty-one years old, and like you, I have children, two boys and a girl, and I do not see them enough. I am not from here, but from one of the neighboring countries; insh’Allah, when we are done here, I will be able to go home for a while. It is hard, isn’t it, to be away from one’s family?”

  Morgan nodded. This she had not expected: Sal—Abu Mustafa—trying to be charming and empathetic; a jihadist in touch with his feelings. This was a man who had helped perpetrate her torture, and the contrast was almost too much to comprehend. But then the memory of her CIA interrogation course, taught by a man named Phil, who was both a spy and a PhD psychologist, began to bubble up. “The guy you’re interrogating may well hate Americans,” the lecturer had said. “Convince him that you’re a member of the same human species, and his mental door is already halfway open. How can I do that? I monologue. I talk about myself, to establish the perception that we have common ground, shared experiences. The important questions to which I want answers can come later. We call the goal here ‘adjusted cognitive reasoning’—to shift the subject’s perspective toward that of the interrogator.”

  There had already been signs they were planning a change of strategy: they had begun to let her take a shower every day, and to wear clean clothes—not the orange jumpsuits of the first days of her captivity, but loose-fitting T-shirts and sweatpants. Abu Mustafa’s fond words about his family were merely another step. Yet as he described his children’s various accomplishments, he did not seem to be faking. “As I am sure you know, the fact I am called Abu Mustafa means my eldest child’s name is Mustafa. He’s almost sixteen, and though he loves his sports, insh’Allah, he will be a doctor or an engineer. Then comes Fatima: she’s only thirteen, but already she knows English, French, and Arabic. Finally there is little Osama. He is still just an imp. He is seven.”

  Morgan wondered whether she could turn this abruptly different treatment to her advantage. Here was a chance to find out more about Abu Mustafa. For example, if his daughter was learning English and French, she probably went to a private school, and the family must have money. Where did Arab children still learn French these days? Lebanon? Jordan? Maybe Syria?

  “Your youngest must have been born in 2000—well before September 11,” she said. “Were you already committed to waging the jihad then?”

  “My son’s name means ‘lion,’ but it has nothing to do with bin Laden. Many Muslim babies were given it, long before 9/11.”

  She tried again. “And where did you study in America? What was it that got you so mad?”

  “Mrs. Cooper, I do not mean to show you disrespect, but having seen the ways of the kufr, I became outraged. And when I started to see that the Muslim lands were also occupied by the kufr, some literally, others only spiritually, and that the law of Allah was being uprooted while the kufr stuffed their jails with the Muslim fighters who had striven to restore it—it was then that I understood the duty imposed on every Muslim, to practise jihad.”

  It was a familiar narrative, one to which a long line of extremists had conformed, from Sayyid Qutb, al-Qaeda’s ideological godfather, to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 planner, currently a guest at Guantanamo. Having sampled the West’s delights, they had become disgusted by them.

  “So tell me about your wife,” she said. “How does she manage when you’re far from home, fighting your glorious struggle? I’ll bet that this wasn’t the life she signed up for.”

  Abu Mustafa took a sip of tea. “You are very perceptive. She is also an educated person, a doctor. She would much prefer our lives went back to the way they used to be, when I worked in an office and was home every night. However, in our culture, ultimately the woman will obey.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’s happy.”

  “She is a good Muslim. We share the same values.” Abu Mustafa spread his palms. “And at least she is safe. But you also turned your back on physical security. What made you do that?”

  Unexpectedly, Morgan felt a surge of emotion. What had made her act in the way that she had? Why had she been so bent on returning to the field that she had disregarded every warning, and ignored the effect her decisions had had on her marriage and her children? The answer had seemed obvious: that it was simply what she wanted, that it defined who she was and what she needed to do in order to feel fulfilled. Now that seemed hopelessly self-indulgent. She breathed deeply, fighting for composure, hoping that Abu Mustafa would not notice the effect his question had had on her battered psyche.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said. “Well, I know how it is because sometimes I feel the same way. In two days Fatima will be fourteen, and I will miss her birthday. I cannot even call her, in case your American friends or the Zionist entity locate my phone signal and send us a missile. How do I keep going? Because I believe that what I am doing is right, that it strikes a blow for ju
stice. And I believe it is Allah’s will.”

  Morgan rallied. “Well, Abu Mustafa, I happen to believe in my mission too, and in the great experiment in human liberty that the United States of America represents. And let me assure you, this doesn’t make us similar, but more diametrically different than you’ll ever understand.”

  After that first session in the compound, they met on the next two mornings. Morgan had remembered another lesson from Phil’s course on basic interrogation: “When you’re still trying to get a subject to the decision point, the point where they break, techniques like isolation and sleep deprivation have their advantages. But once you’ve got past that and they’ve started to talk, you want them well-fed and rested. Otherwise, they may simply be too exhausted to remember vital information.”

  When she wasn’t with Abu Mustafa, she was still being kept in the basement. But although down there she had no natural light, they had moved her to a bigger room with a single bed. They had let her bring her chess set. So far as she could tell, there were no hidden cameras, and for the first time since her capture she felt able to try a little exercise. Every morning, she did crunches, push-ups, and Pilates on the kilim that covered part of the floor. Her muscles, she had noticed, had been atrophying; she needed this limited routine. The food had improved a little. Occasionally, Zainab even smiled.

  Morgan remembered the Stockholm syndrome, the bond that can grow between terrorist captors and their prisoners. First came the loss of control, and total dependency on her captors; then gratitude for the least unexpected kindness; and thence a sense of obligation that would make her give up her secrets. Her first, violent encounters with Abu Mustafa had made it seem impossible that she could ever feel such a relationship developing with him. Yet she was beginning to enjoy his company, and even looked forward to their meetings. So far she had given him nothing, but she had to wonder whether he too had been professionally trained. Had he once been an intelligence officer?