Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  Karim is standing by the side of the truck. His voice is exultant. “So, Mrs. Cooper. It is nice day. Welcome!” He puts the emphasis on the word’s second syllable. “Welcome to Sinai!”

  She can’t reply. She’s still wearing the duct tape gag. She’s struggling to stay upright; the combination of heat and sudden elevation is making her feel faint.

  They’re in what looks like an abandoned quarry, at the end of a dirt road. There’s no vegetation, just brown and ocher-colored stones and scree, and behind, craggy peaks of brown and red rock. A scorching wind blows relentlessly, whipping up swirls of dust. As the sensation returns to Morgan’s legs, Aqil motions to her to descend from the truck. Another guard, whom she doesn’t recognize, has removed Abdel Nasser from his box and is trying to get him to stand, but he’s too weak. She catches sight of his face. He looks barely conscious. His hair and beard are ragged, his cheeks hollow. Yet his eyes meet hers, and, momentarily, his lips turn up in the trace of a smile. Another guard gets onto the flatbed and they lift him bodily off the truck and then, with a guard’s shoulder under each of his armpits, away to a black SUV. As they lead him away he turns his head and looks at her again. With a sudden pang, she wonders whether she’ll see him again alive.

  There’s a second vehicle, a white Toyota Corolla sedan, ubiquitous throughout the Near East, behind the SUV. Karim leads her over, but before he gets in, he holds an animated conversation with the driver of the SUV. Morgan guesses they’re discussing the details of their journey: the exact route, the time of their planned rendezvous, the distance the two cars should travel apart.

  Karim’s conversation is done. He opens the trunk of the car and brings out a black, Wahhabi-style niqab, a veil that leaves only a slit for her eyes, together with a long Bedouin robe. He places them over her head, without removing the duct tape around her mouth. Her hands are still bound. Aqil pushes her by the top of her head into the back of the car behind Karim, who’s in the front passenger seat. It’s as if he’s a New York cop with his prisoner, playing to the cameras with his perp. He gets in beside her, and another man she doesn’t know occupies the driving seat. She still has Abu Mustafa’s knife.

  Morgan is learning something new about Aqil: his stench is worse than her own. Sometimes he seems to be dozing, and then his body starts to loll, and his trunk-like thigh slips across the car’s back seat, inching closer to her own. It can’t be accidental.

  Her head is beginning to throb again, and she realizes it’s been many hours since she had anything to eat or drink. Karim and Aqil both have water bottles. Her need to drink is suddenly overwhelming, and heedless of the consequences, she starts to make wordless noises through the duct tape and the niqab mask, grunts and squeals that indicate they have to listen to her properly. Karim seems to get the message. He speaks to the driver, and a mile or two further down the almost-empty desert blacktop, the car pulls over.

  “Okay, I understand,” Karim says. “I take off the tape, and I let you drink. But you try anything stupid, Aqil will shoot you.”

  Morgan nods. Karim lifts the niaqb far enough to expose her nose and mouth, and with unexpected gentleness, he cuts off the tape that binds her lips with a pocket knife, then pulls the remnant from the back of her neck with a painful tug. He opens a water bottle, holds it to her mouth, and, a little at a time, upends it. The last time, she takes a little too much, and splutters.

  “Thank you,” Morgan says, when she has recovered. “I needed that.”

  Karim only shrugs. “Is not special. I need you alive.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To seaside.” His trademark giggle.

  “To a boat?”

  “You will see. You will learn. All very soon. Now you have choice. I put the tape back, or you say nothing. No more questions.”

  Karim speaks to the driver again and they move off again. Judging by the sun it must be well after ten. There are many hours still to go. Aqil closes his eyes and she touches her knife, reassuring herself it’s still there. She doesn’t begin to know how she’ll use it, but she makes herself a pledge: she will not go gently into their dark jihadist night. Come what may, she’s not getting on that boat.

  Adam is back on the sofa by the coffee table in Khader’s Gaza office. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, just eight hours since they left. Everything feels surreal; Adam would pinch himself, if the helpless dread he feels in his stomach weren’t so heavy. How can everything—at least by the standards of Gaza—seem so normal? In the hours since he last sat in this office, he has witnessed a bloody carnage, he has killed a man who would have killed him, and he hasn’t slept. And despite everything, he has failed. Morgan is still a prisoner, now more remote than ever. He sips a bittersweet Arabic coffee and nibbles a pastry. He’s suddenly assailed by exhaustion. The food and drink are the only things still keeping him awake.

  “Thank you, Khader, for everything,” Adam says. “You did your best. And I am so sorry for the loss of your men.”

  Khader looks as exhausted as Adam. “Thank you. I appreciate your feelings. But it is my fault. I should have anticipated what Karim and his takfiris planned to do. And our intelligence was inadequate. We had no idea about the tunnel in the basement. We may have taken power in the Gaza Strip, but we do not have control.”

  “What about Abu Mustafa, the guy they left behind? What’s going to happen to him?”

  “He is in the Al-Shifa hospital. I think he will live, so long as the Israelis have allowed some antibiotics through their blockade, so that we can prevent an infection. He has been a collaborator with the Zionist entity. But he gave us accurate information about the truck, about the second IED, and the tunnel. He told us Karim had a source inside the Hamas mukhabarat. We will interrogate him, find out everything we can about this source, and about Karim’s group. And then we will let him go. We will send him back through Erez. I think he will live to see his home and family again.”

  “I should be going to Erez myself. I’ll call for a car to pick me up on the far side and take me back to Tel Aviv.”

  “Stay for lunch. We both need to eat. Then I’ll take you to Erez myself.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that. But first I need to make a phone call.”

  Adam dials his parents’ home. His mother answers.

  “Darling! How wonderful to hear your voice. Let me give you to Rob.” She knows this is not the time for chit-chat. His father-in-law comes on the line.

  “It’s me, Adam,” says Adam.

  “I know it’s you. Okay. So take a fucking deep breath. I can’t tell you much, because I don’t know much. But after we spoke, I managed to reach a well-connected two-star buddy I served with at Lejeune. He’s in Washington now, attached to the joint staff. He got it—the urgency, the need to act. All I know for sure is that your intelligence is in the system. It’s reached the right Pentagon intel nerd’s inbox, and the will is now there to action it.”

  Adam can only mutter his thanks.

  “Save the mutual congratulations for when we get her back. Hopefully, the information that we—that you—have supplied is going to match something that is already there. Do not ask me what exactly the fuck they’re going to do with it, because I honestly don’t know. But I will make one promise, that as we speak, some very good guys are giving this all they can. Semper fidelis, Adam. Semper fi.”

  The call has barely ended when Adam’s cell phone rings. Whoever it is has blocked the number, but the voice that speaks when he answers it is female and American.

  “Adam Cooper?”

  “This is me.”

  “Lieutenant Suzanne Shawcroft. I’m calling you from JICCENT, the CENTCOM Joint Intelligence Center. You identified a possible target vehicle in your conversation with Colonel Ashfield. But there are a lot of white pickup trucks in Sinai. First I want to be sure it was a Mitsubishi. Is that right?”

  Adam turns to Khader. “It’s the US military. Is there anything more you can tell them about the truck?”


  “The guy said it looked new, but it was dirty. Like it had been driven a lot off-road. Definitely a Mitusbishi.”

  Adam passes the information on.

  “Okay, stand by, sir. We copy you. We think we have an image of it. We’ve been following it for several hours from a UAV—a drone, an unmanned aerial vehicle. It’s on the highway heading for Cairo. We’re liaising with our Egyptian colleagues.”

  The adrenaline jolt to Adam’s chest feels like a karate kick. He swallows hard. “You think you’ve located her? You really think this is it?”

  “I don’t want to be definitive. Things can go wrong. But tentatively, yes sir, we have her in our sights.”

  “My God. Oh my God.”

  “So keep your phone on. I’ll let you know the minute we have news.”

  “Okay. Okay. I copy you.”

  “Just one thing. The truck we’re following. To judge by its speed and position when we first picked it up, it left Rafah at about 0415, four fifteen this morning. That fits in with what you told Colonel Ashfield, right?”

  “Er … yes, I guess so …”

  And then it hits him.

  “No! Wait! Shit, no! Shit, shit shit. It doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit at all! The Mistubishi with Morgan on board can’t have left Rafah until almost five—0500. Just before the explosion.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  Adam hastily confers with Khader, then comes back on the line. “I’m one hundred percent certain. Four fifteen has to be way too early.”

  Lieutenant Shawcroft’s voice sounds a little panicked. “Thank you, Mr. Cooper, thank you for this input, I’ve got to go.”

  “Does this mean …?”

  “Sir, like I said, I’ll be back the moment I have news. Right now I have to go, goodbye, sir.”

  Adam doesn’t really have to ask what it means. He knows. For the past few hours, an American UAV has been following the wrong truck. The hunt for Morgan is going to have to start all over again, and the chances of finding her are rapidly diminishing. After so much risk, so much bloodshed, he, Khader, Rob, and apparently the collective US military, are all staring at failure.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Tuesday, June 26, 2007

  Karim must have told the driver of the other vehicle to stay well in front of them; for a long time now Morgan has not caught a glimpse of it. Presumably he thinks they will be less conspicuous if they do not travel in convoy, especially when the time comes to leave the paved road. It has been a long night and now a long day, and they have no food. The driver bought some chocolate and nuts when they stopped to buy gasoline, but Karim and Aqil ate it all immediately, and they have brought nothing else. She can only hope that hunger and fatigue will make their reactions sluggish. They seem to have run out of water, too, and the car’s air conditioning is feeble. The journey feels interminable.

  When she isn’t dozing, Morgan ponders. How strange have been the paths that have led her to this final crisis! She thinks about her conversation with Abu Mustafa and his extraordinary disclosures, and the origins of this crazy “operation” cooked up with the help of this Israeli, Amos. According to Abu Mustafa, it was Amos who recommended her as the target of the proposed kidnapping. But that in turn means her name must have been proposed by Gary, because she knows exactly who this Amos must be—the man Gary once described to her as his “closest brother in arms,” Brigadier-General Amos Pearlman, or as Gary liked to put it, “the man from Haman,” Israel’s military intelligence section.

  Over the years, he and Gary have worked together several times. Back in the nineties, Pearlman ran his own unit, focusing his considerable skills and resources on Muslim extremists operating far from Israel’s borders, in the era before 9/11 made such inquiries fashionable. She first heard his name when she was based in Sarajevo, usually mentioned disparagingly. Back then, the western European and American intelligence agencies considered the Serbs to be politically radioactive, but Pearlman spent most of his time with them, drinking plum brandy with butchers like Arkan and Ratko Mladic, and with their senior intelligence staff. More recently, Gary has told her why. Pearlman realized the Serbs were monitoring the hundreds of visiting mujaheddin, many of them veterans of Afghanistan, who were coming to fight from abroad with their brothers in the former Yugoslavia. By becoming the Serbs’ crony, Pearlman persuaded them to share their intelligence with him.

  According to Gary, one of Pearlman’s hallmarks was his ability to manipulate the news media—just as Abu Mustafa said the pair of them had planned to do after her own kidnapping. “You remember that time the Serbs massacred a bunch of women and children by firing on a Sarajevo market?” Gary asked her once, toward the end of an unusually boozy Vespers night at their Tysons Corner out-station. Of course she remembered; she was in the city at the time, and witnessed the terrible aftermath.

  “It could have been very damaging, but suddenly stories began to emerge that the Bosniak Muslims had deliberately killed some of their own in order to increase the pressure on the international community,” Gary said. “It was all just lies and bullcrap, but the media reported it. It kind of took the political sting out of what had happened. Guess who their source was: Comrade Amos. He was doing his Serbian buddies a favor.” Later, when a couple of British journalists came across a Serb concentration camp, Pearlman planted the idea with some of their rivals that the Brit reporters had faked their interviews and pictures, insisting as a senior intelligence operative that the camp was bogus. “According to Amos, it was just a Bosniak propaganda exercise contrived to force NATO to start a war on behalf of the fucking Muslims,” Gary told her. “Of course, the journalists hadn’t faked anything. But thanks to Amos, the real story—that the Serbs were running their own version of Dachau—got buried. It became a media clusterfuck about journalistic ethics and the difficulty of discerning truth amid the fog of war.”

  She hadn’t been able to keep the disgust from her face, but Gary was having none of it. “Morgan, don’t be so naïve. That was how Amos earned his keep with the Serbs. In return, he got some very useful information, stuff he eventually shared with me, that went into our own databases. Those reports are still accessible on your and my workstations. Ratko’s intel guys were pretty reliable.”

  Could it have been Pearlman who betrayed her mission in Montenegro by telling the Serbs about the KLA supply line? If Gary had shared the details with him, it was distinctly possible. Long ago, she asked Gary what had happened, but he insisted he had no idea. “If this was something that came from CIA, it was as the result of a decision made way above my pay grade.” She would never really know.

  But if Abu Mustafa was telling her the truth, it seems that even Amos Pearlman wanted to abort the plan to have her kidnapped in Gaza, once he was told by Abu Mustafa that Karim knew who she was. And the way he recognized her—from a video shot by a camera hidden in Abdel Nasser’s apartment! How much did he see? Did he pass on film to his handlers of her and Abdel Nasser making love? Morgan has so much else to worry about, but this is not a pleasant thought. It feels like a physical assault.

  So Amos closed the border and put the whole thing on hold until someone—surely it can only have been Gary—insisted it should go ahead. She recalls telling Gary shortly before she left for the airport how vital it was that her return must not be delayed, because of Adam’s Supreme Court case. “That’s fine, that’s fine,” he said. “If there’s any problem getting into Gaza, or if you think the risks have become unacceptable, just come on home.” At the time, she pinched herself; she wasn’t used to Gary being sympathetic to the problems she had in balancing the demands of her family and job. Yet he had known all along that she wouldn’t be coming home for months, perhaps more likely never, and just to make doubly sure, he had somehow induced Pearlman to contrive the approach from Ben-Meir. She imagines his voice, his lilting drawl: “Just do something to get her to make another trip to Erez, old friend, and this time, she has to get through. We’ve come too far to wast
e this operation. We’ve already spent millions of dollars, and the future of Palestine is riding on it. Don’t worry, if things turn nasty for her, we’ll send in the cavalry. Next time you’re in town, I’ll buy you a beer.”

  How smart she thought she was being when she asked Ben-Meir to dinner, and persuaded him to use his contacts to get Erez opened in time for her to go in and still get home. No doubt he was just their instrument, a handy instrument who was being manipulated, just as she was. Maybe he owed Pearlman for something. And all they were both really doing was following Gary’s tortuous script.

  Her head still throbs, but now she recognizes a significant fact with terrifying clarity: that her CIA boss, Gary Thurmond, is a classic, clinical psychopath, utterly self-centered, unafraid of the possible consequences of his actions, and programmed instinctively to lie and manipulate. No wonder his Agency career has been so spectacular. Now the last penny drops. He has been prepared to risk her life, and some of the Agency’s secrets, as an act of revenge, a punishment for her temerity in daring to go to the Inspector General about his proposed abduction of the Muslim cleric in Amsterdam. He did all this to get even with her. Inwardly, she reels.

  She closes her eyes. Vivid images of Adam, Charlie, and Aimee flood into her mind, vacations and other happy times past, and visions of the future, graduations and weddings, family occasions that she will attend only inside their memories. She feels a pang and fights to stifle the tears. But if she cannot have life, may she and her family one day find justice. She prays that Adam, after her death, will uncover this degrading conspiracy and expose what has really been happening. One day, perhaps, he will find a way to avenge her in the way he knows best—through the courts.