Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  After her high-speed boat ride from the beach, Morgan had spent her first night aboard the kearsage in the sickbay. There she was fussed over solicitously by a pair of male nurses and a pretty Indian American doctor whose family—Sikh, not Muslim, as she quickly made sure Morgan knew—had settled in Michigan. “You’ve lost a lot of weight and muscle, but so far as I can see, there’s really not much else wrong with you—physically at least,” Dr. Kaur told her next morning after running a battery of tests. “You’re vitamin deficient and short on calcium, and in due course you’re going to need psychological counseling, but that will have to wait until we land.” She gave her a clip to hold up her hair, a gift for which Morgan felt disproportionately grateful. It relieved her neck of the pressure of contact with her mane of unkempt hair, and it meant that when she vomited—something she was doing at least twice a day—she had something to keep it back. The doctor had only one immediate piece of advice: “you must try to get some rest.”

  But though she was utterly exhausted, resting was the one thing Morgan could not do. Far more vivid than anything she was experiencing now were the unbidden scenes in her mind: the day of her abduction; her torture; Zainab’s rape; killing Aqil; the final desperate moments on the beach when she tried and failed to save Abdel Nasser. Familiar with some of the academic literature on the “complex post traumatic stress disorder” peculiar to kidnap victims and abused prisoners of war, she knew these visions might well persist for years. Her overwhelming sense of guilt would surely be equally resilient. She had survived, but her own loyal agent had been killed, and the fact that his death was ultimately caused by what was sometimes termed “friendly fire” made matters worse. She didn’t know what, but she should have done more, and months earlier, before the kidnapping, she should have been more vigilant—she should have seen the signs that their “safe house” was anything but. She knew these thoughts had no rational basis, but she felt that the stain of these crimes could never be expunged. She must dedicate the rest of her life to finding ways of doing penance for them, and the high esteem in which the ship’s crew seemed to hold her was baffling and incongruous.

  Following their first brief exchange at the beach, her first proper ship-to-shore phone call with Adam had come less than half an hour after she arrived on the Kearsage, patched through by a Lieutenant Shawcroft at CENTCOM. She had known nothing of what he had been doing during her absence, and she was bewildered to hear that he was in Tel Aviv. As before, his joy on hearing that she was alive and in reasonable health was palpable. But when he told her that he had been to Gaza himself not once but twice, and had actually been there that morning, she could not control her emotions.

  “You went to Gaza? What were you doing? You’re an American lawyer with a Jewish grandmother, for heaven’s sake! What did you figure the kids would have done if something had happened to you?”

  In all the circumstances, as she later discovered, these were not well-chosen words.

  “I felt I had to. Like I didn’t have a choice. I had to do what I could.” Adam’s voice had sounded thick. “And in the end, I think it did do some good. Quite a lot of good, actually.”

  Morgan knew the call was likely being monitored, and so she did not ask him how. The last thing her husband needed was to have some Arab mukhabarat goon eavesdropping on his account of the role he had played in her release. “Well, let’s not talk about that for now,” she said. “Better to wait until we see each other.” Then she softened. “And it will be so great to see you. Greater than you can imagine. Now tell me about Charlie and Aimee.”

  Whatever was passing through Adam’s mind, he managed to sound enthusiastic. “I’ve got a surprise for you.” There was a click, and then the voices of her children filled Morgan’s ears, patched through from Oxford. Of course, they had already been told she was safe. But as Aimee told her when she finally composed herself enough to be able to speak, until the moment they heard her voice, they had not dared to believe it. What had they been doing? Morgan asked. Granny had just bought her first trainer bra, Aimee told her excitedly; she had learned to play hockey at the Oxford ice rink and she hadn’t missed her American friends at all. “You’ll find I’ve grown up a hell of a lot,” she added. “I guess I’ve had to. I know I’ve sometimes been a brat but I won’t be any more, Mom. Now that you’re coming back, I’m going to appreciate you properly.”

  Charlie’s news was less complicated. He knew none of the detail of her rescue, but the fact she was aboard a US Navy ship “was just so, so cool, I wish I could be there with you.” He had won the class sprint race at his Oxford school sports day, and last weekend, he and a friend’s family had gone for a picnic to a stream on the Hampshire Downs where they caught three trout. Long before the children rang off, Morgan’s tears were flowing freely.

  Later she regretted having taken that phone call before the conversation which immediately followed it—with James Mallon, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent afloat. A seasoned counterterrorism expert from New Jersey, Mallon explained that he had strict instructions: for the time being, she must say very little about her ordeal, either to him or to anyone else. It was vital to keep her account fresh and uncontaminated for the formal debriefing which would begin almost immediately, once she was out of the Middle East. Her information about the Janbiya al-Islam and its operatives was sure to be invaluable; no US intelligence officer had survived an abduction by an al-Qaeda affiliate before.

  But there were a few things Mallon was authorized to tell her. The first was that she had been incredibly lucky. On the day of her rescue, the Kearsage had been due to leave for Dubai, having completed a lengthy tour of patrols and maneuvers up and down the Red Sea, and in the waters off the coast of the Horn of Africa. Its crew and Marines were overdue some rest and recreation, and Dubai was one of the few relatively nearby places where the ship could dock for what the Navy termed a “liberty” R&R—meaning sailors could get an alcoholic drink.

  “We were about to set our course for the Gulf when this piece of intel came through unexpectedly,” Mallon told her. “It happened to match some reports the ship’s own intel cell had been developing, but couldn’t quite nail: that an al-Qaeda group based in Yemen had been organizing a logistics supply line through Sinai, using a dhow they were landing—where else?—at the beach where you were rescued. We’d even set up onshore surveillance there for a few days, but though our guys were well-hidden, they couldn’t come up with anything concrete. They were just unlucky, I guess. Anyhow, once we realized that you might be showing up with a bunch of terrorists at the very location we’d been watching, the R&R was put on hold. The new information completed the jigsaw. It meant we knew where to head for, and we also knew just how dangerous the situation was. We changed course and, well, you know what happened. You were there. One day later, and there would have been nothing we could have done, however good the intel. We wouldn’t have made it in time.”

  “So by now I’d be in Yemen.”

  “If that’s where they planned to take you, yes m’am, you would.”

  “Where did the new intel come from?”

  “The details will have to wait. But I can tell you this: the critical piece was fed by your husband in Gaza—well, at the time he made the first call, I believe technically he was in Egypt. It came through to us very quickly, relayed by someone high up in the Pentagon via your dad. There was a bit of a hiatus when the intel guys started following the wrong pickup truck. But it turned out the right one had already been noticed by a UAV, and once we knew the other vehicle had been eliminated, we were able to figure out where they must be taking you. Eventually we identified what we thought must be the terrorists’ convoy. When we saw the dhow, that clinched it.”

  Since that first call, she and Adam had spoken again at least twice every day. At an intellectual level, she was proud of him, just as she was proud of her dad. She had apologized for her first, hasty comments. Yet their exchanges felt stilted and distant. Muffled by he
r cerulean shroud, she was disconnected from her husband as she was from everything else.

  The Kearsage was due to dock around noon next day. Then there would be nowhere to hide. Her retreat from the world was almost over.

  Adam’s luxurious hotel bed was making no difference, although he had had a long day. The government of the United Arab Emirates did not permit direct flights from Israel, so forcing him to endure a pre-dawn check-in at Ben Gurion for a flight to Amman, eight tedious hours in the stuffy Jordanian terminal, and then a long line to clear immigration when he finally reached Dubai. But still he couldn’t sleep. He felt as if he were facing an exam for a course he hadn’t revised, or a court oral argument for which he was poorly prepared. Then, on the other hand, he could have left his bed, made coffee, and worked, but there was no last-minute preparation he could do to ready himself for coming face to face with Morgan. He wished he could have been able to bring the kids; they would have made things easier. But although his mother had offered to bring them over, the State Department and CIA officials now taking care of Morgan’s rebirth had insisted this could not happen. Apparently the presence of a single additional member of the Cooper family on the shores of the Persian Gulf would constitute an unjustifiable security risk, and since they intended to fly her out in less than twenty-four hours, there was little point in their coming.

  On the eve of his journey, he’d agreed to meet Mike and Eugene in Tel Aviv. Everything that happened from that moment on had to be strictly controlled, they said, because “American lives may depend on it.” To be sure, Adam had done his bit, and done it fantastically—“for an attorney, you sure showed some balls,” as Eugene put it, displaying his customary lack of skill in finding the mot juste. But now the professionals were back in charge. Morgan was going to have to spend a lot of time sequestered with shrinks and her fellow spooks, and there was nothing Adam could do about it.

  “Are you trying to tell me we don’t even get to spend a night together before you whisk her away?” he had asked in Eugene’s unpleasantly familiar office.

  “Sure you do. We just don’t want you at the pier, that might be dangerous, and in any case, we’d like to keep the US military’s role in this under wraps. So the reunion will happen at the Consulate General. You’ll get a little private time together before a media photo-op with a prepared statement—though naturally, no Q and A. Then the time will be yours. You can travel together to the Consul-General’s residence, where you’ll be her guests for dinner, and you’ll spend the night in her residence.”

  “It doesn’t sound like we’ll have much private time at all,” Adam said.

  “Nope. Not for the time being, anyhow. And, I’m sorry to say, no lie-in next morning, either. You’ll need to be up by three-thirty for the flight back to England. You’ll be on a military plane, flying into the Royal Air Force base at Mildenhall. That’s where the children will be, with your parents and Morgan’s dad. I’m sure they’ll give you some privacy there for a while, but it won’t be for long. We need to know everything that’s inside Morgan’s head, and we need to know it quickly. The Brits have lent us a safe house. Somewhere quiet and secluded. She will be able to call you, but for a week or two, no visits.”

  “Jesus.” Adam was aghast. “All these weeks, Charlie and Aimee have been without their mother, not knowing whether she’s alive or dead, and now you’re telling me she’s still a prisoner! And if your precious debrief is so time-critical, why didn’t you start it while she was on the fucking boat?”

  “You can’t just dive into these things. You need the right personnel, and they need some preparation. And all the medical advice says we needed to give her a breathing space, time to compute what’s happened. I’m really sorry, Adam.”

  Eugene tried to touch Adam’s arm, a gesture of faux solidarity, but he pushed him away. “Fuck you, Eugene. Fuck you and fuck your fucking Agency. You and your colleagues did absolutely nothing to free her, and you know it. You fed me high-grade bullshit, week after week—you remember all that crap about the kidnappers being a Hamas front? You planted a chip in my passport, which might have got me killed. Even after all that, you sent Mike to Oxford to ask me not to go back to Gaza in order to give you more time; well, if I’d agreed to that, by now Morgan might well be dead. And someone—maybe not you personally, but someone I think we all know—flung mud at her via some sleazy tabloid journalist, just to try to fuck me up. And now you say I have to stand back, and let you guys do what you want with her for more days and weeks? You’re kidding me, right?”

  This time it was Mike who spoke. “Adam, I know the Agency hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory. But however this mess started, it’s ended well, extremely well, and now you’ve got to let us do our jobs. I think we both know that if you were to ask your wife, she’d tell you that’s what she wants. She’s not just a professional now. She’s a heroine.”

  “A heroine. I’m so glad you think so. But you really think this ended well? With God knows how many people dead?”

  “At least two high-value targets have been taken care of,” Eugene said. “That’s pretty satisfactory, I would say.”

  Adam glared at him. “I do so hope you think it was worth the risk. Because I think you knew Morgan was going to be kidnapped. I don’t know what elaborate game you were playing, but I think Gary, you, and that guy Amos knew all along.”

  “That’s an outrageous suggestion!” Eugene said. “Are you really suggesting we would arrange for a colleague to be abducted? We may not have got everything right here. We may have made mistakes. But we didn’t do that, and you need to be careful what you say!”

  Even then, Adam reflected later, cordiality might have been restored had it not been for Eugene’s next remark. “Look,” he said, “I know that this further period of separation is going to seem especially hard because of some of the things that have gone down between the two of you. I realize you’re desperate to see how things work out, and to figure out what went wrong—what I’m trying to say, and I know I’m not putting it very delicately, is that I do feel for you, and I really understand why it must seem that—”

  Adam stood up, pushing his chair back from the conference table so violently that its opposite edge caught Eugene’s stomach. “I’ve already said this once. Fuck you, Eugene. Fuck you a thousand times.” He stared into Eugene’s eyes. “I am simply disgusted that you’re trying to bring up the subject of our relationship. I don’t know whether you’re making some kind of threat, but this is something you stay out of from here on in. Do I make myself plain?”

  Overall, it might have made Adam’s life slightly easier if he and Eugene were still on speaking terms. But it wasn’t his righteous anger that was keeping him awake. Nor was it the flashbacks that often crowded his mind: the charnel house inside the Rafah apartment building; the moment he shot the suicide bomber; Morgan’s DVD. It was fear, a terror that having been focused on a single, practical outcome for so many weeks, its achievement had left him without a purpose or objective, while making it impossible any longer to dodge the “indelicate” matters that Eugene had so clumsily raised.

  His wife had been banging her agent because her relationship with her husband had grown chilly and distant, and now she had survived God knew what ordeal. There was also the small but perplexing matter of his own personal guilt at having slept with the mother of his children’s best friends. Adam might have learned how to stop a bomber, but just how to deal with his marriage, he hadn’t the faintest idea.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sunday, July 1, 2007

  In the months since Morgan’s kidnapping, superstition—an irrational belief that if he envisioned their reunion too vividly, he would somehow prevent it from happening—meant Adam had tried deliberately not to think about the moment he might see his wife again. But inasmuch as he had pictured it at all, he had imagined it taking place beneath the palm trees outside some Gaza apartment building, after her kidnappers had surrendered or were killed, or—this versi
on just for a day or two, when he heard she was safe on the Kearsage—on the Dubai quayside, a tight and glorious embrace under the dazzling sunshine as she stepped off the gangway from the ship. Instead, he was standing in the hallway outside the elevators on the twenty-first floor of the Dubai World Trade Center, the undistinguished office tower that housed the American Consulate General, flanked by armed agents of the Diplomatic Security Service.

  Jennifer Perkins, an ash-blonde foreign service officer in her forties who served as the chief of mission, stood awkwardly beside him. “It won’t be long now,” she said. “I’m sorry it has to be this way, but out here … well, though it always looks as if the Emiratis have everything buttoned up, we can’t take any risks. I wanted you to be able to stand outside to greet the limo, but I have to take my Regional Security Officer’s advice. Anyhow, they’re on their way.”

  She was flanked to her right by Wendell Fisher, the elderly, sleek ambassador, who had been driven up from his base in Abu Dhabi. He looked at Adam. “You all set?”

  “I guess so. As much as I’ll ever be.”

  The illuminated floor numbers of the left-hand elevator of the two dedicated to the consulate’s use had started moving. Adam’s pulse rate quickened. But when the doors opened, it was only to divulge more security men, a false alarm. It did seem a pity that Uncle Sam hadn’t devoted such resources to protecting her before she was kidnapped; any more armed agents, and the hallway would be jammed. Now the right-hand elevator numbers were flashing. There was a collective hush. This time, it must be her.