The Prince of Bagram Prison

by Alex Carr

  A place to which old spies retired. Wives finally getting their due after a lifetime of reheating dinners and going alone to dance recitals and high-school football games. On the drive in, Morrow had seen more than one of the discreet bumper stickers people like him used to quietly announce themselves as members of the club. It was the kind of thing you wouldn't see unless you knew to look.

  It was early afternoon, but the sky was dark as dusk, the horizon bruised and black by the fist of a thunderstorm moving across the valley. Down on the green plain of the campus, a handful of figures hurried to beat the rain, while the first-year cadets kept their slow and painful stride.

  On the far side of the parade ground, a solitary figure in faculty green emerged from behind one of the barracks and darted forward, her heels sinking into the soft turf as she ran, her stride shortened by the hem of her skirt.

  “Here comes Major Caldwell now,” the General said solicitously. He raised his arm over Morrow's shoulder and pointed out the window.

  She was smaller than Morrow had expected, with a soldier's precision of appearance, her brown hair cropped short against her neck, her shirtsleeves holding their creases in the damp September heat. Though even from a distance Morrow's practiced eye told him her meticulousness did not come naturally. Fifteen years in the military and she still walked with the cautious carriage of someone who had worked hard to learn her part. Precision and something else. Anger, perhaps. Years of resentments. What she'd had to fight for and what others had been given.

  Caldwell, Katherine. Morrow reminded himself of the details of the woman's file as he watched her cross the parade ground. Date of Birth: 7/2/1971. Place of Birth: Boise, Idaho. A childhood patched together from nearly a dozen addresses. Spokane. Billings. Denver. Tucson. Las Vegas. Mother's various boyfriends. Father nowhere to be found.

  And the ROTC. Not a ticket in, Morrow thought, but a way out. She'd been a mediocre student at best through high school, but the army must have seen promise in her, enough to funnel her into the intelligence corps. And then on to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, where someone must have seen more than just promise. For at the DLI she'd been assigned to the Arabic course, which, at the time, was not only one of the smallest programs but the most difficult as well. A matter of chance, someone else's idea of where she belonged, and yet the assignment must have fit.

  The first fat drops of rain spattered the window and the woman picked up her pace, sprinting the last few yards before disappearing into the building below.

  “What did she do her doctoral work in?” Morrow asked.

  “Islamic soteriology,” the General answered. “I'm afraid the details are a bit over my head.”

  Salvation theory, Morrow thought, not what he would have guessed at all. But, at the same time, her choice made a kind of sense to him.

  “I assume you know about her brother,” the General offered.

  Morrow shook his head. There had been nothing about a brother in her official army file.

  The man glanced hastily over his shoulder as if to confirm that they were alone, then lowered his voice a notch. “He was killed in the September eleventh attacks,” he said reverently. “Twin Towers.”

  KAT SMOOTHED HER SKIRT with the side of her hand and started down the second-floor corridor toward the Dean's Office, her reflection wavering in the floor's mirror polish. She knocked once and waited, heard the General's voice telling her to come in.

  There was a man at the window, a civilian by his dress. Wash-and-wear khakis and a blue cotton shirt. Expensive and decidedly unstylish brown walking shoes. A grandfather's Saturday-afternoon outfit, though there was nothing grandfatherly about him.

  He turned and looked directly at Kat. “Sergeant Caldwell,” he said, using Kat's army rank, her proper rank. And then, with a dismissive nod to the General, “You may go now.”

  The General hesitated before glancing sheepishly at Kat and turning for the door.

  “Sergeant,” the man mused, once they were alone. “I must admit, I'm rather baffled. Most people in your shoes wouldn't have chosen to enlist. You didn't want to be an officer?”

  Kat shook her head. “I don't like giving orders, sir.”

  “And yet here you are—Major.”

  “It's a job, sir.”

  “Fair enough.” The man smiled slightly, mockingly, as if her answer confirmed something he'd known all along. “The General tells me you're a salvation specialist.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what about you?”

  “What about me, sir?”

  “Do you believe in God and heaven and all that?”

  It was a question people often felt compelled to ask when they found out what Kat's particular area of study was. She answered as she always did. “No, sir.”

  The man's expression changed slightly. From curiosity to admiration, Kat thought. “Your brother's death must have been hard for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You were with the interrogation unit at Bagram in the spring of 2002?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I understand you were part of the team that handled a young Moroccan boy.”

  Kat nodded, wary of whatever game the man was playing. “Jamal, sir. His name was Jamal.”

  The man turned his back to Kat and looked out the window at the rain sheeting down on the parade grounds. Seventy, Kat thought, seventy-five, fighting the physical signs of his age but showing them nonetheless.

  “Am I being called up for duty, sir?” she asked, though she was fairly certain by now that this wasn't the case. She couldn't imagine the army sending someone three hours just to deliver mobilization orders. Especially someone on a civil-ian's salary.

  “You were close, then? You and the boy.”

  “I'm not sure I would use the term ‘close,’ sir,” Kat said.

  “But you spent quite a bit of time together. He must have come to trust you.”

  Kat shrugged. “No more than the others, sir.”

  “Must have been a bit more,” the man countered, turning back to face her. “After all, I understand it was you who turned him in the end.”

  “It would have happened no matter what, sir.”

  “Have you heard from him since he left Bagram?”

  “No, sir. I was told he would be going to Spain. To Madrid. That was all.”

  Silence then, and the rain, the sound like the rush of incoming surf.

  “Has something happened to him, sir?”

  Lightning flickered in the window and Kat started a slow count, waiting for the thunder to reach them. One mile for each second, a childhood rumor she had never been able to shake.

  “You understand, Sergeant Caldwell, what Jamal was doing in Madrid?”

  Kat nodded. “More or less, sir.”

  Eyes and ears, she had told the boy. All you have to do is watch and listen. And when they come to you with questions you tell them what you know. Jamal had nodded with the eagerness of someone whose entire existence was predicated on his ability to please. They'll take care of you, Jamal.

  And America? The boy had asked.

  Yes, America.

  “He's disappeared,” the man said at last. “A few days ago. We believe he's in serious danger.”

  “I'll tell you what I can, but it's been a long time, sir. The information in my reports is probably a lot more accurate than anything I could give you now.”

  The man lifted his face slightly and his eyes caught the gray light of the storm. “You've misunderstood, Sergeant. We need you to find the boy.”

  Kat was confused. “The reports are straightforward, sir. You don't need me to read them.” But she understood as she spoke that this wasn't what the man was saying, that he actually meant for her to go to Madrid.

  “There's a flight from Dulles this evening,” he said, glanc ing at his watch. “I'll take you home to collect your things.”

  Kat didn't move. “Is this an order, sir?”

  Th
e man looked at her. He was obviously not accustomed to having his requests second-guessed in this way, and found her question impertinent. “Yes, Sergeant,” he said. “It is.”

  Harry Comfort crossed his arms over his chest and stared out the window of the Young Brothers' Freight office. Outside, the blue crescent of Hilo Bay was almost entirely obscured by the morning downpour. It had been raining since he'd left Kamuela and crossed the mystical line that separated the leeward side of the island from the windward side. Two blocks to the west, a desert. Two blocks to the east, a rain forest.

  The door behind the counter opened and the clerk Harry had been dealing with for the past two weeks appeared with a shipping manifest in his hand. He was native Hawaiian, tall and broad-shouldered. Close to Harry's age, but still in possession of a nearly impossible shock of black hair.

  “Nothing for Comfort,” he said, in the maddeningly unhurried manner that Harry had come to understand was the hallmark of any island transaction, and that Harry found all the more irksome because he knew it was in fact a far superior method of encountering the world than his own.

  The man handed Harry the manifest in order to prove his point. “See, no Comfort.”

  Harry scanned the list of names. The clerk was right; the Celestron had most definitely not come in on that morning's barge.

  “I'll be back midweek,” Harry said ridiculously, as if this piece of information somehow changed things.

  The clerk shrugged. “Sure, man. Whatever.”

  Harry thought for a moment. “Is there a pay phone close by?”

  “Just there.” The man raised his arm and pointed out the glass doors of the freight office to an alcove on the other side of the rain-washed dock.

  Two weeks, Harry thought, as he stepped out of the air-conditioned office and pulled his jacket up over his head. Two weeks since the Celestron should have arrived. Six times he'd made the drive to Hilo, and always the same answer. Huddling under his jacket, Harry dashed for the alcove the clerk had indicated.

  The last man on earth without a cell phone, Char had jibed, and Harry had wanted to tell her what he knew—how many ways they could be used against a person, how easy it was to track someone with a cell phone.

  He fished a handful of coins from his pocket, lifted the pay phone's grease-smeared receiver, and slid a quarter into the slot, half surprised to hear the dial tone in his ear. “Haoli girls blow,” someone had scrawled on the wall. And in reply, “So does your sister.” Harry fumbled the remaining coins into the slot and punched in the number he knew by heart.

  Four rings. Five. Midafternoon at the old house. The TV on full blast and Irene's corgi napping on the couch. Either she hadn't heard the phone or she was pretending that she hadn't.

  And then, suddenly, her voice out of the ether. “Hello?”

  “It's Harry.”

  Nothing.

  He could see it all so clearly, the yellow kitchen wallpaper and the garden through the window, the thick screen of vege tation at the back of the yard.

  “I've been waiting for the Celestron.”

  “Yes, well, we're all waiting for something.”

  She hadn't shipped it, Harry thought. The one thing he wanted and she hadn't done it.

  “What do you want?” he asked. Three minutes tops, and he had no more change in his pocket.

  “I want our life, Harry. All of it. The same thing I've always wanted. You, without a goddamned destination. I deserve it, you know.”

  “Yes,” Harry agreed, thinking, Anything—anything but this. “You do.”

  “I'm selling the house,” she said after a moment. “There are some papers we need to take care of.”

  “I'll call Saul,” he told her.

  She sighed. “It's a signature, Harry. Do we really need the lawyers? I can overnight the papers this afternoon.”

  Harry hesitated.

  “I'm not coming to find you, if that's what you think. I'll throw the goddamn address away when I'm done, if it'll make you feel better.”

  No, he thought, she deserves so much more than this. But he couldn't bring himself to speak.

  The line hummed between them, the silence of her acquiescence as relentless as the thrum of the rain on the bay.

  “Do you have a pen?” he asked at last, before rattling off the address of the Kona Pack and Mail, where he kept a box.

  “And a phone number,” she said. “You know FedEx won't deliver without a phone number.”

  “Is that it?” he asked, after giving her his number at the Tamarack Pines.

  “I almost forgot. There was a call for you the other night. A boy, I think.”

  Harry lifted his head. “A boy?”

  “Yes. Poor English. An Arabic speaker, I think. I thought it was a wrong number at first.”

  “Must have been,” he told her.

  “No.” She laughed then, the laugh Harry had remembered and forgotten more times than he could count, and Harry felt his regret like the ache of an old wound. “He asked me if I was Kepler.”

  Regret and something else now, the ligature of panic tightening over his throat.

  “Harry?”

  Then a stranger's voice broke in, the operator asking for money he didn't have.

  “I've got to go,” he told Irene. “I'm sorry. I'm out of change.”

  The line was quiet, and for a moment Harry thought they'd been disconnected, then he heard Irene's voice again.

  “It's okay, Harry. Really. It's okay.”

  ALGECIRAS WAS EXACTLY as Jamal remembered it. Not so much a city as an ugly sprawl of gray buildings fringing an even uglier port. A place, it seemed to Jamal, under constant construction. Everyone and every thing on their way to somewhere else. In the distance, the great monolith of Gibraltar loomed like a boxer's fist. Above it all lingered a brown scrim of industrial haze, the collective fumes of the countless lorries and ships that passed through the town each day. And fear. The guardia civil on every corner. The breath of the Ceuta and Melilla transit camps hot on his neck. Failure in the form of concrete and barbed wire. Two thousand people in a space built for a fourth that many. Everything Jamal had run from five years ago, and now he was going back.

  Abdullah's shop on the Calle San Bernardo was unchanged as well, the old storefront peering out from under its warped awning, fading signs in the window advertising imaginary services in some dozen languages. Change. Cambio. Wechsel. The obvious poverty of the place a deterrent to all but the most naïve travelers. And the boys on the street outside, not just as Jamal remembered them but as he had once been. Abdullah's sweepers, trolling for new arrivals; others who had been lucky enough to survive the trip across and who now possessed a willingness driven by fear and hunger. The real business of the shop.

  Ducking the venomous glances of the older boys, Jamal crossed the Calle San Bernardo and made his way up the shop's crumbling front steps. It was a place where nothing good had happened, to which Jamal had never once wished to return, and he had to remind himself once again of why he'd come—of the horror of his first crossing, of how, too poor to bargain for a space on a boat, he'd nearly suffocated in an airless shipping container. It was an experience he did not want to repeat.

  Jamal forced himself across the threshold and into the wanly lit interior of the shop. The same posters he recognized from five years earlier still hung on the walls. Advertisements scavenged from the back dumpster of a travel agency in an unsuccessful attempt to legitimize the place. Panoramas of Fès and Ouarzazate, the Roman ruins at Volubilis. The colors faded now from desert golds and reds to ghostly blues. A world at permanent twilight.

  In the rear of the shop, above a long counter emblazoned with airline insignia, an ancient television blared the din of a football match. And behind the counter, his bulk perched on a low stool, facing the screen, sat Abdullah. The turtle, Jamal and the other boys had called him, the crude nickname a reference to more than just his wide body and pinched head.

  Jamal took a tentative step forward, a
nd Abdullah glanced over his shoulder. “Get out,” he said gruffly, assessing Jamal with a hasty but practiced glance. The merchandise too old or too worn for his purposes. And then, when Jamal didn't move, “What do you think this is? An employment agency?”

  Jamal ducked his head slightly, acutely aware of just how much rested on this one gesture of acquiescence, on the perfection of it. A pantomime of fear and desire at the same time. My child, he could hear Abdullah say, my favorite one. Breath and lips hot on his neck. I'm not hurting you, am I?

  For a moment Abdullah's face registered nothing and Jamal was convinced that the man had forgotten him, then the turtle shifted on his stool and leaned forward.

  “Jamal?” he wheezed. His eyes were moist with greed.

  The prisoners came in blind and confused, shackled, shuffling forward. Naked as newborns, some wailing, others soiling themselves. Not men but cattle to the slaughter.

  Kat knew from experience that these first moments of confusion were her single best ally. Once the prisoners made it through the shock of in-processing, through the cavity searches and the haircuts and the delousings, and realized there was nothing worse that could be done to them, they became as uncooperative as two-year-olds. Of those who didn't break in the first twenty-four hours, most never would. The ones who did talk invariably had the least to give.

  Kat and the others had been trained on the Cold War model of full-scale conflict between two superpowers. On the premise that most, if not all, of the prisoners they encountered would be happy to tell their captors whatever they knew for a pack of Marlboros and a can of Coke. Nothing had prepared them for the war they were now being asked to fight. None of them could even have imagined it.

  At Kandahar, intake and interrogations went strictly by the book, using the standard timeworn approaches Kat and her colleagues had had drilled into them. Classics with names like Fear Up or Love of Comrades, which invariably worked like a charm in mock-up interviews, and which may in fact have been effective on disgruntled Soviet soldiers but were worse than useless in Afghanistan. The few deviations the interrogators eventually made from the manual, like the decision to keep prisoners awake while they themselves pulled all-nighters typing up situation reports, were slowly and painfully agreed upon.