The Prince of Bagram Prison

by Alex Carr

  IT IS A TERRIBLE THING to wish for the death of another human being, especially one you've come to know in a meaningful way, whose voice you have heard through the walls each morning, whose prayers have marked your day, or whose singing has sheltered you from the cruel cradle of night. That her only joys had come at the expense of fellow prisoners was perhaps the worst of the many humiliations Manar had suffered during her years of incarceration.

  “When one of us dies, praise Allah, they let the others out,” the woman in the next cell had told Manar not long after her arrival in the desert. Her speech was thin and excited, with an anxious timbre. “The woman on the far end has been dying for some time now. She doesn't know it, but I can hear it in her voice. We must pray that she goes soon.”

  The voice of insanity, Manar had thought then, turned on each other like the animals they wish us to be. And she had vowed, naïvely, not to give her jailers the pleasure of watching her succumb.

  But two weeks later, when the woman finally died, and the guards hauled them all out into the sunlit courtyard for the burial, and Manar was finally able to see the faces of the women with whom she shared the darkness, it was as if she had, for the briefest of moments, been born again. As if the dead woman, who had gone horribly at the end, screaming at the rats that could not wait for her to die, had given them all this gift. As if to squander it would be the worst of sins. And so Manar, like the others, had turned her face to the limpid swatch of Saharan sky.

  But there was, Manar would learn, a price to be paid for even this most meager of freedoms. When the guards returned her to her cell and the door was closed and locked, she saw the place as she'd seen it when she first arrived, felt the same breathless panic, the same claustrophobic despair. And in that moment she had prayed to be the next one taken.

  “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most beneficent,” Manar began as she had that day, as she had so many times after, the words now whispered not into the darkness of her cell but of her bedroom. In the name of Allah, in whom I no longer believe, from whom nothing has been given… “please allow me to die.”

  Now that the door had been opened, now that she had been allotted her portion of hope, now that the boy, her child, had taken shape in her soul, the pain of his loss was as it had been that first moment, when the nurse had taken him from her arms. This time Manar knew she could not go on.

  IT WAS NEARLY SEVEN when Harry pulled off Route 50 and into the parking lot of the Patriot Shopping Center in Falls Church. Dinner hour, and the Vietnamese noodle shop on the strip mall's far end was doing a brisk business. Harry didn't stop in the lot but pulled around to the back of the long building, where he was relieved to see the discreet PATRIOT SECURITY SYSTEMS sign still firmly attached to the familiar gray steel door. He parked the rental car and got out, then made his way to the door and pressed the grimy security buzzer.

  A minute passed, and another. The back door of the noodle shop opened and a young man appeared with a heavy black garbage bag. He gave Harry a disinterested look—seen it all before—then tossed the bag into the restaurant's dumpster and disappeared back inside. Most likely he had seen it all, Harry thought. Russians, Chinese, Arabs, Americans, just to name a few. There wasn't an intelligence man inside the beltway who hadn't visited the Patriot at least once in his life.

  Harry rang the bell and waited again. Half an hour he'd stood here once, waiting for Heinrich to finish whatever it was he was doing inside. The German was not, above all, a man who liked to be rushed. Finally, the door swung open and Heinrich's familiar face, worn even further since Harry had last seen it, peered out from the dim interior.

  “Mr. Brown,” the German said, his papery mouth breaking into a satisfied smile. “I thought we were done with you.” And then, with the flourish of a subject summoning a king to enter his home, he stepped aside. “Come in. Please come in.”

  Nodding his gratitude, Harry did as he was told.

  The shop itself was a marvel of engineering, a human-scale ant farm of sorts, the tunnels and rooms created entirely from electronic scrap and junk. To the untrained eye it all appeared hopelessly chaotic, a garbage pile of mammoth proportions. And yet Heinrich, in his brilliant madness, knew with exact precision where every screw, every microchip, was located.

  “This way.” The German beckoned, leading Harry into what appeared to be a parlor—a small room carved out of the rubble, furnished with a frayed Persian rug and three sagging armchairs, one of which was occupied by an unmoving gray cat that Harry could only hope was alive.

  “To what do I owe this pleasure?” the old man asked when they were both seated.

  “Termites, I'm afraid,” Harry said.

  Heinrich shook his head sympathetically. “Nasty buggers. Hard to get rid of, aren't they?”

  “That's why I'm here.”

  “Yes.” Heinrich smiled, satisfied. This was all he needed, all he'd ever needed. Not money, though he happily took their money. But what he really craved was their gratitude, the acknowledgment that he was the best at what he did. And he was.

  “I need something today,” Harry said.

  The German made a clucking sound with his tongue, as a schoolmarm chiding her charges might do. “Always in a hurry.”

  “It's the business,” Harry offered, apologetic.

  “Yes,” Heinrich repeated. “It is the business.” Then he got up shakily from his chair and selected a small box from among the shelves and shelves of similar boxes that lined one wall. “For you, my friend.”

  By the time Harry reached Dong Ba Thin, halfway down the coast, the extent to which he had deluded himself was clear. The road was clogged with southbound traffic, people on foot and others riding in whatever conveyances they could find: oxcarts and trishaws, bicycles lashed together and topped with plywood to form makeshift wagons. It had taken Harry nearly two hours to drive the barely fifty kilometers from Nha Trang, and the collective momentum of the crowd behind him made turning back an impossibility. Once he got to Cam Ranh, he told himself, he would phone Nha Trang and make other arrangements to bring An and her parents south. After all, he had not been the only foreigner in the city. Something would be done, a boat or plane or helicopter sent.

  The mass migration had begun to take its human toll. Here and there along the roadside another bloated corpse, its tongue lolling, its face riddled with flies, lay stinking perversely in the tropical heat, while passersby, their cumulative sense of humanity long extinguished, walked unflinchingly by.

  Unlike Ambassador Martin, the Vietnamese had given up on Saigon, and the majority of the refugees were heading, wisely, not for the southern capital but for the sea. Cam Ranh, with its massive port, had been deluged by a virtual tsunami of humanity. It was close to dark by the time Harry managed to fight his way to the American consulate and the Agency subbase in the city's old colonial quarter.

  The neighborhood itself was hauntingly quiet. Its residents, mostly foreigners and wealthy Vietnamese, had fled sometime earlier, leaving behind their gated villas and gleaming Mercedes, their perfectly manicured French gardens. In a few of the homes, the inevitable process of looting had begun. As Harry pulled his car into the driveway of the consulate, he saw two young Vietnamese men emerge from the property next door carrying cases of French Bordeaux and Russian caviar. It was, Harry couldn't help thinking, a remarkably nearsighted choice given the current state of affairs.

  The consulate itself was deserted, the only evidence of foul play a ravaged liquor cabinet and a dozen hand-smeared crystal tumblers in the downstairs parlor, an ashtray full of spent cigars. Someone's solution to being forced to leave it all behind. Stewed to the gills on brandy and Pimm's. No wonder they were all late getting out of the city.

  Harry reached for the phone on the bar and, surprised to find it still in working order, dialed Susan's number in Saigon.

  Five rings. Six. Out on the street, there was gunfire, the clatter of breaking glass. And in Harry's ear, suddenly and incongruously, the sou
nd of laughter.

  “Carol!” Susan shouted, talking above a din, the unmistakable sounds of a party under way. Carol was one of the other embassy girls. “I told you to get over here.”

  “No, Susan,” Harry corrected her. “It's me.”

  “Harry? I tried you earlier this afternoon. Sorry about this morning. It was childish of me, really. Dick's fine. Got held up helping clean house in Cam Ranh, but of course you knew that.” A pause. “You didn't actually go down there, did you?”

  What to say? “No,” he told her at last. “Of course not. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

  “It is,” Susan said, somewhat awkwardly.

  He hung up and called Nha Trang then, dialed twice and twice let the phone ring and ring. Ten times, eleven, fifteen, twenty. Waiting for An to pick up.

  When she failed to answer the second call, Harry emptied the dregs from one of the tumblers and, suddenly overcome by the magnitude of his defeat, poured himself the last three fingers of Johnnie Walker Black.

  IRENE HAD CHOSEN THE HOUSE, just as she had chosen everything in it, the faux-antebellum furnishings and the flowered wallpaper. Magnolias bigger then a man's fist in their bedroom, creamy bludgeons of prettiness, and in the bathrooms dainty violets and patio roses. The place was hers entirely, as if by this one great possession she could make up for everything else she would never have, for Harry's long absences and the indiscretions, both real and imagined, that accompanied them.

  They had bought the house when they first married, back when an Agency salary could afford such a place, and even then they were lucky to find it. The house itself was unremarkable, a split-level suburban ranch home designed with a family in mind. But the property, nestled just off the beltway in an odd little neighborhood carved out from between two nature preserves, bounded in the back by a thick stand of deciduous woods and a small creek, was a gem.

  It was through these woods that Harry picked his way in the failing twilight, tripping over rocks and deadfall, slapping away mosquitoes, grateful, as he had not always been, for the tangle of locusts and dogwoods at the edge of the yard. Certain that Morrow would have someone watching the house, Harry had left his rental car at the end of a seldom-used dirt service road and hiked back through the preserve. But as he drew closer he was surprised to see no sign of surveillance.

  Skirting the edge of the property until he was hidden entirely from the street, Harry stepped from the shelter of the woods and crossed the back yard. The landscaping crew had recently been through and the lawn was freshly mowed, the smell of cut grass heavy in the air. The house itself was entirely dark, the black windows reflecting the trees and the evening sky. Moving toward the cluster of potted geraniums on the back patio, Harry rolled the largest planter aside to find the key—his key—hidden underneath.

  Thirty-some years in the house, and this was how he had always come and gone. For safety's sake, he'd reasoned. Better, if things went south, not to have a key on him. But even during his Langley postings he had not carried a key, had preferred to slip in like the intruder he'd always felt himself to be. Now, as he'd done so many times before, he opened the back door and let himself inside.

  To know a place, Harry marveled, as he stood just inside the doorway amid the kitchen's familiar surroundings, many of them his own gifts of contrition—the stoneware roosters he'd brought back from his Portuguese posting, the brass coffee mill, beautifully embellished, that he'd found in a market in Istanbul—to be entirely intimate with a place and yet to feel like a perpetual outsider: this was perhaps his one great accomplishment.

  There was a part of him that wanted to go forward into the house. He was hungry, had eaten nothing but airplane food for nearly twenty-four hours. And there was the Celestron in his study; he had a desperate urge to see it. But he was an intruder, after all, and so he stayed where he was, listening to the ticking of the old mantel clock in the living room, waiting for the sound of Irene's own key in the front lock.

  He did not have to wait long. Barely half an hour had passed before he heard her car in the driveway and the single door closing, the scrabbling of paws on the front door. The dog, who had always hated Harry, smelled him immediately and rushed in, barking.

  “Glory!” Irene called from the front of the house. Glory, such a southern name, with that ragged gentility toward which Irene had always aspired. “Quiet, Glory!”

  Then the light was switched abruptly on and she was there in the doorway, her face dispassionate as she took Harry in.

  “The key,” he said, taking a small step forward, setting it on the counter. “You forgot the key.”

  The little dog moved back, snarling, but Irene held her ground. She had a plastic grocery bag in her right hand. Harry could see the shape of a frozen dinner inside, a large bottle of wine.

  He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out an envelope. “I brought the papers,” he said, setting them down beside the key.

  Irene said nothing.

  “You look good,” Harry commented, and she did. But then she had always been careful to keep herself up. She was dressed in vaguely athletic wear—sleek pants and an expensive-looking Lycra top—as if she had just come from the gym, albeit the kind of gym where people never sweat. He realized then the extent of the crime he'd committed by marrying her.

  “What do you want?” she asked wearily. The dog had given up its furor for the time being and was sitting at her feet.

  “I need your help,” he said. No sense in beating around the bush.

  Laughing bitterly, Irene came forward and set the grocery bag down, took out the bottle of wine. “You haven't signed them, have you?” She glanced at the papers as she reached into one of the cabinets for a glass.

  Harry shook his head. “They're signed. See for yourself.”

  She eyed the envelope once again but didn't touch it. She opened the bottle instead.

  “It's not about me this time,” Harry told her.

  “No?” she commented, pouring herself a hefty drink. “It never is.”

  “It's the boy. The one who called. He's in trouble, Irene.”

  She closed her eyes and took a long, slow drink of the wine, then set the glass down. “Dick came to see me himself.” Her loathing of Morrow was clear in the way she spoke his name. She had a right to hate him, had sacrificed more than her share for the cause. And in the end it was Morrow's cause. “He wanted to put someone on the house, but I told him to go fuck himself.”

  That explained the lack of surveillance. “I always thought you missed your calling.” Harry smiled slightly. “You would have made a hell of a case officer. Better than I am.”

  “Maybe if I'd been born twenty years later,” Irene said without irony.

  “Did he mention anything about a phone tap?” Harry asked. He had no doubt Irene's line was bugged. That's why he'd gone to see the German. But he was wagering that the old rules still counted for something, that if Morrow was listening he was doing so off the record and on the sly. If there was a “down line” tap, NSA for instance, there was nothing Harry or anyone could do about it.

  Irene shook her head. “No. If the boy calls again I'm to find out where he is and let Dick know. I'm to tell him you're coming and to stay put.”

  Harry reached into his jacket once again and pulled out Heinrich's box. “You'll need to put it on the line yourself,” he told her. “Not my place. You've seen me do it before. It's quite simple, really.”

  Irene took the box and set it on the counter with the envelope and the keys. All Harry could hope for now was that her hatred of Morrow would outweigh her disappointment in him.

  “You can reach me here,” he said, handing her a business card from his motel with his room number scrawled on the back.

  Irene studied it for a moment, then picked up her wineglass and took another, longer drink. “I want to be clear,” she said finally. “If I do this, it won't be for you.”

  “No,” Harry agreed. “I never expect
ed it would be.”

  “NOT GOOD PLACE FOR AMERICAN LADY,” the taxi driver repeated, in English this time, clearly convinced that Kat had not understood his earlier warnings.

  Kat fished ten euros from her pocket and offered it to the man. “There's another twenty if you wait,” she told him, opening the passenger door and stepping out. But once she was outside the cab, looking up at Ain Chock's massive iron gate and the ruined hulk of the building beyond, the realization of her folly hit her, along with the full force of her fear.

  She should not have come. If she left now, she could return to her room at the hotel and be done with it. Tomorrow she could put Kurtz off, could refuse, in her own way, to help him, as she had that afternoon, when she'd kept her hunch about the young man in the leather jacket to herself. Eventually, Kurtz might come to believe that Jamal had died crossing the strait, and that would be the end of the whole affair.

  But when she turned back to tell the driver that she had changed her mind, it was too late; the decision had been made for her. The taxi was already pulling away from the curb, its tires screeching as it leaped forward and disappeared around the first corner.

  Kat watched the cab go. Leaving now, she knew, trying to negotiate the city on foot, would be tantamount to suicide. Her best hope, her only hope, lay inside the walls of Ain Chock. Kat reached up and adjusted her scarf, tucking her hair inside the blue fabric, tightening the knot under her chin, then started through the gate.

  Here and there down the courtyard's narrow alleys a fire burned, mitigating the darkness. But mainly the occupants of Ain Chock were, like the rest of Casablanca, fast asleep. As Kat made her way down the settlement's main thoroughfare, two boys, neither of them older than eight or nine, each with an addict's bright ring of gold paint around his mouth, approached her from the shadows.