The Prince of Bagram Prison

by Alex Carr

  Momentarily bowing to his cowardice, Morrow padded into the library and poured himself a drink. Bourbon again. He had not eaten all day and the first sip hit him hard. He set the glass aside and made his way into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and contemplated the paltry contents. Some moldy bread. A bag of shriveled grapes. A dozen cans of Susan's vile energy shakes. And, on the door, year-old condiments—pickles and olives and mustards—most of which predated the diagnosis.

  He was trying to decide which of the three drink flavors—strawberry, chocolate, or vanilla—would be the least distasteful when the phone rang.

  Paul, he thought, suddenly panicked. He did not know what to say to his son under the best of circumstances, and the task of breaking the news of Susan's death seemed insurmountable. But it would have to be done.

  Closing the refrigerator door, Morrow reached for the phone, lifted the receiver to his ear.

  “Dick?” Not Paul but Janson on the line. Morrow had called the office earlier that morning to tell his secretary what had happened and that he wouldn't be coming in. “I'm sorry to bother you,” Janson said, “but there's some news about Harry Comfort. I thought you'd want to know.”

  “Good or bad?” Morrow asked.

  “To tell you the truth, I'm not sure. Our tail called in earlier today saying they'd lost him. Evidently he walked into some tourist hotel in Kailua night before last and never came out.”

  “I'd call that bad news.”

  “I would too,” Janson replied. “Except I think we've found him. TSA's got a Harry Lyttle purchasing a last-minute ticket on the red-eye out of Kailua that night. Traveling on a Canadian passport.”

  “Heading where?” Morrow asked.

  “That's the interesting part,” Janson said, pausing for effect. “He flew into Dulles yesterday afternoon.”

  “He's here?”

  “Was here. Our same Mr. Lyttle caught another flight this morning. Paris and on to Casablanca.” Another dramatic pause. “The boy must have contacted him.”

  “I thought we were on top of that.”

  “We are,” Janson assured Morrow. “Irene's been quiet since yesterday. Nothing coming in or going out.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a peep.”

  Morrow put his thumb and forefinger to his eyes, squeezed the bridge of his nose. God, he was tired. Wrecked, really. Just like the other one, he heard Marina say. Too afraid to come inside. Comfort, he thought. After all these years, Harry hadn't been able to stay away.

  “He's been to see her,” Morrow said grimly. He meant Irene. He meant Susan.

  “But we would have heard,” Janson insisted.

  “Not if he put something on the line.”

  Silence.

  “What time does he get into Casablanca?” Morrow asked.

  “About thirty minutes ago.”

  Morrow didn't say anything.

  “What should we do?”

  “Start shaking the tree,” Morrow told him. “He's going to need help.”

  “And Irene?”

  “I'll take care of her.”

  HARRY HAD BEEN TO CASABLANCA many times before. In the seventies and early eighties, when Africa Division was his home, he'd had several important contacts in Morocco and had been a regular visitor to the city. He hadn't liked it then, and he didn't like it now.

  There was a squalid arrogance to the place that Harry found intolerable. Everything that made Morocco's other cities charming had been replaced in Casablanca by the ugliest kind of Western industriousness: wide boulevards and bland gray façades, women in dark-blue business suits and black leather pumps. And, on the outskirts of the city, the detritus of commerce: ungodly miles of slums.

  Even the medina was a contrivance, Harry thought, as he wound his way through the narrow lanes of the old quarter. A relic left untouched by the city's various destroyers. A curiosity piece for tourists to admire. Though at this time of night only the most foolhardy or desperate of visitors would have found themselves here. Harry couldn't help wondering which category he fit into.

  It was late and frighteningly dark, the sky a narrow slate overhead, matte black and starless, the passageways groaning with the sounds of sex and death, like some medieval vision of the netherworld come to life. A figure stepped out of a doorway and hissed in Harry's ear, offering something: drugs, a woman, one of any number of gateways to damnation, fruits of the tree, there for the picking.

  “Fuck off!” Harry snarled through clenched teeth. No translation needed. He was still hungover from the night before, jet-lagged beyond belief. Halfway around the world from his starting point at the Tamarack Pines and in no mood to be hustled.

  The man slunk back into the shadows and Harry continued on, counting the streets as he went, consulting the route he'd laid out for himself in his mind using the walking map he'd bought at an airport kiosk. Three streets, then a left. Four and another left. A blind man tapping his way through the world.

  MORROW COULD HEAR THE DOG BARKING as soon as he started up the walk. The corgi had been sitting on the couch, staring out the front picture window, waiting for someone to harass, when Morrow first drove up. Now the creature was indulging the full range of its ire, darting frantically from one end of the sofa to the other, leaping at the glass like a pit fighter about to take on a formidable opponent. Undaunted, Morrow climbed the front steps and rang the doorbell, noting Irene's Volvo in the driveway.

  A chime rang inside the house, three clear tones followed by a fresh outburst from the corgi and the sound of footsteps on the wood floors. A hand drew aside the ivied fabric that covered the door's oval window and Irene's face appeared on the other side of the glass, her expression souring at the sight of Morrow.

  She drew the lock and opened the door, keeping the screen closed between them. “Hello, Dick.” Her voice was carefully leveled, devoid of any warmth. She was slim and tan, in immaculate tennis whites—a sleeveless shirt and a short skirt that showed off her perfectly preserved body.

  “It might be better if we talk inside,” Morrow suggested.

  “Right here's just fine with me.” She turned away from him and to the dog. “Hush, Glory!”

  The corgi fell silent.

  “I know he's been here,” Morrow said.

  “Who's that?” Irene asked with practiced coolness. She was not going to make this easy for him.

  “What did he tell you? That he could help the boy?”

  “I don't know what you're talking about, Dick.”

  Morrow shook his head. “We know he's in Casablanca. We know he's been in touch with the boy.”

  Irene crossed her bare arms over her chest. “If you know where he is, why are you wasting your time here?”

  “He came to the house, you know,” he told her then. “He came to see Susan.”

  Behind the scrim of the screen her green eyes flickered just slightly, and Morrow thought, This won't be easy for either of us. “It doesn't get old, being the consolation prize?” he asked.

  Irene moved to close the door, but Morrow reached inside the screen and stopped her.

  “Get off my porch,” she said evenly.

  “It's foolish of you to protect him like this,” Morrow cautioned.

  Irene glanced down at his hand on her door with measured disdain. She was not a woman who was easily threatened. “Better a fool than a bastard,” she said. Then she shoved the door closed with such sudden and unexpected force that Morrow had no time to counter it.

  “JAMAL!” Kat put her hands on the boy's shoulders and shook him violently. “Wake up, Jamal!” From the other side of the door she could hear low voices, the muffled commotion of more than one body mounting the stairs.

  The boy sat up, his eyes wild in the darkness. “Who is it?”

  Kat shrugged, put her finger to her lips to silence him.

  The footsteps had reached the upper floor now and were shuffling along the corridor. Kat recognized the voice of the hotel's proprietress, a pied-noir half-b
reed, from their brief encounter that morning. The woman had charged Kat three times what the room was worth, and Kat, too tired to argue, had let it go.

  “Ici,” she whispered. Here.

  Silence, then the sound of the woman retreating down the corridor. Then the man's voice, just outside their door. “Jamal?”

  Jamal flung the covers aside and swung his bare feet to the floor. “Mr. Harry!” he called out excitedly, lunging for the door, opening it to reveal a stout and decidedly unimpressive figure.

  Christ, Kat thought, noting the man's rumpled clothes and two-day stubble, call in the cavalry and get a skid-row Santa instead.

  The man's eyes moved from Jamal to Kat and stopped there, mirroring her own reservations. “You must be Kat. Jamal's told me quite a lot about you.”

  Kat nodded.

  “Not quite what you were expecting, am I?” Harry remarked. “Don't worry. You're not the first woman I've disappointed.”

  MANAR CLIMBED ONTO A STEPSTOOL and ran her hand along the upper shelf of her closet, sweeping aside the paltry detritus of her life—boxes of mementos from the years before, old school books and photographs, things her mother had not been able to bring herself to throw away after Manar's arrest—searching with blind fingers for the shoe box she knew was there. Inside was two months' worth of barbiturates that her mother's doctor had prescribed as sleep aids when Manar had first returned home, and which Manar, unbeknownst to her mother, had discreetly refused to take.

  Her decision to keep the pills had not necessarily been a calculated one, in so much as she had not anticipated any specific future in which she would need to take her own life. But her years in the prison had taught her that such desperation was always possible, and that such a tool was not to be discarded.

  In her haste to get to the pills, Manar knocked a box off the shelf, sending a cascade of photographs clattering to the floor. They were from the last few years before her imprisonment, snapshots of Manar with her friends from school, Yusuf and others from the student group. Manar bent down and swept the pictures back into the box, embarrassed by what they represented—the ridiculous meetings in the basement of the mosque, their earnest speeches, imagining that they could somehow speak for those who had nothing, that they could even begin to understand those lives, that despair—appalled that someone might find the photographs after she was gone and imagine them to be somehow connected to her death.

  She thought about throwing them away, then realized that this act could be construed as meaningful as well, and tucked them back up on the shelf instead. Once she was gone, people could think what they liked.

  She found the pills where she'd left them, the shoe box pushed into the rear right corner of the shelf, padded with dust. Her dust, she thought as she took the box down and carried it to her bed, trying to steady her shaking hands. Her skin, the body's sloughings, finer than sand.

  There was a time when Manar had been afraid of death, but this was no longer the case. Having lived in such close proximity to it for such a long time, having already been to the point of surrender, she understood that to be afraid was entirely pointless, that when the end did come there was no way not to be ready for it.

  She did not believe in the punishments of hell or the rewards of paradise. On the contrary, it was her utter lack of faith that allowed her to proceed as she did. If she had believed, such an act would have been unthinkable, the most final of treasons, the sin against which all others would be measured, the transgression that would have severed her, finally and completely, from her God. But she did not believe.

  Still, she had to force herself to open the box, to set each bottle on her dresser, to shake the pills out, one by one, until she was certain there were enough.

  “Fajr,” Harry remarked, turning his head toward the open window and the sound of the muezzin's song, the day's first call to prayer. “I didn't realize it was so late.”

  “So early, you mean,” Kat corrected him.

  He nodded. “Yes, that too.” His face, shadowed with several days of gray stubble, looked impossibly old, worn beyond the point of repair.

  A man naked in his grief, Kat had thought when she first saw him in the doorway. And it was that which made her trust him completely.

  Kat had spent the bulk of the night filling Harry in on the details of their predicament, including her growing suspicions about the prisoner's death at Bagram, Bagheri's subsequent escape, Kurtz's role in the ambush at al-Amir, and Jamal's description of the MEK camp.

  “I assure you,” Harry said, after listening to Kat's theories, “there are no MEK camps in Afghanistan. You said yourself that Jamal is good at telling people what they want to hear. Maybe the story is simpler than what you are allowing yourself to believe.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  Harry shrugged. “Suppose your British friends were overzealous in their questioning and killed the prisoner by mistake. Suppose they did help Bagheri escape, to keep him from incriminating them.”

  “But why not just kill Bagheri, then? That would have been a hell of a lot easier and safer than helping him escape.”

  “For all we know, they did kill him.”

  But Kat wasn't buying Harry's theory. “Everything Bagheri told him adds up to the camp being MEK. I mean, that stuff about the women. There's no other explanation. And what about Morrow and Kurtz? What about the court-martial? And Colin and Stuart? Don't tell me their deaths were coincidence.”

  “It's one thing to say you're going to lie, another to actually do it. Suppose one or both had a sudden attack of conscience and threatened to come clean about the whole incident. Or suppose they got wind of Bagheri's reappearance and got spooked into telling the truth. A lot of people, including Morrow, would have wanted to keep that from happening. A prisoner tortured to death can make people change their minds about war in a hurry.”

  “I don't know,” Kat said, trying unsuccessfully to order the facts in her mind. “Something's still not adding up.”

  Harry's eyes moved to Jamal once again. “Do yourself a favor,” he told Kat, “let it go. You've got other things to worry about now, like what to do with yourself, and with Jamal. Do you have a passport?”

  Kat shook her head. In her haste to leave the hotel, she'd left her passport in Kurtz's room, along with her bag.

  “It's just as well. You would have needed a new one in any case. You understand that you may have to disappear for a while?”

  Kat nodded, but the truth was that she hadn't given much thought to what would happen next. She certainly hadn't considered the possibility that she might not be going home. She felt as if she'd been kicked in the throat. “What about Jamal?”

  Harry was silent for a moment. Aware, Kat thought, as she was, of how little their past good intentions had amounted to, how unlikely it was that this time around would be any different. “I've been thinking. You know, he might still have family somewhere,” Harry said at last. “If his mother really was a political prisoner, she would have just disappeared and her family might not have even known the child existed.”

  “Jamal told you that?” Kat asked. “About his mother, I mean.”

  “Not in so many words. I'm not sure he even knows. He said something about his mother being taken to the desert by the king. Almost as if it was a privilege. That's the way they did it in those days. Hassan II had special prisons built in the desert for dissenters.” Harry closed his eyes, as if trying not to remember something. “Horrible places.”

  Kat winced, not at Harry's story but at her own stupidity.

  “Did he tell you the same thing?”

  “Yes,” Kat confessed. “I didn't understand. I thought he'd made the story up, to make it all bearable.”

  “No? Well, in any case, as I said, there could very well be family out there who would take him in.” He looked toward the window, through which a thin ribbon of dawn was now visible. “I know people here who can help us. With a passport. With the boy.”

  Y
OU'VE TOLD SO MANY LIES, Harry could remember Irene saying to him once, that you no longer know what the truth is.

  She'd been right, of course, dead on. Though Harry, who at the time hadn't thought much of the truth, couldn't see what all the fuss was about. People lied, and in return it was neces sary to lie yourself; there was no great mystery to the fact.

  But this lie had been different.

  Kat wasn't the first person to suggest that the MEK had expanded its operations to include southern Afghanistan. In the years since September 11, and the subsequent fall of the Tal-iban, rumors of U.S.-MEK cooperation in the region were frequently discussed within the intelligence community. It was no secret that there were voices at the Pentagon, Morrow's chief among them, clamoring for regime change in Iran. A silent partnership with the MEK would have provided the perfect tool with which to explore destabilization efforts in the region.

  Harry knew for a fact that factions in the Agency had been proposing a similar program off and on for decades, but had been shot down by concerns over the MEK's official status as a terrorist organization. Without the threat of oversight, Morrow and the others in Special Plans could have pulled such a program off. In fact, Harry would have been surprised if they hadn't at least tried. Certainly, if the MEK were in Afghanistan, they were there with the blessing of someone in the Defense Department.

  But this was not what he had told Kat. I assure you, there are no MEK camps in Afghanistan. Not just a lie but a story to back it up. Better for her, he'd reasoned at the time, knowing that her ignorance might very well save her life, and the boy's, if he himself could not. Easier to be honest about what one doesn't know than to lie about what one does.

  Could Bagheri have been working for Morrow? Harry wondered, as he and Kat made their way down the Rue Chakib Arsalane to the medina's main gate. It was early still, but the lanes were already crowded, the air rich with breakfast smells: hot grease and honey, beghrirs on the grill. If Morrow had struck some kind of deal with the MEK, he would not have wanted to publicize the fact. Not even to those within the dissident group. If Harry's supposition was right, it was probable that Bagheri's traveling companion hadn't known of his involvement with the Americans.