The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  Wells could have gone straight to the house of Zumari’s family, of course. His dossier had the address. But Zumari was missing. And his mother and father wouldn’t exactly be eager to help a CIA agent find him.

  The call to prayer blared. Wells shucked his sandals by the front door and joined the stream of men stepping inside. Islamic law barred artists from painting images of Allah, Muhammad, or even ordinary men and women. Such portraits were considered distracting and disrespectful to God’s majesty. So the mosque had almost no decoration, though its mihrab — the nook that faced toward Mecca — was laid in an ornate pattern of black-and-white tile. With high ceilings and fans spinning overhead, the mosque was notably cooler than the streets. Unseen pigeons cooed from windows high on its back wall.

  The mosque’s central hall was nearly one hundred feet square, much bigger than it seemed from outside. Hundreds of men had already arranged themselves in front of the minbar, the wooden pulpit where the imam gave his weekly sermon. Muslims prayed five times a day, every day. But the Friday midday prayer was the week’s most important service, the time when the community gathered. Most men sat near the pulpit, but some stayed back, the cool kids in class, leaning against the walls and chatting with friends as they waited for the service to begin.

  Men streamed in, filling the hall. Wells estimated at least a thousand had already arrived. And this was just one mid-sized mosque. Some, like the Mosque of Ibn Tulun south of here, were open squares as big as a city block, capable of holding tens of thousands of men.

  The room was notably warmer now, and the odor of a thousand sweating bodies filled the air. Men were supposed to bathe before the midday prayer, but many came straight from work. The men were mostly Arab, though a handful were black, probably Nubian Egyptians or Sudanese from the Upper Nile. Many had faint bruises on their foreheads, a sign of piety. The bruising came from touching their foreheads to the ground as they prayed.

  Suddenly the imam mounted the wooden pulpit and began the Surah Fatiha, the first verse of the Quran: “Bismallahi rahmani rahmi al-hamdulillah. ” In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful; All praises to Allah.

  The imam spoke beautifully, Wells thought. Even without amplification, his voice filled the mosque. He finished the surah and began his sermon. “Brothers. Allah tells us that we are not to call ourselves pure. Only he knows who is truly righteous. ” Good deeds would not please God if they were done for selfish reasons, he explained. “Actions are judged by motives.”

  As he listened, Wells remembered what he loved most about Islam, the strength and simplicity of its doctrines. The religion had five basic tenets: accept God and Muhammad as His prophet; pray five times a day; give to charity; fast during the month of Ramadan; and travel to Mecca for the sacred pilgrimage of the hajj. Anyone who followed those rules, or sincerely tried to, was a good Muslim.

  The men paid rapt attention to the sermon. No watches were checked, no cell phones pulled out. Wells didn’t know how long the imam spoke; his words flowed together as smoothly as the Nile. When he finished, the muezzin gave the iqama, a second call to prayer performed only at the Friday midday service.

  The men in the mosque clustered together shoulder to shoulder for the rakaat, the core Muslim prayer. Side by side they dropped to their knees and touched their foreheads and hands and toes to the floor, a thousand men affirming God as Muslims had for a thousand years.

  * * *

  AFTER THE SERVICE, the imam stood beside the pulpit, clasping hands with men who’d come forward for advice or a benediction. Finally, the last of the worshippers left and the imam was alone. Wells intercepted him.

  “Salaam alekeim.”

  “Alekeim salaam.”

  “Your sermon today was filled with wisdom.”

  “Thank you.” The imam gave Wells a puzzled smile. “I haven’t seen you before.”

  “I’m from Kuwait.”

  “You came this far to hear me preach?”

  “I hoped you might help me find someone.”

  The imam glanced at the front of the mosque, as if he wanted to ask Wells to leave. But he said only, “Please, come with me.”

  He led Wells through a nook in the wall behind the pulpit and down a concrete corridor. His office was simple, square, and furnished only with a wooden desk and a bookshelf filled with Quranic commentaries. A barred window looked into a narrow alley. A heavy man with the full, bushy beard of a believer sat beside the desk, sipping tea. He hugged the imam, then looked suspiciously at Wells.

  “Salaam alekeim,” Wells said.

  The man let the greeting hang like an unwanted hand extended for a shake. Finally, he murmured, “Alekeim salaam.”

  The imam nodded for Wells to sit. “Leave us, Hani,” the imam said. “And close the door.”

  The man hesitated, then walked out. The imam regarded Wells across the desk.

  “Your name?”

  “Nadeem Taleeb.”

  “From Kuwait?”

  “Kuwait City, yes.”

  “Where are you staying in Cairo?”

  “The Lotus Hotel.” Wells paused. “I understand why you wonder about me. When I arrived, I saw a man watching this place. He wore no uniform. But I’m certain he was mukhabarat.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know. He wore a black shirt and pants. He was drinking tea at the shop on the corner. The one that sells ice cream. He pretended to read, but he was watching your front entrance. Have your men check.”

  “Hani—” the imam said. The door opened, and the fat man scuttled in. The imam whispered to him.

  “Aiwa,” Hani said. Yes. He glared at Wells before he left.

  “So, Kuwaiti,” the imam said. “Who are you looking for? ”

  “Ihab Zumari.” Alaa’s father. “A friend told me he worships here.”

  “You should leave,” the imam said. “Finish your tea and leave. I don’t know what game this is, but I know it’s dangerous. For both of us. I’m a peaceful man.”

  Wells pulled a pen and pad from his robe and scribbled on it in English and Arab.

  “You use computers, sheikh? The Internet?”

  The imam looked almost offended. “Of course.”

  “My apologies. Please. Look at this site. You’ll understand. I’ll come back tomorrow for another cup of tea. Inshallah”—God willing—“you’ll see me. If not, I won’t bother you again.”

  Wells slid the paper across the desk, stood, and walked out, leaving the imam looking at a single note. A Web address: PrisonersofAmerica.com.

  * * *

  THE DIRECTORATE OF SCIENCE and Technology had done a good job, Wells had to admit. Two videos were up. They looked professional but not too professional, the interviewees giving long speeches about how they’d suffered as captives of the United States. One was supposedly an Algerian captured in Iraq in 2006 and released two years later, the second a Pakistani caught in Afghanistan in 2005 and let go in 2009. Both men wore bandannas to hide their mouths and had exceptionally common names: Mohammed Hassan and Ahmed Mustafa. They gave detailed descriptions of the deprivations they suffered. They spoke angrily but not so passionately that they seemed unhinged.

  They were fakes, CIA employees, analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence. They’d agreed enthusiastically to the assignment, knowing that the interviews might be as close as they would ever get to the front lines.

  The technical details were right, too. A commercial Russian Internet service provider hosted the site. Its content was uploaded through a Finnish server that guaranteed anonymity to its users. Even the IP address registration was backdated, so that the site seemed to have been up for months.

  The site itself had a straightforward front page in English and Arabic: “Here you will find the stories of Muslims held captive. Here you will find the truth about the ‘peace-loving’ Americans.” No over-the-top rhetoric. And, of course, no pictures of Wells as Nadeem anywhere. He wouldn’t have been foolish enough to give up his ano
nymity.

  WELLS LEFT THE MOSQUE and a few minutes later found himself on Sharia al-Muizz, a narrow street in the heart of Islamic Cairo. He took his time. If the imam had ordered him tailed, he wanted to show that he had nothing to hide. But no one seemed to be on him. After an hour of browsing the storefronts, he grabbed a cab to the Lotus. He would leave his room at the Intercontinental unoccupied tonight, the bed unmussed. The hotel wouldn’t care unless his credit card bounced.

  At the Lotus, he couldn’t fall asleep for hours. During his time off, he’d forgotten the intensity, the perpetual vigilance, required for these missions. Finally he faded out. He found himself in a windowless room with Exley, interviewing her for the site. She wore a blue hijab and sunglasses and held a duck in her lap.

  “Next question,” she said in English.

  “Did they let you pray?” he said in Arabic.

  “I prayed for you, John.”

  “Please speak Arabic.”

  “You know I can’t speak Arabic.”

  The duck quacked madly. Exley petted its feathers. “He doesn’t mean to upset you, Ethan. He doesn’t know any better.”

  “You named the duck after Evan? My son?”

  “No. His name’s Ethan. Not Evan. He’s named after our son.”

  Wells was confused. “We didn’t have a son—”

  “We did. Would have, I mean. I was pregnant, that day Kowalski sent his men—”

  No, Wells thought. It wasn’t so. He knew she was lying. “Tell the truth, Jenny.”

  “You can’t handle the truth,” she said in Jack Nicholson’s voice.

  “Why can’t you let me go?”

  “I think you have it backwards, John—”

  And with that, a strange scratching pulled him back to the world. Exley disappeared as he opened his eyes. The room was empty. He didn’t know the time, but the city was close to quiet. He guessed it was between 3 and 4 a.m., the quiet hour, when only insomniacs and cabbies prowled the streets.

  The scratching, again. Low and quiet. At the door.

  Wells waited. Let them come. Nadeem Taleb wouldn’t resist.

  The door creaked open. Hani slid into the room, followed by a dark-skinned, wiry man. Hani flicked on the overhead bulb. He held a pistol, a small one. It looked almost silly in his pillowy hands. “No noise,” he said. He gathered Wells’s passport and watch and wallet from the nightstand and moved over to the window and tucked his pistol into his jeans. He flipped through the passport and set it aside. His movements were easy and purposeful, and something in them bothered Wells. Wells flicked his tongue over his lips in a show of nervousness. Then stopped, reminding himself not to overact.

  “Get up, Kuwaiti. If that’s what you are. Get dressed.”

  Wells rolled out, pulled on a galabiya. The wiry man rousted the room, pulling open drawers, rooting through Wells’s toiletries kit, shining a flashlight under the bed, a cursory but efficient search. Wells watched in silence until the man reached the suitcase.

  “It’s locked,” he said.

  “Why?” Hani said.

  “There’s a camera inside.”

  “Open it.”

  Wells extracted a key from his wallet and unlocked the case. The wiry man pulled out the video camera almost triumphantly.

  “Why do you have this?” Hani said.

  “To film the interviews.” Wells took a slightly aggravated tone, as if he could hardly be bothered to answer such a stupid question.

  Hani held up Wells’s Rolex. “You’re a rich man, Kuwaiti. Why stay here? Why not the Hyatt, with your cousins?” The Cairo Grand Hyatt had paradoxically become the favorite of the Gulf Arabs who visited the city. Paradoxically, because Hyatt was owned by the Pritzker family, who were not just Americans but Jews.

  “The Hyatt? So the mukhabarat can watch me come and go? Does that seem like a good idea, habibi?”

  “Stuff your mouth with sand and see if you make such smart remarks,” Hani murmured, to himself as much as to Wells. Again, his manner troubled Wells. A decade ago, in Afghanistan — and especially in the abattoir that was Chechnya — Wells had seen men who responded to any uncertainty with violence, the quicker and messier the better. Hani might be one of them. And yet he didn’t seem angry or volatile. Perhaps he didn’t want to be here, and the imam had forced the mission on him.

  Hani pulled out his cell phone, typed a quick text, slipped it away. He tucked Wells’s passport and wallet into his jeans. “Time to go.”

  “Where?” Wells wasn’t expecting an answer.

  But he got one. “You wanted to meet Ihab Zumari, Kuwaiti? Now you will.”

  OUTSIDE, A PEUGEOT 504 IDLED. A four-door sedan, boxy and black, with tinted windows. Hani ushered Wells into the back, tied a black bandanna over his eyes, tightly enough to ensure that light didn’t leak through.

  Wells lay back, closed his eyes, tried to sleep. He wasn’t overly worried. Most likely the imam was just being cautious. And if not. he’d faced worse odds than this.

  The car turned left, right, then accelerated. Even without the blindfold, Wells would have been lost.

  “What’s your name, Kuwaiti?” Hani said.

  “Nadeem Taleeb.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Kuwait City.”

  “And why are you here?”

  “To interview Alaa Zumari. You know all this.”

  “You’re a spy.”

  “No more than you.”

  The back of a hand stung his face.

  “Be careful, Kuwaiti.”

  Then Wells understood. The well-knotted blindfold. Hani’s two-handed pistol grip. His strangely relaxed attitude. He was no jihadi, however many years he’d spent at this mosque. He was mukhabarat. Very good, but not good enough to eliminate the traces of his training.

  And he, even more than the imam, must be wondering what Nadeem Taleeb was doing here. Behind his blindfold, Wells puzzled through the permutations. The Egyptians couldn’t have penetrated his cover already. Cooperation between the Kuwaiti and Egyptian intelligence services was mediocre at best.

  No. Hani didn’t know who Nadeem really was. His best move would be to play along, to hope that Nadeem could get him to Alaa Zumari. The Egyptians were embarrassed to have lost Zumari. Even if they didn’t want to arrest him, they surely wanted to find him again.

  What about the imam? Did he know his deputy was an Egyptian agent? Could he be working for secret police, too? Wells guessed not, though he couldn’t be sure.

  The car stopped. A hand tugged him out of the car. “Turn, facing the car,” Hani said. “Hands behind your back.” His voice was close. Wells smelled the coffee on his breath, the stink of his unwashed skin. Wells held out his hands, and Hani slipped handcuffs around his wrists and frog-marched him toward a second vehicle, a bigger one with a diesel engine.

  “Two steps here,” Hani said.

  As Wells reached the second step, Hani pushed him forward. He tripped, sprawled forward. With his hands cuffed behind him, he instinctively rolled onto his right shoulder to protect his face. Too late, he remembered that he should have rolled left. Two years before, he had separated his right shoulder, and then it had taken a terrible beating from two Chinese prison guards. He had rebuilt and strengthened the joint as best he could. Now he landed directly on it. It buckled up and came out of the socket with an audible pop, and Wells felt as if the joint were being prodded with a hot iron.

  Through the pain, Wells remembered that Nadeem Taleeb had to swear in Arabic. “Sharmuta, sharmuta,” he said. The word roughly translated as “bitch.”

  Wells squirmed onto his left side, trying to relieve the pressure on his shoulder. The handcuffs worsened the pain, pulling his arm down and out of the socket. His breaths were coming fast and shallow, and he didn’t know how long he could stay conscious.

  Someone tugged off the blindfold. Wells found himself looking up at the imam.

  “Are you all right, Kuwaiti?”

  “The handcuffs—”r />
  “Take them off,” the imam said to Hani.

  Hani hesitated, then reached for the cuffs, giving Wells’s shoulder a final tug as he did. With his arms free, the pain was merely agonizing. Wells sat up, his right arm hanging limp. He was in a midsize panel truck. The imam and Hani sat beside him, a skinny middle-aged man in the corner. His hair was gray, unusual for an Arab. Wells recognized him from Alaa Zumari’s dossier. Alaa’s father, Ihab.

  “Pop it in,” Wells said to Hani.

  “What?”

  “My shoulder.” Wells could fix the joint himself. He had before. But very few people had his pain tolerance, and they might wonder how he’d managed it.

  Hani looked to the imam, who nodded. Hani grabbed Wells’s arm at the elbow and without hesitation pushed it up and into the socket. Wells’s body became a machine devoted to generating pain, the agony radiating across his chest. Then his arm settled in and Wells could open his eyes. He took two breaths, three, and then was able to move. He squirmed backward, leaned against the side of the truck.

  “You are all right?” the imam said.

  “Inshallah,” Wells said.

  “Inshallah.”

  Hani gave the imam Wells’s Kuwaiti passport and wallet. The imam leafed through them. “You came to Suez. Why not fly?”

  “At the airport, every passenger is photographed. It’s best for me if my picture isn’t taken. The pharaoh’s men are everywhere.”

  “That man”—the imam nodded at the man in the corner—“is Ihab Zumari. The one you’ve come to see.”

  Wells braced himself to stand, but Hani put a hand on his left shoulder. “Salaam alekeim, Ihab,” Wells said.

  “Alekeim salaam.”

  “I’m Nadeem Taleeb. I’m sorry to disturb your sleep.”

  Zumari nodded.

  “Did you see my Web site? The videos?”

  Another nod.

  “Then you know why I’ve come to you.”

  “Tell me,” Zumari said. His voice was low, each syllable measured. His dossier said he ran a small electronics store in a run-down section of Islamic Cairo, but he looked and sounded more like a law professor.