“Yes.”
“But you are not going to Guantánamo.”
The nameless man slid the burning end of his cigarette toward Farouk’s eye.
“No.” Farouk shrank back in his chair, blinking furiously, trying to look at anything but the burning ember two inches away.
“I’m glad you agree. No. You are not going to Guantánamo.” The man took a last drag on the cigarette, then stubbed it out against the table and flicked it away. “I don’t want to hurt you, Farouk,” he said. “But you need to tell me the truth. And you will. You’re going to tell me everything I want to know.”
Farouk found his voice. “There are rules,” he said. “You can’t.”
But even as he said it he knew he was wrong.
“I’ll tell you something I probably shouldn’t,” the American said. “There is one rule. I’m not supposed to kill you. Not on purpose, anyway.”
Then he smiled. The expression on his lips scared Farouk more than anything that had happened yet. This man was a devil, a devil in human form. Please, Farouk almost said. I’ll give you everything. I’ll tell you about Khadri. I’ll tell you about the box I got from Dmitri. I’ll even tell you the biggest secret of all, where that box is now. Just leave me alone. Then Farouk reminded himself that he must not fear. But maybe he could give this man a little. Anything to make that smile disappear.
“Farouk, are you listening?”
Farouk nodded. He hated himself for answering the man but his will seemed to have melted away.
“I’m not supposed to kill you. But I am allowed to make you wish you were dead.”
The American walked out. Even before he closed the door, Farouk felt the hood coming down over his head.
“No,” Farouk said. “Please. Ask me something. I’ll tell you.” His voice became a shout. “I’ll tell you! Please!”
But the room went dark, and Farouk knew that the hole awaited.
* * *
THE NEXT FEW weeks were much the same. As the interrogations continued, Farouk’s experiences in confinement became even more terrifying; he was shot up with adrenaline until his heart raced so fast that he believed it would explode. He was slipped LSD and left to chase his mind around the silent room. When he tried to sleep he was hit and kicked by men he could not see.
Meanwhile, Saul lengthened the stretches that Farouk spent outside of solitary confinement, in order to make the contrast between the hole and the world even sharper. Saul wanted Farouk to learn that Saul could save or destroy him, could turn day to night, white to black.
The lessons were effective, and Farouk divulged new secrets at each session. He told them how he had met bin Laden. How he had recruited three employees in Pakistan’s nuclear program. How he had met an American agent for al Qaeda who was being sent back to the United States to help carry out a major attack. Saul hadn’t expected Farouk to give up so much so soon; he simply wasn’t as tough as Khalid Mohammed or other senior al Qaeda lieutenants, who had taken months to break. Still, Saul believed that Farouk was holding something back.
AS THE C-5 made its way over the Indian Ocean, Exley worked her way through the transcriptions of Farouk’s interrogations and his reactions in solitary. The report’s descriptions were cool and clinical: “The subject screamed ‘Allah!’ for several minutes before losing consciousness. When he was revived…” Exley felt herself growing cold, and part of her wished that the jet could turn around and take her home.
“What do you think?” Shafer said.
“I see why I had to sign that security clearance,” she said. “Are we keeping a video?”
“Nope.”
She wasn’t surprised. The Pentagon had learned something from Abu Ghraib, though maybe not the lesson that rights groups had hoped. “I’m not exactly naive, Ellis,” she said. “I knew this stuff was happening.” She shivered. “But I guess it’s different when you read it firsthand. That’s all.”
Shafer merely grunted, and they sat the rest of the flight in silence. They touched down at Diego Garcia so smoothly that Exley hardly realized they had landed. As the plane’s huge rear doors opened and sunlight filled the C-5, the Rangers ran out with a cheer. Exley had never missed being twenty-five so much, though she was consoled by the fact that Shafer looked even worse than she felt, with a scrim of stubble on his cheeks and his eyes bloodshot.
“What day is it?”
Shafer looked at his watch. “Saturday. Saturday morning.”
“We left Thursday night.”
Shafer yawned gigantically. “Nineteen-hour flight, and we’re eleven hours ahead of D.C.”
They walked gingerly onto the tarmac. The equatorial sun shone hard on the Humvees parked around them, glaring off mirrors and windows. Exley was glad she’d brought her sunglasses. Coconut palms and ironwood trees were scattered around the runway, a strange juxtaposition with the military hardware. The warm moist air reminded her of Washington, though a light ocean breeze made the humidity here easier to take. Around them the Rangers were unloading their bags and bitching good-naturedly about the flight. For them Diego was just another base. Yet Exley had an overwhelming urge to be somewhere else.
A soldier walked toward them. “Sir? Ma’am? You must be Mr. Shafer and Ms. Exley. Please come with me.”
FAROUK SAT IN the evil dark, the evil all-seeing dark. The blackest darkness there ever was. So dark that he could almost convince himself the darkness was light. Only it wasn’t.
He knew now that Allah had forsaken him, left him to rot in the claws of the kafirs. He had only darkness. This room and the other. They were the same room really, but this room was dark and the other wasn’t, and that was everything.
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t do this. Please.” Allah you have forsaken me. You have forsaken me.
Tears rolled down his cheeks. In the diminishing rational corner of his mind he knew that the Americans had somehow built this room to hold him. It was just a cell, a specially designed cell that was silent and dark. Sometimes he tried to envision how they had put it together. But he couldn’t keep his thoughts straight for long. Soon enough the darkness took over. The darkness, and the…tricks. He didn’t know what else to call them. The tricks. They hurt.
Farouk had told Saul a lot, more than he’d ever meant to say. But Saul wanted more. “I know that’s not everything, Farouk,” he would say quietly. And the hood would go back on. Farouk couldn’t convince him otherwise, no matter how hard he tried. Because of course he hadn’t told Saul the biggest secret of all, about the package from Dmitri. And he needed to keep that secret with him. In the dark.
SAUL WANTED TO break Farouk today, give the folks from Langley a show. He didn’t feel any need to hide his methods from them. They weren’t from the Red Cross or snot-nosed reporters. They were on the team. They were cleared to see. So let them see.
THE LIEUTENANT ESCORTED Exley and Shafer to a thick concrete building at the northern edge of the compound. BUILDING12. RESTRICTED ACCESS: LEVEL1 TF 121CLEARANCE REQUIRED said a small sign in red letters. A tall, unfriendly man in a floppy hat stood guard by the building’s steel doors, trying to find shadow from the afternoon sun.
“Mr. Shafer, Ms. Exley, this is as far as I go,” the lieutenant said. “But I’ll wait for you there when you leave.” He pointed to a building they had passed.
“Thanks, Lieutenant.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am.” He turned and strode away. He couldn’t wait to get away from this building, Exley saw.
THE MAN ON the infrared monitors hardly moved. They couldn’t see his face, which was covered by a hood. But they could hear his sobbing. “Does he always cry like this?” Exley said.
“He started to cry late in his third session,” Saul said. “Now he cries almost constantly after a couple hours.”
“And how many sessions has he had?”
“Eight. He’s progressing nicely,” Saul said.
“When did he mention Wells?”
“About a week ago. I
can go back over it with him if you like. He’s very cooperative about things we’ve already discussed.”
Saul had shown them the building before bringing them in here. The hole was in its own wing on the first floor, specially proofed against sound and light, he said. Normally such rooms were built underground, but the coral on Diego didn’t permit deep construction.
“Please,” the man on the screen said. “Please.” His sobs thickened. If any of the interrogators noticed, they didn’t comment.
“How long has he been in there?” Exley asked as neutrally as she could.
Saul glanced at his watch. “Only nineteen hours. But his tolerance for the room seems to be breaking down.”
“That doesn’t always happen?” Shafer said.
“Some of these guys get stronger for a while, which makes things tough. But Farouk — I think he’s about ready to break completely.”
“So now what?” Exley said.
“We typically introduce an additional stress element at some point in his sessions. Sometimes early, sometimes late — we don’t want him to be able to anticipate it. Now seems like a good time.”
THE DARK DARK dark. Farouk tried to count to one thousand, but he couldn’t keep the numbers straight anymore. He had tried to recite bits of the Koran, but each time he said Allah’s name he felt more forsaken. So he quit that too, and just sat in the dark.
The American was right, Farouk thought. This was worse than being dead. In fact, maybe he was dead already. Maybe he had died on the roof in Baghdad and he was in hell. But it couldn’t be. He had served Allah as best he could. He belonged in heaven.
“Heaven,” he said aloud. “Heaven.”
As he said the words an intense electrical shock flooded his legs. He threw his head back and screamed in pain. His muscles spasmed uncontrollably, tightening and loosening over and over. He had never felt so much pain, up one leg and down the other.
“STOP STOP STOP!” he screamed.
Finally it did. “Allah,” he said. It had lasted only a few seconds, he realized. Thank God. He couldn’t have taken much more. His legs were still quivering from the shock, and the muscles felt…warm, as if he had been running. He tentatively shook them. They still worked.
Then the pain came again, up his left calf and thigh and across his waist and down the other leg. “STOP! STOP!” He felt his heart thumping, but he couldn’t move. Time no longer existed. He couldn’t tell, couldn’t even guess, how long the shock flowed through him.
The electricity stopped. He had time for three quick breaths before it started again. Somehow it hurt even more this time. He tried to tell himself that they couldn’t keep shocking him like this unless they really wanted to kill him…but that knowledge didn’t help. He wanted to beg them to stop, but the words melted on his tongue and he merely moaned until the electricity stopped flowing.
He could take no more. He would tell them anything, everything, not to have to sit in here and wait for this agony. He wrenched his head from side to side.
“Please…please…please…”
“LET HIM CALM down a little and then get him out of there,” Saul said, watching Farouk twist. “I think it’s done.”
They had just used a Taser on Farouk, an electrical gun that produced 50,000-volt shocks that caused involuntary muscle spasms, Saul said. The gun’s barbs were attached to Farouk’s ankles and didn’t need to break the skin to deliver the electricity, so Farouk probably had no idea where the pain had come from. “I’ve had it done to me and it hurts,” Saul said. “But it works.”
EXLEY KEPT HER face straight. She should have been elated. A senior al Qaeda operative cracked. If he was a senior al Qaeda operative. If he had really cracked and didn’t need another month in the hole. But she couldn’t take her eyes off the quivering mass on the screen. I don’t know if I can face this anymore, she thought. It hurts but it works. And what if it didn’t work? What came next?
I just want to live in the suburbs somewhere with my kids and work forty hours a week and have a nice, small life. Someone has to do this but it doesn’t have to be me. Or maybe no one had to do it. Maybe they just all needed to relax and treat the guys on the other side like human beings.
Then that little voice of hers: Even you aren’t that dumb, Jenny. You want this guy to nuke New York City?
Had Shafer brought her here as an object lesson? Did he believe this torture was necessary? Was it even torture? Farouk would be okay, at least physically. She didn’t have any answers anymore, only questions, and she couldn’t face any more questions.
Suddenly she knew that Wells was going to die. He would be another human sacrifice on the altar of this war. He would die, and she would never see him again. The thought roiled her gut, and she wanted nothing more than to be back in her little bedroom, lying on her back, looking up at the ceiling, with Wells beside her, holding her. Anywhere but here.
Shafer tapped her. “You okay, Jennifer?”
She wasn’t, not at all.
“Fine,” she said. “Just thinking about what he’s gonna have for us. Great job, Saul.”
10
Albany, New York
TAP. TAP. A finger poked at Khadri’s shoulder. He turned to find a shapeless vagrant standing too close, her stringy brown hair pulled into a ponytail, an oversized cross hanging dully around her neck, her foul warm breath on his cheek.
“Excuse me, sir? Spare some change for something to eat?”
“I’m afraid I can’t.” Khadri could hear his English accent creeping out. He didn’t like surprises, even small ones.
“Please, mister? You look like a nice man.”
Khadri fished in his pocket for a dollar so she would go away. The woman’s eyes lit up when she saw the bill. She tugged it out of his hand.
“Thank you, sir.” Khadri shook his head and turned away, hearing her last words, almost a whisper: “I’m gonna pray for you.”
The prayers of an infidel. He mused over the woman’s promise as he opened the glass doors to Albany’s dingy downtown bus station, walking in for the third time that morning. Would she help the cause, or hurt? He stepped slowly through the station’s main hallway, his trainers — what the Americans called sneakers — squeaking on the dirty floor. Besides the trainers, he was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt, camouflage for this ridiculous country where everyone took pride in dressing as poorly as possible.
A half hour later, after what felt like his hundredth loop through the station, he bought a cup of coffee and plunked down on a wire chair, which rocked under him on uneven legs. Running a hand through his close-cropped dark hair, Khadri cataloged his annoyances. The coffee was acrid and cold. The air was stale and hot.
And he was surrounded by Americans. Sweaty fat poor Americans. Women in cheap white uniforms and hairnets trudged past, their mouths slack, their smiles missing teeth. By day’s end they would earn a few dollars, enough to feed their families if they were lucky. This station had lights and running water, but in its rank desperation it reminded Khadri of the most pitiful precincts of Islamabad.
Khadri almost sympathized with these fools. Their infidel religion blinded them to the truth: they were nothing but chattel for the Jews who ran the United States. If only they would realize that Allah was the only God and Mohammed his prophet. If only they would rise against this corrupt country and their devil leaders. But they were caught up in their worship of Jesus. And anyway most Americans weren’t so poor, Khadri reminded himself. They enjoyed their lives, supported America’s wars. No, the United States would never redeem itself, not until the day when al Qaeda proved beyond doubt that only fools stood against Islam.
Khadri believed that such a day would arrive, believed it as he believed in the beating of his heart. So he tried not to overreact to disappointments, like the bad news he had just received from Tarik Dourant in Montreal. Tarik should worry less about his wife and more about his work, Khadri thought. Tarik was a brilliant biochemist and committed to the cause, but Khadri
worried about him. He had come to al Qaeda out of loneliness, a man almost broken by the cruelties of the West.
Khadri didn’t trust that type of recruit any more than he trusted the fanatics who begged to blow themselves up. They were mirror images. The fanatics were irrational, though strong. Men like Tarik were weak and prone to panic. A strong man would not have let his wife insist on taking a job surrounded by kafirs. Tarik needed to regain control over Fatima, or divorce her, not complain uselessly about the situation as if she were the man and he the wife. In fact Khadri didn’t really care what Tarik did about Fatima, as long as he kept working.
Khadri dumped two packets of sugar into the coffee to hide its bitterness. A month earlier Farouk Khan had disappeared in Baghdad after an American raid, and since then he hadn’t responded to Khadri’s messages. Khadri feared the worst. If the Americans had captured Farouk alive, they might have learned of the packages that al Qaeda had brought to the United States. Khadri needed to know if Farouk had betrayed that secret.
So Khadri had come to Albany to conduct an experiment of sorts. Now he needed a helper. An unwitting helper. Someone who wanted money. Someone who would follow orders without asking questions. Someone expendable. The bus station, in the shadow of the highway that stretched down the eastern edge of this ugly city, had seemed a natural place to look. But Khadri hadn’t found anyone suitable. He would never trust a woman for this job, and the men loitering here were old and ragged. He needed someone younger. Maybe a black. They would do anything for money, and Albany was filled with them.
HE LEFT THE station and walked through Albany’s decaying downtown. There. A black man sat on the stoop of a vacant office building, a blue baseball cap pulled down over his forehead, a bottle half-hidden in a bag between his legs. A hostile look settled into the man’s eyes as Khadri walked toward him. “Hello,” Khadri said.
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