The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  And now I feared I would never see her again.

  25

  The electronic locks released.

  The door swung open, again flooding the cell with light. Then the lightbulb overhead turned on. Dr. Hammami and the two MPs at his side were back.

  “Good morning, Mr. Collins.”

  “Is it morning?” I asked, certain I couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly.

  “It is indeed,” he replied, pulling out his stethoscope and starting through his routine again. “It’s just before 10 a.m.,” he said.

  “Ten o’clock Tuesday morning?” I clarified, still not seeing how this could be true.

  “That’s right, Mr. Collins—six minutes before ten on Tuesday morning, to be precise. So how are we feeling today? Did we get some rest? How’s the arm?”

  The patronizing tone alone made me want to strangle him.

  “Fine, yes, better,” I said, fighting the urge to go ballistic.

  Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I did the math. I’d been locked up for almost twenty-eight hours. That meant there were merely twenty hours left until the deadline. I had to get out, find a phone, let someone know what was happening to me. I feigned grogginess, but with a burst of adrenaline I was wide awake now—wide awake and trying to develop a plan to escape.

  “Blood pressure’s still a bit high,” he said when he’d completed the exam.

  It was all I could do not to let the sarcasm fly. The only thing that stopped me was the overpowering urge to break out of this cell. Yet I knew that even if I overpowered the doctor (not a problem) and one of the MPs (not easy but doable), I was still going to have to get the jump on the other MP (which seemed close to impossible). And even if I did succeed, how exactly was I going to get out of the hallway? The doors at both ends were electronically locked, and there were surveillance cameras watching 24-7.

  “Would you put on your socks and shoes, please, Mr. Collins?” the doctor asked.

  “What for?”

  “You have an appointment.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Come now. You don’t want to be late. Best get moving.”

  “An appointment? With whom?”

  “I’m not authorized to say.”

  “Why not?” I shot back, my discipline slipping.

  “Let’s just put on our shoes and socks, Mr. Collins, and be on our way, shall we?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The clock is ticking, Mr. Collins. Let’s pick up the pace.”

  Clearly this banter was going nowhere. He wasn’t about to answer my questions, so there was no point continuing to ask. When I did as I was told, my hands and feet were promptly shackled, and I was led down several hallways, through a series of electronically locked doors, to a windowless little room. There I was told to sit on a metal stool on the far side of a rectangular metal table. Both the table and the stool were bolted to the floor, and I was too after the MPs fastened my shackles to steel hooks near my feet. I was reminded of my first meeting with Abu Khalif, which had taken place in a room not too dissimilar from this.

  The doctor excused himself. Now it was just me and the two MPs, stone-faced and obviously prepared for any foolhardy escape plan I was idiotic enough to concoct.

  The minutes ticked by, and as I waited, I pretended I was in Vegas. I laid down odds for who was going to walk through that door at the appointed hour.

  At the top of my list was some Jordanian prosecutor or perhaps a state-appointed attorney charged with my defense. This was the most logical. But next on my list, with two-to-one odds, was Prince Feisal. I had asked for the meeting, after all, and there was an outside chance he would take a break from the hunt for the president and Abu Khalif to humor me. I was ready for him, prepared to give him my list of suspects and the pros and cons for each. Seeing Colonel Sharif seemed a long shot at best, so I put him at seven-to-one odds. The king was even less likely, certainly not in a room like this, so I put those odds at five hundred to one.

  Toughest to calculate were the odds of seeing Allen MacDonald or a lawyer from the Times, or someone from the U.S. embassy coming to help me out of this mess. All three were in roughly the same category, though clearly an embassy official had a far better chance of reaching me than the other two. Still, that would require the king or the prince or someone else in that bunker reaching out to the embassy and informing them of the suspicions—if not the charges—against me. Were they ready to do that with everything else on their plate right now? Prince Feisal had assured me the answer was a definitive no. Why would he have changed his mind?

  Complicating matters even further was this question: Was the American embassy in Amman even open at the moment? Much of the staff, including the ambassador, had been at the summit, helping coordinate the visit of the president, secretary of state, and other high-ranking officials from the White House, State, and Defense. The ambassador was dead. How many others had survived?

  In the end, I decided it was no better than a thousand-to-one shot that I’d see Allen or a lawyer this fast, while someone from the embassy was about fifty to one—possible but unlikely.

  But when the door opened and a man I actually recognized stepped into the room, it suddenly became clear that not only was I playing the wrong odds, I wasn’t even in the right casino.

  26

  “Mr. Collins, we meet again; how nice.”

  To be clear, I recognized the face. But I couldn’t remember his name from Adam. He was an American, in his midfifties, well built, like he’d once been a Marine, a tad over six feet, with a strong jaw and a buzz cut that seemed like a throwback to the days of black-and-white television. He wore a dark suit and a white shirt with a thick dark tie and black wingtip shoes. I knew we’d met in Istanbul, in the hospital, just after the car bombing that took the life of Omar Fayez. He worked for the FBI—that, too, I remembered, but still I couldn’t place the name. It was unlike me, and I chalked it up to sedatives and stress.

  “Not to worry, Mr. Collins,” he said as he watched me racing through my mental Rolodex and coming up blank. “You meet a lot of people.”

  He handed me a business card and I suddenly had a déjà vu moment. We’d done this before. The card bore the bureau’s logo, a local office address in Istanbul, an e-mail address, a phone number, and the words Arthur M. Harris, Special Agent in Charge.

  “Mr. Harris,” I said. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  Harris didn’t smile, not that I’d expected him to. Nor was I really trying to be funny. He wasn’t coming to set me free. He was coming to bury me.

  Harris sat down on the other side of the table, set his briefcase on the floor next to him, opened it, pulled out a digital voice recorder, and placed it on the table and hit Record.

  “Have you been informed of the charges against you, Mr. Collins?” he began.

  “Not in so many words, no,” I said cautiously.

  “Well, I’m here to do that,” he replied. “But first, let’s review your rights. You don’t have to speak to me, of course. You can ask for a lawyer. But I’m hoping you’ll first shed some light on what exactly has just happened.”

  I tried to decide if I should ask for a lawyer—or rather when to ask for one. If I was really facing charges that could lead to the death penalty, I couldn’t take any risk in saying something that could be used against me. At the same time, I knew asking for a lawyer would shut down the discussion before it had begun, and I wasn’t ready to do that. At the moment, Agent Harris was my only contact with the outside world. To dismiss him because I didn’t have a lawyer meant being sent back to solitary confinement while the clock ticked down to the execution of the president. Harris, therefore, was my only hope of gleaning information about what was happening in the hunt for the president and Abu Khalif. He was also my only hope of learning a bit of what was going on with Allen, with my family, perhaps even Yael, as well as getting messages back to any or all of them.

  “By the way, when I refer to charges,
I should say ‘charges pending’ against you,” Harris clarified. “No formal charges have been filed. Not yet. Too much is happening at the moment. But the Jordanian authorities have made it clear to the bureau they are building a very strong case against you.”

  “What case?” I asked. “I risked my life to save the king’s and his family’s. They’re going to charge me for that?”

  “They say the royal family survived in spite of your efforts, Mr. Collins. And I have to say, the evidence they’ve shown me is rather compelling.”

  “They think I’m conspiring with ISIS against the Hashemite Kingdom?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “They think the fact that I’ve interviewed Abu Khalif and Jamal Ramzy means I’m in collusion with them.”

  “They wonder how you got such ‘exclusive interviews.’ They wonder how you keep managing to live when everyone else around you dies. They wonder why you were allowed to leave Mosul and get back to Jordan just before the peace summit when no other foreigner has been to Abu Khalif’s secret headquarters and come out alive.”

  I’d heard all this before from Prince Feisal, but the list was no less incredible now. “What do they say about the fact that I was the one who spotted the F-16 breaking off from his wingman, that I was the one who alerted the chief of security for the Royal Court that a kamikaze attack was under way?”

  “Too little, too late, they say.”

  “But it wasn’t too late, was it?” I protested. “That ‘little’ bit of warning saved the king’s life, not to mention President Taylor’s, Prime Minister Lavi’s, and President Mansour’s.”

  “Look, Mr. Collins, I’m not here on behalf of the Jordanian government,” Harris replied, deftly changing lanes. “I’m not here investigating the attempted assassination of the king, per se. I’m here investigating the attempted assassination of the president of the United States, along with the murder of the secretary of state and eighty-two other American citizens.”

  “You can’t possibly think I’m complicit in any of that.”

  “Like I said, Mr. Collins, on a short list of suspects, you’re the only one with irrefutable contact with the enemy.”

  I took a deep breath and fought to keep my composure. “Is the FBI charging me with a crime?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But you intend to?”

  “That’s not my call.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “The attorney general’s—he’s in the process of convening a special grand jury.”

  “And I’m a target?”

  “Clearly.”

  “What are the charges the Jordanians are preparing to make? You never said.”

  “Murder, attempted murder, aggravated murder, terrorism, and espionage.”

  I felt sick.

  “At the top of the list is treason—‘making an attempt on the life of the king, the queen, or the regent.’”

  “This is a joke. The only attempt I made was to save the life of the king and queen. A successful attempt, I might add.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Mr. Collins; this is no joke, and I am told they intend to prosecute all of these crimes to the fullest extent of the law.”

  “Which is?”

  “These are all capital crimes. They are punishable by death.”

  I knew from Colonel Sharif that Jordan still had a death penalty, but I was pretty sure they hadn’t used it in years. Were they really threatening to execute me for crimes I hadn’t even committed? “But Jordan doesn’t execute criminals,” I said hopefully.

  “Not true,” Harris replied. “There are currently 106 convicted criminals on death row here. And the Jordanian government executed several ISIS and al Qaeda conspirators earlier this year.”

  If I was going to ask for a lawyer, this was surely the time. Instead, I leaned forward and lowered my voice.

  “Agent Harris, I had absolutely nothing to do with these crimes. I’m a reporter, not a terrorist. I’ve been doing everything I can to understand the enemy and warn my country and the world about their intentions. It was my story with Jamal Ramzy that warned the president and his senior advisors that a major attack was coming. It was my reporting that made it clear that ISIS had captured chemical weapons. The president wasn’t convinced ISIS really possessed them. CIA Director Vaughn told me personally he wasn’t convinced ISIS had weapons of mass destruction. It was my reporting—not his or his team’s intelligence gathering—that provided conclusive evidence that ISIS had sarin gas. Every step of the way, I have warned American and Jordanian leaders—in print and in person—of grave and imminent dangers to them. Dangers that proved to be true. Dangers that have nearly gotten me killed numerous times. Dangers that got me shot, that led to the deaths of my closest friends. In short, Mr. Harris, I’m not guilty of these horrific crimes. Abu Khalif is guilty. ISIS is guilty. And anyone in a position of authority who didn’t listen to my repeated warnings and take appropriate action bears no small measure of responsibility as well.”

  “Very moving, Mr. Collins, but save it for your summation.”

  27

  I was getting nowhere fast.

  Harris wasn’t buying my defense, so I decided to go on offense. It was a risk, especially with a running audio recording, but it was a calculated one, and at that moment I felt I had no choice.

  “Look, Agent Harris, like you, like my Jordanian friends, I’m convinced there’s a mole at a very high level, a mole that has been feeding information to ISIS,” I said, making an enormous concession I was sure no lawyer would advise. “Someone with access to the details of the peace summit must have supplied those details to Abu Khalif and his men in an attempt to kill all four principals and take over the kingdom of Jordan. I categorically deny I am that mole or that I am involved in a criminal conspiracy in any way, shape, or form. But I have been thinking long and hard about this and I want you to consider three possible suspects.”

  “Shall we begin with Yael Katzir?” he asked, catching me off guard.

  “What? Of course not,” I said. “She had nothing to do with this.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s ridiculous. Why would you even ask such a thing?”

  “That’s not a compelling argument, Mr. Collins.”

  “Yael? You’re serious?” I shot back. “She had every opportunity to kill every single principal in the king’s palace, but she fought back against the terrorists instead. She could have easily killed the royal family while we were escaping the palace and racing them to the airport, but she risked her life to save them instead. She—”

  I suddenly stopped midsentence. I was about to say, “She did everything she could to help me expose the fact that ISIS had captured chemical weapons, including giving me classified Israeli intelligence to help me with my story.” But I couldn’t burn her as a source. If I wasn’t going to tell Allen MacDonald and my editors in New York who my confidential sources were, I certainly couldn’t tell the FBI, much less on the record.

  Then Harris stunned me by saying it for me.

  “Because she was your source for the chemical weapons story, wasn’t she?” he pressed. “That’s what you were about to say, weren’t you?”

  “No, it’s not,” I lied.

  “Should I pull out the polygraph and see how you hold up?”

  “You know full well I can’t talk about confidential sources. And even if she was one—and I’m not saying she was—I couldn’t tell you.”

  “A grand jury could compel you.”

  “I’m protected by the First Amendment, Agent Harris—freedom of the press, in case you’d forgotten.”

  “You think the First Amendment is going to protect you if the attorney general charges you with treason against the president of the United States?”

  “The First Amendment, the Fifth, and others—absolutely,” I replied. “But I just told you, my reporting was to warn the president and the American government, not to commit treason against them. Why don’t you
believe me?”

  “Perhaps because you’re a liar, Mr. Collins,” Harris said flatly. “I know you’re lying right now. I know Ms. Katzir was your source, or one of them. I know she was the woman in the café in Istanbul, the one who fled after the bombing. I know Robert Khachigian was another source. And I know you fled the scene of a crime when he and a group of federal agents were murdered in Union Station. I know you still haven’t bothered to tell your side of the story to the bureau on why you fled, why you left the country, why you immediately went to go see Ms. Katzir. I know Ms. Katzir sent you a text message while you were meeting with King Abdullah, and I know what it said.”

  Harris reached down, pulled a single sheet of paper out of his briefcase, and slid it across the table. I looked down and read the message, though I already knew every word.

  James—thank G-d you’re safe! Thnx 4 the note. Have been worried sick. We need to talk. Dangerous new developments. Call me ASAP.—Y

  “You see where this is heading, Mr. Collins?” Harris asked, echoing the question Prince Feisal had asked me. “You see how all this is going to look before a federal grand jury?”

  The man had done his homework. He had the enormous resources of the American government behind him, and he seemed determined to crush me. It was time to launch a counterstrike.

  “You’re chasing the wrong car, Agent Harris. Your case is circumstantial at best, not to mention completely illogical. Worse, you’re not looking at other, far more compelling suspects—men who had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to pull off these crimes. And the longer you try to railroad me, the longer the real conspirators are still out there, still plotting, still putting our country and our allies in grave danger. Now look, I’m not a Muslim. I’m certainly no ISIS supporter. I’ve got no religious motivation to be involved in these crimes. I’ve got no political motivation. I’m a lifelong registered Democrat, same as the president. I’ve got no financial or personal motive. Any reasonable jury of my peers is going to see that every so-called fact you say damns me is completely countered by verifiable actions I took to warn these leaders in order to save their lives. If I was hell-bent on killing them, I had an MP-5 in my hands and plenty of ammunition. So did Yael Katzir. We could have finished them off at any time. But we didn’t. So you tell me how it’s going to look to a federal grand jury.”