by Tom Saric
Bailey stood in front of Crilley’s office door and glanced from side-to-side one last time. She read the engraved plastic sign on the oak door bearing Jim Crilley’s name and title and thought, what on earth is the Deputy Director of the NCS up to?
She unlocked the door, walked in, and closed it carefully behind her, conscious of not making a sound. She closed the Venetian blind covering the small hallway window before turning on the desk lamp. It cast a dull orange glow over the sea of files in stacked brown banker boxes against the walls. There were more boxes on a bookshelf next to the window and Bailey assumed the locked metal filing cabinet opposite his desk contained even more.
Bailey lifted a box up onto the desk and flicked through the files, reading each label, looking for any combination of Paul Alban or Somalia or the MR-14406. After thumbing through a couple of boxes, she realized Crilley had no apparent order to his filing. Finding MR-14406 was a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. She looked through box after box of files, placing each one in their original position, just to make sure Crilley didn’t notice that someone had been in his office.
Her fifteen minutes came and went without her noticing. She went through each box systematically, but found nothing. A second perusal was fruitless. She tried the filing cabinet, but it was locked.
She sat in Crilley’s leather chair. She calculated she hadn’t slept for forty hours. That probably explained the nausea. Maybe the sleep deprivation led her to believe that the file would be in plain sight in Jim Crilley’s office. Maybe it was what led her to believe that Jim Crilley was at the center of some sort of conspiracy.
She decided she had to look through the filing cabinet. Most of the files out in the open were non-specific intelligence reports with very little sensitivity. If he had a sensitive file on a clandestine operative, he would have it under lock and key, likely in one of the underground floors.
Bailey searched Crilley’s desk, felt around the bottom of the drawers, and around the keyboard, but couldn’t find a key. She studied the filing cabinet. It seemed like it had a fairly standard lock. Nothing special. In college, Bailey had chronically locked her keys in her dorm room. As her roommate was almost always out late partying, Bailey had to learn how to pick the lock on the front door. It had been a while, but she still remembered how to go about it.
She grabbed a Uniball pen from the keyboard on Crilley’s desk, popped the top, and bent the clip off. Then she removed a bobby pin from her hair. She inserted the pen clip into the lock and pressed down. All the while, she shimmied the bobby pin into the lock until she felt it release. Then she carefully turned the lock.
Bailey looked at her watch and saw that she had been in Crilley’s office for an hour and twenty minutes. She told herself that she would look through the filing cabinet once and then leave. If she didn’t find anything, she would forget all about Paul Alban. She would wake up in the morning, shower, put extra make-up on and come back to work in five hours, appearing fresh and ready for the next assignment.
But that didn’t happen. MR-14406 was the first file in the top drawer.
Any sleepiness that had accumulated in her disappeared. Her eyelids felt light and her mind became sharp. She sat in Crilley’s plush leather office chair and smoothed the dossier out on the desk.
She flipped open the dossier and saw that the MR were the initials for a deceased man named Marshall Ramsey. A red stamp across the front sheet of the file identified that he had been KILLED IN ACTION in 1998. The first page had basic identifying information: born in Beverly, Massachusetts, the only child of Peter and Annette Ramsey, on June 29, 1960. Peter Ramsey, according to the file, died in 1966, when Marshall Ramsey was six. Fluent in English and French. Married Mary Elridge in 1989 and had one son in 1991. He obtained his medical degree from Harvard in 1985 and then specialized in emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
Bailey didn’t have to wonder about the relationship between Marshall Ramsey and Paul Alban for very long. After she flipped the sheet over, the answer stared her in the face. A passport-sized photo of Marshall Ramsey had been stapled in the top right corner. He was slightly younger in the photo and sported a beard, but it was undeniable.
Marshall Ramsey was, or is, Paul Alban.
Bailey felt flushed. Her heart galloped. She had the feeling that she was about to make a major discovery. She quickly read through the files in the dossier.
The Operations section of the dossier outlined Marshall Ramsey’s activities in the agency. She learned that Ramsey enlisted in the Army, joined the Rangers before remustering to complete medical school. He then worked as a military physician in Fort Worth after he completed his residency in emergency medicine. He had gone as medical support on a number of covert missions to Central America and West Africa. According to the file, the CIA had tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit Ramsey for a number of years. Ramsey was apparently involved in the development of a proposal to establish a joint psychiatry-medical clinic in refugee camps in Africa with a military psychiatrist named Dennis Hildebrand. The project never came to fruition. While they were about to present their proposal at the Nairobi embassy in 1998, terrorists bombed the building, killing Hildebrand in the process. It was only after that had Ramsey applied to join clandestine operations as medical support. According to the file, he specifically asked to be part of the investigation into the Nairobi bombing.
Bailey found that odd. Why would the CIA allow him to join an investigation when he obviously had a personal axe to grind? Apparently, she wasn’t the only person to question that. The files made reference to a potential personal conflict of interest, which Ramsey vehemently denied. Extensive psychological reports concluded that there was no objective evidence that M. Ramsey’s judgment is compromised in this matter.
Bailey screwed her eyes tight and then opened them, focusing on the papers in front of her. She kept reading. It seemed Ramsey became part of the FBI-DND team interrogating suspects implicated in the bombing. Towards the end of ’98, he worked exclusively with interrogators Sergeant Steven Sidwell and Special Agent Bruce McCormick.
The documents outlined the evidence that the team uncovered, the confessions, and the leads. The evidence led to a man named Kadar Hadad, a terrorist on the most-wanted list for the better part of a decade. Summaries of forty-five days of interrogations showed that although Hadad was likely behind the attacks, he never confessed.
Just as Bailey flipped the page, the overhead lights came on.
Bailey froze. Jim Crilley stood in the doorway, arms crossed and jaw clenched. He only said one word, “Explain.”
Bailey stared at the ground. “I, was just getting background… on Paul Alban.” She looked up, hoping for mercy. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to….”
Crilley nodded, stepped into the room and looked sideways at the file on the desk. “I see you’ve got all the background now. Because that’s Marshall Ramsey’s file.”
Crilley walked around the table and patted her on the back. “Good investigating, Clarke. Not a lot of analysts would piece it together the way you did. That’s why we took you from paramilitary.” He tapped her forehead with his index finger. “We wanted that brain of yours.”
Bailey sat frozen, unsure of how to respond.
“I had a feeling this was going to happen, so I had security notify me when you entered the building.” Crilley sat down in the chair across from her and interlocked his fingers behind his head. “But I’m not going to do anything to you. There will be no firing, no reporting, and no court martial. Okay?”
Bailey furrowed her brow. Was she hearing him correctly? She had broken into his office, read confidential files, and he didn’t care? “Why?” came out softly.
“Why?” Crilley laughed. “Do you want to go to prison, Clarke? Don’t get me wrong here. I know after this you’ll never break into my office again. You have my word that if you do, I won’t have the same reaction. Okay?”
Bailey nodded.
“The reason is because
I understand,” Crilley explained. “Things weren’t making sense to you, so you went digging. That’s good judgment. That’s why your work is going to save American lives. And I wasn’t totally honest with you about everything that was going on. I kept you on a ‘need to know’ basis. But clearly, you needed to know more. You’re working for me, so you might as well know what I know. So, I’m here now, Clarke, what do you want to know?”
Bailey had to collect her thoughts. She shuffled through the papers in the file. “It says Marshall Ramsey died, but he didn’t, he’s Paul Alban.”
“He certainly did not die. We just made it look that way, staging a car crash in D.C. Marshall Ramsey was a good man, a good doctor, and he and his team were on their way to getting a confession from a big-time terrorist.”
“Kadar Hadad.”
Crilley nodded. “They took things pretty far, all kinds of enhanced interrogation, to get a confession. I tell you, Clarke, this team got things done and they would have drawn a confession. But there was this FBI agent on the team, McCormick, a real fuckin’ lush. He gets drunk in a bar one night and gets conned by an undercover reporter and tells her all about what they’re doing at the black site. It gets out into the media and boom, it’s all over.”
“What do you mean?”
“Optics. It’s all about optics. People hear of the U.S. government torturing anyone, there’s an outcry, and they want justice. Then, Senator Janet Carter took up the cause and what would’ve been a week-long news story turns into a full-blown indictment on the government.”
“I remember the inquiry.”
“Yeah, and now she has a book on it, and is probably going to throw her hat in the ring for the presidency. This crusade for justice seemed to work well for her. But no one seemed to care about justice for the dead civilians that the terrorists killed. So, scapegoats were needed. And these guys were it. Their names were mentioned in Vanity Fair, exclusive report, one of those ten-page ones. We had no choice but to prosecute him.”
“But he was working for the CIA, under orders of--”
“Optics, Clarke. Let me ask you, what’s worse—that we had someone working outside of protocol or that the whole CIA is involved in what the public perceives as barbaric torture? We hung Ramsey out to dry. The inquiry found him guilty of delaying medically necessary treatment and permitting medically compromised interrogation strategies. He was sentenced to ten years in federal prison.”
“Then he died.”
“He cut a deal.” Crilley rubbed his moustache. “The team lead, Steve Sidwell, who was a real crazy fuck to be honest with you, was causing all sorts of problems inside our black sites. He consistently worked outside of protocol. He was such a loose cannon that prisoners would give false confessions all the time just to avoid any further abuse. Even the inquiry ruled that any information obtained from Kadar Hadad was invalid. Sidwell caused us to follow a bunch of bogus leads costing agents’ lives, not to mention millions of dollars.”
“So why did you keep him?”
“It was hard to get concrete proof of all this. We keep surveillance of interrogations minimal for obvious reasons. And Sidwell kept things pretty hidden. That’s what we used Ramsey for. Ramsey monitored the prisoners while Sidwell and McCormick interrogated them. He witnessed everything Sidwell did. Ramsey’s testimony gave us enough information to put Sidwell away. In exchange for the testimony and his continued work with us in clandestine operations, we gave Ramsey a death certificate.”
“Where is Sidwell now?”
“He was a well-connected man. He spent years running interrogations all over the world, met a lot of people. He disappeared before we could arrest him. Probably sipping piña coladas on a beach in the Canaries or something. As long as he’s not under my watch.” Crilley shrugged. “I don’t really care.”
“This doesn’t make sense.” Bailey shook her head. “Ramsey was about to serve ten years. Why would he leave his family forever to go live in the most dangerous country on earth?”
Crilley smiled, impressed with Bailey’s questions. “If you’re alive, the guys you tortured are going to come for retribution.”
“So his death ensured his family’s safety,” Bailey said, more to herself than to Crilley. She thought about Alban, who had been little more than a voice on the phone to her, faced with the decision to leave his family. How could a man put all that behind him?
Crilley sat with his arms crossed. The edges of his moustache curled up just a bit and the corners of his eyes puckered underneath his glasses.
“So you used him as an operative in Somalia,” Bailey said. “But why embed an operative instead of obtaining a local asset?”
“Good question. The problem was getting an asset that would stay loyal. We’d been through hundreds of assets in the nineties, but they’d either get lazy or sell intelligence off to the highest bidder. We couldn’t get a foothold, and frankly, we couldn’t compete with the offers they were getting from the warlords down there. So, we used Alban. He had a good cover, Frontier Doctors, and we knew he’d stay loyal. On top of it, we could always hang the carrot of coming back to the United States over his head if he ever mentioned quitting.”
“Did he ever mention it?”
“Not once. Not once in a decade. He was as reliable as you could pray for.”
“Until now, when he’s been working on his own,” Bailey said, pursing her lips, wondering if Crilley would bite.
“Bailey, Chris called me.”
Bailey didn’t react. She looked blankly at Crilley.
“You don’t have to pretend. We’re on the same side here.”
Bailey cleared her throat and looked at him with suspicion. “Who gave Alban the manifest?”
“We did.” Crilley nodded.
Bailey leaned back, thinking. “Why?”
“Because we needed to get things done.” Crilley let that sit in the air for a moment and continued. “Somalia is fucked up. Diplomatically, politically, hell—even militarily we haven’t been able to make a lick of difference there. For the past decade, we’ve been doing this business of aiding pirates and warlords to try to establish some government from the inside. How far has that gotten us?”
Bailey nodded her acknowledgment.
“Somalia is a powder keg. It’s a hotbed for terrorism. Every CIA report shows that in the next ten years, terrorism from Somalia is going to be ten times a bigger threat to the U.S. than terrorists from Iran, Syria, and Iraq put together. The only solution, Clarke, is a full-scale war. An invasion to establish a stable government. Do you know how easy it is to get the U.S. government to start a war?” Crilley didn’t wait for an answer this time. “Almost impossible. Look at what it took for us to go into Afghanistan. Thousands of dead American civilians. And why won’t the U.S. government act without a disaster?”
“Optics?” Bailey offered.
“Right. Unless there’s a clear threat coming from a country, the public, the media, will never get behind it. And neither will the government. So we create the threat. We cause it. We make it happen. We get it done. If we show a real threat coming out of Somalia, one that we can control, it becomes a lot safer than if we let it happen on its own.”
“How did you control this?”
“The general at AFRICOM received intel about a shipment of illegal nuclear weapons that were going to be passing through the Gulf of Aden. We go through our channels, using Paul Alban, to get pirates to hijack the ship. We then also inform, through different channels, terrorists about the shipment. They try to smuggle the weapons out and we stop them and recover the weapons, demonstrating the threat.”
“It was all staged?”
Crilley nodded. “The pirates and the terrorists didn’t know about it. But we did.”
“So you planned it all?”
Crilley shook his head. “General Kaczmareck did. All I did was provide him with the channels to Paul Alban.”
Bailey processed all of what she had now been told, what she couldn’
t unknow. “Now that the weapons are recovered…,” she asked. “What now?”
“We wait for the machine to move. Once the media create a stir and the government pulls out of Iraq, then Somalia will be next.”
“What do we do with Alban?”
“His work is done.” Crilley smiled. “He’s done a great service to the country. Let’s get him to come back for a debrief.”
Bailey let out a sigh. “I can let him know. I’ll arrange a flight for him.”
Crilley nodded. “Let’s bring our boy home.”
24
Paul cooked underneath the morning sun. After leaving the Internet café, he climbed into the Jeep and drove around, looking for some shade to park under. He gave up after only a few minutes. Ceerigaabo seemed like a village built out of the desert sand. There were no trees to speak of, and the buildings were all one-story concrete structures.
He ended up parking the Jeep back across from the Internet café. He found a towel in the backseat and put it over his face to shield the sun. He reclined his seat back and closed his eyes. He planned to give his mind a rest and sleep.
But all he did was think. He had been able to dismiss the doctored manifest as a set-up, a way to smuggle weapons into an unstable country. On the balance of reason, even James Wright’s reaction to arrest him as a traitor made some sense. But the resurrection of Kadar Hadad tipped the scales. It felt unreal, as though his mind were making connections that couldn’t possibly exist.
And now a helicopter registered to an oil company had rescued Hadad.
The phone ringing stunned Paul and sent a pounding through his arm. He shot up and rummaged through the contents of the back seat to find James Wright’s cell phone. He put it to his ear and waited for the caller to say something.
It was a woman’s voice. “Paul,” she began. The voice was soft and gentle, barely louder than a whisper, just like Ellen’s. Paul let out a sigh of relief. “Is this Paul?”
