The Candidate (23 page)

ERICA STANDS IN FRONT OF the full-length mirror in her hotel room at seven thirty the next morning. She's exhausted and out of sorts, but edgy and eager to get going. She's wearing the men's clothes Nancy brought her and the flak jacket from Bob Ruggio. With her hair pinned up and the hat's brim pulled down, she could pass for a man, at least from a distance. It's a strange and disconcerting feeling. And a little bit heady. In the Arab world—not to mention the rest of the world—the rules are different for men. They have freedom to come and go without worrying about being sexually assaulted or raped, freedom to look like crap some days, freedom to seize power without apology or explanation, to be full-out jerks. Erica smiles ruefully and walks around a little bit, almost clomping in her boots.

You know what? I'd still rather be a woman.

But Nancy was right—she feels more secure and anonymous in these clothes.

As she walks through the lobby, no one gives her a second glance. She joins Bob Ruggio and the cameraman at their table in the dining room. The room is pretty full, and even at this hour there are a lot of sidelong glances and huddled whispers. Erica scans the faces—who
can be trusted? Who is an enemy? She feels slightly nauseous, uneasy, a stranger in a strange land, a place where scorpions crawl across bedsheets and ISIS kills innocents in the name of God.

“This is Riley Smith,” Bob says.

Riley is young and eager, handsome and sun-burnished with a hipster beard, clearly a young adventurer.

“Thank you for signing up,” Erica says.

“I'm juiced,” Riley says, inhaling a plate of eggs and sausage and potatoes.

“Smart outfit, Erica,” Bob says. “Are you anxious?”

“Yes. You?”

“I've been doing this for a while, and I always try to stay anxious. I've located the jail on GPS; we'll go there first. It may be full of squatters, but we'll see. Then we'll drive to this tiny village and look for the guard.”

“Hamade will be here at eight.”

“It's fantastic that he's coming. He's considered one of the country's best journalists. He may be very helpful both in finding the guard and getting him to talk. My Arabic is passable but . . .”

The men eat, but Erica is just too queasy to get down anything but half a banana. She's having a hard time sitting still. Eight o'clock comes—and goes. So do eight fifteen and eight thirty. The mood at the table grows ever more apprehensive.

“I'm going to go call,” Erica says. She heads out of the restaurant, filled with prying ears, and finds a quiet lobby alcove. She calls Hamade's house. A woman answers.

“This is Erica Sparks. I'm trying to reach Anwar Hamade.”

“This is his sister-in-law. Anwar is dead.” She sounds very sad and very angry. Erica can hear sobbing in the background.

“Oh no.
No!
”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“When he turned on his car, it exploded.”

“I am so sorry.”

“Maybe you should be. Maybe you are the reason he is dead.”

Erica feels a massive wave of guilt pummel her. Her mind goes blank for a moment. It just flatlines. What can she possibly say? There is more wailing in the background. Erica starts to rock on her feet, at a loss. Thankfully, Hamade's sister-in-law hangs up. Erica stands there, numb. She remembers Hamade from last night—serious, ironic, helpful. Clearly a man of the greatest integrity. A fellow journalist. Who would want her to move forward with her investigation. To quit now would dishonor him and his death.

She returns to the table. “His car was rigged, he's dead.”

“Oh, sweet mercy,” Bob says.

Riley goes silent and Erica knows that both of them are rethinking today's trip. She isn't. Horrific as it is, Hamade's death confirms her suspicions that someone is very threatened by her investigation. And that she's closing in on some answers.

Erica leans across the table and lowers her voice. “Listen, Bob, Riley, if you want to back out, I'll understand. But this isn't some puff piece about the horrors Mike Ortiz endured as a hostage and how brave his escape was. I wouldn't put us in danger for a story like that; I'd rely on stock footage. I believe Ortiz underwent some sort of brainwashing in that jail and that he came back to the States a different man, under control of some outside entity, maybe the CIA. Hamade felt that the whole thing—Ortiz's capture, imprisonment, and escape—may have been a setup. If Ortiz wins the presidency, he will be a fraud and maybe a puppet. And who knows what dark agenda his puppet masters have.”

There's a long pause and then Riley says, “Whoa.”

“I'm in,” Bob says simply.

“Me too,” Riley says.

Erica stands up and says, “Let's do this.”

THEIR DRIVER, STOIC IF PROFESSIONAL, heads north out of Baghdad with Riley riding shotgun and Erica and Bob in back. The city gives way to unkempt suburbs, and then they're in the countryside. The land and sky are vast and unforgiving. How does anyone survive in this brutal landscape? But they do. And have for thousands of years.

Erica is hyperalert, looking for any signs of trouble or ambush. She scans the landscape, often turning to look behind them. As they continue north they pass small villages with gas stations and car repair shops, restaurants, general stores with their wares piled out front, and children playing, families walking. These people are far enough away from the cities and towns to feel somewhat safe from the worst of war, and Erica gets a sense of life going on as always. It's really all anybody wants, isn't it, no matter where they live—the chance to raise a family, earn a living, snatch some good times. And yet their leaders seem to prefer bombs and bloodshed. Eternal bloodshed. If Mike Ortiz is elected president, she wonders, will he lead the country back into war? Will his time as a prisoner give him political cover? Is that
why
the CIA—or whoever—wants to control him?

The traffic is steady—buses jammed with passengers, their suitcases tied to the top and sides, small trucks loaded with crates of squawking chickens, old American cars with their colors faded, military transports. And all around them the sun and heat, heat and sun. Erica feels disoriented. It's all so foreign and forbidding, she feels like they could be swallowed up by the sand and sky and never heard from again.

“We're about halfway there,” Bob says, his voice tense.

“You want a little establishing footage?” Riley asks. Clearly he's eager to put his nervous energy to use.

“Wait until we get closer,” Erica answers.

The miles pass in expectant silence. And then the driver turns right onto a dirt road.

“Where are you going?” Bob demands in Arabic.

The driver doesn't answer but his jaw is set, his eyes unreadable behind dark glasses. And then up ahead, in the distance, they see a van.

“It's a setup,” Erica says, her pulse rocketing up.

As they approach, the van's back door flies opens and two men with machine guns leap out. Bob pulls out a pistol and slams it down on the driver's skull. He cries out but keeps driving.

Erica reaches over the front seat and grabs the driver's door handle and pushes his door open, crying to Riley, “Kick him out!”

Riley braces himself against his door and kicks, hard. The driver grips the wheel like a vise, and they're getting closer to the men with the machine guns. Erica fights to pry his hands off the wheel, and they loosen a little. Bob brings the pistol down on his skull again and blood spurts out as Riley kicks and kicks. And then, with a piercing cry, the driver lets go of the wheel and is ejected from the car. Riley scrambles into the driver's seat, grabs the wheel and turns it hard, kicking up dust, executing a tight screeching turnaround. Then he floors it.

As they speed away, Erica looks back to see their driver struggling to his feet and the two assailants growing smaller and smaller. The only sound in the car is the three of them gulping air. They reach the main road and Riley turns right, heading north toward the prison.

“Is that the best they can do?” Erica asks finally. And they laugh. But the laughter is hollow, and the day takes on a darker cast. Erica thinks of Greg, of his years as a war photographer—traveling into dangerous territory like this was just another day on the job. How did he do it? Live with the fear, all day and all night, every day and every night? The man has true courage. If only he were with her now.

They drive deeper into the countryside, and settlements grow few and far between. If they get into trouble out here, they're on their own.

“There should be a road coming up on the left,” Bob says.

Sure enough, they reach a rutted, torn-up paved road. Riley turns and the car rattles along.

“We should be coming to a small settlement. According to my sources, it's been abandoned. Still, I think we should stop and do some reconnaissance before we drive in.”

And then there it is, up ahead, a small collection of one-story buildings that look like a Middle Eastern ghost town. Riley stops and turns off the engine. Almost instantly the car turns into a sauna. Bob takes a pair of binoculars out of his bag and looks through them.

“No signs of life as far as I can tell. You check.” He hands the binoculars to Riley, who looks and then hands them to Erica. She scans the landscape—there are about a dozen small structures, and the ground is littered with dented oil barrels and a couple of dead vehicles. There's something eerie and malevolent about the scene. It's too quiet. As quiet as death. She scans the perimeter and sees—nothing. Just endless sky and endless desert. And eternity—implacable and indifferent.

“Judging from the pictures I've seen, I'd say the structure on the left was the jail,” Bob says.

Erica scans the jail. It's beat-up, has a few high horizontal windows. Like the rest of the settlement it looks long-deserted.

“Let's go in. Riley, how about I drive and you shoot our approach?” Erica says.

She gets out, opens the driver's door, and gets in as he moves over and hefts up his camera to start shooting through the windshield.
Behind her, Bob leans out a window, his gun at the ready. Erica turns on the engine and taps the accelerator, driving no more than five miles an hour, practically rolling toward the spectral settlement. Then they've arrived. She turns off the engine and that deathly quiet settles over them. They get out of the car and walk over to the jail as Riley shoots more establishing footage.

The door to the jail is ajar; Erica pushes it open and they all step inside. It takes a moment for their eyes to adjust to the sudden dark, pierced only by the shafts of light from the doorway and the narrow horizontal windows set high in the far wall.

Then the smell hits them—it's some rank combination of tobacco and sweat and urine and excrement and fear. They're at one end of a corridor that runs down the center of the jail. Erica slowly walks down it. There are three cells on each side, enclosed by mortar walls, with a small window in each door for food to be passed through. She pushes open the door to one of the cells and steps inside. It's tiny, no more than four feet by four feet, smaller than most kennel cages, with a dirt floor and no window, no room to lie down, no room to think or dream or plan. But more than enough room to go insane.

Erica feels a wave of claustrophobia and steps back into the corridor. She reaches the room at the back, the interrogation room. There are several straight-back chairs and an old table. There's no sink, no toilet, no running water, no electricity. And the air is so hot and dense that Erica feels as if it has substance and shape—moving through it takes effort. Sweating in her heavy clothes and flak jacket, made slightly dizzy by the heavy air, she feels alive and alert. Something happened to Mike Ortiz in this jail, and she feels she is moving toward the truth of what it was.

“What a place,” she says quietly. “Riley, let's go outside and get some footage.”

Erica stands about twenty feet in front of the jail as Riley shoots. “Behind me—here in the middle of the blistering Iraq desert—is the jail where Mike Ortiz was held captive for nine months and nine days.
The jail is part of this unnamed and abandoned settlement. Let's take a look inside.”

Riley trails Erica as she walks back into the jail, his camera's light on, throwing the creepy interior into stark light and shadow. Bob stands beside Riley, checking the small monitor on the side of the camera, nodding encouragement to Erica.

“One of these six identical cells housed Ortiz,” Erica says. “This is where he slept, ate, and exercised. Food came once a day, if that, and was usually a slimy gruel. Ortiz lost forty pounds. There was no toilet, only a bucket that was emptied by his captors when they felt like it. Ortiz had no books, no writing implements or paper, no contact with the outside world.” She moves down to the office. “This is the room where he was interrogated by Al-Qaeda officers. At first they wanted him to divulge intelligence and to renounce the United States, but when he refused, they tortured him, almost for sport. He was whipped and threatened with beheading. Standing here, in air that is so hot and thick that breathing is difficult, it's hard to imagine how Ortiz survived with his sanity intact. And yet he took this hell and turned it into strength and will.” She exhales and tells Riley, “That's good for now.”

Riley turns off the camera and Bob says, “Looks strong, Erica.”

“I think we've got what we need here. Now let's go try and find that guard.” As they leave, Erica takes one last look behind her at the dark dank prison.

Isolation. Sensory deprivation. Fear. Indoctrination. Love.

WITH BOB RUGGIO NOW DRIVING, they continue north through the sandblasted landscape. After twenty minutes, Bob turns down a paved road. “The village should be a couple of miles up here.” The three of them go on high alert as they put more distance between themselves and any possible escape.

And then there it is. Bob stops the car when they're still several hundred yards away, and they look for signs of trouble. The village is tiny; there couldn't be more than a couple of hundred residents, but it's tidy and benign looking. There's a small food store, children playing, a man is plastering the outside of a house, and in the central square a woman is drawing water from a well using a hand pump that looks like something out of an old Western.

“You'll often find these villages around a dependable well,” Bob says. “And they have power.” He nods to the overhead line running in from the main road.

“And we're sure Ortiz's former guard lives here?” Erica asks.

“I trust my source. I've got the guard's name, Akram Kouri. So we should be able to find out, one way or the other.”

Several villagers notice their car and stop what they're doing to
stare. “Places like this don't get a lot of visitors. Remember, they don't want trouble any more than we do,” Bob says. “Let me go break the ice.”

He walks into the village square. A middle-aged man comes out of the food store; he has a paunch and carries himself with authority. He greets Bob and they shake hands and talk. After a few minutes Bob waves to the others to join him. By the time Erica and Riley—carrying his camera—reach Bob, a small crowd has gathered. They're curious and wary, but there's no hostility. Still, Erica knows that ISIS could be hiding anywhere—even in a tiny village like this one—and her heart is pounding in her chest.

“How do you do?” the man says. “I am Ahmet and this is my village and my shop. You are welcome. We do not have war here. Are you hungry?”

While Ahmet seems trustworthy and peaceable, Erica wants to find Kouri as quickly as possible. “We're fine, thank you. What we would like is to speak to Akram Kouri.”

“Ah . . . Akram. He is . . . ah . . .” Ahmet makes a circular gesture with his index finger beside his ear.

“Was he a guard at the prison where Mike Ortiz was held?” Erica asks.

“Yes. He see bad things. It is sad. Come.”

Ahmet leads the three of them through the village—they pass small houses, gardens, and yards home to chickens and goats. They reach the house farthest from the square. There is a walled front yard with dusty chickens pecking at the dusty earth. An elderly woman is sitting in a plastic-webbed lawn chair that looks like it was picked up at Lowe's a decade ago. Her face is crisscrossed with a crazy quilt of deep wrinkles and she's shucking a bowl of peas. As they enter the yard she frowns at them. When she sees Erica she leans back in surprise; then she narrows her eyes, sneers, and looks away.

“She is Akram's mother,” Ahmed explains.

Bob hands the old woman some bills, and she nods her head toward the front door. They walk inside—the house is just one room, small
and dark and at least ten degrees cooler than outside. The place smells like sweat and rancid cooking oil overlain with cheap air freshener. There are two single beds at one end and a rudimentary kitchen at the other. There's an old man sitting at a small table covered with oilcloth. No, wait, he's not old. He's middle-aged, but his face is so haunted, so ravaged and sunken, that he looks as old as his mother.

There's a tiny tinny radio on the table. The BeeGees are singing “Stayin' Alive” and the man is making jerking gestures in response to the beat. He is definitely off in his own private Idaho.

Ahmet greets him, and the man looks at them blankly. Then he recoils. Ahmet speaks to him calmly, soothingly, and the man relaxes a little.

“Can you tell him we want to find out about what happened in the prison?” Erica says.

Ahmet speaks to Kouri, loudly and slowly. A look of abject fear comes over his face and his body shrinks in on itself. Riley stays in the background, quietly filming.

Ahmet continues to question him, and Kouri grows more and more agitated and begins to speak in a fevered rush. Then he leaps out of his chair, eyes wild, words spewing, and he mimics strangling someone, now a blindfold is going on, now he's screaming in someone's ear, now he's tying them down in a chair, now he's whipping them. He's in a frenzy, a fit, talking, babbling, flailing.

And then, like a switch was flipped, he stops and goes completely still. But his eyes remain wide with fear and agitation.

“Ask him who did it,” Erica whispers.

“Who?” Ahmet asks.

The man remains silent, sits back down, and a bizarre calm settles over him.

“Please, try again. I need to know,” Erica says.

Ahmet squats down so he's level with the man. He puts a hand on his thigh, lowers his voice, and asks again. There's a pause and time stops and Erica feels suspended over a great chasm, the chasm of truth.
Then Kouri mouths an almost inaudible answer. Ahmet brings his ear close to Kouri's mouth and asks him to repeat it. He does.

“What did he say?”
Erica implores.

Ahmet turns to her. “He said they were Chinese.”

In the pounding desert heat Erica feels her blood run cold. She needs to be sure. She asks, in a slow somber tone, “You are sure the men who came and tortured Ortiz were Chinese?”

Ahmet asks and Kouri nods.

“How often did they come?”

“He says they came all the time.”

Then the old man's body starts to shake and he starts to cry and blabber.

“What's he saying?” Erica asks.

“He's afraid the men are coming for him. Today.”