The Midnight House (13 page)

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—”

“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.

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.

“I want to talk to your son. Interview him.”

“Why Alaa? It must be thousands of detainees who’ve been released.”

“Only a few from the secret prisons.”

Neither Zumari nor the imam looked convinced.

“You wonder why I do this. I’ll tell you about myself. I’m not a jihadi. I pray, sure, but I never hated the Kaffirs. Back in the 1990s, I lived in France. I liked it. But five years ago, a boy I know, a friend’s son, Ali, he went to Afghanistan. He wasn’t really a jihadi. Not very religious. He went with the Talibs for the adventure, I think.”

“Adventure,” the imam said.

“Kuwait, it’s boring. Office buildings, oil wells, desert. These boys have nothing to do but drive around all day. Not even a wife, unless they’re rich. The sheikhs take three, four women each, and there’s none for the rest of us. With the Talibs, they can fire AKs, throw a grenade. Pretend they’re soldiers.”

“You don’t have children.”

“I’m not a sheikh. I didn’t have the money to marry. Anyway, Ali, the Americans caught him in Afghanistan and kept him for two years. Finally, they released him. When he came back, he told me how they kept him in a little cage. I think it made him crazy. He was so angry. At the Americans, the Kuwaitis, his own family.”

“He was like that before he went to Afghanistan?”

“No. He was a regular boy. But once he came back to Kuwait, he wasn’t anymore. He only ever talked of martyrdom. And then he disappeared. I found out later, he went to Iraq, became a fedayeen”—a martyr.

“A bomber.”

“Yes. He killed himself outside a police station in Baghdad. Thirteen police died. And after that, I had the idea for these interviews. So that everyone will know what the Americans are doing. I know about computers and filming. But it isn’t easy to find the men, or get them to talk. They may be home, but they aren’t free. They know our police are working with the Americans and don’t want to be embarrassed. And lots of them are just—” Wells spread his hands out, meaning
disappeared
. Then winced as his shoulder caught fire again.

“You should go to Saudi.”

“In Saudi the
mukhabarat
are too good.” Wells paused. “And your son, there’s something else, another reason I want to talk to him. I heard he wasn’t a jihadi at all. Just a man who wanted to set up a cell-phone business. An innocent.”

“You heard this? Who told you?”

“People see the videos, the Web site, and they e-mail me. Most of the time I can’t confirm what they say. But this time I found someone who could.”

“Who?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

Wells looked to the imam. “It is best for all of us if I’m the only one who knows. For the same reason you took these precautions to pick me up.”

“And my son’s story—”

“He tells whatever he likes, as much or as little. I protect him, hide his face. Show just enough of him that people know he’s real. The video takes one, two hours to make. Three at most, if your son has a lot to tell. I send it to the Web site, and you never see me again.”

And along the way I’ll find out if he knows anything about the murders, Wells thought.

“Even if I wanted to help, I don’t know where he is,” Zumari said.

“But you can reach him.”

“I can try.”

“Then please try.”

They were silent as the truck rumbled on. Hani dialed his phone, spoke so quietly that Wells couldn’t hear.

“Do you have anything else to tell us? ” the imam said.

“No.”

The truck slowed, then stopped.

“Kuwaiti,” the imam said. “Your shoulder is all right?”

“I think so, yes.”

The imam handed Wells his passport and wallet. “Then this is where we leave you. There’s a ramp ahead. Take it down, go back to your hotel. Stay away from my house”—the mosque. “If we need to see you again, we will find you.”

“I’m sure,” Wells said. “I ask only this: whatever you decide—” Wells broke off.

“Yes?”

“Decide soon. It will be safer for all of us.”

An air horn blasted through the cargo compartment. Hani pulled up the back gate of the truck. Wells saw they were on a highway, the traffic piling up behind them.

“Ma-a-saalama,”
he said to Ihab and the imam. Peace be with you. Good-bye.

“Ma-a-saalama,”
they said in turn. Wells jumped out the back of the truck. A wave of dizziness hit him and his knees buckled, but he stayed upright. Behind him, the truck rumbled off. He didn’t turn to watch it go.

He found himself on an elevated highway, staring east, into the rising sun. To the north and south were endless zigzag blocks of misshapen concrete buildings. Many seemed unfinished, their roofs turned into dumps filled with half-melted tires and lumpy plastic bags of garbage. He must still be in Cairo, somewhere on the ring road that had once marked the outer edges of the city.

A Mercedes sedan nearly knocked him over. He turned to look for the exit ramp—and saw, looming over the city on a plateau to the west, the three great pyramids, just beginning to reflect the glow of the morning sun. Wells understood immediately why European adventurers had thought that they’d been built by aliens. They were immense, so much larger than the buildings around them that they seemed to be governed by entirely different laws of physics. Wells stared at them until a honk brought him back to the highway. He walked slowly down the ramp until the city swallowed up him and the pyramids.

 

 

HEADING BACK
to the hotel, Wells saw the scope of the city at last. Close to twenty million people lived in Cairo, though no one, not even the Egyptian government, knew exactly how many. The shabby concrete and brick buildings went on block after block, mile after mile, unrelieved by parks or gardens or even palm trees. The place was overwhelming, ugly, primordial, Los Angeles without highways, Rio without the ocean. Year after year it had grown east and west into the desert and south along the Nile, swallowing every settlement in its path.

Wells had seen only one other city as big and dense, as noisy and smoggy: Beijing. But in Beijing the hand of the Chinese state touched every alley and dumpling stand. Beijing was order disguised as chaos. Not Cairo. Cairo was chaos, undisguised. Cairo lacked any organizing principle. Except Islam.

A minivan pulled in front of them, and the cabbie banged his brakes to avoid a collision. Wells stifled a groan as the seat belt grabbed his shoulder. The van, improbably enough, seemed to have a load of goats as passengers.

Suddenly, Wells badly wanted to find his way to the Intercontinental for air-conditioning, a hot shower, and a cold beer. He reminded himself that he’d spent a decade living without any of the three. No, he would go back to the Lotus, where he belonged. And as the traffic inched forward, he smiled to himself. The
mukhabarat,
the jihadis—he was back in the game.

T
he Counterterrorist Center was the CIA’s fastest-growing unit. To make room for it, the agency had built offices in a subterranean maze carved from the foundations of the New Headquarters Building. The fight against Al Qaeda ate a disproportionate share of the agency’s budget, so the new space had bells and whistles the rest of the CIA lacked: flat-panel screens, dedicated teraflop-speed connections to the National Security Agency and Department of Defense, and videoconferencing equipment capable of projecting in three dimensions. Somewhere, Osama bin Laden was quaking in his boots.

Or not.

Brant Murphy met Shafer at the main entrance to CTC, a miniature version of the agency’s main lobby, two guards overseeing a bank of turnstiles. The official logic behind the secondary checkpoint was that CTC needed extra security because it so frequently hosted visitors from other federal agencies and foreign spy services. In reality, the second guard post was further proof that the unit held itself apart from the rest of the agency.

Murphy was handsome and compact, with deep blue eyes and close-cropped blond hair that had lost its grip on his temples and was fighting a rearguard action against its inevitable fate as a widow’s peak. He had a firm two-pump handshake, friendly but manly. Shafer couldn’t understand how Murphy had ended up with 673. Spending a year-plus in Poland interrogating detainees didn’t seem like his idea of a great time.