The Prince of Bagram Prison (27 page)

The first lie, so small, yet so reckless, not thinking of the lies that would follow, but only of what had to be done in that moment:
Hamid Bagheri is here in Madrid.

And the look on the American's face when Jamal said this, a depth of greed the boy knew well. The same insatiability Jamal had recognized so many times before, in the face of that first man in Tangier, in Abdullah's face, and Bagheri's.

You have seen him?

Another scrap.
Twice now. At the mosque on the Calle Espino.

You're certain, Jamal? You're absolutely certain?

Yes. In the name of the Prophet, yes.

He was alone?

The first time, yes. The second time there was another man as well.
Thinking: details, one must have details to be believed.
A Saudi.
The lie now unfolding as if of its own free will. Already too late to take anything back.

And, just like that, the American was hooked.

“I
NEVER MEANT
for anyone to get hurt,” Jamal said when he had finished with his story. “But Mr. Justin, he was always pressing and pressing. Jamal, what do you see? Jamal, what do you hear? He said he was going to stop giving me money if I didn't tell him something.”

Still and always the pleaser, Kat thought, not for one moment doubting the boy. She had seen the same thing happen more than once in the booth, had experienced it firsthand: that dangerous moment when the prisoner's need to confess and the interrogator's need to hear that confession threaten to overwhelm logic and reason, when the two parties, normally enemies, become willing partners in a deception that is often only nominally about the facts at hand, and sometimes not at all.

Kat and the others had been warned about this over and over, had had their own vulnerabilities constantly drummed into them. No doubt Jamal's American had been taught the same lessons. But it is one thing to understand our shortcomings and quite another to correct them.

The times Kat had been drawn in by false confessions, the shift from disclosure to fabrication had occurred with such simultaneous force and subtlety that neither she nor her prisoner had been aware of what was happening. And in each case, by the time she realized her mistake, neither could tell where the lies ended and the truth began.

“It's okay,” she told Jamal. “I understand.”

But it was not okay. Not at all. Where she had before seen the narrowest possibility for escape, Kat now saw none.

Jamal's face brightened. “We can explain everything, yes? You will help me.”

Kat thought about this for a moment. She did not want to deceive him any further; there had been too much of this already. But she could not bring herself to tell him the truth, either—that his lie had outgrown itself, that no explanation would change that fact.

Kat still did not understand exactly what had happened, what it was about Bagheri's presence in Madrid that could have set the events of the last week in motion. But, whatever the reason, Colin and Stuart were both dead because of it. She thought it unlikely that she and Jamal would be allowed to simply walk away, knowing what they knew.

Perhaps Bagheri knew something about what had happened out at the salt pit. Perhaps the same thing Colin and Stuart both knew. Perhaps the SBS team really had been behind Bagheri's escape, as Hariri had suggested. But none of this explained Morrow's interest in Bagheri, or Kurtz's, or why they would have waited until now to get rid of the two SBS men.

No, she told herself, remembering how she'd found Colin waiting for Kurtz at the Special Forces camp, and the next night in the ICE, Kurtz's face when the SBS team had taken fire, there was something more, something she was missing.

Shaking her head, she looked back at Jamal. “I'm sorry,” she said, “but this isn't something I can explain away. We're in trouble, Jamal. Serious trouble.”

“But there is no Bagheri,” Jamal insisted. “Don't you understand?”

“I do understand, but it's not that simple.”

Jamal said nothing.

“Look,” Kat told him, “I'll figure something out, but we can't stay here. This is the first place Kurtz will look.”

At the mention of Kurtz's name, Jamal's face grew pale.

Kat rose and extended her arm to Jamal to help him up, but Jamal didn't stand. Instead, he reached into the pocket of his pants, pulled out a scrap of paper, and offered it to Kat.

“What is this?” she asked, taking the paper, unfolding it. It appeared to have been torn from a book. There were eight letters in bold type: es kepler. And, below the letters, a hastily scrawled U.S. phone number.

“Mr. Harry,” Jamal said. “He will help us. He said so.”

Kat contemplated the northern Virginia area code. “Who's Mr. Harry?”

“From Madrid,” Jamal explained. “Before Mr. Justin.” He made an encouraging motion with his hands. “We can call him.”

Kat shook her head. “No, Jamal. I don't think that's a good idea.”

But it was clear from the look on Jamal's face that the matter was not up for discussion. “We call Mr. Harry,” he said, with uncharacteristic resolve. “Or you go without me.” And then, throwing Kat's own words back at her: “You must trust me.”

A
FTER SIX UNBEARABLE MONTHS
back in the States, Harry had finally been posted to Kinshasa. Back to the night-soil circuit, and he'd been happy to go. Relieved to be anywhere besides a desk at Langley.

Irene had been the anti-Susan. A southern girl with a genteel Virginia accent and a sorority pin. Kappa Kappa Gamma, Sweetbriar chapter. A congressman's daughter indulging her diminutive wild streak with a foreign-service job before settling down. She hadn't been a virgin when they met, but close, still uncomfortable with the lights on, still discreetly absenting herself once a month. Always freshly showered and perfectly made up, smelling of lilies and lilacs.

When they were first introduced at the embassy Halloween party, Harry had mistaken her pink twinset and pleated skirt for a cleverly ironic costume. It wasn't until a few days later, when he ran into her in the cafeteria, that he realized this was they way she always dressed.

When Harry was with her, it was as if the last decade—Vietnam and the mess at home—had never happened, as if what had brought them to Africa was not another of Kissinger's dirty wars but a college mixer.

This was what he had fallen in love with: not Irene but the illusion of himself she offered, the person she was not.

I
T WAS NEARLY THREE IN THE MORNING
when the phone next to Harry's bed rang, jolting him out of an unusually pleasant dream in which he and Char had moved from the Tamarack Pines into a rambling villa in the Kona Hills and were diligently exploring their new home, stopping to have sex in each of the many rooms.

The reality of waking wouldn't have been nearly so painful if it hadn't been for the hangover that accompanied it. On his way back to the motel from Morrow's house, Harry had stopped at a package store and bought a fifth of cheap vodka. It was a decision he'd known he would regret in the morning, and he hadn't been wrong. Though, to be fair, it was hardly morning.

He reached for the phone in the darkness, groping the unfamiliar bedside table, knocking the vodka bottle to the floor as he did so and spilling what little was left of the contents. The smell of the liquor made him gag.

At last his hand found the receiver. “Hello?”

“It's me.” Irene.

“Look,” Harry began, “you don't have to do this. I underst—”

“He called,” she said, cutting him off. Her voice was nervous, electric.

Loving it, Harry thought, as they all did. When it came right down to it, all those things he'd been taught at the Farm about people's weaknesses, about money or shame or sex, were nothing compared to the hook of power, of being on the inside looking out.

“He's in Casablanca,” Irene continued. “At the Hotel des Amis, in the medina. I told him you're coming.”

Harry didn't know what to say. “There will be questions,” he told her. “You'll tell Morrow that I forced you to do this. I threatened you.”

“I'm not afraid of Morrow,” Irene said, and Harry thought, No? You should be. But he didn't say it.

There was a long silence then, neither of them ready to go, but neither with anything left to say.

“I'm sorry,” Harry told her at last.

“Don't be,” Irene said.

“I think you must come now.”

It was 6 AM, and Marina's voice was Morrow's wake-up call. The words were ambiguous, but the meaning was clear, and Morrow was up as soon as they were spoken, jamming his feet into his shoes, shrugging into his jacket.

It was daylight by the time he crossed the Key Bridge, heading toward Georgetown, a postcard morning. Down on the Potomac a single scull slid fluidly upstream, the rower moving with machinelike precision. Sweep, dip. Sweep, dip. Legs gliding forward and back, hands crossing and uncrossing. Body sexless from this distance, transformed entirely by the singular concentration the task required.

It's time, Dick,
he could hear Susan say. Another morning like this one, another hurried drive. Years earlier, and the details of it were still fresh in his mind. Susan's dress: red with yellow flowers. Her hair pulled back into a neat bun. Her face filled out, softened by the pregnancy.

The memory was so vivid that when he pulled into the driveway now he half expected to see her waiting for him as she'd been that day, her red leather suitcase in one hand, her other hand on her belly. Laughing at him as he leaped from the car. Mouth open, head thrown back, laughing.

But there was no one to greet him this morning. Morrow pulled into the driveway and sat in the Mercedes with his hand on the key, unable to bring himself to turn off the ignition, unable to go inside.

After what must have been at least half an hour, the side door opened and Marina appeared. She was wearing a housecoat and worn blue terry-cloth scuffs, and her hair was tucked, as always, into a cotton scarf. It had been weeks since she'd gotten a full night's sleep, and she looked justifiably exhausted.

She came down the steps and walked to Morrow's open window. “Just like the other one,” she said, shaking her head. “Too afraid to come inside.” She reached into the car and put her hand on Morrow's hand, turned the ignition off. Her face was almost touching his. Her smell filled the car. It was the odor of days of unwashed sweat and wet wool and boiled meat, a smell that seemed not acquired but somehow native to the woman.

He was going to ask her what she'd meant by her previous comment, but she interrupted him before he had a chance.

“Don't worry,” Marina said. “She has just had her morphine. You will not need to speak to her.” Then, triumphantly, she released Morrow's hand and moved away.

W
HEN KAT WAS IN INTELLIGENCE SCHOOL
, she took a class called “Games.” The course was legendary, as was the instructor who taught it, a wizened, grandfatherly figure whose heavy Slovak accent and crude forearm tattoo betrayed a past of which he never spoke, and to whom Kat and the other students referred simply as Yoda.

Appropriately, the curriculum of “Games” consisted of just that. Every day for three hours, Kat and the others would struggle through various seemingly unsolvable puzzles while Yoda looked on, offering a rare grunt of approval or, more often, a cluck of displeasure.

His favorite challenges, and by far the most difficult, were a series of three-dimensional wooden puzzles in which various pieces fit together to form sculptures of sorts. What made these puzzles so difficult was the fact that there were many possible solutions, but only one in which all of the pieces could be used.

“Remember,” Yoda would say as he paced the room, his long sleeves rolled conspicuously down to his wrists, even at the sweltering height of summer. “Every piece in its place, even the ones that look like they don't fit.”

The old man had died not long after Kat graduated, and “Games” was no longer offered. But on more than one occasion Kat had heard Yoda's signature phrase used by colleagues who had graduated long after she had.

Every piece in its place,
she thought now as she sat in the window of the hotel room watching the narrow lane below. It was early afternoon and the passageway was clogged with foot traffic—housewives doing their daily shopping and tourists hunting for the ever-elusive deal. Behind her, in the room's single slip of a bed, Jamal was sleeping, as he had been for some time, moving now and again in restless dreams. She still did not know what to make of his Mr. Harry, but her options were slim enough that she was willing to wager a great deal on the boy's judgment. What other choice did she have at this point?

Down in the lane, a man appeared, a European with a build close enough to Kurtz's that Kat's heart seized up for a moment. Then he drew closer, passed beneath the window, and moved on.

Kat watched him disappear into the crowd, then reached into the breast pocket of her jacket for a pen and a scrap of paper. If she could see what the pieces were, she told herself, thinking of her old teacher again, she might just solve the puzzle.