The Prince of Bagram Prison (5 page)

It had been Susan's decision to hire her. This woman, out of all the nurses they had seen. It was almost, Morrow concluded, as if Susan had chosen the Russian to punish him.

I suppose you want the pretty Filipino,
Susan had snapped when he'd questioned her choice. And Morrow had thought, no, any of them would be fine. Anything but this beast.

He'd even gone so far as to have Marina checked out through the old channels. But, to Morrow's disappointment, she'd turned up clean, the product of American evangelicals who sponsored believers from the former Soviet Union. Just a nurse from Leningrad who'd whored herself to God for a plane ticket and a green card.

And now here she was in his house, a ghost of all the Russians he'd known. Grim-faced, suffering the burdens of life. The two of them knocking into each other in the early-morning stillness that, by all rights, should have been his alone.

The kettle shrieked, and Marina's knobby hand sprang for it. She filled the teapot, spooned a generous dollop of blackberry jam into each mug. The jam was hers. She had canned it herself, for all Morrow knew. The first time he'd seen the label-less jar on their kitchen counter, Morrow had thought immediately of Moscow—of the horrible little grocery store near the embassy, half-vacant shelves stocked with sticky bottles of fruit syrup and conserves that looked as if they'd been fabricated in some babushka's kitchen. Misstamped cases of Cuban peanuts one week, moldy Syrian oranges the next. Leftovers to feed an empire.

Marina lifted the tray and turned back to face Morrow. “You take?” she asked.

Goading him, he thought, already fully aware of his answer. He shook his head. “She's expecting you.”

“Yes,” she agreed. But as she moved past him she grunted just slightly, as if to remind him of the boundlessness of her contempt.

Morrow listened to her trudge down the hall, then poured himself a cup of coffee and climbed the stairs to his office. The second floor was his, and his alone now. Susan couldn't climb the stairs, and Marina wouldn't, having made it clear from the beginning that her services were for Susan alone. When she'd first arrived, Morrow had made the mistake of slipping a shirt into Susan's laundry, and Marina hadn't acknowledged him for a full week afterward.

The kind who would have fingered her own mother to the NKVD for a bag of sugar or a week's ration of toilet paper, Morrow had thought then.
Yes, Comrade. The woman is a traitor, Comrade. I have seen it with my own eyes.

Morrow checked his watch, then picked up the phone and dialed Peter Janson's home number in McLean.

“Hi, Dick.” Janson's wife, Anne, answered before Morrow had a chance to speak.

The miracle of caller ID, Morrow reminded himself, quelling decades of habitual suspicion. Yet another battle Susan had won.
For chrissakes, Dick, I want to live like a normal person for once
.

“Good morning, Anne. Is Pete still around?”

Morrow heard her move the phone from her mouth, call out, “Pete! It's Dick Morrow.” Then she was back. “How's Susan doing?”

“She has her good days,” he lied.

“I've been meaning to come by,” Anne offered.

Silence, then the merciful interruption of Janson's voice. “I've got it up here, Anne.”

“Tell Susan I said hello,” Anne said hastily.

Morrow listened for the click that told him she had hung up, then waited a moment more before speaking. “Any word on the boy?” he asked finally.

“Nothing since Andrews and Damien lost him. They're pretty sure he's bolted. It looks like he cleared some stuff out of his room.”

“Any idea where to?”

“It's anyone's guess. But he's a smart kid. He won't stick around Madrid. I'm thinking he may be heading home.”

“To Morocco?” Morrow was skeptical. It had been more than four years now since the boy left, with less than nothing to go back to.

“He's scared, Dick,” Janson offered. “And it's close.”

“Anything more on Bagheri?” Morrow asked.

“Nothing.” Janson was silent for a moment. “I've been looking at the kid's file,” he said at last. “There's a woman. One of the interrogators from Bagram. Apparently they were pretty close.”

“Agency?”

“Army,” Janson answered. “She teaches Arabic at a military college out in the Shenandoah Valley.”

“She's retired?” Morrow asked.

“Ready reserve,” Janson said. “So technically she's still ours.” And then, as if anticipating what Morrow was about to say, “I feel good about this, Dick.”

“Well, I don't. We'd need someone on her, in case she actually finds the boy.”

“Andrews and Damien are still in Madrid.”

Morrow thought for a moment. “The boy saw them?”

“Andrews, yes. Damien, maybe.”

“No. We'll use Kurtz. I assume everything's cleared up on the London end of things.”

“They might know each other,” Janson reminded him. “From Bagram.”

Morrow thought for a moment. A bad idea, and getting worse, he told himself. But then Kurtz had as much to lose as the rest of them. More, in fact. “Fax me what you have on the woman,” Morrow said. “I'll drive out to see her this morning.”

A
DECADE PREPARING FOR THIS MOMENT
, Kat had thought as she stood at the Tangier ferry dock, paralyzed by fear. Ten years of study, and now that she was facing the place she wanted nothing more than to turn and run. She had expected a different Morocco altogether, Africa and Islam tempered by years of colonial rule into something pleasantly and unthreateningly foreign. But for this—the formless women in their black chadors, the grubby children who would not be put off, the frightening men with their leering offers of assistance—she had not been prepared.

Europe. North Africa. Egypt. Turkey,
she could hear herself say,
Who knows?

That first night, humiliated by her own weakness, recoiling at the filth and desperation of the place, she had gratefully allowed herself to be driven past the squalor of the medina, past the African prostitutes ranting outside the Bab el-Marsa and the mass of child beggars at the port entrance, to a tourist hotel in the
ville nouvelle.

Later, safely ensconced in her room, with its beige furnishings and fleur-de-lis wallpaper, she had assured herself that her discomfort had been a product of exhaustion; that, once she ate and slept, the panic she'd felt since stepping off the ferry would fade. The next day she would get up early and have coffee at one of Burroughs's little cafés on the Petit Socco, then hike up through the crooked streets of the old city to the casbah.

But in the morning, after sleeping late, she ordered room service instead: strong French coffee and croissants, with two fried eggs. Sustenance, she told herself, for the day ahead. And what did it matter if she lingered? She had weeks here, months if she so chose.

By the time she showered and dressed and left her room, it was early afternoon on the eleventh of September, the world she was about to enter and her relation to it already utterly and irrevocably changed.

Downstairs, a small group of guests were huddled around the lobby television watching the first disturbing images of the attack on the World Trade Center. The second plane had not yet hit, and the early consensus was that there had been a terrible accident. But even in those first confusing moments Kat had known otherwise, had understood that she would be going home. And despite herself, despite the horror of what had happened, she had been relieved that this was the case, that she would not have to venture any further.

She had not known about Max then, had not even imagined that her brother might be there in the towers. It was almost three weeks before she called her mother and learned that he was among the missing.

A week later, while Kat was still in New York sorting through the detritus of Max's unfinished life, the official notification came through, informing Kat that she had three days to pack her bags and close up her own life before reporting for duty. Two months after that, she found herself on the frigid tarmac in Karshi-Khanabad, waiting for the C-130 that would take her and the rest of the interrogation team to Kandahar.

K
AT KICKED HER FRONT DOOR CLOSED
behind her and lunged for the phone, slamming the receiver to her ear without bothering to look at the caller ID.

“Hello?”

Stuart's voice was so much like Colin's, their lowland accents so closely matched, that for a moment Kat was fooled into thinking everything was fine.

“Colin?”

He hesitated before correcting her. “No, it's Stu.”

“What's wrong?” she asked immediately.

“It's Colin. I'm so sorry, Katy.”

She knew without asking that she had been right. “What happened?”

Stuart paused, struggling audibly to keep his voice together. “Overdose,” he said. “Morphine sulfate. The stuff he'd been taking for his arm. They found him two days ago in a pub bathroom in King's Cross.”

“So it was an accident, then?” Kat heard herself say.“No, Katy. I don't know all the details, but evidently his prescription was time-release. He'd sped up the dosage somehow. Mixed it in with his drink.” Another pause, and that struggle again.

Kat said nothing. She'd known Colin was unhappy. Losing his arm had been hard for him—beyond hard—but it had been three years now, and she had sensed from their last few conversations that he was finally moving on.

There was Stuart's trial coming up, of course. He'd been charged in the death of one of the Bagram detainees. Colin had been the only other member of their team to witness the man's death, and his testimony at the court-martial would weigh heavily in the case against his friend. But they all knew that the proceedings were merely a formality. The man had been asthmatic, something Stuart could not possibly have known, and had died under interrogation as a result of his illness. If anything, Colin's testimony would mitigate Stuart's responsibility.

“Are they sure?” Kat asked.

She felt numb, removed from herself. An accident she had been prepared for. A fall while climbing in the Cuillins or a wreck on his old Triumph. Trying to prove to himself that he was still the same person he'd been before al-Amir. But this, this she could not have imagined. It was a choice she would have thought utterly foreign to the person she had known and loved.

Stuart cleared his throat. “He knew what he was doing, Kat.”

Neither of them spoke then, and for a moment Kat thought Stuart was crying. She wouldn't have been surprised, had seen more than her share of tough-as-nails Special Forces guys break down at makeshift funerals at Kandahar and Bagram.

“There will be a service of some sort,” he offered at last. “I expect his parents will be arranging it. I can let you know.…”

“Yes,” Kat told him, grateful for something concrete to focus on. The requisite motions of mourning. “Of course.”

“I'm sorry,” he said again. “I'm so sorry.”

Then there was nothing more to say.

I
T WAS THE SPRING OF
2002
, and the Guantánamo facility had finally opened, bringing a merciful end to the operation at Kandahar. After four inhuman months at the southern base, defecating into barrels and subsisting on MREs and dust, Kat and the other interrogators had happily welcomed news of an impending transfer north to Bagram.

Kat was one of the last of her team to go, and one of the few not leaving Afghanistan. “That's what we get for being part-timers,” one of her fellow reservists had complained when the orders came down. “Stuck here full-time.” But Kat had thought, At least it'll keep us out of Iraq.

Kat had four days of R&R coming to her, and she'd chosen to head to Oman before settling in at Bagram. Kandahar was a virtual ghost town by then, and Kat found herself the sole passenger as she hustled her gear onto the C-130 that would take her north to K-2.

“Bet you've never flown on a private jet before.” The air-force crewman winked as he secured Kat's gear for the flight. He was younger in looks than in years, with a wily Texas smile and oversized ears. “It's the milk run today. We've got to stop at Bagram and drop off some supplies.” Another wink. “Give you a chance to check out your new digs.”

Reports of a virtual Club Med in the desert had been trickling south for weeks. Hot showers and real meals. Uzbek beer and sunbathing on the roof of the interrogation facility. But as the C-130 finally dipped low for landing, skimming the jagged terrain, Kat's first view of Bagram through the plane's right portal was of a sprawling city of war.

Dirt revetments branched off the airfield like suburban cul-de-sacs; jet-size bunkers burrowed into the rocky, upchurned earth. A bleak neighborhood of tents blanketed the land along the main runway, the makeshift military structures mingling with the larger, Soviet-era buildings. All of it hunkered in the footprint of some two thousand years of bloodshed and defeat.

As the plane braked to a stop on the runway, a handful of scraggly soldiers appeared, as if from nowhere, and scrambled up the massive cargo ramp. Like most of the Special Forces soldiers Kat had encountered in Afghanistan, the men were not in uniform, at least not in the traditional sense. Their clothes were an improvised mix of standard Afghan attire and Western military wear. Mushroomy
pakols
and knee-length
chapans
paired with army-issue camouflage. The men's faces were shoe-leather tan, their beards long and unkempt.

At first, seeing their Colt M-16s, Kat mistook them for Americans, but when the Alfred E. Neuman staff sergeant hustled back to greet them Kat saw one of the men raise a small Velcro flap on the arm of his jacket and flash a Union Jack.

Not asking permission, Kat had thought at the time, for the fact that these men didn't need permission was something she had come to understand early on during her tenure in this strange place. That in a world where a pair of new socks required the signature of a senior officer, these men could hop a plane without answering a single question.

Kat didn't pay much attention to the soldiers on the flight up. The deafening roar of the C-130's engines made conversation impossible, and most of the men had taken the opportunity to sleep. But as the plane banked toward the landing strip at K-2, Kat looked up and saw one of the men watching her.