The Prince of Bagram Prison (8 page)

Ducking the venomous glances of the older boys, Jamal crossed the Calle San Bernardo and made his way up the shop's crumbling front steps. It was a place where nothing good had happened, to which Jamal had never once wished to return, and he had to remind himself once again of why he'd come—of the horror of his first crossing, of how, too poor to bargain for a space on a boat, he'd nearly suffocated in an airless shipping container. It was an experience he did not want to repeat.

Jamal forced himself across the threshold and into the wanly lit interior of the shop. The same posters he recognized from five years earlier still hung on the walls. Advertisements scavenged from the back dumpster of a travel agency in an unsuccessful attempt to legitimize the place. Panoramas of Fès and Ouarzazate, the Roman ruins at Volubilis. The colors faded now from desert golds and reds to ghostly blues. A world at permanent twilight.

In the rear of the shop, above a long counter emblazoned with airline insignia, an ancient television blared the din of a football match. And behind the counter, his bulk perched on a low stool, facing the screen, sat Abdullah. The turtle, Jamal and the other boys had called him, the crude nickname a reference to more than just his wide body and pinched head.

Jamal took a tentative step forward, and Abdullah glanced over his shoulder. “Get out,” he said gruffly, assessing Jamal with a hasty but practiced glance. The merchandise too old or too worn for his purposes. And then, when Jamal didn't move, “What do you think this is? An employment agency?”

Jamal ducked his head slightly, acutely aware of just how much rested on this one gesture of acquiescence, on the perfection of it. A pantomime of fear and desire at the same time.
My child,
he could hear Abdullah say,
my favorite one.
Breath and lips hot on his neck.
I'm not hurting you, am I?

For a moment Abdullah's face registered nothing and Jamal was convinced that the man had forgotten him, then the turtle shifted on his stool and leaned forward.

“Jamal?” he wheezed. His eyes were moist with greed.

The prisoners came in blind and confused, shackled, shuffling forward. Naked as newborns, some wailing, others soiling themselves. Not men but cattle to the slaughter.

Kat knew from experience that these first moments of confusion were her single best ally. Once the prisoners made it through the shock of in-processing, through the cavity searches and the haircuts and the delousings, and realized there was nothing worse that could be done to them, they became as uncooperative as two-year-olds. Of those who didn't break in the first twenty-four hours, most never would. The ones who did talk invariably had the least to give.

Kat and the others had been trained on the Cold War model of full-scale conflict between two superpowers. On the premise that most, if not all, of the prisoners they encountered would be happy to tell their captors whatever they knew for a pack of Marlboros and a can of Coke. Nothing had prepared them for the war they were now being asked to fight. None of them could even have imagined it.

At Kandahar, intake and interrogations went strictly by the book, using the standard timeworn approaches Kat and her colleagues had had drilled into them. Classics with names like Fear Up or Love of Comrades, which invariably worked like a charm in mock-up interviews, and which may in fact have been effective on disgruntled Soviet soldiers but were worse than useless in Afghanistan. The few deviations the interrogators eventually made from the manual, like the decision to keep prisoners awake while they themselves pulled all-nighters typing up situation reports, were slowly and painfully agreed upon.

It was Kat's second day at Bagram, her first live shift at the facility, and already she could see that it was a whole different world at the northern base. The prisoners were harder, for one thing, angrier and less cooperative than any of the detainees Kat had encountered at Kandahar. There was an undercurrent of hostility among the interrogators as well, a recklessness Kat had never seen before, a willingness not just to bend the rules but to break them.

“It's a whole different ball game up here,” one of Kat's former team members from Kandahar had told her when they ran into each other in the mess the night before. “It takes some getting used to, but once you do it feels good to be in charge.”

This shift in attitude wasn't the only difference Kat noticed at Bagram. There had been only a handful of non-military personnel at Kandahar, civilian intelligence men who went by the collective moniker of Other Government Agencies, and who, for the most part, kept to their cramped and makeshift offices in the old terminal building. At the Bagram base the OGAs were suddenly everywhere, including the in-processing facility.

Most of these civilians came from the alphabet soup of the intelligence world—the CIA, the FBI, or their foreign counterparts. But there were others whose loyalties were less easily identifiable, and for whose services the military had clearly paid.

Such arrangements were not unusual. A good portion of the army's support staff, including many mess and transportation workers, were civilian contractors. But the idea of intelligence contractors was something else altogether, and Kat wasn't quite sure what she thought of it. At the very least, it would take some getting used to.

In the world outside, it was frigid early morning, the bald half-moon glaring down on the dark and dusty expanse of the Shomali Plains, but the oversized watch on the wrist of the young MP who'd been assigned to Kat blinked a stubborn 6 pm. Mountain time, Kat observed, home time. Somewhere in Wyoming or Montana, the kid's family was sitting down to dinner without him.

Inside the facility, under the stuttering glow of the perpetually failing fluorescents, it might as well have been high noon. Two Special Forces teams had just returned from the mountains, and the old Soviet machine shop that served as the facil-ity's in-processing center was crowded and chaotic, the air thick with stale sweat and urine—the stench of hundreds of unbathed bodies in an airless space.

Kat's post, at the far end of the cavernous room, was the detainees' final stop before the mammoth cages in the main prison, the last in a series of humiliations in which they'd been stripped of their original clothes and repackaged in bright-orange jumpsuits and rubber slippers, and the men's final hope at a chance for freedom before they were caught permanently and inextricably in the web of military bureaucracy.

The Special Forces raids had been routine at Kandahar, and Kat was familiar with their results. The ostensible purpose of the sweeps was to ferret out the last of the holdouts. But the raids, conducted under the cover of darkness, were by definition indiscriminate, and more often than not the majority of prisoners were neither Taliban nor Al Qaeda but luckless peasants. Not good men, necessarily, but not bad men, either, fathers and grandfathers whose only loyalty was to their own survival. To Kat and the other interrogators fell the impossible task of separating the former from the latter. It was a job that was made all the more difficult by an insurmountable and nearly constant language barrier.

Kat was muddling through an intake interview in her halting Pashto, trying to calm the toothless old man across the table from her enough to get his name and age, when she saw Kurtz coming toward her through the crowd. She shouldn't have been surprised to see him. In the wake of September 11, Arabic speakers were a rare and precious commodity in the intelligence community, and she had thought of Kurtz more than once, but she had never given serious thought to the possibility that their paths might cross. Now here he was, just as she remembered him.

“Sergeant,” he said, stopping in front of her and making a stiff demi-bow. It was a gesture Kat remembered clearly from Monterey, an aspect of Kurtz's awkward formality that had made him seem vulnerable at the time. “I believe you have an Arabic speaker in the medical line.”

He still hated her, Kat thought. Nearly a decade had passed, and he still hadn't forgiven her for rejecting him.

“Hello, David,” she said. And then, because it seemed ridiculous to say nothing, “You look good.”

Kurtz nodded. “I was sorry to hear about your brother.”

So he knew, had already known she was on the base. “I didn't realize I was a celebrity.”

“I was at Major Greeley's press briefing this morning,” Kurtz explained. “He's quite honored to have you here.”

Kat had heard about the Major's daily briefings from some of the other interrogators, how he started each session with a canned obit of one of the September 11 victims.

Kat rose from her chair and glanced at the young MP. “See if you can find him something to drink,” she said, gesturing to the old man. And then, to Kurtz, “Your Arabic speaker?”

The medical line was the prisoners' first stop after the initial trauma of having their clothes cut off. It was touted as a safety measure, a way of ensuring that no weapons or harmful diseases made their way into the facility. But both the prisoners and the interrogators understood that the real purpose of the examination was to establish exactly where and with whom all control lay, to cement the contract of power and powerlessness between prisoner and jailer.

Normally, Kat made it a point to stay away from this part of the intake process. There was a vulnerability about the male body that she found disturbing, and she didn't want her feelings to get in the way later, during interrogations. As she and Kurtz approached, the few prisoners who didn't already have their hands over their genitals moved quickly to cover themselves.

“There,” Kurtz said, pointing to a young boy near the back of the line.

Kat's first thought was that Kurtz was obviously mistaken. She had seen her share of foreign fighters, but they were all grown men. This prisoner was barely more than a child, his face smooth and unshaved, his thin body that of an adolescent. Though anyone under sixteen was strictly off limits, a few underage locals were often swept up in the raids. Standard protocol was to release them back to their villages with a consolation bag of chocolate bars and hot tamales from the PX. No doubt that's what would happen to this boy.

“He's just a kid,” Kat said dismissively.

The two burly MPs at the front of the line yelled for the next prisoner to step forward, then grabbed the man by his neck and forced his head down for the cavity search. Kat saw the boy's stomach convulse.

“I'm telling you,” Kurtz insisted. “He's not local.”

Kat moved to turn away, then stopped herself. The last thing she wanted was to prove Kurtz right, but she wasn't altogether convinced that he was wrong. “Step forward, please,” she said in Arabic, and to her surprise the boy did.

“What's your name?” she asked. For a moment, when he didn't say anything, she thought she had been mistaken, that the previous response had been just a coincidence.

Then he blinked up at her. “Jamal,” he said through chattering teeth. He was shivering wildly, from fear or cold or both, and his upper lip was glazed with snot.

Kat turned to Kurtz. “Get me a blanket.” And then, to the boy, “It's okay, you're going to be okay.”

The boy nodded, clearly unconvinced, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“How old are you, Jamal?”

He paused before answering, aware, Kat thought, as she was, of just how much rested on this one piece of information. A year in either direction the difference between a one-way ticket to Guantánamo and the rest of his life.

“Fifteen,” he said at last, and Kat thought, Good boy, right answer.

She scanned the room, searching for Kurtz among the tsunami of bodies. A blanket, she told herself, glancing at the boy, at the wings of his collarbones protruding from the top of his gaunt torso. How long does it take to find a goddamn blanket?

But when she looked up again her eyes caught not Kurtz's but Colin's. He was watching her, as he obviously had been for some time.

T
HE RIGHT ANSWER
or the wrong one, Kat thought as the plane touched down on the runway at Barajas and taxied toward the terminal.

I suggest you take a look at that,
she could hear the man say. Morrow, he'd finally told her his name was, the same name as the signature on her orders. And, on the floor in front of the car's passenger seat, Jamal's file, Kat's own words oddly unfamiliar to her after three years.

I suggest you take a look at that.
And she had understood, correctly, that the three-hour drive to Dulles would be her only chance to do so.

The plane braked to a stop and the passengers leaped from their seats, smoothing the creases from their clothes, jockeying for position, taking what few extra inches they could get. Kat squeezed into the aisle and slid her bag from the overhead bin. After a long, sleepless night, she'd made the mistake of dozing for an hour at the tail end of the flight. Now she felt as if someone had rubbed a handful of sand into her eyes.

You will find someone waiting for you at the hotel in Madrid,
Morrow had told her on the curb at Dulles before handing her a small brown envelope. Plane tickets and a hotel reservation. Five hundred euros in medium-sized bills.
Put the money in your billfold, please. It looks better that way.
Better to whom? Kat had wondered.