THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (8 page)

'Is that right, we let some out?'

'Just five, only five . . . It was about pressure, image. So, what's the big deal? It was five guys, why does that matter?'

Across the desk, the supervisor glowered at him. To Jed, he looked drawn, stressed in the neon strip-light washing over his face. It highlighted the strain at his mouth and the sacs below the eyes. If Jed hadn't gone down with the headcold he would have returned to Guantanamo a week earlier. By the time he had gone back with Brigitte and Arnie Junior to the apartment near the Pentagon, the headcold had been streaming out of his nose, he'd had a raw throat and a hacking cough. He'd delayed his return to Gitmo. He held the list of names in his hand. The days that Jed Dietrich, in his time with the Defense Intelligence Agency, had called in sick could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. It had hurt him, a conscientious man, to be back late off leave, and the winnowing guilt fuelled his show of temper.

'It matters, Edgar, because two of them are on my work list.'

'The hell it matters - and, as I said, pressure and image played their part. Those factors may not figure at your level, Jed, but they do at mine. Coming across my desk is pressure to improve the image of this god-forsaken place. So, we let a few out and the pressure eases, the image improves. Now, it may be the end of the day but I still have

.a shitload of work to do.' The supervisor grinned cagily. 'And I imagine, Jed, you'll want to look after that cold of yours. Get your loot up so you don't lose any more time here.'

It was dismissal. His supervisor had fifteen years on Jed and three grades of superiority. Perhaps because the headcold had tired him, perhaps because the connection out of San Juan had been late, perhaps because victories at Camp Delta were in short supply, Jed persisted.

'Shouldn't have happened, not names on my list. They shouldn't have been released, not without consultation. Did they just come out of a hat?'

'For God's sake, look at that.' The supervisor waved at his piled in-tray. 'I have work to do.'

'Did you authorize the releases? Was it your decision?'

To a few colleagues, Jed Dietrich was dedicated. To most colleagues he was a plodder. He liked things done right . .. He had nearly, almost, cleared two of the names on the list but 'nearly' and

'almost' were not good enough for him. A frown clung to his brow.

He knew the way it would have worked out in his absence. The Bureau and the Agency had authority; DIA was down the ladder, bottom rung.

Jed said, 'The blind one, I don't have a difficulty with him, but this guy - Fawzi al-Ateh - he was unfinished business.'

'What are you trying to say?' the supervisor menaced him.

'I'm just saying that it's not professional. It's crazy to clear a guy, Edgar, when interrogation hasn't run the full road.'

'You're on a roll this morning.' The supervisor's smile was grim.

'It's not crazy, it was an order.'

'I thought about him.'

'Did you? Well, let me say it - when I'm up for vacation I won't be thinking about any of them, about anything to do with this place. He was just a taxi-driver . . . Lighten up. Forget about him. All you need to remember is that he's gone. This is your new roster.'

The supervisor handed Jed the printout of his interrogation duties for the coming week. Jed held it in one hand; in the other was a list of the five names of men released when he'd been away from Gitmo.

The first week of his vacation, the names and patterns of the questioning had drilled in his mind; by the time he'd reached the cabin in Wisconsin overlooking the lake, they'd been scrubbed out. But on seeing the name on the list, the itch and irritation had returned. He must have been scowling.

'Damnit, Jed, didn't you get any fish up there?'

He stood up and went out into the evening air. The
Maghrib
prayers were being broadcast over loudspeakers. Beyond the wire fences, flooded by the arc lamps' light, he heard the murmured response of six hundred men, a droning cry, like the swarm of bees.

He passed the interrogation block, his workplace, where ceiling lights blazed, and came to the prefabricated wood building that was his work-home. He hated the place because, here, even little victories were hard to come by. In front of him was the concrete building - not of prefabricated wood - where the Agency and the Bureau were installed: they took the cream of the prisoners; they weeded out the best from which bigger victories might be squeezed. They were the kings of Gitmo.

In his cubicle, barely wide enough to take a single outstretched boat rod, long enough for a single float rod for bank angling, Jed studied the roster for his week's interrogations. There were names he didn't know, which would have been passed down to him because other interrogators had finished their Gitmo posting. There was a rhythm and routine at Camp Delta that added merely to a sum result of failure. He swore . . . Later, he would sign himself out at the compound gate, take the shuttle bus to the ferry and go across the bay to the main Marine Corps base. From his sparsely furnished room he would phone Brigitte and he'd tell her everything was dandy, fine, but first he had work.

His fingers hammered on the computer console. The message was to Defense Intelligence Agency at the Bagram airfield in Afghanistan. Could a check be run on Fawzi al-Ateh, ref. no. US8AF-000593DP? Could a report be sent back on the return of Fawzi al-Ateh to his community? Had he been quizzed on the reasons for the request, Jed could not have responded with any coherence. Might have been merely pique that he had not been consulted. Might have been a feeling far down in his gut.

It would be a month, if he was lucky, before Bagram replied. He sent the signal.

the marine eyed him as if he was an intruder and not welcome.

Eddie Wroughton smiled back, left his opinion, like flatulence hanging in the air, that the marine corporal's hostility was of no concern. The messenger from the front desk of the embassy left him at the gate. The suite of offices used by the Central Intelligence Agency was high in the building. The outer walls had been strengthened, the windows were shatter-proof, and the inner doors were steel-plated. The marine watched over the grille gate into the suite. Wroughton gave his name and flashed his passport. Before the marine could telephone for instructions, Juan Gonsalves had bustled from an inner room. The gate was opened. Wroughton was admitted.

His name went into the ledger. They embraced. Gonsalves led Wroughton through an open-plan work area, the territory of the juniors and secretaries. Eyes followed Wroughton, echoing the hostility of the marine corporal. Precious few of the embassy's own American staff, seldom even the ambassador and no other non-nationals, were permitted access to this inner sanctum where Riyadh's heat and dust could not penetrate. The air-conditioners purred. What Wroughton knew, Juan Gonsalves didn't give a shit.

Eddie Wroughton was the only foreigner allowed into the heartland of Agency territory. They went past a desk and a junior bent forward awkwardly to hide his papers. A secretary flipped the button to blank her screen. They walked on. Wroughton wore his linen suit and ironed white shirt, his tie knotted over the button; Gonsalves had faded jeans low on his ample hips and his shirt tail had worked out of the belt. They were opposites but they had mutual trust because they fed off each other, and they shared a common enemy. It was, however, an unequal feast.

Eddie Wroughton's greatest problem in his Riyadh posting was bringing sufficient food to the table. Too often - and it nagged him -

all he had was a fistful of crumbs. He was led into a side office.

The room was a mess. Wroughton knew there had been an inspection team out from Langley three months before, and he presumed that his friend had made an effort to shift chaotic heaps of files off the floor, the table and chairs, to have the coffee-cups and wine glasses washed and laid to rest in the cupboard, to clear away the fast-food packaging, to put a cover sheet over the updated Most Wanted photographs, to keep the safe locked -

but it was now twelve weeks since the team had gone home and standards had slipped again. His own office, in the British Embassy, was presided over by an assistant, who was prim and elderly with her hair netted tight in a bun above the nape of her neck.

She kept the room pristine, as if she feared provoking his criticism.

Wroughton stepped carefully between the files, removed a box of papers from a chair, selected the least dirty coffee mug, held it up and gazed into the crowded depth of the open safe. Above him, when he sat down, the faces of the Most Wanted stared down malevolently, some with a Chinagraph cross daubed across their cheeks with the date of their capture or death; the majority were still unmarked. A plate with a half-moon of pizza abandoned on it lay beside Gonsalves' steaming kettle. Coffee was made and an old biscuit tin passed to him. Dominating the Most Wanted photographs was the image of the First Fugitive. A long face topped by a white cloth that hid the hairline, bright, sparkling eyes, a prominent nose, a range of uneven but white teeth, a moustache that came wispily past a laughing mouth to merge into a straggling beard of which the centre was greying and the extremes were dark. Around the throat was a buttoned-up brown overshirt. Above the First Fugitive's head had been written in a juvenile hand, ' "The death of the Martyr for the unification of all the people to the cause of God and His word is the happiest, best, easiest and most virtuous of deaths": Medieval Scholar.' Wroughton was thinking of the men who had climbed on to the passenger aircraft less than three years before and was wondering if they'd known those words. Gonsalves slumped in his chair, tilted it, heaved his feet on to the table, scattering papers, and slopped his coffee.

'OK, Eddie, can I shoot?'

'Fire.'

Gonsalves languidly gestured to the Most Wanted and the First Fugitive, sipped his coffee, then shot.

'They are screwed. In trouble. Hunted. They have problems. They are in disarray. They are looking over their shoulders. Not capable, right now, of the big hit. They are hurt. But—'

'But they are intact, Juan.'

'But they are intact. Bull's eye, Eddie, right in the inner circle. So, in retreat a commander looks to find a new defence line, somewhere he can hunker down and—'

'And regroup, Juan.'

'Afghanistan is finished for him. Pakistan is hot and difficult for him. Iran is—'

IIran is quietly co-operative, useful as a transit and short-time hideaway.'

'Iran is not a place for a long-term base camp. Chechnya, forget it.

Somalia and Sudan are past history for him, the game's moved on.

We're hearing talk from elsewhere . . . What do you know, Eddie, about the Empty Quarter?'

Eddie Wroughton could have said that what he knew about the Empty Quarter was that it was empty, could have said that it wasn't a part of Saudi Arabia to which Juan should take his Teresa and the tribe of children for weekend camping, could have said anything facetious - but didn't. When he fed from his friend's table, he cut the smart-arse quips.

'I've flown over it, of course. I used to have that major in the Border Guard, you'll remember him, but he's posted up north now. I know precious little about it.'

'It isn't Siglnt, and not EIInt, and it's most certainly not HumInt, it's just rumour. I did some reading anyway. Except for some mountain in the Himalayas, right on the peak, the Empty Quarter seems to be as remote as you can get. It's a huge area, like the name says, but I have confirmation there have been no satphone links out of there, or radio, and—'

'There wouldn't be, unless they're suicidal.'

'—and all I have to go on is a rumour of couriers passing through northern Yemen and heading up to the border, and people coming back. Three days ago it got kind of interesting.'

A story from Gonsalves was like water spilled on linoleum, it meandered but it kept going. It did not sink quickly into sand.

Without the morsels of Agency information Wroughton's own work would have been harder and his future darker.

'We don't have people in north Yemen, not on the ground, but we have the Yemeni military we've trained. Three days ago, our liaison officer in San'a was brought a cardboard box, like it was a present, the sort of size box you'd put groceries in. There were guys standing around and giggling, and he was invited to open it up. There was a head, severed, and two hands, all sawn off with a knife, and there was some squidgy sort of shit - I mean it. A guy had approached a roadblock, had seen the military, had jumped out and left his vehicle, then run for cover in the rocks. They did well, the military, but not quite well enough. Before they shot him, he was seen to swallow something - OK, OK, he's dead. So, what they did, Eddie, was they disembowelled him. They got into his upper intestine, down the bottom of his throat, and they got out a scrap of chewed paper, what you'd use for home-made cigarettes. Then they took off the head and the hands - you understand, for identification. I think our liaison guy's putting in for counselling, maybe for a transfer. I mean it, they slit his stomach and got out his tubes, then cut into them. Christ, we got some allies . . . What was left of the paper went back as an image to the laboratory at Langley, but we can't break into whatever writing there was. All we end up with is a courier carrying a message so tiny it might not have been found, so important it was worth swallowing and dying to protect it, and we don't have identification and there's no databank in Yemen that could match the fingerprints off the hands. The other thing - earlier, the roadblock military had seen a small camel train waiting down the track, nearer to the frontier. We trained those boys well, they're bright and keen. As soon as they'd filled the cardboard box they skipped back up the road to where the camels had been and two Bedouin. The sound of shooting carries a long way across those hills and the sand - no camels, no Bedouin. What do you think?'

'I'd say that's promising, maybe interesting.'

'What we're doing, Eddie - this is between you and me, this is between friends or it'll be my head in the next cardboard box -