White: A Novel (4 page)

“We recently captured a man named Ali Fallal Mahar. Do you know him?”

“Yes. Of course,” Muhammad responded. “He is called the messenger. I met him once in Malta. 1999. He is a religious man—a mullah.”

“We have reason to believe that Mahar has been planning attacks inside the United States,” she said. Prisoners were deprived of outside news, so Muhammad had no idea that the attacks had already begun.

“He has talked of such things,” Muhammad volunteered. “But his resources were small. He had great power within his own country, but I think it would be hard to imagine him gaining any real following among American Muslims. Indonesians don’t have a strong community inside the United States.”

“What about non-Muslim groups?” she asked.

Muhammad looked puzzled.

“Non-Muslim groups? What do you mean by this? Mahar is a jihadist. He wants to kill your people, not befriend them.”

That seemed to bring Muhammad some pleasure. GI Jane made a note in her little green notebook, then turned off her recorder and laid it on the cot beside her. She paused a moment to consider her words.

“What if I told you we found him less than a week ago with three Americans? Non-Muslim Americans,” she added. “What if I told you they had traveled all the way to Indonesia to see him? What would you think about that?”

Muhammad’s eyebrows tilted.

“I would not know what to say.”

But then the expression on his face began to change. The thick black eyebrows settled, and the glimmer of resistance in his eyes dulled to some deeper understanding. GI Jane noticed.

“Muhammad, I know you don’t like me,” she began. The CIA officer spoke with the confidence that comes with being able to stroll out of the jail cell at the end of the interrogation. “I don’t care. What I do care about is saving American lives. Give me the information I need, and you can walk out of here. Dance me in circles and you can rot in this shithole with all the rest of your towel-headed freak buddies.”

Muhammad thought a moment. He understood the American mindset. Their arrogance. He had seen it in Beirut and in the West Bank and in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan. But he also knew how to turn this knowledge in his own favor. Capitalism was trade; trade was barter, and barter was old as his Bedouin ancestors.

The Americans wanted information, and he wanted to leave this place of empty souls. As the posters in the infirmary said, “Brother, follow my steps; truth, cooperation, then back home.” As Muhammad’s personal favorite stated: “Brother, the road to return must be paved with your complete truth and cooperation.”

“Jafar al Tayar,” he said. The one-time Taliban fighter spoke softly, quieter than the ventilation fans behind him. He looked concerned that the others outside would hear.

“Jafar the pilot?” GI Jane spoke Arabic as well as Muhammad did.

“Jafar the pilot, Jafar the one who flies, the high-flying one . . . yes. Depends on your interpretation, of course.”

“Not another airliner plot.” She laughed. “You’ll have to do better than that. If I had a rial for every airliner plot I’ve heard about down here, I’d be able to buy the goddamned island. Save your breath.”

“No, no,” Muhammad objected. “I am not talking about planes. Jafar al Tayar is a person of great power and respect. This is why they call him the pilot, or the flyer. It is metaphor . . . a metaphor for one who holds high position, one who can control things from on high.”

GI Jane picked up the tape recorder and rested it in her lap. She had conducted dozens of interrogations in which prisoners tried to trade meaningless information for an extra ration of bread at dinner. This sounded like something more.

“Who? What kind of person are we talking about?”

“Could be a military leader, a powerful businessman, someone in the media,” he replied. “This person has earned himself a position of trust and power.”

Muhammad stared out the door behind her. If he could have seen beyond the tarpaulin-covered walls, he would have looked out on more than three thousand miles of open ocean. The nearest land—should anyone get past the guard dogs and machine guns—was Florida. That was a ninety-mile swim over open ocean with little hope of friendly faces on the other side. There were just two ways out of Camp Delta: through cooperation or in a pine box.

“I do not even know if this is true,” he said. “All I know is that Jafar al Tayar is hope for many of my people. It is a plan you won’t hear discussed in mosques, in the bazaar, over coffee. No, it is whispered—like a legend. A myth. Maybe nothing more.”

GI Jane tried to judge veracity in the man’s face.

“Do you believe it?” she asked, hoping to catch something in his answer.

“I believe in Allah,” Muhammad said. “I believe in his will. If it is His Will that your government shall fall, then it will happen. This is all nonsense, this business between you and me.”

GI Jane stood to leave.

“Thank you, Muhammad,” she said. “I’ll note your cooperation in my report to the warden.”

“I don’t care about favorable reports to the warden,” Muhammad said, now smiling. “But there is something more you need to know. Something only I can give you. If you want to save your country, you will have to offer me something in return . . . something considerably more valuable than freedom.”

“ELIZABETH, THIS IS
no time to butt heads. I need options, not power trips.”

The president of the United States led a party of five upstairs from the Situation Room to the Oval Office. He was still dressed in the white shirt and pinstriped suit he had worn the previous day. One of his aides had handed him a fresh tie on the way, and he was clumsily looping it around his neck as they walked.

Unfortunately for David Ray Venable, and perhaps the rest of the country, as governor of Connecticut he had never dealt with anything more threatening than budget deficits. And like most leaders unaccustomed to true crisis, he had already violated the first rule of incident response: he had mistaken leadership for responsibility. Instead of delegating authority and going to bed at an appropriate hour, he had stayed up the entire night, obsessing over what few details he could glean from cable news. Unlike Beechum and many of his senior advisors, the leader of the free world was headed into day two of a national tragedy with no sleep at all.

“This is not a power trip,” the vice president argued back. “You need to accept that the United States government worked quite well before you took the reins and will work quite well after you’re gone. Let the professionals do their jobs. You need sleep.”

The president stopped in the middle of the brightly lit room and turned in circles, searching for a mirror in which to check his tie.

“Can’t we get a mirror in here?” he barked. “What kind of office doesn’t have a mirror?”

This office, apparently. In fact, not only was there no mirror, there were no wall hangings at all. The room looked more like a construction site than an executive work space. The paint scheme was only half finished. New carpet lay in rolls along the west wall. Opposing couches offered the only place to sit, and movers had stacked them with boxes of Venable’s personal memorabilia. None of this had seemed much of a problem until today, of course. Presidents get to decorate as they please, and Venable—the product of a New England lineage that traced its roots to the
Mayflower
—had shown no tolerance for his predecessor’s bronze Remington horses and western scenes by Julian Onderdonk, Tom Lee, and WHD Koerner.

“If your beloved intelligence community is so good, why does the director of the CIA have to read stuff off index cards that I can get from CNN?” he demanded, trying to find his reflection in a silver Revere bowl one of the decorators had left atop a bookshelf.

“This happened less than twelve hours ago, David,” she answered. “Crises are very confusing at first. It takes time to put the pieces together.”

Elizabeth Beechum, a four-term senator from South Carolina, had served three terms as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. Few people in Washington knew more about the resources available in the government’s war on terror.

“I don’t have time,” the president said. “I want the first draft of my remarks by six o’clock, understood? And I want something meaningful to say. Something promising.”

The president walked to a thin wooden podium that had been arranged in front of the Rose Garden windows. Venable used the relic, which White House historians traced to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to write on, having years earlier sworn off traditional work spaces as breeding grounds for procrastination. Many things would distinguish his presidency, he had declared during his inaugural address, but none more than decisive action. One of his first acts had been to clear the Oval Office of its trademark desk.

“We have FBI evidence response teams and the Critical Incident Response Group on-scene with all the best technology available,” Alred ventured. “We have integrated federal, state, and local law enforcement through sixty-six joint terrorism task forces. The Joint Terrorist Threat Integration Center is coordinating law enforcement, military, and intelligence resources with the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and counterparts around the world. Everyone from FEMA to DOE to the CDC and every other TLA you can name is pulling out all the stops to make sure the on-scene commanders have what they need to deal with this.”

“TLA?” the president asked. “What’s the TLA?”

“Three-letter agency,” Alred explained sheepishly. “It’s an expression we use to . . .”

“Like I told you,” Beechum said. “Get some rest, David. Trying to micromanage operations from a podium in the Oval Office is counterproductive.”

Venable rubbed his sleep-deprived eyes.

“How about a cup of coffee?” he mumbled. “What I really need right now is a double skinny latte.”

The people around him looked at one another accusingly. Just five staff members had made the cut and been summoned upstairs from the National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room: Beechum, Chief of Staff Andrea Chase, Havelock, Alred, and the director of Homeland Security, Jim Davis. None of them felt obliged to fetch refreshments.

“DHS thinks we need to raise the terror threat advisory,” Havelock announced. Davis shot the national security advisor a curious leer, guessing correctly that Havelock had made the suggestion simply to escape steward’s duties.

Venable stopped rubbing his eyes.

“Oh for goodness’ sake, that color crap is a national laughingstock,” he grumbled. “I’m sure FOX and MSNBC will be glad to cover the press conference, but don’t you think that most Americans have already gone to the highest state of alert!”

Beechum smiled. Davis leered at her too.

“What about SIGINT?” Venable asked. He had heard the term numerous times during coverage of the 9/ 11 aftermath and thought using it made him sound informed. “Alred, what are we hearing?”

The FBI director rolled his shoulders. What he knew about signals intelligence could be summed up with a shrug, but that didn’t stop him.

“Based on the reports I have seen, sir, chatter is up,” he said. “Unfortunately, our intercepts show little more than loosely defined celebration. There is a lot of confusion among terror players, from Indonesia’s Abu Sayaaf and Jemaah Islamiya to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the remnants of al Qaeda. Everyone seems thrilled about the attacks, but no one seems to know anything about who is behind them.”

“Chatter. Right. What exactly is that anyway?” the president asked.

“Intercepted microwave transmissions,” Davis explained. He didn’t want to get the coffee either. “Unfortunately, pulling actionable intelligence out of the data stream is like trying to sip water from a fire hose. We often target a geographic region—the Middle East, for example, or Central Asia—and have to draw conclusions based on generalized traffic. That’s chatter.”

“In other words, a bunch of Middle Easterners are ringing their phones off the hook, talking about bombings in America.” Venable nodded, now satisfied with the knot in his tie. “I would hope that you don’t find that surprising.”

“No, sir,” Alred said. “But there is something else. We have been tracking a series of odd financial transactions by ranking officials within the Saudi government. Big transactions to very obscure accounts. Our best analysts suspect that one or two wealthy Saudis have established a financial pipeline to rogue cells inside the U.S.”

“Saudis?” He paused a moment. “Inside the U.S.?”

“Yes, sir. But they are using Quantis phones to conduct their business. We simply can’t listen in.”

The president shook his head. Even with three weeks on the job, he understood how much these new phones had hurt U.S. intelligence efforts. Borders Atlantic, the world’s biggest telecommunications company, had developed a new encryption technology that rendered everything from standard telephone relays to fax, cell, satellite television, and Internet connections impenetrable to overhears. Jordan Mitchell, the company’s CEO, had introduced his product in a joint venture with the Saudis, handing virtually everyone in the Middle East secure lines of communication. The NSA still hadn’t broken through.

Venable walked to within arm’s reach of his FBI chief. This man definitely seemed the best prepared so far. “You have names?”

“Well, yes and no, sir. We have focused our investigation on three possible subjects.” He reached into a manila envelope. “Hassam Ibrahim Lnu, Ahmed Mustafa Lnu, and Fnu Lnu, also known as Ali Asar—three Saudi-born Yemeni nationals last known to be living in Spain. We may not be able to intercept their calls, but we can trace them to . . .”

“Wait a minute,” the president interrupted. “Lnu . . . Fnu Lnu? Those don’t sound like Arab names. Sounds Asian to me—maybe Indonesian. Are they all brothers or something?”

All eyes focused on Alred. It suddenly became obvious that he would be the one going after the coffee.

“Umm . . . no sir, not exactly.” The FBI director cleared his throat. “Lnu is law enforcement shorthand for Last Name Unknown. Fnu Lnu would mean ‘first name unknown,’ ‘last name unknown.’ We know these individuals by code names, mostly. We don’t have full descriptors.”