AFTER THE nearly constant adrenaline rush Clark and his team had experienced since touching down in Las Vegas twenty-four hours earlier, what followed immediately upon arriving at Hendley’s country house was anticlimactic. To his obvious disappointment, Pasternak announced that it would be another day, perhaps two, before his patient would be stable enough to undergo interrogation. That left everyone with plenty of time to waste and nothing to do but play cards and watch cable news. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a whiff of what had occurred at Yucca Mountain, but there was wall-to-wall coverage of what the networks had universally dubbed “The Heartland Attacks.” The Claymore mine blast at the Waterloo, Iowa, church had claimed thirty-two dead and fifty wounded; the mortar attack at the Springfield, Missouri, statue unveiling, twenty-two dead, fourteen wounded; the grenade incident at the Brady, Nebraska, swim meet, only six dead and four wounded, thanks to a quick-thinking, off-duty volunteer police officer who shot the perpetrator dead after he’d rolled only three grenades beneath the bleachers. The Waterloo and Brady perpetrators, both of whom had been tracked to their respective homes within hours of the events, had taken their own lives. Added to the other attacks, the casualties were climbing into triple digits.
Under the guiding hand of the FBI and Homeland Security, the near-miss chlorine attack aboard the Losan in Newport News had been attributed to a galley fire.
By four p.m. of their first day at Hendley’s country house, as the plastic-pretty female and lantern-jawed male anchors that dominated afternoon cable news collectively announced that President Edward Kealty would be addressing the American people at eight p.m. eastern, Clark got up and wandered off to find Pasternak. He found the doctor in Hendley’s woodworking shop, a fully appointed pole barn behind the house. The maple-topped bench had been converted into a makeshift medical suite, complete with halogen work lights, a Drager ventilator, and an EKG machine/resuscitator by Marquette, including manual external defibrillator paddles to convert an irregularly beating heart to normal sinus rhythm. Both machines were brand-new, fresh from their manufacturer’s shipping cartons, which now lay stacked a few feet away. Everything was ready and present, save the guest of honor, who was ensconced in one of the guest bedrooms under a rotating watch manned by Chavez, Jack, and Dominic.
“All set?” Clark asked.
Pasternak pressed a series of buttons on the EKG and got a series of apparently satisfying beeps in reply. He powered down the unit and looked at Clark. “Yeah.”
“Got second thoughts?”
“What makes you say that?”
“You ain’t exactly a poker player, Doc.”
Pasternak smiled at this. “Never was good at it. Guess it’s the whole Hippocratic oath-kind of a hard thing to shake. I’ve had over ten years to mull it over, though. After Nine-Eleven, I couldn’t figure out if it was just about revenge or about something bigger-the greater good and all that.”
“What’d you decide?”
“It’s both, but more of the latter. If we get something from this guy that helps save some lives, then I’ll figure out a way to deal with what I’ve done-what I’m going to do. Or God willing, when the time comes.”
Clark considered this, then nodded. “Doc, to lesser or larger degrees, we’re all in that boat. All you can do is decide what you think is right, go with that, and let the rest come as it may.”
The anticipation had everyone up at dawn the next day. Dominic, the best cook of the group, made a bowl of oatmeal and wheat toast for their guest, who, now fully awake and clearly in pain, stubbornly declined the meal.
At seven, Dr. Pasternak came to examine him. It took only a few minutes. Pasternak looked to Hendley, who stood in the doorway, the rest of the group behind him.
“No fever, no signs of infection. He’s good to go.”
Hendley nodded. “Let’s move him.”
The Emir neither struggled nor helped as Chavez and Dominic carried him out the back door and through the pole barn’s side entrance. It wasn’t until he saw the halogen-lighted workbench and makeshift leather restraints bolted to its surface that his face changed. Jack saw the fleeting expression but couldn’t quite put his finger on its nature: fear or relief? Fear of what was coming, or relief because he suspected martyrdom was at hand?
As practiced the night before, Chavez and Dominic laid the Emir on the workbench. His right arm was cinched into the leather restraint, while the right, the one on the same side as the equipment, was stretched across a folded towel and similarly secured. Finally, both legs were locked down. Chavez and Dominic stepped back from the bench.
Now Pasternak began powering up the equipment: first the EKG, then the ventilator, followed by a self-diagnostic test of the manual external defibrillator. Pasternak then turned his attention to the wheeled cart beside the table, on which lay an array of syringes and bottles. All of this the Emir watched closely.
He had to be curious, Jack thought, and he must be inwardly terrified. Nobody could be that indifferent to what was going on around him, all the more so a man who was fully accustomed to being the ultimate and total boss of everything that happened around him, used to having his every order obeyed with alacrity. The world around him was no longer in his control. There was no way he could be comfortable with that, but he retained a sense of dignity that was, in its way, rather impressive. Okay, he was courageous, but courage was not an infinite quality. It had its limits, and those in the room with him would be exploring those limits.
Dr. Pasternak rolled up the Emir’s shirtsleeve and unbuttoned his shirt, then stepped away from the table, reached to the cart, and retrieved a plastic syringe and a glass vial. He checked his watch and looked up.
“I’m going with seven milligrams of the succinylcholine,” Pasternak said, measuring the amount carefully into the plastic syringe as he withdrew the plunger. “Somebody write that down, please.” On the chart Pasternak had asked Chavez to maintain, Ding wrote the information down: 7mg @ 8:58. “Okay…” the physician said. He stabbed the syringe into the brachial vein just inside the elbow and pushed the plunger in.
There was no real pain for Saif Rahman Yasin, just the momentary prick of something piercing his skin inside the elbow, and the needle was soon withdrawn. Were they poisoning him? he wondered. Nothing overt seemed to be happening. He looked at the man who’d just stabbed him and saw a face that was waiting for something. That was vaguely frightening to him, but it was too late for fear. He told himself to be strong, to be faithful to Allah, to be confident in his faith, because Allah could handle anything men could do, and he, the Emir, was strong in his faith. He inwardly repeated his profession of faith, learned as a small boy more than forty years before, from his own father at the family house in Riyadh. There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet. Allahu akbar. God is great, he told himself, thinking his profession of faith as loudly as he could in the silence of his own mind.
Pasternak watched and waited. His brain was racing. Was he doing the right thing? he wondered. It was too late to worry about that, of course, but even so, his mind asked the question. The man’s eyes looked into his now, and the doctor told himself not to flinch. He was the one in control. Completely in control of the fate of the man who’d killed his closest relative, his beloved brother, Mike, the man who’d ordered the man driving the airplane to crash into the World Trade Center, causing the fire that would weaken the structural steel, and dropping the entire Cantor Fitzgerald office a thousand feet to the streets of lower Manhattan, crushing to death more than three thousand people, more than had been killed at Pearl Harbor. This was the face of the fucking murderer. No, he would not show weakness now, not before this fucking barbarian…
The man was waiting for something, the Emir thought-but what? There was no pain, no discomfort at all. He’d just injected something into his bloodstream. What was it? If it was a poison, well, then the Emir would soon see Allah’s face, and could report to Him that he’d done the Lord God’s will, as all men did, whether they knew it or not, because everything that happened in the world was Allah’s bidding, because everything that ever happened in heaven or on earth was written by God’s own hand. But he had freely chosen to do Allah’s will.
But nothing was happening. He didn’t know, he couldn’t tell, that his mind was racing at light speed, outstripping everything, even the blood in his own arteries, spreading whatever it was that the doctor had shot into him. He wished it were poison, for then he would soon see Allah’s face, and then he could report on his life, how he had done Allah’s will as best he understood it… or had he? the Emir asked himself, as the final doubts came. It was a time for ultimate truth. He’d done the Lord God’s bidding, hadn’t he? Had he not studied the Holy Koran his entire life? Did he not have the Holy Book virtually memorized? Had he not discussed its inner meaning with the foremost Islamic scholars in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Yes, he had disagreed with some of them, but the nature of his disagreement had been honorable and direct, founded on his personal view of scripture, on his interpretation of God’s word as written and distributed by the Prophet Mohammed, Blessings and Peace be upon him. A great and good man, the Prophet had been, as well he might be to have been chosen by God Himself to be His Holy Messenger, the conveyor of God’s will to the people of the earth.
Pasternak was watching the sweep-second hand of his watch. One minute gone… another thirty seconds or so, he figured. Seven milligrams ought to be plenty for this application, delivered as it was, directly into the bloodstream. It would be fully distributed by now, infusing itself in all the man’s bodily tissues… and first would be…
… the flutter nerves. Yes, they’d be first. The widely distributed nerves, the ones that worked peripheral systems, such as the eyelids, right about… now.
Pasternak moved his hand to the man’s face, striking at his eyelids, and they didn’t blink.
Yes, it was starting.
The Emir saw the hand slap at his face but stop short. He involuntarily blinked his eyes… but they didn’t blink… Huh? He tried to lift his head, and it moved a centimeter or so, then collapsed back down… What? He commanded his right fist to close and pull against the handcuffs, and it started to but stopped, falling back down to a resting position on the wooden surface of the table, the fingers unflexing of their own accord…
His body was no longer his own…? What was this? What was this? He moved his legs, and they moved under the command of his brain, just a little, but they moved as they should, as they had since before his childhood memory had begun, following the commands of his brain, as the body always did. Command your arm, an infidel philosopher had written, and it moves-command your mind, and it resists. But his mind was working, and his body was not. What was this? He turned his head to look around the room. His head did not move, despite his commands-neither would his eyes. He could see the white drop-ceiling panels. He tried to focus his eyes more closely on them, but his eyes were not working as they should. His body was like the body of another man; he could feel it, but he could not command it. He told his legs to move, and they barely fluttered, then froze limply in place. Limp like a corpse.
What was this? Am I dying? Is this death? But it wasn’t death. Somehow he knew that and-
For the first time the Emir felt the beginnings of fear. He didn’t understand what was happening. He only knew it would be very bad.
To Clark it looked as though the man was going to sleep. His body had stopped moving. There had been a few jerks and some little spasms, like a man settling to go to sleep in bed, but they’d stopped with surprising rapidity. The face became vacant, not focused, not proclaiming strength and power and lack of fear. Now he had the face of a mannequin. The face of a corpse. He’d seen that often enough in his life. He’d never thought what it was like for the mind behind the face. When death happened, the problem with that body was over for all time, allowing him to move on to the next problem, leaving this one behind for all time to come. It had never been necessary for Clark to destroy the body. When it died, the body was finished, right? Part of Clark wanted to approach the doc and ask him what was happening, but he didn’t, unwilling to disturb the man in charge of the current operation quite yet…
He could feel all of his body. It was all a matter of crystal clarity to Saif. He couldn’t move any of it, but he could feel it all. He could feel the blood pumping through his arteries. But he couldn’t move his fingers. What was this? They’d stolen his body from him. It was no longer his. He could feel it but not command it. He was a prisoner in a cell, and the cell was… himself…? What was this? Were they poisoning him? Was this the onset of death? If so, shouldn’t he welcome it? Was the face of God just moments away? If so, he told his mind to smile. If his body couldn’t move, then his soul could, and Allah could see his soul as clearly as a large stone in the midst of the sea. If this were death, then he would welcome it as the culmination of his life, as a gift he’d given to so many men and women, the opportunity to see Allah’s face, as he would soon do… yes… He felt the air entering his lungs, giving him the last few seconds of life as these infidels stole his life from him. But the Lord Allah would make them pay for this. Of that he was sure. Completely sure.
Pasternak checked his watch again. Coming up on two minutes, coming up on the last part. He turned and looked at the resuscitator. The green pilot light was on. The same was true of the ventilator. He’d have them when and if he needed them. He could restore this bastard’s life. He wondered what Mike would think of that, but that thought was far too distant for him to latch on to it right now. What happened after death was unknown to living men. Everyone found out eventually, but none could return and relate it to the living. The great mystery of life, the subject of philosophy and religion, believed, perhaps, but not known. Well, this Emir guy was getting a look, of sorts. What would he see? What would he learn?
“Just a moment now,” Pasternak told those around him.
The Emir heard that and understood the words. Just a moment until he saw God’s face. Just a moment before Paradise. Well, he’d not gone all the way he’d hoped to go. He’d not become the world leader of the Faithful. He’d tried. He’d tried his best, and his best was very, very good. Just not good enough. That was a pity-a great pity. So much he could have done. Someone else would have to do it now? Ahmed, perhaps? A good man, Ahmed, faithful and learned, good of heart and strong of faith. Perhaps he’d be good enough… The Emir felt the air going in and out of his lungs. He felt it so clearly. It was a beautiful feeling, the very feeling of life itself. How was it that he’d never appreciated it, the beauty of it, the wonder of it?
Then something else happened-
His lungs were stopping. His diaphragm wasn’t-wasn’t moving. The air wasn’t coming into his lungs now. He’d been breathing since the moment of his birth. That was the first sign of life, when a newborn screamed its life to the world-but his lungs weren’t filling with air. There was no air in his lungs now… This was death coming. Well, he’d faced death for the last thirty years. At the hands of the Russians, the hands of the Americans, the hands of Afghans who’d not accepted his vision of Islam and the world. He’d faced death many, many times-enough that it held no terrors for him. Paradise awaited. He tried to close his eyes to accept his destiny, but his eyes wouldn’t close. He still saw the panels of the drop ceiling over his head, just off-white rectangles that looked down at him without eyes. This was death? Was this what men feared? How strange a thing, his mind observed, waiting, not with patience but confusion, for the final blackness to overcome him. His heart continued to beat. He could feel it, thumping away, pumping blood through his body, and thus bringing life, bringing consciousness, soon to end, of course, but still present. When would Paradise come to him? the Emir wondered. When would he see Allah’s face?
“Respiration stopped at three minutes, sixteen seconds,” Pasternak reported. Chavez wrote that down, too. The doctor reached for the ventilator mask, checking again to be sure the system was turned on. He hit the button on the mask and was rewarded by the mechanical sound of rushing air in the rubber mask. Then he took the paddles off the resuscitator and pressed them to the man’s chest, turning his eye to the EKG readout on the small computer screen. Normal sinus rhythm, he saw.
That wouldn’t last long.
The Emir heard odd sounds around him, and he felt strange things but was unable even to make his eyes go look for the source of the sounds, locked as they were on the white ceiling panels. His heart was beating. So, he thought rapidly, this is what death is like. Was it like this for Tariq, shot in the chest? He’d failed his master, probably not because he’d been sloppy, just because the enemy in this case had been overly skillful and clever. That could happen to any man, and doubtless Tariq had died shamed at his failure to fulfill his mission in life. But Tariq was now in Paradise, the Emir was sure, perhaps enjoying his virgins, if that was really what happened there. Probably not, the Emir knew. The Koran didn’t say that, not really. Enjoying the favor of Allah. That was sure enough, as he, the Emir, was about to discover. That would be sufficient.
It started to hurt some, right there in the center of his chest. He didn’t know that when his breathing had stopped, so had stopped the infusion of oxygen into his system. His heart, a powerful muscle, needed oxygen to function, and when the oxygen stopped, then the heart tissues went into distress… and would soon start to die; the heart was full of nerves, and they reported the lack of oxygen as pain to his still-functioning brain. Great pain, the greatest pain a man could know.
Not quite yet, but going that way…
His face showed nothing at all, of course. The peripheral motor nerves were all dead, or effectively so, Pasternak knew. But the feelings would be there. Maybe they could measure that on an electroencephalograph, but that would just show traces of black ink on white fan-fold paper, not the searing agony that the tracings represented.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “It’s starting now. We’ll give him a minute, maybe a little more.”
Trapped within his nonfunctioning body, Saif felt the onset of pain. It started distantly, but it increased steadily… and quickly. His heart was being wrenched from his chest, as though a man had reached inside with his hand and was pulling it out, ripping the blood vessels as he did so, tearing it loose like wet paper from a destroyed book. But it wasn’t paper. It was his heart, the very center of his body, the organ that provided life to the rest of him. It seemed to be on fire now, burning like kindling wood on open ground surrounded by rocks, burning, burning, burning… inside his chest, burning. His heart was burning alive, burning as he felt it. Not beating, not sending blood to his body, but burning like dry wood, like gasoline, like paper, burning, burning, burning… burning while he lived. If this was death, then death was a terrible thing, his mind thought… the worst thing. He’d inflicted this on others. He’d shot Russian soldiers-infidels, all of them, but still he’d ended their lives, put them through this… and thought it amusing? Entertaining. Part of Allah’s will? Did Allah find this amusing, too? The pain continued to grow, to become unendurable. But he had to endure it. It would not go away. Nor could he. He could not run from it, not pray aloud to Allah to stop it, not deny it. It was there. It became all of reality. It overwhelmed all of his consciousness. It became everything. It was a fire in the middle of his body, and it was burning him up from the inside out, and it was more terrible than he’d ever imagined it to be. Was not death quick in coming? Was not Allah merciful in all things? Why, then, was Allah permitting this to happen to him? He wanted to grit his teeth to fight against the pain-he wanted, he needed, to scream aloud to protect himself from the agony that lived inside his body.
But he couldn’t command his body to do anything at all. All of reality was pain. Everything he could see and hear and feel was pain. Even the Lord Allah was pain…
Allah was doing this to him. If everything in the world was God’s will, then had God willed this on him? How was that possible? Was not God a god of infinite mercy? Where the hell was His mercy now? Had Allah deserted him? Why?
Why?
WHY ?
Then his mind faded into unconsciousness, with a final epilogue of searing pain to see him on his way.
On the EKG readout, the first irregularities showed up. That got Pasternak’s attention. Ordinarily in the OR, as anesthesiologist, it was his job to keep watch on the patient’s vital signs. That included the EKG machine, and he was, in fact, rather a skillful diagnostic cardiologist himself. He had to pay very close attention now. They didn’t want to kill this worthless fuck, and more was the pity. He could have just given him a death such as few men had ever experienced, a fitting punishment for his crimes, but he was a physician, not an executioner, Pasternak told himself, pulling himself back from the edge of a tall and deadly cliff. No, they had to bring this one back. So he reached for the ventilator mask. The “patient,” as he thought of him, was unconscious by now. He pressed the mask onto his face and pressed the button, and the machine shot air into the flaccid, deflated lungs. Pasternak looked up.
“Okay, mark the time. We’re breathing him now. Patient is doubtless unconscious now, and we’re infusing air into his lungs. This ought to take three or four minutes, I think. Could one of you come over here?”
Chavez was closest, and came at once.
“Put those paddles on his chest and hold them there.”
Ding did that, turning to look at the EKG readout. The electronic tracings had settled down and were repeating themselves regularly but not in sinus rhythm, something his wife might have recognized but to him were just like things he’d seen on TV. To his left, Dr. Pasternak was hitting the ventilator button at regular intervals of maybe eight or nine seconds. “What’s the score, Doc?” Chavez asked.
“His heart is settled down now that it’s getting oxygen. The succinylcholine will wear off in another couple of minutes. When you see his body moving, then it’ll be mostly over. I’ll breathe him for another four minutes or so,” the doc reported.
“What did he go through?”
“You never want to find that out. We gave him the equivalent of a massive heart attack. The pain would have been intense-I mean, really miserable. For him, maybe that’s just too damned bad, but it would have been pretty fucking awful. We’ll see how he responds to it in a couple of minutes, guys, but he’s been through something that nobody will ever want to repeat. He probably thinks he’s just seen the bottom floor of hell. I guess we’ll see what that does-did to him-in a few minutes.”
It took four minutes and thirty seconds before the legs moved. Dr. Pasternak looked at the EKG readout on the resuscitator and relaxed. The Emir was out of the influence of the succinylcholine, and his muscles were now under the control of his nerves, the way they were supposed to be.
“He’ll be unconscious for a few minutes, until his brain is fully suffused with oxygenated blood,” the anesthesiologist explained. “We’ll let him awaken normally, and then we can talk with him.”
“What’s his mental state going to be?” This was Clark asking the question. He’d never seen anything even remotely like this before.
“That depends. I suppose it’s possible that he might remain strong and resistive, but I would not expect that. He’s been through a singular and very, very adverse experience. He will not want to repeat it. He’s been through pain that makes childbirth seem like a picnic in Central Park. I can only speculate how dreadful it’s been for him. I don’t know anyone who’s been through this-well, maybe some people who’ve been through massive coronaries, but they don’t usually remember the intensity of the pain. The brain doesn’t work that way. It erases great pain as a defense mechanism. Not this time. He will remember the experience of it, if not the pain itself. If that experience doesn’t frighten him beyond anything he’s ever experienced, well, then we’re talking about John Wayne on amphetamines. People like that do not exist in the real world. There’s the complication of his religious beliefs. Those can be pretty strong. How strong, well, we’ll have to see, but if he resists us from this point on, I will be surprised.”
“If he does, can we repeat the experience?” Clark asked.
Pasternak turned. “Yes, we can-almost indefinitely. I’ve heard around the shop at Columbia that the East German Stasi used this technique to interrogate political and espionage prisoners, and that it was uniformly successful. They stopped using it-I don’t know why. Maybe it was too evil even for them. As I said yesterday, this is off the syllabus from the Josef Mengele School of Medicine. The guy who ran the Stasi was Jewish, as I recall-Marcus Wolf, I think his name was-and maybe it affected him on that basis.”
“How are you feeling, Rich?” Hendley asked.
“I’m fine. But he isn’t.” The doc paused. “Will they still execute this guy?”
“Depends on who ends up getting him,” Hendley replied. “If the FBI gets him, he’ll go through the federal court system, and if he does, then eventually he goes night-night at Terre Haute, Indiana, after due process of law. That’s not our concern, really.”
Because what he’s just been through was quite a lot worse than that, Pasternak didn’t say. His conscience was under control, but it was making noise. This really was out of Josef Mengele’s play-book, and that wasn’t something calculated to make a New York Jew happy. But his brother’s body had never been recovered, squashed to atoms by the collapsing WTC tower. He didn’t even have a grave that he could visit with Mike’s kids. And this bastard had made that happen, and so Rich Pasternak told his conscience to be quiet. He was doing if not God’s work, then his family’s work, and that was fine with him. His conscience would have to be quiet about it.
“What’s this guy’s name exactly?” Pasternak asked.
Clark handled the answer: “Saif Rahman Yasin. He’s child number fifty-plus of his father, a man of commendable vigor, his dad was, also tight with the Saudi Royal Family.”
“Oh? I didn’t know that.”
“He hates the Saudi Royals more than he hates Israel,” Clark explained. “They tried to whack him about six years ago, but they blew the mission. He hates them because of corruption, so he says. I guess they have some-I mean, a huge amount of-money controlled by a relatively small number of people, and you’re going to get some, but compared to Washington, it isn’t all that bad. I’ve been there. I learned the language there back in the 1980s. The Saudis I’ve met are pretty good people. Their religion is different from mine, but hell, so are the Baptists. The Saudis want this mutt dead more than we do, believe it or not. They’d love to drive him to Chop-Chop Square in Riyadh and take his head off with a sword. To them, he’s spit on their country, and their king, and their religion. Three for three, and that’s pretty bad over there. Doc, the Saudis are not the same as we are, but neither are the Brits, okay? I’ve lived there, too.”
“What do you think we ought to do with him?”
“Above my pay grade, sir. We can always kill him, but better to do that in public-hell, do it at halftime at the Super Bowl with instant replay and color commentary from the network TV crew. I could live with that. But it’s really a bigger question than that. He’s a political figure, and his removal will be a political act also. That always screws things up,” Clark concluded. He had little in the way of political instincts, and didn’t really want any. His world was a simpler one: If you did murder, then you died for it. It wasn’t elegant or very “sensitive,” but it had, actually, worked once. As the legal system had worked a lot better before his country had been overrun with lawyers. But there was no going back, and he could not make it so. Clark had no illusions about ruling the world. His brain just didn’t stretch that far. “Doc, what you just put him through, was it really that bad?”
“Far worse than anything I’ve ever come close to experiencing myself, worse than anything I’ve ever seen in twenty-six years of medical practice, worse than anything you can inflict on a person without killing him all the way dead. My knowledge of this is, really, theoretical, but it’s not something I’d want to go through myself for any reason.”
Clark thought back to a guy named Billy, and his time in Clark’s recompression chamber. He remembered how coldly he’d tortured that little rapist fuck, how it had not touched his conscience one little bit. But that had been personal, not business, and his conscience still didn’t care much about it. He’d left him alive in a farm field in Virginia, later to be driven to a hospital and treated futilely for a week or so before the barotrauma had stolen his worthless rapist life. Part of Clark wondered occasionally if Billy liked it in hell. But not often.
So this was worse than that? Damn.
Pasternak looked down and saw the eyelids flutter. Okay, he was coming all the way back. Good. Sort of.
Clark walked over to Hendley. “Who’s going to interview him?” John asked.
“Jerry Rounds, to start.”
“Want me to backstop him?”
“Probably a good idea if we all stand in here. I mean, it would be best if we had a psychiatrist handy-best of all, an Islamic theologian-but we don’t. We’re always shank’s mare here, aren’t we?”
“Cheer up. Langley would never have had the balls to do what we just did, not without a whole law school handy to kibitz, and a reporter from the Post to take notes and build up his moral outrage. That’s one thing I really like about this place: no leaks.”
“Part of me wants to discuss this with Jack Ryan. He’s not a shrink, but I like his instincts. But I can’t do that. You know why.”
Clark nodded; he did. Jack Ryan also had been known to experience conscience problems. Nobody was perfect.
Hendley walked to a phone and punched in a few digits. Just two minutes later, Jerry Rounds came in. “Well?” Rounds asked.
“Our guest has had a bad morning,” Hendley explained. “Now we need to talk to him. That’s your job, Jerry.”
“Looks unconscious,” Rounds observed.
“He’ll be that way for a couple of minutes,” Pasternak clarified. “But he’ll be okay,” the doctor promised.
“Jesus, do we have enough people in here?” Rounds observed next. More people than the regular board meetings. Then the TV camera came in, set up on a tripod by Dominic, and the tarpaulin curtains they’d duct-taped together the night before were erected around the workbench. At his nod, Dominic hit the camera’s record button, and Hendley took over, announcing off camera the time and date. Gavin Biery would, of course, later digitally alter Hendley’s voice. Dominic replayed the sequence and pronounced the recording clean.
“Head games?” Rounds asked, almost to himself, but Clark was standing right next to him.
“Why not?” Clark responded. “No rules on this, Jerry.”
“Right.” Clark had a way of cutting down to the bone of the issue, the intel chief noted.
Clark wondered if everyone should wear cowboy dress, jeans, gunbelts, and ten-gallon hats, to distort him all the way, really to play head games with Saif. But it was better, probably, to keep it simple. Thinking too much about anything usually obfuscated everything and ended up leading nowhere. Simple was usually better. Almost always.
Clark walked to the table and saw that Saif was moving now, moving and twisting in his sleep. About ready to wake up. Would he be surprised to be alive? Clark wondered. Would he think he was in hell? For damned sure it wasn’t paradise. He looked closely at the face. Little muscles were moving now. He was about ready to rejoin the world. Clark decided to stay where he was.
“John?” It was Chavez.
“Yeah, Ding?”
“It’s really been that bad, eh?”
“That’s what the doc says. He’s the expert.”
“Jesus.”
“Wrong deity, man,” Clark observed. “He’s probably expecting to see Allah-or maybe the devil.” I guess maybe I can stand in for him, John thought on reflection. He looked around. Jerry Rounds looked uneasy. Hendley had sent him up to bat in the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded and a full count. Well, he’d be inhuman not to be a little tight, John thought.
He felt himself being drawn into this. It was coming his way, and he suddenly knew it.
Oh, shit, Clark thought. What was he supposed to say to this bastard? This was a job for a psychiatrist. Maybe a serious Islamic churchman, or theologian-what did they call them? Mufti? Something like that. Somebody who knew Islam a hell of a lot better than he did.
But was this guy really a Muslim? Or was he a would-be politician? Did he himself even know what he was? At what point did a man become what he proclaimed himself to be? Those were deep questions for Clark. Too damned deep. But the man’s eyelids were fluttering. Then they opened, and Clark was looking into them.
“Feels good to breathe, doesn’t it?” Clark asked. There was no answer, but there was confusion on the man’s face. “Hello, Saif. Welcome back.”
“Who are you?” the man asked, somewhat drunkenly.
“I work for the United States government.”
“What have you done to me? What happened?”
“We induced a heart attack, then brought you back. They tell me it’s an agonizing procedure.”
To this Clark got no response, but he could see the flicker of terror in the Emir’s eyes.
“You should know this: What you just went through can be replicated-indefinitely and without long-term damage. Fail to cooperate and your days will consist of nothing more than one heart attack after another.”
“You cannot do that. You have-”
“Laws? Not here we don’t. It’s just me, you, and a syringe, for as long as it takes. If you don’t believe me, I can have the doctor back here in two minutes. Make your choice.”
The Emir’s decision took less than three seconds. “Ask your questions.”
Clark and Rounds quickly discovered that their interaction of the man known as the Emir wasn’t going to be an interrogation but rather a cordial debriefing. Yasin had clearly taken Clark’s warning to heart.
The first session lasted two hours and covered the mundane to the significant, questions to which they already had the answers, and mysteries they’d yet to unravel: How long had he been in America? Where and when had he undergone plastic surgery? His route after leaving Pakistan. How was the house in Las Vegas purchased? How big was the URC’s operational budget? The locations of bank accounts; the URC’s organizational structure, cell headquarters, sleeper agents, strategic goals…
And so it went, into the early evening, until Hendley called a halt. The next morning the group gathered in the kitchen of the main house to do a postmortem and to plan the day’s questioning. Their time was limited, Hendley explained. Whatever their personal inclinations, the Emir didn’t belong to The Campus, and justice was not theirs to dispense. The man belonged to the American people; justice to be dispensed according to their laws. Besides, once Yasin was in the hands of the FBI, months and years could be spent wringing from him every last drop of information. In the meantime, The Campus would make hay with what the Emir had so far disclosed. They had plenty of leads to run down, and enough intel to keep them busy for eight months to a year.
“I’d say there’s just one last thing we need to get out of him,” Jack Ryan Jr. said.
“What’s that?” Rounds replied.
“The why of it all. This guy’s thinking is too layered. All the pieces and parts of Lotus-Yucca Mountain, the Losan, the attacks in the Midwest… Was the whole point terror, or something bigger? It has to be more than Nine-Eleven writ large, right?”
Clark cocked his head thoughtfully and looked to Hendley, who took a beat, then said, “Damned good question.”
By mid-morning they had what they wanted; they turned their attention to the tricky matter of turning Yasin over to the FBI. As symbolically and visually appealing as the idea might be, trussing up the Emir like a Christmas goose and shoving him from a moving car onto the steps of the Hoover Building was a nonstarter. The Campus had for weeks been skirting the gray line between remaining in the shadows where it was designed to operate and attracting the attention of the U.S. government.
So the question became how to “regift” the world’s most wanted terrorist without having it blow back on them. In the end, Dominic Caruso, having learned the lesson from Brian, came up with the solution.
“KISS,” he said. “Keep it simple, stupid.”
“Explain.” This from Hendley.
“We’re overthinking it. We’ve already got the perfect cutout: Gus Werner. He tapped me for The Campus, and he’s in tight with Dan Murray, Director of the FBI.”
“This is a damned big gift horse, Dom,” said Chavez. “Think he’ll go for it? Better question: Think he can make it work?”
“How would it go down?” asked Jack.
“He’ll be arrested immediately and locked up in a very secure location. You know, read him his rights, offer him an attorney, try to talk to him some. Get a U.S. Attorney involved. They’ll tell the Attorney General, who’ll tell the President. After that, the snowball starts getting big. The press gets involved, and we sit back and watch the show. Listen, Gus knows how we work, and he knows how the Bureau works. If anybody can sell it, he can.”
Hendley considered this for a few moments, then nodded. “Call him.”
In the Hoover Building, Gus Werner’s phone rang. It was his private line, and few people had access to that. “Werner.”
“Dominic Caruso here, Mr. Werner. You got a few minutes this afternoon? Say, twenty minutes.”
“Uh, sure. When?”
“Now.”
“Okay, come on down.”
Dominic parked a block from the Hoover Building and went into the main lobby, showing his FBI ID to the desk guards. That allowed him to walk around the metal detectors. FBI agents were supposed to carry sidearms. In fact, Dominic wasn’t at the moment. He’d forgotten and left it at his desk, rather to his surprise.
Augustus Werner’s office was on the top floor, complete with a secretary that he rated as a full assistant director of the FBI, just a few doors away from Dan Murray’s rather larger director’s office. Dominic announced himself to the secretary, and she whisked him right in. He took a seat across from the AD’s desk. It was exactly 3:30 by his watch.
“Okay, Dominic, what do you want?” Werner asked.
“I have an offer to make.”
“What offer is that?”
“You want the Emir?” Dominic Caruso asked.
“Huh?”
Dominic repeated the question.
“Sure, okay.” Werner’s expression said, What’s the punch line?
“Tonight, at Tysons Corner. Upper-level parking area, say at nine-fifteen. Come alone. I know you’ll have people close by, but not close enough to see the transfer. I’ll personally hand him over to you.”
“You’re serious. You have him?”
“Yep.”
“How the hell did that happen?”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell. We’ve got him and you can have him. Just leave us out of it.”
“That’d be tough.”
“But not impossible.” Dominic smiled.
“No, not impossible.”
“Anonymous tip, unexpected break-whatever.”
“Right, right… I have to talk this one over with the director.”
“I understand that.”
“Stay by your phone. I’ll be in touch.”
As everyone knew it would, the call came quickly-within ninety minutes, in fact-and the time and place of the meeting was confirmed. Eight-thirty came soon enough, and then it was time to get ready. Dominic and Clark walked out to the workshop to find Pasternak giving the Emir a once-over under the watchful eye and ready Glock of Domingo Chavez.
“He good to go, Doc?” Dominic Caruso asked.
“Yes. Careful with the leg, though.”
“Anything you say.”
Clark and Dominic stood Yasin up, and Dominic took the flex-cuffs from his back pocket and attached them to his wrists. Next, Dominic took out an Ace bandage, which he wrapped around Saif’s head half a dozen times. It would make a good blindfold. With that done, Clark grabbed him by the arm and walked him to the door, then across the backyard and through the back door to the garage. Hendley, Rounds, Granger, and Jack were standing beside the Suburban. They remained silent as Dominic opened the Suburban’s rear passenger door and helped Yasin inside. Clark went around to the other side and slid in beside him. Dominic got in front and started up. The drive would be down U.S. 29 to the D.C. Beltway, and then west into northern Virginia. Dominic stayed right on the posted speed limit, which was unusual for him. The addition of an FBI ID in his wallet usually absolved him of all speed limits in America, but this evening he’d play everything strictly by the rules. Across the American Legion Bridge into Virginia, which turned into a sweeping left uphill turn. Another twenty minutes and Dominic took the right-hand exit to Tysons Corner. Traffic picked up, but mostly away from the shopping center. It was 9:25 now. He took the ramp to the upper level on the south side of the shopping center.
There, Dominic thought. An obvious Bureau car, a new Ford Crown Victoria with an extra radio antenna. He pulled to within thirty feet of it and just sat still. The Ford’s driver-side front door opened. It was Gus Werner, dressed in his usual go-to-work suit. Dominic got out to join him.
“Got him?” Werner asked.
“Yes, sir,” Dominic answered. “He looks a little different now. Bleached his skin some. Using this”-Dom handed over the half-used tube of Benoquin that he’d taken from the Las Vegas house-“and he’s had some work done on his face, in Switzerland, he told us. I’ll get him.”
Dominic walked back to the Suburban, opened the rear door, helped Yasin down, then slammed the door shut and walked him toward Werner.
“He’ll need some medical attention. Bullet injury to his thigh. It’s been looked at, but he might need a little more attention. Aside from that, he’s a hundred percent healthy. Hasn’t eaten very much. Might be hungry. Taking him to D.C. Field Division?”
“Yep.”
“Well, sir, he’s all yours now.”
“Dominic, someday I want to hear all of this story.”
“Maybe someday, sir, but not tonight.”
“Understood.”
“One thing: Ask him about the Heartland Attacks first. Ask him about his sleepers.”
“Why?”
“He’s trying a little sleight of hand. It’d be best if nobody runs with it.”
“Okay.” Then Werner’s voiced turned formal. “Saif Yasin, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be taken down and can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present. Do you understand what I just told you?” Werner asked, taking the man’s arm.
The Emir didn’t say a word.
Werner looked to Dominic. “He understand English?”
Dominic grinned. “Oh, yeah. Believe me, he knows exactly what’s happening.”