Ahmed al-Adel had been sitting alone in his cell with the lights off for about an hour. No one had spoken to him in more than ten hours by his estimation. No reading, no radio, no TV, and no communication since he'd last talked to his lawyer after lunch. He had no watch, no way of telling time, but it seemed that they turned the lights off at 10:00 each night.
He was in solitary confinement and so had no contact with any other prisoners, and only sparse contact with his guards. They dropped off and picked up his food three times a day. He assumed they watched him from the camera mounted on the wall opposite his cell. All of this was fine with him. He had no desire to talk to anyone. Even his lawyer was irritating him. Jackson was beginning to question his story.
Worse, though, was that Jackson had already been proven wrong. The lawyer had told him that there was no way they would be able to hold him in jail over the long weekend unless they charged him formally. Instead of charging him, though, the feds had decided to hold him as a material witness. Jackson told him that the American Arab community in Atlanta, Miami, Baltimore, and New York had all been hit with a flurry of arrest warrants. This was not good news, but al-Adel didn't let Jackson know it bothered him. It was crucial that he feigned ignorance for another day. Whether he lived did not matter, just so long as his death came quickly and without pain. Al-Adel was ready to be martyred. They had promised him that his pivotal part in this operation would be properly recorded. All of Arabia would soon know of his greatness.
The clanging noise of a heavy door opening and closing pulled him from his thoughts of greatness. He could hear footsteps coming down the hallway. He wasn't sure if it was more than two people, but it was definitely more than one. Two men suddenly appeared on the other side of his bars. Al-Adel couldn't see much more than their backlit silhouettes, but he could tell by the uniform that one of them was a guard.
The guard unlocked the door to the cell and left without uttering a single word. The man who was left did not open the door right away. Instead he pulled a phone from his pocket and dialed a number.
"Are you in?" the mysterious man asked. He listened for a second and then said, "Cut the video feeds and erase anything that shows us entering or leaving the building."
The man put the phone away and began addressing al-Adel in flawless Arabic. Al-Adel sat up in his bed clutching his blanket, terror coursing through every vein. "I am an American," he said with what little courage he could muster. "I want to see my lawyer."
The man on the other side of the bars did not answer him with words, but with laughter, laughter that showed no fear of anything that al-Adel could say or do, laughter tinged with a deep anger that spoke of unpleasant things to come.