The Prince of Bagram Prison

The Prince of Bagram Prison
is a work of fiction
.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Random House Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2008 by Jenny Siler
Dossier copyright © 2008 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon
are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
MORTALIS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING
-
IN
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PUBLICATION DATA 

Carr, Alex.
The Prince of Bagram Prison : a novel / Alex Carr.
p. cm.
“Mortalis.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-49738-3
1. Terrorists—Fiction. 2. Informers—Fiction. 3. Women intelligence officers—Fiction.
4. Madrid (Spain)—Fiction. 5. Casablanca (Morocco)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.I42125P75 2008
813'.54—dc22   2007023203
www.mortalis-books.com
v 3.0

 

N
othing was as Manar had imagined it would be. Her mother should have been there, and her two aunts. Her older sister, whose hand she had held through two births and who had pledged to do the same for her. There should have been clean sheets and basins of warm water, someone with a cool cloth for her forehead. And, on the other side of the house, the men regaling Yusuf with stories of their own children's arrivals, so that when the time came he would be awake to say the
adhan
and perform the
tahneek
, the first sweet smudge of dates in the child's mouth.

But there was none of this.

The room smelled of blood and feces. Manar's mostly, but other women's as well. Old blood, and on the once-white walls the stained remnants of past catastrophes. Birth or death or both.

On the far wall, Hassan II hung in stiff portrait. An aging playboy performing the role of beneficent king in an expensive French suit and a red fez. Polo player, racing-car driver, epicurean, Manar thought, looking at his slim fingers and European face. Torturer, murderer, rapist.

In the stark light of the prison infirmary, the doctor's round forehead glistened like the grease-laden haunch of a lamb on a spit. Four in the morning, and Manar could smell the stale liquor on the man's breath, the sweat stink of the whore he'd left to come here. He was the same man who had examined her the night they'd brought her in, who had grudgingly confirmed for her jailers what she'd been trying desperately to tell them all along, through the first round of beatings and humiliations: that she was pregnant.

The doctor had not dared look her in the face then, and he didn't now.

“Put her feet up,” he said to the nurse, and Manar felt the woman's hands on her ankles, the cold steel of the stirrups on her bare feet.

A contraction hit her, faster and harder than the previous ones had been. Manar took a deep breath and shifted her hips to absorb the pain.

“Do not let her move,” the doctor snapped.

His hand was inside her now, as if she were an animal. She could feel his wrist against her pubic bone, his meaty fingers on the baby. And the pain—greedy, ravenous, wanting everything she had and more. She turned her head and retched, emptying the thin contents of her stomach onto the filthy floor.

“Do not let her move!”

The nurse took Manar's hand and smiled weakly, a conspir-ator's smile, and Manar thought, There is nothing between us. Nothing. How could you even dare?

“He is turning the baby now,” the nurse said. “You must stay still. It will all be over soon.”

For a moment, it was. Manar's abdomen relaxed and she felt the baby shift inside her, felt the doctor's hand slide out from between her legs.

Please, God, she thought, taking that single moment of calm to offer one last prayer. Please take the child now, before it is tainted by any of this. Then another contraction hit her, and with it the undeniable need to push.

“This is the easy part,” the nurse told her.

To Manar's surprise, the woman was right. After fifteen hours of submission to the pain, the agony of pushing was a relief.

When the baby finally came, the doctor did not give it to Manar but handed it to the nurse while he cut the umbilical cord. The baby was still and stunned, his skin dark as a bruise. For a moment, Manar felt a sense of profound relief that her prayer had been answered. Then the child cried out and she realized that he was not dead.

He cried out and Manar could not help herself. At least he will be my reprieve, she thought selfishly, as she had that first night, when she had naïvely consoled herself with the presumption that they would not rape her while she had a child in her body. Even they, even these animals, she told herself now, would not harm her while she had milk to give.

She put her arms out to take the boy, but the nurse shook her head. “I'm sorry,” she whispered. “You must have known.”

“The
adhan,
” Manar pleaded, understanding that she had been completely forsaken, that neither of them was to be spared. Her child would live and she would die. “Please, in the name of Allah, I must say the
adhan
.”

The baby shrieked in the nurse's arms, and Manar felt his desperation in her entire body. “He is mine!” she yelled.

The woman stepped forward and laid the child on Manar's chest. He was naked and bloody, his eyes wide open, dark as two wet stones.

Manar put her lips to his right ear and smelled him, her smell and his together. Blood, like the earth, like the mud from which God had fashioned them all. Behind his ear was a small red stain, a single blemish on his still-purple skin. An imperfection, Manar thought, like that which a pot suffers in the kiln, a mark of what he had suffered inside her.

“God is great,” she whispered.

“I testify that there is no god except God.

I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.

Come to prayer.

Come to salvation.”

Then she turned him to say the second prayer, but the nurse was already taking him from her again.

“So, then, Jamal,” the American said, resting his hands on his knees as was his habit. “How's everything going?”

He was a tall man, his arms and legs too long for his torso, his head square, with a neatly shorn cap of blond hair, pale eyelashes set in a pale face. Justin, he had insisted more than once that Jamal call him. But the boy could imagine nothing more awkward than addressing him this way.

It was evening, still barely light outside, and through the open window Jamal could see into the apartment across the street, where the woman in the pink
abaya
was cooking dinner, as she almost always was during these meetings with the American.
Harira,
Jamal thought, smelling the heady odor of garlic and spice. Last week there was lamb. And, the week before, the pleasant aroma of sugar and cinnamon. The promise of seeing her was the one thing about these weekly meetings that Jamal did not dread.

“There are some very important men coming to see you,” the American announced, not waiting for a reply to his earlier query, apparently not wanting one. “They're going to ask you some questions about Bagheri.”

Jamal's mind raced anxiously back through everything he had said. He had not meant for it to come to this, and now he wasn't quite sure what to do. Somewhere in the building, a baby was crying. A baby was always crying, though whether it was the same baby or different ones Jamal could not say.

“From Washington?” he asked, trying to conceal his panic.

The American nodded, the gesture somehow both encouraging and unkind. “Just tell them what you know, what you've told me, and everything will be fine.”

Jamal thought for a moment. “Will Mr. Harry be there?”

The man sighed, clearly exasperated. “We've talked about this, Jamal. Harry—Mr. Comfort, that is—doesn't work with us anymore. But you have me now.” He conjured a smile, leaned forward, and handed Jamal a scrap of paper with an address scrawled in black ink. “There's a safe house in Malasaña. We'll meet there at midnight tomorrow.”

Jamal took the paper. “And after I tell them about Bagheri I can go?”

“Of course.” The American shrugged, pressed his hands against his knees, and unfolded his long body from the chair. “You can go right now if you'd like,” he said, not understanding.

“No.” Jamal followed the man's face as he rose. “I can go to America?”

The man paused to recover himself. Clearly he had not expected this, and his mouth was suddenly grim in the room's fading light. “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, of course. We'll talk about that later.”

Jamal nodded, sensing that this was the right thing to do, though he knew the American was lying. He had seen this same look many times before. Not pity but guilt. Shame at what had been done, at what was about to be done.

“Trust me,” the man said. Pulling his wallet from the back pocket of his pants, he slipped a hundred-euro note—much more than the usual payment—from the billfold and handed it to Jamal, then turned for the door.