The Prisoner of Guantanamo (12 page)

“So what do you do here, besides keeping him in line?” Bo asked.

“Interrogator. Saudis, mostly.”

“She's regular Army. Fluent in Arabic, so they sent her to the Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca.”

“Ah,” Bokamper said, “a ninety-day wonder. I hear it's been a struggle for some of you.”

Falk winced, but Pam seemed to take it in stride.

“There's always a learning curve. But you could say that for the pros, too. I'd bet no more than five or six of them had ever dealt directly with Arabic speakers, much less Pashto or Dari, which is most of the Afghans. You could do a whole joke book on some of the cultural blunders.”

“Except in the case of our friend here, Mr. Arabist,” Bo said. She smiled for the first time since introductions. Falk wanted to seize the common ground and hold it, but Bo was already bolting for the next hill.

“I wasn't referring to cultural blunders as much as some of the other horror stories,” Bo said. “Rookies losing control of the interview. Facing their interpreters instead of their subjects. Even being intimidated. I hear some of the hard cases were practically laughing in your faces.”

“That must have been before I got here.”

“Maybe so. But what's up with the sex stuff?”

“You mean the taunts? The ‘Hey, big boy, how 'bout a good time' stuff some of the women were told to try out?”

“I heard it was a little worse. Rubbing their boobs against them. Painting the poor little pious fellows with nail polish and saying it was menstrual blood. Really freaking 'em out.”

Pam's cheeks colored. Exactly what Bo intended, if Falk had to guess. It made him a little ashamed of all the times he'd tried for the same effect.

“That was never my department,” she said tersely. “There was some of that, but it's been phased out. It was a disaster, which I could have told them after spending ten minutes with these guys.”

“Oh, c'mon. Don't tell me you haven't batted your eyes now and then. Or wouldn't if they gave you the right signals. A come-on is a come-on. And if it makes 'em talk, why not?”

“You're not shooting for a come-on when you're trying to become their mom. Or their sister. Even if I did, I'm not into offering blow jobs for a few names in the network.”

“Easy, sister. Or should I say mom? No need to bring blow jobs into it. I'm just pulling your chain.”

“And where'd you learn all about interrogation?”

“Talking to people like this guy. Reading stuff.”

“A ninety-page wonder. Pretty ballsy coming in here talking like a pro, don't you think?”

“‘Ballsy'?” He smiled with apparent relish. Falk cringed in anticipation. “I know you're military, but you'd be doing yourself a real favor by toning down the tough-gal act just a notch.”

Falk could tell from Pam's eyes that the remark stung and that she was itching to strike back with a quick “Fuck off.” But she must have realized that would be playing right into Bo's hands. So instead she took a deep breath, turned to Falk, and said with forced calm, “Is your friend always such good company?”

Bo answered first.

“Falk's too polite to ever say this in front of me, but you've got to take everything I say with a grain of salt. Maybe even a whole box.”

She didn't reply, but her nostrils were flared, and a glint in her eye warned that she was still seeking an opening for a counterattack. Awkward as it was to watch his two friends spar, there was another emotion behind Falk's uneasiness. He'd seen Bokamper get into these sorts of immediate confrontations with other women, and they always led to either lasting enmity or passionate affairs. Neither prospect would promote much happiness in Gitmo's close quarters. Blessedly, Bo seemed to back off a bit, lowering his shoulders and easing down in his chair. Then, as if reading Falk's thoughts, he turned to him and said in a stage whisper, “Don't worry, man, I
am
married. Besides, I don't poach.”

“Did he really just say ‘poach'?” Pam asked. “Unbelievable. So you've got an ego to match your big mouth.”

“Easy,” Bo said, chuckling now. “Don't take it personally. It's the way I was trained.”

“Another Marine?”

“That, too,” Falk said, “but he's referring to his family. If you'd met them you'd know. Six brothers and sisters and an argument every minute, with their dad egging 'em on like a pit bull trainer.”

“Constructive engagement,” Bokamper said. “That's what Pops called it. He was an old infantry sergeant, and it was his version of the Socratic method. Throw out a topic at dinner and let the offspring rip each other's lungs out. If you weren't the biggest mouth you got knocked off the podium. Sort of a verbal king of the hill.”

“So did you ever tell your sisters to cut it with the tough-guy act?”

“Oh, far worse than that.”

She smiled in spite of herself, then quickly shook her head, as if trying to take it back.

“So what have you come here to do?”

“I'm the new liaison to the task force from the secretary of state.”

“I didn't ask your title. I asked what you're doing.”

“See, you're getting the hang of it. But mum's the word. I've already told Falk more than I should have, so maybe you should ask him later.”

Falk was relieved Bo hadn't used the words “pillow talk,” and felt that the worst was over. A few moments of relative calm seemed to restore the table's equilibrium, and Falk seized the opportunity to fetch another round from the bar. If he wasn't around to provide an audience, Bo would probably play nicer, and he was eager for this cease-fire to hold.

         

“S
O HOW'D YOU GUYS MEET?”
Pam asked Bokamper, once Falk was out of earshot.

“I was just going to ask you the same thing.”

“But I was first.”

“I'll bet you always are.”

“Do I get an answer?”

“I was his drill sergeant's CO. Parris Island.”

“Not exactly the way most friendships get started.”

“You got that right. But I was pretty new to the job, and he was fighting us. He needed some help getting over the hump.”

“A father figure?”

“No, but that's what my sergeant kept telling me, only because everybody kept misreading the poor bastard. Falk was such a stubborn cuss they were sure he was never going to make it. Any kind of father act only got his back up. What he needed was a big brother, somebody to teach him how to deal with authority by example, not by layering on more.”

“Sounds like somebody who'd had enough of his parents.”

“He ever talk about them?”

“A couple of drunks, from what I gather. Died when he was in his teens. Pretty bad when your father names you out of spite.”

“What's that?”

“He never told you how he got his name?” Pam's face flushed with the joy of a minor victory.

“Sure. He was named for Paul Revere. His dad was a big Red Sox fan pushing for any Boston connection, and his mom had already nixed ‘Yaz.'”

“That's part of it. But it also had to do with some Maine connection. It seems that during the Revolution Paul Revere led this disastrous naval expedition up the Penobscot. Lost a bunch of ships and fled through the woods like a coward. So that's how he was known around Deer Isle, at least among the old-timers. Nice little joke to play on your son, huh? Of course, Falk got that from his mother, so who knows.”

“Interesting. He told you all that?”

She nodded.

“Then I guess he also told you about his engagement?” Her jaw dropped. “Didn't think so. Don't worry, it was ages ago. He was barely out of college. Would have been a huge mistake, which I guess finally occurred to him. Ever since then he only seems to get really close to women when he knows he won't be around for that long. Like during his posting to Yemen during the
Cole
investigation. Or to Sudan after the embassy bombings.”

“Or to Gitmo. Not that you were going to say that. How nice of you to warn me.”

“Not saying it'll happen to you, of course. But you do know the three most important factors in relationships? Location, location, location. Just like real estate.”

“So now I'm a piece of waterfront property?” She offered a smile carved in ice. “A perk of the current posting?”

“Weren't you the one just telling me about Gitmo's point system? Another variation on the theme, that's all. I'm just saying you should keep your options open, because he always has.”

“Some friend. I thought it was all Semper Fi with you Marines.”

“Oh, it is. I'd do anything for Falk. Even if he was over there robbing the bartender right now, if I saw an MP raise a gun to shoot him, I'd drop the guy. No hesitation.”

“That loyal, huh?”

“Forever and a day.”

“Maybe that's because you've never been on opposite sides when something really mattered.”

Before Bo could answer, Falk returned to the table, followed closely by Whitaker, who seemed to have rallied.

“Was just telling Falk that I'm headed back to the ranch soon, if anyone needs a lift,” Whitaker said.

“You've got a car?” Bokamper asked.

“Falk and I both. Tell Fowler if he's a good boy I might let him take her out for a spin.”

“If you think of it,” Falk said, “turn on my window fan when you get back.”

“With any luck I won't need to. Repairman was out this afternoon, two days ahead of schedule. He remembered you from your Marine posting. Said to say hello.”

Falk's stomach took a tumble. “You catch his name?”

“Harry. Which is funny, 'cause I'd have sworn he was Cuban, one of the old commuters. Anyhow, he said to come see him sometime.”

Falk would be doing just that, he supposed. It now seemed clear that Elena's message was more urgent than he had thought. But with one soldier dead, arrests in the offing, and a team of Washington snoops on the loose, the timing couldn't have been worse. Gitmo was still shrinking by the minute.

The last thing Falk wanted to do after that exchange was to look Bo in the eye, so he turned to Pam, only to detect a smoldering anger. He wondered what Bo had said in his absence.

“I think I'll leave you boys to talk about guy stuff,” she said, forcing a smile. “Nice meeting you, Bo.” Her tone was perfunctory, but Bo smiled back.

Whitaker, oblivious to everything, started in on the subject of Fowler and Cartwright as soon as Pam left. But a few minutes later he, too, called it quits. Falk was inclined to do the same.

“Need a lift?” he asked Bo.

“Better not. Looks like the bus is still waiting. That's probably how Fowler wants to see me arrive home.”

“Since when did you worry about appearances? This mission must really be serious.”

“Now if I only knew what the mission was.” He leaned across the table and said in a lowered voice, “We need to talk again. Soon. Someplace with privacy. Voice and otherwise.”

“Well, now. How 'bout tomorrow after breakfast, a little walk on the beach?”

“Perfect.”

“I'll show you where Ludwig went in.”

“Even better.”

“This really
is
serious, isn't it?”

“Tomorrow, Falk. Tomorrow after breakfast.”

CHAPTER NINE

A
DNAN AL
-H
AMDI
had learned to think of himself as a mouse in a burrow, surviving in a desert filled with hawks and snakes. It was a scorched landscape where the white sun never set.

The hawks were a constant presence, their shadows flitting across his face at perfectly timed intervals, as if they circled to the beat of a drum. The drumbeat was their footsteps, the boot tread of guards relentlessly approaching, then fading in the corridors of Camp 3. Once per minute. Twice per minute. Every hour of every day.

Sometimes he watched them from his bunk, the mouse buried beneath the sheets with his nose to the air, twitching just enough to take a reading as they passed—talon, beak, and feather cloaked in military camouflage, gun at the ready—a menacing sight, yet harmless as long as he didn't cry out or stir, the way he often had at first. Careful observation had disclosed a weakness in their bearing. In the place on their uniforms where their names were supposed to appear, there were instead strips of tape. Apparently they, too, feared this place.

Adnan wasn't exactly sure how long he had been here, mostly because those first weeks—months perhaps? years even?—were now a blur, only some of which he could remember.

He had been captured on the battlefield after only a few months in Afghanistan, having departed his homeland with a sense of zeal and a spirit of adventure. Off to join the jihad. God's work was calling from across the seas and deserts. He landed in Pakistan, where holy men from the mountains drove him north from Karachi, and then west, across the barren passes. There were not enough guns to go around, and the snow on the ground at higher elevations had shocked him, numbed him. For weeks they did little but wait or march, and then the bombers came. Half of the men were dead within a week. Huge explosions all around, and then a chaotic journey south. A band of Tadjiks picked them up, packed them on a colorful truck, and then shoved them all into a stinking dungeon in the middle of an orange grove, stuck there for weeks until he was hauled out into the sunlight before two men in pressed pants and sunglasses. They spoke on two-way radios and drank water from clear plastic bottles. One spoke some Arabic, but not very well.

“You are a leader,” the men told him.

“I am a soldier,” Adnan replied. “A zealot, yes, praise be to God the most holy, but still just a soldier.”

“No,” they said. “The men who brought you here say you're a leader, an organizer.”

Further questions followed. Where did you train? Who paid you? How did you recruit them? They mistook his ignorance for stubbornness, then drove him north, half a day up a valley, another two days in a hot metal crate at the edge of an airstrip, surrounded by mines. They dressed him in an orange jumpsuit, and then blindfolded him and bagged his head like a chicken for beheading, the sack coming down across his face while someone else shackled his wrists and his ankles. He was duckwalked onto an airplane, its engines already roaring, the floor vibrating beneath his feet. Then more shackles as he sat, binding him to the floor. A door slamming, then only darkness and the lift of take-off before a journey of what seemed like days. Swamped in his own vomit and shit and piss as the plane swayed in the cold skies, ever in the roaring darkness. He shivered, crying, but heard only the shrieks of his neighbors inside the hollow metal tube that carried them onward. At one point someone put an apple in his hands, and he was able to strain into position long enough to take a few bites, the flavor and juices overwhelming. But it was too hard to keep eating, bound as he was, and when the plane bounced through some turbulence the apple jostled loose. He felt it roll between his ankles across the floor.

Then, finally, after hours more, the plane thudded hard against the ground and came to a throbbing stop. Light poured in through the blindfold and sack as he heard the rear hatch wrenching open. There was shouting, some in a foreign tongue and some in a rudimentary Arabic, telling him to stand while someone unlocked him from the frame of the plane. His knees buckled as he tried to rise. Then a stick knocked against his calves, and someone shouted into his ear, incomprehensible, before hands grabbed him roughly beneath the armpits and hauled him forward, his legs full of pins and needles. He smelled sea air, and felt a windy blast of dust and grit rake across his hands. The air was a humid blanket that he would wear from that day forward.

When they finally took off the blindfold and hood he was in a chilly white room seated in a metal chair with his legs shackled to the floor. For hours on end they asked him the same questions that the two men in Afghanistan had asked. Where did you train? Who paid you? How did you recruit them? When he replied again and again that he didn't know, they shut him away in his burrow. Not the one where he lived now, but a sort of glorified cage among other cages. He had come to his present home later, while still clouded by fears and strangeness.

Weeks ago this new world had finally begun to come into focus for him. It happened after he realized that the only way to reclaim equilibrium was by imposing his own natural order. He would name and classify the things around him, sort and list them in his own fashion. And he had settled on the idea of hawks and snakes as the first zoological labels, a taxonomy that he hoped to expand through further careful observation.

Some aspects of this universe resisted easy categorization. Day and night, for instance. The fluorescent panels of Camp 3—he had overheard a hawk speaking the number of this place—cast a harsh perma-glow. It was a chill limbo between sun and moon, which left Adnan's compass spinning without anchor until he rediscovered the lodestone possibilities of prayer. Now he oriented each day by the five calls that came regularly over the prison loudspeakers, falling to the narrow floor in famished zeal. He aligned himself toward Mecca by a small black arrow marked on the floor at the foot of his bed, then knelt on a thin foam mat.

There was little space for much else. The room was six feet by eight feet, eight inches, with the bed taking up about a third. It was his home for almost every hour of every day, except for those times when he was forced back into the white room, the clean but cold den of the snakes. Otherwise, there was only a once-weekly trip to the showers, when he was escorted at gunpoint to bathe beneath coils of razor wire, plus a half hour each day of “exercise,” a bit of idling on a small cement corner while he stared across the grounds toward the burrows of other mice who spoke in other tongues.

He had few belongings, only what they had given him in a small bag on the very first day, replenishing his supply as each item ran out: his orange jumpsuit, flip-flops for the shower, a white cloth prayer cap, a foam sleeping mat plus a sheet and two blankets for his bed, a washcloth, two small towels, a stubby toothbrush that fit onto a fingertip, soap, shampoo, the prayer mat, and a copy of the Quran that came in a plastic bag.

The toilet in his room was a hole in the floor in one corner. In another corner was the sink, where the water emerged in a pale yellow stream that was as warm and stale as the air. He had to stoop to wash his hands, and he had to stoop lower to get a drink, gulping straight from the faucet. The hawks wouldn't give him a cup. A security risk, they said. You might use it to throw your own shit and piss at us, the way you did earlier—he didn't remember any of that now, but had no reason to believe it wasn't true. Or you might make something out of it, a weapon even. They told him the sink was built low to make it easier for him to wash his feet for prayers.

But Adnan no longer bothered with ablutions, because piety no longer motivated his prayers. He had been religious back in Yemen, and even more so in Afghanistan, when his hopes for adventure had turned bleak and hopeless in the face of gunfire and deprivation. Whenever death came near, God had seemed to lurk right over his shoulder, a fine warm breath upon his neck. But in this place he sensed God only as an absence, a void. God, in his infinite wisdom, had escaped and taken no one with him, vanishing without a word into the vapors of the heat. So prayer became merely a wheel in Adnan's timepiece and, when meshed with the clockwork of mealtime, told him the approximate hour of the day. In a world without horizons beneath a sky with no stars, calibration was its own salvation.

The wheel of his day turned like this: dawn prayer, breakfast, shower time (but only once per week), sick call, noon prayer, lunch, a half hour in the exercise yard, mail call, sunset prayer, dinner, evening prayer.

The only events that always came upon him without warning were the summonings to the dens of the snakes. In the beginning—or what he could remember of it—he had been taken to them daily, locked into chains and shackles by the hawks, then delivered to the dens. The hawks hobbled him onto a cart that glided across gravel paths. The vipers' chambers were divided into eight rooms all in a row, like a giant egg case, a place where perhaps they gestated, reproduced. Or, no, he decided, amending his version of the natural order, perhaps these rooms were instead aligned like the stomachs of a camel, each with its own digestive function. But he was always taken to the same one. Always the third door and, behind it, the same two men working in tandem. And sometimes a third behind a mirror, where he could detect just enough movement when the light changed to know that the mirror was really a window. Eventually he discarded this image of the camel stomachs and began thinking of the rooms instead as holes in the ground, deep places where the snakes lay in wait behind their mirrors and beneath their tables.

In the earliest days the snakes splayed him, stripped him, and held him wide open to their hissing. They circled and swayed in the manner of cobras, broadening to show their hoods, while the rollers of their chairs emitted mouse squeaks to echo his own as they circled toward him to strike. Prim men who spoke Arabic sat to one side—jackals, he later named them—translating snake words into Arabic. Sometimes the questioners rose up from their seats to tower above him, then pierced him with fang and venom. Other times they tried swallowing him whole, their bones crushing his own until every juice was ingested into their systems.

His vague recollection was that in self-defense he began to babble, to talk nonsense, but they only squeezed harder, until he was no longer sure of what he was saying. Or maybe he was saying nothing at all, the poison rigid in his jawbone, locking it shut. That must have been the case, because finally the day came when they left him alone, casting him back into his burrow for a few weeks of rest beneath the shadows of the circling hawks, who no longer came for him in the floodlit night.

It was during that interval that he began to recover his sense of order, the clockwork of his days, then began to name and classify. And it was around that time that the newest of the creatures arrived. He, too, demanded Adnan's presence in the lair of the snakes, but he was different. Quieter. Slower. He circled at a distance, and he didn't hiss in the tongue of the others, or depend on a jackal to interpret his words. His use of Arabic was at first alarming, as if he must have crept into the family home in Sana, stolen the words of Adnan's parents and sisters, and then twisted them almost beyond recognition with his serpent's accent. Even as his mouth shaped Yemeni vowels and offered the buzzwords of the bazaar, his accent betrayed him as an interloper. But at least he never bared his fangs. Sometimes he even chose to circle with the hawks, especially at night, in the quiet hours when the permalight was at its harshest, or in the bleakness before first prayers, when Adnan's sense of time was at its weakest.

Like every other beast inhabiting the world outside Adnan's burrow, this one offered no name. So Adnan came up with one of his own, settling on the Lizard. Still a reptile, but without the snake's bite. More like the big green creatures that he had seen beyond the fences, which were probably just other interlopers in disguise, waiting to shed their skins to take the form of humans.

Adnan decided that by keeping the Lizard happy he might gradually improve his life, and thus began their dialogue, cautious and wary at first, but harmless enough that Adnan began to almost welcome their sessions, now finding it a relief to leave the burrow. The Lizard never said much about himself, but he didn't have to. You could learn a lot about a creature like him just by paying attention. He had been a soldier once, that much Adnan was sure of. And he had lived in this place before, at a much earlier time. His lack of uniform meant he now must be working for one of the security services that practically everyone in the world had heard of, even in Sana—the CIA or the FBI. All of this had piqued Adnan's curiosity for reasons he wasn't yet ready to reveal. When Adnan returned to the burrow from one of their meetings he did something he had never yet tried—so far as he could remember—and shouted to the other mice in the cells all around him.

“I told them nothing!” he yelled, having heard others shout the same thing.

There was applause, a few words of encouragement in Arabic.

“Allahu Akbar!” someone offered, missing the point entirely. It was not about God anymore. It was about spreading the word, filling in the blanks, passing along the news of this new world that he was finally beginning to comprehend.

Up to now, he supposed, he had been a broken link in the chain of communication that often spread news among the cells of Camp 3. Newer arrivals had passed word to them that they were in Cuba. Others had told them that the whole world knew of their existence. Every bit of information added dimension to his new sense of things. Word went around that a few dozen men had actually gone home, back across the water on the same plane that had brought them here. Adnan, who had always stayed out of these cell-to-cell conversations, mended his ways and joined in, telling the others even more than he had told the Lizard. Because he had secrets. And he now knew intuitively that if the snakes and the Lizard wanted those secrets, then perhaps they could also be of value to the other mice.