Threatcon Delta (12 page)

I
t was Major Dell’s dream that one day she would have an orderly. That had not yet happened. Here, though—unlike Iraq—she had a buzzer. When someone came to the door, she didn’t have to shout.

She expected the callers and let them in. Ryan Kealey was tall, in his forties, and dressed in civilian clothes. General Emory Farrell was a head shorter, some ten years older, and barrel-chested. The officer shut the door behind them.

“Thanks for seeing me,” Kealey said, shaking her hand after she’d saluted the general.

“Your call intrigued me.”

“Plus, I ordered her,” Farrell said. He didn’t sit but stood fidgeting anxiously as he gestured for the others to be seated. Only Major Dell did.

“So?” Kealey asked her. “How about the major?”

“He’s all right,” she said.

“Define ‘all right,’ ” Kealey said. “And be specific. Please.” He was impatient. He wanted answers, not the usual bureaucratic dance.

“The major is feeling a little lost, a little alienated, a little claustrophobic—”

“The first two I got. Would you care to explain that last one?” Kealey urged.

She sat back. “Major Phair is being choked by the support system he needs here—”

“Here as in ‘Fort Jackson’ or as in ‘the United States’?”

“Both.”

“How does that manifest itself?” Kealey asked.

“General restlessness,” she replied. “He’s been used to free-ranging, not sitting. He
wants
to be somewhere else without making a complete break, so having both feet in one place upsets him.”

“A straddler? Indecisive?”

“No,” she said emphatically. “He’s more like a kite. One that wants a long string and just as much tail as is required for stability.”

“Who doesn’t?” Farrell asked.

“Which is why your call interested me,” she went on, ignoring the other officer.

“I didn’t really tell you anything,” Kealey said.

“You’re with the CIA and you’re asking about a cleric who spent well over a decade in the streets of Iraq,” she said. “You have an operation that requires his skills, his experiences. It doesn’t take a profiler to figure out that one.”

“Maybe you should hire her,” Farrell snorted.

“Maybe I will,” Kealey said. He smiled, a little too disarmingly to be sincere. He used it like a surgeon’s knife. “I have to know, yes or no: can we rely on him?”

“That depends.”

“That’s not yes or no.”

“Do you want him abroad? Working domestically? Using his mind, his body, his faith? I can give you a yes or no to each of those, but there are a lot of combinations and variables.”

“That’s fair,” Kealey replied. “Has he gone over?”

“No,” she said. “He has not.”

“But he’s been living among Americans,” Kealey said. “What happens if we send him back?”

“He’ll no longer be living among Americans, sir,” she replied.

The general smiled sweetly. “Until there’s a drawdown, I’m not so sure of that.”

“Touché,” she said, embarrassed to have misstepped in front of Kealey. She moved on quickly. “Sirs, I’ve been looking for lingering psychological tripwires. I haven’t found any.”

“Do we know if he ever left Iraq during his time there?” Kealey asked.

“He says he didn’t, and there are no fingerprints of Iraqi IAM,” she replied.

“IAM?” Farrell asked.

“Input And Manipulation.”

“She means ‘brainwashing,’ ” Kealey said.

“That’s right.”

“What would those fingerprints be?” Farrell inquired.

“You can’t remake the brain without psychological scarring,” she said. “We’ve been studying subjects who have been held in Iran, for example, for five or more years and pulled out by special ops teams.”

“Subjects?” Farrell asked.

“Tourists, soldiers, people we’ve allowed to be kidnapped.”

“Helluva commitment on their part,” Farrell said.

“It’s the only way to do it,” Kealey told him.

“Because the captives have been retrained by and spoken only with Iranian indoctrinators, they forget, and tend to trip over, colloquial phrases, both saying and comprehending them,” Dell said. “That’s because the psy-ops personnel in Iran were educated in English or American universities where they tended not to socialize with local students and did not pick up jargon.”

“So the subjects are thrown by cadences and usage that jar with deeply planted overwrites,” Kealey said.

“Repetitive overwrites,” Maj. Dell said. “The key to IAM is repetition in circumstances of sensory deprivation.”

“That’s all they have to focus on,” Kealey added.

“Right.”

“I understand that Major Phair freaked out in a confessional,” Kealey said.

His words were like thrown ice. “How do you know that?”

“I stopped in the chapel on the way to see the general, told some of the kids I was an old army buddy looking to surprise him,” Kealey said. “They’re a little green, you know.”

“I think we need a base-wide directive,” General Farrell said.

“I did give Major Dell a chance to divulge that when she said he felt claustrophobic,” Kealey said.

“That information was privileged,” she said.

Kealey didn’t seem to care. His eyes remained on the major. “Would a man who was held, say, in a steel cage in somebody’s desert cellar flip out in a situation like that?”

“He would display a wider range of anxieties,” the psychologist said sternly.

“Beyond freaking out in a confessional,” Kealey said.

“That’s right. He would be prone to express rage whenever he felt trapped, not just physically but emotionally. He would be uneasy in cafeteria lines, a standing automobile, an elevator.”

“You’ve had no reports of that kind of behavior?” Kealey asked.

“Major Phair was not held in a cage and brainwashed,” Major Dell replied.

General Farrell shook his head slowly. “You know, Mr. Kealey, I’m not sure whether my decision should address your needs or his. He sounds a little iffy. And before you plant the ‘national security’ flag, sending an incomplete man into the field doesn’t exactly help that cause, either.”

“There will be a lot of eyes on him,” Kealey assured him.

The general took a long breath and looked at Major Dell. “The part I would need you to sign off on is whether or not you think he’s a security risk.”

“General, I’m sure you remember the incident with Col. Tina Meadow at Fort Bragg,” the psychologist replied. “She wasn’t a security risk until her mom was about to lose her house and someone offered Colonel Meadow a suitcase filled with hundred-dollar bills.”

“You can always expect the unexpected,” the general said. “Our job right now is to consider the odds.”

“Consider the situation,” Kealey urged patiently. “I need a cleric who speaks Arabic and knows the Iraqi people. I need someone who knows how to win their trust. The risk of inaction is worse than the slim chance we’re taking the wrong action.”

“How do you define a ‘wrong action’?” Major Dell asked.

“James Phair causes World War III,” Kealey said. “Short of that, he can’t do a worse job than we’re doing in the area of counter-theocratic operations. The jihad isn’t dying, we may be looking at the start of a new push within it, a new alliance, and I need someone who can help me reverse that.”

The Stalin Maneuver,
Major Dell thought. Five years ago, during her fourteen-week Army Medical Department training at Fort Sam Houston, one of the instructors warned the class about the inevitable clash between intuitive psychological care and checklist military procedure. “The worst part won’t be the disagreements,” Col. Naomi Griss had warned her, “but the fact that your patients are commodities. Just don’t succumb to the Stalin Maneuver, which the Russian dictator employed during World War II, which is to throw anyone and anything at a problem until something works. That cost him three million lives.”

“At least let me talk to the man,” Kealey implored. It was the first time he’d made a request that didn’t sound like a demand.

“That’s tantamount to turning him over to you,” Major Dell said. “You’ll work the claustrophobia, offer him space.”

“No,” Kealey assured her. “My ass is on the line, too.”

General Farrell sat in the armchair opposite the desk as he considered the request. In the distance, church bells sounded eleven a.m. That seemed to decide him. General Farrell pushed himself up using the armrests.

“Your patients have a more comfortable chair than I do,” he told the psychologist. He quickly became serious. “Has Major Phair been off base since he arrived?”

“Only locally,” she replied. “He goes to the movies, eats with students once in a while.”

“So this could be good for him, too,” the general said.

“It could.”

“Can you say that with more conviction, Major?” the general asked.

“Sir, ideally I would have more time to make a determination. Absent that, I can only guess.”

“And your guess is as good as his,” the general cocked his head toward Kealey, who stood like a car in neutral, idling with an occasional rev in his eyes.

“Mr. Kealey does have one advantage,” she said. “If he is allowed to take Major Phair from the base, at least he will be present in Washington to perform any mid-course corrections.” She regarded him. “If the major goes to Iraq, will he go alone?”

“I don’t know,” Kealey said. “In any case, he wouldn’t go unprepared. I don’t want to lose him or jeopardize my work.”

“Well, he’s been instructed to wait in his apartment in the event he was needed,” the general said. “I guess the next step is up to him.”

Major Dell rose. “Then I’ve said all I can.” She saluted the general and offered the other man her hand. “Good luck, sir.”

Kealey thanked her, smiling somewhat more sincerely than before.

The men left together, leaving Dell feeling as though she’d been used. It was a Kabuki-like drama that Kealey had clearly intended to go a certain way. The fact that General Farrell had come here personally suggested that he was under some pressure from Washington to comply. She didn’t see any point fighting it, and the general was correct. She had no good reason to dissent. If Phair proved reticent, he could be sent to some remote post like Fort Greely, Alaska, or on a typhoon-watch in the Republic of Palau, where soldiers had nothing to do but study radar screens and watch DVDs, and the clerics had less to do than that. If Phair opted to retire, he could be pressured by the threat of a dishonorable discharge or even a court-martial. Because the cleric had acquired a unique talent set in Iraq, his actions during and subsequent to the battle had never been reviewed by a military conduct panel. That was still an option. The DoD could still destroy him, professionally and spiritually.

She hoped that it would not come to that, though she wondered—even at the risk of personal peril—whether Phair would accept a position that might exploit the citizens he had lived among.

It wasn’t her problem, though Dell knew what she would counsel if Phair asked.

Take it.
Not from fear, not even from patriotism, but because the Middle East needed people of conscience.

Washington, too,
she thought as the men’s footsteps faded down the hall.

M
aking things happen in government was like trying to put out a wildfire with spit. It’s possible, but just barely. And unless you dance while you’re spitting, you’re definitely going to get burned, inhale smoke, lose your bearings, and maybe lose your house if there’s a sudden change in the wind. Which is why, when Ryan Kealey made up his mind to do something, he started spitting . . . and dancing.

Kealey left General Farrell at the front of the medical building, where the general’s driver met him and brought him back to his office. The general did not say much after they left Major Dell’s office, other than to iterate that he would honor Phair’s own wishes in this matter and abide by the psychologist’s findings—which did not seem like an endorsement to Kealey, but an avoidance of committing to one. The psychologist saw no reason to believe that Phair was a risk, but offered no real evidence that he was not.

If Kealey’s field operatives gave him reports like that, the nation would be in the gravest peril.

It was a pleasant afternoon and, having secured directions from the driver on how to get to the new residential block, Kealey decided to walk.

The air was scented with freshly cut grass and diesel fuel, and there were a few patches of late tulips along his walk. The orderly layout of the base, the passing columns of vehicles and marching recruits, the clean, emphatic lines of the buildings, all spoke to the kind of organization that went completely to hell outside these walls. Kealey had been to Iraq and Afghanistan several times and—though he’d never say this to General Farrell—he would take a questionable, free-ranging operative over a mechanized brigade any day. The way to get these guys was to undermine them from within, like decay, not hammer them from without. It was great when a couple of five-hundred-pound bombs took out a terrorist leader. By their nature, however, those weapons also took out any civilians, residences, shops, and passersby who happened to be in the blast radius. Unavoidable, but a real spreader of ill will. The Iraqis had more respect for a combatant who pulled some bastard warlord from a hole in the ground by his hair, as they did to Saddam. In the end, in this struggle, combat was just a distraction. The real work was on the inside, the erosive stuff.

And who’s the greater boon to the national goal?
he thought.
A morally numbed reservist on his third consecutive tour of duty, or an American cleric who can, hopefully, still distinguish between an opportunity and a target?

The salmon-colored homes with identical lines and sidings lay behind neat squares of lawns, which were tucked behind wide cement sidewalks and litter-free streets. It was a perfect, economical little community, and he wondered if that was an architect’s vision or someone’s compromise. Did someone think we’d all be better off living in giant ant colonies?

Is it a joke on the super-patriots?
he wondered.
Are the people in charge inevitably Communists at heart?

Sprinklers watered the small, identical lawns up and down the street. Kealey glanced at the numbers painted olive green on the curb. He squinted into the sun and saw Phair sitting in a folding lawn chair on a small patio at 323, away from the spray of the sprinkler. He recognized the cleric from his dossier photo. Phair was dressed in jeans and a military-issue short-sleeve shirt. His silver hair was cut short and he was clean-shaven. In the photos from Baghdad, it had been long and he’d worn a thin beard which had prevented his cheeks and chin from turning bronze.

Kealey raised his left hand in greeting, Phair raised one in acknowledgment—like two Native American braves meeting unexpectedly and warily on the trail—and the agent turned up the narrow cement path that bisected the lawn perpendicular to the sidewalk.

“Sorry to keep you hanging around like this,” Kealey said, extending his hand. It was always good to open an attack with an apology for it. That softened resistance. “I’m Ryan Kealey, special agent, CIA.”

The other man rose easily and accepted the hand. “James Phair.” Phair’s grip was strong. His brown eyes were wary but unflinching.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Kealey said.

Phair was studying him. “You don’t look like a Company man.”

“How so?”

“Those boys are all hungry, like bees in the morning. You’re relaxed.”

“I’m—well, let’s just say I’m not one of the regulars and leave it at that for now.”

“A defrocked priest who still has faith,” Phair said, warming.

“Something like that.”

“You want to talk inside or out?” Phair asked graciously. Either he had good manners or was looking to put Kealey at his ease for a counterattack.

“Here is fine,” Kealey told him.

“I’ll get another chair.”

“Don’t bother,” Kealey said, leaning against the rubbery vinyl rail, putting the sharp afternoon sun behind him. “I don’t much care for being on my ass.”

Phair sat back down and squinted up at his guest. “What kinds of things do you do when you’re off this ass?”

“Nice try, but as I just suggested I’m not going to talk about that,” Kealey said with a smile. “Interesting work, though. I like to think it’s important.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“That’s too strong a word,” Kealey said. “Let’s call it ‘necessary.’ What about you? Do you enjoy what you’re doing here?”

“Oh,” Phair sighed. “I’m guessing you know the answer to that.”

“Actually, I don’t,” Kealey told him. “I know what you’ve said to others and what they’ve said to me, but I don’t trust hearsay. Everyone has an agenda, even if they don’t realize it. Facts get spun. Let me be more specific. Do you enjoy teaching here?”

“The work is challenging,” Phair said carefully.

“Rewarding?”

“To a point,” he replied.

“Would you ever consider doing anything more challenging?”

Phair was still being cautious. “Such as? And please, Mr. Kealey. Don’t go fishing on me. What do you need?”

Kealey liked that. He had been waiting for a sign of the real Phair, and there it was. “Iran and Iraq are getting together on a nonsectarian hospital in Basra. We’re worried about the opium route, about why Iran would suddenly start promoting nonsectarianism, a few other things. We’re thinking about putting someone on the inside,” Kealey said. “I need you on it. Maybe to go inside, maybe just to plan, but definitely to be involved.”

Phair chuckled. “Wow.”

“What?”

“I spent sixteen years among a nation of hagglers,” he said. “The only people who were as direct as that had their faces covered with black cloth and carried Iranian weapons.”

“Well, at least you’re on the same side as
this
radical,” Kealey said with a mirthless little laugh.

He watched Phair’s reaction carefully. The cleric pursed his lips and nodded. He did not look away. “Thank you for that,” Phair said.

At that moment, Kealey saw a surety of purpose. He believed he could trust this man.

“You’re welcome. The heart of it is, I’m offering you a job, Major, a more interesting one, I hope, than what you’re doing now. But before I say more, I must know if you’re interested. There are security issues.”

“I’m interested in helping people spiritually, Mr. Kealey. I’m not clear how spying fits in with that.”

“That’s a ratty little word,” Kealey said with distaste. “Private eyes looking for adulterers ‘spy.’ We collect data.”

“My apologies,” Phair smiled.

“To answer your question, this is a larger task of intelligence-gathering and interpretation. With perks.”

“Perks?”

“We have a license to kill,” Kealey said.

Phair looked at him with horror that came on like a quick, summer thunderstorm.

“That last part was a sort of a joke,” Kealey said.

“Thanks for clarifying,” Phair said with a nervous laugh. “But you’re not kidding.”

“Major, like you, we’re interested in protecting the innocent, whoever they are. Anyone who is vulnerable to terrorist activity.”

“When I was in Iraq—”

“You hung out with some pretty rough
hajiis,
” Kealey interrupted. “And survived. Few Americans can claim to have done that.”

“I had to prove myself in ways”—Phair stopped, swallowed—“ways of which I’m not terribly proud.”

“Such as?”

Phair’s eyes dropped. He stared at the vinyl slats underfoot. “I once noticed men yelling at women and children just before an improvised explosive attack,” he said quietly. “That’s not uncommon, but after the street exploded beneath an American convoy I asked the onlookers if the men who were yelling were the men who had rigged the IEDs. They said yes. They said the men were telling them that if they warned the Americans, they would be killed in their beds. When the rest of the American convoy searched for the perpetrators, I remained with the children and said nothing. One of the bombers was still watching. I could have identified myself and left with the convoy, but these people could not. They would have been killed.”

“Tough call,” Kealey said.

“What would you have done?”

“I probably would have encouraged—no,
urged
—them to talk and offered them protection.”

“Where? In some other town? Would
you
want to be relocated from Washington to Havana or Cape Town?”

“Some days, yes.”

Phair smiled a little. “The point is, they wouldn’t have left and coalition soldiers couldn’t protect them forever. Jihadists have long memories. They’re still angry about the Crusades.” Phair’s faraway expression suggested there was something more.

“You gave the locals advice afterward,” Kealey said.

Phair’s eyes snapped up. “How did you know?”

“It’s what priests do. What did you tell them?”

Phair took a steadying breath. “That if they saw the insurgents again, to thank them for not harming the children.”

That surprised Kealey, though he didn’t show it. “Why?”

“The security of their families is the only blessing they can realistically hope for,” Phair replied. “They must protect that, aggressively. And—looking ahead, the Iraqis need more children who are going to grow up with reasonable voices based on generous spirits, not bombers.”

“Some people would say you were teaching them appeasement.”

“I would call it goodwill,” Phair said. “Feed an angry dog often enough and it may one day cease to be angry. That works for the spirit as well.”

Now he sounded like Major Dell, conjecturing and extrapolating. Kealey preferred facts: a dead terrorist was better than one who might be rehabilitated. Still, he understood where the cleric was coming from.

Phair looked toward the apartment. “Would you like a drink? I’ve got water and Coca-Cola.”

“I’m okay,” Kealey said.

“I’m going to get myself something,” Phair said, rising.

Phair went inside and Kealey looked out at the flat, chocolate-colored roofs across the street. There was a glint in the window of one, a prismatic sliver from behind a vase filled with hydrangeas. Kealey smiled. Somewhere in the distance he heard a lawnmower. Farther along the street someone was grilling hamburgers. There was a small garden to his right, just in front of the patio. The simple comforts and security Phair had described as lacking in Iraq were abundant here. Instead of enjoying them for himself, he was still clearly lamenting that others didn’t have it. That reinforced Kealey’s impression that the man would do what was necessary to bring peace to the land. He just had to choose the right time to tell him about Dr. al-Shenawi, the main purpose of the mission.

Phair returned with a plastic bottle, which he set beside him as he sat. His hand remained around the bottle.

“Does it remind you of Iraq?” Kealey asked, indicating the bottle.

Phair chuckled. “How’d you know?”

“Coke is big there. Plus, the bottle is safe here, but you’re holding it. Lot of quick thieves over there.”

“You’re a one-man intelligence agency,” Phair said.

“And a stockholder in Coke,” Kealey said. “Amazing what you learn about national habits from local bottlers. So, Major Phair. What do you think?”

“I don’t suppose I can have a day or two to think about it,” Phair said.

“My cell is on silent.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s a development you missed,” Kealey said. “It vibrated five times since I’ve been here. I didn’t answer it. In modern parlance, that means I’m serious about this.”

“I see.”

Kealey positioned himself casually but strategically between Phair and the street. “Would it help you decide if I told you there’s a woman using binoculars to watch and lip-read in the living room of number 324?”

Phair frowned. But he didn’t look over. Iraq had trained him not to look at potentially dangerous people. Men like those bombers he had seen didn’t like to be identified later, even by the design of their clothes or the shoes they were wearing. Not with American soldiers arresting anyone who might be a bomber.

“How do you know?” Phair asked.

“You spend a lot of time on the patio. The sun, Iraq, good memories—they comfort you, just like the Coke. The sprinklers would drown out audio, so I looked for someone eye-level with your chair and found her.”

“Damn.”

“That’s why I’m sitting with my back to the street.”

“I just got that,” Phair said.

“Your apartment is almost certainly bugged, so if you do stay here I would ask you not to say anything about what I just told you, any of it, to anyone.”

Phair shook his head. “How do I know it’s the general doing it and not you?”

“Well, there you have it.”

“Pardon?”

“The difference between spying and what we do,” Kealey grinned. “We engage people face-to-face.”