Operation Mockingbird (4 page)

Suarez turned slowly toward Matt as he continued.

“I spoke with Ms. Calle Ocho. She says she’s a close personal friend of yours.”

The smile became a grimace as the right corner of Commissioner Suarez’s mouth began to jerk. The right eye joined in and there was a veritable concert of uncontrolled activity taking over the man’s face. Matt offered his nemesis his most engaging smile and took another sip from his own glass. Matt briefly looked away as he returned his glass to the napkin on the bar and reached for a small notepad in his suit jacket pocket.

Matt turned back toward Commissioner Suarez just in time to see the man throw his head and glass back, inhaling the liquid. He flung his glass to the ground and he lunged at Matt, slamming him against the back of the bar.

Matt stumbled and then pushed back. The two men fell into the crowd. A woman screamed, and the onlookers in the crowd scrambled away. The men crashed to the floor. Suarez punched and kicked from underneath, as Matt tried to deflect the blows while at the same time pushing himself
up and off the other man. Matt was suddenly struck in the back of the head by a blunt object.

Everything after that was a bit of a blur. Matt was jerked up to his feet, escorted to an exit by two very large men and was unceremoniously thrown out of the building. Out on the sidewalk, Matt inspected the damage done to his rented tuxedo. One torn pants pocket. Missing bow tie. His head throbbed and he felt an egg rising on the back of his head but he supposed it could have been worse.

He looked around, not surprised to see that Commissioner Suarez wasn’t standing on the street with him. He thought briefly about going back inside but quickly acknowledged that none of the socialites inside, including his date, would be missing him.

The next day
The Chronicle
published Matt’s story reporting on the events that had transpired the night before. The day after that, though, after receiving several phone calls from Senator Suarez, the commissioner’s older brother and a powerful statesman, the paper put Matt on temporary leave. Management was impressed with his gutsy recklessness, or so they said behind closed doors. But the paper was the subject of intense pressure from several local politicians and many loyal constituents of Commissioner Suarez who all suggested that Matt was harassing a prominent politician who was being unfairly persecuted by the federal judicial system, a system that was clearly biased against Hispanics.

Matt didn’t know when things would die down. For some time he had been thinking about traveling to the Middle East. Right now was looking like a really good time.
He wasn’t sure how long it would be before some politician or star athlete found himself embroiled in a very public scandal and for Matt’s rather public “interview” of the commissioner to be forgotten. Matt started to make the arrangements.

He tried to speak with Dana before he left. He left messages on her voice mail. He sent emails. He had flowers delivered to her office. He harassed the doormen of her apartment building, who had apparently been instructed not to let him up the elevator. He sheepishly dropped by her work where he was met with an icy stare from the receptionist. Dana wouldn’t see him or take his calls.

Finally, the time came for him to leave and he did without having made amends. He hated to admit it now -- but from her perspective Dana had a right to be pissed off. His altercation with Suarez and his decision to go to Afghanistan may have been yet another in a series of career-limiting moves.

CHAPTER FOUR

MATT WOKE TO THE FEELING of someone pushing heavily against his chest. He tried to catch his breath, but the weight kept pressing him down. He tried to reach up, but his arms were pinned. He struggled to free his arms, his efforts more frantic as the pressure became more suffocating. The vise grip of the restraints seemed to tighten, squeezing the last drop of air out of him. But then, suddenly, he was free. He shot up to a sitting position, his heart pounding as though it were trying to break out of his chest.

He scanned the room for his attacker as his eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. The moonlight streaming in from the window behind him bounced off the walls. Familiar walls. Matt recognized the worn wood table in the corner and the threadbare rug covering the floor.

Home.

His sheets, tangled and soaked with sweat, lay in a heap on the floor beside his bed. The house was quiet except for his ragged breathing. He swung his feet onto the floor and slowly rose. Walking around the house, touching
familiar objects, he tried to shake his mind free of the enormous weight that had been crushing his body.

Matt returned to bed and lay back down. His mind began grabbing for threads of the nightmare still lingering in his subconscious. Perhaps trying to remember the specifics would be helpful. At least that’s what all the psychobabble he had seen on television suggested.

Funny how he couldn’t remember Dana’s birthday or where they shared their first kiss, but he could still recall every detail, the sounds and even the smells of those last days in Kandahar up to the moments just before the explosion that changed his life. Sometimes he woke to the memories of the screams that brought him back to consciousness. Other times his dreams were filled with the details of his escape from his captors.

When Matt regained consciousness after the bombing, he was alone in a dimly lit room. His body ached all over. When he drew a deep breath, he felt what seemed like the jagged edges of his ribs scraping across his lungs. He slowly sat upright, his body screaming from the effort. The room spun around him. He gingerly swung his legs over the side of the bed and pushed himself up off the bed. For several seconds he stood there, swaying unsteadily on his feet. His head throbbed, and he reached up to find the source. His hair was greasy but also matted and stiff in places. Drawing his hand back, he saw flakes of dried blood on his fingertips. Like a blind man, he took inventory of his own face and didn’t like what he felt.

A single light bulb hung from the ceiling. He tapped it, and the globe swung slowly in an arc. The weak light
provided a glimpse of his surroundings. He took a slow turn around. It was a small room, containing nothing but a steel-framed bed with a stained mattress, a threadbare blanket and a wooden chair. The only window in the room was boarded up. Slivers of light came through the spaces between the boards covering the window. He tapped the bulb again. He noticed a crimson stain on the wall behind the bed, and a chill ran through him.

He walked toward the door, turned the knob and pushed. Nothing. The door was bolted from the outside. He banged on the door, shouting for someone to let him out. He heard voices on the other side, but no one came. He strained to make out what was being said. There were no discernible words but he caught the unmistakable sound of Arabic.

Matt found out later that the coalition forces had been using unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with infrared cameras to monitor the neighborhood. They had identified some people in the area as potential insurgents and believed the house in the neighborhood where he was staying hid a huge cache of weapons. The building was located in a “no-go zone,” an area the military considered too dangerous to send in troops. So they sent in Predator drones equipped with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles.

The attack had lasted only a few moments. But when it was over, the house and two neighboring buildings had been destroyed. He had been knocked unconscious, but the lives of many Afghan civilians -- men, women and children -- had been tragically cut short. Later he found out that they did find weapons parts in the basement of the empty
warehouse next door. It turned out to be an abandoned munitions factory that hadn’t been used since the Russians had fled Afghanistan in 1989. There weren’t enough antiquated parts to create one full weapon of any significance, but those facts never made it in the press. Weapons were declared to have been destroyed, and with only Afghan casualties, the mission was considered a success.

That would have been difficult to explain to the families of the people who had perished in the attack. Eleven people had died -- blown to bits or crushed under the weight of the collapsed walls. Several others were pulled from the rubble barely alive. Had the bombing happened ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later, Matt would have been counted among the dead.

Shortly after the attack, Matt, partly covered by rubble, unconscious and bleeding, had been spotted by Taliban patrolling the area to assess the damage. They were furious about the deaths of so many of their own people and the fact that Matt was still alive. They dragged him into the street, kicking and pummeling his body in front of the crowd that had gathered. The onlookers cheered his attackers and shouted for his death. Matt only vaguely recalled this, but the markings on his body and the aching in his bones confirmed the story.

Ultimately, the Taliban leader of the patrol realized Matt was of greater value alive than dead and the public assault was abruptly terminated. They dumped him into a car and took him to one of their houses in another part of
town. Matt was thrown into a room, and a local doctor was sent for to check on his condition and tend to his wounds.

Matt recognized the doctor. His name was Aamir. Matt had previously met him as the doctor made regular rounds to the various clinics in the area, administering to the sick and injured. He and Matt renewed their acquaintance and, over a period of time, became friends. Aamir came to visit him every day, long after his wounds warranted such attention.

Aamir was a middle-class Afghani who had been educated in the United States at Tufts University School of Medicine. After interning at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, he became a resident at Boston’s Mass General Hospital and then joined the staff as a surgeon in the trauma unit. He married Sofia, an Afghan woman who had also been educated in the United States, and they started a life together there. When the rebuilding in Afghanistan began, Aamir and his wife thought they could help in the efforts by returning to their homeland. Aamir explained to Matt that since he had been back, he had been able to accomplish much, using his connections and foreign aid to build clinics in some of the rural areas. The clinics were equipped with only a bare minimum of equipment and supplies, but the staff was still able to care for the sick, most of whom traveled many days and over many miles to see him.

Originally, Sofia shared her husband’s enthusiasm and was optimistic about the family’s future in their homeland, but the redevelopment had been far slower than they had anticipated. The multibillion-dollar opium trade had begun
to flourish again, and the violence among the Taliban and the regional warlords overshadowed Afghanistan’s attempts at democracy and threatened the lives of Aamir and Sofia and the future of their two small children. They both yearned for a better life for their children and wanted to return to U.S. But it was not that simple. They were not U.S. citizens, and the U.S. was making it difficult for them to immigrate legally.

One night a couple of weeks after the bombing, Aamir arrived at his usual time in a state of extreme agitation. While inspecting Matt’s wounds, he whispered that coalition forces were closing in on the Taliban group holding Matt. The fighters knew and were preparing to pull out. They were planning to retreat to a smaller village farther south where they still maintained a stronghold. Some of the guards wanted to execute Matt and leave his body in a conspicuous place as a warning to other Americans who dared to trespass upon their holy lands. A minority was in favor of taking Matt with them as a hostage. Either way, the outlook was not good.

Aamir had a plan to bring Matt to safety, a plan that might even allow Aamir and his family a chance to start over. Matt remembered that last night clearly. They huddled together in that dank room and talked quietly into the night about what they needed to do. Together, they formulated a scheme to escape. It was risky, but they had few options. The nightmares that plagued Matt tonight, the nightmares that he would probably endure for the rest of his life, were about the day Aamir and Matt executed that plan.

Later that morning, Matt’s front doorbell rang. The two men standing in his doorway eclipsed the sun behind them and momentarily gave Matt the uneasy feeling that he was trapped in his own home. They were dressed identically in dress slacks, pressed white shirts and navy blazers. Both had neat short hair, cropped closely on the sides. Dark sunglasses hid their eyes. With their rigid postures and lips pressed firmly together, it was clear they were not here for a social call.

The younger man spoke first.

“Good morning. Are you Matt Connelly?”

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“My name is Cole Harrison. My partner Jack Rabin and I work with the Department of Homeland Security. We need a few minutes of your time.”

“What’s this all about?” Matt asked still blocking entrance into the house.

“We know that you just returned from traveling in Iraq and Afghanistan and need to speak with you. May we come in?”

“I don’t know,” Matt said haltingly. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Matt, we keep track of Americans who have traveled to high alert areas and interview them upon their return. These exit interviews, which are now standard operating procedure, are designed to gather information that may be helpful in the war on terror.”

“It would be better if we did this inside, Matt,” the older man said. “And we only need a few minutes.”

“All right,” Matt reluctantly agreed. “Fifteen minutes. That’s all I’ve got.”

Matt hadn’t wanted to be difficult, but he worried that the exit interview was not really standard procedure but instead had something to do with his being considered persona non grata with the coalition forces and the U.S. military by the time he was finally permitted to leave the country. It was possible that these guys were merely here to harass Matt for what had happened in Afghanistan. Matt tried to shake the feeling of dread as he stood aside and the two men filed past him, each stopping to formally shake his hand.