The Identity Thief (15 page)

"We fake a jailbreak."

"No, you're going to really escape. As I said, other than two people in this prison under my command, no one knows you are working for the Committee. Not the Colonel in charge, not the Marines, not the CIA interrogators."

"Well, I'm clearly not as gifted a planner as you, but wouldn't it be easier to tell them?"

Mr. Jones shook his head. "Unfortunately, the prison is lousy with moles. Warriors of Allah moles."

X found that hard to swallow. "What, posing as Marine guards? As janitors and cooks?"

"The Warriors of Allah has been putting people in place, deep-cover operatives, for years, long before 9/11. They're masters at creating false identities."

"Gee, you can't trust anyone these days."

Mr. Jones seemed genuinely amused by that; his blue eyes twinkled. He drew a paper out of his vest pocket and handed it to the identity thief.

"Here are the plans. Read them, memorize them, then I'm afraid I'm going to have to destroy them."

X perused the plans, trying to ignore the increasingly loud and frequent screams emanating from the digital recorder.

They were to crawl through a narrow ventilation shaft from the isolated ward of the prison hospital out onto a rooftop, run across it without being seen and drop through a hatch into a building that housed equipment being used to remodel what had once been the old commandant's quarters, turning it into a chapel. There they were to borrow tools and use them to dig a 16-foot tunnel under the prison fence.

"You've got to be joking," X protested. "Sixteen feet? How long is that supposed to take?"

"According to our calculations, three weeks, working hours nightly. You'll have proper tools, remember. Not sharpened spoons."

"Nightly? You mean we're supposed to make that trip through the air shaft, like
Mission Impossible
, and over that rooftop every night for nearly a month without ever being spotted?"

"Precisely!" said Mr. Jones, pointing his pipe at X for emphasis.

All X knew about prison breaks was what he'd seen in old World War II movies like
The Great Escape
. Perhaps if he were humble enough to believe he'd ever be pinched, he would have read up on the subject. This didn't sound particularly feasible. But he saw a bigger problem and brought it to Mr. Jones's attention.

"How are we supposed to get into the infirmary?" he demanded.

Mr. Jones gave a smile that made X uneasy.

"Ah, yes, how indeed," he said. "This is the really creative part of the plan, the part an ingenious mind like yours is sure to appreciate."

He took from the cart a black plastic container about the size of an eyeglass case. He opened it, revealing a hypodermic needle.

"What the fuck is that?" X demanded.

The bearded man held up the needle and grinned.

"Yersinia pestis," he revealed. "Also known as Pasteurella pestis. AKA plague bacillus."

X shook his head in disbelief. "As in the Bubonic Plague?"

Mr. Jones nodded, still wearing the benign smile. X stepped back, folding his arms.

"You expect me to let you inject me with Black Plague germs? If that's your plan, you'd better just hang me back on those chains. I'd be better off. In fact, hell, I'll hook myself up."

The spymaster chuckled. "It's a genetically engineered variety our lab boys cooked up. We call them the Ben Franklin Department. Don't ask me to explain the science of it, but in a nutshell, you have all the symptoms of the plague and your blood will test positive for it, but the bug is designed to die out after 72 hours. After that your temperature will continue to run high for a few weeks, but you'll be fit as a fiddle. You'll have to fake feeling too weak to move. Make believe is your strong suit, isn't it?"

X was picturing Black Death bacterium swimming like salmon through his bloodstream, and continued to shake his head. "No, no, no, no," he kept muttering.

"You'll infect your cellmate, and you'll both begin to experience the symptoms: swollen lymph glands in your armpits, groin and neck, chills, fever. You'll vomit up blood fairly continuously for a while and there'll be blood in your piss as well. You'll cough a good bit and most dramatically, little black dots will appear all over your body. You'll suffer some real delirium, although, as I said, after a few days you'll have to go on faking that in front of the medical staff."

X's distrust of Mr. Jones was quickly blossoming into hatred. The old man delivered this news with obvious relish.

"I suppose it would be too simple to just give us the flu," the identity thief said without any attempt to disguise his bitterness.

Mr. Jones opened a bottle of alcohol and dipped a cotton ball in it.

"We need something that will get you into the special isolation room and keep you there. For obvious reasons, the room has its own ventilation and the shaft leads to precisely where you need to be."

He stepped toward X, with the needle in one hand and the cotton swab in the other. X stepped back.

"Now, don't be a baby," Mr. Jones said. "You know there's no alternative. It's either this or I leave you to the CIA interrogators. You'll be tortured - excuse me, subjected to harsh interrogation techniques - for weeks or months, given rougher and rougher treatment because you refuse to break, since of course, you have nothing to give them.

"Then, your mind and body broken, you'll be deep-sixed and forgotten in some holding center until the War on Terror is over - a few decades from now. Or, you somehow manage to convince someone of who you really are, in which case you go to prison stateside until we have flying cars."

X stared at the rotund, white-bearded man, trying to his make his Santa-like appearance jibe with his heartless words.

"You make a compelling case," he said finally, raising his arm.

"No, no," Mr. Jones said, pushing down his arm, "not there."

X smirked and turned around. "In the butt? Why am I not surprised? How appropriate."

"Bottom of your feet, between your toes, if you don't mind," the elderly spook said. "I'm afraid you'll be searched before the symptoms kick in and we can't have any obvious marks on you."

X sighed and lifted up his right foot, like a horse being shod.

Mr. Jones - whose real name was Arnold Fiorella, by the way - didn't always want to be a spy. Indeed, he attended divinity school with every intention of being ordained a priest. But during the '70s, when the intelligence community was ravaged by the corrupt influence of politicians, all the way up to the White House, he saw the need to restore American spies to the role they'd played in World War II. Back then, the OSS matched wits with Hitler's spymasters, and secret agents were knights without armor, championing the cause of liberty. So he joined the CIA and within a year was recruited by the Committee.

Mr. Jones still considered his current calling God's work. When the second President Bush was chided for using the incendiary word "crusade" to describe the war on Islamofacism, Mr. Jones solemnly told his colleagues the Commander in Chief was right the first time.

"This is a holy war, make no mistake about it," he said in the musty, mahogany-paneled meeting hall in Philadelphia where Committee chiefs had gathered since the Revolution. "A clash of civilizations doesn't begin to cover it. This is Good versus Evil."

Mr. Jones was a vastly talented spymaster. He was especially adept at black flag recruitments - convincing people to surrender their country's secrets to what they believed was a friendly nation. How many Jewish intelligence officers in Argentina had he flipped into double agents by convincing them their handler was Israeli?

Despite his rather broad puritanical streak, he made liberal use of "ladies" as they were called - to lure officials into compromising situations. Photographs of such "honey traps" provided Jones with biographic leverage (known to the uninitiated as blackmail material) to control the subject. Mr. Jones pulled the strings of such hapless souls so deftly that his nickname on the Committee became The Puppet Master and later Geppetto.

* * *

Back in his cell, wearing a few obligatory bruises the spymaster had apologetically applied to his cheek, eyebrow and lower lip, X lay on his bunk. Though he'd feigned a limp when lurching into the cell, there was nothing fake about his mental exhaustion. His eyes were shut, and he said nothing, but his cellmate didn't take the hint.

Asar rambled on effusively, "I knew they couldn't break you! Those infidels know nothing about the strength of spirit Allah confers on his warriors, those who have surrendered to him."

"You bet," X said in English.

Asar laughed heartily. "I know what that means. I heard it in a Tom Cruise movie."

X rolled over on his belly. Was he already beginning to feel ill, or was it his imagination? Surely the microbes couldn't work that fast. Or could the genetically engineered medical miracles do anything their creators wanted?

"I can't wait until they come for me," Asar declared, thumping his chest. "I will spit in their faces, just as you have done. You are my inspiration, Ali. It is an honor to share the company of one such as you."

* * *

FBI agent Traci Kingsmith walked across the prison yard, escorted by a pair of Marines, uncomfortably aware of the stares of prisoners in orange jumpsuits milling about the exercise yard. It was obvious they hadn't seen a woman in a long time, certainly not one without a burqa.

Jesus, is there no prohibition against undressing a woman with your eyes in your culture
?

Why she had been excused from her duties in the middle of her lunch break by her boss Mr. Normand and flown halfway around the world she could not imagine. She'd simply been told that it was a matter of national security and she was to pack only necessities. Until she boarded the small jet - a Cessna 560 Citation V - she was not even told by the pilot where they were bound. He and the co-pilot were the only other souls on board and they didn't utter a single word to her except to tell her to buckle her seatbelt before takeoff and unbuckle it after landing.

Now, with her escorts, she strode toward a drab, windowless, flat-roofed cinderblock building in the center of Abd Al-Rahman Prison in Afghanistan. It was one of a dozen squat buildings surrounded by a double line of 12-foot high chain-link fences. Each fence was topped with rusted razor wire.

There were four guard towers, one at each corner of the compound. Machine gun muzzles protruded from the covered platforms. She and her silent escorts approached the two-story building - the only one with windows, albeit tiny ones. Two Marine guards toting M-4 carbine assault rifles stood on either side of a metal door. A hand-painted sign above the entrance identified this as the Administration Building. After Traci's escort gave one of the guards her papers, he pushed a button at the right side of the door and a buzzer sounded so loudly she almost jumped. The door swung open and they were admitted.

They marched down a long, sterile hall lined with closed doors. Then the agent was ushered into a small room that, suspiciously, had nothing but the word "office" on the plaque beside it.

When Traci saw Mr. Jones behind the desk, she was not bewildered, more pissed off, really.

"I might have known you had something to do with this," she snapped. "What agency do you work for?"

Mr. Jones lit his pipe. "Have a seat."

Traci didn't move. "Are you going to answer my question?"

He smiled enigmatically.

"Then I'm out of here," she declared, and turned.

"The only thing I'm at liberty to say is that I have the authority to have you shot before you set foot outside the gates."

He said it calmly and without overt menace, but with enough iron in his tone to leave her no doubt whatsoever that he was speaking the truth. She turned slowly. He gestured to the chair, and she sat, her ankles crossed in a ladylike manner with her hands in her lap.

"Congratulations on your capture in Nevada," he said. "Very impressive."

"Thank you," she replied icily.

"I should tell you, however, that the man you took into custody is not Ali Nazeer."

"The hell he isn't."

And so Mr. Jones told her of Nazeer's death, of X's true identity, of the mission, and with every fresh revelation, she shook her head with incredulity.

"Why wasn't I informed that the man we spent hundreds of man hours and millions of dollars pursuing was a fake?" she said. "A two-bit hustler."

"No one in the FBI was informed, nor in the Department of Homeland Security."

"You've got to be joking. We were all on a wild goose chase? Why weren't we in the loop?"

"There are plants in all of those agencies. Muslim Americans - and perhaps even some non-Muslims - who are deep-cover operatives of the Warriors of Allah."

"In the CIA? Homeland Security? Come on!"

"You probably know that 9/11 caught our nation with its pants down. Our intelligence agencies had only a handful of Arabic-speaking agents and we had to go on a recruiting spree. Well, while we were busy catching up, our enemies were busy planting moles. In fact they planted many of their moles years
before
the attack."