The Prisoner of Guantanamo (26 page)

The only other people down here tonight were a guy and his date, smooching off to the side in the glare of a streetlight. Falk led the MP toward the opposite side, down by the water's edge.

“What's your name, soldier?”

The kid looked down and saw that his nameplate was still taped over. So much for trusting the kids completely, Falk supposed.

“Sorry,” he said, tearing off the duct tape. “Specialist Hilger. Out of Kentucky.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“It was all 'cause of something I let slip. I told some of the guys at dinner one night about one of the kids, Shakeel. He's thirteen and he has these nightmares. Some weeks it's every night. Wakes up shouting, in a full sweat. We finally figured that the best way to calm him down was to take him outside. It's against regulations—they're not supposed to be out after dark. But, hell, it works, and it's better than having him wake up the others. He walks it off in the moonlight, out where he can hear the waves on the rocks. So, anyway, word got around the way it always does, and this Captain Van Meter must have heard.”

“And figured he'd have a chat with Shakeel.”

“Exactly.”

“Might have been nice if Wallace had told me this.”

“I guess he figured there was no point. Shakeel told Van Meter he hadn't even been out that night. So why put him through the wringer again for nothing.”

“For that matter, why tell me now? I can't do a damn thing about Van Meter.”

“Because Shakeel
was
outside that night. And so was I. It was my last week on overnight duty, and I was sitting at the picnic table, having a smoke while Shakeel walked it off. We were both too scared to tell that asshole Van Meter, so we ended up not telling Wallace, too. But I figured somebody ought to know. Just to set the record straight.”

“Or to cover your ass.”

Hilger shook his head vigorously.

“No. I'll be glad to take the heat for it. Hell, maybe they'll send me home. It's Shakeel I'm worried about. He's due to go home. All of them are, if the brass ever stops putting it off. But if Van Meter finds out Shakeel lied to him, well …” Hilger shrugged. “God knows what would happen. He could be stuck here 'til he's eighteen. Then they'd move him to Delta and nobody would give a fuck.”

“Point taken. I'll keep it quiet.”

“You still don't get it, do you? Shakeel wasn't just out there, he saw something. Out on the water. The same night that sergeant went missing.”

Falk checked their flanks, stunned and suddenly worried. He would hardly have felt more vulnerable if someone had just rolled a live grenade beneath their feet. The smooching couple, still going at it some twenty feet away, was by all appearances completely preoccupied. But, hey, think OPSEC.

“Let's move onto the dock,” Falk said, glancing around. “And I don't want a word of this going elsewhere. Understand?”

“Sure. That's the way I'd prefer it.”

The planks creaked beneath their feet as they walked to the end, just beyond a circle of light thrown by a lamp on a piling. A fish flicked at the surface, then vanished.

“So what did he see?”

“A boat. Not a big one. One of those little rubber ones.”

“An inflatable?”

“Yeah, like the commandos use.”

“Did you see it?”

Hilger shook his head.

“I was zoned out, half asleep. He didn't tell me 'til the next night. I think it scared him, like he knew it was something he wasn't supposed to have seen.”

“But you can't even see the beach from there.”

“It wasn't on the beach. The boat was passing by, just beyond the breakers.”

“In what direction?”

“East.”

“Back toward Camp America? Toward the Cuban side?”

Hilger nodded. “All three of them.”

“Three boats?”

“Three people. One boat. That's how many people Shakeel saw.”

Falk considered this for a moment. Something didn't add up.

“There wasn't even a moon out that night. How could he have seen anything, much less made a head count?”

“By the lights from our place. They keep 'em on all night. It's not as bright as the ones at Delta, but still. He saw it, all right. He'd have no reason to make it up. And I know he never heard anything about that sergeant.”

“And he was sure there were three of them?”

“Yeah.”

“So why didn't you tell Van Meter?”

“Like I said. The kids. I wasn't there when Van Meter came by. I just heard about it later. I could never live with it if Shakeel got busted, held here for life.”

“And you think that's what would happen?”

“Van Meter said as much, to all three of 'em. ‘Lie to me and you're never getting out of here.'”

“Prince of a guy.” Not to mention an idiot as an interrogator. Another dope who'd watched one too many cop shows where confrontational assholes got the goods.

“Besides, I figure if three guys are out horsing around in a raft, and one of 'em drowns, eventually one of the others is going to 'fess up, right? And if not …” He shrugged. “Then I guess they'll have to live with that.”

“So that's what you think it was? Three guys joyriding after dark? Maybe taking a little cruise to the forbidden zone, just for kicks?”

“What else would it be?”

“I don't know.”

But to Falk, any fellow who'd go to the trouble of first removing his wallet and keys didn't sound like the joyriding type. An inflatable was just the sort of craft Ludwig would have been least inclined to board.

“Well, don't worry, Hilger. You did the right thing in telling me.”

“I hope so. I'll admit, I almost didn't because of, well, because of what people are saying.”

“And what might that be?”

“Oh, you know. The usual stuff you hear about Arabic speakers. One of the guys in my group said he thought you were one of them.”

“Well, you know how rumors are. Like I said, you did the right thing.”

“Thanks, sir.”

Hilger took his leave, trooping back up the hill to his buddies without another word as Falk watched from the swaying dock. The amorous couple had disappeared. Falk shook his head as he thought about all the tales that must be making the rounds. It made him wonder again what Pam must be saying. Maybe Bo was right, and she was telling all to save her own skin.

He brooded about it further as he walked to a lonely table at the periphery of the Tiki Bar, finishing the third gin, then starting on a fourth. By then he was just stewed enough to come up with a plan to find out more, and he knew of only one person who could help him carry it out.

He returned to his car, groping the key into the ignition before pausing to lean against the wheel as he marshaled the remnants of sobriety. The last thing he needed was to run the car into a ditch or a big cactus, or to get pulled over by a security patrol for drunk driving. He fired up the engine and set off into the night, checking the mirror at every curve to make sure no one was following.

The turnoff was hard to find in the dark. It was even tougher negotiating the coral lane with the headlights off. He rolled down the window as he came to a stop outside the corrugated shack, listening to the engine tick, a metronome for the ratcheting chorus of night bugs. Switching off the dome light before he unlatched the door, he turned in his seat to make sure no one had followed him in.

He pulled a notebook and pen from his briefcase, then sat for a few seconds as he considered what to say. If the wrong person saw this first, he wanted the instructions to be vague enough not to arouse suspicion.

“Need you to check the air conditioner on Iguana Terrace one more time,” he scribbled in the dark, hoping it would be legible. “Something is rattling behind the vent screen. Thanks. Falk.”

Reconsidering, he added a P.S.—“The sooner the better.”

He folded the note twice, scribbled “For Harry” on the outside, and then walked to the padlocked metal door and wedged the note behind the hasp. He checked the sky. Still cloudy. With any luck the rain would hold off until morning.

By the time he reached the house he had decided what to say in the second note, and he wrote it down while he sat in the driveway. This time he folded the note even tighter before making his way behind the house in the dark. He pushed aside the low limbs of a rubber tree to reach the air-conditioning unit that protruded from the living room window. Then he squeezed the note up into a slot of the vent. The foliage would keep any neighbors from seeing either it or Harry. The question was whether Harry would have the balls to actually carry out Falk's request.

In the privacy of the house he popped three Advils to ward off the headache he almost always got from gin. Then, with a sense that he had done all he could for now, he stripped to his boxers and crawled between the chilly sheets.

No sooner had he laid his head on the pillow than he wondered if Perkins had yet replied from Washington. He fired up the laptop on the foot of the bed, the screen casting a vaporous glow as he pecked his way to the e-mail server. There was no further word. Strangely enough, the earlier message from Perkins seemed to be gone as well.

Had he accidentally deleted it? It wasn't in the Delete basket. With a lump of panic in his throat, he clicked into the Sent basket. His own message to Perkins had also vanished. Erased by either an intruder or an e-minion elsewhere on the base, locked in some windowless room where OPSEC never slept.

Falk wasn't sure whether to be outraged, frightened, or both, but he leaped from the bed in his bare feet. What he needed most was a beer and a stroll on the lawn to calm his nerves, but that didn't seem like the wisest move after four gins. Besides, he would feel vulnerable out there. An easy mark.

So he sat tight and considered his options. Just him and the four walls of the bedroom, far more confining than they usually seemed. Even on his worst days as a Marine, the Rock had never felt quite this small.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

S
EDATED BY THE GIN,
Falk slept until nine thirty. Just as well, he supposed. If the day went as planned, he would need every spare ounce of energy.

Fortunately there was no trace of a hangover. In another stroke of luck, it hadn't rained. He checked the air conditioner to find that Harry had retrieved the note while he slept. So far, so good.

His first order of business was to check the interrogation sign-out sheets inside Camp Delta, so he made coffee while flipping through the file for the Saudi he was scheduled to interrogate, Khalid al-Mustafa. The information confirmed that Mustafa had been pretty well exhausted as a useful source. The observations of the Biscuit team were particularly revealing:

“Aristocratic background and university educated in London. Polished diction. Generally cooperative attitude toward questioning. Khalid al-Mustafa is a dilettante among the committed, a ‘gentleman jihadist,' as one examiner observed. The idea of adventure abroad appealed to him more from a standpoint of personal conquest than of religious fervor. Often embellishes narrative accounts, a tendency springing from a desire to burnish his self-image as a man of action. Accounts of contemporaries make it apparent that during his eleven months in Afghanistan he accumulated little if any leadership responsibility. It is most likely that the casual tenor of his participation was tolerated due to the value of his family's financial portfolio in Jeddah. Appears eager to offer whatever information necessary to secure his release. Highly recommended that any actionable intelligence from this subject be double-referenced.”

Great. He was about to waste an hour chatting with a glib fabulist, an al-Qaeda sugar daddy who liked being photographed with a scimitar but was handier with a checkbook. Small price to pay, he supposed, for getting his hands on the records.

Security had tightened in his absence. It took more than half an hour just to get through the gates. Procedures that normally lasted a few seconds stretched into minutes, as first one, then another sentry checked and double-checked IDs and authorizations. Hardly surprising. If a guard from Camp Iguana was hearing rumors about Arabic speakers, he could only imagine what the ones inside Delta were picking up.

A cooperative sergeant greeted him at MP headquarters. Falk logged Mustafa's name onto a clipboard along with a series of code numbers and letters. He wrote seven characters in all, with a hyphen after the first three, like a phone number. The prefix—a letter followed by two numbers—identified your group and tiger team. Falk's was S04, the number four team in the Saudi-Yemeni group. The last four numbers identified the individual.

Some interrogators had made a hobby of trying to spot and memorize the numbers of friends and colleagues, turning it into a parlor trick to amuse (or horrify) their drinking buddies. Falk had stumbled onto Tyndall's number after following him inside the wire one afternoon, committing it to memory if only because he felt that a Bureau man should keep tabs on the competition. One rumor had it that the CIA knew all the numbers anyway, with full access to the master list on file at the Pink Palace.

“Oh, you're here for Mustafa,” the sergeant said. “He'll be thrilled. Hasn't had a customer in weeks. Ought to have all kinds of news for you.”

“So he's still a talker?”

The sergeant smiled and made a yakking motion with his hand.

“When he's in the yard it's all the others can do to shut him up. And his English isn't bad either, so all the MPs get an earful.”

It was a wonder none of the detainees had tried to do him harm. Blabbermouths were generally frowned upon by the Camp Delta population. Then again, anyone inclined to vengeance probably wouldn't have made it into the Haj of Camp 4.

“We'll bring him over to the booth,” the sergeant said.

“Great. Oh, and if it's not too much trouble, I need to check some of the recent sign-out sheets. Refresh my memory on some ground I've been covering.”

“You mean these?” He tapped the clipboard.

“That plus the last few weeks' worth. I need a look at the duty rosters for the MP shifts, too. You know the Bureau. Got to dot our ‘i's and cross our ‘t's or they think we're spending all our time on the beach.”

“No problem,” the sergeant said, apparently not in the mood to make an issue of it. “I'll round it up while you're talking to Mustafa. You only want the MP records for Camp Four?”

“Three, actually. That's mostly where I've been working lately.”

That seemed to slow the sergeant down. Camp 3's detainees were the hard cases. But eventually he nodded and said he would do what he could.

“Perfect. I'll make sure and report your willingness to go the extra mile, Sergeant …”

“Badusky,” he said, flipping back the line of duct tape like a flasher opening his trench coat. “Sergeant Phil Badusky. From the 112th.”

         

M
USTAFA SEEMED THRILLED
to have gotten out of the yard. The idea of a little air-conditioning couldn't have been too disagreeable, either. The MP didn't bother to bolt his leg irons to the floor once they arrived, and Mustafa insisted on speaking English. His command of the language was better than Falk had remembered.

“I have been practicing,” he said with a flourish. “When I went to school in London it was always good, but then I became rusty. So every day now I speak English. I teach it to others in my block. It will be good for business when I am home.”

“Assuming you get there.”

“It will happen. Someday we will all go home. Even Donald Rumsfeld does not want to feed us forever. That reminds me, you must please tell the cooker in the kitchen. Cooker? Is that correct?”

“Cook.”

“Cook, then. Or chef. Yes, chef is better. If you can please tell the
chef
for me, no more boiled eggs at breakfast. They are green inside, and dry. Enough of boiled eggs.”

“I'll put in a word.”

Falk covered some old ground for the sake of protocol, and they spent a few minutes going over names from Mustafa's unit, reviewing their roles and their movements during his time in Afghanistan. Both of them soon grew bored, and Falk didn't resist when Mustafa simply wanted to chat. It was then that Mustafa caught him off guard.

“So tell me, which one among you is the Marine? Is it you, perhaps?”

“The Marine?”

“The one of whom they speak who knows the Cubans. Is it true, this story?”

Falk felt the heat in his cheeks. He knew that to a trained eye he must be lighting up like an alarm. Was this the same thread Pam had unraveled?

“Look, I really don't …”

“Surely you must have heard this, too?”

“Can't say that I have. Is this how you guys inside the wire kill time now, making up stuff about us?”

“Oh, no, this did not come from one of us. It was from one of
you.
”

“From us?”

“From interrogation. From questions, not from answers. The new people asking questions, they have been saying this.”

“Which new ones?”

“Two of them. With so many strange questions. You must have heard this yourself. You are playing games with me.”

What could he say? Every possible response led somewhere dangerous. He was just glad he had recovered his composure before the glib Mustafa had noticed. A more attentive detainee—like Adnan, for instance—would have noticed right away. He considered asking more about the “new ones,” but that would only have added fuel to the rumor mill. So he sat up straighter in his chair, tried to look as disinterested as possible, and steered Mustafa to another topic. Within a few minutes they were both bored again, the light gone out of Mustafa's eyes.

Later, back at the MP station, Falk was still mulling the implications of Mustafa's tale when Sergeant Badusky burst through the door holding a ledger and a green file folder.

“Here you go, sir. MP duty roster for Camp Three in the book, interrogation sign-outs in the folder. They go back about a month.”

“Thanks. Shouldn't take long.”

“Take your time. Business is slow. Has been all week.”

Falk was looking for Yemenis, which wasn't hard because he knew all their names, even if at times a roster from any Islamic country seemed to include at least a dozen guys named Muhammad.

He started from four weeks back, and the first name he found was Adnan's, a 4 p.m. session twenty-four days ago in booth three. The team and interrogator ID numbers were his. Two more Yemenis were on the same page, both signed out to other members of his tiger team. In the following week he found more such notations, with some of the Yemeni subjects signed out to other teams that were also part of the Saudi-Yemeni group. He tried recalling some of the names and faces from those teams. They were reasonable people who would have been interviewing these subjects as a matter of course. Whenever Adnan's name turned up, his own number followed. He wouldn't have expected otherwise.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until a reference from two weeks ago, on a Tuesday at 8:20 p.m., when another Yemeni had been signed out for an interrogation. It was an awkward time of day for business, during the customary lull between the daylight hours and the spike of activity that usually commenced at 9 or 10 p.m. It was an hour when most analysts and interrogators were relaxing after dinner, either in their quarters or at the Tiki Bar.

Falk drew a finger across the page to the final column, but in the space where the number of the interrogator and his team should have appeared there were instead the initials “OGF-NCOIC,” scribbled in a rigid hand.

“What the hell,” he muttered.

“Problem?” Badusky said, looking up from his magazine.

“Yeah. Tell me what this means.” He turned the page around while Badusky walked over for a look.

“Well, NCOIC is …”

“Noncommissioned officer in charge. That I'm familiar with, but what's it doing in place of the interrogator's ID?”

“Because the NCOIC was signing out the prisoner for an OGF, a session at an off-grounds facility. Camp X-Ray, usually. The abandoned camp with all the old cages. Some guys like to take the detainees there for the change of scenery. Truck them down to the jungle at night. Supposedly scares the shit out of them.”

Falk had heard of the tactic, but didn't know anyone who had actually tried it. It sounded almost farcical, a touch of tropical Gothic. He supposed it might be pretty spooky being taken to the deserted Camp X-Ray, which was now nearly overgrown by vines.

“I guess that makes sense. But shouldn't there still be an ID number?”

“You'd have to ask the NCOIC from that shift. And that'll be in the ledger.”

First, Falk scanned the rest of the sign-out sheets for more of the mysterious notations. There was one on each of the next five days. Each involved a Yemeni detainee, and each occurred between 8:10 and 8:45 p.m. That meant there were six in all, on successive days. Each involved a different Yemeni detainee, with the last one occurring on a Sunday, nine days ago. Why had they stopped? He knew of at least six other Yemenis they hadn't yet talked to, and one was Adnan.

He flipped open the MP duty ledger, spent a few seconds getting his bearings, then turned to the Tuesday of two weeks ago. He found the 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift for Camp 3 and recognized the rigid handwriting that he had seen on the sign-out sheet. It was the signature that threw him for a loop: “Sgt. Earl Ludwig, 112th MP Co.”

Ludwig was the noncommissioned officer in charge at that hour for each of the next six days. He was also on duty the following Monday, when no one had been signed out to Camp X-Ray. On the next day, a Tuesday, Ludwig never showed up for work. It was the night he disappeared into the sea, on an inflatable bound for Cuban waters with two other men.

Falk went back to the sign-out pages and reviewed the last few weeks more closely. He returned to the page for last Wednesday—the day after Ludwig's disappearance and the day Falk had last spoken to Adnan—and checked for Yemenis. He quickly found his own sign-out of Adnan, high on the page at 2:30 a.m. Just as it should be. But at the bottom of the page he saw that Adnan had been signed out again, at 11:54 p.m. It was another OGF reference, meaning someone had taken him down to Camp X-Ray even before the transfer to Camp Echo. This time there was an interrogator's ID number, one that Falk didn't recognize. He knew only that it didn't come from one of the three teams that regularly dealt with Yemenis.

Falk thought back to that day, trying to remember what he had been doing at that hour. Mostly he remembered how tired he had been, from all the long hours of work following Ludwig's disappearance. He had been called to the North East Gate to retrieve Ludwig's body in the afternoon. Then they had welcomed Bo and the investigative team at Leeward Point around 7 p.m. before retiring to the Tiki Bar, followed by a late date with Pam. He must have dropped her off at about eleven. The sign-out had occurred during the following hour.

Falk couldn't imagine the tactic working, not with the way Adnan was wired. Maybe that was when they had decided to move him to Camp Echo. He jotted down the ID number, then flipped through the rest of the pages, but found nothing to further stir his curiosity.

It was then that he remembered Bo's request: Bring the pages, not just copies. It was a tall order with Badusky sitting a few feet away.

“These ID numbers for interrogators—do you guys keep a master list?”

Badusky shook his head, now eyeing Falk warily.

“That's all up at Command,” he said. “Which reminds me, you never gave me your name. I mean, normally I'm not supposed to ask, and you mentioned something about being with the Bureau, which is fine. But I thought you were just backtracking your own schedule. If you're checking up on others, I'm gonna need some better ID. So if you don't mind …”