The Third Target (28 page)

The guards woke me up before dawn.

They gave me back my clothes and my toiletries and told me to follow them. They locked me in the bathroom and told me to take a shower. The water was freezing cold, so I essentially took a sponge bath instead. When I had dressed and brushed my teeth, I knocked on the door.

They let me out and took me back to the living room. The shades were shut, but I could tell it was still dark outside. As I sat down
 
—once again in handcuffs and leg irons
 
—a deep sense of dread and foreboding came upon me. Whatever Khalif had meant by the “big day” ahead of me had arrived.

I sat there for a while
 
—maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe longer. None of the guards said a word, and I said nothing either. They gave me nothing to do, and with every minute that passed, my anxieties intensified. My mind raced through a thousand what-if scenarios, each more chilling than the last. Finally Abu Khalif entered the room and took his seat across from me while his bodyguards took up positions around the room.

“Now, Mr. Collins, it is time for me to ask you some questions,” he began, still without a hint of emotion in his voice. “How is your
mother doing? Maggie, yes? What a lovely home she has there in Bar Harbor
 
—Waldron Street, isn’t it?”

My stomach clenched. Why was this monster bringing up my mother? And how did he know what street she lived on? I said nothing.

“And your brother
 
—Matt, I believe; and his wife, Annie
 
—how are they? And those precious little children. Is everything well with them? A healthy family is so important. Don’t you agree?”

Now it was clear. This was a warning. A direct threat, in fact: play ball or sentence those closest to me to death.

“Feeling a little quiet today, are we?”

I clenched my jaw and said nothing.

“I’m afraid I don’t have the time for your resistance, Mr. Collins,” Khalif continued. “There are certain things I want to know from you, and I will get answers. To begin with, are the rumors I’m hearing from my sources in Jerusalem and Ramallah true? Is the criminal Zionist Lavi about to sign a treaty with that Palestinian traitor Salim Mansour?”

The question startled me. I’d braced myself for more questions about my family, but it seemed that was just the sadistic preamble to what he really wanted to discuss.

“Why do you ask that?” I inquired.

“No, Mr. Collins, you’re not asking the questions today
 
—
I am
,” he shot back, his eyes glaring, his voice thick with emotion for the first time.

My pulse began to quicken. It was not wise to make this lunatic angry, but what was the right answer? What did he want to hear?

“Yes, they’re true,” I replied, concluding if I was going to die anyway, it wasn’t going to be for telling foolish lies.

Yet rather than make him angrier, my answer seemed to calm him considerably. He eased back in his seat. The emotions in his face and in his voice seemed to drain away.

“You’re saying Lavi and Mansour have hammered out a treaty?”

“I believe they have.”

“And it’s done, final, complete?”

“That’s what I’ve been told.”

“Why haven’t you reported it yet?”

“That’s not my beat, and I was coming here instead.”

“To Iraq?”

“Yes.”

“Direct from Israel?”

“No.”

“From Jordan?”

I hesitated for a moment but then nodded.

He seemed to chew on that for a moment, then asked, “How soon will the treaty be signed?”

“I don’t know.”

“What
do
you know?”

“I hear there’s going to be a signing at the White House sometime later this month,” I said, avoiding any reference to the announcement ceremony that was going to be held within days, presumably in Jerusalem.

“And they will all be there
 
—at the White House
 
—Mansour, Lavi, and President Taylor?”

“Yes.”

“And King Abdullah, as well?”

“I believe so.”

“That would make sense, would it not, as he has been a key broker of the deal, correct?”

“I’m not sure how the king would characterize his involvement,” I said, which was technically true and yet the closest thing to a lie I had uttered so far in this bizarre conversation.

“You don’t think the king sees himself as the true author of this treaty?” Khalif pressed. “After all the private meetings he had with the Zionists like Lavi and with a
kafir
like Mansour and with sheer infidels
like your president, over and over again for the last few months, you really don’t think Abdullah
 
—the betrayer of the Prophet and all that he stood for
 
—not only sees himself but prides himself as the godfather of this so-called peace deal?”

“I really can’t say,” I replied.

“You can’t say, or you won’t say?” he asked. “There is a difference, Mr. Collins.”

“I can’t,” I replied. “I have not spoken to the king about this or about anything else. He and I don’t know each other. I’ve never met or interviewed him.”

“Your grandfather interviewed his great-grandfather, did he not?”

I found myself both intrigued and unnerved by the intelligence Khalif had on this most top secret of Mideast initiatives, not to mention my own family history. So far as I was aware, not a single reporter in the region, the U.S., or the rest of the world knew the peace deal was done or that the Jordanian monarch was its broker, except me. If some other reporter in any news organization, including my own, had the information, they certainly would have published it. Yet nobody had
 
—not yet, anyway. The
Jordan Times
was furthest out front, giving hints that a deal was in the making. But even they had not been definitive.

How, then, had Khalif gotten such insider information? If it wasn’t coming from a reporter, could it be coming from a mole inside one of the four governments involved
 
—American, Israeli, Palestinian, or Jordanian? And how was this lunatic going to use the information?

“Actually, my grandfather never got the
 
—”

But before I could finish my thought, Khalif cut me off. “Oh yes, how could I forget? Fate stepped in. The king was murdered. How sad . . . for your grandfather.”

Just then I heard a phone ring several times. An aide entered the living room from a doorway to my right and handed Khalif a satellite phone.

He took it and spoke into it in Arabic, slowly and deliberately. “Not yet. . . . But your preparations are proceeding? . . . Do you foresee any obstacles? . . . And you’ve briefed the others? . . . Very well, call me again in two hours.”

Khalif gave the satphone back to the aide, who now handed over several pieces of paper.

He read them carefully and then passed them to me. They were printouts off the
Times
website. My articles were both lead stories.

“The news is breaking, Mr. Collins,” Khalif said with a slight smile. “But there is so much more to come.”

Then he changed directions. “I want to ask you about your profile of me,” he said calmly. “Something about it is bothering me a great deal.”

I tensed immediately.

“You stated that I ‘claimed’ to have possession of chemical weapons ‘allegedly’ captured from a Syrian military base near Aleppo several weeks ago. Why did you use the words
claimed
and
allegedly
?”

“I’m not sure I understand the question,” I replied as diplomatically as I could.

“Of course you do,” he said. “It’s a very straightforward question. Why did you use these words to describe my statements?”

I was still not following but tried to answer nonetheless. “When I asked you about the chemical weapons back at the prison, you did claim to have them, and you did say your forces captured them from that base.”

“Exactly.”

“So that’s what I wrote.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I countered. “That is what I wrote.”

“No, you qualified what I said,” Khalif replied. “You made it seem like I merely
said
that I had WMD
 
—as if I were making up a
story
 
—when the fact is we do have these weapons, and we will use them when the time is right.”

“I was only reporting what you said.”

“I get the impression you don’t believe me.”

“It’s not a matter of what I believe,” I said. “I was just trying to be a careful reporter of the actual facts.”

“ISIS has chemical weapons
 
—
that
is a fact, Mr. Collins.”

“So you say.”

“Yes, I do say, and that makes it a fact.”

“Not in my world.”

“My confirming the story doesn’t make it true?”

“Not without proof.”

“I see.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said. “I reported what you said. I showed it to you ahead of time. You e-mailed it to my editor as is. How can you now be upset?”

“I’m not upset,” Khalif said. “I just want a story that makes it clear to the infidels that we are not talk, not spin doctors. We don’t simply issue press releases and audiotapes and videos on YouTube. I am not Zawahiri. This is not hype. We are the true mujahideen for Allah, and we want the world to know this clearly.”

With this, he stood. “Come, Mr. Collins; I have something to show you.”

Two guards pulled me to my feet. They blindfolded me and reapplied duct tape over my mouth, and before I knew it I was being shoved into the back of a car. When we began to drive, someone turned on the radio full blast so I couldn’t hear anything but some wretched music the others in the car all seemed to love. I couldn’t hear street noises or birds or construction equipment or anything that might give away our route or destination. I couldn’t even hear what the others were saying.

I would estimate that we drove for fifteen or twenty minutes,
though without any points of reference it was difficult to maintain an accurate sense of time. Finally, however, we came to a stop. The music stopped. I heard doors open. I heard Khalif giving orders in Arabic, and then I was pulled from the car.

When the blindfold was removed from my eyes, I found myself inside a dark garage. By the time my eyes adjusted, I saw a hulk of a man in the shadows and realized Jamal Ramzy was standing in front of me, at Abu Khalif’s side.

“Welcome to Mosul, Mr. Collins,” Ramzy said. “What an honor. You’re the first infidel ever to be permitted inside not just one ISIS base but two.”

I nodded slightly but said nothing.

“Now, put this on,” Ramzy said, handing me a gas mask.

“Why?” I asked.

“So you don’t die
 
—at least not prematurely,” he said, and I complied.

Ramzy, too, put on a gas mask, as did Khalif and the dozen armed guards around us. Then Ramzy led the group through a dark corridor and down several flights of stairs to the basement of whatever facility we had come to. We headed through one set of doors that were nothing special, but we quickly came to another set of doors that obviously served as an air lock into some sort of research laboratory. Though my gas mask was fogging up a bit, I could see lots of scientific equipment of various kinds and at least a half-dozen men wearing white lab coats and masks.

Ramzy ushered Khalif and me and one armed guard into a separate room. There was nothing in there
 
—no chairs, no tables, no furniture of any kind
 
—but in front of us on the far wall was a rectangular window with glass that appeared several inches thick. On the other side of the glass was a concrete bunker of sorts. It too was empty, but as I watched, someone with a lab coat entered from a side door to our right. He was carrying a wooden chair. He set it down
and went to retrieve another and another and then finally a fourth chair. Working quickly and methodically, he lined up the chairs in a row facing us. Then he was gone.

My heart was racing. Sweat was beginning to drip down the back of my neck. I was feeling claustrophobic in this mask and struggling to breathe. But there was no way out. Abu Khalif was standing immediately to my left. Jamal Ramzy was immediately to my right. And an ISIS thug was standing behind me, in front of the door, holding an AK-47.

Through the window
 
—which I assumed was a two-way mirror
 
—I saw three prison guards from Abu Ghraib appear, along with the prison’s warden, whom I recognized immediately. They were all handcuffed and shackled together. When they had been led into the room on the other side of this window, they were unchained and ordered to strip. It was clear that each of them had been tortured severely. They were bloodied and bruised. Their faces were swollen. Two of them had broken noses.

Once they were naked, they were ordered to sit down on the chairs, which they did, each of them trembling. Abu Khalif rapped his knuckles on the glass, apparently giving an order to the man in the gas mask and lab coat, who nodded and quickly left the room.