Hendley walked to a phone and punched in a few digits. Just two minutes later, Jerry Rounds came in. “Well?” Rounds asked.
“Our guest has had a bad morning,” Hendley explained. “Now we need to talk to him. That’s your job, Jerry.”
“Looks unconscious,” Rounds observed.
“He’ll be that way for a couple of minutes,” Pasternak clarified. “But he’ll be okay,” the doctor promised.
“Jesus, do we have enough people in here?” Rounds observed next. More people than the regular board meetings. Then the TV camera came in, set up on a tripod by Dominic, and the tarpaulin curtains they’d duct-taped together the night before were erected around the workbench. At his nod, Dominic hit the camera’s record button, and Hendley took over, announcing off camera the time and date. Gavin Biery would, of course, later digitally alter Hendley’s voice. Dominic replayed the sequence and pronounced the recording clean.
“Head games?” Rounds asked, almost to himself, but Clark was standing right next to him.
“Why not?” Clark responded. “No rules on this, Jerry.”
“Right.” Clark had a way of cutting down to the bone of the issue, the intel chief noted.
Clark wondered if everyone should wear cowboy dress, jeans, gunbelts, and ten-gallon hats, to distort him all the way, really to play head games with Saif. But it was better, probably, to keep it simple. Thinking too much about anything usually obfuscated everything and ended up leading nowhere. Simple was usually better. Almost always.
Clark walked to the table and saw that Saif was moving now, moving and twisting in his sleep. About ready to wake up. Would he be surprised to be alive? Clark wondered. Would he think he was in hell? For damned sure it wasn’t paradise. He looked closely at the face. Little muscles were moving now. He was about ready to rejoin the world. Clark decided to stay where he was.
“John?” It was Chavez.
“Yeah, Ding?”
“It’s really been that bad, eh?”
“That’s what the doc says. He’s the expert.”
“Jesus.”
“Wrong deity, man,” Clark observed. “He’s probably expecting to see Allah-or maybe the devil.” I guess maybe I can stand in for him, John thought on reflection. He looked around. Jerry Rounds looked uneasy. Hendley had sent him up to bat in the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded and a full count. Well, he’d be inhuman not to be a little tight, John thought.
He felt himself being drawn into this. It was coming his way, and he suddenly knew it.
Oh, shit, Clark thought. What was he supposed to say to this bastard? This was a job for a psychiatrist. Maybe a serious Islamic churchman, or theologian-what did they call them? Mufti? Something like that. Somebody who knew Islam a hell of a lot better than he did.
But was this guy really a Muslim? Or was he a would-be politician? Did he himself even know what he was? At what point did a man become what he proclaimed himself to be? Those were deep questions for Clark. Too damned deep. But the man’s eyelids were fluttering. Then they opened, and Clark was looking into them.
“Feels good to breathe, doesn’t it?” Clark asked. There was no answer, but there was confusion on the man’s face. “Hello, Saif. Welcome back.”
“Who are you?” the man asked, somewhat drunkenly.
“I work for the United States government.”
“What have you done to me? What happened?”
“We induced a heart attack, then brought you back. They tell me it’s an agonizing procedure.”
To this Clark got no response, but he could see the flicker of terror in the Emir’s eyes.
“You should know this: What you just went through can be replicated-indefinitely and without long-term damage. Fail to cooperate and your days will consist of nothing more than one heart attack after another.”
“You cannot do that. You have-”
“Laws? Not here we don’t. It’s just me, you, and a syringe, for as long as it takes. If you don’t believe me, I can have the doctor back here in two minutes. Make your choice.”
The Emir’s decision took less than three seconds. “Ask your questions.”
Clark and Rounds quickly discovered that their interaction of the man known as the Emir wasn’t going to be an interrogation but rather a cordial debriefing. Yasin had clearly taken Clark’s warning to heart.
The first session lasted two hours and covered the mundane to the significant, questions to which they already had the answers, and mysteries they’d yet to unraveclass="underline" How long had he been in America? Where and when had he undergone plastic surgery? His route after leaving Pakistan. How was the house in Las Vegas purchased? How big was the URC’s operational budget? The locations of bank accounts; the URC’s organizational structure, cell headquarters, sleeper agents, strategic goals…
And so it went, into the early evening, until Hendley called a halt. The next morning the group gathered in the kitchen of the main house to do a postmortem and to plan the day’s questioning. Their time was limited, Hendley explained. Whatever their personal inclinations, the Emir didn’t belong to The Campus, and justice was not theirs to dispense. The man belonged to the American people; justice to be dispensed according to their laws. Besides, once Yasin was in the hands of the FBI, months and years could be spent wringing from him every last drop of information. In the meantime, The Campus would make hay with what the Emir had so far disclosed. They had plenty of leads to run down, and enough intel to keep them busy for eight months to a year.
“I’d say there’s just one last thing we need to get out of him,” Jack Ryan Jr. said.
“What’s that?” Rounds replied.
“The why of it all. This guy’s thinking is too layered. All the pieces and parts of Lotus-Yucca Mountain, the Losan, the attacks in the Midwest… Was the whole point terror, or something bigger? It has to be more than Nine-Eleven writ large, right?”
Clark cocked his head thoughtfully and looked to Hendley, who took a beat, then said, “Damned good question.”
By mid-morning they had what they wanted; they turned their attention to the tricky matter of turning Yasin over to the FBI. As symbolically and visually appealing as the idea might be, trussing up the Emir like a Christmas goose and shoving him from a moving car onto the steps of the Hoover Building was a nonstarter. The Campus had for weeks been skirting the gray line between remaining in the shadows where it was designed to operate and attracting the attention of the U.S. government.
So the question became how to “regift” the world’s most wanted terrorist without having it blow back on them. In the end, Dominic Caruso, having learned the lesson from Brian, came up with the solution.
“KISS,” he said. “Keep it simple, stupid.”
“Explain.” This from Hendley.
“We’re overthinking it. We’ve already got the perfect cutout: Gus Werner. He tapped me for The Campus, and he’s in tight with Dan Murray, Director of the FBI.”
“This is a damned big gift horse, Dom,” said Chavez. “Think he’ll go for it? Better question: Think he can make it work?”
“How would it go down?” asked Jack.
“He’ll be arrested immediately and locked up in a very secure location. You know, read him his rights, offer him an attorney, try to talk to him some. Get a U.S. Attorney involved. They’ll tell the Attorney General, who’ll tell the President. After that, the snowball starts getting big. The press gets involved, and we sit back and watch the show. Listen, Gus knows how we work, and he knows how the Bureau works. If anybody can sell it, he can.”
Hendley considered this for a few moments, then nodded. “Call him.”
In the Hoover Building, Gus Werner’s phone rang. It was his private line, and few people had access to that. “Werner.”