One more step brought him to the window with the hatch. There, two men in black uniforms, black body armor, and black ski masks stared blankly through the Plexiglas back at him. On their chests, MP5 sub-guns hung at the ready.
They wore no badges or insignia at all.
Only their eyes were visible.
The Emir held their gazes, one after the other, for a long moment, his face not more than two feet from theirs, though both men were several inches taller. All three sets of eyes broadcast hatred and malevolence. One of the masked men must have said something on the other side of the soundproof glass, because two other masked and armed men sitting at a desk in the back of the viewing room turned their heads toward their prisoner, and one flipped a switch on a console. A loud beep rang out in the Emir’s cell, and then the small access hatch opened below the window. The Emir ignored it, continued the staring contest with his guards. After a few seconds he heard another beep, and then the amplified voice of the man at the desk came from a speaker recessed in the ceiling above the Emir’s bed.
The masked guard spoke English. “Put your blanket in the hatch.”
The Emir did not move.
Again, “Put your blanket in the hatch.”
Nothing from the prisoner.
“Last chance.”
Now Yasin complied. He had made a small show of resistance, and here that was a victory. The men that had held him in those first weeks after his capture were long gone, and Yasin had been testing the fervency and resolve of his captors ever since. He nodded slowly, dropped his blanket into the hatch, and then the hatch shut. On the other side, one of the two guards close to the window retrieved it, opened it up and looked it over, and then walked toward the laundry basket. He walked past the basket and tossed the wool blanket into a plastic garbage can.
The man at the desk spoke into the microphone again: “You just lost your blanket, 09341. Keep testing us, asshole. We love this game, and we can play it each and every fuckin’ day.” The microphone switched off with a loud click, and the big guard returned to the glass to shoulder up next to his partner. Together they stood as still as stones, staring through the eyeholes in their masks at the man on the other side of the window.
The Emir turned away and returned to his concrete bed.
He would miss that blanket.
7
Melanie Kraft was having an exceptionally bad week. An intelligence reports officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, Melanie was only two years out of American University, where she received her B.A. in international studies, and her master’s in American foreign policy. This, augmented with having spent five of her teenage years in Egypt as the daughter of an Air Force attaché, made her a nice fit for the CIA. She worked in the Directorate of Intelligence — more specifically in the Office of Middle East and North Africa Analysis. Principally an Egypt specialist, young Ms. Kraft was bright and eager, so she occasionally reached out a little from her daily duties to work on other projects.
It was this willingness to stick out her neck that now threatened to derail a career that was barely two years old.
Melanie was accustomed to winning. In language classes in Egypt, as a soccer star in high school and then during her undergrad years, and with perfect grades in school. Her hard work won her fawning appreciation from her professors and then exemplary performance reviews here at the Agency. But all her intellectual and professional success had come to a screeching halt one week ago today, when she leaned into her supervisor’s office with a paper that she had put together on her own time.
It was titled “An Evaluation of Political Rhetoric by the Muslim Brotherhood in English and in Masri.” She’d combed English and Egyptian Arabic (Masri) websites to chronicle the growing disconnect between Muslim Brotherhood public relations with the West and their domestic rhetoric. It was a hard-hitting but well-sourced document. She’d spent months of late nights and weekends creating and using phony profiles of Arab men to gain access to password-protected Islamist forums. She’d gained the trust of Egyptians in these “cyber coffee shops,” and these men let her into the fold, discussed with her Muslim Brotherhood speeches at madrassas across Egypt, even told her of Mo-Bro diplomats going to other nations in the Muslim world to share information with known radicals.
She contrasted all she learned with the benevolent façade the Brotherhood was projecting to the West.
She finished her paper and handed it over to her immediate supervisor. He sent her in to Phyllis Stark, chief of her department. Phyllis read the title, nodded curtly, and then tossed the brief onto her desk.
This frustrated Melanie; she had expected some show of enthusiasm from her chief. As she’d walked back to her desk, she’d hoped, at least, that her hard work would get passed upstairs.
Two days later, she got her wish. Mrs. Stark had passed it on, someone had read it, and Melanie Kraft was called into a fourth-floor conference room. Her supervisor, her department chief, and a couple of suits from the seventh floor that she did not recognize were already there when she entered.
There was no pretense about the meeting at all. From the looks and gesticulations of the men at the conference table, Melanie Kraft knew she was in trouble even before she sat down.
“Miss Kraft, what is it you thought you would accomplish with your moonlighting? What is it you want?” a seventh-floor political appointee named Petit asked her.
“Want?”
“Are you trying to get a new gig around here with your little term paper, or do you just want it to circulate around so that, if Ryan wins and brings in his own people, you will be the flavor of the month?”
“No.” That had not occurred to her in the slightest. Theoretically, an administration change should have next to nothing to do with someone at her level in the Agency. “I just have been reading what we’ve been putting out on the Brotherhood, and I thought it could stand some countervailing data. There is open-source intelligence — you’ll see in the brief I cited everything — that points to a much more ominous—”
“Miss Kraft. This isn’t grad school. I’m not going to check your footnotes.”
Melanie did not respond to that, but she didn’t bother continuing her defense of her paper, either.
Petit continued, “You have overstepped your boundaries at a time when this agency is at its most polarized.”
Kraft didn’t think the Agency was polarized at all, unless the polarization was between the seventh-floor graybeards who stood to lose their jobs with a Kealty defeat and the seventh-floor graybeards who stood to move into better positions with a Ryan win. That world was far removed from her own, and she would have thought Petit could have seen that.
“Sir, it was not my intention to cause any rift here in the building. My focus was on the realities in Egypt, and the information that was—”
“Did you prepare this document while you were supposed to be working on your daily reports?”
“No, sir. I did this at home.”
“We can open an investigation into you, to see if you used any classified resources to create—”