“Whether or not Mr. Hasan wants to talk to or cooperate with you is up to him. We protect him. We don’t tell him what to say, think, or do. But just in case you do have a problem tryin’ to communicate with the old boy, keep in mind that Mrs. Witherspoon, his housekeeper, speaks better Arabic than he does English. She’s been with the witness protection program longer than I have… and I should probably mention, she’s a better shot than I am.”
The trek up the three hundred yards or so of dusty, rutted lane ended on the front porch of a clapboard house with two dogs sleeping on the porch. Discounting the two men who had driven them to where Hasan was being kept, there wasn’t another soul… or building in sight. Bogner decided Miller was right when he said, “There sure is a hell of a lot of nothing around here.”
Mrs. Witherspoon turned out to be pretty much what Bogner figured the prototypical frontier woman looked like. She was rawboned, sunburned, plain-talking, and unsmiling. She pushed open the screen door, studied both of them for several moments, and finally ushered them into a sprawling room decorated with the finest products of the taxidermist’s art. Bogner counted three deer heads, a couple of smaller varmints, one of which was an armadillo, and a shaggy mountain lion. He figured the latter had probably been there as long as the old ranch house. It was moth-eaten and covered with dust.
“We’re here to see Mr. Hasan,” Miller announced.
“I know why you’re here,” the woman grumbled.
“The people called.” She left Bogner and Miller standing in the middle of the room, lumbered back into the recesses of the house, and returned several moments later. When she returned, she paused and introduced her charge.
“This is Mr. Hasan.”
Fadel Hasan was an unimposing figure of a man, short, slight of build, and cursed with nervous eyes. He did not appear to be what one would have expected of the man who’d once held the title of Iraq’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. He wore thick glasses, had a thin mustache, and his head was shaved. He walked with a slight limp and appeared, on the surface at least, to regard his visitors with an air of intolerance.
Miller handled the introductions and asked Hasan if they could talk.
“What about?” the old man asked.
Bogner understood immediately what the man in the cowboy hat had meant. Fadel Hasan was more than a little difficult to understand. He found himself straining to understand through the accent.
“We’d like to talk to you about General Baddour,” Miller said.
Hasan hesitated and shifted his gaze to Mrs.
Witherspoon. Bogner figured he was trying to decide whether or not he wanted to answer the question.
“I have already told the people who brought me here everything I know,” he finally said.
“Perhaps there is something you overlooked at the time, or something you now realize you have forgotten to tell us,” Bogner tried.
According to Hasan’s dossier, he’d claimed to be sixty-two years old when he sought asylum in the United States. To Bogner he looked a great deal older, and the records indicated he had only been in the country eighteen months. Still, if he knew anything about Baddour’s operation in Ammash, it could be helpful because it would still be considered relatively recent information. Hasan squinted and continued to appraise the two ISA agents as they took seats across from him.
“Are we correct in assuming you are familiar with the operation in Ammash?” Bogner asked.
Hasan nodded.
“To some extent,” he conceded.
“What do you know about the Nasrat Pharmaceutical Company in Ammash?” Miller pushed.
Hasan’s weathered expression gave them only a small indication of his amusement.
“Ahhh… from the nature of your question, it appears their tests have again betrayed them,” he said.
“And what kind of tests would those be?” Miller pressed.
“I must assume that only something as potentially disturbing as one of their cyanide formulation tests could inspire your government to send two men all the way out here to talk to an old man.”
“Cyanide?” Miller repeated.
Again Hasan waited before he answered. This time there was less reluctance in his voice.
“When I left my homeland, my esteemed former colleague, Dr. Rashid, was continuing to develop variations of both AC-hydrogen cyanide HCN and CK-cyanogen chloride CNCL gases for weapons purposes.”
“For weapons purposes…” Miller repeated, wanting to make certain he understood what the old man was saying.
“Dr. Rashid and his wife’s efforts can hardly be construed as efforts to enhance the welfare of mankind,” Hasan said.
Miller thumbed back through his papers until he found the name of the man Hasan had referred to as his esteemed former colleague.
“Would that be the same Zilka Rashid who was a candidate for a Nobel Prize in chemistry several years ago?”
Hasan nodded and rubbed his chin.
“I fear that Rashid’s ambitions have compromised his integrity.
Baddour appeases him by promising him a position of importance in the new government.”
“What new government?” Miller pushed.
Hasan explained.
“President Abbasin is an old man. General Baddour is still young, perhaps no more than his early fifties. The president has a four-hundred-thousand-man army. Baddour has no more than seventy thousand men. But Baddour has Rashid and he has the now-infamous GG-2. It is a rather simple equation. An ambitious general plus Rashid’s weapons equal a new government.
Would you not agree it is inevitable?”
Bogner continued to weigh each word Hasan spoke. Strangely enough, it occurred to him during the course of the conversation that if he had listened that carefully to Joy, their marriage might still be intact. He repeated the name Dr. Zilka Rashid and said, “Tell us about his work.”
“Actually there are two Rashids,” Hasan offered, “and without their tools of violence, Salih Baddour’s ambitions would be doomed to failure.
I have witnessed his arsenal firsthand. He has neither the army, nor the weapons, nor the money to overcome the president. To achieve his objectives, he will have to rely on that which the Rashids develop.”
Up until then, Miller had been sitting on the edge of his chair. Now he settled back. They were making headway, far more than he had anticipated.
He phrased his next question carefully.
“Are you aware that in recent weeks there have been a number of attacks on Kurdish settlements in the northern part of your country?”
The old man stared back at him as he spoke.
“Baddour is not a fool. He tests his weapons on the unfortunate souls who have no one to speak for them. It matters little to the Iraqi government in Baghdad whether ten thousand or one hundred thousand Kurds perish. What Baddour does will not matter… until the day Baddour turns his weapons upon the army of Iraq.” There was obvious emotion in the old man’s voice. He had not at all been surprised by the news that Baddour had renewed his weapons testing on the Kurds.
“Another question,” Bogner said.
“We are equally curious about the Iraqi military facility adjacent to the building where the pharmaceutical company is situated in Ammash. We have photographs of it.”
Miller opened his briefcase, took out the satellite photos, and handed them to Hasan.
“Two of the buildings on what we believe is really a military complex are quite large. We want to know what is in those buildings.”
Hasan looked at the photographs, but he was tiring. He smiled thinly and looked across the room at Mrs. Witherspoon. It was an unspoken appeal for her intervention. She stepped forward to interrupt.
“Enough,” she said.
Without warning, the interview was over and the woman was assisting her charge from the room. When she returned, both Bogner and Miller were standing. Once again. Miller handled the protocol; he thanked Mrs. Witherspoon, and glanced down the lane to see if the men and the minivan were waiting.