Outside, two black Jeeps and a Range Rover waited in the dark. Jack Fisher stood at the foot of the stairs. Zawadzki had run a couple of other prisoners to this squad over the last year. From what Zawadzki could see, they weren’t afraid to knock the prisoners around a little bit, maybe too much. But that wasn’t his business.
“Any trouble?”
“This one,” Zawadzki said. “Knocking his head against the floor, got a bloody nose. Says the Paki police broke his ribs on the way to the airport.” Zawadzki hesitated. “He needs medical treatment, maybe.”
“Poor little angel,” Fisher said. “You know, him and his buddy shot one of our guys last night.” Fisher reached behind the prisoner and pulled up his shackled hands, dragging his arms out and back and twisting his shoulders in their sockets. The prisoner groaned. “That’s right,” Fisher said. “You weren’t a good boy.” He let go. The prisoner flopped down, nearly falling over. Zawadzki propped him up.
“Let’s get them back to base, settle the paperwork there,” Fisher said. “Get him a deep-tissue massage.” He lifted the prisoner’s hood. “Lemme get a look.” He pushed back the prisoner’s lips, looked at his teeth and nose like he was inspecting a horse.
“Banged himself up nice, didn’t he? Good. Less work for us.”
12
Wells came back to Langley spoiling for a fight.
He’d spent a night in Cairo locked in an empty office at the mukhabarat headquarters in Abdeen, while the Egyptians verified his identity. Oddly, the room was festooned with Egyptian tourist posters, their slogans in English and French: Leave London behind, come to Cairo for Christmas! Les Pyramides d’Egypte: Une Merveille du Monde! Wells dated the posters to the late seventies: the men wore mustaches and checked short-sleeve shirts, the women blown-out hair and brightly colored miniskirts.
He had just fallen asleep, his head on the desk, when Hani walked in and poured a bucket of freezing water over his head and down his galabiya. Wells was covered in so much dust from the cemetery that he didn’t mind.
“I knew you were no Kuwaiti. I knew.”
I did you a favor, Wells didn’t say. You were getting nowhere fast. Now you can blame me for this mess.
“You knew I was muk,” Hani said.
“I thought so.”
“You should have told me who you were.” Hani banged a flashlight against the desk, sending vibrations oscillating into Wells’s damaged skull.
Wells sat up. “Did Alaa get away?”
“For now.”
“Good.”
This time Hani brought the flashlight down on top of Wells’s head. Not a full swing, and not in the same place as Wells had been sapped. But more than a love tap. Wells counted Mississippis in his head until the ringing stopped.
“What did you want from him?”
“I can’t remember.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Mainly, we talked soccer.”
Hani raised the flashlight over his head, turned toward Wells, measured his swing like a batter in the on-deck circle. One practice swing, another—
Then another swing, this one for real, the flashlight whistling through the hot, dry air at Wells’s face—
And stopping just short of his left eye. Wells didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink. He burrowed into the core of himself and waited.
A thin trickle of sweat dripped down Hani’s left temple. He stared at Wells and then sighed and sat on the side of the desk and lit a cigarette. “I’ll be glad to have you gone,” he said.
WELLS SLEPT FITFULLY until the morning, when Hani brought in a doctor — or a man in a dirty white coat who said he was a doctor — who poured rubbing alcohol on Wells’s scalp, setting his broken skin on fire, and then taped a gauze pad to the wound. Hani was the only mukhabarat agent Wells saw. He guessed the case was so toxic that no one wanted to be near it. Day turned to evening, and finally Hani returned.
“You leave tonight.”
Wells didn’t argue.
At midnight they put a hood over his head and bundled him into a van. When they pulled it off, he stood on the tarmac of Cairo International, staring at the blinking lights of a Delta 767. Delta ran a flight to New York four times a week.
Hani took Wells’s fake passports and the digital camera and arranged them neatly on the tarmac. He pulled a red plastic canister from the back of the van, splashed gasoline over the pile. He lit a cigarette and dropped it on the pile. The flames danced sideways on the tarmac, and the acrid smell of the camera’s melting battery filled the hot night air.
“Burn, baby, burn,” Wells said in English. “Got any marshmallows?” Hani hadn’t given him food or water since his arrest, a full day ago now. He was unsteady, feverish, his temperature spiking and diving like a Blue Angels pilot showing off for a new girlfriend.
“Marshmallow? What is that?”
Wells poked at the dying fire with his foot. “That wasn’t strictly necessary,” he said. “Can I go now?”
“Unfortunately, I don’t have a choice in the matter,” Hani said. “Our American ally. But if you ever come back to Egypt. We have so many accidents in Cairo. I know how I would suffer if Mr. John Wells were hit by a truck.”
“If I ever come back to Egypt, you’ll be the last to know,” Wells said. His voice tore his throat like ground glass. No more talking, in any language. He turned away and stumbled across the tarmac. At the jetway, he made sure to give Hani a wave.
FROM NEW YORK, he flew to D.C., where an army doc met him and stitched him up properly. The doctor told him he needed to spend a day at Walter Reed, but Wells turned him down. He took a cab to the apartment that Shafer had arranged as a crash pad and slept for eighteen hours straight.
When he woke the next morning, his fever was gone. He still had a headache, a dull pounding behind the eyes, but he felt just about human for the first time since the Northern Cemetery. Two messages waited for him on his cell phone, which he’d left in Washington. The first: “John. It’s Anne. Hope you and my friend Tonka are all right. Wherever you are.” She laughed nervously. “Don’t shoot anybody I wouldn’t shoot, okay? And call me sometime.”
The second message was nothing but a few seconds of breathing, followed by a hang-up. Wells wanted to believe he could recognize the fluttering of Exley’s breath. But the line didn’t have a trace, so he had no way to know. He listened twice to Anne’s message and three times to the hang-up and then saved them both.
He showered and shaved and sped to Langley, his headache growing more intense as he approached the front gate. For once, he wanted to talk to Duto. But when he got to Shafer’s office, he found out he wouldn’t have the chance.
“Duto going to see us?” Wells said. “Talk about Alaa Zumari? Tell me what an idiot I am, how I should have gotten the Egyptians involved from the get-go?”
“Nope.”
“Have a full and frank exchange of views?”
“Nope.”
“Because I’ve got a few things to say to him.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“He had to have known the details of Alaa Zumari’s interrogation. Had to. That Zumari gave up Samir Gharib. Why didn’t he tell us? It’s like he’s deliberately inciting us.”
Shafer cocked his head sideways and grunted.
“Are you trying to speak, Ellis? Because that’s not English.”
“Thinking.” He tilted his head to the other side. No other response.