The Towers (35 page)

On the chair a small, hunched prisoner sat with one leg tucked under the other, gripping one shin. He had a wild, dark beard, long hair with streaks of silver, and bruises on his wrists and under red-rimmed, weary eyes. He had a button nose and thick eyebrows and red-apple cheeks and maybe he did look like a leprechaun, if you had a good imagination or were really tired. Dan smelled his rank metallic sweat and the plywood and some volatile chemical like paint thinner. The interrogator put a Coke on the table. After a moment the prisoner cracked the pop top and drank, not taking his eyes from his captor.

Dix started with questions about a supply route, apparently what they'd been talking about before Dan arrived. The translation took a while; the squatting Afghan turned the Engish into what Dan assumed was Pashtun. Then the response came, and that took a while too, and then they had to wait for translation. Dix patiently noted the answer on a steno pad. It seemed like a very deliberate process. The prisoner swung his foot and glanced at Dan, then away.

“All right,” Dix said. “Now, back to the meeting at Pajuar you told me about. First of all, where is Pajuar?”

The prisoner shook his head. He spoke briefly, not looking at the interrogator, but at the galvanized wire screen above them.

“He says, what is the use? He will answer no more questions.”

Dix took his time. His gaze stayed on the Afghan, who seemed not to want to meet his eyes. “Remind him, the outcome is up to him. We can turn him over to the Northern Alliance. They have a prison in Kabul. Translate that.”

The terp spoke for a while. When he stopped, Dix said, “It used to be a Talib prison. Maybe you remember it. Always used to be crowded. But it's funny, we keep sending people there, and they never say they have too many.”

The prisoner didn't react. Dix reached into his folder. Took out photographs and put them on the table. “What're your kids going to do without you, Ahmed? You did want to see them again. Or you wouldn't be carrying their pictures. You have a choice. We can send you to Kabul. Or”—Dix looked at the poster, and Dan suddenly understood—“we can send you to Cuba. To Guantánamo. You won't see your family for a while. But eventually, after we sort out our friends from our enemies … it's your choice, Ahmed.” Dix waited again for the translation, as the prisoner's eyes reluctantly fastened on the poster.

“Will he be able to walk on the beach in Guantánamo?”

Dix shrugged. “If he is our friend, why not?”

A hesitant question. “In Cuba. Will he be shackled and caged?”

“He doesn't bargain. This isn't a souk. He's either with us, or against us. This is what our president has said.”

The prisoner lifted his head. He closed his eyes, then sighed. Spoke, a flood of resigned speech.

“He will tell you what he knows,” the translator said. “More than that, he says, he cannot say.”

Dix asked about Pajuar again, and this time the prisoner grew animated. He used his hands to show directions, glancing at the translator occasionally. Everyone else waited patiently. Finally the answer came through, but it sounded complicated. Dix noted it all down and asked how long it would take to walk there from various villages in the valley.

At the end of an hour the interrogator got up, stretched, rubbed his eyes. He looked at the prisoner, who hadn't changed position, but whose head was hanging down. He said something to the translator in Pashtun and jerked his head at Dan to step outside.

In the corridor, he tore off a page from his pad. “Going to be tough to get this down to a UTC coordinate. But this is the best I can give you. It's in the Shah-i-khot, that's pretty clear. What they call the Place of Kings. There are three villages in walking distance. He's described the trail from each village. There are halt points along the rat lines, for springs or cached supplies. What the mountain looks like to the east of it. Apparently there's a cave there, some kind of hideout. Hope it helps.”

The Place of Kings. Dan had seen a reference to that before, an intel spot report from Yemen. And Provanzano too, had mentioned it. “I guess what I need to know is, can we trust what he says?”

“That's the five-dollar question, isn't it? I don't pick up any cuing that he's lying. If it helps, he swears it to Allah on his heart and limbs.”

“Is that, like, a guarantee?”

“No. They all say stuff like that. Like a Mafia guy, swearing on his mother's grave.”

“Uh-huh. Great. Thanks.”

“Want us to follow up? More details on the location? Who's going to be there?”

“I already have an idea who'll be there. We just needed to know where ‘there' was. But, yeah, if you come up with anything else, shoot it over. Anything that might lead us to the higher-ups. Here's my direct e-mail.” Dan tore a scrap off the steno page and jotted it down.

The interrogator said he understood. He rubbed his eyes hard in the glaring light. “Okay, back to it.… Want a Coke? We keep feeding them Cokes. Figure, if they can't sleep when we give them a break, they'll be twice as fucked-up when we start the next session.”

“This seems to go pretty slow.”

Dix gave him a sharp glance. “It's a time-intensive process, good interrogation.”

Dan took a deep breath. “Yeah. I see. I'll take one. And thanks.”

Standing once more on the balcony, drinking off the can in swift, too-sweet swigs, he pondered the chain link, the lights, the overflowing buckets, the casually leaning guards. The men in orange squatted or strolled under the blinding lights, between the hanging banners.

Seen close up, the enemy didn't look physically menacing. But men like these had blown up embassies, warships, flown airliners into buildings. For a moment he heard again the screams in the darkened, fuel-stinking corridors of the Pentagon. Blair had been through even worse. They had to be interrogated, to gather any intel they could yield. And screen out any innocent sheepherders. But after that, he couldn't think of anything better than a firing squad. He'd volunteer for it.

They said they wanted a new caliphate. Something like a new Ottoman Empire, based on sharia and Koranic justice. But by all accounts, Afghanistan under Omar had been no paradise. More like a totalitarian hell. Stonings. Executions. Noses, ears, hands, cut off. Schools closed. Women sold like cattle, beaten like slaves. But all that had been fine with the West. Until they'd attacked New York and Washington.

Maybe we needed a wake-up call, he thought. We let Hitler go too, and Pol Pot, and all the rest. Until it hits us, we don't react. Until it's too late, we don't care. We're focused on the next quarter's market results. The next election. Not what's coming ten years down the road.

Anyway, what business of it was his? Whatever he thought wasn't going to affect anything. Not one iota.

He finished the can, crumpled it, and tossed it into the darkness.

*   *   *

BACK
at the JOC Dan passed the steno sheet Dix had given him to Henrickson to input into CIRCE. Then felt his way to a cot. He stared up at the slowly breathing roof of the tent. Tried to close his eyes, but the lids were on springs. Shouldn't have gone to the JIF. No, he'd had to. Part of his job. If only Provanzano or Belote had wormed an agent into bin Laden's inner circle. They could've stopped the whole plot. Now they were vacuuming up all this human debris, but did the bedraggled men wearing prison orange actually matter? Were they ALQ leaders? Or just hangers-on, pawns, or warm bodies turned in to settle clan vendettas: “Oh, him—he is a bad man. Yes, he is high Taliban, important Al Qaeda. Give me the thousand dollars reward.”

Finally he got up. Henrickson gave him the eye but didn't say anything. Dan went to another terminal and read the latest reports, then searched again for Pajaur, Pajuar, Bajuar, Bajaur, and every other possible spelling. He got a couple more hits but nothing eye-opening. He went out into the main tent, woke a cartographer, and worked out a UTC coordinate from the directions the prisoner had given. Then went back to his own terminal and retrieved all the imagery he could find for that location. Nothing much was visible on the ground. A rocky valley. He zoomed in and out, squinting, searching for shadows or changes over time. Didn't see any.

He woke to Wenck standing over him. “Jay-wick meeting, Commander.”

“Thanks, Donnie. You making out okay?”

“Yeah, okay. Boy, these guys are really interested in CIRCE.”

“That so?”

“They wanna know all kinds of stuff. Keep asking for copies of the software. And I keep telling them, it doesn't reside here.”

“Good on you, Donnie. Keep that up.” Dan patted the kid's spindly shoulder. Then did a quick moist shave from bottled water, grimacing at his body odor as he stripped his shirt off.

“Oh, and, Commander—we're getting some high numbers on that meet site.”

“High? How high?”

Donnie told him.

*   *   *

THE
JWC meeting was in the bigger tent, five men and one woman around a field table. Army, OGA, spec ops, and Dan. Belote and Provanzano sat off to the side, not exactly part of the discussion, but also, Dan noted, not missing a word. Some wag had duct-taped a sheet of yellow paper to the back of his monitor. It read,
Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory. Even more are false. And most are uncertain. Clausewitz
.

An army colonel, the chairman, briefed first. After a quick overview of the last twenty-four hours, he said British communications intercepts indicated ALQ leadership were planning an emergency regrouping, or at least a meeting of the withdrawing high leaders, somewhere north of Kandahar. The location was not mentioned in the intercepts, but one of the speakers had mentioned “the woods.” “The most likely meet place is the remote border region near Pakistan,” he concluded. “That's the broad brush. The challenge is getting more specific, so we can get shooters or weapons there at the same time.”

“I disagree,” one of the analysts said. “Why meet on this side of the border? When the Pak side's safe? I think the meeting's in North Waziristan, the same sites we've seen before.”

Belote said, “We need a firm location. We're throwing brains at this problem, but I'm not seeing results coming back.”

The analyst shook his head. “We're on it. But these guys have pretty decent comm discipline. And we don't speak the language.”

Dan sat back, listening to them wrangle. Once again, a split was growing between Defense Intelligence and the CIA. They started from the same facts, but interpreted them differently. One side wanted the meeting in Afghanistan; the other said it was going to be out of their reach, in Pakistan. Apparently bin Laden was as much at home on one side of the border as the other.

“Dan?” Belote said. “We've got a deadlock. What's your crystal ball coming up with?”

He sat for a moment, mustering his thoughts. He had nothing to prove. But the numbers were getting convincing. “CIRCE's generating an eighty percent confidence level the meet'll be in Pajuar.”

Heads came up; gazes sharpened. “Where's Pajuar?” a woman asked.

“We're pretty sure, based on JIF work as of this morning, that it's a valley to the north of the Shah-i-khot.”

Dan keyed it in and turned his notebook so they could see the overhead. “Imagery as of two days ago. A steep valley. Wooded—so the phrase ‘in the woods' could apply. Located at the intersection of trails from these three villages, so if someone approaches by one trail, there are two escape routes. Also, we're seeing a high degree of probability both OBL and Al-Zawahiri will attend.”

The analysts looked skeptical. “This is based on what?” one said. “A computer program?”

“It does the same thing you guys do. Goes through tons of material and generates connections. Looks for patterns. Gradually outlines recurrent activities and infrastructure. It knits that into a web, then makes predictions based on probabilistic calculations.”

“A computer can't do analysis,” one of the analysts said. “You need to look inside your target's head. Live in his skin. All this thing is doing, it's re-creating the past.”

“Not exactly.” Dan understood where the analysts were coming from. All most people owned were their skills. No wonder they'd perceive his contribution as a threat. “I agree, it doesn't get into OBL's head, the way one of you could. It doesn't care
why
he does what he does. But does he repeat himself? Or does he do what you don't expect, because you don't expect it? At each decision point, the target has to make a decision. The program runs out the consequences, examines them from his point of view, and makes its predictions based on how he sees the world.”

“But you can't know everything he knows.”

“Of course not. This isn't a magic mirror from a fantasy novel. But when it gives us a probability that high, there may be something there. At least it's worth checking out.”

“That's how you got Al-Maadi,” Belote put in.

Dan turned to face him. “There were other inputs. HUMINT. Overhead imagery. But, yeah, that's what vectored us in on his hideout.”

They discussed it, and the skepticism deepened. No one had ever heard of Pajuar. The interrogation report hadn't come through the proper channels, been scrubbed down and blessed by CFLCC. He found himself getting angry, starting to argue that if they waited, the opportunity would slip away. As so many others had. He started to quote Sun Tzu:
In war, the supreme consideration is speed
. But instead, closed his mouth. He pushed too hard. Had been told that over and over, during his career. Maybe this was one of those situations where stepping back, taking a deep breath, and admitting the other guy might be right was the better part of valor.

Tony Provanzano had been sitting off to the side, occasionally lifting the inhaler. Now he cleared his throat, and discussion stopped. “Can I put in a word?”