Capitol murder

Chapter Thirty-one

When Ali Bashar came to, he was lying on a cot in a narrow, windowless concrete cell wearing an orange jumpsuit. Shining down on him was a caged lightbulb. The light hurt Ali’s eyes. He closed them and forced himself to sit up. The effort made him dizzy. He rested for a moment, then struggled to his feet. His knees buckled, but he managed to stay upright.

Ali looked around. His only furnishings were the cot and a squat toilet. There was a thick metal door in one wall with a spy hole in the middle and a slot at the bottom. Ali tried to open the door even though he assumed his efforts would be futile. They were. He was sealed in. Ali sank down on his cot and tried to clear his head.

In the camp, Ali had been told how to act if he was captured. Ali’s instructors had told him that he would be tortured, and he had been briefly subjected to waterboarding and other cruelties so he would know what to expect. The consequences of capture were an added incentive to carry out his mission.

Ali’s imagination started to work on him. His life was filled with incidents in his village when he was singled out for teasing or beatings by older and bigger children. Ali was always too frightened to fight back, and he endured humiliation and pain daily. It was his fervent hope that he would find the peace in paradise he had never found on earth, and now his hope of meeting Allah had been dashed. Fear ate at Ali and robbed him of his strength and his will. He waited for his torturers to come. But no one came.

There were no clocks in Ali’s cell, and no one fed him. The ceiling light was always on, and every time he tried to sleep, loud music blasted into his cell through an invisible loudspeaker. Once he had slipped into unconsciousness despite the noise, and a guard had slapped him awake and threatened worse if he caught him dozing off again.

Other than these intrusions, silence was Ali’s constant companion, with one exception. Every so often someone would scream. The screams would go on and on, and they were horrible. Ali would get sick to his stomach as he imagined what you would have to do to people to make them scream like that.

Ali had been clean-shaven when he was arrested. By feeling his stubble, he estimated that he had been a captive for two to three days. He hoped that he would be brave when his time came to be taken for interrogation, but his bowels loosened and he grew faint when the locks in his door finally snapped open.

The guards were big and moved with athletic grace. Ali knew that there was no point in resisting. They pulled Ali to his feet without a word, shackled his hands and ankles, and placed a hood over his head. Ali’s legs felt like jelly. If the guards had not held him up, he would have melted onto the floor.

When the hood was removed, Ali found himself in a bare concrete-block room. The guards sat him on a chair with a headrest. Then they secured his head to the headrest, tied his arms and legs to the chair’s arms and legs, and put a strap around his chest. When they stepped away, Ali could not move.

Seated in front of Ali behind a metal desk was a slender man dressed in a suit and tie. He had on old-fashioned tortoiseshell glasses with thick lenses and his black hair was slicked back. He looked like an attorney.

“How has your stay been so far, Ali?” he asked.

Ali found the question odd. It was a question a friend would ask a guest. Ali had been told that he should not answer questions and should resist any attempts by his captors to seduce him with kindness, so he remained mute.

“Do you know where you are?” the man asked. “No? I’ll tell you. You have disappeared into hell. But there are different levels in hell, and you will have a chance to save yourself from being cast down into the depths. Answer my questions, and you will save yourself from pain and receive the most comfortable quarters available to our prisoners. You will have access to the Koran, books, and television. You will be allowed to exercise. Your food will be decent. If you resist, there will be terrible consequences.”

The man gave Ali time to think about what he had said. While they sat in silence, Ali’s interrogator stared at Ali. Ali was afraid to close his eyes and his head was secured in place so he couldn’t look away. The stare was ice cold and unfeeling. Ali could see no sign of pity and no hope of mercy. Suddenly, the man graced Ali with a gentle smile.

“Before we have a serious talk I want to tell you a little about myself. I have no family. I did have a family-a wife, a son who was eight, and a daughter who was eleven. I loved them very much. On September 11, 2001, they visited my brother, who worked in the World Trade Center.”

Ali’s stomach clenched.

“You can probably guess what happened.” The smile disappeared and all the darkness that had been hidden behind it was suddenly revealed. “When they died, most of my emotions died with them. But a desire remained for revenge against their murderers and anyone like them.”

The man paused to give Ali time to think.

“Do you know how I know your name?” the man continued. “Your fellow prisoners told me. Like you, they did not answer any of my questions the first few times I asked them. After a fairly short time, they were only too glad to tell me anything I wanted to know.

“I have been given a list of things we want to know, and I will ask you these questions to elicit this information. But I am different from other interrogators. Other interrogators hope that pain will force the person they are interrogating to answer their questions. I hope you resist so I can keep torturing you. The longer you hold out, the longer I can inflict pain. I will enjoy making you scream, and I am expert at it, Ali. I have a lot of practice.”

Ali struggled to maintain his dignity. He wanted to beg and grovel. He wanted to do anything to avoid pain.

“There may be a chance for you, Ali,” the man said. “We have learned a few things that lead us to believe you may be different from the other members of your cell.”

Ali saw a glimmer of hope. The man nodded, and one of the guards wheeled a cart that held a television set with a DVR in front of Ali. The interrogator picked up a remote control.

“Someone you know, who cares about you, has something she wants to say. Listen carefully.”

The man pressed the PLAY button, and Ann O’Hearn appeared on the screen. Her hands were clasped in her lap, her shoulders were hunched forward, and she looked very nervous.

“Ali? I… I can’t believe you wanted to kill all those people. You seemed so nice. I can’t begin to understand why you would want to take your own life and hurt so many innocent people who have never done anything wrong to you. There were children at the game, Ali.”

Ann paused. Ali felt shame and hated himself for feeling shame. What he’d tried to do was just. The people in the stands were unbelievers, infidels, enemies of Islam.

Ann took a breath. “I know there is good in you, Ali. If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t have tried to warn me, to tell me to go home. I care about you, Ali, and you must care about me, because you tried to save my life. I’ve asked the FBI to help you like you tried to help me. I don’t want them to hurt you. Please, Ali, do what they ask. If you got to know the people who came to the game the way you got to know me, you wouldn’t have been able to go through with… with what you planned. I believe that deep down you are good. I…”

Ann looked away from the camera.

“Please do what they ask. I don’t want you to be hurt.”

The screen went blank. The man stood up.

“I’m going to give you time to think, Ali. I hope Miss O’Hearn is right about you. When I come back, I will ask you questions. If you answer them, it will go well for you. If you refuse to answer my questions, you will be stripped naked, and I will go to work. If that happens, you will suffer in ways you cannot imagine.”

The man left the room, and the guards faded into its corners, silent and out of sight. Ali was terrified. His village, the camp in Somalia, even the safe house where he had spent the past months seemed like dreams. These concrete walls were his reality. Terror was his new companion.

Ali was having trouble breathing and he was sweating. Hunger made it hard for him to think. The man’s family had died at the hands of al-Qaeda; his wife, his children, his brother. There would be no mercy, and he knew he would talk eventually. Even brave men broke at some point.

Ali thought about Ann. Why had he tried to save her? Would he have warned her if he truly believed in his mission? If he had died, there would have been no remorse, no guilt. He would have been with Allah in paradise. But he had not died, and he had to face the consequences of failure, and the consequences were captivity and unspeakable pain that would end only when he did what his captors asked. Why endure any pain when he was certain he would give in? Would Allah forgive his cowardice? Would he be barred from paradise if he gave the enemy what they wanted?

Ali felt tears form. He was weak, he was a coward. While he was in his cell, he had heard his companions scream. They had resisted. But for how long? The man said they had given him Ali’s name, he said they had answered all his questions. Had they held out to save face, knowing they would give their tormentors everything eventually? Had any not broken?

Ali didn’t want to be hurt. He did not want to be burned, to have his bones broken, and to be drowned over and over and over. When the man returned, Ali was sobbing. When he stopped crying he begged for mercy and agreed to answer every question.