Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 11

As the embassy’s Mercedes wound its way through the hills outside the city, Andrea sat in the backseat, crossing and uncrossing her legs, reading a report. The report was four days old, and this was the third time she’d gone over it.

In the front seat, Marine sergeant Nilthon Alvarado adjusted the rearview mirror, ostensibly to see if they were being followed, in fact to admire the chief of station’s legs.

The report was from the MSB, the Special Branch of the Royal Malaysia Police. It concerned a CIA-MSB operation targeting a thug named Nik Awad, who was known to be a liaison between the Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM) and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). These were terrorist networks hell-bent on making Malaysia part of an Islamic republic whose borders would stretch from northern Thailand to the farthest island in the Philippines. The CIA’s interest was parochial. Awad was thought to be planning an attack on the American military base in Sumatra.

Recently, telephone surveillance had generated an interesting lead. In a call from Berlin, Awad was asked to facilitate the visit of “a friend from Beirut.” The friend was identified only as “Aamm Hakim,” and Awad was to meet him at Subang Airport.

Since Awad was going to be detained anyway, the Special Branch decided to wait for the friend’s arrival. A day or two would make no difference, and Subang Airport was as good a place as any to take Awad down. When the time came, plainclothes MSB officers fell in step behind Awad as he waded into the crowd in the Arrivals terminal. When he exchanged abrazos with a man coming out of Customs, they swooped.

Which is when it got interesting. “Aamm Hakim” was traveling on a Syrian passport issued to a man named “Badr Faris.” The passport appeared to be valid, and Mr. Faris was not on any of the lookout lists. From an intelligence standpoint, he was cherry. And having just entered the country, he’d done nothing wrong, so there were no real grounds for holding him. Not even under the Internal Security Act.

Special Branch was disappointed. With hopes of netting a big fish, instead, they had a businessman who claimed to be looking for a site on which to build a condom factory. They were skeptical, but there was nothing they could do. The man’s political views were unknown, and he didn’t seem particularly religious. On the contrary, “Faris” was a clean-shaven businessman who obviously enjoyed himself. His suitcase contained a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a photomagazine called Beaver Hunt, and a business card for an erotic massage and escort service in Beirut.

As to the call from Berlin, Faris claimed he knew nothing about it. “A friend in Beirut offered to put me in touch with Mr. Awad. Said he could be helpful. I thought, okay, why not? I assumed my friend placed the call himself, but… apparently not. As to who he called in Berlin, I have no idea. I’ve never been there.”

So how had Awad recognized him?

Oh, you know how it is… I was looking for him, he was looking for me. We saw each other looking around…

Andrea looked up from the report. So why did they call him “Aamm Hakim”? she wondered. “Aamm” was an Arab honorific, referring to an uncle on the paternal side. If Faris was the uncle, who was the nephew? Was it the guy in Berlin who’d placed the call? Or was it Awad himself? It had to be one or the other, and yet, according to Faris, he didn’t know either of them. Obviously, Faris was lying.

Andrea’s eyes returned to the report.

After an hour of questioning, the MSB agents were about to let Faris go, when one of the detectives noticed something about his shirt collar. “What is that?” he asked, reaching for the collar.

All hell broke loose. Coming out of his chair, Faris drop-kicked the detective in the balls, and bolted for the door. That was as far as he got. One cop dragged him to the floor, while another pinned him by the arms. He had something in his hand that he wouldn’t let go of – until the detective with the sore balls stomped on his elbow, snapping the ulna.

A pill rolled onto the linoleum and, suddenly, it was clear that Mr. Faris was no ordinary businessman.

Since then, Andrea had visited the interrogation center on two occasions. Each time, she sat outside Room 11, listening through headphones to what the Malaysians called a “disciplinary interrogation.” If she had a question, she would ask it of Jim Banerjee, MSB’s liaison to the Agency, and Banerjee would put the question to the interrogators in the room. In this way, Andrea could truthfully say that she had not participated in Mr. Faris’s questioning (or “so-called torture”).

By then, “Faris” was more subdued than he’d been at the airport. No more shouts of “God is great!” Instead, there was a lot of heavy breathing, punctuated by questions posed in a voice that was alternately angry and cajoling. The answers came with a quaver, sometimes followed by a crackle of electricity as Mr. Faris’s inquisitors lit him up with a stun gun.

So far, they’d learned almost nothing. However, the fingerprint check had come back positive. The detainee’s real name was Hakim Abdul-Bakr Mussawi. Special Branch files identified Mussawi as a fifty-four-year-old Egyptian who’d been expelled from the Muslim Brotherhood twenty years earlier for excessive militance. Since then, he had been implicated in the activities of the KMM, Jemaah Islamiyah, and the Baalbek-based Coalition of the Oppressed of the Earth. There were warrants for him in his homeland and five other countries. Both the Ministry of the Interior in Oman and the FBI were offering rewards.

But if Andrea had anything to say about the matter, it would be a while before they’d learn about Hakim. There was no point in making a splash – it would just send Hakim’s friends packing. Better to keep him under wraps. Maybe she could leverage him.

The interrogation center was a complex of modern buildings about twenty miles from Kuala Lumpur. Built with U.S. funds in the aftermath of 9/11, it lay at the end of a two-lane access road, behind a juggernaut of concrete barriers and electrified fences topped with concertina wire.

Banerjee was waiting for her at the registration desk on the mezzanine. He was a tall, ethnic Indian with a pockmarked face and a razor scar under his chin, where a thief had tried to kill him. Andrea had met him in the States two years earlier, when he’d attended an antiterrorist training module at the Farm. A Special Branch lieutenant in his early thirties, Banerjee liked to skydive on weekends, jumping out of the plane with his pet python, Roosevelt, draped over his shoulders.

He handed Andrea a visitor’s pass. “You signing in?”

She answered with a Mona Lisa smile and a little shake of her head.

Banerjee shrugged, and swiped his pass through a slot in one of the turnstiles. “After you.”

“What about Dr. Najib?”

“He’s waiting for us,” Banerjee told her.

“Good. There’s something I’d like to try.”

“And you need a doctor for it?”

Andrea shrugged. “It’s just a precaution. I don’t want to kill the guy.” She paused. “How is he, anyway?”

Banerjee rolled his eyes. “Same as yesterday. I think he’s still in capture shock.”

The interrogation rooms were in the subbasement. Stepping into the elevator, Banerjee pressed the button for B-2. As the doors closed, Muzak played quietly from a speaker above their heads… We all live in a yellow submarine…

“I meant to ask…” Andrea said. “Have you talked to the FBI?”

“Not yet.”

Andrea was pleased. “So they aren’t in the picture.”

“Well, they know about Awad. We’re sending them dailies of his interviews. But I don’t think anyone’s said anything about Faris.”

“Faris?”

“That’s the name on his passport,” Banerjee told her.

“I know, but – What about the fingerprints?”

“Oh, that! Yeah, that’s… that’s a real contradiction. We’re looking into it.”

Andrea gave him her searchlight smile. “So…”

“So, he’s just another detainee. For now, anyway.”

Her smile became even wider. Banerjee thought she had the whitest and most even teeth he’d ever seen. “How long can you keep it like that?”

The lieutenant looked doubtful. “Not long.”

“Well…”

They both knew that the longer Hakim Mussawi remained in Malaysian custody, the more they would get out of him. While the CIA and the military had taken off the gloves after 9/11, they’d put them back on more recently. For a while, torture had been defined in terms of “organ failure.” No organ failure, no torture. Then Abu Ghraib hit the fan and suddenly, hostile interrogation techniques required legal reviews and special permissions that were not granted often enough – to Andrea’s way of thinking.

No one wanted his or her name on a piece of paper saying yes, it was okay to beat the crap out of a prisoner, or, if the spirit moved you, to immerse him in a tub of lye. It could screw up your whole career path.

After the recreational torture at Abu Ghraib was exposed, new protocols went into effect. It was still okay to torture people, but you couldn’t actually hurt them. You could terrorize them, but you couldn’t flay them.

Discomfort, even “intense discomfort,” was okay, but only for a while. Prisoners might be placed in stress positions, but there were limits. Only one hour at a time, and no more than four hours in a day.

This would not break a hard man. Better, then, to humiliate him, or bring him to tears by threats to a loved one. That took time, though, and if you were in a hurry, you wanted an ally like Malaysia, which had yet to ratify the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. If the MSB wanted to play by the old rules, sliding splinters of glass and bamboo under the fingernails of the people they detained, that was an internal matter. So long as Andrea didn’t enter the room or ask a direct question, the CIA could take the position that it had nothing to do with the interrogation.

The funny thing, Andrea reflected, was all the crap about whether torture actually worked. Senator McCain insisted that it didn’t, but Andrea could show him a lot of Vietnamese video that gave the lie to that. In her experience, torture worked a treat. Liberals denied it, but that was because they didn’t want to deal with it.

If torture didn’t work, why did the Agency fight so hard to be exempted from prohibitions of the practice? If torture was ineffective, why was it so widely practiced? The fact was, if you tore someone’s fingernails out, that person would probably answer your questions – and truthfully, too, so long as the person was led to believe that things would go harder if the information was found to be false.

Of course, there were limits. Torture stopped working when the person being questioned ran out of secrets. At that point, the subject would begin to make things up to avoid further punishment. But a skilled interrogator would usually know when that point was reached. It was the point at which the subject agreed that, yes, he’d shot John F. Kennedy and set fire to the Reichstag.

“After you…” Banerjee stepped aside as the elevator doors slid open. They entered a vestibule at the end of a long, wide corridor. Fluorescent lights, tiled walls. In some ways, the center resembled a hospital, except that people went in healthy and came out sick – if they came out at all.

A security officer looked up from behind a gray metal desk.

“I’ll sign,” Banerjee said.

The guard handed him a pen. Banerjee scribbled in the Visitor’s Log, checked his watch, and noted the time. Under “Detainee,” he printed the name “Faris.”

The guard glanced at the book, then jerked his head toward the corridor. “Number Eleven,” he said. “I’ll tell Dr. Najib.” He picked up the phone and dialed an extension.

Banerjee led the way. Ahead of them, a man in camouflage fatigues was trying to maneuver a wheelchair through the doorway to one of the rooms. Banerjee gave him a hand with the door, and Andrea saw that it was a woman in the chair, and that she was cuffed to the frame. Her chin was on her chest, and she seemed to be praying.

Then the door closed, and they continued walking toward Room 11. Andrea was struck by how wide the corridor was, as wide almost as the ones in Langley. And like the corridors at home, this one had a color-coded stripe running horizontally along one wall, all the way down to the end. It was a yellow stripe, about six inches wide, but its purpose was the same as the ones at headquarters. Basically, they let people know at a glance if you were somewhere you didn’t belong. Red pass, yellow stripe – you wouldn’t get far.

Arriving at the door to Room 11, Andrea hesitated. Once she entered the room, she was crossing a line. She would no longer be an observer, but a participant.

It’s worth it, she thought.

Still, she hesitated. The room would stink. Places like this always did. Fear and anger soured the sweat of everyone in the room. And if it got rough, there would be other smells as well. Reaching into her handbag, Andrea removed a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. Unscrewing the cap, she dipped a pinky into the grease, then dabbed a bit at each of her nostrils. It was a trick she’d learned in college, working part-time on the weekends at the city morgue. As always, the mentholated scent delivered a rush of half-remembered sensations. For an instant, she was ten again, lying in bed with a cold, the humidifier puffing away at her bedside.

This is so fucked up, she thought. Banerjee knocked. They entered.

The room was a clean, well-lighted place that smelled bad. In the center of the room, Hakim Mussawi was strapped to a stainless-steel table under a buzzing fluorescent light. A nurse was at his side inserting an intravenous feed into his left arm. Hearing Andrea and Banerjee enter, Mussawi raised his head, then fell back in exhaustion.

An elderly doctor in a white coat came over, smiling. “I’m Dr. Najib,” he whispered. The name bar on his coat was covered with a piece of white tape. A sensible precaution, Andrea thought.

“How’s our patient?” Banerjee asked.

“Oh, he’s been a bad boy,” Dr. Najib reported. “He admits nothing!”

“Well, perhaps we can change that,” Andrea said.

“I’m sure we can,” Dr. Najib replied. “But it may take a while. He’s a tough nut.”

“Maybe not,” Andrea said. Reaching into her purse, she removed an ampoule of glass, and handed it to the doctor. “Have you used Anectine before?”

Dr. Najib held the ampoule up to the light. “Not as such. What’s the generic?”

“Succinylcholine chloride,” Andrea told him.

Dr. Najib made a face. “In that case, yes, of course. At the hospital. We use it all the time for tracheotomies when we intubate. Makes it easier for the tube to go in.”

“So what are you going to do?” Banerjee asked. “Relax him to death?”

“Pretty much,” Andrea said. “The thing is, when they use it in a hospital, the patient is unconscious. I’d like Dr. Najib to administer it while our friend is awake.”

Najib stared at Andrea. “Really!” he said. “But how can you question him? I mean, you can ask him whatever you want, but how do you expect him to answer you?”

“Well, you’re right, of course. He won’t be able to speak. But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to ask him anything. I’m just going to talk to him for a couple of minutes and then, when the drug’s worn off, there may be one or two things that he’ll want to get off his chest.”

Banerjee gave her a look that said, Are you nuts? Then he shook his head, as if to clear it. Finally, he said, “So, it’s painful?”

“Not exactly,” Andrea told him.

“What does that mean?” Banerjee asked.

“It means it’s disturbing, but it isn’t painful.” She turned to Najib. “It might be a good idea to have a cardiac-assist pump on hand – just in case.”

The doctor nodded in agreement, and left the room.

Andrea turned to Banerjee. Speaking quietly, so that the man on the table couldn’t hear, she said, “Dr. Najib’s going to give him a shot of Anectine. It’s fast-acting, so-”

“What does it do?”

“Well,” Andrea said, “it causes paralysis. Progressively. After thirty seconds, the muscles in the face begin to go numb. Then the numbness spreads to the throat and down to the chest. The diaphragm slows, and after a minute or two, it stops pumping.”

Banerjee thought about it. “So…”

“It’s like turning to wood. You can feel the muscles dying, the flesh going dead. You can’t breathe, but your system’s flooded with adrenaline. So you’re in a panic, but you can’t move. It’s like a bad dream. A nightmare, only real.”

Banerjee blanched.

Andrea smiled that wonderful smile of hers. “Aversive conditioning. I’ve been dying to try it out in an interrogation setting.”

“Well, I’m sure it will be interesting.” Banerjee looked unnerved.

Andrea crossed the room. The subject was lying on his back with his eyes closed, and she could see that he’d had a hard time of it. His right arm was in an air cast, and his lower lip was split, where a tooth had gone through it. His left cheek twitched uncontrollably, and there was something wrong with the fingers of his left hand.

Lifting his hand, she looked at it closely. His thumb was perfectly manicured, and completely intact. But his second and third fingers were missing the nails, and the two other fingers were black with blood. Someone – Banerjee or Najib – had driven something under the nails.

She let go of his hand, which fell to the table with a soft thud. Hakim Mussawi looked at her, then just as quickly looked away.

“We need to talk,” Andrea told him. “Do you understand English?”

He kept his head turned to the side, and said nothing.

She repeated the question in Arabic.

Banerjee came over to the table. “His English is actually quite good,” the detective said. “He went to college in California. Chico State. I looked it up. That makes Mr. Mussawi a Wildcat. Isn’t that right, Mr. Mussawi?” Banerjee gave the man’s broken arm a squeeze, and watched him gasp.

Andrea shook her head. and Banerjee let up. In a soft voice, she said, “Hakim, I want you to look at me.”

No way.

The door to the room opened and closed behind her. Dr. Najib wheeled an apparatus to the side of the table.

“How much would you say he weighs?” the doctor asked.

“Ninety kilos,” Banerjee guessed. “He’s got a gut.”

The doctor produced a syringe. “Sixty milligrams, then.”

While Najib readied the injection, Andrea spoke in a quiet voice. “Hakim, I want you to listen carefully. I’m an American intelligence officer. And you’re in some really deep shit. But I can get you out of here. I can make this stop. But you have to give me something.” She paused. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Nothing.

“I’m ready,” Najib announced, holding the syringe like a handgun, with the barrel pointed toward the ceiling.

With a sigh, Andrea made room for him at the table. “We didn’t have to do this,” she said. “And I hope we won’t have to do it again. And again. And again.”

Mussawi began to stir.

Banerjee laid a hand on his arm. “Stay!” The needle went in.

Andrea looked at her Rolex. She had six minutes. One for the drug to take effect. Two for the muscles to die. Another two to suffocate. And a minute to come out of it.

Timing was everything.

Her watch was a Lady’s Oyster Perpetual Date, eighteen-carat gold. She’d given it to herself as a present when she made chief of station. She admired it now as the second hand swept through its first quarter turn, then another and another. When she finally looked up from the watch, she saw that Hakim’s jaws had begun to slacken. The tic in his cheek was gone, and the puzzlement in his eyes was turning to alarm.

She said his name in an admiring and regretful way. “Hakim, Hakim… I can’t imagine how you’ve held out so long. You’ve been so brave. But no one holds out forever. No one can.”

His head lolled on the table.

“I want to make a deal with you, Hakim.” Three minutes. “But I don’t know if I can. The thing is, I can’t do anything for you… unless you do something for me.”

The Anectine was roaring through his bloodstream now, crashing down a chain of neurotransmitters, wreaking havoc on his nervous system. Andrea reached down, and turned his head to face her, so that he was staring into her eyes.

It was strange. He didn’t look as if he had a care in the world. On the contrary, he had the bland look of a man who’d died in his sleep.

She searched his eyes, and saw that they were the color of mud, glassy, and bloodshot. The opposite of her own.

It didn’t take a mind reader to guess what he was thinking, to guess what he was going through. Paralysis, suffocation, and panic. He was dying from the inside out.

“I know you’ve acted against the United States in the past. So, of course, the FBI will want to talk to you. But that’s not the point.” She kept her voice steady and low, patient and slow, so that he’d hang on every word, desperate to end the moment. “That won’t get you out of here,” she said. “What gets you out of here is me. Nothing else. No one else. And it’s just like I said, I’m an intelligence officer. Not a cop. So I’m not interested in yesterday’s news. I need to know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I need to know who’s going to happen tomorrow.” Five minutes, fifteen seconds. “If you can help me with that, we can walk out of here in half an hour. And if you can’t, well, Hakim, in that case, this goes on forever.”

She took a step back from the table, and waited. Patiently, expectantly.

But there was nothing. No movement at all.

She’d killed him.

Then a tremor rolled through his chest, and she realized that she’d been holding her breath, waiting for him to breathe.

She glanced at her watch, and saw that she’d timed her speech perfectly, coming to the end just as his muscles began to relax.

Suddenly, his body jerked on the table. A snarl curled from his throat, and he gasped. “There’s an American!” he said. “He’s building a machine.” He hacked up the words, and spat them out. “He says…”

“What?”

“He says he’s going to stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“The motor.”

“What motor?”

“The motor of the world.”