Alex Berenson: The Secret Soldier

Wells refilled the jug, poured water over Hassan’s head. Hassan shifted uncomfortably, opened his eyes, closed them quickly. Wells nudged his right foot. Hassan groaned and scrabbled sideways and stared up hatefully. Wells pushed him up so he was braced against the cabinets, and pulled over a chair and sat beside him. He hoped that a mighty helping of fear would do the trick. He didn’t want to have to hurt this man. The Midnight House was fresh in his mind.

“Hassan. You need help. For your foot. We can get you help.”

Hassan said nothing. Wells showed him the phone, the missed call. Hassan shook his head. “Who’s this? Who called you?”

“Water. Please.”

Wells got him a glass, tilted it to his lips. Hassan drank, cleared his throat in a low growl — and spat a runny mix of drool and phlegm and blood. It barely escaped his lips, slid slowly down on his chin. A tooth rolled out of his mouth and down his gown. “It was your mother. She wanted to screw. I said no.”

Wells grabbed Hassan’s cheeks, squeezed his ruined face. “Tell us where he is.”

“He’s in hell. Where he belongs.”

Wells knelt beside him, reached for his foot. Hassan looked away. “What’s in the package?”

“Your father’s balls.”

“You’re going to make us hurt you.”

“Do whatever you like.”

But Wells found he couldn’t do anything. He wasn’t sure he could break this man with pain, and even if he could, he didn’t want to try. He reached into his pocket for his pistol, put the silencer to Hassan’s head. “I’m going to give you three seconds.”

Hassan closed his eyes and mumbled the shahada, and Wells put the pistol away without even starting to count. Mock executions might not be physically painful, but they were still torture.

“I’m Muslim, too,” Wells said. “And this is wrong. This isn’t what Muhammad would have wanted.”

“Now you tell me what it’s like to be Muslim. You find a hundred ways to be a fool.” Hassan grinned crooked and bloody. “Dance for me now. Dance for me and I’ll tell you where he is.”

Wells squeezed his fists and fought his very strong urge to shoot Hassan in the head. “We’re going to find him. And you’re going to die.” Hassan shook his head, and Wells punched him in the stomach. Hassan slumped down onto the floor of the kitchen. Even so, Wells couldn’t help but feel that Hassan had bested him. He reached for electrical tape and slapped it over Hassan’s mouth so that he wouldn’t have to hear the contempt in the man’s voice anymore.

A tug on his shoulder pulled him up. Gaffan. Wells had been so focused on Hassan he’d forgotten Gaffan. “Forget it,” Gaffan murmured. “Nobody can break a guy like that in ten minutes. Not you, not anyone. Now what?”

“Go over the house, find what I missed.”

But they didn’t find anything. The place seemed to be a cutout, a depot for men and messages to pass. Wells wondered if the “package” in the voicemail referred to Kurland himself.

Wells listened to the message again, realized something else. It was just ten p.m. now. The curfew didn’t take effect for another hour. So the caller wasn’t in Jeddah. He was somewhere nearby but not close enough to come here with only a few minutes before curfew. One city, forty miles east, fit that profile better than any other. “Is the Jeep close?”

“Just up the block.”

“Then let’s go.” Wells took one last look around the kitchen, opened the back door.

“Where to?”

Wells pulled the door shut behind them and they left 42 Aziz behind. “Mecca.”

MECCA. UNDER OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES, WELLS WOULD HAVE BEEN excited at the chance to see the heart of Islam. Christianity and Judaism had holy sites, of course — the Wailing Wall, Mount Sinai, Bethlehem. But no faith was as closely tied to a single spiritual center as Islam was to Mecca.

Muhammad had been born in Mecca, lived in Mecca when he received the prophecies that led him to preach, been forced from Mecca in fear and returned in triumph. Five times a day, 1.5 billion Muslims turned toward the Kaaba, the black stone at the heart of the Grand Mosque, to pray. The hajj, the spiritual journey to Mecca, was a central tenet of Islam. Millions of Muslims came each year. Their numbers would have been even greater if the Saudi government had not limited the size of the pilgrimage to control stampedes. Meanwhile, non-Muslims were barred even from setting foot in Mecca. “Oh you who believe! The idolaters are nothing but unclean, so they shall not approach the Sacred Mosque,” the Quran’s ninth verse said.

Yes, it was true that Muhammad had once commanded his followers to pray toward Jerusalem. He’d changed the direction of prayer to Mecca after falling out with the Jewish tribes in Arabia. And yes, it was true that many scholars believed that Muhammad had made the hajj part of Islam mainly to placate Mecca’s merchants. Even before Islam existed, Mecca had profited from pilgrims visiting the Kaaba.

No matter. Wells didn’t have to believe in the literal truth of every word in the Quran to feel the pull of the place. When he faced the Kaaba to pray, he imagined a billion whispered prayers coming from all over the world, from every direction, from worshippers of every color. Pleas of fear, hope, redemption, and revenge, dreams great and small, vows to honor and to love, all melding at the Grand Mosque into one holy message that only God could hear.

UNFORTUNATELY, AS A PLACE to live, Mecca left much to be desired. Home to almost two million people, the city was dust-clogged and overcrowded. Most Saudi cities dealt with their rapid growth by spreading into the desert. Mecca didn’t have that option. It lay in a valley ringed by low mountains. Unable to expand horizontally, it had occupied every square inch of space in the valley and then grown vertically. Office towers and apartment buildings now hemmed in the Grand Mosque from all sides.

The mosque itself looked very different than it had fifty years before. To handle the crush of hajj pilgrims, the Saudi government had repeatedly rebuilt and expanded the structure. The mosque was now the world’s largest, with gleaming white marble galleries surrounding a central plaza that held hundreds of thousands of worshippers. The Saudis had also expanded the city’s network of walkways and pedestrian tunnels to ease the traffic jams that occurred every hajj as pilgrims traveled between the mosque and their temporary homes in tent cities outside Mecca.

Mecca’s congestion offered endless hiding places for Graham Kurland and his kidnappers — assuming Wells’s hunch was right and they were in the city. For now the call Hassan had received was his only clue. He grabbed his sat phone, called Shafer. “I have a number for you. Saudi. Probably a disposable phone. Used twenty minutes ago. Can NSA do anything?”

“If it’s on, probably. If not, I don’t know. It may take a while. Depends on the carrier, how much cooperation we’re getting.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. How hot’s the number?”

“Maybe very.”

“Those two words don’t go together. What happened at the house?”

“One KIA, two WIA.”

“One what KIA?”

“I’m reasonably certain he was hostile.”

Shafer was silent.

“He wasn’t friendly, that’s for sure.”

“If you’re wrong, you’d better hope the king likes you. Not much we can do if you killed a Saudi civ on Saudi soil.”

“Just tell the FBI to get a team to the house. Tonight. One of the wounded is in bad shape.”

“Sounds like you had yourself a fun time.”

“It was unavoidable.” Aside from the guy I shot in the back. “I need that trace, Ellis. While I was there, somebody called, left a message. I think it’s related.”